Local Hero

Author Tim Green Licence CC BY 2.0 Source Wikimedia Commons

Huddersfield Station

 

The Birmingham Royal Ballet's website and programmes used to state: "Huddersfield is not as famous in the world of classical dance as St Petersburg, Paris or London, but it was the birthplace of David Bintley - one of the most consistent and significant forces in British ballet."  After attending  Deborah Weiss's online interview of Andrew McNicol for the London Ballet Circle on 7 May 2025, I looked up the McNicol Ballet Collective and found that it was based in Huddersfield.   IMHO the Collective counts as another significant contribution from Huddersfield to the world of classical dance.

Andrew McNicol is a freelance British choreographer and Artistic Associate at English National Ballet School.  He has created work for companies and ballet schools around the world, including the Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Joffrey Ballet, the Tulsa Ballet, the Royal Ballet School and the English National Ballet School.   He founded the McNicol Ballet Collective in 2021.

The McNicol Ballet Collective describes itself as "a creation-based ensemble of extraordinary artists at the peak of their creative powers, alongside emerging talent primed to showcase their brilliance and artistry."  They create works for the stage and screen and have launched a learning programme called "Compositions and Configurations."

I discovered that the Collective has a mailing list, so I subscribed to it.  Yesterday, I received my first newsletter.  It started with a note of thanks from McNicol to those who had attended the Collective's shows, made donations or engaged with it on social media.  Since its formation, the Collective had presented 4 ballets to critical acclaim, premiered a new ballet called Liquid Life and commissioned a new score from Jeremy Birchall. There is also a link to the Collective's Insight Event with the Royal Academy of Dance.   

For those who want to learn more about McNicol and his project, I recommend Trevor Rothwell's write-up of Deborah Weiss's interview on the London Ballet Circle website and the Insight Event video.  Apart from asking McNicol why he chose Huddersfield as his base during that interview, my only contact with him was at the Tell Tale Steps Choreographic Laboratory  10 years ago.  I remember struggling to get a word in edgeways at the panel discussion.   I welcome McNicol's initiative in setting up the Collective and I will do my best to support it.

Ballet Cymru at the Bangor Pontio Centre

Standard YouTube Licence

Ballet Cymru has commissioned Charlotte Edmonds to create a new ballet called Wired to the Moon. to a score by Katya Richardson with sets and costumes by  Eleanor Bull,  It will be performed at the Pontio Centre in Bangor together with Patricia Vallis's Divided We Stand and Darius James and Amy Doughty's Celtic Concerto on 29 Nov 2019.  I saw Divided We Stand in Cardiff earlier this year (see Made in Wales 29 March 2919) and Celtic Concerto at Sadlers Wells (see Ballet Cymru in London 1 Dec 2015). I can recommend the evening for those two works alone.  Having seen Edmunds's Fuse for the Dutch National Ballet Junior Company and her contribution to Northern Ballet's Tell-Tale Steps I think we can expect a very special evening.

The Pontio Centre is more than a theatre as I said in The Pontio Centre: A Resource for Inventors, Designers and Makers in North Wales 14 Dec 2018 NIPC Inventors Club. There is also a cinema, restaurant, students' union, bars and cafés and, most importantly, the Hwb which is the Pontio innovation area.  According to the Centre's website:

"Pontio Innovation is about equipping individuals and businesses with the tools they need to succeed in the modern economy. With a focus on transdisciplinary working and rapid prototyping, the Co-Lab, Media Lab, Hackspace and Fablab areas are equipped with cutting-edge technologies. It will boost the University’s cross-disciplinary teaching programmes and encourage collaborative work between students, staff and local businesses,"

Like the Menai Science Park (M-SParc) which I shall be visiting earlier in the day to give a talk to local entrepreneurs, inventors and creatives it is an initiative of Bangor University. New knowledge-based businesses are sprouting are springing up on both banks of the Menai Strait.

Many of the folk who have migrating or returning to Bangor and Anglesey will be attracted by the combination of coastal, mountain and pastoral landscapes that make Northwest Wales one of the most beautiful corners of the planet, but they also require the arts.  That is why the Ponto Centre's facilities supporting regular visits by Wales's classical dance company and other world-class performing artists are crucial to the social and economic development of Northwest Wales.

