April truly can be the cruellest month. Five years ago, Liam Scarlett, the prodigiously gifted choreographer and former artist-in-residence at the Royal Ballet, died by his own hand. Following allegations of sexual misconduct, an independent investigation found “no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School”. A tsunami of rejection swept the ballet world nevertheless, with companies cancelling his upcoming productions and severing ties. Those who had championed him now treated him as a pariah.
Seen by many as the natural heir to Kenneth MacMillan, Scarlett created ballets that were lyrical, hauntingly beautiful and intensely human. He was only 35 when he was found by his parents, who had to turn off life support in hospital four days later. Evidence presented at the inquest described a man under terrible emotional strain, acutely affected by the collapse of his career and the damage to his reputation. His mother stated, “We feel Liam would not have taken his life if his name hadn’t been dragged through the press with inaccurate allegations”.
Scarlett was the golden boy of the Royal Ballet and one of the most important choreographers of his day, alongside Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. His life was intimately entwined with the company. He had joined the Royal Ballet School as a child in 1997, where he created his first piece at the age of eleven, progressing through the upper school and winning a series of prizes before joining the company as a dancer in 2005.
Scarlett’s mainstage debut Asphodel Meadows — an abstract one-act ballet set to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and named after the Greek underworld for ordinary souls — immediately marked him out as a rising choreographic star. His choreography is rooted in a classical vocabulary — often highly romantic and sensuous, with psychologically intense pas de deux framed by ensembles — with a modern twist. He responded with innate musicality to Poulenc’s neoclassical score, which weaves between lush romanticism and quirky, rhythmically percussive passages. The second movement is a particular jewel.
So how did this all end in the ultimate act of despair?
His ascent was meteoric, with The New York Times heralding him as the “choreographic wonder boy of British ballet” and the Independent declaring him “dance’s hottest property”. By 2012, Scarlett was appointed artist-in-residence — a role specially created for him at the age of 26 — and became the youngest choreographer to create a full three-act ballet for the Royal Ballet. He continued to produce a series of significant works, both full-length narratives and shorter pieces, and established himself on the international stage, with commissions and residencies across Europe and beyond.
So how did this all end in the ultimate act of despair? A vertiginous rise to success and spectacular fall from grace, followed by public humiliation and the tragic suicide of a young artist in his prime. Ironically, it has the makings of a great dramatic ballet. But the person to choreograph it is now dead.
Allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards male students at the Royal Ballet School were first raised in August 2019. Leah Hurst, the head of legal and business affairs for the Royal Opera House, later said these included “inappropriate physical contact in rehearsals and other settings, sexual behaviour out of the workplace that was felt to be inappropriate [and] improperly made casting decisions”. Scarlett was “immediately suspended” by the Royal Ballet. A planned new work, Oklahoma, was also called off, though this was framed as a routine programme change.
When the allegations were made public by The Times in January 2020, the Royal Opera House confirmed that a disciplinary investigation was underway. Scarlett’s name and face were splashed across the papers, even appearing under baneful titles such as “Sex predators try to make ballet students dance to their tune”. This article dwells on the “serious allegations… involving pupils” — a curious use of “pupils” instead of “students”, which conjures up thoughts of young children — and claims they didn’t “come as a complete surprise”. Across the board, “innocent until proven guilty” seemed to disappear from view. “Sexual misconduct” even became “sexual assault” in some papers.
The Royal Ballet allowed his production of Swan Lake to proceed as planned in February, perhaps due to the sheer expense and disruption of rescheduling such a major canonical work. It helped that his 2018 reimagining of the Petipa/Ivanov classic, set to Tchaikovsky’s soaring score, was a box-office hit.
On 23 March 2020, the Royal Opera House issued a curiously opaque statement. It announced that the seven-month independent investigation had found there were “no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School”. In the same breath, it announced that Scarlett’s position as artist-in-residence had ended: “He will no longer work with, or for, The Royal Ballet.” The upcoming revival of his Symphonic Dances would no longer go ahead. Ostensible exoneration was paired with decisive professional erasure.
Other companies had already begun to distance themselves from Scarlett in the wake of the media storm in January. San Francisco Ballet removed a planned revival of Scarlett’s work Hummingbird. Queensland Ballet, for whom he had just created the full-length Dangerous Liaisons, moved quickly to sever ties with the choreographer — despite having conducted its own internal review which found “no evidence of improper behaviour” during his time with the company. They terminated his position as artistic associate and cancelled the ballet, restating their “strong ethos surrounding wellbeing in the arts”. This compassion does not appear to have been extended to Scarlett, whose “wellbeing” fell by the wayside.
The coup de grâce came after an attritional year. Aside from a couple of pre-existing engagements with companies such as Bayerische Staatsballett and Royal New Zealand Ballet, Scarlett’s once-promising career lay in tatters. Then on the day he died, 16 April 2021, the Royal Danish Ballet announced that his three-act ballet Frankenstein had been axed due to “unacceptable behaviour” during rehearsals in Copenhagen in 2018-2019 — a decision that the coroner stated Liam “clearly” knew about in advance. This staging of a major work could have been a renaissance. But the ballet itself had been tainted and the final glimmer of hope extinguished.
