Excellence in Wales

Ballet Cymru "The Light Princess"

(c) 2017 Ballet Cymru: all rights reserved

The Wales Theatre Awards recognize excellence in theatre, dance and opera created and presented in Wales. Nominations for the 2017 awards were made by 40 English and Welsh language critics working throughout Wales for print, broadcast and online platforms. They made 830 nominations for 281 artists and 157 shows from 89 companies (see Mike Smith Wales Theatre Awards - The Winners 25 Feb 2017 Art Scene in Wales).

I am delighted to report that two of the companies that we follow were among the winners.  Ballet Cymru won best dance production with Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs which David Murley reviewed brilliantly in Little Red Riding Hood comes to London 2 Dec 2016 and I covered in Ballet Cymru's Summer Tour 22 May 2016 and Ballet Cymru's "Sleeping Beauty Moment" 5 Dec 2016. Caroline Finn of the National Dance Company of Wales won the best female dance artist award with Folk which I reviewed in Cambriophilia on 18 March 2016.

The best male dance artist award was won by Phil Willians of Cascade Dance Theatre. I have not yet made the acquaintance of Mr Williams or his company but I hope to do so before long. His company describes itself as

"a repertory touring company working with the Creu Cymru dance touring network to provide ensemble dance that is artist-led with a Wales and international perspective, having high production values and with an equal emphasis on quality of the art and a passion to speak to a general public audience."

For the benefit of readers outside Wales, I should say that Creu Cymru is the development agency for theatres and arts centres in Wales. Its members include nearly all the professionally run theatres, arts centres and other venues in Wales.

Last year was a good year for Ballet Cymru having been nominated for the second year running for one of the National Dance Awards. It has recruited some fine young dancers one of whom was my outstanding young dancer for 2016 (see The Terpsichore Titles: Outstanding Young Dancers of 2016 28 Dec 2016). We hope to see more of them in Ballet Cymru's Spring Tour with its new production, The Light Princess which I previewed in Ballet Cymru's The Light Princess 25 Jan 2017 and A Midsummer Night;s Dream that I also mentioned in that post. Ballet Cymru has now supplied us with the photo for The Light Princess with its press release which I have posted above.

National Dance Company of Wales's Spring Tour

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When I saw the National Dance Company of Wales in Huddersfield last year, I wrote in Cambriophilia 19 March 2016:

"One of the reasons I am a Cambriohile is that Wales has a great ballet company in Ballet Cymru. I am delighted to say that it also has a fine contemporary dance company in the National Dance Company Wales."

The NDCW is on the move again with a double bill consisting of Caroline Finn's The Green House and Roy Assaf's Profundis (see Spring Tour 2017).

Caroline Finn is the company's artistic director and I have reviewed two of her works:

• Bloom which she created for Phoenix Dance Theatre (see Phoenix in Huddersfield 27 Nov 2015); and
• Folk which I reviewed in Cambriophilia.

The company' website sets the scene on The Green House as follows:

"What happens when we prune ourselves to perfection? Caroline Finn takes us on a nostalgic journey, asking us to peer into The Green House. On a twisted TV set, characters discover the fine line between fantasy and reality."

It also has this to say about Profundis:

"Playful, vibrant and provocative. Profundis dares us to ask questions about what things are, and what they are not."

The Spring tour will cover just about every part of Wales but will make only two forays into England (Shrewsbury 21 Feb and Newcastle upon Tyne 18 March 2017) and one into Scotland (Dundee 13 May 2017).

Cambriophilia

"We have Anglophile and Francophile, but what do we call someone who is a lover of the Americas - particularly North America?" asked The Guardian on its Semantic Enigma page. "Mad" was one ungracious reply which not unnaturally ruffled more than a few Transatlantic feathers. A more serious reply was Americophile which I googled and, yes, the word does seem to exist.

But the English language doesn't seem to have a word for a lover of Welsh culture which is strange because there is so much to admire in that beautiful peninsula just a short drive away for most of us. So I'm going to coin one which I hope will one day find its way into the OED. "Cambriophile" and its noun "Cambriophilia".  That adjective certainly applies to me. As I said in Ballet Cymru in London 1 Dec 2015:

"To the best of my knowledge and belief there is not a millilitre of Welsh blood in my veins. Such Celtic heritage as I can claim is Irish and Scottish yet I love Wales as much as anyone who was lucky enough to have been born in that country."

