Ross Stretton, former director of the Australian Ballet and of the Royal Ballet, died in Melbourne today of melanoma. He had been ill for some time. He was 53.

Thank you, Jane for the sad news. Such a young man.

What a talented young man he was.

ABC News has an obit:

Former Australian Ballet director Stretton dies


A brief obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Ross Stretton dies




Stretton will be remembered for his brief, stormy tenure as Director of the Royal Ballet, but he was also a star dancer with the Australian Ballet and a principal with ABT. He's shown in the Frederick Wiseman film, "Ballet," during his tenure as ballet master with ABT (and reportedy a very good one).

When he was an assistant to Kevin McKenzie at ABT, he was the nicest man you could have met. I was saddened when he resigned from the Royal Ballet. I am devastated to learn of his death. This has been an especially tough 8 months for me . Mr. Stretton's death from cancer just
reminds me of the terrible losses my family and I have endured so far this year. I also had my own fight with bone cancer. May Mr. Stretton rest in peace. I am thinking of his loved ones now. And praying for them.

A warm and tremendous friend was Ross. Giving artist with a wonderful sense of humor and the ablity to make others better. Perhaps fondest memories are of class at Maggie's and breakfast afterwards.....

Does anyone have an address where condolences may be sent? Please pm or email me -

I remember seeing Ross Stretton during his time in the Australian Ballet in the late 70s & 80s, and particularly his extraordinary and heroic dancing in their production of Spartacus. Such sad, sad news.

How sad. So young, too. May he rest in peace.

That is such sad news. I remember him fondly from his days with ABT; he was immediately recognizable and a joy to watch. I followed his stormy post-ABT career with a sense of frustration for him.

Giannina

I saw him dance only once -- as the cavalier in Ballet Imperial I guess Baryshnikov's first season as director -- what a beautiful company that was, and he was creme de la creme. It was a glorious performance -- noble, elegant, easy -- double cabrioles so delicate, like eyelashes batting.

Ballet.co.UK has a thread of obituaries and photographs.

He got Gelsey through some pretty scary Sleeping Beauty Act III pdds in the last months of her ABT career.

Is anyone but me a bit stunned by the obituary in the Telegraph? (It's in today's Links.) I've seen kinder obits of drug kingpins. Is an obituary the place to detail, blow by blow, its subject's greatest failure?

Mean spirited and disgraceful.

Whoever wrote that obituary in the Telegraph doesn't even have the guts to put their name to the piece. Yes, I agree it's disgraceful.

As a Londoner I had mixed feelings about Ross Stretton as I wasn't too happy about some of his rep decisions, though it was a stroke of genius on his part to acquire "Eugene Onegin" for the company. On the other hand he was quick to note the company's shortcomings and start to tackle the serious drop in dancing standards which are sadly still all too prevalent today.

To say that he didn't have the backing of the dancers is only true in part, as he did win support from a number of them. The allegations of improper behaviour with female dancers were probably not true, and the anonymous obit. writer is way out of line repeating these calumnies.

From what I have heard from an RB insider, Ross Stretton was more sinned against than sinning and it will be interesting to know if now that he has sadly passed away, more information about what was the ugliest period in the Royal Ballet's history will come to light.

This sounds like a classic "two sides to every story" issue, which isn't surprising since people are rarely like characters in Hollywood movies. Both good people and bad people can be treated well or badly -- although we're rarely satisfied by the extent to which bad people are treated badly -- and even dictators have people who truly like love them without fear or a hidden agenda, while very giving people have hangers on who are ready to sell them to the highest bidder. It's to be seen how much of either side is published or spoken about in interviews.

Anna Kisselgoff's obituary in the New York Times speaks to some of the political forces that were in the air during his tenure at Australian Ballet and Royal Ballet, as well as the resistance to his goals at Australian Ballet when he was there, compared to the post-tenure praise of his work. (This article is cited in 17 June Links.)

Alexandra wrote:

Yes, Pol Pot got more sympathy. I think obituaries should be candid and not shirk the bad stuff, but this was a bit much.

Just to put the record straight, Obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, like those in The Times, are never signed. They are supposed to be an objective record of the subject's life and achievements - warts and all.

