All that was missing from this Evening's Performance was a Ballet by Marney ......

This evening's performance by Ballet Central of its mixed programme at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre was a triumph and I said so on twitter.

But just one thing was missing - a work by Christopher Marney. Last year we had War Letters (see Images of War: Ballet Central's "War Letters" and other Works 29 April 2016), Scenes from a Wedding the year before that (see Dazzled 3 May 2015) and in 2013 anon (see Central Forward 22 March 2013). But not this year.

So, here is a gift to everyone who attended the show to turn a great evening into a perfect one.  A charming extract from Chris's ballet, The Carnival of the Animals, which he created for the Chelmsford Ballet Company in 2015. In my review of the ballet, A Delight Indeed, 22 March 2015 I explained:

"Marney did not create a new version of The Carnival of the Animals. He made a ballet about a company that was about to dance The Carnival of the Animals. A young stage hand longed to dance - perhaps because of his longing for its principal dancer performed beautifully by Wallis. But when he tried to lift her - dainty though she is - he found that pas de deux work was not quite as easy as it looked. According to Tim Tubbs's programme notes the ballet was set in the 1930s - the heroic early days of the English ballet after Diaghilev had died but before the Second World War when endless touring by the Vic-Wells Ballet won the hearts of the nation to this originally foreign art form. There were a few animals - foxes perhaps - and a yapping lap dog quite invisible to all but the dancers but clearly another dog like Bif which could do ballet (see Woof 12 Oct 2014 to understand the reference) - but the main characters were people. Quildan the stage hand, Wallis his sweetheart and principal dancer and Pettet her mother"

As you probably guessed, the stagehand was Stephen Quidlan and Jasmine Wallis was the dancer.

The person who uploaded the film to Vimeo was Marion Pettett. She is the Chair of the Chelmsford Ballet Company of which Chris is joint patron and I am a non-dancing associate. Marion graciously permitted me to embed the film into this blog and I am enormously grateful to her. I should add that Marion appears in the film clad in red.

I need to spend some time on my write-up in order to do justice to Chris and Ballet Central. It will appear towards the end of the day or maybe tomorrow.

Dutton at the Dancehouse

The Dancehouse

Author Pit-Yacker
Source Wikipedia
Creative Commons Licence

Tomorrow at 18:30 Martin Dutton will give a special class to students of advanced and pre-intermediate Level students at the Dancehouse Theatre on Oxford Road in Manchester.  The pre-intermediate starts at 18:30 and ends at 19:55.  The advanced class starts at 20:00 and ends at 21:15. The fee for both classes will be £10.  As Karen Sant, KNT's principal says:, "it will be amazing."

Dutton must have excelled in music as well as dance for he entered Chethams and became head chorister of Manchester Cathedral.  He trained at Central School of Ballet where "Christopher Marney, Hannah Bateman, Kenneth Tindall, Rachael Gillespie, Dominic North, Sarah Kundi, Paul Chantry and many more of my favourite dancers and choreographers trained" (see Ballet Central returns to Leeds 1 Feb 2017).

He began his career in the corps of Northern Ballet Theatre (now Northern Ballet) and danced for a while with Peter Schaufuss Balletten.  Readers will remember that Schaufuss created the production of La Sylphide that the Queensland Ballet brought to London in 2015 (see A dream realized: the Queensland Ballet in London 12 Aug 2015). This should be our national ballet because it is set in the Scottish highlands but try to getting a British company to dance it - even one that is actually based in the Scottish highlands (see Taynuilt - where better to create ballet 31 Aug 2013). I digress. The point is that Dutton must have impeccable credentials with exposure to the Danish tradition as well as the English and Russian ones.

For the last 10 years or so Dutton has taught at some of our most prestigious ballet schools including Northern Ballet School (see New Dance Teacher Martin Dutton Nov 2012), Ballet Theatre UK and the Hammond School.  It is not every day that adult dance students get a chance to learn from a teacher with this kind of experience and reputation. Even if you live some distance from Manchester this class will be well worth the journey.

Team Hud Adult Ballet Class

Our local university is The Times Higher Education University of the Year. The university's website notes:

"The award comes at an exciting time at the University with its new Student Central building due to open in early January. The new building will form a central hub, home to the Students’ Union and support services plus a state-of-the-art sports centre and gym which includes an eight court sports hall, two squash courts and two dance studios as well as a gym kitted out with Technogym Artis technology."

I tried out one of the dance studios at 18:30 this evening when I attended the first adult ballet class given by Fiona Noonan. I have mentioned Fiona before because she also teaches at The Base Studios in Huddersfield.

Today's class consisted of about 20, all women, most of whom were quite young. Although the class is open to the public I guess that at least half the pupils were undergraduates. For many of us it was our first lesson.  

We started with pliés, then tendus followed by glissés, ronds de jambe, fondus and développés at the barre and then some centre work which included chassés and posés pirouettes. Finally, we finished with stretches. 

This class was just what I needed. My confidence had taken a knock a week or two ago when I fell flat on my face trying to do posés pirouettes that I had not really mastered and I was starting to ask myself whether at age 65 I wasn't getting a little bit too old for this ballet malarkey. One day my body will say "no" and I think that is likely to come sooner rather than later but until it does I am going to pack in as many classes as I can. The London Ballet Circle shared a poster on its Facebook page from Étude Ballet Boutique with the words "Money can't buy you happiness but it can buy you ballet classes which are kind of the same thing," Oh how true.

The class meets every Wednesday during term between 18:30 and 19:30 in the Student Central Building which is opposite Sainsburys. There is plenty of street parking at that time. For those using public transport the university is perhaps 5 minutes walk from the bus station and slightly further from the railway station. Classes cost £5 per hour.

Post Script

Fiona sent me the following text last night after reading the review:

"u forgot to mention how fabulous I am ....... hee hee xxx,"

Actually that is quite an omission because a good teacher is everything when learning ballet and in my very limited experience Fiona is one of the best.

Well, I say limited, but when I think of it I have had regular ballet classes from three teachers, occasional classes from another two and of course lots of teaching in other subjects from classical Greek to COBOL programming.  The test of a good teacher is whether he or she can stretch his or her pupils to their limits of and Fiona certainly did that.  We did a lot of exercises which do not come easily and we all made a reasonable stab at them. Best of all we left the class chattering and happy.