Sarah Kundi - An Appreciation

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Readers of this blog will know that I have a particularly high regard for Sarah Kundi.  Although I must have seen her several times when she was with Northern Ballet she first came to my notice through the YouTube video of Depouillage in which she danced with Jade Hale-Christofi.  It was that film that led me to Ballet Black (see Ballet Black's Appeal 12 March 2013).  When I saw her dance for the first time in  "Dopamine (you make my levels go silly)" and War Letters at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre on Saturday 18 May 2013 I was bowled over (see Why Ballet Black is Special 20 May 2013).

When Ballet Black came to Leeds 6 months later, Sarah Kundi had left the company.  As I said in Ballet Black is Still Special on 7 Nov 2013, I enjoyed Ballet Black's performance in Leeds at least as much as their show in Tottenham but I did miss Sarah Kundi.   I did not have long to wait because I found out that she had joined MurleyDance which performed in Leeds on 1 Dec 2013 (see MurleyDance Triple Bill 2 Dec 2013).

Sarah Kundi did not stay long with MurleyDance and there were reports that she had been offered work with Victor Ulate in Spain (see ByeBye and All the Best 10 June 2014).  Happily, English National Ballet offered her an appointment while she was dancing in Romeo and Juliet in the Round (see Saved for the Nation 17 July 2914).  She remained with that company for the rest of her career picking up the emerging dancer award and triumphing as Lady Capulet (see Congratulations to Sarah Kundi on 20 June 2018) and Hortensia in Christopher Wheeldon's Cinderella (see Cinders in the Round  13 June 2019).

She announced her retirement on Facebook at the end of English National Ballet's latest season in the Royal Albert Hall and I shall miss her greatly.   She was blessed with an expressive countenance that made her a remarkable actor as well as a fine dancer and a physique that gave her an aetherial appearance on stage. Those are qualities that not all principals possess and it is why there were many times that I enquired whether she was in the cast before looking up the leading artists.

Although it is unlikely that we shall ever see her on stage again, Sarah Kundi is not lost to dance.  I was delighted to see the Royal Ballet School's announcement that she has joined its staff. There she will pass on her skills, knowledge and experience to promising students.   I have had the good fortune to meet her at the stage doors of the Palace Theatre in Manchester and the Albert Hall as well as interview her over Zoom for the Stage Door.   I can report that she is as graceful and charming to her fans as she is magnificent on the stage.

I have to thank her for the many years of pleasure that she has given me and no doubt countless other balletgoers and wish her well in her new career as a teacher.

Ballet Black post Johnson - Still a good performance but something was missing

Author Jynto
Reproduced with kind permission of the author

Ballet Black Dopamine (You make my levels go silly), Captured, Red Riding Hood 18 Nov 2017 Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre Leeds

If anyone is interested, the photo above is a model of a molecule of dihydroxyphenethylamine or dopamine. It appears above because I can't use a lovely photo of  José Alves and Marie-Astrid Mence in Michael Corder's House of Dreams that I received just after I had published my review of Ballet Black's triple bill in Nottingham and which I had been saving for my review of their performance in Leeds.

I should begin this post by congratulating Damien Johnson on joining the Suzanne Farrell Ballet in Washington DC. I wish him every success with that company. Damian was my Outstanding Male Dancer of last year. Ironically, the last time I saw Ballet Black coincided with Damien's tenth anniversary in the company (see All Hail to the Lone Star Dancer 23 June 2017). Had I known in June what I know now, I would have queued at the stage door to shake his hand as he was one of the most exciting dancers on the British stage. He is an American so I suppose it is only right that he will now delight audiences in his native country as he delighted us. I am told by David Murley who attended the Red Riding Hood workshop in February that Damien is a good teacher.  I had several opportunities to attend one of his classes.  I now feel like kicking myself for letting those opportunities slip.

I surmise that one immediate impact of Damien's departure is that the company no longer had a second man for House of Dreams.  It substituted Dopamine (you make my levels go silly) which is a duet. It was danced beautifully by Cira Robinson and José Alves. I had last seen it four years ago when José partnered Sayaka Ichikawa on a previous visit ti Leeds (see Ballet Black is still special 7 Nov 2013). The rest of the programme proceeded as advertised with Martin Lawrance's Captured and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Red Riding Hood.

