Metal lovers, ballet freaks and metal-loving ballet freaks… assemble!
As a rule, the contemporary dance world and metal pioneers Black Sabbath have remained sadly light on crossovers: no disrespect to either, but the sludgy amphetamine fury of the legendary Midlands band is not obviously suited to doing pirouettes to, while it’s difficult to imagine a ballet interlude at a Sabbath gig of yore going down anything other than disastrously.
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That accepted, guitarist Tommy Iommi did recently team up with some of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s dancers at the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, where he by all accounts had a jolly good time and was impressed by the BRB’s charismatic leader Carlos Acosta (pictured with Iommi below). Thus it came to pass that Acosta was given the nod to commission ‘Black Sabbath – The Ballet’.
Basically, it’s eight Sabbath classic songs – ‘Paranoid’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘War Pigs’, ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Orchid’, ‘Laguna Sunrise’ and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ – reorchestrated by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia (don’t worry, we’re promised guitars and drums) and used as a musical backdrop for choreography by Swede Pontus Lidburg (the Swedes totally dig metal), plus additional choreography from Raúl Reinoso and Cassi Abranches.
It should be… quite something, a headline-grabbing new dance work for the Second City, and about as close as anyone’s going to get to a Black Sabbath gig in 2023 now that the band has retired and Ozzy Osbourne has sadly retired from live performance. We don’t know that much else about it, but the official image of guitar-toting dancer Sofia Liñares certainly has vibes.
The work will premiere at the Birmingham Hippodrome in September, with tickets going on sale February 9 at 11am. It’ll then tour to Plymouth Theatre Royal and Sadler’s Wells in London later in the autumn, with dates tbc.
‘Black Sabbath – The Ballet’ is at Birmingham Hippodrome, Sep 23-30.
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