Notes on the death, inquest, tragedy, and art of choreographer Liam Scarlett

Notes on the death and inquest of the choreographer Liam Scarlett

April 24, 2021, revised and supplemented July 14, 2021 and December 31, 2021

I.

The choreographer Liam Scarlett, aged thirty-five, suddenly died on Friday 16 April, 2021. It was widely and immediately assumed the cause was suicide; this was later confirmed.

Over a month later, an inquest opened in Ipswich at which it was briefly explained that “Liam Scarlett was admitted to Ipswich hospital on 12 April 2021 due to a cardiac arrest following an attempted hanging. Liam was treated in Ipswich hospital. However, following discussions with his family, it was decided that it was in Liam’s best interest to stop active treatment and keep him comfortable, due to the poor prognosis. He sadly passed away on 16 April 2021.

“A postmortem was completed on 23 April 2021 by Dr Olga Gronowska-Szczecina.

“It is requested that an inquest be opened and adjourned for further work to be completed, and a case review will be held on 16 September 2021 and an inquest date has been booked for 11 November 2021.”

This was reported in The Guardian on May 28. Neither I nor many others heard of that inquest, however, until July. An already sad story grew sadder and more complex.

Scarlett’s inquest was then completed in November 2021, as was reported by The Guardian, BBC News, and other outlets. Again, alas, many people in the dance world remained unaware of its findings, some of them important.

II.

Since April 2021, the shock of Scarlett’s death has gone on causing wave upon wave of complex emotion, across and beyond the dance world. Large parts of his career were effectively terminated in 2019-2020 by an ambiguous investigation that concluded with a two-pronged announcement by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. On one hand, the company announced (March 2020) that no evidence had been found to corroborate the allegations against Scarlett. On the other, it terminated its association with him. Other companies were also quick with further terminations.

People who first knew him in the last century, however, assured me in April 2021 that the details surrounding his death were known to very few. After to speaking to a few of the intimate friends he made during this century, I’m inclined to suspect that literally nobody knows all the factors involved. He died in his home town, Ipswich, Suffolk. We should not assume - as many have done - that “Cancel culture” was the sole or chief determining factor. It seems he was probably already in terminal condition before the announcement made in Copenhagen on the day of his death: of which more soon. Suffolk’s area coroner, Jacqueline Devonish, while recording suicide as the cause of death, stated Scarlett already “clearly knew”, of the Copenhagen cancellation: she did not cite that cancellation, though, as the principal cause of his suicide.

Instead, Devonish said: “It’s clear from his own words that there were feelings of humiliation around all of what happened in regards to those allegations.”

It’s worth noting that she went on to say that the “main contributing factors to his decision” were the “serious nature of the allegations made by individuals at the Royal Opera House” and “press reports making public those allegations”. She also said that Scarlett “clearly knew” that his production of Frankenstein had been called off by the Royal Danish Ballet, ahead of its announcement on 16 April, and that this may also have been a factor.

Deborah Scarlett, the choreographer’s mother, made a different interpretation of the cause of suicide, however. She said that she had spoken to her son about the allegations after they appeared in the press. She said: “He told me they weren’t true and he couldn’t understand why people would make allegations against him.

“We feel Liam would not have taken his life if his name hadn’t been dragged through the press with inaccurate allegations.”

A sense of public humiliation? Press inaccuracies claiming he was sexually involved with minors? The cancellation of large areas of his career by most (not all) ballet companies? The unpublished facts involved behind the 2021 cancellation of the Copenhagen Frankenstein? A recurrent preoccupation with death and the afterlife expressed in many of his own artistic creations? These are among the factors that may have been involved in Scarlett’s death; I doubt they are all of them.

III.

