Different Drummer
Different Drummer is a one-act narrative ballet made by Kenneth MacMillan for the Royal Ballet, first performed on 24 February 1984 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Its story is drawn from Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck, the fragmentary drama of a soldier driven to murder by poverty, humiliation and delusion, and the score combines Anton Webern's Passacaglia for orchestra, Op. 1, with Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.
What is danced
The source article does not describe the choreography, the movement vocabulary, or how the Woyzeck narrative was staged in dance terms — it gives only the title, authorship, music, premiere details and original cast. I cannot responsibly assert what is danced beyond what the record and article state, since doing so would be recall dressed up as citation. What can be said from the article is structural: this is a single continuous act, not a multi-scene ballet with named divertissements, so there is no numbers list or synopsis to draw section-level dance claims from.
Context
The premiere places the work in 1984, within Kenneth MacMillan's mature period as a resident choreographer associated with the Royal Ballet, working in the tradition of psychologically driven narrative ballet that had defined his career since works like The Invitation and Mayerling. Pairing Büchner's bleak, proto-expressionist Woyzeck with Second Viennese School music (Webern and Schoenberg) situates the piece alongside MacMillan's recurring interest in staging extremity, mental disintegration and social cruelty rather than classical divertissement narrative.
Staging history
The article records only the original 1984 production for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and its opening-night cast; it gives no information on revivals, transfers to other companies, or later restagings.
How to watch it
Because the article gives no synopsis or number breakdown, a viewer should watch for how the piece handles Woyzeck's fragmented, scene-by-scene dramatic structure within a single unbroken act, and for how the choreography responds to the harmonic language of Webern's Passacaglia and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht rather than to a conventional narrative ballet score. Attention to the original cast pairing (Wayne Eagling and Alessandra Ferri in the lead roles) may help identify the central relationship the ballet dramatizes.
Credits
- composer: Anton Webern