Jerome Robbins and Kenneth MacMillan, the two choreographers who did the most to bring real people into ballet, share a bill at the Royal Ballet this November.
The Royal Ballet puts Jerome Robbins and Kenneth MacMillan on one bill on the Main Stage at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Monday 9 November 2026.
The two men were born eleven years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Robbins, born in New York in 1918, moved between the ballet studio and Broadway all his life. His work runs from Fancy Free to West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, and it brought the vernacular into the classical vocabulary.
Robbins also ran New York City Ballet alongside Balanchine.
MacMillan, born in Dunfermline to a working family, went the other way. He brought psychological damage into a form built for princesses, in Mayerling and The Judas Tree.
Both men made a good deal of their work on this company, and both are now dead. The company keeps that work alive by dancing it.
The bill runs until Saturday 28 November 2026, alongside the company’s own Manon. That puts two MacMillan programmes at Covent Garden at once, one full-length and one short.