Prologue
On the verge of womanhood, a girl imagines her future.

The Proctors’ house
The girl, Abigail, works for the family of Elizabeth and John Proctor and becomes entangled in a dangerous relationship.

Meeting House
The community of Salem join together in a service of devotion and fellowship, led by Reverend Samuel Parris.

Shadow play
Abigail and her friends, including Parris’ daughter, Betty, play at the edge of the village.

Forest
The girls follow Tituba, Parris’ slave, into the forest. Abigail seeks a way to curse Elizabeth Proctor. As they dance, out of control, the girls are discovered by Reverend Parris. Betty collapses and is carried by her father to the Meeting House.

Meeting House
The community rallies. Reverend Hale, an expert in witchcraft, is summoned. In the process of trying to save Betty, a powerful force is unleashed in Salem as the girls begin to accuse people within the community of witchcraft.

Meeting House—Witch trial
Events have progressed; as the community fragments, increasing numbers fall under suspicion. The Deputy Governor of Massachusetts, Danforth, leads the hearings.

The Proctors’ house
Abigail persuades the Proctors’ new servant, Mary, to store a poppet, a small doll made to look like Abigail herself, in the Proctors’ home. Unbeknownst to Mary, the poppet, stuck with a pin, serves as evidence of witchcraft. The authorities arrive with a search warrant, discover the poppet and accuse Elizabeth. Sure of her innocence, Elizabeth gives herself up for arrest so she may speak her truth in court.

Meeting House—Court
Given a choice between a confession or the noose, the prisoners hold fast to their truth. For Elizabeth and John Proctor, their private shame of John’s affair is made public and Abigail is exposed. However, in denying her husband’s affair, Elizabeth, unwittingly, condemns herself.

Outskirts of the village
Unable to bear her humiliation, Abigail flees Salem.

Jail
As the day of reckoning dawns for the citizens of Salem, John Proctor faces a terrible choice, should he save his life or his name?

This illicit coupling between the married John Proctor and Abigail, the orphaned teenager who is a servant in the Proctor household, is the atmospheric and disconcertingly erotic beginning of Scottish Ballet’s timeless retelling of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. In this moment of shared passion, the pair are blissfully unaware how quickly love can turn to guilt, rejection can fuel vengeance and private passions can have public—and deadly—consequences.

In 1692 the Massachusetts village of Salem, a small tight-knit and devout community, was gripped by a hysteria that the devil was living in their midst. Neighbor turned on neighbor and friends and family members testified against each other as rumours of bewitchment spread through the community after two girls suffered fits.

Fueled by superstition, fear, and a desire by some to save their own skins by pointing the finger at others, an apparently stable community quickly collapsed into chaos. By the time the witch-hunt subsided two years later 14 women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for witchcraft.

Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama The Crucible was inspired by the Salem witch-hunts but was intended as an allegory that pointed the finger at the reds under the bed witch-hunts that gripped mid-20th century America. These witch-hunts demanded that many working in Hollywood and the arts testified against each other about past or present communist sympathies.

But The Crucible is also a play for all time. As Miller himself remarked after seeing many productions around the world, it served “as either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.”

“It’s not just about Salem in 1692 or 1953 America but it is also about now, about what might be lurking in the shadows waiting to be unleashed,” says The Crucible’s choreographer Helen Pickett.

Peter Salem’s score draws on 17th century psalms, and evocative sounds such as the courtroom gavel or a church bell but also embraces the electro beat of rave music which heightens the repressed sexuality of the teenage girls whose naked antics in the woods are used as evidence of sorcery. Emma Kingsbury and David Finn’s clever design and costumes look back to Puritan simplicity and forward to sharp 21st century style to place the story both now and then, here and there.

One of the things that Peter Salem’s score and Pickett’s choreography amply demonstrate is that less is often more and sometimes there is no need for words. “It is a play of many, many words,” agrees Pickett, “but words often fail to tell us how we feel, and movement can do that. It can make an audience lean in and feel the story. It is a play in which darkness and light sit side by side, so that although we see the horror, and the othering that goes on we also see the loyalty that people have towards each other and the courage they show.”

Pickett is interested too in using the choreography to explore the psychology of movement, the way we unwittingly reveal or betray ourselves through gesture, when we tuck hair behind our ears or cross our arms in opposition or try to hide our true feelings.

The Crucible serves as a reminder that what keeps great classics alive is not admiring them out of duty but reinventing them in many forms so that they speak as directly to us as they did when first produced.

Scottish Ballet treats Miller’s play with respect, but not undue reverence, and it uses the expressive language of dance to explore what goes unspoken in Miller’s play, fleshing out the relationships that underpin the drama. It creates the febrile atmosphere of a fearful religious community living uncomfortably close both to a real dark forest and those of the mind to explore how this community could so quickly descend into the hysteria of a witch-hunt.

The world of the story is one of shadows and superstition, a place where little girls innocently playing with puppets in the woods can quickly turn to something darker.

Pickett points to the fact that although the community seems stable it is vulnerable and as a result fearful of the unknown. She also has an explanation for Abigail’s behavior after she is turned out of the Proctor household.

