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On a recent afternoon, 18 members of Birmingham Royal Ballet spun, pirouetted and leaped across a rehearsal room, with all the grace and skill associated with classical dance. Yet the music blaring out of the sound system wasn\u2019t by Tchaikovsky or Ravel. It was by Black Sabbath.<\/p>\n
When the dancers finished the sequence to the Ozzy Osbourne-fronted band\u2019s pounding track \u201cIron Man<\/a>,\u201d Pontus Lidberg, the lead choreographer for the company\u2019s new production, \u201cBlack Sabbath: The Ballet<\/a>,\u201d nodded approvingly. Then he decided he needed movement more suited to the aggressive music.<\/p>\n \u201cShall we try a stage dive?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 2020, Birmingham Royal Ballet \u2014 based in England\u2019s second most populous, but often overlooked, city \u2014 grabbed the British dance world\u2019s attention when it appointed the Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta<\/a> as its artistic director. Now, Acosta said, he hoped that the Black Sabbath Ballet, which has its premiere Wednesday, would gain the company global attention, too, as well as help the company find a wider audience at home.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The second part appears to be working. An eight-show run at Birmingham\u2019s vast Hippodrome theater is sold out, as are runs in London<\/a> and Plymouth, England<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Acosta said he had chosen Black Sabbath for his first major commission at the company because the heavy metal band was one of \u201cBirmingham\u2019s jewels.\u201d Before forming, the group\u2019s four members worked in the city\u2019s factories and abattoirs, but soon after they came together in 1968, they began mixing lyrics influenced by horror movies with hard rock, in a style that was eventually christened heavy metal. Over the following decades, most major metal bands, including Iron Maiden and Metallica, cited Black Sabbath as a key influence, and the band sold over 70 million albums.<\/p>\n Acosta noted that Birmingham has a canal bridge named for Black Sabbath, but otherwise, he said, the city hadn\u2019t done enough to celebrate the brand or the genre it created.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The idea of melding heavy metal music and dancing on pointe was initially met with some confusion, Acosta said, including from Black Sabbath\u2019s members. Tony Iommi, 75, the band\u2019s guitarist, said that when he heard about the project, his first thought was: \u201cDancing to Sabbath! How\u2019s that going to work?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, Iommi agreed to meet Acosta and was won over by the dancer\u2019s enthusiasm for the band and a shared background: Acosta came from a poor part of Havana, Iommi said, while Black Sabbath\u2019s members hailed from rough districts of Birmingham, where street brawls were common and ballet lessons nonexistent.<\/p>\n \u201cCarlos had such a belief in what he was doing,\u201d Iommi said.<\/p>\n It took Acosta several years to work out how to stage a full-scale ballet to the band\u2019s music. Ben Ratcliffe, writing in The New York Times<\/a> in 1993, described the ideal Black Sabbath song as \u201cslow and low, loud and long.\u201d Lidberg, the ballet\u2019s lead choreographer, said that the repetitive, angry riffs of the group\u2019s most famous songs, like \u201cWar Pigs<\/a>\u201d and \u201cParanoid<\/a>,\u201d at first seemed more suited to contemporary dance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was only with a deep dive into the band\u2019s catalog that the creative team realized there were other songs \u2014 including the psychedelic \u201cPlanet Caravan<\/a>\u201d \u2014 that had gentler moods. The final ballet will contain orchestral versions of eight Black Sabbath tracks, as well original music by a team of composers. A metal guitarist will play onstage, too.<\/p>\n Although the piece is no story ballet, it does feature scenes based on real events, including an industrial accident Iommi suffered in 1965 that was key to the development of Black Sabbath\u2019s sound. The guitarist, then aged 17, was working a shift in a Birmingham sheet metal factory when he caught his right hand in a machine. It tore off the tips of two fingers, leaving bloody bones sticking out.<\/p>\n To continue playing, Iommi fashioned new finger tips out of dishwashing soap bottle caps, then slackened his guitar strings to ease the pressure as he pressed down on the fretboard. Those changes helped create Black Sabbath\u2019s \u2014 and so metal\u2019s \u2014 signature booming sound.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Five years later, when Black Sabbath released its self-titled debut album, critics hated it, but fans flocked to the band\u2019s concerts. Black Sabbath made headlines throughout the \u201970s for its drug-fuelled antics as much as for its music. (The sleeve notes for the band\u2019s fourth album, recorded in Los Angeles in 1972, thanked the city\u2019s drug dealers.) But even for Black Sabbath, Osbourne went too far, and in 1979, the band\u2019s other members fired him. In the solo career that came after, Osbourne once bit the head off a live bat onstage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Lidberg said that he had toyed with including many strange, real-life moments in the ballet, including the bat biting, but, ultimately, the show would be thematic, rather than specific. The first act centers on how Birmingham\u2019s clattering factories influenced heavy metal\u2019s sound, he explained, and the third act is about the band\u2019s fans.<\/p>\n Lisa Meyer, a Birmingham music promoter, is credited as the ballet\u2019s \u201cmetal curator,\u201d tasked with ensuring authenticity \u2014 but it remains to be seen what metal fans will make of it.<\/p>\n