Alastair Macaulay wrote in 2012 for the New York Times about “Viscera,” the piece Mr. Scarlett later created for the Miami City Ballet, that its “images, constructions and textures” showed why Mr. Scarlett had “achieved the status of an important choreographer of classical ballet. “
Speaking to The Times about Mr. Villella in 2014, Mr. Scarlett said, “I owed Eddy a lot because I was very aware that American executives would all watch to see what the outcome would be. After this piece everyone called. “
Mr Scarlett ended his dance career in 2012 and became the Royal Ballet’s first artist in residence that same year. Over the next seven years, he not only created numerous pieces for his home company, but also choreographed works for the Norwegian National Ballet, New York Ballet, American Ballet Theater, England National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and the Royal New Zealand Ballet Queensland Ballet, BalletBoyz and Texas Ballet Theater.
Although he was invited to create abstract works as a guest choreographer, his pieces for the Royal Ballet showed his fondness for storytelling. With works such as “Sweet Violets” (2012), a story of Jack the Ripper and murder in Victorian England, “Hansel and Gretel” (2013) and “The Age of Anxiety”, a ballet on the subject of war based on the poem by WH Auden based Mr. Scarlett, who had the same title and was seated on Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, showed that he was part of a long tradition of dance drama at the Royal Ballet.
In 2016 he created his first full-length work, Frankenstein, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel based on a score commissioned by Lowell Liebermann. It received lukewarm reviews both in London and when it was performed by the San Francisco Ballet in 2018. His new version of Swan Lake, performed for the Royal Ballet in 2018, was received with more warmth.
“It’s far from a radical reinvention – the setting and choreography remain close to the nineteenth-century original – but what sets it apart from so many other swan lakes is its attention to dramatic detail,” wrote Judith Mackrell in The Guardian.