Thank you for making the point about the byline, Alymer. The negative side of the no-byline policy, however, is that it can make an unpleasant obituary look more like a drive by shooting. I agree with you about warts-and-all -- but it did seem to me as if the Telegraph piece was a trifle over the top.

I missed the "and-all" part in the Telegraph obit.

Among some of us here (a species known as "Guardian readers" & suspected of eating müsli and wearing sandals), the Daily Telegraph is known as the "Daily Torygraph." The obit of Mr Stretton seems overly exercised by some of those old Tory principles, and particularly snide about Stretton's non-Britishness (I think I detect a whiff of old imperial contempt for colonials ...) and his importation of 'foreign dancers' and imported ballets. As I'm sure many of you already know, the Royal Ballet is not just a ballet company - it's seen by many of its faithful audiences as a specifically British cultural institution, and implicitly expected to reflect this Britishness in the ethnic makeup of its dancers and repertoires. Of course, this is not overt policy, but the cultural (ideological in the broadest sense?) context in whioch the RB operates. But the ethnicity or nationality of the RB causes passionate debate (see ballet.co.uk for some of those debates). I'm not saying either side is right or wrong - just doing my cultural historian's observation thing - but I think that that kind of context would make it tricky for anyone who comes from the perceived 'outside' to try to innovate.

I saw the Telegraph obit less over-the-top than under-the-bottom.

I'm so sorry to hear this news. Ross was a very sweet, kind friend in our Joffrey days together.
I danced with his wife in A Wedding Bouquet.

I went to ABT's Fokine program today.
What a day of nostalgia.

I realize that I'm almost a week late with this. I am so sorry to hear of
his death. My deepest sympathy to his family. Mashinka you made an
excellent point here. In Kirkland's second book, she mentioned that she
passed none other than Lynn Seymour in a Covent Garden hallway.
Seymour advised her to, "Watch yourself around here." I also hope that in
death he will be vindicated. Afterall he was the RB's A.D. whether some liked it
or not. As such, he is apart of the RB's history, however short his tenure. In
the Pantheon that is British ballet there are a few critics who are at times a little excessive in their opinions. You've heard of professional Balanchine mourners? Well, the vitriol in this "eulogy" is the English version.

There are echoes of Stretton's experience at the Royal Ballet in Riccardo Muti's recent forced resignation from Teatro alla Scala. Some 700-plus employees of La Scala (talk about padded payroll in some of these state theaters !!!) voted to demand the resignation. Only 3 voted for Muti.

The story's in the July, 2005, Opera News. (Sorry, I could not get a Link.)

The Sydney Morning Herald gets hold of an oral history interview given by Stretton to the National Library of Australia. It’s quite something. Story by Valerie Lawson.

Thank you for this Dirac. It's very rare we allowed to hear about the business side or day-to-day practicalities that go into running a ballet company.

After reading two dance biographies in a row, Rudolf Nureyev's and Vera Volkova's, and seeing the biases and influences of major critics, who are often enlisted in writing obits, and reading this new article, I have to wonder who was feeding info into The Guardian obit and had influence over the tone it took, or whether this was a hatchet job on a public employee, meant to embarass an organization getting public subsidies.

Wow. It is something. I guess it's important to realize we're not seeing it unedited, and also that oral histories aren't necessarily corroborated. It sounds like there was, as Stretton says, bad blood everywhere.

How interesting--Lady Macmillan does seem like a piece of work though! The idea of restaging Macmillan's Sleeping Beauty is appalling--it was truly one of the worst disasters I have ever seen, at least up to that time. It opened to a gala audience, who simply refused to applaud. I have seen worse since, I'm afraid.

Especially discussed with this degree of candor.

I will say, for what it's worth, that Stretton's account is consistent with the back story that dance writers were getting, off the record (not by Stretton) at the time. This doesn't mean that Lady MacMillan and the others don't have a side, of course, nor that there were not other issues involved.

One thing I will say from trying to piece together a life story starting from interviews is that written evidence trumped oral history every time. NOT that people were lying. There were three dancers who told me one "fact" and could have passed any lie detector test. They absolutely believed what they were saying and had no angle and no evil intent -- but they turned out to be wrong.

