A photo of our last company class in a studio. It was held on 29 Feb 2020 in Studio 2 at The Dancehouse and Jane Tucker of Northern Ballet was our guest ballet mistress. I am particularly fond of that studio because it was there that Jane taught us Swan Lake, La Bayadere, Coppelia, Romeo and Juliet and The Nutcracker in KNT's wonderful choreographic workshops. It is also where my pre-intermediate class with Karen used to meet.
Jane gave us our first company class in Huddersfield two years ago. Last year she gave us a great anniversary class at Yorkshire Dance with David Plumpton at the piano. I had booked Jane, David and the same studio on 30 of this month for another anniversary class.
I have no idea when we shall be allowed to reassemble in a studio but from what the PM was saying last night it is unlikely to be any time soon. Also, as I am in the most vulnerable age group I have to face the possibility that I may never take a conventional class again.
But we can still do online classes. To make up for the classes that we missed in March and April I have booked Charlotte Ingleson at 14:00 tomorrow and Jane Tucker at 11:00 on 16 May to train us online. Jane will still deliver our anniversary class at 11:00 on 30 May which I shall make as special as I possibly can.
On the first Saturday after dance studios reopen, Jane and David have agreed to give you the class of your lives even if I cannot join you in person because of continuing social distancing for my age group.
So make the following notes in your diaries:
2 May 2020 14:00 Charlotte Ingleson Online Company Class
16 May 2020 11:00 Jane Tucker Online Company Class
30 May 2020 11:00 Jane Tucker Anniversary Company Class
"Stage Door" is a new service to keep ballet goers in touch with their favourite artists and artists in touch with their fans during these miserable times.
Every Sunday afternoon during lockdown (and possibly longer if theatres remain dark) I shall interview one of my favourite artists over Zoom. After the interview members of the audience will be invited to put questions to the guest through the chat function.
I shall start with Gavin McCaig of Northern Ballet. I featured Gavin in Terpsichore shortly after he had joined the company (see Meet Gavin McCaig of Northern Ballet3 Sep 2014). That interview is still one of my most popular articles. Next week I have lined up Maria Chugai of the Dutch National Ballet, the best Myrtha I have ever seen in 60 years of ballet going. For the week after that the world-famous accompanist David Plumpton whose DVDs power ballet classes everywhere.
As this is an experimental service and I am still on a learning curve I do not have the brass neck to charge anything just now. But the arts and education need help during this time. I am therefore inviting everyone who enjoys these talks to contribute to a charity or good cause of the guest's choice. Gavin has nominated the Academy of Northern Ballet. As I study ballet there I think that is a great choice. I have not been able to find an online donations page for the Academy but you can call them on0113 220 8000, by email academy@northernballet.com.
If you want to hear Gavin on Sunday you must register here. When I get a little more experience with webinars I may livestream these events over YouTube or Facebook but baby steps for now. My thanks to Gavin for being our first guest,
By https://es.ifixit.com/User/524640/Sam+Lionheart - https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/gFgosPJbspyCBD5P, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41473740
Last year I featured Maria Chugai of the Dutch National Ballet. You will see from my article that she is a very special dancer. She trained at the Vaganova Academy which produced such greats as Pavlova, Karsavina, Nureyev and Makarova. She must have been one of its best pupils for she was cast in the lead role of The Nutcracker at the age of 17, one year before her graduation. She first came to my attention in a performance of Giselle where she danced the Queen of the Wilis (see Mooie 10 November 2018. She was the best Myrtha that I have ever seen in over 60 years of ballet going.
Earlier today she offered Powerhouse Ballet an online class over Zoom on Tuesday, 21 April at 18:00. Needless to say, I accepted with alacrity. Anyone who wants to attend should register through Eventbrite immediately. Those tickets are unlikely to remain for very long,
To attend this class you will need to download at least the free version of Zoom. We shall have a rehearsal on Monday at 18:00. An hour before the rehearsal I shall send those who register a link and invite them to join the meeting. Should there be any problems our chambers IT guru will be on hand to sort them out.
If you wish to join the class, here is the link to Eventbrite. If you find you can't make it let me know as soon as possible.
