Given that for Gen-X’ers the 1990s era Grunge movement kicked off the most recent Black Sabbath renaissance, will an upcoming Black Sabbath Ballet proved to be a much bigger “renaissance”?
By: Ringo Bones
Back around April 2023, there was an announcement by Carlos Acosta – the director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet – that a Black Sabbath themed ballet will soon hit the stages across England by September 2023 and later, the world. For those old enough to live through the last great “Sabbath Renaissance” during the 1990s Grunge movement, will the upcoming Black Sabbath Ballet prove to be a much bigger cultural event music wise compared to the one that happened in the 1990s?
Given that the original members of the innovators of heavy metal music all hail from Birmingham, it might be a long-time coming to finally honor them. Not only that, but Birmingham was well-known for being an impoverished, largely underfunded city when Ozzy and his buddies started the band around the late 1960s. And it wasn’t until near the end of the Thatcher Administration – as in the late 1980s – that all of Birmingham’s World War II era bomb damages were finally repaired.
The Birmingham leg of the show will start in the 23rd of September 2023 at the Birmingham Hippodrome and all of the music will be performed live by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia. Sparks will undoubtedly fly given the “recondite” nature of “conventional ballet music” normally used in a typical ballet performance. But given the relatively successful “marriages” of Western European Classical Music and heavy metal music – i.e. Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, S&M and Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain to name a few, the upcoming Black Sabbath – The Ballet could prove, at least, a very interesting musical event.
