Prix de Lausanne

Although life in general is getting easier, sometimes the memory of a special person just catches you at those moments where you would usually just pick up the phone and share something which would both find interesting. Sometimes it's not so much the performance I've just been to see, but what I find online. That's a funny one in itself, as GM never really lived in the world I did.  I might not be a 'digital native' but I thoroughly live in the digital world, work included.  The internet was a strange thing to most people born in the 30s - my grandparents tried it once when my brother got them a tablet and a data package, but the functionality just didn't make sense to them. 

There's a huge amount of fabulous content on YouTube, often in HD. I've see Don Quixote from the Dutch National Ballet with Matthew Golding, Coppelia from the Bolshoi with Natalia Osipova, an ancient Swan Lake from when the Mariinsky was known as the Kirov and a plethora of fine documentaries from around the world.

This week has been the Prix de Lausanne - the highly rated annual ballet competition which takes place in Switzerland. Prix winners are given a year long scholarship to a partner ballet school of their choice and older entrants can win an apprenticeship with the company of their choice. Previous winners include Deborah Bull and Alessandra Ferri, both former dancers with the Royal ballet (although Ferri of course is making her return this season), some of my favourite (RB) dancers Viviana Durante, Darcey Bussell and of course, Carlos Acosta, for whom the Prix announced him to the world at large and opened a life of opportunity for him. 

The Prix is now available to watch online, live on Arte TV, and gives access to classes, workshops and coaching sessions for both classical and contemporary ballet. Watching the week leading up to the performances on  Friday and Saturday (available live and also after the event for quite a while), you can seek out favourites from your armchair.  The great thing about the Prix is that entrants aren't simply judged on their performance on the day, but also based on the improvement they have made based on the classes and the limited 6 minute coaching sessions they have had. It was great to see 2 personal favourites not only make it through to the final, but also winning prizes. 

You can watch the final and find more videos here.

My Ballet Year

You should live life, not just watch it go by. After 17 years off, last January I started to take ballet classes again, finally finding myself in a Grade 8 RAD class with a group of teenagers which really pushes me. It's great exercise but I definitely don't have the stamina (or figure) which youth affords! I am, however, really enjoying the chance to dance, especially given it's a grade made up of a short barre and then 1 compulsory dance and 3 options. I might even take the exam.

I am also making the most of the opportunities London has to offer.  In the 15 years upto January 2016, I could count on one hand the number of trips I had made to the ballet - work and family just got in the way. In the past year alone I have seen far more than I could have imagined, English National Ballet's Corsaire and Giselle as well as the exciting Emerging Dancer competition (won by the phenomenal Cesar Corrales), The Royal Ballet's La Fille Mal Gardee, Carlos Acosta's final Farewell (where strangely the first dance from Winter Dreams uses the same music as the Grade 8 compulsory dance), The Bolshoi's Don Quixote, the ABT dancing a triple bill including The Prodigal Son  and Matthew Bourne's Red Shoes. I have also been able to enjoy 3 events from the Ivy House Music and Dance programme where I have had the pleasure to 

• Share the audience with Dame Monica Mason
• Hear Sir Peter Wright speak about Margot Fonteyn and watch Donald Macleary coach a RBS student
• Hear Federico Bonelli interviewed, watch him coach junior dancer David Donnelly who had raced right from the stage at the ROH and watch him work through the Grand Pas from Nutcracker with his wife, first soloist Hikaru Kobayashi

The coming year has so much to bring already - an Ivy House event on Kenneth McMillan, his work Mayerling at the ROH, Ballet Black as local as Finchley, an Ashton triple bill including a favourite - Marguerite and Armand, ENB's Emerging Dancer 2017 and ticket permitting, the Mariinsky's Swan Lake and perhaps another Don Quixote. 

ENB dance Skeaping's Giselle

My first experience of Giselle was back in Manchester in 1994 with Derek Deane's production set in post WW1 Austria, Jane Haworth dancing the role of Myrtha, but today dancing Giselle's mother Berthe.

The current production pre-dates that - it's by Mary Skeaping, first performed in 1971 by the ENB, in those days known as the London Festival Ballet.   This production is close to a reconstruction of the original Giselle performed and demonstrates just how much has changed over past century or so.  For a start, the music of Adolphe Adam has since dropped a fugue in Act 2, which even to the untrained ear sounds rather out of place.

In Act 1, a lot of the story is told in mime - Loys (Prince Albrecht in disguise) and Giselle falling in love, Hillarion warning Giselle away from him, Berthe; Giselle's mother miming the fate of young girls with weak hearts like Giselle's who will surely die and join the man-hating Willis, spirits who suffered untimely deaths before they were wed. Comparing with Peter Wright's production for the Royal Ballet, there is significantly more mime and therefore less dancing. There is also no pas de six, but a pas de deux danced by the brilliant Cesar Corrales (winner of ENB's Emerging Dancer competition in 2016) and Rina Kanehara (Emerging Dancer finalist 2016) which was reputed to have been added in the 1840s for dancer Nathalie Fitz-James who used her influence as the mistress of a patron of the Paris Opera.  

The close of Act 1 is incredibly emotive - Giselle driven to death possibly by her weak heart, or possibly with the grasping of Albrecht's sword which is rather quickly removed from her hands. The act ends with Berthe and Albrecht beside themselves next to Giselle's body, Berthe pushing Albrecht away and the two love rivals arguing as to who was to cause for her death.

Act 2 was a sheer celebration of dance. Although known as a 'white ballet', the costume designers have given ghostly Willis have a hit of green in their costumes and mist is created by a little stage smoke, giving this act the sense of a spooky forest graveyard.  Michaela de Prince from the Dutch National Ballet guested as a physically powerful and unforgiving Myrtha, while still delicate in her arms and light on her feet.