Although I knew what to expect and saw a very different interpretation with Thiago Soares in the title role, Itziar Mendizabal as Tatiana, David Donnelly as Lensky and Meaghan Grace Hinkis as Olga, I was as thrilled second time around as I had been the first time I saw the ballet.
As before, it was the choreography that thrilled me. In my 2015 review, I described John Cranko as my favourite choreographer of all time and so he remains. I said: "Cranko understood and interpreted music in a way that produces a fluency that is instantly recognizable but hard to describe". But that was not all. I added: "He was also a great storyteller with a sense of humour." Not so much humour perhaps as in The Taming of the Shrew which remains my favourite work by Cranko but there is a great story of which many of us in the English speaking world would otherwise have been unaware.
Soares's Onegin was very different from Golding's. I had described Goldring's portrayal as "steely, amoral but ultimately foolish" but I saw complexities in Onegin's character that I had missed before. I believe that he was conflicted and he had certainly matured between his duel with Lensky and his reacquaintance with Tatiana in St Petersburg. Maybe I would have picked that up from seeing the ballet again but I am not sure. Soares has the ability to communicate mood and maybe even thought.
I also learnt something new about Tatiana from Mendizabal. With Osipova I sensed revenge in the last act but Mendizabal seemed much more conflicted. It was if she still had feelings for Onegin despite the way he had humiliated her at her party and the quite unnecessary duel with Lemsky. She must have known that running away with him would have ruined her. She would have thought that if he was capable of dropping her once he could do it again. She had a good husband. All that anyone could want. And yet, She was tempted. Happily, she listened to her head rather than her heart and sent Onegin packing. Some ballets do have a happy ending.
Grace Hinkis was a great Olga and Donnelly a loyal but headstrong Lensky. Watching the run-up to the duel was like watching a video of a train crash in slow motion. A bit like the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Mercution picks a fight with Tybalt that possibly end well.
There are some steps for the corps that must require lots of rehearsing. For instance, the folk dance towards the end of Act I with the girls' jetés on the arms of their partners who march off stage but do not run.
Jurgen Rose's set designs, particularly of the outdoor scenes and especially the venue for the duel, impressed me as much as they did the first time I saw them. The first rays of dawn were a triumph of lighting design. The costumes were gorgeous. I am not a big fan of rearranging music that was never intended for dance I make an exception for Kurt-Heinz Stoltze's score.
I had expected the matinee to be eclipsed by English National Ballet's gala at the Coliseum which I saw a few hours later but, if anything, it was the other way round. Onegin is a great classical ballet created in our own time which is why so many leading companies around the world stage it.
Standard YouTube Licence Scottish Ballet The Snow QueenTheatre Royal, Glasgow, 11 Jan 2020
I have been following the company now known as Scottish Ballet for nearly 60 years. The first ballet of theirs I can remember is Peter Darrell's Mods and Rockers which was quite unlike any ballet that I had ever seen before. It has staged some great works since such as Darrell's version of The Nutcracker, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa A Streetcar Named Desire, Christopher Hampson's Cinderella and David Dawson's Swan Lake. However, as I tweeted immediately after seeing the show, The Snow Queen is its creator's best work yet and one of the company's best ever,
@HampsonChris, great to run into you at @GlasgowKings yesterday. Congratulations to you, the cast, creatives and all at @scottishballet on #SBSnowQueen. I think this is your best work yet and one of the company's finest ever. Already a fan of Wraith, Loudon, Horler & now Addison.
The ballet is based loosely on Hans Christian Andersen's tale. Hampson inserts a prologue to explain the Snow Queen's meanness. That is permissible just as the spurning of her stepsister's flowers in Christopher Wheeldon's Cinderella is permissible to explain the girls' dislike of Cinderella. The score is an arrangement of Rimsky Korsakov by Richard Honner. The designs which were breathtaking were created by Lez Brotherson. A work by Brotherson, Hampson and Honner could hardly fail and I had high hopes for it but it exceeded my expectations greatly.
Hampson's libretto creates three big female roles as well as some interesting supporting ones. There is the Snow Queen herself who features strongly at the start and end. Her sister is the Summer Princess. While the siblings live together, all is harmony but when the Summer Princess sets off to explore the world the personality of the Snow Queen changes. She becomes disorientated, resentful and vindictive. Her sister disguises herself and calls herself Lexi as she scours the world for Kai. Her rival for his affection is Gerda. Kai is the lead male role but there are also solo roles for the men such as the ringmaster, strong man, clowns and bandit leader as well as bandits and townsfolk for male members of the corps.
