Back to the Studio with KNT

Manchester Quay Street

Author Mikey Licence CC BY 2.0 Source Wikimedia Commons

Throughout this pandemic, Karen Sant of KNT Danceworks has kept north country dancers moving and motivated. Frst by transferring her regular classes online. More recently by holding some of those classes in the open air in Castlefield near the Roman fort where Manchester began.  While nothing beats alfresco dancing on a warm summer evening our city is better known for precipitation than sunshine.   On a particularly inclement evening, Karen announced a new venue in the ABC Buildings on Quay Street.  I rolled up there for my regular pre-intermediate ballet class with Karen yesterday.

 As Quay Street was my old stamping ground when I practised in Manchester I had no difficulty in finding the building.  It is located near Cobden House which housed the Manchester District Registry and County Court offices for many years and is now occupied by a set of barristers into which my former chambers merged.  It is a few hundred yards from Spingingfields car park and there is usually some metered street parking nearby if you care to look for it.  It is very close to Deansgate which is the main shopping street of Manchester.  Also, a moderate walk from the nearest tram stop by the Town Hall or Victoria and Piccadilly mainline railway stations.    

One hazard for dancers coming by car is the roadworks in Quay Street and approaches.   The congestion caused by those excavations was horrendous.   The journey from the intersection of the Oldham Road and Swan Street to Spiningfields - which can't be much more than a mile - took almost as long as the 25 miles from Holmfirth to that intersection.  Next time I shall park on the outskirts of the city centre and finish my journey on foot.

The class took place at the top of what I believe to be the B Building of the ABC complex. It was not easy to find because there is no signage. The reception desk was unoccupied and the staff in the cinema bar hadn't a clue though they did their best to point me in the right direction.  Happily, I ran into two other wandering souls.  After eliminating between us just about every landing and staircase in the building we caught a peel of tinkly music that eventually led us to Karen.   Newcomers to the class should enter the building by the first set of doors if coming from Deansgate or the last if coming from Spiningfields, walk down a long corridor to the lifts, take a lift to the top floor and climb the stairs to what appears to have been the penthouse.

Although probably not intended to be a dance studio, that space is an improvement on Studio 2 of the Dancehouse in several respects.  For a start, it has windows along both main walls.  Two doors open onto a balcony with views of central Manchester. The doors also provide good ventilation.  On the other hand, the floor is unfinished, there is no sound system and we have to use the window structures as a barre.  However, the amenity of the space more than made up for its limitations.

Because I was badly delayed by traffic and could not immediately find the class I arrived in the middle of pliés.  Karen took us through all the usual barre exercises except grands battements which she combined with tendus and pirouette practice in the centre.  She also taught us a delightful adagio which we performed in two groups.  We had warm-up jumps and joyful temps leves at the end.

It was a delightful class.   It was good to see so many familiar faces and of course Karen.  Everyone I could see had grins from ear to ear.   At £6.50 this class was a bargain.   To sign up or future ones, register or log on to the KNT Class Manager site and follow the simple directions.  There are also other classes at different levels of several genres on most days of the week,

A Phial of the Antidote

Photo Mattia Giannuzz
Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported Licence
Source Wikipedia

I had intended to write about the brilliant Southbank Centre's Alchemy Doncaster festival of South Asian arts that Gita and I attended at CAST in Doncaster yesterday and Friday but after last night's outrage in our capital, I am not in the mood for celebrating and I  doubt that my readers are in a celebratory mood either. However, I do intend to report on the festival soon because the arts are the antidote to the toxins of hate that have led to terrorism and all sorts of other distressing events recently.

This weekend's festival of comedy, dance, drama, gastronomy, music, photography and poetry from British artists of South Asian heritage and artists of the South Asian diaspora living here contains a phial of the antidote.  Cakes, a brilliant monologue by Bilal Zafar, in which he gently took the mickey out of folks who have a problem with Muslims with his tweets about a fictitious Muslim only cake shop in Bristol is just one example. Whether intended or not, Cakes reminds me of Sir Toby's riposte to Malvolio:

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"

Bilal has posted a video of his monologue to YouTube which I think you will enjoy.

