About the Author

Alastair Macaulay - Historian and critic of the performing arts

Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. In 1983, he was founding editor of the British quarterly Dance Theatre Journal for its first five years. In 1988 and 1992, he was guest dance critic in New York to The New Yorker. In 1994-2007, he was chief theatre critic of the Financial Times (London), for which he also reviewed music and dance; and in 1996-2006 chief dance critic to the Times Literary Supplement, for which he also wrote about theatre and opera. In 2007-2018, he was chief dance critic to the New York Times. He has also written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, Dancing Times, Dance Magazine, Ballet Review, Ballet News, Opera, and Opera News. Since 2021, he has contributed several extended essay to the American quarterly Liberties; since late 2023, he has contributed essays to each issue of the German magazine Dance for You.

He has taught dance history, dance analysis, and related subjects at Juilliard and the 92nd St Y (in New York), the Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Royal Academy of Dancing, the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, University of Surrey, University of London Goldsmiths College, and London Studio Centre (in the U.K.). He was chief examiner in dance history to the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing in 1987-2002. Since 2014, he has given successive lectures for Dansox at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (U.K.), and was chief lecturer at its 2019 inaugural dance summer school.

An experienced and popular lecturer and broadcaster, he has contributed to conferences, symposia, and radio programmes in the U.K., U.S.A., Canada, France, and Italy, on Frederick Ashton, Merce Cunningham, Serge Diaghilev, Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth MacMillan, Mark Morris, Marius Petipa, Serge Prokofiev, Harold Pinter, Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, dance reconstruction, the teaching of dance history, multiculturalism in dance, and European theatre. In 1999, he was co-chairman of the Royal Academy of Dancing’s conference The Fonteyn Phenomenon; in the years 2012-2019, he convened a series of top-level seminars at the New York Library for the Performing Arts on The Sleeping Beauty (2012), Swan Lake (2013), Balanchine’s Serenade (2015), Giselle (2016), Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune and Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun (2017), Balanchine’s Apollo (2018), and Merce Cunningham’s Exchange and Channels/Inserts (2019). In 2018, he gave the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts’ prestigious Lincoln Kirstein lecture, Balanchine and Ashton: Parallel Lives. In 2019, he was a director’s fellow at NYU Center of Ballet and the Arts. In 2020, he curated and introduced New York City Center Studio 5’s online series Great American Ballerinas.

His short biography Margot Fonteyn was published in 1998 (Sutton Books, U.K.). His extensive book of interviews with the choreographer Matthew Bourne, Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Motion Pictures was published by Faber & Faber U.K. in 2000; a second edition, Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Dance, with seven new chapters, was published in 2011. He is preparing a critical biography of Merce Cunningham for Farrar Straus Giroux (N.Y.). He has contributed chapters to books on dance history, dance analysis, multiculturalism in dance, and Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.