The Snow Queen was danced by guest artist, Katlyn Addison, a first soloist with the American Ballet West which is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and not to be confused with the school and company of the same name at Taynuilt in Argyll. The Summer Princess or Lexi was danced by Grace Horler. and Gerda by Araminta Wraith. Horler and Wraith I had seen before and were already favourites of mine. Particularly Wraith who had impressed me in character roles such as Cinderella's stepmother and Hansel and Gretel's mum as well as for her classical technique in what I think must have been The Nutcrackernot too long after she had joined the company. This was the first time I had seen Addison and I sincerely hope it will not be the last. I have made a mental note to include Salt Lake City in my itinerary for a future holiday in America.
Kai was danced by Evan Loudon who first impressed me in the Emergence and MC 14/22 double bill at Sadler's Wells in 2017. Kai is a complex character combining the most attractive masculine attributes with the most infuriating. An accomplished dance actor, Loudon discharged that role with flair. Other dancers I noted immediately after the performance include Nicolas Shoesmith who was the ringmaster and Rimbaud Patron as the bandit leader. All danced well and all are to be congratulated. So, too, are the orchestra and their conductor Jean-Claude Picard.
The Scots have an onomatopoeic adjective for miserable weather - dreich. The evening of 11 Jan was as dreich a night in Glasgow as ever there could be. The thunderous applause from an audience that had already been drenched to the skin and chilled to the bone says it all.
Standard YouTube Ballet West Swan LakeSEC Armadillo, Glasgow, 8 Feb 2020 and Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, 9 Feb 2020, 19:30
According to Wikipedia, the SEC Armadillo has 3,000 seats. When I attended Ballet West's performance of Swan Lake on Saturday evening the place was heaving. That was the wild night that Glasgow was hit with 70 mph winds and horizontal, torrential rain when most sensible Glaswegians would have been safely ensconced at home. Though the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock is somewhat smaller, there was also a pretty large audience there on Sunday. A small ballet school nearly 500 miles from London and even 87 from Glasgow that attracts crowds like that must be doing something right.
And indeed it is. The current production of Swan Lake is the best show that I have seen from Ballet West in the 7 years that I have been following them. It was not just a good student production. It was a good show - one of which any company could be proud.
There are several reasons why this show worked so well.
First, it was a true Swan Lake and not just a dance show about humanoid swans. Swan Lake's appeal lies not just in Petipa and Ivanov's choreography or Tchaikovsky's score but in its simple, powerful message of redemptive love. Consider the opening lines of Milton's Paradise Lost:
"OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat."
The swans have lost their humanity and are held in thrall to von Rothbart for a reason that we know not. They could have been redeemed by Siegfried but he betrays them by pledging his love for von Rothbart's daughter. The only other way is the sacrifice of Odile and Siegfried. Any deviation from that story is just not Swan Lake/ That is why I am exasperated by works called Swan Lake that omit that narrative
The second reason for the success of the show lay in the casting. I was impressed by Norton Fantinel who danced Siegfried and even more by Karina Moreira who danced Odette-Odile but the artist who caught my eye from his serpentine entrance at the beginning of the white act to his destruction at the very end was Rahul Pradeep. He danced von Rothbart and his role is as crucial as Odette-Odile's and Siegfried's in that he is the personification of evil. He manifests it in so many ways from the moment he and his daughter barge onto the scene literally sending the chamberlain flying to his studied rudeness as he slouches next to the queen turning his back on the divertissements. Other dancers who grabbed my attention were Luciano Ghideli, Michaela Fairon and Josephine Mansfield in the pas de trois, Fairon again with Florence Blackwood, Caitlin Jones and either Freya Hatchett or Josie Ridgway in the cygnets and Fairon once again with Gianni Illiaquer in the Neapolitan divertissement. Their agility and joie de vivre reminded me of Wayne Sleep and Rosemary Taylor in my salad days. I could go on to list the artists in the Spanish and Hungarian dances and the Mazurka but then this review would resemble a telephone directory. All who took part in the show including the Glasgow associates merit commendation.