“Abigail is dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She has seen her parents slaughtered and she has been taken in by her uncle. But what she really wants is to belong. She is in pain.” Perhaps like the other teenage girls she doesn’t really know the destruction she is unleashing until it is too late when the monsters have become all too real and human.

The composer, Peter Salem, admits that The Crucible is not an obvious choice for a ballet. But he believes that makes it all the more interesting.

“I kept the play close by when I was writing the music, I was always referring to it, but we are not “doing” the play but rather are finding the emotional undercurrents of every scene and making clear what is going on at every single moment. It’s about finding the way through the two opposing narratives, one full of violence and brutality, and the other represented by the relationship between John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth, which is full of love.”

Pickett agrees and believes that it is a story that throws a challenge down to us at a time when new shadows loom and fear of the unknown and outsiders is on the rise. “I hope The Crucible puts audiences in a position where the audience watch and wonder ‘what would I do in that situation?’ And wonder “‘what would I stand up for and defend?’”

Hampson joined Scottish Ballet as Artistic Director in 2012, becoming CEO in 2015. Since then, the company has performed across the world and he has brought in significant dance creators including Crystal Pite, David Dawson, Helen Pickett, and Matthew Bourne, while developing in-house talent. In 2017, he curated the world’s first Digital Season—dance to be experienced through digital platforms and has since brought more Scottish Ballet repertoire to screens including the creation of his first award-winning feature film, The Secret Theatre, and Starstruck. He chairs the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion steering group at Scottish Ballet; he established the Dancers’ Education Group and is a passionate advocate for dancer career transition and creative leadership.

Hampson is on the boards of Scottish Ballet, Central School of Ballet, and Ballet Black.

In 2024 and 2025, Pickett will create full-length narratives for American Ballet Theatre and Dutch National Ballet, and a new short work for Boston Ballet. In 2023, Pickett premieres Emma Bovary at National Ballet of Canada, IN Cognito at West Australian Ballet, and When Love with Festival Ballet Providence. Pickett choreographed 12 dances for film, during 2020-2021, including The Air Before Me, which won the Audience Choice Award for Screen Dance International Festival, and Hurley Burley, which was nominated for an Emmy Award^®. While resident choreographer for Atlanta Ballet, 2012 – 2017, she was named Best Choreographer in 2014, for The Exiled. In 2015, Pickett won Best Choreographer and Best Dance Production for her full length, Camino Real. Critic  Manning Harris wrote that Camino Real would “become a legend in the dance world.” In 2016, Pickett received an Honorary Doctorate from University of North Carolina School of the Arts, from Dean Susan Jaffe.

In 2021-2022, Pickett worked with, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Vail Dance Festival, American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Kansas City Ballet, and Cincinnati Ballet. From 2005-2020, Pickett choreographed work for: Boston Ballet (6), Royal Ballet of Flanders, Ballet West (2), Dance Theatre of Harlem, Semper Oper/Dresden Ballet, Vienna State Opera, Scottish Ballet (3), Philadelphia Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Alberta Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Charlotte Ballet (2), Atlanta Ballet (4), Aspen Santa Fe Ballet (2), Louisville Ballet (2), Ballet X, Smuin Ballet (2), Oklahoma City Ballet (2), Sacramento Ballet, and The Washington Ballet. In addition, she choreographed for the Chicago Lyric Opera, Les Troyens, and, in London, an evening length, multi-media musical, Voices of the Amazon.

Pickett’s 12 dance films were choreographed and rehearsed on Zoom. Home Studies, a five-film series, was later translated to the stage for a premiere at Jacob’s Pillow in August 2021. Three films from her series, The Shakespeare Cycle, were featured on PBS. The film, The Air Before Me, created with director Shaun Clarke, made four Official Selection lists around the world and won the Audience Choice Award for Screen Dance International Festival. For the films, Pickett worked with dancers from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Charlotte Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Kansas City Ballet, Les Grands Ballet Canadians de Montreal, and Royal Swedish Ballet. In August 2020, Scottish Ballet premiered Trace, a duet created for film in My Light Shines On: An Evening with Scottish Ballet for the Edinburgh International Festival.

In 2020, Pickett created CVJS a YouTube talk show. The intimate one-on-one conversations would become Creative Vitality Jam Sessions, with the first interview produced on May 20th. Pickett created CVJS to not only highlight extraordinary dance and theater artists but also to support and build an inclusive, equitable dance community. 

In April 2021, Pickett founded the Female Choreographer’s Big Round Table, a zoom meeting place for female choreographers to build community and forge avenues for more equitable work environments. To date, 162 female choreographers have joined the Roundtable!

He also provided music for Pickett’s dance project Home Studies, her dance film The Air Before Me and composed the music for Desire which Pickett created for ABT in 2021.