And so to the star of the show - Alina Cojocaru for whom this week was her debut as Giselle for the ENB and what a Giselle she was! Young, playful and in love in act 1, while still obviously with a delicate heart. A highly spirited performance and she acted youth well. In act 2, she becomes the epitome of the romantic era of ballet.  It is through her portrayal of Giselle here  that you can imagine how powerful the introduction of pointe shoes were in the 19th Century, for she truly appeared to glide across the stage like a ghostly apparition.

And so I start to wonder again about the story of Giselle and how this village girl is duped into loving a man who is already taken, so forgiving in death, wanting to protect him from Myrtha. Do we assume that Albrecht's intentions were somewhat honest, that he was betrothed to a woman he had no feelings for,a highly likely situation in those days?

Giselle runs to 22 January at the London Coliseum.

Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes

As I mentioned in my first post, The Red Shoes was a firm favourite of my grandma, who rushed to see it when it first came out in the cinema in 1948 when she was seventeen. This is the production that I desperately wanted her to see, but her illness was diagnosed around the time of its premiere and so it wasn't to be. Grandma physically would have made a convincing Vicky Page, perhaps a tad darker in hair colour, more of a deep red than ginger and so aside from her love for the film, there will always be a connection for me in terms of her physical attributes.

This production had apparently been 20 years in the making for Bourne  and it was well worth the wait. The story telling was superb - of course some adaptations to make this work as a pure dance production, but overall, this made the performance slick and fast paced. There was perhaps a bit of a loss of the message that Paige was torn between her love for Julian Craster, the composer/conductor and her love of ballet, symbolised through Lermontov and his company.  This would be quite a difficult story to tell in dance alone, but perhaps lost with the very first change to the plot - Svetlana bows out due to an injury, whereas in the movie, she leaves to get married, Lermontov being the force who demands marriage to the ballet. Creative license and editing of stories is always needed to pull together the production and to those familiar and unfamiliar with the film, the story still retained a very clear thread.

According to an interview in the programme, Bourne gave all of his dancers - not just his Vicky Pages - a name based on the historical talent of the day to study in order to draw it into their performance. Ashley Shaw was Vicky Page at Sadlers Wells for the performance I saw and in the first act at some points - costumes included - it was almost like seeing the ghost of Moira Shearer!

The staging was supreme. Central to the stage was a rotating curtain/stage frame, allowing us to see what happens from the audience's perspective in performance and also behind the scenes - and this switched around in seconds.

The 'Red Shoes' sequence was cleverly done in black and white, aside from the Red Shoes and Vicky Page's dress which also had elements of red. There was a duality between this and when Vicky Page returned to the ballet company towards the end of the performance, leading to her altercation with an oncoming train. I do wonder how much sense this bit would have made to those who hadn't seen the movie and therefore didn't understand the degree of the struggle between two loves.

That aside, this is a production which I hope continues to live on in Bourne's repertoire beyond his 30th anniversary year on which it is on tour. I might pop up to Manchester and take a family member when they return in July or even head to one of the other locations to see it again. I hope it might even make a TV screening, or a DVD/Bluray for posterity.

For photos, head to DanceTabs Flikr album here.

For more information on where to see The Red Shoes on tour, visit the production site here.

The original balletomane

This blog has been up my sleeve for a few weeks now. My ballet friend, my beautiful grandma, the original balletomane (indeed she passed on a copy of Arthur Haskell's book which coined the very expression) passed away after a relatively short battle with pancreatic cancer. She passed her love of ballet onto me and in the 90s while I was growing up in Manchester, we went to see everything which visited. I remember seeing many of the classics from the English National Ballet in addition to a beautiful set of more contemporary dances choreographed by ice skater Christopher Dean.  I also remember when I could finally treat her to a performance that it was incredibly modern and abstract and perhaps not quite what grandma had in mind when she thought of ballet. But that is growth and development and we don't always have to like what we see!

My blog is essentially a continuation of the journey which I began with my grandma in Manchester. Having moved to London, having a very busy life as a young adult and not much money, the opportunities were few. I think I could count on one hand the number of trips to the ballet in my twenties which included the wonderful Manon at the Royal Opera House. Next, becoming a mum meant that my time was no longer my own and the juggle meant simply battling to cope with family life and holding down a job. For my 30th birthday, my husband surprised me with perfect seats to see the Royal Ballet -  Ashton's Cinderella -  made all the more wonderful with the additional surprise that my mum and my very special grandma would be joining me.

Another few years passed by and grandma started to suffer from Parkinson's. She was a proud lady and although physically, the Parkinson's would be noticeable to few, she tended to restrict herself to the house on her bad days. She didn't want to share her illness with even the closest of her friends and only the family knew. The theatre trips which she loved so much became fewer because it just wasn't possible to guarantee how she would be feeling, but my mum and I did manage to treat her to the BRB's visit to Manchester early last year.  I'd call to tell her about all of the wonderful dance opportunities I had on my doorstep - being able to go to the Royal Opera House at relatively short notice to see whatever they were showing, seeing the Bolshoi's summer programme, Carlos Acosta's farewell performance, getting to go to more intimate events run by Ivy House Music & Dance. All the while, I would pop the occasional DVD in the post for her to enjoy.

When Matthew Bourne's Red Shoes was announced in 2016, I was on the phone immediately. This had been grandma's favourite movie at about the age of 17, she and her best friend went to the cinema one weekend, watched the show through then ducked down to hide in their seats to catch the next performance...and the next. Oh I had great plans to take her, but then came the cancer diagnosis which frankly came too late - the unfortunate truth of this particular cancer.

And this is all the pretext for my blog, to draw out the memories as I continue my ballet journey and hopefully inspire my children and my niece with the love that my dear grandma had.