The third reason for the production's success was the investment in sets and costumes. The backcloths displayed computer-generated graphics which included falling leaves, a waterfall and ripples on the surface of the lake which were of cinematographic quality. The author of the graphics software is not mentioned in the programme but I understand him to be Léon ten Hove. Rarely have I seen detail of that kind on stage. There were two moments that literally took my breath away. The sudden appearance of a super life-size vision of Odile as Siegfried is on the point of declaring his love for Odile and the final scene as the swans soared above the clouds illuminated by an outsize moon. The costumes, especially the dresses of the guests to Siegfried's party, were sumptuous. So, too, were von Rothbart's robes. How the artists must have enjoyed wearing them.
I take a close interest in dancers' education. I support other schools such as Central, the Northern Ballet School and, more recently, the National Ballet Academy in Amsterdam. But Ballet West has a special place in my esteem which is why I return to Scotland at this time of the year every year. It is partly its idyllic position with views of the banks of Loch Etive but I think there is something special in the quality of its training.Towards the end of the programme, there are pages headed "School Highlights" and "Where are they now?" They make very interesting reading.
St Petersburg Classic Ballet Thr Nutcracker 7 Jan 2020 Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield According to the programme notes for its recent tour of the UK, the St Petersburg Classic Ballet "has built a fan following of audiences who appreciate the artistry and technique of this company of exquisite young dancers and stars of the future". Maybe I saw it on an off-day because I have to say that I have seen better performances of The Nutcracker.
My heart sank with the opening bars of the familiar overture for it sounded thin and tinny. My spirits were not raised when the curtain revealed a set that looked cheap and artificial, So, too, did the costumes even though they were supposed to have been made by "craftsmen of the legendary Mariinsky Theatre Workshops." The blue Father Christmas hats which were worn by Fritz and the other little boys at Mr and Mrs Stahlbaum's party and the moon and stars outfit of Dr Drosselmeyer particularly irritated me. I saw some competent dancers but none of them seemed to be particularly young and I should be very surprised to see any of them in leading roles with major companies. Somehow they managed to fill the Sheffield Lyceum but I suspect that had more to do with the attraction of brand "Russia" and brand "St Petersburg" than anything else. Many in the audience will have seen clips or read reports of the Mariinsky or Kirov and I should not be surprised if one or two of them thought that that was the company that they had seen that night.
As I said in The Nutcracker #2 - The Bolshoi Screening(25 Dec 2019), there is a difference between The Nutcracker as performed in Russia and the versions that are performed in the West. Here it is a Christmas show - almost a pantomime - with expanding Christmas trees, toy soldiers, a really saccharine choral bit in snowflakes and lots of jolly divertissements about chocolate, tea and coffee in the kingdom of the sweets. There it is much more dramatic and in some ways darker with lots of psychological undertones. The version that we saw in Sheffield was decidedly Western. They called the Stahlbaums' daughter "Clara" rather than "Marie" or "Princess Masha" and although they separated the roles of Clara and Sugar Plum in the cast list both roles were danced by Yulia Yashina.
On reviewing my notes a month after the performance, I see that there were some bits that I really liked. I starred the Chinese dance by Mikhail Bogmazov and Alina Volobueva. Although I wasn't moved sufficiently to mark the dancers' performance I much preferred the Russian dance to be performed by a man and a woman as it was in this show than by four lads pretending to be Cossacks as happens in other productions.
The Nutcracker is already a very short ballet as it consists of two acts but this production seemed to be even shorter than usual. Two acts of 50 minutes each with a 20-minute interval. Divertissements seemed to have been left out of both acts. There were some touches that I just could not understand like the appearance of 4 men in the scene where the Sugar Plum appears with her beau. I know that this is a touring production that requires compromises to be made but this seemed to have more than most.
My ticket to this performance had been an early birthday present and I hate to winge when someone else is treating me. Being a bit of a duffer when it comes to ballet, it ill behoves me to criticize those who make their living from dance. But I just can't give this show a ringing endorsement and I won't be seeing the St Petersburg Classic Ballet on any future tour it may make to the UK.