Gita and I will review Bring on the Bollywood with its brilliant dancing as well as many of the other performances this week but today our thoughts are with the victims of last night's appalling violence and their friends and relations.

Factory to go ahead

St John's Gardens

Author: R Lee
Source Wikipedia
Creative Commons Licence

Ever since George Osborne MP delivered his Autumn Statement for 2014 I have been beating the drum for the Factory arts and cultural centre as a centre for dance in Manchester (see Let's bring the Royal Ballet to The Factory Manchester 11 Dec 2014, The Factory begins to take shape 26 Nov 2015 and Thanks George 8 Dec 2015). Yesterday, Manchester International Festival ("MIF") announced that it had obtained planning permission to build the arts complex as part of the redevelopment of the St John's district of Manchester (see MIF announced as operator for Factory).

According to the Festival's website:

"MIF will be the operator for Factory, creating a year-round programme of work and running the building, which is due to open 2020. Factory will give audiences the opportunity to enjoy the broadest range of art forms and cultural experiences – including dance, theatre, music, opera, visual arts, spoken word, popular culture and innovative contemporary work incorporating multiple media and technologies"

MIF has commissioned dance before.   In 2015 it commissioned Wayne McGregor's Tree of Codes which was premiered at the Manchester Opera House on 3 July 2015 and is to be performed this year at the Palais Garnier, the Musikhuset in Aarhus and Sadler's Wells. Last year it facilitated Akram Khan's Giselle which the MIF's artistic director described as “an example of the sort of collaboration we can expect to find at The Factory” (see Verity Williams MIF’s Giselle at The Palace Theatre, preview: Dancing to a different tune 15 Dec 2016 creativetourist.com).

While I was not exactly bowled over by Akram Khan's Giselle I applaud MIF's commitment to dance. Now that we shall have a 1,600 seat auditorium for Manchester there is no reason why the second city of the UK should not host its own world class resident ballet company. Ideally, I should like to revive plans for a Northern home for the Royal Ballet which the last Labour government had proposed.  If that is not possible we may have to build one ourselves from the ground up. We shall see.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants some idea as to how the Factory will look there is a great article about the Factory with some good pictures on the BBC website (see Designs approved for Manchester's £110m Factory arts venue 12 Jan 2017).

More than just Hype - Beginners and Improvers Classes in Sheffield

Sheffield Town Hall                                                                    Photo  Wikipedia

For the last year and a bit I have been taking Fiona Noonan's adult ballet classes at The Base Studios and Team Hud in Huddersfield (see "The Base Studios, Huddersfield"  2 March 2013 and "Team Hud Adult Ballet Class" 22 Jan 2014).  Recently she has been engaged to teach advanced, intermediate and pointe classes at Hype Dance Academy in Sheffield while the regular teacher is on maternity leave. For the next three weeks she will be covering Hype's beginners and improvers classes too.  Yesterday I followed her to Sheffield to take her classes at Hype.

The first thing to say is that Hype is not easy to find. I lived a mile from Hampton Court Palace between 1955 and 1982 so I know all about mazes but not even that labyrinth had prepared me for Sheffield's one way traffic system. I suspect it was devised in the days when Sheffield City Council was said to be slightly to the left of Fidel Castro and it was the local local authority's policy to drive motorists off the roads and onto the excellent trams.  Hype's address is 67 Earl Street, Sheffield, S1 4PY which my satellite navigation seemed to think was on planet Zog. The first time I tried to find it I missed the class altogether as I crawled around the city centre from one traffic jam to the next as the minutes ticked by. There are directions on the "contact page" of Hype's web site but these are not much help unless you know Sheffield well. It is no good calling the studio for directions because the switchboard is not covered for the whole of the day.

If you are a motorist the trick is as follows:

• get on the A61 (inner city ring road in the clockwise direction) which you can join at the Park Square roundabout from the Parkway which connects with the M1 (watch the cameras they are super-sensitive after the 50 mph sign), 
• follow the ring road past the station which should be on your left, 
• make a sharp right onto St Mary's Road, 
• then another into Matilda Street, 
• carry on down Matilda Road past the UTC college which should be on your right, 
• then a left into Sydney Street, 
• a sharp right on Arundel and 
• then left on Earl.

