London Dance Award nominee Sir Peter Wright: “The more they keep putting on my productions, the happier I will be”. To finish, he quite simply encapsulates where all the hard work, vision and success comes from, “It keeps me alive, it keeps me awake – Ballet will always be my life.”

Following his nomination for the London Dance Award 2012, I talk to Sir Peter Wright about his incredible career - and I feel privileged to catch a quick chat with him as he tells me jovially that he is caught between two nutcrackers.

I ask how he made the transition from professional dancer to choreographer back in 1957. “I’d just got married, and I was all the time on tour with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. These were fourteen week tours, and I just couldn’t continue with that sort of life...”  So the young newly-wed went to the company’s director with his troubles. It just so happened that the company were experiencing financial difficulty at the time, but young Peter must have made quite some impression.  “She said she’d had her eye on me and not to worry”, and before long, he was the one to look after the company now known as the Birmingham Royal Ballet. He also started to work as a television director at the time, but the first ballet under his hands was A Blue Rose at Covent Garden, with music by Samuel Barker. “That’s when I really started” he says, and it was quite the debut.

In all this time and work, I wonder what he might call his greatest achievement, “Becoming Director of Sadler’s Wells Ballet... and the move to Birmingham. When I could take all my experience from all over the world, (especially Stuttgart which changed my life, and where I discovered myself), and move the company to Birmingham – which is now rather prestigious” he adds gently.

His first ballet in Stuttgart was Giselle. “John Cranko said he needed a new production, and he wanted me to do it. He gave me great inspiration, and great trust. I told him I didn’t know the ballet (and what’s more, didn’t much like it), and he urged me to take some leave, return to England and do some research. So I did, and it was fascinating.” Sir Peter then goes on to talk about how important it is to discover the original, and how the book Romantic Ballet in Paris solved the long-running mystery for him, of whether Giselle had killed herself or died of a broken heart.

“There was a passage that read ‘and Giselle took Albrecht’s sword, plunged it into her heart, and died’. And so I understood that she was a suicide, had committed a mortal sin, and couldn’t be buried in church, but had to be buried out in the forest instead”.  Some may disagree with this creative interpretation, but what was vital to Peter was to go back to the roots of the creation.

This all forms part of his creative process; a return to the beginning to discover what the creators had originally envisaged. “I’m not interested in new psychological approaches, I simply want to express the idea and remain faithful... it’s not my ballet, it’s just my interpretation”.

These days, Peter is Director Laureate of the Birmingham Royal Ballet but not involved directly, he says. However, his production of Coppelia will return to the Coliseum in March and so he will be working once more with the beloved company, “I always go to rehearse the company, and that seems to pay off”.  One suspects he is more involved than he gives himself credit for. He is now Vice President of the Elmhurst School, and attests that he is kept occupied with that. However, he sees it as “his duty to keep an eye on things” at the BRB, whilst at the same time uttering nothing but praise for Company Director David Bentley, and Associate Director Marion Tait.

Sir Wright’s Swan Lake will also be returning in two seasons. At nearly 85, it seems there is joyfully no rest for the talented, “The more they keep putting on my productions, the happier I will be”. To finish, he quite simply encapsulates where all the hard work, vision and success comes from, “It keeps me alive, it keeps me awake – Ballet will always be my life”.