Memory of what could have been

On 20 June 2015 the Birmingham Royal Ballet celebrated the 25th anniversary of its move to Birmingham and the 20th anniversary of the appointment of its artistic director in Birmingham (see In Praise of Bintley 21 June 2015), Northern Ballet hosted a programme of events called Tell Tale Steps which included a company class, a panel discussion on narrative dance in ballet (see My Thoughts on Saturday Afternoon's Panel Discussion at Northern Ballet 21 June 2015) and English National Ballet presented Choreogaphics Live in London, I lamented at the time at being forced to choose between those three and I did manage to get to the company class and panel discussion in Leeds and the Bintley triple bill in Birmingham (see Three into Two won't go 20 June 2015). The reason I was able to see part of Northern Baller's offering and all of Birmingham Royal Ballet's was that English National Ballet recorded its performance on video which can still be seen on ArtStreamingTV's website and YouTube.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that my favourite work was Memory of what could have been by Renato Paroni de Castro which was danced by Guilherme and Vitor Menezes and Sarah Kundi. I have been following Kundi for a long time and she moves me in a way that no other dancer can. I should explain that I can say the same of other dancers but they move me in a different way. Last year I feared that we would lose her to Spain but thankfully she is now with English National Ballet.

Memory is a very good example of a plotless narrative ballet which was being discussed in Leeds at the very moment that it was being performed in London. This is an interaction between  three dancers - the Menezeses dressed as sailors in summer whites and Kundi in a flowing orange dress. For the first part of the ballet Kundi is detached as the boys complete but this ballet is much more like Christopher Marney's War Letters (in which Kundi has also danced) than Gene Kelly's On the Town. One of the sailors disappears while the other changes into winter or navy blue uniform. What happened to him? Did the girl in orange simply make a choice or was he lost in action.

This is a haunting work sensitively danced by all three. It is very tense and very taught. Such relief as exists is at the beginning of the work. Though I admired the work I am very conscious that I am missing a lot by viewing it on a lap top rather than in the Lilian Baylis Studio where it was performed.  The video goes on for one and three quarter hours including an interview with Tamara Rojo at the start. I hope to review the other ballet's presently.

My Thoughts on Saturday Afternoon's Panel Discussion at Northern Ballet

Photo Marie-Lan Nguyen
Source Wikipedia

Before I left for Birmingham I listened to a panel discussion advertised as a State of the Art Panel Discussion: Narrative Dance in Ballet. It took place in the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre between 13:15 and 15:00 on 20 June. The panel was chaired by Mike Dixon and consisted of the critics Mary Brennan, Louise Levene and Graham Watts, Christopher Hampson, the artistic director of Scottish Ballet and dancers Tobias Batley and Dreda Blow.

Northern Ballet's artistic director, David Nixon, introduced the session by explaining that this discussion was part of the Tell Tale Steps programme the purpose of which was research. He described the work that had been carried out by Kenneth Tindall, Ludovic Ondiviela, Constant Vigier and Andrew McNicol as a "laboratory" and not a workshop. The crucial difference, he explained, is that a workshop is for creating things whereas a laboratory is where experiments take place.

It all sounded very exciting and I awaited inspiration and erudition with bated breath. Although it was a very interesting discussion that did not exactly happen.  I certainly didn't learn anything I did not already know or could not easily have looked up on Google. If that was the case for me it must have been even more true for Nixon and the other dance makers and dance artists who attended.

The problem was that the panel was too large and their experience was too diverse.  Each of the speakers spoke about his or her personal experience. The critics spoke about the criteria for judging a ballet. Hampson spoke about how he creates a ballet which is very personal. Batley spoke about his reading before works starts on a new ballet and produced his copy of The Great Gatsby bristling with post it notes. He gave an example of how he considered a sentence in the novel about his character's smile and tried to incorporate it into his performance. Blow spoke about the ballet that she had created for children.

