Powerhouse Ballet Looks Forward

Powerhouse Ballet in Class

© 2022 Jane Elizabeth Lambert

 

This year has been Powerhouse Ballet's best ever.  We gave our second and third public performances to packed houses at the Chroma Q Theatre in Leeds on 19 Nov 2022.  I reviewed the show in A Celebration of Dance: Wilis and More on 21 Nov 2022.  We held full-day workshops on The Nutcracker in March and Giselle in July.  We returned to the Northwest with company classes in Bolton and Salford in September and November.  We have offered training and rehearsing opportunities for four of our members with teaching skills, namely Katherine Wong, Lauren Savage, Christie Barnes and Alicia Jolley.

We are now on a roll and will build on that success immediately with a special online-only Post-Christmas company class with Beth Meadway between 14:00 and 15:30 on 28 Dec 2022.  Beth is one of Ballet Cymru's lead dancers.  I reviewed her performance as Helena and the Wall in Dream in Ballet Cymru at its Best on 13 Nov 2022 and in A Child's Christnas in Wales and  Terms and Conditions in Ballet Cymru in Bangor - Finishing a Great Week of Ballet on 19 Dec 2022.  Anyone can attend Beth's class from anywhere in the world.  There will be no charge.   All you need is a computer with an internet connection, a leotard or other danceweaer, ballet shoes and a little bit of space at home or elsewhere.  It is not every day that you get a chance to dance with an up and coming ballet star from the comfort of your home.  If you want to attend, register here.

Our first class in the studio of the New Year will be given by Northern Ballet Academy's Annemarie Donoghue at Dance Studio Leeds from 13:00 to 14:30  on 28 Jan 2023.  In February we hope to give our first class in Wales.   Alicia Jolley who danced in Aria has kindly agreed to give that class.   The date, time and venue have yet to be agreed but it will probably take place in Mold on the afternoon of Saturday, 25 Feb 2023.   In response to popular demand I have asked Fiona Noonan to deliver our March class and she has accepted in principle.   Her class is likely to take place on 25 March 2023 either at Dance Studio Leeds or Huddersfield University.  

Karen Lester-Sant of KNT Danceworks has kindly invited Powerhouse Ballet to dance in KNT's next show in Manchester.   We are looking forward to this opportunity immensely.   We shall start rehearsals as soon as we know the date.   We already have the piece that we presented in Leeds on 19 Nov 2022 but it is possible that we may have a new work by then. Jane Tucker who directed and choreographed the Dance of the Wilis has offered us a workshop on another scene from Giselle early in the New Year.  I shall leave the choice of scene to Jane but we have discussed some of the possibilities.  These include the Retour des Vendageurs in act 1 as there is a big role for the ensemble.   As soon as Jane gives me a date, I shall announce the workshop on Eventbrite.

One of the objectives of Powerhouse Ballet is to provide opportunities for members to develop their skills in all aspects of theatre.   We have already made use of our members' teaching skills but other members also have skills that could be useful to the company.  Fiona Cheng, for instance, is a  drama student at Leeds Conservatory.   I have seen her act in one of the Conservatory productions and was very impressed.  The betrayal scene at the end of act 1 of Giselle requires considerable dramatic skills from Giselle and the other characters  Drama is not formally taught in many dance schools and perhaps it should.   I have therefore invited Fiona to propose an acting workshop for us.  Other possible workshops include exhibition classes in Kathak and Welsh folk dancing with its spectacular grasshopper step.

As we are a company and not a school we will never charge our dancers for attending our classes and workshops.  However, we shall be introducing a Friends scheme for those who wish to support the company and participate in some of its activities but not dance in its shows.   A year's subscription will be around £25 a year and it will be possible for members to switch from "Friend" to "Dancer" and vice versa within the course of the year.   

As this will be one of my last posts for this year, I should like to wish all my readers a happy and prosperous New Year.

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.

Powerhouse Ballet's Reawakening

Standard YouTube Licence

The last two years have been tough for everyone in the arts but they have been particularly hard for adult ballet students who long to perform in public.  For Powerhouse Ballet which was founded just under 4 years ago, the lockdown was almost fatal.  We had been riding high with our very successful workshop with Yorkshire choreographer Alex Hallas and were looking forward to learning the snowflakes scene from The Nutcracker when everything was put on hold.

I feared that it would be the end of Powerhouse Ballet and probably all the other amateur companies in the United Kingdom because we could no longer meet for class.  But help came quite unexpectedly from Amsterdam when Maria Chugai of the Dutch National Ballet offered us an online class.  That class was very successful and showed that it was possible to train over Zoom.  I engaged all our regular teachers as well as Shannon Lilly, Beth Meadway and Krystal Lowe to give online classes.  When restrictions were relaxed in 2020 we held classes in studios in Birmingham and Leeds.   Though it was expensive and hard we never missed a monthly company class and, most importantly, we stayed together.

