Sir Peter Wright

June 2026

Sir Peter Wright is 100 years old. He was born the same year Frederick Ashton made his choreographic debut, the same year Ballet Rambert was established [Dancewatch, June 15, 2026], and his professional career has developed hand in hand with British ballet. Wright has been a dancer in ballets, films, and revues, a model, a teacher, a television director, a choreographer, and from 1976 to 1995 the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet (now Birmingham Royal Ballet).

When I interviewed him exactly 40 years ago, he was about to lead that company on its first visit to the U.S. since 1951, and he wanted to talk about touring. He began with that long-ago trip and concluded with comments he might still make today.

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“I was on that tour [as a dancer]. Seven months, seventy stops, sometimes fifteen nights at a stretch on a train. There was a lot of excitement about tours then, certainly about a tour of the States, although it was exhausting. In those days, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet brought back a lot of dollars to England, and the ballerinas were called dollarinas.

“When I was over there [in 1951] I went to New York City Ballet and poked my nose in at the American Ballet Theatre studios, and the standard [was] absolutely marvelous. In fact I’m pretty sure that American dancers’ virtuosity, especially with the men, is higher than ours. We’re not [now, in 1986] going to compete on that level. Our strength is in the sort of ballets we do and how we do them. It would be silly for us to go and try to dance like Americans. We want to go and show what we do, how we do it, and otherwise there’s no point in going.

“The tour is well within our range, and we’re well equipped for touring, but it’s tough. We’re doing thirty-two Sleeping Beautys , and then many performances of the triple bill, and different triple bills. When we go to Mexico we change over to Coppélia, right in the middle of the tour.

“Normally we’re fifty dancers. We have augmented the company, really as a safeguard, so the strain on the sort of middle area, the soloists and the coryphées, isn’t so severe. When we’re on tour here, it’s quite easy for me to phone down to London and get replacements, but I can’t phone over from Mexico and say, ‘Send me over a Lilac attendant.’

“The very nature of our work and the demands on the company mean that we have to be ready for everything all the time. We have been hit by injuries—we’re always hit by injuries. I’m always begging for more dancers, because every day seems to be a nightmare of how are we ever going to get the show on. But it’s better to be that way than have people sitting around doing nothing and sometimes bored.

“We’ve had one or two setbacks, but we’re well covered, and I don’t think they’re going to affect the overall standard of presentation. SWRB is not just enthusiasm and vitality and get-up-and-go. The actual standard is very high […] and the company’s strong right through. It’s not as if we just have a few who are terribly good and then a corps de ballet who can only do corps de ballet roles.

“I’m not scared. I have a certain amount of anticipation and apprehension about how it will turn out—it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. We’ve had a remarkably successful period recently, both with the critics and the public, and I think we’re a much-liked company at the moment. We’re a good size now, not too big, and you still can retain that sort of family approach to the work. I have to say, it’s how I feel a ballet company should be.

“People tend to hark back and say, ‘In those days they danced much better.’ I don’t think it’s true. They danced differently because the technique wasn’t so advanced […] With SWRB I think we’ve got a very good balance of the technical side and…Well, you can always do better technically, and that’s what’s so marvelous about being a dancer. There’s always something to do, and I’m surprised that anyone can say, ‘Oh, I’ve done it all.’ Then you might as well die.

“I mean, for me dance is so consuming, it’s so much a part of life, and that’s the great thing about dancing: it’s life for the people who do it. And if the desire or the urge goes, or the self-satisfaction comes so that you can say ‘I’m perfect,’ then you die.”