KNT Danceworks Day of Day - A Couple of Postscripts

Standard YouTube Licence


Two postscripts to Vampires, my write up on yesterdays' Day of Dance at the Dancehouse,

The first is that Karen has posted the video of our performance of Daethon and Arundel to YouTube which you can see above.   Remember we learned this piece in 90 minutes.  For many of us it was the first time we had heard David Hotchkiss's music or learned about his libretto.   Daethon was danced by Ruaridh Bisset and the lead vampire by Mark Hindle.

The other postscript is that Harriet Mills, who taught the advanced ballet class yesterday, keeps an excellent blog called A Ballet for Life which I strongly recommend. Harriet is a principal of the Karlsuhe State Ballet.  On 17 Nov 2018 her company will premiere a new production of Swan Lake by Christopher Wheeldon which I for one should like to see. 

If anyone would like to see it with me get in touch as soon as possible.   If there are enough of us we might be able to negotiate group discounts with the theatre, hotel and airlines.

Vampires

The Vampire

Author Philip Burne-Jones

KNTs Day of Dance at the Dancehouse was a great success.  I got some valuable tips on arabesques and développés from Rachael Crocker that everyone else seems to know but had somehow eluded me these last 50 years and I got to dance a vampire in a scene that Karen Sant had created from David Hotchkiss's music for Daethon and Arundel.  I would not have missed the day for the world.  Judging by the comments on Facebook and twitter, neither would anyone else who was there.

I had booked just two classes:  beginners and pre-intermediate ballet with Rachael from 14:00 to 15:30 and the repertoire class with Karen from 15:30 to 17:00.  There was, of course, much more than that.  There had been classes in jazz, PBT and contemporary in the morning. The prima ballerina, Harriet Mills gave a class for more advanced students at the same time as our beginners and pre-intermediate class and Rachael gave a repertoire class in musical theatre at the same time as Karen's class.

There were a lot of familiar faces from KNT but also several from Northern Ballet.  Several students had travelled considerable distances.  One from as far way as Anglesey which is where I plan to spend my long awaited and much anticipated summer holiday next week.  While I have been beating the drum for KNT in Leeds my Yorkshire friends have been spreading the word for Hannah Bateman's Ballet Retreat next weekend which I would have been tempted to attend had I not arranged a holiday.  Karen occasionally refers to us as the KNT family which sounds soppy but really isn't while a friend who attends the Ballet Retreat tells me that is how she feels about that workshop.  One of the wonderful things about events like yesterday's are the friendships and connexions that they catalyze.

Rachael's class began  with the usual barre exercises with a particular focus on relevés, retirés and balancing on demi with rapid turns.  Clearly she was getting us used to the idea of pirouettes. We did plenty of those in the centre including chassé, pas de bourré and turns in fourth.  I continue to find them difficult even though I had performed the exercise with two other teachers that week.  Rachael spotted that several of us were struggling with arabesques and pivots and diagnosed the problem as the position of the right arm. Similarly, several of us were struggling with  développés,   "Imagine your leg connected to your arms by a piece of string", she suggested. "You raise your arms from bras bas to first at the same time as you lift your leg," I tried that and it really helped.  "And as you unfold your right leg you raise your left arm," she added.

I was so pleased about what I had learned from Rachael that I mentioned it to Mark Hindle on the way into studio 1 for Karen's repertoire class.  I suspect that he was surprised that I had not worked that out for myself or learned it from another teacher some time between yesterday and my first ballet class in 1969.  Diplomatically he observed that it was one of the advantages of taking classes from different teachers.  I had already learned that from Marion Pettet of the Chelmsford Ballet. That is why the Chelmsford Ballet invites different teachers for its company classes which is what I try to do with Powerhouse Ballet.

Mark was in the repertoire class because he was lead vampire in the scene that Karen had choreographed from David Hotchkiss's score.  A recumbent Daethon (danced by Ruaridh Bisset) was ambushed by circling vampires. Most of us wore black as had been requested by Karen.  We surrounded Daethon menacingly with our arms rippling like bat wings.  We bourréd away to form several lines where we pivioted, pliéd, turned twice, joined hands, balancéd, pushed Daethon to the ground as he morphed into a vampire.  Pretty chilling choreography and at least as impressive in my humble opinion as other choreographers' Dracula.  There is only so much that can be accomplished in 90 minutes but I think Karen did justice to David's score.

We performed our piece before Rachael's musical theatre students who applauded us generously.  Ruaridh and Mark and many of my fellow vampires were superb and deserved their clapping though I am not sure that I did.   I was beginning to slow down after 90 minutes of hard exercise.  Rachael invited us back to studio 1 to show us what her class had learned.  They were very good indeed. Very slick, very polished and you could tell from the smiles on their faces that they were having a whale of a time.

I hope that Karen arranges another day of dance soon. Many others have said the said the same on Facebook.  Having said that I also enjoyed the repertoire workshops with Jane Tucker and Martin Dutton.   I hope that we shall have a few more of them too. Although I can attend Jane's class in Leeds throughout the year her repertoire classes were special.  I learned more about Swan Lake and La Bayadère from her intensives than watching scores of performances from the stalls and reading libraries of books and programme notes.

Powerhouse Ballet - What comes next

Kirklees Leisure Centre

© 2018 Jane Elizabeth Lambert: all rights reserved

At about 3 pm today. a group of dancers will meet in the studio shown in the photograph above to begin a 90 minute class with Jane Tucker of Northern Ballet Academy. I have no idea how big that group will be. Some 20 people have registered for the class but several have had to drop out. On the other hand, I have received at least one intimation through twitter from a dancer who has not yet registered that she is looking forward to meeting everybody. All I would say is that if you want to come and have not yet registered is please let me know as soon as possible so that I can ask the staff at reception to let you in.

