Imagine the curtain rises at the Royal Opera
House in London. Right, the classic setting.
Exactly. You are sitting in the velvet seats,
the lights dim, and you are, you know, fully
primed for an evening of pristine classical ballet.
You're speaking swans gliding across a moonlit
lake. Yeah, swans, or maybe a tragic princess
in perfect white tights. Tchaikovsky should be
drifting up from the orchestra pit, but instead...
The stage lights come up on a high -end cafe.
Just a cafe. Just a cafe. And the humans sitting
at the tables are being served by waiters dressed
entirely as penguins. It is the ultimate visual
whiplash. It really is. I mean, the audience
comes in with a very specific, elevated expectation
of what classical dance is supposed to look like.
You know, usually something that floats comfortably
above the messy, grim realities of the world.
Right. And instead, they're handed this surrealist
painting that forces them to look directly at
those exact realities. Welcome to today's deep
dive. We are taking a shortcut to being well
informed by looking at a truly fascinating, deeply
quirky slice of cultural history. Highly quirky.
Definitely. We are exploring the source material
surrounding a 1988 ballet called Still Life at
the Penguin Cafe. Such a great title. Right.
And our mission today is to figure out how this
piece managed to collide the traditional world
of classical dance, wonderfully eccentric chamber
music, and urgent environmentalism in a way that
feels honestly incredibly surreal even decades
later. It remains a remarkable piece of work
because it defies almost every convention of
its medium. It took a deeply uncomfortable subject,
mass extinction, and somehow made it demand to
be taken seriously on one of the world's most
prestigious stages. Okay, let's unpack this.
To really understand what we're dealing with,
we need to meet the architects behind this beautiful,
bizarre creation, because you don't just wake
up one morning and accidentally put a penguin
cafe on the stage at Covent Garden. You certainly
don't. The ballet was conceived by David Bentley.
In the late 1980s, Bentley was the resident choreographer
at Covent Garden in England, working with the
Royal Ballet. A huge deal. Oh, massive. And he
had this grand, unusual vision for a piece, but
a ballet is completely tethered to its score.
Right, the movement needs a sonic landscape.
Exactly. So Bentley approached a musician named
Simon Jeffs. And Simon Jeffs is a legendary figure
in his own right, operating in a completely different
musical universe than your typical classical
composer. Yeah, he was the founder of an ensemble
called the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Ah, so that's
where the name comes from. Yes, that is actually
where the ballet gets its name. Still Life at
the Penguin Cafe is derived directly from Jeffs'
group. Billy didn't just want Jeff to write a
few pieces of background music. I wanted more
than that. Much more. He wanted to build an entire
choreographic world around the highly specific
eclectic sound that Jeff had already spent years
creating. That collaboration brings us to the
actual premise of the ballet. We transition from
the minds of the creators to the stage itself.
And we really have to dissect how the show opens.
Because it is intense. It absolutely refuses
to ease the audience into the experience. There
is no gentle overture. The ballet begins with
a spoken voiceover. And it's not just any voice,
it's Jeremy Irons. Think about the sheer gravity
of that choice. You have Jeremy Irons, an actor
known for this incredibly resonant commanding
delivery, speaking into the dark theater. And
he isn't introducing a fairy tale. No, he is
delivering a literal eulogy. Yeah. He delivers
a monologue describing in stark terms how the
Great Ock was very recently driven to extinction
by man. It's heavy. That is your opening tone.
You came for a night of elegant entertainment,
and you were immediately hit with the permanent
death of a species. And that eulogy transitions
instantly into this highly stylized visual setting.
The lights come up on the cafe. The famous cafe.
Right, you have several human characters, the
patrons, sitting at tables relaxing, and they're
being attended to by these penguins dressed as
waiters. The setup reminds me of some kind of
absurd high -end dinner theater. But instead
of a jazz trio or a cabaret act coming out to
entertain the diners, the floor show for these
human patrons is a poignant dancing showcase
of endangered species. It's a brilliant structural
choice because of the sheer contrast. Yeah, you
have the sophisticated, relaxed, cafe setting,
a place of leisure, luxury, and human indulgence.
And the entertainment provided to them is the
grim reality of the Great Ox extinction and the
precarious existence of all these other creatures.
