Lady Macbeth

In this new, full-length production, Pickett and Bonas reveal the unseen, hidden scenes from Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Macbeth, seen through the eyes of Lady Macbeth, one of the most captivating ‘creations’ of the sixteenth-century playwright. As a spectator, we feel her fears and desires, her unbridled lust for power, the pinnacle of this power and, in the end, her descent into deep despair.

Power and decline

In her very personal, powerful dance idiom, Pickett creates a fascinating world, in which she and Bonas zoom in on themes like control, power, love, reality and illusion, and the disintegration of someone’s mind when that world collapses. As in previous productions, they are working with the composer Peter Salem, who previously proved himself a fantastic storyteller with Dutch National Ballet, in his music for Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida.

Unique talent 

Pickett danced with William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt for eleven years and performed for five years with the Wooster Group in New York, before becoming a high-profile choreographer. Her recent successes include Emma Bovary (based on Gustave Flaubert’s classic Madame Bovary), Camino Real (based on Tennessee Williams’ play) and The Crucible, inspired by the play in which Arthur Miller uses a seventeenth-century witch hunt as a metaphor for the American witch-hunt on the communists in the 1950’s. Ted Brandsen remarks, “This production, for Scottish Ballet, really grabbed me by the throat. The ability to translate such a ‘linguistic’ piece into such an impressive and energetic dance production shows unique talent.”