Wrights & Wrongs: My Life in Dance

Peter Wright has been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, producer and director in the theatre as well as in television for over 70 years. His many productions of classic ballets are danced by companies not only in Britain but North and South America, Australia and Japan as well as in Europe. His production of Giselle has been danced by National Ballet of Canada for over 40 years. Birmingham Royal Ballet, the company he created, has performed his Swan Lake for 35 years, The Sleeping Beauty for over 30, a production Peter staged in Budapest in April 2016. His different stagings of The Nutcracker at Covent Garden and in Birmingham have charmed audiences for over 30 years.

Peter started his career in wartime, with the Kurt Jooss company. He has worked with such greats as Pina Bausch, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Marcia Haydée, Richard Cragun, Monica Mason, Karen Kain, Miyako Yoshida and Carlos Acosta – as well as today’s generation of stars including Alina Cojocaru, Marianela Nuñez, Natalia Osipova and Lauren Cuthbertson.

While now regarded as part of the British ballet establishment, for many years Peter developed his career outside London, particularly in Germany with John Cranko’s Stuttgart Ballet. That distance gives him a unique and unrivalled view on ballet companies. His close association with choreographers Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan and David Bintley gives Peter an authoritative perspective on British ballet.

In Wrights & Wrongs, Peter offers his often surprising views of today’s dance world, lessons learned – and yet to learn – from a lifetime’s experience of ballet, commercial theatre and television.