Valley of Shadows is a one-act ballet made by Kenneth MacMillan for the Royal Ballet in 1983, using a score assembled from Tchaikovsky (extracts from his Hamlet incidental music and Souvenir de Florence) and Bohuslav Martinů (the 1938 Double Concerto). Its narrative draws loosely on Giorgio Bassani's novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which is set among an assimilated Jewish family in Fascist-era Ferrara, giving the ballet a specific historical and political subject rather than an abstract or fairy-tale one.
What is danced
The source article gives no synopsis, scene breakdown, or description of steps, holds, or technique, so nothing here can be stated about the actual movement vocabulary on the record's own evidence. What can be said with confidence is structural: it is a one-act work (not divided into acts or numbered scenes in the article), built on a mixed orchestral score rather than a single continuous ballet score, which typically shapes a MacMillan-era Royal Ballet piece into distinct musical sections even without a printed scenario. Beyond that, a reader wanting to know what the dancers actually do will not find it here — the article records the production's credits (choreographer, composer, designer, cast) but not its choreography.
Context
This entry cannot independently establish period context from the article, which supplies only credits. From general knowledge of the choreographer's output (flagged as not sourced to the article): 1983 falls in the later, more dramatically and politically engaged phase of MacMillan's career at the Royal Ballet, following works such as Mayerling and Gloria, in which he repeatedly turned to twentieth-century historical trauma as subject matter for narrative ballet — a direction distinct from the plotless, score-driven neoclassicism dominant elsewhere in the repertory at the time.
How to watch it
Attend to how the choreographer uses two stylistically unrelated scores (Tchaikovsky's Hamlet extracts and Souvenir de Florence set against Martinů's 1938 Double Concerto) to mark shifts in tone or time within a single unbroken act, since the article gives no scene divisions to guide you otherwise. Viewers who know Bassani's novel should watch for how a literary story of an assimilated family under Fascism is translated into an ostensibly plotless one-act form, which is the central interpretive puzzle this piece sets for its audience.
Credits
- composer: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky