One of KNT's Best Shows Ever

Friends' Meeting House, Manchester

Photo RuthAS Licence CC BY 4.0 Source Wikimedia Commons

 

KNT Showcase of Dance Friends Meeting House, Manchester 19:30 21 May 2022

Yesterday's Showcase of Dance was KNT's first show since the pandemic and, in many ways, it was one of its best. Showtime is important to dance education because dance is part of theatre. Everything we learn in class is in preparation for performance.  It is therefore important that everyone is offered a chance to perform even though not everyone wants to accept it.

KNT is run by Karen Sant, one of the most enterprising but also one of the most pleasant young women I have ever had the good fortune to know.  Over the last 13 years, she and her teachers have offered adults and kids evening and weekend classes in ballet, contemporary, jazz and tap in central Manchester.  For most of those years, they gave those classes in the studios of Northern Ballet School on Oxford Road.  When access to the studios was prevented by the pandemic Karen transferred the classes online.  When it became possible to hold classes in the open air, Karen moved them to Castlefield.  When it became possible to teach indoors again Karen tried a number of venues including eventually the Quaker Meeting House. 

Karen's students followed her through those changes of venue. That says a lot for both Karen and her students. Students followed her because she is an excellent teacher and her classes are fun.  But dance is not easy and requires a lot of personal commitment.  Dance students are good at supporting each other and from such support, friendships form. That is particularly true of rehearsals, choreographic workshops and days of dance when we have a shared project and rely on each other for the project's success as well as our own.  I have made a lot of friends at KNT over the years.  One of the delights of the evening was seeing many of them in the show.  

Part of the reason for yesterday's success was the venue which the compère likened to a school assembly hall.  In fact, it was a place of worship which would have been used as such this morning and nearly every other Sunday. Quaker worship can take many forms which, incidentally, could include dance. While I did not detect religiosity yesterday I did see enthusiasm (derived from ἐνθουσιασμός or "inspired by God") and plenty of devotion.  But the main advantage of yesterday's venue was its intimacy.  The audience was very close to the dancers which I particularly appreciated as I would normally have been one of them.

Every class performed a short piece last night,  The teachers skilfully choreographed each piece to display their students' skills to their best advantage and I was most impressed with their capabilities. In the beginners' ballet for example one of the few men in the show supported a woman in a movement that gave the impression of a duet.  The tap class danced to music from Slumdog Millionaire.  The compere performed in that piece changing from a three-piece suit to his costume before the audience.  When he asked how he had done I found myself shouting "very well".   My friends and classmates from my pre-intermediate class filled me with pride.  However, my favourite piece of the evening was the advanced ballet class's interpretation of music that Karen has chosen for her wedding.

Yesterday coincided with Karen's birthday. At the reverence, she was presented with a cake, flowers, a massive card and presents to a more or less tuneful rendering of "Happy Birthday".  It was a wonderful evening that I would not have missed for the world.

Small Steps - Northern Ballet Academy's Commemoration of the Kindertransport

Arrival of Jewish refugees, London

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S69279 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Source Wikipedia

 Creative Commons Licence

On Sunday the 24 Jan 2016 at 14:00 the Lord Mayor of Leeds will commemorate the Kindertransport, the rescue of nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi Germany and occupied territories immediately before the Second World War. Members and attenders of the Religious Society of Friends (whose faith I share) helped to promote and facilitate that effort by making representations to the government to relax immigration restrictions, fetching the children from their points of departure and accompanying them to England and providing homes and schools for the children upon their arrival (see Kindertransport on the Quaker website).  The history of the Quakers' contribution has been recorded on remember.org.

I mention the commemoration of the Kindertransport  because I learnt today in my Over 55 improvers' class at Northern Ballet Academy that Cara O'Shea has choreographed a short ballet called Small Steps for the Centre for Advanced Training students of our Academy which they will perform at the Town Hall. There will also be a speech by Nick Winton (the son of Sir Nicholas Winton who was particularly prominent in rescuing Czech children), a performance by the Clothworkers' Consort of Leeds, readings, lighting of candles and prayers by Rudi Leavor of Bradford Synagogue (see Leeds Town Hall Civic Remembrance Event on the City Council Website).