I wouldn't say candor. I'd say rancor. I'm not sure anyone is telling the whole truth here.

Candor and rancor aren’t necessarily exclusive (and candor and honesty aren’t the same thing, while we’re on the subject). I meant his talking candidly about subjects such as who was getting paid more for doing less, for example. Obviously he wasn’t recollecting in tranquillity with all passion spent, but considering the circumstances that’s not surprising.

I suppose nobody ever does tell the whole truth, because they can only know their truth, not the whole truth. This doesn’t excuse dishonesty or egregious omissions, but we can only ask that witnesses they tell it as they saw it, and it’s up to responsible reporters and biographers (and writers of obituaries) to determine as much of the ‘whole truth’ as we can know.

Ross had an interesting and largely successful career. My husband was a fellow dancer for a short amount of time in the Joffrey ballet and thinks of him as a totally decent and generous person. I'm sure that Ross tried his best and did what he thought was right in any situation. Dance historians, a few years from now, can look back and sort it all out.

I think an unusual amount of venom came out in the article, perhaps because it is too soon to make judgments. Obviously passions run high - it is unusual for an obit to be so negative.

Her influence continues to be damaging as Luke Jennings points out in a response to next seasons programming (scroll down to the end for his comment).

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/0...pera_house.html

Oddly enough someone remarked to me only last week, in response to the disastrous revival of Dancers at a Gathering, that what the RB needs is someone like Ross Stretton to rid the company of its 'dead wood'

Most interesting in the interview from my point of view, is the explanation of the Royal Gala debacle which I still remember with horror. Sounds like it was less an act of incompetence than sabotage.

In today's Telegraph, a rebuttal from Deborah MacMillan.



Seems to me the lady is being a trifle lawyerly. In any case, the Board got the message.

Thanks for that link, Mashinka. Jennings' tone isn't exactly negative, though. He adds that it's too bad no one is holding the Royal's feet to the fire on Ashton's behalf. There's a case for having works of the second rank preserved and performed along with the very best.

I find it hard to believe that Stretton was given only 24 hours to prepare that gala. He must have known that there was to be a gala for the Queen's golden jubilee and the the ballet would be playing a major part. Certainly most of the interested public knew several months in advance. If the news really was kept from him then that in itself must be quite a story, or does he mean only one day's stage and technical rehearsal. Even so, the programme consisted only of extracts from work that had been given that season - there was nothing new or specially prepared for the occasion, a major point of dissatisfaction. I would add however that although the gala was generally regarded as a disaster I think Southgate's public criticism was totally out of order.
Reading only extracts from the interview in Valerie Lawson's story it's hard to form a balanced judgement. But certainly hostility towards an outsider from some members of Royal Ballet staff is an old story. That Norman Morrice faced the same difficulties I know on reliable evidence. And one or two of Stretton's quoted criticisms of the state of affairs in the Royal Ballet probably have a more complex back story than appears here.
Deborah MacMillan certainly does have a reputation as a fearsome champion of her husband's work and that was the case long before he died. I can't help wondering though, whether having now granted performing rights for Manon to English National Ballet who give regular seasons of in-the-round classics at the Albert Hall, she will get her wish and we shall see Manon in the round in the near future. Presumably with 60 whores rather than the 60 swans the company fields for Swan Lake.

I'm sure there are two sides - indeed, probably more than that. Ismene Brown responded quite sharply in today's Telegraph. I didn't think she was quite fair, in all honesty, but plainly feelings are still running high.

It's too early to figure out what happened, but Stretton's final comment surely sets a record for either bravery or folly:

Being fair is never easy to achieve, but the effort to be fair must always be paramount. There are some very wayward accusations in this discussion concerning Sir Kenneth MacMillan's widow, hence

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...stretton120.xml

Carlos Acosta enlightens one corner of the story in a recent interview in The Australian (not by me):

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...7-16947,00.html

Quote: "His one serious setback in recent years was during Stretton's short-lived tenure at Covent Garden in 2001-02, when the Cuban found himself sidelined from important roles.

"Ross Stretton had a problem with me and with high-profile people. I think it was his insecurities. He couldn't handle big artists because if you are going to direct big artists you need to know more than them but he was never a star," Acosta says.

