One of the Best Ballet Experiences Ever

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When Karen Sant introduced Harriet Mills at KNT's Manchester studios last night, we gave her a spontaneous ripple of applause.  Applause is expected at the reverence but at the beginning of a class it is very rare indeed.  We applauded her because Harriet is a very special teacher.  A principal of the Karlsruhe State Ballet no less which seems to have a gorgeous repertoire. Feast your eyes, ladies and gents, on these YouTube clips that I have managed to google:  Romeo and Juliet, La Sylphide and Anne Frank.  There is something very special about a class from a teacher who has danced with a well known company and a class from a principal is particularly precious.  I have been lucky enough to attend several classes by Chris Hinton-Lewis in Leeds who was one of my favourite dancers at Northern Ballet (see It's an Ill Wind - Review of Northern Ballet's Beginner's Class 8 Dec 2013) but this was my first class with a ballerina at the height of her career.

Directing us to face the barre Harriet showed us how to stand from our toes to our shoulders.  She then conducted us through pliés in 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th, tendus, glissés, ronds de jambe, frappés and a combination of tendus, glissés and grands battements. Calling us into the centre she said that the secret of the port de bras is to keep the arms flowing and she gave us a delightful exercise that required us to do just that.  Next came pirouettes - preparations, quarter turns, half and finally full turns. Then jumps starting with glissades and assemblés in preparation for a joyful combination of balancés, arabesques, pas de chats and temps levés.  Usually our class lasts a little over an hour but Harriet gave us a full 90 minutes.  The class was so good that Karen and Mark Hindle, who has just returned from a season of the Lion King at the Hague, joined in.

Because Harriet has given us some extra time she had to start the next one immediately afterwards. It was not possible for us to thank her for our class.  I always try to do that because the relationship between teacher and student is very special as I explained in Le jour de gloire est arrivé - Dame Antoinette Sibley with Clement Crisp at the Royal Ballet School 3 Feb 2014:

"As Sibley spoke about her teachers I realized that every teacher represents to his or students every dancer, choreographer and teacher who has gone before. Sibley loved her teachers and I can relate to that because I love every one of mine. Those who have gently corrected my wobbling arabesques and feeble turns. I texted one of them yesterday after the talk .......

"Oh super jealousy" she replied.
"Don't be jealous" I responded "You are also part of the tradition. You live it, I just see it. And you pass on your gift to others."
"Awwwww Thanku xxxx"
"When I go to class you or Annemarie represent every dancer, choreographer and teacher who ever lived".
"Aw Jane! I won't be able to leave the room soon"
"I am only paraphrasing Sibley. She should know. Through you I am linked to your teacher who is probably linked to someone at Ballet Russes who is linked to Petipa."
"xxxxx wise woman!"

As indeed Dame Antoinette is. I learned so much from her yesterday for which I shall always be grateful."

So this blog post has to serve as my thank you to Harriet for a great class. We all left happy and inspired.

If anybody is interested, Karlsruhe is a pleasant medium size town in Baden-Württemberg which hosts the German Constitutional Court as well as a fine ballet company.  Practitioners in my area of law have been taking a particular interest in the Court lately because it is determining a challenge to German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement. That was the topic of a talk that I gave to Queen Mary University of London Law School on Monday night (see Jane Lambert Is British Ratification of the UPC Agreement even relevant now? 12 Feb 2018 NIPC News).

The Importance of Performance

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I spent last weekend driving to Truro and back to see Duchy Ballet (see Cornwall's Coup: Duchy Ballet's Sleeping Beauty 19 March 2017).  I shall spend this weekend driving to Chelmsford to see my company dance Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have emphasised the possessive adjective because I am proud to be a non-dancing associate member of the company and the only reason why I have never auditioned for dancing membership is that Chelmsford is just a tad too far for rehearsals.

It would have been cheaper and easier to have whizzed down to London and back by Hull Trains, Virgin or Grand Central to see Project Polunin at the Wells or even the Pite, Wheeldon and Dawson triple bill at the Royal Opera House and cheaper and easier still to have stayed in Leeds to see another performance of Northern Ballet's Casanova  (which I strongly recommend, by the way - see Casanova - "it has been a long time since I enjoyed a show by Northern Ballet as much as I enjoyed Casanova last night" 12 March 2017) but I would have missed something important.

Performances like the one I saw in Truro on Saturday and the one I expect to see in Chelmsford are important because they give a purpose to all those years of exercises at the barre and in the centre.  Ballet, like Shakespeare, is intended for the stage. Without performance, class is just a workout - about as arid as cramming Romeo and Juliet for an exam.  Performances are important not just for children and young adults but for students of any age.  I shall never forget the thrill of my first performance at Northern Ballet Academy's end of term show in 2014 (see The Time of my Life 28 June 2014).

However, students will take performances seriously only if audiences take them seriously.  Such audiences should include not just mums, dads and siblings but also regular ballet goers and even the occasional ballet blogger.  The attendance of a critical audience is particularly important when principals of leading companies perform in a student show as Elena Glurdjidze and Arionel Vargas of English National Ballet did in the Bristol Russian Ballet School's Romeo and Juliet (see Good Show - Bristol Russians' Cinderella in Stockport 19 Feb 2014) and Tom Thorne and Laura Bösenberg of the Cape Town City Ballet did on Saturday.

There is sometimes a reward for audiences who make it to civic theatres in remote parts of the country. Sometimes you see stars of the future as I did when I saw Xander Parish for the first time in York in 2007. Even as a student it was clear that he was going places.  I think I saw a spark of excellence in the lilac fairy on Saturday and also in Odette-Odile in Greenock last month (see Ballet West at the Beacon 13 Feb 2017). I don't want to embarrass or tempt fate for either of those two promising young women but I don't think I have seen the last of either of them.

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.