Still Life at the Penguin Café

Still Life at the Penguin Café is a full-length ballet in two acts choreographed by David Bintley to music by Simon Jeffes of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It was created for The Royal Ballet and received its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1988. The work is structured as a series of vignettes set in a fantastical café, in which endangered species — including the Texas Kangaroo Rat, the Brazilian Woolly Spider Monkey, and the Utah Longhorn Ram — take the floor as cabaret turns, each characterised with wit and invention in both movement and costume. The ballet is an ecological allegory, ending with all the creatures gathered on an ark as rain falls.