What's fascinating here is the specific categorization
of this piece as An eco -critical ballet. Eco
-critical? Yeah, that term is crucial to understanding
Bitly's vision. By placing this narrative in
a refined human social setting, you know, a cafe
where you sit back, relax, and are served, the
choreography is holding a massive mirror up to
the audience. Because the people in the theater
seats are doing the exact same thing as the people
on stage. Precisely. Bitly forces the human audience
in the theater to watch the human patrons on
stage. And those patrons are, in turn, literally
sitting and watching the consequences of their
own actions performed for them. Wow. That's so
layered. It is. It strips away the comforting
distance we usually maintain from environmental
destruction. We are turning the very things we
are destroying into a spectacle for our own amusement.
It's like we are watching ourselves ignore the
end of the world while waiting for an espresso
to arrive. Exactly. Which naturally moves us
out of the cafe seating and onto the dance floor
to the performers that these humans are watching.
The specific endangered species that make up
the cast of this ballet. And the cast is amazing.
The sources detail the original 1988 royal ballet
production. And the cast list is just wonderfully
bizarre. It is a highly specific, eccentric menagerie.
The choreography demands that classical dancers
embody these distinct non -human movements. We
already mentioned the great awk. Right. Which
was danced in the original production by Nicola
Roberts. You can almost picture how a dancer
would try to capture the tragic, grounded nature
of a flightless bird that no longer exists. Yeah,
the weight of that. Then the performance shifts
to the Utah Longhorn Ram. brought to life by
Deborah Bull with Guy Niblett acting as her ram
partner. Then we have the frantic nervous energy
of the Texan kangaroo rat. Oh, I love that one.
Danced by Bruce Sansom. And then the spotlight
shifts to Humboldt's hognose skunk flea. Danced
by Fiona Brockway. Wait, hold on. Let's stop
right there because I really have to push back
on this concept. We are talking about the prestigious
Covent Garden, the Royal Ballet, and we have
a classically trained dancer cast as a skunk
flea. A skunk flea. I understand a majestic ram
or a tragic bird, but how is an audience supposed
to process the extinction of an insect, a microscopic
parasite no less, through the medium of classical
ballet? It's definitely a choice. Right. We usually
reserve this art form for sweeping romances,
not fleas that live on skunks. It seems completely
absurd on the surface, but that absurdity is
exactly the point. By elevating a flea, specifically
Humboldt's hognose skunk flea, to the exact same
premiere stage as swans and princes, the ballet
is making a profound ecological argument. An
argument about what we consider valuable. Yes,
an argument against aesthetic hierarchy. Yeah.
Human beings are very good at caring about the
extinction of majestic, beautiful, or culturally
significant animals. We like pandas and tigers.
Exactly. We love the charismatic megafauna. But
ecosystems do not rely solely on the beautiful
creatures. They rely entirely on the microscopic,
the parasitic, the things we might label ugly
or insignificant. That makes a lot of sense.
Extinction doesn't discriminate based on human
preferences. Every lost thread, even a flea,
unravels the larger tapestry. Bentley is forcing
the audience to mourn a parasite with the same
reverence they would mourn a swan. That actually
reframes the entire piece for me. The tragedy
of the flea is the tragedy of the entire ecosystem.
It's all connected. It is all connected. And
the ballet extends this concept of interconnected
loss beyond just wildlife. The cabaret continues
with the Southern Cape Zebra, danced by Philip
Brumhead. OK. And the Brazilian Woolly Monkey,
danced by Stephen Jefferies. But interspersed
with all of these animal performances are the
rainforest people. Ah, right. danced by Tracy
Brown, Jonathan Cope, and Michelle DiLorenzo.
The inclusion of the rainforest people is the
ultimate synthesis of the ballet's ecocritical
theme. It's a stark necessary reminder that environmental
destruction doesn't just wipe out flora and fauna.
It affects humans, too. Exactly. It displaces,
impacts, and ultimately erases human cultures.
Indigenous populations whose entire existence,
language, and history are intertwined with those
ecosystems are pushed to the brink alongside
the animals. Wow. The ballet treats the erasure
of a human culture with the exact same choreographic
weight as the extinction of a species. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Because now
we know exactly who is dancing on that stage,
from the Great Auk to the Rainforest People.
But to fully grasp the atmosphere of this piece,
we need to understand the music they are dancing
to. The music is key. And the highly unusual
way that music came to exist in the first place.
The musical score is where Simon Jeffs' contribution
becomes entirely unique. Because the music for
Still Life at the Penguin Cafe wasn't actually
written for a ballet. Which breaks basically
every rule of classical choreography, right?
Yeah. Usually a choreographer commissions a composer,
they sit in a room together, and they write a
score meticulously tailored to the specific narrative
beats of the dance. That is the standard practice.