One of the reasons I am a Cambriohile is that Wales has a great ballet company in Ballet Cymru. I am delighted to say that it also has a fine contemporary dance company in the National Dance Company Wales.

The National Dance Company Wales spent a day in Huddersfield on 10 March 2016 and we got to know them well. They invited us to their company class over cakes at lunch time before performing three of their works on their current Spring tour and then finally sticking around in the meeting room afterwards for a Q & A. I should say for the benefit of those readers who have never been to Wales or Huddersfield that we share quite a bit in common. We also live in a hilly, gritty landscape which once had mines and mills and we share a love of singing with one of the best choral societies in the world. A language close to Welsh was once spoken in Yorkshire and quite a bit of it remains in names of geographic features such as Pen-y-ghent for one of the highest points in our county.

Company class was taken by Lee Johnston, the company's rehearsal director, and it was entirely classical starting with warm ups on the floor, barre work, and the usual centre exercises albeit to slightly different music than would normally accompany a ballet class. While the dance these artists perform on stage may not be ballet they are clearly ballet trained and they are as supple and graceful as any ballet dancer. Gita and I ran into Johnston on the way from the auditorium to the cafe.
 "Thanks for coming" she said.
"On the contrary. we thank you for letting us watch your company class" was our reply.
We introduced ourselves as Team Terpsichore and expressed our delight at meeting another Welsh dance company.
"We are good friends of Ballet Cymru", we were told, "who are just down the road from us."

The NCDW is based in the Dance House in the Millennium Centre in Cardiff which is indeed not far from Rogerstone which is the suburb of Newport where Ballet Cymru is based. The facilities of the Dance House sound magnificent: "a world-class production facility and performance and rehearsal space for local artists, youth groups and touring companies across the UK and beyond." They share that space with a roll call of some of the best and the brightest in Wales Welsh National Opera, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Touch Trust, Ty Cerdd, Literature Wales, Hijinx and Urdd. Facilities include "two dance studios, a lounge area and office space. The main production studio, the Blue Room, has the highest quality technical specification for producing and presenting dance, including 100 tiered and retractable seats. The second studio, Man Gwyn, is a simple square rehearsal studio complete with ballet barres, mirrors and full circle grey drapes for rehearsal, auditions or intimate presentations." Apparently the Dance House is always buzzing with activity.

The company has 9 dancers of whom only Josie Sinnadurai seems to be Welsh. The rest come from England and the Continent.
"You call yourself the National Company of Wales" I asked in the Q & A after the show, "so what's so Welsh about you?"
"Good question" replied David Pallant, their latest recruit, "well we go to all parts of the country and interact with schools of community groups."
"Our dancers are actually learning Welsh to work with children" added Lee Johnstone.
"Would you like to say something in Welsh?" said our Canadian master or rather mistress of ceremonies to Angela Boix Duran who is a strikingly beautiful young woman from Barcelona.
"Yr wyf o Sbaen" ("I'm from Spain") came the fluent reply.

The company performed three works for us:

• Tuplet by Alexander Ekman whose work includes an alternative Swan Lake which seems to be even more off the wall than David Nixon's (see Up the Swannee 17 March 2016) or even Sir Matthew Bourne's (see Swan Lads - Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, Bradford Alhambra 4 March 2014 5 March 2014) so if a choreographer must have a go at one of my most cherished ballets he may as well do a proper job;
• A Mighty Wind by Jeroen Verbruggen who also designed the sets as well as choreographed the ballet; and
• Folk by the company's artistic director Caroline Finn.

I liked all three works enormously but the one I enjoyed the most was Verbruggen's Mighty Wind. It was exciting as the men tossed one of the women between them as though she were a sack of potatoes and also innovative in the way he used four mobile fans with powerful lighting to flare the dancers hair as though they were on fire. Verbruggen had created The Nutcracker for the Geneva Ballet which I mentioned in Geneva Nutcracker on 25 Oct 2015. I would love to see that work one day but for now A Mighty Wind will do.

