A Celebration of Dance: Wilis and More

 

Dance Studio Leeds, Powerhouse Ballet, Part of Giselle 19 Nov 2022, 15:00 Chroma Q Theatre, Leeds

By some fluke, I once accomplished a chassé, pas de bourrée, pirouettes single or double and pirouette dedans without everything going wrong. The delight on my teacher's countenance was a picture to behold.   I saw exactly the same expression on Saturday after  Powerhouse Ballet had danced the scene from act II of Giselle where Zulma and Moyna summon the wilis from their hidden forest graves to attend  Myrtha.

The reason for my teacher's delight is that the cast danced very well.  So well that I felt impelled to rise to my feet in standing ovation.  Our teacher, Jane Tucker, had taught us the choreography during a day-long workshop in July and rehearsed us almost every weekend since.  She had a cast with different levels of skill and experience and she adapted Coralli and Perrot's choreography in a way that enabled each and every one of them to shine. Christie Barnes excelled as Myrtha as did Lauren Savage and Esther Wilson as Moyna and Zulma.  They were supported by a polished corps consisting of Fiona Cheng, Jayne Johnston, Helen Peacock. Sue Pritchard, Helena Tarren, Lois Watters, Anne Williams and Bo Zhang. 

During our rehearsals, we discovered the talents of many of our members.  Christie Barnes not only danced Myrtha but also directed several of our rehearsals including one that was effectively a second workshop at York St John University.  We also discovered that she is an accomplished photographer and filmmaker as she chronicled our progress. Lauren Savage proved to be an excellent teacher leading one of our company classes and several warm-ups.  We found costuming and make-up skills and lots of practical tips such as the best place to park on a busy Saturday from different members.

Those discoveries have advanced one of the objectives of Powerhouse Ballet which is to provide opportunities for members to develop their theatre skills. That is why I invited Katherine Wong to lead our company class in Bolton last October`.  I have also asked Alicia Jolley to give a class in North Wales in the New Year, Holly Middleton to help rehearse future productions and drama student, Fiona Cheng, to teach us how to act.

Our 8-minute extract from Giselle was just one of many pieces performed at Dance Studio Leeds's Celebration of Dance on Saturday.  The show was staged to raise funds for Martin House children's hospice in Boston Spa.  At a health and safety briefing just before the show, the studio's director, Katie Geddes, announced that she had raised a very healthy profit for the charity,  Readers will be happy to learn that this publication contributed to that sum as one of the show's sponsors.

Because I wanted to assist our cast in any way I could I only saw the second half of the show.  However, everything that I did see was excellent.   Every style of dance was on display from Egyptian folkloric bellydance to West Side Story.  I enjoyed them all, particularly belly dancer Ya Habibi who entered the stalls inviting the audience to join her on stage, West Side Story and Afro Fusion's Rise 'N' Shine.  Some of the pieces that I would like to have seen but couldn't because they were in the first part were Indian classical dances.  Happily, at our last rehearsal, I asked the director to give us an exhibition class and some background information on the art form early in the new year.

Powerhouse Ballet hit a number of headwinds even before lockdown of which the biggest was scepticism.  When Covid 19 closed the studios and theatres I wondered how we could possibly survive.  Relief came from an unexpected source.  Maria Chugai, a soloist of the Dutch National Ballet and the best Myrtha I have ever seen in over 60 years of balletgoing, offered us an online class in April 2020 which was a spectacular success.  The success of that class encouraged me to invite other performers such as Krystal Lowe, Beth Meadway and Shannon Lilly as well as Jane Tucker, Annemarie Donoghue, Fiona Noonan and other teachers from our region to be online ballet mistresses.

Powerhouse Ballet is now on a roll.  We have found a new venue at Ballet Contours near Manchester city centre where we shall hold this Saturday's company class. We welcome dancers from Hull to Hollyhead.  If you can get to East Ordsall Lane by 15:00 do come and join us.  We have invited Heather Boulton, the director of the studio, to give us our first company class at that venue.  I visited the studio a few weeks ago and was most impressed.  It is fully equipped with a well sprung floor.  Above all, Heather is an excellent teacher.