To me the discussion was unfocussed.  Maybe because I am a lawyer I would have appreciated some definitions. The title of the discussion was "Narrative Dance in Ballet" but what exactly did the panellists mean by "narrative dance"? Something with a plot like Sleeping Beauty? But that would exclude an awful lot of ballets like Les Sylphides which has characters like sylphs and a poet and indeed tells a story but does not have a plot as such. On the other there are some ballets like Giselle where the plot is best forgotten. Others like The Nutcracker where the plot is tenuous at best. I was bursting to ask that question from very early in the discussion but I did not get my opportunity until the very end.  In fact, only Gita and I managed to get a word in edgeways.

There were topics that I really wish the panel could have developed. Brennan mentioned the work of Peter Darrell who was artistic director of Western Theatre Ballet when it moved to Glasgow. Another panellist mentioned all the versions of Cinderella that had been produced lately including Hampson's and wondered whether there was a trend. Yet another discussed how technology enabled dance makers to explore topics that could not have been addressed before. Anther opined that it was impossible to choreograph ballets to Beethoven. I could have contributed to all those discussions.

The topic I most wanted to discuss was Darrell. I was at St Andrews when Western Theatre Ballet moved to Glasgow and one of our professors was John Steer who later chaired the company. Scottish Theatre Ballet (as the company called itself after the move) was the first company that I got to know and love. That was because Darrell had ignited my love of ballet. I met him once and got to know some of his dancers better. I am still a Friend of Scottish Ballet and I greatly admire the work of Hampson, his successor. Some of the things that were said about Darrell, his work and legacy did not sound quite right,

Although the panel discussed Cinderella, nobody mentioned Darius James's version for Ballet Cymru which I saw last week and is the very best version of the story I have seen to date (see Ballet Cymru's Cinderella 15 June 2015). They spoke about Ashton's, Ratmansly's, "Christopher's" (I am not sure whether they were referring to Wheeldon or Hampson) but not the gem that has recently been touring the nation.

On the use of technology and whether it increases the dance maker's range I wanted to sound a note of caution.  The use of film to represent flashbacks was not new. I had seen MacMillan's Anastasia and modern choreographers should treat such technologies with circumspection.

As to whether Beethoven can be choreographed, nobody mentioned Ashton's magnificent Creatures of Prometheus to the Eroica symphony which marked the bicentenary of the composer's birth.

I had hoped to introduce myself to Hampson and Watts but the panellists were whisked away to the boardroom after the discussion.  Gita buttonholed Brennan for a while and she seemed to want to talk but even Brennan was eventually RKO'd from the profanum vulgus by a minder. I think that was a big mistake (huge) on the part of the organizers. The folk who gave up their Saturday afternoons to attend the seminars are the ones who keep the ballerinas in pointe shoes, whether as theatre goers, taxpayers, Friends of the company or in many cases all three and we have ideas, views and experiences to contribute that could be useful.

Tell Tale Steps - Choreographic Laboratory

During this month Kenneth Tindall has been participating with Ludovic Ondiviela, Constant Vigier and Andrew McNicol with dancers of the Northern Ballet in a choreographic laboratory called Tell Tale Steps. Their work has been streamed to the public and you can watch the first and second weeks work on YouTube (see Choreographic Laboratory Live Stream 5 June 2015 and Tell Tale Steps, live session 2 (Fri 12 June)). The choreographers have also made video diaries which you can see at Choreographic Laboratory, Week One Video Diaries and Choreographic Laboratory, video diaries week 2.

The work will culminate in a full day session at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre on 20 June which will consist of company class, a brown paper bag lunch, a panel discussion on narrative ballet and a sharing of the work by those four choreographers. Again, the work will be streamed over the internet over Northern Ballet's YouTube channel.

Regrettably this all day session coincides with the last day of Birmingham Royal Ballet's short season of The King Dances and Carmina Burana in Birmingham which is reconstruction of one of the earliest spectacles in ballet and of enormous cultural and historical significance (see The King Dances 23 May 2015) and that Saturday is the only day I can traipse down to the Midlands but Team Terpsichore hopes to be represented in Leeds by another contributor. If that is not possible I shall certainly watch and comment on the video recording.

Tindall, Ondiviela, Vigier and McNicol are enormously talented and they are still quite young. There is every chance that they will become influence British ballet in the way that Cranko, Darrell and MacMillan did when I was young. Such concentrations of talent and potential are very rare in ballet. Such opportunities should be seized and savoured.