David Bintley

David Bintley completed his training at the Royal Ballet School before joining Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. He was an outstanding character dancer, particularly noted for the title role in Petrushka, and Alain and Widow Simone in La Fille mal gardée.
The company’s director, Peter Wright, encouraged his desire to choreograph and his first professional piece, The Outsider, was created soon after. From 1986 to 1993 Bintley moved from resident choreographer for Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet to the same post at Covent Garden. From 1993 he worked freelance, creating ballets around the world.

In 1995 he was appointed Artistic Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet and from 2010 took on the additional role of Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Japan, recently creating The Prince of the Pagodas (2011) for that company.

His works range from one-act pieces such as the early gently elegaic Flowers of the Forest (1985), the exquisitely classical Tombeaux (1993), the poignant 'Still Life' at the Penguin Café (1988) and the varied jazz-based pieces of the last decade, including The Shakespeare Suite and The Orpheus Suite, through witty balletic reworkings of Hobson’s Choice (1989) and more recently Cyrano (2007), to the powerfully dramatic, such as Edward II (1995) and his Arthur cycle (2000-2001).

He was appointed a CBE in 2001. His recent ballet E=mc2 won the last ever South Bank Dance award in 2009, and his new version of Cinderella (2010) was screened on BBC television as the 2010 Christmas ballet.