Yolanda Sonnabend, theatrical designer - obituary

Yolanda Sonnabend, the painter and theatrical designer, who has died aged 80, was a driving force in the look of British ballet, particularly in the psychologically challenging productions of the Royal Ballet’s choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan; she was also an outstanding portraitist.

Yolanda Sonnabend came from a generation when British ballet design was evolving into a highly sophisticated art under the visually acute MacMillan. She was one of his two favourite designers, alternating with her art school tutor Nicholas Georgiadis, who was the master of the choreographer’s large narrative ballets, whereas Yolanda Sonnabend’s rampant abstractions better evoked the moods of MacMillan’s more personal one-act works – what she called his “neurotic” ballets.

She also designed opulent classical ballets, including the Royal Ballet’s productions of Swan Lake and La Bayadère.

A small, striking, black-haired Rhodesian, she kept her North London house packed like a cabinet of curiosities with masks, half-built sets, costume sketches and artistic materials, reflecting her peripatetic life, Russian-German-Jewish background and deep interest in the powers of imagination and memory.

Her contribution to MacMillan’s realisations of his pioneering psychological journeys in ballet was crucial to his vision. “It’s a very strange and intimate thing a designer has with a choreographer,” she said. “It’s like the portrait-painter and the sitter – you give each other a kind of power. The choreographer uses you, because you have a different way of seeing. ”

The memorable results included her Brontë-esque moorland setting for MacMillan’s My Brother, My Sisters, a disturbing incestuous family group, her wire-meshed yard in his study of oppression, Playground – which she researched by visiting a mental institution – and her celestially delicate lightbox for his Requiem (for which she suggested the remarkable opening image when the dancers shuffle on with mouths gaping wide).

For MacMillan’s Valley of Shadows she provided both an Italian garden and a concentration camp. When she was invited by the Royal Ballet’s artistic director Sir Anthony Dowell to design a new Swan Lake in 1987, followed by La Bayadère, she said that “it was a joy to turn from all MacMillan’s damaged children to something that could all just be pretty”.

Yolanda Sonnabend’s reimagined swans in her opulent Gustave Moreau-inspired Swan Lake were typically fantastical, not dressed in the traditional white swan tutus but in long cream ballgowns, and her sets were more akin to landscapes of the mind. The swirling decorative excess divided audiences. This year the Royal Ballet announced plans to replace the 28-year-old production.

Yolanda Sonnabend was born on March 26 1935 in Bulawayo, then in Rhodesia, the younger child of the sociologist Dr Henry Sonnabend and the physician Dr Fira Sonnabend. Her parents were Jewish, her father of German family, her mother of Russian, who met at Padua University in the 1920s and emigrated to South Africa in 1930.

While her father developed his anthropological work in South Africa, her mother and aunt, Rachel Sandler, set up the first all-female doctors’ practice in Rhodesia, and Yolanda attended Eveline High School, Bulawayo. When her mother died in 1946 Yolanda and her brother Joseph (who became an eminent Aids physician) were raised by their aunt, before the family relocated to Geneva.

Yolanda Sonnabend became an art student at London’s Slade School under Nicholas Georgiadis, just as MacMillan, who had a powerful visual sense, was demanding new approaches to ballet design. Thanks to Georgiadis’s influence, she designed her first ballet in 1957, Peter Wright’s A Blue Rose for Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet. Following acclaimed designs for the New Opera Company and the Oxford Playhouse Oresteia in 1961, she did her first work with MacMillan, Symphony (1963), described by one critic as “soft floating backcloths (with) gorgeous splashes of colour”.

The 1970s and 1980s were Yolanda Sonnabend’s peak years, designing for MacMillan the Japanese-themed Rituals (1975), Requiem (1976), My Brother, My Sisters (1978), Playground (1979), and his television ballet The Seven Deadly Sins (1984). That year the two had a rare falling out over his Different Drummer when, five days before the premiere, MacMillan decided that Yolanda Sonnabend’s set no longer suited his much-altered concept for the ballet, though he kept her costumes. The designer was bitterly upset.

In 1979 she designed Derek Jarman’s idiosyncratic film The Tempest, setting it in a decaying mansion. Many of her sketches are collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum, including her gold-leaf costumes for Michael Corder’s 1982 creation for the Royal Ballet L’Invitation au voyage. She created further major classical designs for K Ballet, Tokyo (run by the former Royal Ballet star Tetsuya Kumakawa), such as The Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet.

Yolanda Sonnabend taught design at the Slade School of Fine Art, Wimbledon School of Art and Camberwell School of Art. “Design is not decoration – decoration is just added on,” she told an interviewer. “Design is visualisation of emotion … Always start at the end and work backwards. The last vision is the most important, because it’s what the public take away with them.”

She much regretted the change in recent ballet styling of plotless contemporary works to all-over leotards: “They just want a mood to put their body sculpture in, because it’s now all about the extraordinary way dancers move, about athletic pyrotechnics … It’s a shame that in costumes glamour and fantasy has migrated almost completely over to the catwalk.”

Yolanda Sonnabend was a sought-after portraitist, with nine of her portraits collected by the National Portrait Gallery, including Kenneth MacMillan, Steven Berkoff and the young physicist Stephen Hawking – two more of her portraits of him are in the Science Museum and at Oxford University. She was herself the subject of three NPG portraits . In 2000 she was awarded the Garrick/Milne Prize for theatrical portraiture.

She was unmarried and is survived by her brother, Dr Joseph Sonnabend.

Yolanda Sonnabend, March 26 1935, November 9 2015