The young British choreographer Andrew McNicol talks to Ballet Position about his prolific career as a dance maker
(Image Credit: Tulsa Ballet in Andrew McNicol’s Cinderella. Photo: Kate Luber Feb 2023)
Andrew McNicol has been making something from nothing ever since he can remember. “When I was really young I used to make model [stage] sets out of shoe boxes and fairy lights,” he recalled when we met to talk about what by any measure has been an extraordinary career as a choreographer.
Mild-mannered with an easy smile, his olive green eyes shine with fierce intelligence. At only 32-years-old, his bulging portfolio includes especially commissioned works for a huge variety of UK and international ballet companies, his own McNicol Ballet Collective, and a full-length ballet.
How It All Began
Much to talk about, then; best, perhaps, to start from the beginning. After attending ballet schools in and around his hometown of Hull, in the north of England, 14-year-old Andrew entered the Royal Ballet School determined to become a star ballet dancer.
“There they have a choreographic competition, and it felt like the way to release the pressure a little bit. There’s an intensity to ballet training, which I loved, but choreographing just became this outlet to feel a little bit like breaking the rules and being in the room with people making something from nothing.
“So, I just did it because I enjoyed it and then over time it started to take over. Then I won the Kenneth MacMillan choreographic competition and that gave me confidence to do a bit more. I realised over time that what I really enjoyed was being in the studio creating a world together.”
“I like people, I’m interested in what makes people tick, kind of solving that puzzle.”
To a very large extent his interest in people dictates the way in which McNicol approaches each choreographic project.
“I try to create ballets for the people that I’m working with and as much as possible to be aware of the place that I am: it’s very different making a ballet in Chicago for the Joffrey Ballet than it is for my own company, or in Portugal. I really enjoy travelling, I enjoy trying to absorb the energy of the place.“
Classical Ballet for Our Times
Some things, though, are constants in all McNicol ballets: all are deeply musical and skilfully layered.
“I see a ballet as a world, so I hope that it feels like a complete world where all the ingredients make sense together. Other than that, classical ballet is in my DNA, I believe in its language as a training mechanism, it’s beautiful, it’s like a language of the present tense and I think that’s what I’m so drawn to.”
McNicol creates both story ballets and abstract works, but a narrative thread is always present, if more subtle and nuanced in the abstract pieces. He calls it “an inherent drama”, the result of his life-long love of the theatre.
All McNicol works involve intense collaboration, not only with dancers, but also with scenic artists and musicians.
“Choreographing can become quite isolating; and your collaborators are the ones who bring those conversations where perhaps the ideas are not yet fully formed and the only way to form them is through talking. I’m interested, for example, in talking to lighting designers before the ideas are articulated. It’s interesting how they get there, talking about colour, or texture, or energy or architecture, and I’m fascinated by that.”
This symbiotic collaboration between choreographer and scenographer/lighting designer came to the fore in Upstream, a piece McNicol created for the National Ballet of Portugal, which premiered in Lisbon last March and was inspired by Portugal’s proximity to water.
“I wanted to work with Yaron Abufalia, the scenographer, and so we started talking about Portugal and the water became the central thing. He started to suggest ideas for the lighting and we started to build this world, even though it wasn’t necessarily inhabited yet, to have the sense of what the energy would be.”
Peter Gregson’s music, with which McNicol was already familiar, provided another key element. One of the most musical of all choreographers working today, McNicol takes music as one of his main sources of inspiration.
“I like to work with companies that commission new music, because I think the future of ballet is linked to what happens to the future of music; so, conversations with composers are important, how they talk about it, what they’ve seen or what is important to them.”
Cinderella!
What was already the remarkable career of a very talented young man moved up a few notches when Tulsa Ballet commissioned McNicol to create a brand new ballet of Cinderella, his very first full evening ballet. It was 2022 and he hadn’t even reached the age of 30.
The pressure was tremendous, and McNicol found he was up against unexpected competition…
“The tricky thing with Cinderella is that for a lot of people in America their reference was Disney; and a lot of people that I spoke with were referencing nostalgic childhood images associated with their childhood version of Cinderella.
“And it became this thing: on the one hand, to provide enough of what they wanted, but then make it work for today; and also, as it was a big investment for the company, it has to be around for 10-15 years at least.”
He used Prokofiev’s eloquent and much loved score, but approached the story with fresh inquisitive eyes.
“All the productions that I’d seen had a few things that I always felt were missing. One of them was, who is the prince really? Why is he deserving of her love? If she represents kindness and open heart and all these amazing human qualities, why would she fall in love with this guy, who is he?
“The other thing I felt was, it was important to show that Cinderella had some kind of autonomy, decision-making, she wasn’t just a victim of this dysfunctional family, that she was making choices herself.”
And he made Cinderella’s father a court painter, which allowed him to shift the domestic setting from a drab kitchen to a painter’s studio, with all its scenic possibilities.
He took risks, but they paid off. The Tulsa Ballet Director, Marcello Angelini, pronounced himself delighted with the work which, he said, “will be one for the history books” and set “new standards for storytelling throughout the field of dance.”
McNicol Ballet Collective
Away from the demands of big American productions, the choreographer enjoys the freedom – “the fluidity”, as he puts it – afforded him by his own McNicol Ballet Collective, a smaller, “ideas-driven” ensemble, which marks its fifth anniversary in 2025 with a brand new production that will tour the UK.
“I’m grateful for all the opportunities that I’ve had, but I’m the kind of person that likes having my own thing that isn’t necessarily dependent an other people. And I think I make better work for companies because of the Collective, and I make better work for the Collective because of the companies.”
He also hopes to develop platforms where young choreographers and composers can come together just to experiment and test ideas. All of which promises a busy and fruitful new season.
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