Readers of this blog will know that I have a very high regard for Cara O'Shea. It was she who trained the childen in The Nutcracker who helped to make the show for me (see Northern Nutcracker 19 Dec 2015). She first came to my attention when she was teaching the boys for the Northern Ballet Open Day on 18 Feb 2014 and a few days later I was lucky enough to be taught by her (see A Treat For Us Old Ladies 27 Feb 2014). She is also close to two other institutions for which I have enormous regard: the Northern Ballet School where she trained and the Chelmsford Ballet Company where she danced Aurora at age 15.

While the Kindertransport commemoration would be well worth supporting for its own sake a performance by some of our Academy's most promising students under the direction of one of their excellent teachers will make it particularly memorable.

Reflections on Giselle

Adèle Dumilâtre (1821-1909) as Myrtha, Source Wikipedia

The performances of Giselle with Carlos Acosta and Natalia Osipova that I saw at Covent Garden on the 18 Jan and in the cinema on the 27 Jan were outstanding and will take their place in my memory alongside magnificent performances that I saw over 40 years ago by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell and Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn. However, I always feel uneasy after seeing Giselle - not just this performance but any. I hear my father's reproaches that time once lost can never be recovered,

The reason I have a problem with Giselle is the story. It is not that it is a silly story.  Compared to Swan Lake and The Nutcracker it makes perfect sense. An impressionable young girl who has a steady relationship with the village gamekeeper is seduced by a playboy aristocrat in disguise who is already engaged to another woman. She shows him off to her mother and her friends and she is crowned queen of the wine pageant.  The aristocrat's connections visit the village and he is exposed as a philanderer by the gamekeeper.  Betrayed and humiliated the girl loses her reason and goes into a frenzy in which she either dies or kills herself.  So far so good.  The story could have come out of The Archers and I would not be surprised if something like it has not been run at some stage over the last 60 years.

But then the plot loses me because Giselle is buried in unconsecrated ground where her spirit joins those of other women who have been seduced and die before their wedding day. They have it in for men and if any man is unfortunate enough to stray across their path as the gamekeeper did they kill him (though having said that I have seen one performance, though I cannot remember which company, where the gamekeeper survives and the curtain falls on his shaking hands with the playboy).  That is a pretty unpleasant as well as fantastic story and offends my sensibilities as a Quaker as well as an aesthete.

Interestingly I see from the programme notes that Peter Wright had similar reservations about the story when asked to stage Giselle and it is only in the last day or so that I find that he was also brought up as a Quaker. You see the idea of burying in a forest a young woman who has died of a broken heart or even killed herself  appals us and the idea of hateful and vengeful forest spirits is .... well let's not go there.  All this is of course a product of romanticism which produced great art but it also had a dark side which degenerated into nationalism, racism and, ultimately, fascism.

Of course all this was wonderful material for the Soviet authorities.  Look at what used to happen in older superstitious times and count yourselves lucky that you now live in a modern socialist state that has no place for the likes of Albrecht. No wonder Giselle remained in the the repertoires of both the Kirov and Bolshoi and was indeed developed by them.

Yet Adam's music is so beautiful and the choreography of the second act is so compelling that I can't keep away from Giselle. I am ashamed to say it but it is my favourite ballet,  And I leave the theatre after a good performance like the one on the 18 Jan damming the waves of tears. How do I sit through it despising myself for harbouring those emotions yet unable to walk away?  The solution - and it is one that partially works for me any may not for anyone else - is to put the story out of my mind.  To absorb the music and dancing as pure abstraction as though they were the work of Balanchine.

Further Reading

Adult Beginner  Giselle  8 Feb 2014  A very interesting and perceptive view of a performance of the Royal New Zealand Ballet by a blogger from Los Angeles.

See the wonderful Flashmob video of the second act of Giselle danced by the Dutch National Ballet in a Beijing shopping centre ("Now you can see why I am such a fan of the Dutch National Ballet" 8 Dec 2014).