Matz Skoog made his name in the 1980s as a virtuoso and charismatic dancer with London Festival Ballet. “It was a great place to be, you worked really hard and I wanted to work hard. Festival Ballet did eight performances a week — it was very exciting for a young person,” he said.
He was a familiar sight to fellow dancers waiting for the curtain to rise. A compact, blond-haired figure with legs seemingly made of India rubber and an equally elastic grin, he bounced up and down, whipping off double and triple turns in the air to “get in the mood”. Just as the orchestra finished their overture and the curtain began to twitch, he flung off his dusty tracksuit, buckled on a rapier, “and there was your night’s Romeo”, reported Luke Jennings in the Evening Standard, describing the Swedish ballet star as “the Sven-Goran Eriksson of dance”, a reference to the England football team manager.
The critics adored Skoog’s “spirited dancing” in Giselle and “quick elegance” in Romeo and Juliet, for which he was also the company’s poster boy. He went on to create new roles, offering wild and turbulent movements in Glen Tetley’s Pulcinella (1984) and a poignantly emotional performance in Christopher Bruce’s The Dream is Over (1987), based on John Lennon’s songs. “Matz Skoog, wild-haired and wild-eyed, flamboyant but icily self-contained, makes a convincing working-class hero in his dance to the song of that name,” John Percival reported in his review for The Times. His most notable role was arguably in 1988 as one of the guards in Bruce’s highly charged Swansong (1987), a powerful study of state brutality during a prisoner interrogation.
Skoog, right, in Swansong
BILL COOPER/ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET ARCHIVE
BILL COOPER/ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET ARCHIVE
Unsurprisingly, Skoog’s return as artistic director in 2001 to what was now English National Ballet (ENB) was cheered by dancers and critics alike. So too was his declaration that he would aim to make the company a leading place for creative artists. Describing himself as a team player, the bespectacled Skoog talked about creative management as if he were leading a student seminar. “Art is where society experiments with new ideas and we have to be part of that,” he earnestly told Debra Craine in The Times when his appointment was announced.
Yet he had walked into a financial crisis, one that was compounded by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US that overshadowed his first day in the office. Matters got worse, with Skoog and Derek Deane, his predecessor, trading insults in the press. Skoog suggested that Deane had been dumbing down ballet’s image to chase the box office; Deane criticised Skoog’s “naive and arty-farty” ideas.
Meanwhile, the softly spoken, self-effacing and courteous Skoog set about refreshing the repertoire and encouraging British choreographers, including Christopher Hampson and Michael Corder. Inspired by seeing Will Tuckett’s stagings of Wind in the Willows and Pinocchio with his children, he commissioned Tuckett’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. He also replaced Deane’s luxurious Nutcracker with a sharp new version by Gerald Scarfe, the cartoonist, and dragged the company away from arena-ballet populism into upmarket venues including the Coliseum and the Royal Opera House. In 2003 he received the Critics’ Circle award for most imaginative repertoire.
Alas, Scarfe’s Nutcracker proved expensive and controversial while a refurbishment of the Coliseum at Christmas 2003 sent ENB scurrying to the cavernous and loss-making Hammersmith Apollo. The move to classier venues may have brought kudos, but it too dented the balance sheet: performances plummeted in number, attendances halved and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a new full-length ballet by Corder, was cancelled. Skoog was not helped by a hands-on board whose demands for box-office hits contradicted their desire for artistic innovation. Despite his declared desire to move away from dancers who merely “kick up their legs and look cute”, Skoog found himself forced to rely on Deane’s box-office friendly productions.
Skoog in Coppelia
CATHERINE ASHMORE/ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET ARCHIVE
In Cruel Garden, 1988
DEE CONWAY
In March 2005 the great and the good of ballet gathered in Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for Dame Alicia Markova, who had cofounded London Festival Ballet with Anton Dolin. Skoog read the lesson from Isaiah: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the messenger who brings good news …” Three weeks later he resigned, the fourth artistic director to leave the company in 15 years.
Matz Skoog was born in Stockholm, in 1957, the son of a jazz-musician father and a mother who was an actress and dancer. He was eight when his mother suggested that he try for the Royal Swedish Ballet School. “I was a good little boy so I said, yes, why not?” he told The Arts Desk website. “In 1965 I was accepted into the school, which was run in parallel to the ballet and opera companies inside the opera house.” He became an apprentice in 1973 and a full company member in 1975.
Thanks to his parents’ connections he also trained at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), though these were turbulent times. Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the country’s leading dancers, had just defected and on Skoog’s second day Yuri Soloviev, another great dancer, took his own life, apparently after being in touch with Baryshnikov in the West. “I turned up at the theatre that day, it was absolutely quiet, no one was saying a word to me,” he recalled.
Encouraged by Dolin he crossed the North Sea in 1977 to join London Festival Ballet, then directed by John Field but which later came under the lively but debt-ridden directorship of Peter Schaufuss. There he met Amanda Price, a New Zealand dancer who went on to retrain in arts administration at City University, London. They were married in 1991 and she survives him with their sons, Sam and Louis, who both work in the performing arts.
Skoog when he was with English National Ballet
COURTESY OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET.
Skoog had left English National Ballet in 1989 to become a freelance dancer and producer, including staging La Sylphide in Rome in 1991. He then honed his management skills with London City Ballet, Aterballetto in Italy and the Rambert Dance Company. In 1996 he was appointed artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, broadening the international range of the company’s work. When the vacancy for director arose at ENB, he jumped at the chance to return to the country and company that had been home to much of his dancing career.
After his departure Skoog returned to the Royal New Zealand Ballet, where Amanda was executive director from 2007 to 2015. He remained active in dance as a teacher, coach and mentor, sharing his expertise with younger dancers and serving on juries of prestigious competitions. Before clearing his desk at ENB Skoog had acquired Kenneth MacMillan’s 1987 American Ballet Theatre staging of The Sleeping Beauty, a production that, according to Donald Hutera’s four-star review in The Times, “offers few surprises but many pleasures”. As peace offerings go, few could ask for more and it remains in the company’s repertoire today.
Matz Skoog, director of English National Ballet 2001-05, was born on April 10, 1957. He died of cancer on February 7, 2026, aged 69
