Ballet & Dance

Carl Davis had a long love affair with ballet, working with the major choreographers of the day. His work began with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, for whom he produced music for David and Goliath (1975) and Dances of Love and Death (1981). In 1987, Carl was commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet to write A Picture of Dorian Gray, followed by Fire and Ice, a television ballet for LWT for Torvill and Dean.

Commissions from Northern Ballet Theatre included the award-winning A Simple Man (1988) and Lippizaner (1989), both with Gillian Lynne, and Liaisons Amoureuses (1989). Carl’s collaborations with fellow New Yorker Robert Cohan continued with A Christmas Carol (1992) and Aladdin (2000), both written for Scottish Ballet. Aladdin was later taken up by David Bintley for Tokyo’s New National Ballet in 2008, and subsequently enjoyed a critically acclaimed season at the Birmingham Royal Ballet, followed by a UK tour in 2013. Aladdin was also part of the 2016 season at the New National Ballet of Japan. David Bintley had previously commissioned Carl to compose music for the full-length ballet Cyrano(2007) for the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

His long association with Derek Deane led to the full-length ballet Alice in Wonderland (1995), based on themes by Tchaikovsky and commissioned by the English National Ballet, and later The Lady of the Camellias (2008), commissioned by the National Ballet of Croatia and since performed in Naples (2018), Shanghai (2019), and Australia (2020).

2015 saw the premiere of his newly written ballet based on the life of Nijinsky, a commission from the Slovak National Ballet Company and choreographed by Daniel de Andrade. Nijinsky continued to feature prominently in the Slovak National Ballet Company’s 2016 season. 2019 saw the creation and premiere of Chaplin: The Tramp, which had performances in the 2019/2020 season.

2019 also saw the premiere of another new ballet, The Great Gatsby, for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, choreographed by Jorden Morris. This was performed as part of the 2020/21 season with Colorado Ballet.

In 2016, the Hague-based ballet company De Dutch Don’t Dance created an alternative version of Carl’s Alice ballet titled Alice In Winter Wonderland for their Christmas season (to be revived in 2020). In 2019, DDDD revived Carl’s hugely popular A Christmas Carol for their Christmas season, which was also part of their 2021 season.