The National Dance Company of Wales's next stop on their Spring tour is The Place in London on 12 April and then on to Aberystwyth, Milford Haven and Mold.  If you live anywhere near those places they are worth a visit.

Phoenix in Huddersfield

Phoenix Dance Theatre, Mixed Bill, Lawrence Batley Teatre, Huddersfield, 27 Nov 2015

When I reviewed Phoenix's triple bill at The Linbury in The Phoenix Soars Over London on 13 Nov 2015 I promised to focus on Itzik Galili's Until.With/ Out.Enough and Caroline Finn's Bloom as soon as I had seen them in Huddersfield. I made that romise because I was so impressed with Sharon Watson's TearFall that I ran out of space and time to write about anything else. I am unable to keep that promise in its entirety because the first two works in last night's show were not Galili's piece bbut Christopher Bruce's Shift and Shadows. 

Not that I'm complaining for I am a great admirer of Bruce's work as you can see from my reviews of Rambert's Rooster (see Cock a Doodle Doo - Rambert's Rooster 27 Oct 2015 and Rooster ................ :-) 4 Oct 2014) and Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems (see Bruce Again 6 Oct 2015). Nevertheless it did occur to me to ask the reason for the substitution in a question and answer session with the cast in the Syngenta cellar at the end of the show. I didn't get a chance to ask that question because there were so many others who wanted to quiz the company but it was answered by Tracy Tinker, the tour director, who explained that the company had to dance Galili's piece in London because it had been a joint commission with the Royal Opera House.

The substitution prompted me to buy a new programme at the first interval and I remarked to a lady selling Phoenix merchandise in the foyer that this was a completely new programme. It wasn't entirely new. The other two works, TearFall and Bloom were the same as in the Linbury. 

As on the 12 Nov 2015 I enjoyed TearFall tremendously and appreciated it a little bit more for seeing it twice. It was clear from the Q & A that that piece went down well with the audience. Prentice Whitlow explained his interpretation of the work in response to a question from the floor. One point that I had missed before was that men and women think of tears in an entirely different way and the piece explored that.  Whitlow had introduced the piece with a short monologue and recordings of his voice and someone's (possibly his) weeping recurred at several points of the show.

Finn's Bloom was another work that I got to understand better the second time round though I am still not sure that I have got to the bottom of it.  Perhaps if I describe it you will see why.  It began with a group of dancers on the left hand side of the stage cooing and clucking around a table.  Suddenly one of them screams and Sam Vaherlehto wearing a clown's tragedy mask appears round a microphone. He shifts and shuffles apparently with embarrassment as his audience applauds and looks on. There is a duet - or more properly a dance dialogue - with Whitlow. One of the women in a tutu like skirt dances a solo to a rhyme that seemed to mock medicine. In another scene Vaherlehto gathers the dancers who were stretched on the ground like corpses and assembles them into a pile. The dancer in the tutu makes her way to the centre and lies down about them.  Towards the end Vaherlehto, stripped to his underpants, danced to a song with the chorus "I'm a creep. I'm a wierdo. What the hell am I doing here." Starting with the title Bloom I wondered whether the dancers might be plants or flowers and that the man in the mask was the gardener. I was dying to ask whether or not I was on the right track but sadly didn't get a chance to find out.

Even if it was about flowers Bloom did have disturbing undertones such as the thin line between reality and hallucination, Bruce's Shadows also seemed to be about aberrations of the mind as it started with furniture throwing. I was not the only one to see a connection with depression. The lady sitting next to me in the Q & A was a therapist and she alluded to it in formulating her question.

Shift, however was quite different. I had seen the same dancers dance that work at The Sapphire gala in March and I think they were better second time round. More polished somehow. Dressed in forties costumes with the women in head scarves Gracie Fields style they seemed to represent a production line. I was reminded very much of the munitions workers in Liam Scrlett's No Man's Land which I had seen in Manchester two days earlier (see Lest We Forget 25 Nov 2015). However, Bruce's workers seemed to have a lot more fun that Scareltt's canaries.