When news of Scarlett’s untimely death — widely assumed to be suicide — broke, the Royal Opera House released a brief, corporate-toned social-media post: “Our thoughts are with his friends and family at this very sad time.” A more perfunctory message could hardly be imagined, and the post understandably met with outrage. The historian and biographer Amanda Foreman spoke for many when she wrote, “I don’t think I have ever read a more false and insincere statement”. Was this the same Wunderkind of the Royal Ballet, touted as a once-in-a-generation talent? Was this the same young man who met with rapturous applause when he came onstage at the end of Asphodel Meadows to take a bow in 2010, wearing red tartan trousers and a huge grin? I remember. I was there in the audience.
The story sent shockwaves through the ballet community, eliciting mixed responses. There was an outpouring of tributes to the man and artist. Some urgently warned against the inevitable consequences of cancel culture run amok, advising that an obsession with safeguarding can blind companies and newspapers to the importance of due process and create a catastrophic domino effect.
One such figure was the prominent choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who claimed that the companies Scarlett had worked for “removed his ballets from the rep and cancelled all his future contracts” — a silent but devastating part of the cancellation process. Ratmansky continued: “I did hear one director saying: ‘I can’t program his ballets, I’ll be eaten alive.’ Liam knew he had no future as a choreographer. That killed him. It should not have happened.” Ratmansky, like others, considered this a witch-hunt dressed up in the language of safetyism, culminating in a tragic and avoidable death.
Then, of course, there were limp calls not to “politicise” tragedy, as if making any connection between the allegations and Liam’s death was beyond the pale. Of course, the inquest itself found that the allegations and subsequent press reports were the “main contributing factors to his decision”.
Others warned against blaming “victims coming forward” for his death. Dance Magazine, for example, claimed that “Statements like Ratmansky’s … place a burden of guilt on victims”, who “don’t owe us their accounts of abuse”. (They do, in fact, if they want people to be fired. Again, has the concept of innocent until proven guilty flown out the window?) Morally loaded sentiments such as these presuppose that there were indeed “victims”, positioning Scarlett as a predator without a scrap of evidence. Let’s not forget: there were zero criminal charges. Any allegations of improper conduct raised by student dancers were investigated.
Say there had been “inappropriate behaviour” towards adults in the company — biased casting decisions, flirting, or sexual involvement with colleagues. Would this be sufficient for the ballet world to blacklist Scarlett? Is there no chance at redemption, even in a febrile post-#MeToo environment? It is hardly legacy-ending, let alone life-ending. The choreography exists beyond the choreographer, too. If we judged works of art by the moral purity of their creators and cut them accordingly, we’d end up missing out on a great deal of genius.
The Royal Opera House has not restored Scarlett to the repertoire in any meaningful way. His work has remained largely absent from the company’s programming, with the exception of Swan Lake – and there are practical reasons for this. Unlike Frankenstein or The Age of Anxiety, Swan Lake is a canonical ballet, with Scarlett as one interpreter among many, and it retains Petipa/Ivanov’s foundational choreography. When his production premiered in 2018, it became the Royal Ballet’s de facto Swan Lake, superseding the earlier version by Anthony Dowell. It is easier to stage without centring Scarlett personally. And, of course, it remains a financial cornerstone of the company.
There was no public rehabilitation or reassessment of Scarlett’s status, even in light of the investigation, suicide and inquest — after which the company released a statement defending its “robust reporting mechanisms”, including “an anonymous whistleblowing service”, while admitting that “nothing is beyond improvement”. Very few seemed to care about Scarlett, who simply slipped off the map. Where, after his tragic death, was the evening commemorating the young man and his life’s work?
It is heartrending to think of the ballets he would have gone on to create, which will now never see the light of day
Equally troubling was the removal of rehearsal material from the Royal Opera House YouTube channel. Reeling from the news of Scarlett’s death, I went online to revisit some rehearsal clips in homage. I’d watched these on repeat over the years and never failed to appreciate Scarlett’s insightful commentary, intellectual energy and readiness to collaborate, and sensitivity to emotion as it is played out by the human body. My favourite clip was a rehearsal of Sweet Violets, a ballet which centres on the painter Walter Sickert’s obsession with Jack the Ripper. I’d seen it multiple times onstage. In the shadowy bedroom of the opening scene, the chromatic sensuality of Rachmaninov’s Trio élégiaque no. 2. is matched by the twisting limbs of the dancers as they wind around each other.
But the clip had gone. Not only had Liam killed himself, never to create a work of art again, but access to his existing material had apparently been limited. Like many other balletomanes, I felt bereft. To this day, Sweet Violets only lingers in my memory.
Liam Scarlett was an artist of rare imaginative power who had decades ahead of him. It is heartrending to think of the ballets he would have gone on to create, which will now never see the light of day. The world is impoverished without his talent. Faced with the finality of death, there is nothing to do now but make sure we observe our duty of care to the accused, as well as the accuser, and restore the legacy of this brilliant late choreographer.