Scarlett rose to international renown at age 24 with the world premiere of his Asphodel Meadows (2010), choreographed to music by Francis Poulenc, at Covent Garden. Although the Royal Ballet was wrong at the time to claim that Scarlett was the youngest person to choreograph for the company at Covent Garden – Christopher Wheeldon had made Pavane pour une infante défunte there at age 23 in 1996 – Asphodel, made for a far larger ensemble, was remarkably accomplished for anyone his age. Edward Villella, artistic director of Miami City Ballet, saw it then. He immediately commissioned Scarlett to choreograph for his company in 2011; and then a second in 2012. Those, named Viscera and Euphotic, were Scarlett’s first works for any American company. In 2012, Scarlett became artist in residence to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Before his thirtieth birthday, he had created ballets for K-Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Norwegian National Ballet, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Soon after his thirtieth birthday in 2016, he choreographed the full-length Frankenstein at Covent Garden. With that, he became the youngest choreographer to stage a full-length work on that stage. Other premieres followed until 2019, when allegations arose of inappropriately sexual behavior arose. They led to a scandal, an inquiry, and, in March 2020, the report that ended his employment with the Covent Garden company.

On the day of his death - Friday, 16 April, 2021 - the Royal Danish Theatre announced the cancellation of its planned production of his Frankenstein. Very firmly, this Copenhagen announcement revived the sexual/moral allegations made against Scarlett in 2019-2020. In the words of Danish director Kasper Holten, “Offensive behavior is unacceptable at the Royal Theater, also from visiting artists. The well-being and safety of our employees is a high priority for us. We therefore do not wish to perform the works of the choreographer in question for the time being, and Frankenstein in the spring of 2022 has therefore been cancelled.” This wording was much more unambiguous that that of the Covent Garden company the year before.

The circumstances that led up to Holten’s announcement are among the many mysteries of the whole Scarlett affair. Who knew that the Royal Danish Ballet had been planning a new production of the Scarlett Frankenstein anyway? To which “offensive behaviour” was Holten referring? In speaking of the Royal Danish Ballet’s concern for “the safety and well-being of its artists”, to whom did he mean to send what message? We may assume his words were intended as a firm reassurance and guidance to staff, performers, and audiences of the Royal Danish Theatre. Did Scarlett on April 12 try to hang himself because he had heard of the action the Royal Danish Theatres planned to take? And did Holten make his statement on April 16 without any knowledge that Scarlett was in terminal condition in hospital?

It’s striking to read that Leah Hurst, the Royal Opera House's head of legal and business affairs, told the Suffolk inquest in November that the 2019 allegations "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 decision. There were allegations around drugtaking as well.” She clarified, however, that Scarlett’s misconduct had not involved children: a claim that had been made in some press reports, to Scarlett’s distress.

It seems that every possibility here has its own suggestions of anguish. But let nobody blame Holten for causing Scarlett’s death. When people take their own lives, their action is their own responsibility, often causing longterm grief to others. Compassion is needed for a range of the survivors as well as for the one who died.

IV.

It should be noted that dancers and admirers of Scarlett’s work are recalling him with intense affection and loyalty. During his lifetime, many of them extolled him as among the greatest.

I never shared that degree of admiration for his work - I reviewed at least six of his world premieres for the New York Times - but there was no doubt of his work’s immense organisational skills, its structural sophistication, and its visually decorative allure. It seemed to me that he had by no means reached the point that George Balanchine spoke of with his own creation of Apollo: the lesson not to use everything, the lesson to eliminate. (Frederick Ashton said that this lesson was part of his collaboration with Sophie Fedorovitch, his first and most loved designer, who insisted on his paring away extraneous elements. He learned this so thoroughly that, in his old age, he confessed that he often spent time thinking about successful ballets where he should have pared away even more.)

