The Royal Ballet rehearse Kenneth MacMillan's Elite Syncopations, filmed as part of #WorldBalletDay 2017. Find out more at www.roh.org.uk In 1974 Kenneth MacMillan created the perfect antidote to the blues with Elite Syncopations – as he told the New Yorker at the time, ‘Something short and light and funny’. The resulting 35-minute ballet, using onstage music from ragtime composers including Scott Joplin, is as luridly lewd as it is sassily sophisticated, and has become a staple of the repertory. Costume designs by Australian artist Ian Spurling are wacky skin-tight evocations of 1920s vaudeville, reimagined in the unmistakably acid colours of the 1970s. MacMillan’s choreography also spans the decades, melding 1920s social dances – Black Bottom, Charleston and others – and virtuoso classical ballet. MacMillan introduces characters as loud as their costumes, in a ballet which sees MacMillan at his wittiest and most nonchalant.

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