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.