The All Blacks of the Art World are coming to Leeds

On the 3 and 4 Nov 2015 the Royal New Zealand Ballet will dance in the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre in Leeds. A visit by a national ballet company is a great compliment to Yorkshire especially as the dancers are coming to Leeds before touring High Wycombe, Canterbury and London.

The New Zealanders are bringing two works to this country:

• Giselle which the inimitable Adult Beginner reviewed in This is what happens when you don’t read the plot synopsis 3 Feb 2014 and Giselle 8 Feb 2014 when they visited Los Angeles last year; and
• The Anatomy of a Passing Cloud, a mixed bill consisting of Javier de Frutos's ballet of that name, Andonis Foniadakis's Selon Desir and Neil Ieremia's Passchendaele.

The last of those works is to mark the centenary of the First Word War and New Zealand's participation in that conflict and honours the mant New Zealand troops who fell in Passchendaele. The company has performed that ballet with the band of the New Zealand army as part of Salute a tribute to that nation's war dead.

The company will dance Giselle in Wycombe and Canterbury and The Anatomy of a Passing Cloud in Leeds and London. I don't know whether it is a coincidence but the Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa which translates literally as the "land of the long white cloud".

I visited that beautiful country in February 1992 and travelled everywhere from Cape Reinga in the North to Bluff in the South. I saw a great performance of The Mikado in the Aotoa Centre in Auckland. Equally remarkable was the sight of two young women meeting on a pedestrian crossing in Wellington Street Auckland and two lines of traffic at 18:00 at the height of the rush hour waiting patiently for them to finish their conversation. Not a single motorist hooted his horn. I do hope the New Zealand dancers don't try to do that in Wellington Street in Leeds. Our motorists just wouldn't understand.

I am no expert on rugby but I believe that the All Blacks are one of the best national sides in the world.  If the Royal New Zealand Ballet aspires to be the All Blacks of the art world I think we are in for a treat.

Post Script

@tweeting_nik who lives in New Zealand has just tweeted

@jelterps You won't be disappointed! I saw it on Saturday night (as part of their Salute programme). Powerful. Sobering. Moving. Brilliant!

— Nik (@tweeting_nik) May 25, 2015

I responded to her tweet as follows:

@jelterps It was one of the greatest evenings of dance that I've seen anywhere in the world! You're going to be blown away.

— Nik (@tweeting_nik) May 25, 2015

Nik has just pointed out that the mixed bill will also include "Dear Horizon" which has recently been premièred in  New Zealand.

Bourne's "Lord of the Flies" at Bradford: good though not quite my cup of tea

William Golding

Photo Wikipedia

New Adventures' Lord of the Flies closed in Bradford to a standing ovation  though it has to be said in an auditorium that was a good deal less than full. I was one of the few members of the audience who did not stand up on Saturday evening. Neither did I cheer. But I did clap. For although the show was not quite my cup of tea it was good.

Based closely on the novel by William Golding about a group of schoolboys on a desert island who descend into savagery when left to their own devices. it was far from comfortable to watch. The cast was of course all male and many of the dancers had been recruited from local schools. An on-line form on New Adventures ' website explains:

"Lord of the Flies is a unique project that will bring together professional dancers from our company and young male dancers from the regions in which we will present the production. Over the coming months each regional venue will be launching large-scale community outreach programmes to find the young men to be in the show. We are interested to hear from young men aged between 10 - 25 year old. No previous experience of dance is necessary. "

The main characters were Ralph, Piggy and Jack danced respectively by Sam Archer, Sam Plant and Danny Reubens of New Adventures. They all performed well and I think I would have liked to have seen more of those principals had the story and choreography permitted.

The score by Terry Davies fitted the story very well. There was a lot of percussion and rhythm. The choreography which had to be within the capability of schoolboys with no previous experience of dance while allowing the principals to shine was devised cleverly by Scott Ambler. Lez Bretherson made ingenious use of hampers and clothes rails as props.

The show was dramatic, well produced and well danced. For the children who took part it must have been a wonderful experience. Nureyev, Acosta, Polunin and indeed Bourne himself had already eroded much of the the prejudice against dance for boys. Shows like this bury it for ever and for that alone it deserves to be commended.