About the Author

Alastair Macaulay - Historian and critic of the performing arts

Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. He was educated at Felsted School (1964-1973, with successive scholarships in 1968, 1969, and 1972) and Clare College, University of Cambridge (1973-1976); and remains proud that Felsted went co-educational at Sixth Form level just as he was entering its Sixth Form - and that his generation of Clare students was the second year to include women, at a time when only three Cambridge colleges (and no Oxford one) were co-educational. He first became a critic of the performing arts in 1978, first reviewed dance for a newspaper (The Guardian) in 1979, and first began to teach dance history (at B.A. level) in 1979. In 1980, he was one of the three winners of the American magazine Ballet Review’s competition for young dance writers.

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, each time for six months while its resident dance critic, the illustrious Arlene Croce, took sabbaticals. Also in 1988, he began to review dance and classical music for the Financial Times (London); in 1990, he also became one of that newspaper’s full-time theatre critics. In the years 1994-2007, he was the Financial Times (London)’s chief theatre critic, while also still reviewing music and dance for it. In the years 1996-2006, he worked as chief dance critic to the Times Literary Supplement, for which he also wrote about theatre and opera.

In the years 1987-2002, he was chief examiner in dance history to the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. Since 2014, he has given many lectures for Dansox at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (U.K.), and was chief lecturer at its 2019 inaugural dance summer school.

In 2007, he moved to New York as chief dance critic to the New York Times. In 2008, he was one of the papers nominees for a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism; and in August 2008 he received a New York Times Publishers’ Award.

In 2011, he was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, California. During the years 2007-2018, he lectured and taught at Princeton University; Boston University; the Houghton Library Harvard University; New York University; and Barnard College, New York.

He has also written for The Guardian , The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph, Dancing Times, Royal Academy of Dance Gazette, Dance Magazine, Ballet Review, Ballet News, Opera, and Opera News. Since 2021, he has contributed several extended essays 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 courses of dance history, dance analysis, and related subjects at Juilliard and the 92nd St Y (in New York), the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (now Trinity Laban), University of London Goldsmiths College, University of Surrey, and London Studio Centre. And he has lectured on aspects of dance at the Royal Opera House (now Royal Ballet and Opera), Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Royal Academy of Dancing (now Royal Academy of Dance), the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, Roehampton Institute, London College of Dance and Drama, and London Studio Centre (in the U.K.).

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, Mikhail Fokine, Margot Fonteyn, Kenneth MacMillan, Mark Morris, Marius Petipa, Serge Prokofiev, Harold Pinter, the Royal Court Theatre, 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. This was at the New York Public Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium, where he has also given presentations on The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, the Royal Ballet, Balanchine’s Apollo, Marius Petipa, Giselle, and Balanchine Rarities. At St Hilda’s College, Oxford (U.K.), his Dansox lectures and presentations have been on subjects from Swan Lake, George Balanchine, and Frederick Ashton to Fred Astaire and classical Indian dance.

After stepping down from the chief dance critic post at the New York Times in December 2018, he became a director’s fellow at NYU Center of Ballet and the Arts in 2019. In 2020, he curated and introduced New York City Center Studio 5’s online series Great American Ballerinas. He now contributes to both the New York Times and Financial Times as a freelancer - for the New York Times, mainly on dance; for the FT, mainly on classical music.

Essays and reviews by him may be found in a number of anthologies: notably Reading Dance (edited by Robert Gottlieb, 2008, Knopf Doubleday, USA), Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Time and Space (edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 1992), and Dance in America: a Reader’s Anthology (edited by Mindy Aloff, 2018, Library of America, USA).

In May 2024, Felsted School (founded in 1564), where he had studied more than fifty years before, honoured him by giving his surname to its new Macaulay Performing Arts Studio. He gave a lecture on the occasion; “Education, Passion, and a Life with the Performing Arts.” He was invited back in July 2024 to give the main speech on the school’s annual Speech Day.