Peter Farmer has designed for most of the major ballet companies in the world, including the Royal Ballet, London Festival Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Houston Ballet, London City Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Rome and Cologne Opera Houses, Stuttgart Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, New London Ballet, Ballet Rambert, Scottish Ballet, Northern Ballet Theatre, the Dutch National Ballet, the Washington Ballet, and Chicago City Ballet.
His work includes designs for The Sleeping Beauty for the Munich Opera House, Anna Karenina and The Three Musketeers for the Australian Ballet, Giselle for Texas and Rio de Janeiro, Swan Lake for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Hong Kong Ballet, The Great Gatsby for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, The Nutcracker for Cincinnati Ballet Company, Les Sylphides for the Teatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro, A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Hirofumi Inoue Ballet de Chambre in Tokyo and Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Divertimento Nº 15 for Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham) Royal Ballet. He designed Anna Karenina for the Ballet de Santiago Chile and for the Norwegian Ballet, La Traviata for London City Ballet, Cinderella for the Cincinnati Ballet, Giselle for the Star Dancers Ballet Foundation in Tokyo, Coppélia for the Portuguese National Ballet and also for the Inoue Ballet Foundation in Tokyo and Nutcracker for Pittsburgh Ballet. He designed Kenneth MacMillan’s Winter Dreams for the Royal Ballet and his Manon for the Australian, Vienna and Houston Ballets.
In 1991 he designed Peter Darrell’s Tales of Hoffmann for the Hong Kong Ballet. He has designed Les Sylphides and Coppélia and, in 1995, Ashton’s Birthday
Offering for the Birmingham Royal Ballet. He has also designed the full length Butterfly for Australian Ballet. In 1996, he designed Swan Lake for the Hong Kong Ballet, returning in 1997 to design their Nutcracker. More recently, he designed Swan Lake for the English National Ballet at the Royal Albert Hall, London. He has recently designed Manon for the Kirov Ballet
He collaborated on numerous occasions with Robert Cohan and Robert North for London Contemporary Dance Theatre. These include Cohan’s Stages, No-Man’s Land, Sky, Consolations of the Rising Moon Stone Garden, In Memory, Metamorphoses and Crescendo and North’s Meeting and Parting, David and Goliath and Troy Game.
His drama work includes The Night of the Iguana, at the Savoy Theatre, Man and Superman at the Vaudeville, Kean at the Globe Theatre, What Every Woman Knows at the Albery and A Woman of No Importance for Chichester Festival Theatre.
Peter Farmer is also a prolific book illustrator and a successful painter, who has had numerous one-man exhibitions of his work.