Scarlett was gay. One curious feature of his choreography was its insistently heteronormative character - with men exclusively partnering women and indeed over-partnering them: something it shares with that of the vast majority of ballets by Christopher Wheeldon. I don’t require that twentyfirst-century ballets should be acts of self-expression by their choreographers, but it has become increasingly normal since 2010 for even heterosexual choreographers to include some degree of same-sex partnering in their work. (A pas de deux is a dance for two, in which both dance. In the early days of baroque ballet, two women or two men could dance a pas de deux, without physical contact. In recent decades, however, a number of people in British ballet have used the term “pas de deux” to mean partnering in which the man manipulates the woman. In British modern dance, expressively gay same-sex duets have been well known since the 1980s; in ballet outside Britain, some degree of same-sex duets has become a feature for over ten years; but - despite a few short-lived exceptions - British ballet has remained heteronormative to a peculiar degree.) Since same-sex marriage has become widespread across the western world, why have certain gay British ballet choreographers been excluding it from their ballets?

V.

Another characteristic that seemed exceptionally curious during Scarlett’s lifetime became far more poignant after it: his poetic absorption with death. Three of his works took their titles from the various mythological realms of the dead.

Asphodel Meadows (2010) was the work that immediately made his name with the Royal Ballet: although it was a pure-dance creation, the “asphodel meadows” of its title are part of the Greek underworld. Acheron (2014), his debut creation at New York City Ballet, was likewise pure-dance – but the river Acheron is one of the rivers running through the Greek underworld. Scarlett’s final work for San Francisco Ballet was Die Toteninsel (2019): the title means “the isle of the dead”. (Early in his career, he told a friend of his plans to make a trilogy of ballets about the realms of the dead, one each for a leading ballet company. They were probably these three.) His debut creation for Miami City Ballet – again plotless – was Viscera (2011): the word “viscera”, meaning guts, usually refers to the entrails of the dead or severely lacerated. His Sweet Violets (2014, Royal Ballet) addressed the sexual murders of Jack the Ripper’s London, in an elegiac tone that made it singular and haunting.

Scarlett himself retained cherubic looks: rosy cheeks, curly hair, boyish demeanour. Yet his mind kept turning to death even in the titles of admired plotless ballets. The contradictions in his character may never be resolved now.

Since at least the Middle Ages, Western culture has made profound connections between love, sex, and death. It seems likely, however, that Scarlett’s artistic fascination with this nexus was profoundly influenced by the ballets of Kenneth MacMillan, who repeatedly returned to connections between intense sexuality, abnormal psychological and psychological trauma, major historical crises in politics and society, and death. Mayerling (1978) - though by no means a flawless ballet - is MacMillan’s masterpiece. Brilliantly, it shows the social hypocrisies and repression around Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria; it demonstrates how Rudolf links sex with skulls, guns, and death until finally his only escape from social misery is to end his life in violently sexual union with his mistress, Mary Vetsera, and then in double suicide. MacMillan arranged this, skillfully, to music by Liszt, as arranged by John Lanchbery. In 2014, Scarlett’s second creation for New York City Ballet, Funérailles, revisited Mayerling terrain in an intense duet for Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild. There was no official scenario, but the costuming and behaviour suggested that a nineteenth-century infanta (frothing full-length petticoats galore) had picked up a good-looking, bare-chested bit of rough, shoved him into a frock coat, and used him to express her violently existential torment: all to music by Liszt. (Its title, Funérailles, does indeed mean Funeral.) Here we touch on a recurrent feature of Scarlett’s choreography: the insistence on overwrought and manipulative partnering of women by men, a tendency in which both Wheeldon and Scarlett have often gone beyond MacMillan.

Many other MacMillan ballets - Romeo and Juliet (1965), Song of the Earth (1965), Anastasia (1971), Manon (1974), Isadora (1981), Gloria (1980), Valley of Shadows (1983), and The Judas Tree (1992 – are death-lorn in a range of ways. Scarlett (born 1986) came to the Royal Ballet School after MacMillan’s death in 1992. Nonetheless his ballets’ fascination with death, sexuality, psychological torment, and intensive male-female partnering made him MacMillan’s most complete heir.