To say you can't miss the studio would not be true because it is a very undistinguished two storey brick building which must have been a warehouse or other light industrial building in its heyday.  There is signage for the observant pedestrian and no doubt aspirant taxi driver if they have anything like The Knowledge in Sheffield but it is easy to miss.

One good point about the location is that there is plenty of street parking which costs £1 after 18:00.  Don't be fooled into using pay by phone because the app tried to charge me £2.40. Another is there are some very good Chinese restaurants and a grocery within a few hundred yards of the dance school. My favourite is the Wong Ting where I celebrated my 60th birthday.

Once you find Hype and get inside it is very nice. There appear to be two studios and Fiona's class was in Studio 1.  That is a long narrow room with barres along the right hand side and a mirror at the front. The walls are decorated with posters and playbills and Victorian schoolroom style exhortations such as dance is 20% talent and 80% labour. Yeah!

There must have been between 15 and 20 people in the beginners' class, mainly women nearly all of whom were in their twenties.   We filled the fixed barre and 4 of us spilled on to a travelling barre. They were a friendly crowd and most of them were well kitted out in leotards and soft toed ballet shoes.

Fiona introduced herself to the class and told us a little bit about her training in Australia and her career as a dancer and teacher. She then asked the students what they had learned from their regular teacher and how she had taught them. The answers suggested that her method was very much like Fiona's.

We had a warm up exercise in the centre for toes and legs.  I was dismayed to find that my balance was well below the class's because I had to let my feet touch the floor once or twice. We then sidled off to the barre for the usual exercises.

Fiona is a good teacher but I have never seen her teach better than she did yesterday. She likes a big class of enthusiastic students and she found them at Hype. Through the barre exercises she focussed on technique particularly on basics such as weight distribution and the use of abdominals and abductors. She has an eye for detail and I think we all had a correction to make. Once she was happy with our pliés, tendus and glissés we moved on to fondus and développés which do not come easily to this old lady but nevertheless have to be done.

In the centre we followed a port de bras exercise that I had already attempted several times in Huddersfield which consists of chassés starting on the right, then left and en croix, a lunge, a pivot, arabesque which is substantially repeated on the left.  Annemarie in Leeds has a similar exercise for us old ladies except that we soutenu rather than pivot and cut out the arabesque.  We marked it without and then with music and then tried it for ourselves.  To my joy I found that I could just about hold my pivot - at least for the first time.  The second was a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Fiona asked the class about travelling steps and two of the students set off with something that looked very much like temps levés to me.   That is certainly what we ended up with.  The long narrow room gave us plenty of space for building up some momentum.  We did that exercise in groups of three and loved it.  In the last few minutes we did a few sautés and jetés again making good use of the room's length.

All too soon the class was over. Fiona explained that another teacher would be taking over from her in a few weeks' time. That announcement elicited a few sighs showing how much everyone had enjoyed the class.

A few of us stayed on for the improvers' class which started immediately afterwards.  One of the students in that class was Mel with whom I had driven down to Lincoln the previous Friday (see "Chantry Dance Company's Sandman and Dream Dance" 10 May 2014). Mel is a good dancer and I had feared that I would find myself out of my depth.  Although she and all the other students were in a different league to me they were also friendly.  Everyone was keen to learn.   The barre and centre exercises were similar to those that we had done in the beginners' class but they were done by my fellow students even more slickly and elegantly.

The final class of the evening was beginners' pointe for which I did not stay. I doubt that I shall ever reach that standard because try as I might my ankles are weak and my core is jelly but you never know.  When I started ballet again just over year ago I couldn't do any of the centre work.   Now I am at least having a jolly good bash.

Before coming to Sheffield I had done two classes in Leeds and I had expected the Sheffield classes to be a bit of a slog but they weren't. They were a lot of fun and I could have carried on for more.  I have not met the other teachers but judging by the standard I found at Hype they must be good.  I have no hesitation in recommending that dance school.