Phoenix - A Double Celebration

Standard YouTube Licence

Phoenix Dance Theatre A Celebration of Female Choreographers Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre, 28 Sept 2017 19:30 and Celebration Gala for Nadine Senior West Yorkshire Playhouse, 8 Oct 2017 19:00

Phoenix Dance Theatre does not have a large number of dancers and only half of them are women, yet it can stage a whole evening of top-class dance in celebration of female choreographers created entirely by its own artists.  How impressive is that?  How many other companies many times its size can do anything like that? Yet that is what that company presented in Phoenix At Home on 28 Sept 2017.

That is why Phoenix was my contemporary company of the year in 2016 despite competition from Alvin Ailey, Nederlands Dans Theater 2, the National Dance Company of Wales and, of course, Rambert (see Terpsichore Titles: Contemporary Company of 2016 31 Dec 2016).

When I started to follow Phoenix I learned about Nadine Senior and everything that she did for that company:

"Phoenix Dance Company was formed in 1981 by David Hamilton (Artistic Director), Donald Edwards and Vilmore James, three young men who had their enthusiasm for dance sparked by the tuition they received in school, particularly from teachers John Auty at Intake High School and Nadine Senior at Harehills Middle School who went on to found Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and following her retirement in 2001, was Chair of Phoenix’s Board of Trustees for six years."

Nadine Senior died in 2016 and Sharon Watson, Phoenix's Artistic Director, penned this beautiful tribute to her. Last Sunday her former students, colleagues and friends as well as folk like me, who had never met her but acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to her, assembled at West Yorkshire Playhouse to celebrate her life and work.

Thus we had a double celebration within a few days of each other.  First, a celebration of the enormously creative female artists of the present. Then, a celebration of a remarkable woman of the recent past who created so much and inspired and continues to inspire so many.

The celebration of female choreographers began with Sandrine Monin's Calyx which I reviewed in There's a reason why Phoenix was my contemporary company of the year 11 Feb 2017 and previewed in Calyx  8 Dec 2016. I have always been impressed by the work ever since I first saw it in rehearsal but I appreciated it only on a superficial level. Watching it a second time certainly increased my understanding.  I saw the parallels between limbs and shoots or roots from the moment Sam Vaherlehto's leg emerged from the box in which he had germinated. These were not houseplants or flowers from the garden but weeds and perhaps toxic ones at that.

Tracy Tinker's Elemeotary which she created with Vanessa Vince-Pang was a welcome relief after all that Japanese knotweed and deadly nightshade which we had just seen.  Vanessa Vince-Pang, who is in reality at the very top of her art, presented herself for an audition as a nervous young dancer. We heard disembodied voices off stage. "Would you like me to do some tap?" volunteered Vanessa. "Would you mind removing your top so we can see your number?" came the reply. Not even a name. Just a number. Then commands were barked out as in Gauthier's Ballet 101: "fall", "recover", "feel the space". Vanessa threw herself around the stage with considerable grace disappearing in what appeared to be a shower of lemons.

Next came Page 24 by Carmen Vasquez Marfil to music by Paganini and Arvo Pärt. A solo work by the choreographer with an outsize chair as a single prop and a screen upon which appeared images of the dancer. Clad in a simple flowing dress Marfil seemed to interrogate first the chair as though it were alive and then the screen.  I see from my programme notes that film was made by Ana Zamorano and Prentice Whitlow. Now I know Prentice. He is a hugely talented and impressive dancer who can now add filmmaking to his catalogue of accomplishments but I don't know Ana Zamorani. So I googled her. The only Ana Zamorano that I could find was the author of a children's book called A Comer about a family with a little girl called Alicia who looks and is dressed very like Carmen in this performance. Now I may be barking up quite the wrong tree (in which case apologies all round) but this fascinating piece made me think very much of growing up. Just like Alicia in Zamorano's story.