But in this case, the music was drawn from several
standalone pieces that Jeffs had composed well
before this ballet was even a concept in David
Bentley's mind. Oh, really? Yeah, we were talking
about music and proposed over a six -year period
from 1981 to 1987. And crucially, most of these
pieces were originally written for very small,
intimate ensembles. Like, how small? Maybe just
a violin, a cello, a guitar, and a piano playing
together in a room. I look at Jeff's process
here as a massive feat of musical upcycling.
He is taking these intimate, whimsical, highly
acoustic tracks and blowing them up to absolute
IMAX proportions. Sounds a great way to put it.
He took these small chamber pieces and orchestrated
them specifically for the scale of a ballet.
So in that 1988 Royal Ballet production, these
little tunes were suddenly being blasted out
by the full orchestra of the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden. conducted by Isaiah Jackson. Right.
The acoustic scale shifts dramatically, going
from a handful of instruments to dozens upon
dozens. But the eccentric, slightly arf -kilter
heart of Jess's music remains completely intact.
And you really see that personality shine through
in the strange original titles of the musical
pieces that ended up paired with the dancers.
The pairings are so delightful to look back on.
For example, Bruce Sansom's Texan kangaroo rat
dances to a frantic musical piece called Long
Distance, which actually had the original title
Horns of a Bull. And returning to our debated
friend. Humboldt's hognosed skunk flea. The flea!
That particular dance is set to a musical piece
famously titled, Pythagoras's Trousers. Pythagoras'
Trousers. It just sounds playful, a little bit
mathematical and slightly jerky, which weirdly
fixed the frantic, bounding energy you'd imagine
a jumping flea to have on stage. Exactly. Then
you have the Southern Cape Zebra dancing to a
piece called White Mischief, and the Brazilian
Woolly Monkey segment, which is set to a track
called Music by Numbers. Though we should ensure
we note from our sources that this specific track
was co -composed by Jeffrey Richardson. If we
connect this to the bigger picture, the very
act of how this music was assembled, perfectly
mirrors the core theme of the ballet itself.
How so? Think about what Chefs did. He took older,
disparate, small scale pieces of music. isolated
little creations that were floating around independently.
Yeah. And he orchestrated them together, forcing
them into one massive unified space for the ballet.
He gathered them all up. Oh, that is a brilliant
parallel. He gathered all these isolated musical
tracks onto one stage, just as the ballet's narrative
is about gathering all these isolated, vulnerable,
endangered living things and forcing them to
share one space. Confronting their shared precariousness.
The structure of the music is the structure of
the story. It really is. The idea of gathering
everything into one unified space leads us directly
to the climax of the ballet's storyline. We've
gone through this entire cabaret of extinction,
watching the patrons sip their drinks, and we
arrive at the conclusion. Which is set to a musical
piece quite starkly titled Numbers 1 to 4. The
conclusion is a sudden, massive downpour. A deluge
hits the stage. And all of these characters we've
just met. the animals, the rainforest people,
they have to withstand this torrential rain by
gathering together on an ark -like boat. It's
a very striking visual. I really want to pause
here and ask you, the listener, to chew on this
imagery for a second. Think about the symbol
of an ark in our culture. Usually an ark symbolizes
hope, right? Yeah, salvation. Exactly, it's salvation.
It's a promise of a new beginning after the storm
washes the old world away. But when you look
at it in the context of this ballet, is it actually
a tragic symbol? That's the question. Is this
crowded little boat an admission that the world
as we know it has already drowned? Is this ark
just a floating tomb for the final remnants of
a failed planet? It's a haunting ambiguity that
Bentley leaves the audience with. Yes, the animals
and the people survive the immediate downpour
by getting on the boat. but they are displaced
forever. They can't go back. No, they can never
go back to the cafe or the forest or the plains.
They're essentially refugees of a changing planet,
adrift on a stage. So what does this all mean?
We have this beautiful, strange, bleak and somehow
hopeful ballet from 1988. What is its lasting
legacy and how do we even interact with it today?
Because it's a live performance. Right. The inherent
tragedy of a ballet is that it's live art. Once
the curtain drops and the dancers go home, the
art is gone. That fleeting nature is usually
the reality of dance, but still life at the Penguin
Cafe has a surprisingly diverse and robust history
of physical media preservation that has kept
it alive. It wasn't just left in the 80s to be
forgotten. It lived on. It actually premiered
in the United States a few years later in 1991,
continuing to spread its message. But the way
we captured that original 1988 performance is
a fascinating journey through the evolution of
technology. Thames Television actually filmed
the ballet that very year, cementing it on tape.