Now that the country is emerging from lockdown Powerhouse Ballet can rebuild.  My immediate aim is to stage a mixed bill which will include Terence Etheridge's Aria, Yvonne Charlton's Morning, Waltz of the Flowers and Snowflakes from The Nutcracker and part of the wilis' choreography from Act II of Giselle. Much of the preparation for this will be at a summer school in North Wales.  In the longer term, we plan to set up an associates class and I have engaged the assistance of someone with considerable experience in that area to advise me.

That leaves the tricky matters of funding and governance.  Over the last two years, it was easier for me to sponsor the company's activities and I will continue to do so but our plans will require more than I can afford.  In the medium term, we will need to reintroduce a subscription, seek grants and sponsorship.  Publications like this blog, the Stage Door and classes outside the North of England could generate revenue for Powerhouse Ballet.   Eventually, we shall seek charitable status for which we shall need trustees, a business manager and a full-time artistic director.

Returning to the present, if you want to meet us with a view to joining us, register for our company class at Dance Studio Leeds on 26 Feb 2022 from 15:30 until 17:00.   

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).

Ronaldo likes Ballet

I am a bit of a fan of the TV series "Spiral" or "Engrenages" as it is called in France. It is about the Paris underworld and the French criminal justice system.  The heroine of the series is Captain Laure Berthaud, a plain clothes officer played by Catherine Proust while her arch enemy is a really nasty Latin American psychopath by the name of Ronaldo Fuentes. Here's a photo of him behind his red headed counsel at what I seem to remember was his bail application.  Known as "the butcher," he kills and mutilates women in the most horrid way.

Incensed by his viciousness Captain Berthaud makes it her personal mission to hunt him down.  In the series that was shown on British television the Captain eventually corners him but, rather than take him into custody, she discharges two bullets at him at point blank range. 

And that, mes amis, one might think was the end of that.  But one would be wrong for it seems that Ronaldo has survived and has an account on twitter. Not only that but he seems to like ballet.  Last week he mentioned my article on Dave Tries Ballet as well as another article on a music industry convention in Dubai in The Dark Shadows Daily. Naturally, I thanked him for the mentions.  He replied:

"@nipclaw Even though I have to lie low from les flics, I do enjoy a bit of nutcracking at l'Opéra de temps en temps"

I was a bit surprised that a serial killer should like a ballet about a pre-pubescent girl's dreams of a battle between mice and toy soldiers and an excursion through the land of sweets.  Giselle with its ghosts of women who had died horrible deaths seemed to be more in his line.  So I replied:

"@Ronaldo_Fuentes J'aurais pensé que vous preferez <<Giselle>> avec toutes les femmes mortes sauf Myrthe vous rappelle une certaine policiere."

which I translate as

"@Ronaldo_Fuentes I'd have though that you would prefer Giselle with all those dead women unless Myrthe reminds you of a certain woman police officer."

 Myrthe, in case the allusion is not obvious, is the Queen of the Wilis (the ghosts of these poor, unfortunate women) and she sees it as her mission to revenge herself on mankind (and I do mean MAN kind and not humankind) just as Captain Berthaud saw it as her mission to avenge the women Ronaldo had butchered.

Ronaldo replied to my tweet:

"@nipclaw C'est drôle ça. J'adore Laure et Giselle, mais Carmen est ma danseuse préférée. Oublie pas que je suis un latino, gringa:) A toute!"

Again, I translate loosely.

"@nipclaw That's so funny. I adore Laure and Giselle, but Carmen is my preferred dancer. Don't forget I'm a Latino, "Gringa" (Limey) :) See you!"

Now Carmen is a popular opera but it is not quite so well known as a ballet, at least not in the English speaking world. However, Roland Petit did choreograph a version for his wife, the remarkable Zizi Jeanmaire. Jenmaire was a very sensuous dancer and I can just imagine her dancing the Hanbanera.

"L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
Et c’est bien in vain qu’on l’appelle
S’il lui convient de refuser."

I translate as:

"Love is like an untamed birdThat nobody can cage.It is pointless calling after himIf it suits him to stay away."

However, I did find this clip of Ulana Lopatkina which in my humble opinion is more than acceptable.

I have tweeted it to Ronaldo:

"Pour @ronaldo_fuentes, je cherchais le habanera de Zizi Jeanmaire mais cette danseuse russe va assez bien a mon avis http://youtu.be/f7xYnXb7WTg"

 "For @ronaldo_fuentes. I looked for Zizi Jeanmaire's Hananera but I think this Russian dancer is at least OK."

I wonder if he agrees.