✦ Who He Is ✦
Mats Ek was born in 1945 in Malmö, Sweden, the son of choreographer Birgit Cullberg and Royal Dramatic Theatre actor Anders Ek. He came to dance relatively late and by way of theatre: he took a modern dance summer course under Donya Feuer at seventeen, studied at Marieborg Folk College, and spent the second half of the 1960s directing at Stockholm's Marionette Theatre and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. He joined his mother's company, Cullberg Ballet, as a dancer only in 1972, at twenty-seven, and did not choreograph his first piece until 1976.
Birgit Cullberg had founded the company in 1967, building it into one of Sweden's major dance institutions on a foundation of dramatic, psychologically driven narrative ballet - values her son absorbed and then pushed further. Mats Ek co-directed Cullberg Ballet with his mother from 1978, took over as sole artistic director when she retired in 1985, and led the company until 1993. It was during this period that he made his name internationally, not with new ballets but with radical rebuilds of familiar ones: he kept the original scores of Giselle, Swan Lake, and Carmen note for note, while discarding almost everything else - replacing mime, pointe work, and Romantic-era plotting with an earthbound, psychologically exposed vocabulary of his own. His wife, dancer Ana Laguna, originated the leading female role in most of these works, including Giselle, and remained his closest collaborator for decades.
Signature Works
Giselle (1982)
Ek's breakthrough reinterpretation for Cullberg Ballet moves the Romantic tragedy's second act into a mental asylum, replacing the Wilis with patients and their supernatural queen with a ward nurse - all danced to Adolphe Adam's original score.
Swan Lake (1987)
Ek's swans are heavy, land-bound creatures rather than ethereal spirits, and his prince is a mother-fixated young man drawn to a rougher, more physically direct Odette-Odile than the fairy-tale original allows.
Carmen (1992)
A television production for Swedish television often credited as an Emmy Award winner - though sources differ on this, since International Emmy Award nominee records for the year list it among the nominees rather than the winners - Ek's Carmen strips Bizet's opera of its exoticism and plays its central triangle as blunt, contemporary sexual politics.
Juliet & Romeo (2013)
Made for Royal Swedish Ballet, this late reworking reverses the title to foreground its heroine and reframes Shakespeare's lovers as teenagers acting under real domestic and social pressure rather than fated, storybook figures.
Style & Method
Ek's signature move is not writing new ballets but taking existing ones apart from the inside. He keeps a source's score intact and often its broad plot outline recognizable, then rebuilds the choreography and staging around a contemporary psychological or social reading of the story - turning a supernatural forest of spirits into a psychiatric ward, or a devoted fairy-tale swan into a creature closer to an ordinary, difficult woman. The resulting vocabulary favors weight, flexed feet, low center of gravity, and bare or near-bare feet over the lifted, turned-out lines of the ballets he is reworking, blending classical training with the grounded physicality of modern dance.
Much of this was developed in close partnership with Ana Laguna, who danced the central female role in most of his major reinterpretations and shaped how those roles moved. Ek has also been notably possessive of his own repertory: in 2016 he announced he was withdrawing performance rights to his works worldwide rather than let them be staged without his direct oversight, a decision that made headlines as a kind of retirement - though he went on to make new work for Paris Opera Ballet in 2019 and Royal Swedish Ballet in 2025, never fully stepping away from choreography.
Legacy
Ek received the Prix Benois de la Danse in 2006 and the Europe Theatre Prize in 2016, the latter citing his "contribution to the revolution in contemporary dance." His deeper legacy lies in demonstrating that a 19th-century story ballet could be entirely rebuilt - vocabulary, staging, and psychology all replaced - while its score and title stayed the same, without the result reading as parody or novelty. That template, tested first and most famously on his 1982 Giselle, gave later choreographers permission to treat the story-ballet canon as raw material rather than a fixed museum piece, and his reworkings of Giselle, Swan Lake, and Carmen remain in repertory around the world as some of the most performed alternatives to their classical originals.