And from there, the ballet essentially rode the
wave of changing home media formats. It was commercially
released on laserdisc in 1991 by a label called
Linden Deka. The legendary laserdisc. You cannot
get more early 90s audiovisual prestige than
a massive heavy laserdisc. It was the premium
format of its day. And then, as technology shifted,
it received a VHS tape release by Polygram Records
in 1992. Naturally. Eventually, it made the leap
into the digital age with a DVD published by
Arthouse in 2008. What is fantastic for preservationists
is that both the original laserdisc and that
later DVD release contain a 50 -minute documentary
focused entirely on the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
So the context, the eccentric musicians who built
the sonic landscape. survives right alongside
the choreography. And speaking of the music,
the score didn't just stay attached to the video
footage. None at all. The music for the ballet
was released as a standalone album under Simon
Jeffs' name. And what makes that specific album
release so special is that it didn't just include
the ballet score. It also included an 18 -minute
suite called Four Pieces for Orchestra. It's
incredible how much life these compositions took
on. What was actually in that 18 -minute suite?
It was comprised of lush, orchestral recordings
of earlier Penguin Cafe orchestra tracks. Pieces
with wonderful titles like Perpetua Mobile, Southern
Jukebox Music, Oscar Tango, and Music for a Found
Harmonium. Oh, I've heard that last one. Yeah,
it's quite famous. That CD was released by Polygram
Records in 1991 and it featured the BBC Concert
Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth. Even
though the physical CD is out of print now, the
music remains available as a digital download
today. And for the people who don't just want
to listen but want to physically recreate the
art themselves, the music was preserved on paper.
In 2002, Peter's edition LTD in London published
the sheet music featuring arrangements for the
piano done by Henry Roche. This raises an important
question. When we look at this massive list of
media, we are tracking how incredibly meticulous
human beings can be when it comes to preserving
art. Oh, definitely. We have transferred this
ballet from a live stage performance, to a television
broadcast, to a laser disc, to a VHS tape, to
a DVD, to a CD, to a digital download, and all
the way to publish piano sheet music. We've covered
all the bases. We have fought tooth and nail,
utilizing every technological advancement we
have to ensure that our representation of the
great awk and the kangaroo rat survives the passage
of time. We will move heaven and earth to save
the DVD of the skunk flea, but we won't save
the forest the actual flea lives in. It is the
ultimate glaring paradox of human culture that
this ballet exposes. We are perfectly capable
of revering the memory of nature, sometimes fiercely
protecting the art about it, while remaining
entirely apathetic to nature itself. That is
a heavy, entirely necessary realization. It brings
the whole eco -critical mirror right back to
us today. As we wrap up this journey, we have
traveled from the resonant Shakespearean eulogy
of Jeremy Irons, mourning a flightless bird stepped
into a surreal high society cafe staffed by penguin
waiters, watched a skunk flea perform classical
dance, exactly, and finally weathered a torrential
downpour to crowd onto a survival arc. It stands
as a profound testament to how boundary pushing
David Bentley and Simon Jeffies truly were. They
didn't just make a ballet to entertain an elite
crowd for a few hours. No, they didn't. They
constructed an ecological warning disguised as
high society entertainment. And I want to connect
this directly back to you, the listener. It is
so easy to consume art. passively, to think of
it just as a reflection of reality, something
pretty to look at or a nice melody to listen
to while you go about your day. Right. But still
life at the Penguin Cafe reminds us that sometimes
art is a vibrant, bizarre, and absolutely necessary
alarm bell ringing in the dark. It uses beauty,
absurdity, and humor to make us look at our own
capacity for destruction. which leaves us with
a final thought to mull over as you go about
the rest of your day. We discussed how the ballet
begins with the already extinct Great Auk and
ends with the remaining vulnerable animals huddled
together on an ark in a massive storm. Yeah.
If David Bitley and Simon Jeffers were choreographing
this exact ballet today, decades after its 1988
premiere, which new animals, or perhaps which
human cultures, would be waiting in line to board
that boat? Next time you are sitting in a cafe,
sipping your coffee and scrolling on your phone,
take a look around the room, and matter the waiters
serving you are penguins. And ask yourself what
consequences we are comfortably watching perform
right in front of us. Thanks for joining us on
today's Deep Dive. We'll catch you next time.