It’s worth stressing that not all Scarlett’s ballets were overwrought or about suffering. He seems to have imagined the realms of the dead as places of peace. How remarkable it is now to read the words in which he spoke of Die Toteninsel at the time of its 2019 premiere. He told the San Francisco writer Caitlin Sims of taking inspiration not only from his Rachmaninov score (the 1908 symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead) but from the painting that had inspired that music, Arnold Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel. This painting (Böcklin made successive versions; many prints were made from them) was so influential that Vladimir Nabokov wrote that reproductions of it could be “found in every Berlin home”; one was kept by Freud in his office, another by Lenin above his bed; Hitler paid much for one of the originals. Of a 5/8 time signature in the score, Scarlett said “Like waves lapping, or breathing in and out, or a heartbeat. There’s a definite and then a faltering step. By putting that second beat on different accents, time shifts and is not as we know it. If you’re making a journey to somewhere that’s not in this life, then who’s to say what time is?”

Talking in San Francisco about the movement style he had developed for this Isle of the Dead ballet, just a few months before the scandal that felled his career at Covent Garden, Scarlett also told Sims: “It’s like water and how you move underwater. When gravity is diminished and time is warped into something else, then you don’t need to adhere to the same rules. You twist them a bit, so it’s clear we’re somewhere else. Everyone has wondered ‘What’s the next thing after this life?’ Thinking about it raised a lot of questions for me, and I put those questions in the piece. But I haven’t necessarily answered them.”

VI.

Scarlett’s death raises many issues. Foremost has been a widespread unease about the way that many dance companies in recent years have seemed to hush up various scandals or crises that purportedly involve a range of alarming sexual matters, heterosexual and homosexual, adult and under-age, on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as cases of violent assault. How truly “independent” was the inquiry that, at the Royal Ballet in 2020, found “there were no matters to pursue” about Scarlett? What real “independence” was there in the inquir, at New York City Ballet in 2018, that found that accusations against Peter Martins were “not corroborated”? Scarlett and Martins have been two of the large number of male artists who have resigned or have been removed from their posts in recent years - and yet in no case has the company in question given a satisfactory explanation.

At New York City Ballet, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro were reinstated after the charges made against them in Alexandra Waterbury’s 2018 lawsuit - though Catazaro chose not to rejoin his former company. In 2020, the judge in the Waterbury case dropped charges against both those men.

Since it’s therefore possible that those two - and some others – were truly innocent of the allegations that removed them, isn’t it time that dance companies instituted systems of accountability? These should operate in several ways. Should dance institutions establish and publish the rules of behavior to which they require their dancers and staff to conform? And should they likewise explain why they are severing connections with certain artists?

The answers are not simple. The Royal Ballet’s “there were no matters to pursue” announcement of March 23, 2020 did too little to clear up the rumours surrounding Scarlett. By contrast, Holten’s announcement of April 16, 2021 was far more specific about “offensive behavior” and about the Royal Danish Ballet’s concern for “the safety and well-being of its artists.” Were Scarlett still alive, his reputation would have been definitively sullied. Holten has close connections to Covent Garden, where he worked for years earlier this century. Why did the British company say nothing of Scarlett’s behavior while the Danish one called it “offensive”? Since Scarlett’s death, rumours have proliferated about the never-fulfilled project of his staging Frankenstein in Copenhagen and about the Danish dancers’ objections. I don’t know that we should be given any fuller information - I accept that ballet politics abounds with behind-the-scenes negotiations, and that the grief caused by a death does not entitle us to be told all the facts, even if all could be told - but I wish we were not faced with so many unhappy ambiguities in this case.

Which brings us to discuss what is now known as “cancel culture”. Let’s begin by establishing that this comes in two forms: first, the companies that actually cancel their associations with individual artists; second, the voices in publications or social media that demand an end of any art by artists whose behavior is considered injurious and/or offensive.