James Bonas’ most recent work in opera includes the French premiere of Abrahamsen’s Snow Queen for Opéra National du Rhin—winner of the French critics Best Scenic Elements/Scenography award 2022—and Jonathan Dove’s Flight for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is a regular collaborator with animator Grégoire Pont at Opéra National de Lyon, where productions include Orff’s Der Mond and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and L’heure espagnol. Their innovative approach has led to these works being seen around the world, including at Opéra de Limoges, Opéra de Lille, Royal Opera House Muscat, San Francisco Symphony, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Other recent stagings include the world premiere of a new community opera Silent City for Matera in Italy (European Capital of Culture) and Chabrier’s L’étoile at the Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos (Lisbon). In Spring 2023, he makes his German debut with Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos at Theater Magdeburg.

Bonas also works internationally in dance and enjoys an ongoing collaboration with choreographers including Helen Pickett and Sophie Laplane. With Helen Pickett he created the award-winning narrative ballet The Crucible for Scottish Ballet with further runs at Sadler’s Wells, London, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and Nashville, Tennessee. With Sophie Laplane he created the celebrated short film Dive, also for Scottish Ballet, which has been featured in dance film festivals worldwide including the 2021 Venice Biennale and winning the Grand Jury Prize at Cinedans 2022. Plans include new creations for National Ballet of Canada, Scottish Ballet, and Dutch National Ballet.

An advocate for multi-disciplinary performance, Bonas collaborated with Damon Albarn and Abderrahmane Sissako as Artistic Consultant on the creation of Le Vol du Boli, an exploration of the complex and often brutal relations between Europe and West Africa, at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Appearing regularly at the BBC Proms, he staged Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale with the Hebrides Ensemble at the Drill Hall, Lincoln, as well as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique with Aurora Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. For the 2022 BBC Proms he collaborated with Anthony Roth-Costanzo and English National Opera (ENO) on Glass Handel at the Print Works in London.

As associate director, Bonas regularly worked alongside directors including Rufus Norris, Terry Gilliam, Tom Morris, and Simon McBurney on productions such as Wonder.land at the National Theatre and Théâtre du Châtelet, Raskatov A Dog’s Heart for ENO/Complicité, and Adams The Death of Klinghoffer for ENO and the Metropolitan Opera.

In the world of live performance in February 2020, Kingsbury designed sets and costumes The Firebird for Texas Ballet Theater and in 2019, The Crucible for the Scottish Ballet, which won the 2019 UK Theatre Award for Dance. She has designed for a number of American ballet companies including Atlanta Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Oregon Ballet, Richmond Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Smuin Ballet, and Texas Ballet Theater.

A frequent designer for the L.A Philharmonic in Los Angeles, Kingsbury has designed five productions for them in 2018-2019, including artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s concept opera Bliss, Costume Designer for Atlas: An Opera in Three Parts composed by Meredith Monk, and John Cage’s Europeras 1&2 at Sony Picture Studios. The latter two operas were directed by the visionary Yuval Sharon.

For Opera Australia in 2019, Kingsbury designed the opera The Ghost Sonata directed by Greg Eldridge. Other operas include Salieri’s Der Rauchfangkehrer for Pinchgut Opera and Ich Habe Genug for Sydney Chamber Opera. Other work includes costume designer for Andy X: The Movie, directed by Jim Sharman, Atomic: The Musical, Sydney/ New York productions, The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe touring Australia/ U.K. Kingsbury's theater design includes The Tempest, Oedipus Rex, The Winter’s Tale, and The House of Bernarda Alba. Kingsbury’s film credits include The Wolverine (2013), Gods Of Egypt (2016), Truth (2015), El Tonto (2019), Dreamworks/Global Creatures How To Train Your Dragon, Childhood’s End (2016), Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) and Legendary Entertainment’s Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). Kingsbury was costume designer for various productions created by the legendary Australian Artist/ Sculptor Ken Unsworth and the Australian Dance Artists.

In August of 2022, Kinsgbury designed sets and costumes for the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s new production of Cinderella. She is currently engaged to design two new ballets for San Francisco Ballet in 2023 and a new opera in Italy. She is a proud member of the Costume Designers Guild-CDG Local 892 and currenlty based in Northern California.

His long history of collaborations with Robert Wilson includes Der Sandmann (Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus), Zinnias (Peak Performances), The Odyssey (National Theater of Greece), and KOOL (Guggenheim NYC) as well as the exhibition The Hat Makes the Man at the Max Ernst Museum (Brühl, Germany).

Bolman is an Assistant Professor at California State University Fullerton and has served as an adjunct professor at Colorado College and Montclair State University, a teaching artist at the Brown-Trinity Rep Consortium, and a guest lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Rydout is a qualified Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis instructor and gained a Post-Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Arts Education. Rydout was a founding member and lecturer on the BA Modern Ballet program at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Rydout became Rehearsal Director in 2017 and Director of Dance & Artistic Development in 2023.

She began teaching and choreographing in 2012, joining the faculty of Alonzo King Lines Ballet in San Francisco.

Cassini was rehearsal director with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, Theater St Gallen, and Ballet BC. She was a San Francisco Ballet school faculty member and a guest teacher with Ballett Theater Basel, Bern Ballett, the Czech National Ballet, the Icelandic Dance Company, Arts Umbrella, New Zealand School of Dance, the Arts University of Iceland, and Scottish Ballet.