Eighteen ballet dancers in pointe shoes stretch and preen in front of the mirrored walls of a vast dance studio. Someone presses a button on a tablet and suddenly a loud, growling guitar riff fills the studio followed by Ozzy Osbourne’s plaintive voice: “Has he lost his mind?”
It’s a good question, and one that can be applied equally to superstar ballet dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta, director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and to Tony Iommi, founding member of Black Sabbath and the man widely credited with inventing heavy metal. Those two less-than-likely bedfellows have come together for Black Sabbath: The Ballet, one of those ideas which, on paper, hovers between derangement and genius.
As the Sabbath classic Iron Man continues to play, the dancers snap into action, executing their ‘flying squirrel’ moves in a complicated, interlocking time that involves a lot of counting. A male dancer calls a halt. “Is that in arabesque?” he asks in slight confusion. Choreographer Pontus Lidberg seems surprised. “Yes, yes, arabesque,” he says, and Ozzy’s voice takes over again: “If he moves, will he fall?”
“I’m not a purist, because I’m Cuban,” Acosta says as he perches on a sofa in his office wearing a very tight suit. “I was born with all the Cuban culture, with African dances and salsa. I used to be a hip hop dancer back in the day with Michael Jackson, and then I discovered ballet and I became good at it. But in me, I had so much eclecticism.”
Acosta has long been one of the leading lights in ballet, known as much for his exceptional classical talent as for his attempts to refresh an often stuffy and traditionalist world. When he took over Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2020, he knew he wanted his tenure to be about “taking risks into the unknown”.
While pondering a series of new commissions for the company, inspiration struck him when he found himself sitting next to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page on a flight to Havana. “That was when I had the idea to do something ballet with something rock. When I joined Birmingham Royal Ballet I knew Black Sabbath was the way to go. Birmingham has all this really important history, but it hasn’t been so effective at voicing that with a megaphone for everybody to know.”
Meanwhile, over the years Iommi had batted away various proposals for using Black Sabbath’s music, including a request from maverick filmmaker Ken Russell to create an opera. So when Acosta suggested the idea of a ballet, it took Iommi completely by surprise.
“I went, ‘how on earth are they going to do that?’” he says, tapping his fingers on a boardroom table. Long dark hair emerges plume-like from the centre of his scalp, he wears his signature blue-tinted glasses. He speaks softly and excitedly – or as excitedly as a 75-year-old rocker gets – his Brummie accent still strong. “But we came here, had a meeting and Carlos explained his idea. He was so enthusiastic. How could I refuse that?”
Acosta’s idea was not to tell the story of Black Sabbath in any straightforward or linear way, but to use the music as a showcase for the band and the ballet company. It would be a three-act piece, each act by a different choreographer, with a score by a different composer, two juniors mentored by one more experienced in each field.
The next step was to give the show some structure. In came Richard Thomas, who had experience in the artistic collision of unlikely worlds having co-written Jerry Springer: the Opera and Anna Nicole, an opera about Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith. “They said we’ve got three acts, they’re not story ballets, we want you to make an evening of it somehow,” says Thomas over the phone. “And we don’t want it to be a tribute show.”
Thomas gave each act a purpose: “We had approval for something like five songs and two instrumentals. I knew act one’s got to have War Pigs, Paranoid, Iron Man. Boom. Get them back after the interval.” Act two features interviews with Iommi and Sharon Osbourne, covering some of the most famous stories of the band’s history including the accident in a sheet metal factory that sliced off the tips of Iommi’s fingers, leading him to play in the unique, slack, riff-heavy way that became the sound of heavy metal.
The final act represents the band’s fans, set to a symphonic score by Christopher Austin weaving in many of the motifs from Sabbath’s music. “My first surprise was that no one’s done this before,” Thomas says. “There’s not an orchestral version of Black Sabbath anywhere which is mad. Heavy metal and an orchestra completely works. It’s not a tokenistic approach – ‘here’s a band, let’s stick on some backing strings’ – the Black Sabbath songs are completely symphonic.”
It’s the third act that we’ve been watching all morning, which has an orchestrated version of Iron Man among other tunes. “Let’s do Debbie,” says Lidberg to his assistant, who relays the message to the ensemble. They scramble towards a huge timber ramp and wheel it out into the centre of the room. This is Debbie the Demon which, in the show, will be an upturned silver car with the band’s iconic silver demon on top. “One last flying squirrel to finish it off,” says Lidberg. The dancers assume the position.
Tickets have been sold out for weeks, and Acosta says it’s the most successful show Birmingham Royal Ballet has ever had. Some 60 per cent of sales went to new audiences, he adds. It’s a long way from the derisory way in which the band was received when they started out in the late Sixties, when even the band’s name sparked cries of blasphemy from the usual figures of religious rectitude.
“You name it, we had it come to the shows,” Iommi reminisces. “The church were outside with banners, Satanists, witches, God knows what else. There are some right nutters out there. One night we got to the dressing room and there was a cross on the door in red. Never thought any more of it. Turns out this bloke had cut his hand and done a cross in blood on the dressing room door. Anyway we go on stage and I was having problems with my amp, so I turned to walk away from it and there was a guy behind me with a dagger, a religious sort of person that thought we were Satanists. Security grabbed him and got him on the floor. This is in the early days. They’d just shoot us now.”
Hardly the sort of people one expects at the ballet, but Iommi warned Acosta this might be the case. “I said to Carlos, you realise that people could start getting up, clapping or shouting or singing the songs. He went, ‘Great!’ Anyway our fans are not nasty and throw things. They’re my age. They might want to come to a ballet rather than a rock show.”
“Sing along, whatever,” says Acosta, “as long as you respect the person next to you. What we do belongs to the people and people should be able to consume it how they want. Hopefully there won’t be people ripping out seats or anything. But we have to bring ballet to a completely new audience for the survival of the art form itself. Otherwise, little by little we will be drifting into oblivion until we become a museum piece.”
Some weeks later, the show opens in Birmingham to strong reviews: “A generous-spirited crowdpleaser,” says the Standard’s David Jays. “I’m quite surprised I have to say,” Richard Thomas laughs. “My concern was it’s a tricky thing to make into an evening that had some cohesion. It was challenging. But everyone is overjoyed, and I think at heart it’s such a brilliant idea.”
And while the rehearsals I saw involved elegant choreography, there is definitely some headbanging and air guitar in the show.
The show opens in London on Wednesday, but the question for Acosta now is how to follow it up. Megadeth the Ballet? “We don’t like to repeat ourselves,” Acosta chuckles. “But maybe something like Buena Vista Social Club the Ballet.”
As for Iommi, it’s been quite a year. He’s still reeling from the huge success of the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in 2022, which saw him and Ozzy Osbourne reunite for a performance of Sabbath’s biggest hit Paranoid (a performance which, he explains, came together with about a week’s notice and one rehearsal).
Add the response to the ballet, and it’s clear how much love there is for the band. “After the closing ceremony we were offered other stuff, a 50-minute set in California for an astonishing amount of money, but we turned it down. It wasn’t about the money. I wouldn’t want to put Ozzy through that. If that’s going to be the last show that people remember, and it’s crap, no one wants that.”
He’s still writing music, and he reckons he’s laid down about 12 tracks in the studio, many incorporating orchestral tinges after working with Austin on the ballet. What about ballet itself, what has he learned about the art form during the last few months? “I’ve learned that I can’t do it,” he deadpans. “I can hardly stand up.”