I myself often write on social media. After writing of Scarlett’s death, I received very contrasting responses. Here are two. The first: “If his behaviour was indeed preying on his young students, then there should have been consequences. Cancel culture is not dangerous but sexual predation, especially of minors, is.” The other (written by someone who has experienced cancellation first-hand): “I think the lesson here for organisations, especially ballet companies, is that saving face is not more important than the health of the dancers or faculty that they have nurtured for many years. I myself have had experience of cancel culture and have thought of suicide; I know of others with the same experience and the same thoughts of suicide. It is a serious problem. Employers need to take it seriously.”

The word “Shame” has been thrown around since Scarlett’s death. Presumably shame was something he had come to feel. Now others also want the organisations that punished him to feel shame and those who used social media to express outrage also to feel shame. (The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, recalling with great emotion both Scarlett’s talent and the companies that had cancelled his work, wrote “How is it possible that the whole ballet world, all of us, turned our backs on such an amazing talent, forcing him to die so young?! Shame and sadness. RIP Liam.”)

Should we call this “Shame culture”? Shame on you; and you; and you; and you. Yet many of us have spent much of our lives trying to shake off the damage caused by shame. The old aggressive puritanism is being replaced by a new, no less aggressive one, with people on all sides being called worthy of shame.

How hard it is for any of us to be sure of what’s right! I feel sorrow for those who loved and admired Scarlett; I feel sorrow for those who are now blamed for prompting his death.

Among the allegations against Scarlett were reports of a range of sexually inappropriate behavior with young men and boys. (Since no legal charges were made against him, we should presume him innocent of them. As I’ve written above, it was established at the November inquest that his misbehaviour did not involve children, though some press reports claimed it did.)

It may be worth reflecting on the oddity with which cultural values have changed. An earlier culture, that of the ancient Greeks, approved of pederasty - of sexual relations between adults and adolescents - which has even been called “the principal cultural model for free relationships between citizens” by historians.

I don’t mean to suggest either that Greek culture was better than ours - or that ours has entirely surpassed it. The Greeks did use shame and ostracism - but in other ways. When the philosopher Socrates was tried and found guilty, it was for corrupting the minds - not the bodies - of the young and of not believing in the gods of Athens. He committed suicide in a way that has been widely admired ever since.

Is “cancel culture” really not dangerous? I’ve already quoted one artist who considered suicide because of it. Many, including the coroner at Scarlett’s inquest, have assumed it played a part in Scarlett’s sudden death, though not the only one. Some voices on social media have rushed to assume the worst of the behaviour that led to Scarlett’s downfall at the Royal Ballet in 2020. Sanctimoniously and aggressively, a number of people - undeterred by his recent death - have denounced any silence about his behaviour as symptomatic of the favour automatically doled out to white, male, figures of power who are guilty of predatory, heinous, sexual abuse, despite ignorance of whatever Scarlett may have done and despite the Royal Ballet’s 2020 statement.

Complaints have also been made that companies keep commissioning art from morally flawed people. (I have my own cancel culture when I hear from those vindictive and censorious new puritans: I block them.) Let’s only have art by the virtuous! Let’s have more art by those who are as smugly virtuous as ourselves! No art by sinners for us! A New York friend writes of a conversation after Scarlett’s death in which one colleague of his made this extremist remark: “Well, it’s important for white men to die in order for these institutions to really change.”

Simply, very few people indeed know what led to Scarlett’s downfall at the Royal Ballet. (I, too, have heard extensive rumours - but they are just rumours). And fewer people, even after the news of his April 12 “attempted hanging”, know the full circumstances that led to his tragic death: probably nobody, neither the coroner nor the Scarlett family. I agree that there are powerful white men who are sexually abusive, whose injurious behaviour is covered up by the system, and whose victims suffer - but I do not have the information to qualify Scarlett as one of these. There should be no certainties here.

VII.

