Calling all Northerners and Fans of Northern Ballet

Civil Service Club, Venue for London Ballet Circle Meetings

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David Nixon, one of the Vice Presidents of the London Ballet Circle and Artistic Director of Northern Ballet will be interviewed by Esme Chandler on the first floor of the Civil Service Club at 13-15 Great Scotland Yard, London SW1A 2HJ from 19:30 on Monday, 28 Nov 2016, The event is open to the public for a fee of £5 for members of the Circle and £8 for everybody else.

In case anyone from the North of England wants to attend that event, the venue is easy to reach by tube from King's Cross, St Pancras and Euston Stations and the Victoria coach station.  Embankment, which is served by the District Line and Charing Cross are not far away.  Great Scotland Yard leads off from Northumberland Avenue which runs from Trafalgar Square to the river. Look out for the green and white flags of the Nigerian embassy which abuts Northumberland Avenue as the venue is right next door.  If you are driving from the North a good place to park is Luton Parkway. The station multi-storey is very cheap even by Northern standards and you can make the rest of your way into town by Thameslink. You can change to the District line at Blackfriars.

Those coming to the London Ballet Circle can order meals and drinks before and after the talk. Again, at Northern prices. I can particularly recommend the fish and chips and the roast dinner. If you want to combine Nixon's talk with a spot of Christmas shopping, Harrods and Harvey Nicks are within walking distance and Fortnums is even closer. There is, of course, also the whole of the West End to entertain you if you want to stay for any length of time.

Of course, you will have come mainly to hear about Northern Ballet. The season began with revivals of Nixon's Wuthering Heights (see Janet McNulty's review Northern Ballet's "Wuthering Heights" at the West Yorkshire Playhouse 9 Sept 2016 and my Northern Ballet's "Wuthering Heights" at the West Yorkshire Playhouse - about as good as it can get 10 Sept 2016) and Jean-Christophe Maillot's Romeo and Juliet (see Romeo and Juliet after the Shrew 15 Oct 2016) and will continue with Nixon's Beauty and the Beast which I reviewed in my law blog IP Yorkshire (see Ballet and Intellectual Property - my Excuse for reviewing "Beauty and the Beast" 31 Dec 2011 IP Yorks).

Happily, some new work is promised for the new year.  There is, of course. Kenneth Tindall's first full-length ballet Casanova as I mentioned on 24 May 2016. I will try to get an interview with Kenny before the premiere on 11 March. There will also be Daniel de Andrade's The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas that opens in Doncaster in May and will tour the rest of the country before finding its way back to Yorkshire and Nixon's own Little Mermaid  which opens in Southampton in September and trundles into Sheffield in November and Leeds in December.

There should be a lot to discuss with our company's artistic director. We don't get a chance to talk to him very often. It will be worth making the long trek south just this once.