The class will take place at the Kirklees Leisure Centre at Spring Grove Street, Huddersfield, HD1 4BP which is just to the west of the Castlegate ring road. It is just down the hill from junction 24 on the M62 with oodles of onsite parking at 70p per hour and a short walk from the bus and railway stations for those who will use public transport.

There will be a short meeting after the class to decide whether we want to form a company and to elect a small steering committee to draw up a business plan and constitution. Several of the people who have had to drop out have stressed that they still want to form a company. Several others who can't be here today have said the same. We have even had messages of support from Mel Wong and David Hotchkiss in Hungary. I think we have enough support to plan for our next activity.

It is important to keep the momentum. Chelmsford Ballet holds company classes with a different teacher on the first Sunday of every month. Cara O'Shea, who once danced Princess Aurora for the the Chelmsford Ballet, gave her old company a very good class a few years ago. We need to do the same. Jane Tucker has very kindly agreed in principle to give us another class as have a number of other teachers.

As many of us have progressed from beginners to improvers and beyond without mastering all the basics and have acquired bad habits I have asked Karen Sant of KNT to arrange a day long ballet boot camp to iron some of these out (see Ballet Boot Camp Pilot 9 May 2018 Powerhouse Ballet). As it is likely to take a little more than a day for folks like me I have discussed the possibility of residential courses with Gillian Barton in Scotland and Terence Etheridge in Cornwall.

Chelmsford arranges all sorts of other events throughout the year such as workshops, an annual coach trip to London to see a show, a performance with the Brentwood Choral Society at Christmas and a children's workshop called "Let's make a ballet" in the Autumn. As workshops and summer schools require time off work I was thinking that we may as well hold them in places where we might well go on holiday such as Taynuilt and Truro. I was also thinking of inviting artistic directors of visiting companies, choreographers, dancers and musicians to dinner meetings where we talk to them over a glass of wine or coffee after a light supper. If I can persuade them to sit down with us, Christopher Marney, Yoko Ichino, Cira Robinson and Koen Kessels are high on my list. Finally, I hope we can persuade Northern Ballet, Phoenix Dance Theatre and visiting companies to arrange special events with us where we can explore the choreography and maybe meet their dancers, creatives and technicians.

I emphasize that we need artists, craftsmen and women, designers, managers, musicians and technicians as well as dancers. If you would like to help us in any capacity even if you live outside the North, do get in touch.

Daethon and Arundel - A New Four Act Ballet

David Hotchkiss

© 2018 David James Hotchkiss, all rights reserved

Daethon and Arundel is a love story between a lowly young palace manservant and the prince he serves.  It is set in the 18th century somewhere in Mitteleuropa.  The young English composer, David Hotchkiss has written the score for a 4 act ballet around this story which you can hear on YouTube. He is now appealing to the public for funds to stage the ballet through GoFundMe. His target date for completion of the project is 14 July 2020 which is the 110th anniversary of the death of Marius Petipa.

David writes:

"In no art-form do I believe the beauty of love is better conveyed than in ballet. I have danced ballet myself now for almost two years, training in both England and Hungary three to four times a week, and I have seen many great ballets on the stage in England, Russia, Austria and Hungary."

One of the places where he trained was KNT Danceworks in Manchester and it was there that I made his acquaintance last year.

Most of the great 19th and 20th century ballets focus on love between a man and a woman represented on stage by a ballerina and her beau,  Slowly this is beginning to to change.   Last October, for instance, Lauren Lovette created Not our Fate for the New York City Ballet. Writing in the New York Times, the critic Gia Kourlas observed:

"Same-sex partnering on its own is not new, especially in contemporary ballets and in modern dance. And even at City Ballet, there have been instances of same-sex partnering in several ballets, including those by Ms. Lovette, Pontus Lidberg and Mr. Peck. What feels unusual in these two dances is their fresh approach: Full of abandon and brimming with romantic desire, they seem utterly natural." (see When Two Men Fall in Love on the Ballet Stage, and Why It Matters 10 Oct 2017).

 "I am really keen to get this sort of work actually choreographed and produced" writes David. "My hope is that the New York City Ballet will take this on themselves but I am also trying my best to petition other ballet companies to take the piece on."

One of the reasons why David is so keen to stage this work is that he is gay.  Love between persons of the same sex has been accepted in the UK and other countries since the Sexual Offences Act 1967 but it is still not mainstream.  He longs for a world where, for example, at Christmastide families with young children might watch movies where two men fall in love and think it no different from movies where a man and a woman fall in love. To get to that place is still a long journey, and in writing this piece of work he hopes to take a step in that direction. His dream is that a ballet like the one he has written might one day be as popular as The Nutcracker, Coppélia or Swan Lake. To get there he needs to show that the love between two men or between two women can be as graceful, beautiful and meaningful as the love between a man and a woman.

Although I can think of other works that explore same sex love such as that subsisting between Siegfried and the swan in Sir Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake  and perhaps between Simon and Anthony in David Nixon's version, I can think of no full length work on the theme of same sex love with a detailed libretto and a wholly original score. That is a significant enterprise and it is why David deserves every encouragement.

Crowd Funding
GoFundMe Daethon & Arundel - A Gay Ballet