Pointe it black: Jagger works on ballet set to Rolling Stones music

For those arabesque-loving Rolling Stones fans used to thinking they can’t always get what they want, it seems they can.

Sir Mick Jagger, pictured, is collaborating with his girlfriend, the ballerina Melanie Hamrick, on a ballet that is set to Rolling Stones music.

The as-yet untitled production is set to premiere next year at two of the world’s leading ballet festivals with the music curated by Jagger. Songs already earmarked for inclusion from the band’s extensive back catalogue include You Can’t Always Get What You

Want, Paint It Black and She’s a Rainbow, his spokesman has confirmed.

Jagger, 75, has been in a relationship with Hamrick, 31, for the past four years and the couple have one child, Deveraux, aged two. The boy is the eighth child of the singer, a great-grandfather who will take his band’s No Filter tour to the US next year. Hamrick, a member of the American Ballet Theatre for the past 14 years, is due to take a leave of absence from the company after her role in its production of The Nutcracker to create her new work.

She has previously spoken of her hopes of being a trailblazer in the notoriously tough industry after becoming one of the few women in the company’s corps de ballet to also be a mother.

Six months after her maternity leave she was forced to take an extended break from the company, however, after tearing the deltoid ligament in her upper arm.

She said in an interview in October that this prompted her to think ‘‘about other things’’, adding that she would like to try choreography. ‘‘I don’t know yet if I have the talent but it will be fun to try,’’ she said.

Her ballet is due to have its premiere in April at the Mariinsky Theatre’s ballet festival in St Petersburg, Russia, before being performed in New York’s Lincoln Centre at the Youth America Grand Prix.

While ballet and rock’n’roll seem unlikely bedfellows, the Rolling Stones do have something of a ballet pedigree.

Christopher Bruce, one of Britain’s leading choreographers, created Rooster, a celebration of the Swinging Sixties set to a roster of Stones songs, including Sympathy for the Devil, As Tears Go By and

Paint It Black.

It was premiered in Geneva in 1991 before going to Britain three years later and has now entered the repertoire of the Rambert Dance Company.

Jagger attended a performance of it at Sadler’s Wells and, according to Bruce, loved it.

In 2014, before one of its many revivals, Bruce said that the ballet, like the Rolling Stones’ music, ‘‘doesn’t seem to date ... it seems to affect and engage a whole range of generations from youngsters to 80-year-olds.’’

Other ballets set to rock music have had varying degrees of success.

Pink Floyd collaborated with the choreographer Roland Petit on a production that premiered in 1972, with the band playing live, but which failed to gain critical acclaim.

The original intention for the

Pink Floyd Ballet had been to do a musical version of Marcel Proust’s

Remembrance of Things Past but band members got bored reading the book.

There has also been a ballet created in the 1970s by a Canadian company for the Who’s rock opera,

Tommy, while the first rock ballet is generally recognised to have been Peter Darrell’s Mods and Rockers, which was created in London in 1963 and set to music by the Beatles.

One of the most successful has been Wayne McGregor’s Chroma with a score based on music by the American rock band the White Stripes.

Another one based on the Beatles, Pepperland, was premiered last year for the 50th anniversary of the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and is due to be performed at Sadler’s Wells in March next year. – The Times