It was a good performance. Ballet Black retains excellent experienced dancers and has a very promising recruit in Ebony Thomas.  Mthuthuzei November wowed us with his flirtatious virtuosity as he had wowed the Nottingham Playhouse and the London Barbican.  Sayaka was an excellent Red Riding Hood adding a soupcon of fun and naughtiness to her veneer of innocence. Grandma was as funny and dazzling on pointe as ever.  The cast danced their hearts out and they were rewarded with hearty applause.

Yet something was missing and that something was Damien.  Ballet Black has lost some fine dancers in the past such as Sarah Kundi and Kanika Carr who seemed irreplaceable at the time but it always recovered stronger than ever.  The company will no doubt get over the loss of Damian in time but he will be the hardest gap to fill.

This is Ballet Black's last performance in the North. They will appear in Portsmouth on the 21 which seems to be the last stop on their current tour. If you live or happen to be in Hampshire or Sussex on that day I urge you to see them.  They will then work on their 2018 season which will include a revival of Arthur Pita's A Dream Within a Midsummer Night's Dream. The company was recently nominated for the best creative artist in the Black British Entertainment Awards. They have recently achieved National Portfolio funding from the Arts Council England.  They are still a fine company and those like me who wish to support them can do so by subscribing as a Friend.

Ballet Black is still special

You can see the same company perform the same works with many of the same dancers in two different venues and come away feeling that you have seen two different shows.  Why is that?  I think it is because each theatre has a different atmosphere. And each audience interacts differently with the cast.

Yesterday evening I saw Ballet Black's Quadruple Bill at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre in Leeds. Exactly the same show as I had seen at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham 6 months ago (see "Why Ballet Black Is Special" 20 May 2013).  And yet it wasn't the same show.  There were different dancers and a very different audience.  The audience in Leeds last night was predominately white, female and middle aged and probably drawn largely from comfortable North Leeds suburbs like Bramhope and Headingley or towns like Harrogate and Ilkley. The sort you see in Bettys who had almost certainly seen and possibly even studied a little ballet before.  The audience in Tottenham was younger, more racially mixed, there were far more young men and from conversations that I overheard in the Blooming Scent and the queue for the loo there were many for whom that performance was their first experience of ballet

Sayaka Ichikawa and José Alves danced Dopamine very differently from the way it had been performed by Sarah Kundi and Jazmon Voss.  Ichikawa is a delicate dancer and her movements are precise.  She revealed detail in Ondviela's choreography that I had missed before.  Alves partnered Ichikawa with equal precision and grace.  The adjective that I scrawled on my cast list was "pretty".  My notes last May contained the nouns "elegance" and "power".

Powerful is an adjective that I would use for Isabela Coracy, one of the company's two new dancers. We saw something of that power in the YouTube clip that I inserted into my article "Ballet Black's New Dancers" on 24 Sept.  She reminded me of dancers of the Soviet era like Maya Plisetskaya and I was not surprised to read in the cast list that she had toured Russia extensively.  She shone in Frutos's The One Played Twice.  This was also our first opportunity to see the company's other new hire, Christopher Renfurm who performed fluently. In that ballet they danced with Damien Johnson and Cira Robinson who are regarded as Ballet Black's stars and were not eclipsed.

The last work before the interval was Robert Binet's Egal, elegantly danced by Kanika Carr and Jacob Wye.  I had seen Carr in that role May but yesterday she was partnered deftly by Jacob Wye.

Christopher Marney's War Letters is a very moving piece and it resonated with the audience in Leeds last night even more than it had done in London.  Possibly because it was danced in poppy season.  Two movements brought many including me close to tears.  The hospital visit to a seriously wounded soldier and the Winter coat.  Beautiful chorepgraphy giving every dancer an opportunity to show what he or she can do.

Though I do miss Kundi and would love to see her dance again I enjoyed yesterday evening's show at least as much as the one in May.  I can't wait until February when I shall see them in their home in Covent Garden.