"So if you are going to be in a room and correct my Don Quixote, a role I know a great deal, you need to know it better than me. And I think he always tried to go for very young dancers (who) know no better so he could have authority, so people like Sylvie Guillem and myself, those people were pushed away. And all of a sudden I was in a position when I had like 10 shows all year. From 30-something the year before I had seven or something ridiculous. So I had to book myself in places like Dallas, Budapest, jetsetting all over the world just to keep busy because I wasn't getting the roles."

Ismene Brown

I know nothing of the inside story about the Stretton debacle except that the Board of the Royal Opera House were at fault in their decision on employing him and they should have resigned for the shocking damage done.

Thank God, Monica Mason was there to provide a safe and rescuing pair of hands, as it is my opinion, that no one else in the whole ballet world, could have possibly have done the job as successfully as Dame Monica has done.

However, it is also my opinion that the MacMillan revision of "Romeo and Juliet" is a very pale shadow of the original production and the peformances of the 1960's and other McMillan works have not revived so well. Perhaps they are more of their time, rather like "kitchen sink" dramas in the theatre.

The mere thought of "A Different Drummer" (booed at the premier) being revived, as well as the disastrous "Isadora" (after protests divested of (seemingly by some) as an obscene dance with a pole) - I was not witness to the rehearsals but saw the finished work - one can only wonder what pressures exist to re-present these two ballets that did nothing to support the best of MacMillan's oeuvres.

There are many, yes many other works from the RB repertoire in my opinion more worthy of revival to sustain the RB aesthetic.

I enjoyed this bit from Ismene Brown's article in the Telegraph, since I am the ignorant American nethead, I guess! Though not so ignorant as to call someone whose background I knew nothing about (1) American (I actually grew up outside of the US, and spend some time in London, where I saw a lot of the Royal Ballet long before she started writing0 and (2) ignorant, since a complete ignorameous would neither know nor care about Lady Macmillan.

"that she's "a piece of work", as some American nethead described her to the world from a position of complete ignorance. "

But we should be very pleased and flattered that writing on Ballet Alert is the equivalent of broadcasting to the entire world!

To anyone with experience of new-broom CEO's in the academic world and business, the following comment by Carlos Acosta certainly rings true. (I have eliminated the names, which enhances the universality. Where the word "artist" remains, it's quite possible to replace it with "academics," "excecutives," etc.)

It's amazing how often a new executive brings in his own "team" of followers and admirers and butts heads with all sorts of people, even those who are the most valuable, in the institution.

Lady MacMillan's role, on the other hand, remains controversial and not at all resolved. There are clearly defenses that can be made on both sides.

I don't think anyone's trying to accuse her of anything, certainly not here. We're trying to sort out conflicting accounts of her role and influence. In any case, MacMillan seems to be able to defend herself articulately and with vigor. (Thanks very much for contributing, BTW.)




It seems as if everyone can agree on that.



Well, that's certainly something a star would say. Obviously there were problems with Stretton's directorship, to put it mildly, but as a general principle annoying stars, "butting heads," and pushing young people forward is sometimes part of an AD's job.

From a quick reckoning I calculate that MacMillan's Romeo accounted for 18% or the Royal Ballet's performances this season. A triple bill which included two of his ballets accounted for a further 6%. If Lady MacMillan holds the rights to these works and then tells the Board of the Opera House (of which incidentally she has been a member), that she will probably withdraw the rights, then it's disingenuous to say the least to pretend she does not have considerable influence over their decisions.

But perhaps more interestingly, what would have happened if she had carried out her threat? The ballets would not have been lost as they are notated and several are in the repertories of companies other than the Royal Ballet. At the very least it would have resulted in a major re-think as to what the company should be doing, and might have brought about the 'up-dating' the Board claimed it wanted from Dowell's successor.

And a final thought with regard to the Acosta interview:

I'm sorry to learn that he's not prepared to accept correction. It might account for some of the performances he's given in London this season.

I agree. That's a distinctly not-ready-for-prime-time attitude on the part of a dancer. It's obvious Mr. Acosta has never had a ballet master along the lines of Antony Tudor, who would have you wondering if you knew your own name after a couple of rehearsals.