Introduction

Wayne Eagling (27 November 1950) is a Canadian ballet dancer and choreographer, well known for his acclaimed performances for the Royal Ballet during the 1970s and 1980s. Having started ballet lessons at the age of 8 in California, he was offered a scholarship at the Royal Ballet School in London after an audition in San Francisco at the age of 15. At the Royal Ballet Eagling’s dancing skills were soon acknowledged, first as a soloist but later he performed in many prominent productions as a principal dancer.

In the early 1980s Wayne Eagling took up choreography and his first production titled “R.B. Sque” (pronounced Arabesque) was a performance staged at a gala for Amnesty International on the 27th of November 1983. The ballet was performed by the Royal Ballet School at the Theatre Royal of Drury Lane in London. For its music Eagling approached Vangelis, a process he described in an interview:

WayneEagling1984“The first time I came to the studio, and I said I wanted a very romantic sentro section for the finale. I didn’t réally know what I wanted, I just know I wanted something very sort of heartfelt, and sort of sorrowful. And he sat down and he played this wonderful tune, and I said ‘It's just perfect, when did you write that?’. He said: ‘I just made it up’. I said: ‘Can I hear it again?’ He said: ‘No, ‘cause I can’t remember what I did’. You know, it was sort of instant awareness of what I wanted. I think it is just his ability to capture emotions instantly, you know, two or three notes, two or three phrases, and you are caught up in the whole running of the piece. The piece that we did was a charity, a gala-thing, and really it was done for him, it was just a generous sort of gift, we didn’t talk about fees or money or anything like that. It was just something... he was excited by the idea of it, and that was all that mattered, and he became very interested in it. And, an actual fact, I mean it’s very strange, that we had worked a bit on it, and I needed the finale, which was supposed to be 4 or 5 minutes long at the most, and having come to seeing a few things, when we started working on the piece, we sat in the studio, and he started playing, and 20 minutes later I got 20 minutes of music, and the piece was going on in a weeks time, you know all of a sudden he just got totally carried away and into the whole project.”

The next year, in 1984, the Royal Ballet School re-performed the “R.B. Sque” ballet at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.

LesleyCollier1984Dancer Lesley Collier recalled: “The nicest thing about Vangelis was he was a composer that actually came to a rehearsal room, saw what the choreographer was doing, and say ‘I can change this for you, I can make that happen there, we can retake this’. And to me that was something wonderful, I mean I don’t know how Stravinsky worked, or those composers that actually wrote for dance earlier than this. But for me that seemed wonderful that he had this interest in the rehearsal, in the ballet itself, and that he was very willing to change just little bits, to make it easier for us, or maybe he thought would make it more exciting.”

Later Wayne Eagling and Vangelis would cooperate again on two other ballet performances i.e. “Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus” (1985) and “Beauty And The Beast” (1986).

In 1991 Eagling retired as a dancer and took up the position of artistic director at the Dutch National Ballet, where he produced new performances of his “Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus” ballet in 1993 and 2000. After leaving in 2003, he was appointed artistic director of the English National Ballet in London from 2005 to 2012. In 2018 Wayne Eagling choreographed "Remembrance", inspired by the story of Dame Marie Rambert’s life during the Great War, presented by New English Ballet Theatre.

 

Details and credits

  • Choreography Wayne Eagling
  • Performed by The Royal Ballet School
  • Music by Vangelis

Cast

  • Wayne Eagling
  • Lesley Collier

 

Performances

  • 1983, at the Theatre Royal of Drury Lane, London.
  • 1984, at the Sadler's Wells Theatre, London.

 

Media

Unfortunately there are no known recordings of any performance of this ballet.