The Q & A session was my first chance to see all the dancers together and hear them speak. I had already met Whitlow a few days earlier, I have been following several of the others on twitter and I knew Marie-Astrid Mence from Ballet Black. They are an impressive bunch of artists. Watson explained her selection process which is uber competitive. They were asked how they took up dance. Two of the men explained that they took up dance because their sisters were taking lessons. The others gave various reasons. They were asked by the therapist how they relaxed and we learned from Vaherlehto that they look (or at least he looks) to another art. Photography in his case someone added.  I hope to run a feature on Mence and Whitlow in Terpsichore soon.

This has been a pretty good month for dance and the two shows by Phoenix were among the highlights. Although rooted in Leeds it really is a world class company with dancers from around the world.  I am very proud of them.

The Phoenix Soars Over London

Phoenix Dance Theatre, Mixed Programme, Linbury Studio Theatre, London 12 Nov 2015

It should never be forgotten that there are two great dance companies at Quarry Hill in Leeds. My beloved Northern Ballet, of course, but also Phoenix Dance Theatre which started in Leeds and remains rooted in that city.  It is entirely fitting that Phoenix's artistic director, Sharon Watson, should chair the committee that will coordinate the city's bid to become the European Capital of Culture for 2023. If anyone can bag that prize it is she.

Yesterday she showed her genius in TearFall as part of Phoenix's Mixed Programme at the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House in London. TearFall is a work of art but it also incorporates science. One of the disadvantages of our English, Welsh and Northern Irish Systems (but not so much the Scottish one) is that our schoolchildren are required to focus their studies on three arts or science "A" levels from age 16. The result is that we have educated several generations of science graduates with an incomplete knowledge of history, social sciences, the arts and literature but also several generations of arts graduates with only the scantiest understanding of basic science. C. P. Snow discussed that phenomenon in the Two Cultures as long ago as 1956. As Sharon Watson explains in Rehearsals: Revealed - TearFall - Sharon Watson she collaborated with Professor Sir John Holman of the University of York in creating Tear Fall. There are shots in the video of Sir John in a seminar with the choreographer and dancers and also sitting with them on the floor in a rehearsal studio. The work is supported by the Wellcome Trust which usually funds pharmacology and healthcare. It is great to see that it is also funding the performing arts.

The performance began with a short monologue by Prentice Whitlow on the function and composition of tears. Having began his topic quite clinically he discussed tears as a vehicle for conveying emotion and that, of course, was the topic explored by the dancers. Even without props the choreography would have been sufficiently expressive but Yaron Abulafia's lighting with little bulbs symbolizing individual tears complementing the pearl coloured helium balloons focussed the audience's thoughts (or at least mine) on the things that had caused them pain.  I shed many tears this week having been forced to end a friendship that has lasted for 6 years and it has almost been a bereavement.  Kristian Steffes's music also spoke to me, especially the sound of sobbing.  For so many reasons, I felt TearFall had my name on it and I am very glad that Sharon Watson and her dancers have produced this work and that I saw it when I did.

TearFall was one of three brilliant works and my focus on that work has meant that I have not done sufficient justice to Itzik Galili's Until.WithOut.Enough and Caroline Finn's Bloom. These are two very different works as you can see from Rehearsals: Revealed - Until.With/Out.Enough and Rehearsals: Revealed - Bloom - Caroline Finn and suit different moods.  The first is sombre while the last is comic though not without a bitter sweet twist.  I think Sharon Watson had a reason for inserting her work which deals with pleasant as well as painful emotions between them. I loved the music for both - Gorecki for Galili's work and some very clever lyrics in Bloom.  I shall see this programme in Huddersfield on 26 Nov 2015 and I will focus on them properly then.

Phoenix has never forgotten where and how it started and it works closely with local schools and community groups in Leeds.  If you look at its twitter stream you will see that it has not taken a rest in London. It has led workshops in the capital too. It is the nearest thing we have in Yorkshire to a national treasure.  On the steps leading down to the Linbury we were handed leaflets inviting us to support the company. I urge all my readers to do so.