The widespread - though not universal - termination of Scarlett’s career as a choreographer in 2019-2020 was largely attributed to the possibility that dancers and dance students might be upset or damaged by his behaviour to them. Now, however, Scarlett is dead. So what happens now to his choreography? He can no longer cause offence to individual dance artists in whatever ways he may have done. It’s possible therefore that his ballets now can be revived without causing moral offence.

This confronts “Cancel culture” with an important choice. Will dance companies continue to cancel Scarlett’s ballets because their choreography is somehow polluted by his sexual and social behaviour? Or will they now try to revive his ballets, both in memoriam and because the ballets deserve revival?

First, not all companies terminated their associations with Scarlett in 2019-2020. In October 2020, he went to Munich to stage his With a Chance of Rain (2014) for the Bayerische Staatsballett. Maddie Dowdney, a British dancer there, has written that his behaviour was nothing but professional, and that he impressed all as having learned from his errors and as happy to be given the chance to move on. The Royal New Zealand Ballet also announced that it would revive his A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015) at Christmas 2021. There may have been other 2020-2021 engagements that have not yet come to light.

On Sunday 18, two days after Scarlett’s death, the Bayerische Staatsballet streamed its “Paradigma” programme, which included Scarlett’s With a Chance of Rain, with these words: “The Bayerisches Staatsballett dedicates this stream to the recently passed away choreographer Liam Scarlett (1986 – 2021).” The Royal New Zealand Ballet announced “The company was privileged to work with Liam when he created his beautiful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream back in 2015. He was, quite simply, a joy to work with, and inspired everyone to give their very best. We are truly proud to be bringing A Midsummer Night’s Dream back to New Zealand this Christmas, but the performances will be bittersweet, knowing that Liam will not be with us again to share the magic.”

How will other ballet companies respond in honouring Scarlett’s international achievement as a choreographer? Sure, the revival of any choreographer’s work after his death is a highly complex area. But I assume that there are dancers and stagers who would work for a Scarlett Trust if one were created; and I believe that some of them would want to do so. Scarlett was greatly admired and loved by many of his colleagues. I’m sorry that I did not share the exalted opinion they and many others held of his choreography, but I hope I can see the qualities others found in it. What are ballet companies - not least the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, to which he was artist in residence in 2012-2019 - going to do with Scarlett’s ballets now that Scarlett has died?

During the 2019-2020 period of inquiry into his alleged offences, the Royal Ballet never dropped his production of Swan Lake (2018), which was the last thing it danced before the March 2020 lockdown. Somehow, after the inquiry, the company saw fit to announce the cancellation of its 2020 revival of his Symphonic Dances (2017) while continuing with his Swan Lake. Why?

One factor is that it was easier to keep his Swan Lake going without him returning to rehearse it. Another factor was that the company, having taken trouble to commission so extremely and showily expensive a spectacle as this, could not now face cancelling it. For those of us who found it deeply foolish, this continuance in repertory is distasteful. For those who admired it, its return will be a consolation.

I can’t help feeling, however, that a fitting memorial to Scarlett would be a triple bill of the three ballets he made about the worlds of the dead: Asphodel Meadows (2010), Acheron (2014), and Die Toteninsel (2019). Because he made them for different top-rank companies, they would show the stylistic range of his achievement; and they would show those afterlife realms to which his imagination kept turning. Scarlett died; we should now contemplate his own contemplations of what follows death. Will any company have the vision to present such a programme? In my view, nothing less is owed to an artist in whose talent so many people - his devoted dancers not least - believed so passionately. Why invest time and money and passion in staging ballets by a choreographer during his lifetime, although his life proved to be disturbing, but cancel them once he himself has died and can no longer cause those disturbances?

These are just some of the perplexing matters that arise from Scarlett’s death. Let our dance companies now proceed to improve the conditions in which troubled artists may make trouble for others. There have been calls for better counselling. Certainly I wish that Scarlett had received effective counseling; I also hope that all dancers hurt by moral and physical abuse will receive counseling and help. May the sorrow and shock caused by his death lead to a saner, kinder climate within and around many companies.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2021