The first Act was rounded off by Vanessa Vince-Pang's Kerenza which was my favourite piece of the evening. The stage was full of joyful energetic young people who are the pre-vocational students of Phoenix Dance Academy. A few movements from the piece appear in the YouTube video that you can see above. I love the music which was written by Oliver Davis - or so my programme tells me. I felt uplifted as I do when I see anything by Chris Marney or Ernst Meisner.  Kerenza and Elemontary have left me eager to see more work by Vanessa Vince-Pang.

Everyone I spoke to was excited by what we had seen but the best was yet to come in Act 2. The whole of that Act was devoted to a preview of Sharon Watson's Windrush which will be premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse in February. The piece was named after the Empire Windrush which carried 497 passengers - mainly young men of African heritage - from Jamaica at the invitation of the government to ease the post-war labour shortage.  They were by no means the first Afro-Caribbean or African people to come to this country. Many others had studied here, served in two world wars or settled in great port cities like Cardiff and Liverpool. However, the Windrush is a symbol of an event of enormous significance for this country as it is of course for those who made the journey and their descendants.

Introducing the piece, Sharon told us that the work will be in two parts - first the preparation for the voyage and the voyage itself and then what happened upon their arrival. We saw the first part which was harrowing enough as it showed the separation of families. And as we know what happened afterwards - Notting Hill, Smethwick and Enoch Powell - the second part may not be a bundle of laughs either.

But, of course, this was not history but dance and I don't think I had ever seen, or would ever see, Phoenix dance better. But that was before I saw them perform Robert North's Troy Game. This is a work originally performed by men. It was created for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1974 and has been staged by the Stuttgart Ballet, Scottish Ballet and many other companies. The performance that we saw last Sunday was restaged by Julian Moss for Phoenix, the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Phoenix Dance Academy and pupils of Harehills Modern School. The cast was twice as large as in the original show and, for the first time, there were women in the show.

Troy Game was the pièce de résistance in a glorious evening that included a solo by Darshan Singh Bhuller in his own work The Path, David Hughes's performance of Siobhan Davies's interpretation  of L'Après Midi d'un Faune, Northern School of Contemporary Dance's Ocean, RJC Dance's Soca Jambiez and ACE Youth's State of Mind.  There was poetry from Khadijah Ibrahim and tributes from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Janet Smith, the Principal of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Peter Gruen and, of course, Sharon Watson.

Long though this review is it does not begin to do justice to the Nadine Senior Gala when we saw some splendid and unique things. Think of the last two paragraphs as an appetiser, folks. I shall review the gala properly just as soon as I can.  I have seen some great dance over the last few weeks and I am burning to write about it all.

Images of War: Ballet Central's "War Letters" and other Works

The Green Howards at the Battle of Anzio

Author Sgt. Radford, No. 2 Film and Photographoc Unit
Source Wikipedia

Ballet Central, Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre, 28 April 2016

When I first saw Chris Marney's War Letters for Ballet Black nearly three years ago I wrote:

"War Letters, which took up the whole of the second act, brought all the dancers together. It opened with the voice of Kwame Kwei Amah reading the words of a soldier's letter to his sweetheart rejoicing at their love. The mood changed with a poignant pas de deux between a wounded, gassed or shell shocked soldier in pyjamas and his lover who arrived with smiles and left with a broken. Next came a dance to the music of Glenn Miller. Four soldiers met four girls on the dance floor. Three of the girls were asked to dance but the fourth was ignored. She tried to attract the boys' attention but to no avail. The second reading came from Thandie Newton comparing throwing off a lover to the loss of a heavy coat - but then regretting the loss of warmth. This analogy was taken up by the choreographer as the boys tried to lend her their overcoats. The scene ended with the girl shrouded with the soldiers' coats. Finally, there was the voice of the wartime radio presenter John Snagge announcing "Victory in Europe". The last scene is of the artists together which I reproduced in my previous post. Home came the boys nursing their injuries. This was not the first ballet on the horror of war but I still found it a very moving work."

I saw the same company dance that work again in the Stanley and Aubrey Burton Theatre six months later:

"Christopher Marney's War Letters is a very moving piece and it resonated with the audience in Leeds last night even more than it had done in London. Possibly because it was danced in poppy season. Two movements brought many including me close to tears. The hospital visit to a seriously wounded soldier and the Winter coat. Beautiful choreography giving every dancer an opportunity to show what he or she can do."

 Yesterday I saw the young dancers of Ballet Central dance that work and found the work even more poignant than before. I think it is because the dancers are so young - exactly the age of so many of the boys who were called up and the girls who were left behind - and the painstaking attention to detail. The boys wore British uniforms and the girls wore their hair exactly as their grandmothers (or even their great grandmothers) would have done. I was born well after then end of the second world war but remember bomb sites, amputees and even some rationing. I was reminded of my parents' reminiscences of war. This performance spoke to me in a way that previous ones had not done.

All credit then to the artists: Holly Girdham, Emma Hancox, Mai Ito, Mia Lambuschagne, Seren Williams, Valerie Yeo, Jaspar Arran, Cian Hughes, James Parratt, James Roxby-Brwn, Mark Samaras and Joseph Vaughan. I particularly enjoyed Mai Ito's performance of the girl on the side, a role that Kanika Carr created for Ballet Black. Mai Ito danced that charmingly - playful at one moment, petulant the next, and always flirtatious.

Although it was the chance to see War Letters again that excited me it was not the only work that delighted me. I enjoyed all the works that the company danced last night but three impressed me in particular: Christopher Gable's Celebration which opened the show, Sharon Watson's Repetition (2) Change and the Pas de Trois from Paquita which rounded off the first part of the show.  Of those three works it was Celebration that I enjoyed the best, possibly because it had been created by Gable.

I first saw Christopher Gable when he was with the Royal Ballet. Many years later I saw him in Gillian Lynne's A Simple Man for Northern Ballet. He was artistic director when I started to follow Northern Ballet and created my favourite ballets for that company.  Celebration, a gorgeous classical work reminded me of all that.  After the dancers had presented themselves there was a delightful pas de deux, a virtuoso piece by the men, a joyful succession of duets and so on.  The music was provided by the composer, Philip Feeney, in person. The work was staged by Carole Gable who is Central's ladies' ballet tutor and rehearsal coach.

Carole Gable also staged the Pas de Trois which was performed skilfully by Mai Ito, Kanami Dano and Mark Samaras to Minkus's music.  This requires virtuosity and grace from each of those three young dancers which they displayed in abundance.

Like her TearFall which I reviewed in The Phoenix Soars Over London 13 Nov 2015 Watson's Repetition (2) Change was a science lesson as well as dance. Two sets of dancers, some male others female, clad in almost identical red and black gowns, wove around each other in seemingly random patterns. According to the programme notes "the fascinating intricate world of DNA is placed under the microscope" in this work. I could not quite work out was whether the red and black dancers were supposed to be different letters of a sequence, DNA and RNA or something else. Watson was in the auditorium but I did not get a chance to ask her. I was however gratified to find that the piece had been sponsored by Susan Dalgetty-Ezra of the London Ballet Circle. The work was staged by our very own Sandrine Monon of Phoenix.

The other works that I enjoyed were Leanne King's duet Insinuare danced by Elizabeth Medway and Joseph Vaughan to Feeney's music and Sara Matthews's energetic Superstruct, also to a score by Feeney.

It was a very good programme though perhaps a little less ambitious than last year (see Dazzled 3 May 2015). Also, while there were many impressive young dancers nobody stood out in the way that Mthuthuzeli November did last year. On the other hand War Letters was wonderful. In performing that work think I saw Central at its very best last night. The company will move on to Uppingham, Newbury, Chipping Norton, the Royal Automobile Club, Bridport, Eastleigh, Margate, Wedmor, Bristol and the Stratford Arts Centre.