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Toronto Technology For Ballet
Ballet has taken a new leap into technology, with students from 18 international schools having performed together virtually at a conference in Toronto. The students from Toronto were linked through dance and livestream with dancers in Amsterdam as part of a curriculum Canada’s National Ballet School has worked into the Assemblée Internationale, a week-long conference in Toronto with student dancers from ballet schools around the world. As a collaborative conference, it will bring students together to form bonds and learn about working together just as they are thinking about where they will be dancing professionally in a few years, with technology central to what they do.
Assemblée Internationale is an ambitious conference that involves 72 Canadian students and 109 from international schools, and among the young dancers in the Canadian class are dancers from London, Paris, Sydney, Havana, Copenhagen and New York. The conference allows the dancers to be involved in a new creation as a huge opportunity in the preparation for their professional careers where they will be working with many new choreographers. In addition to this, the project involves several aspects of technology which will broaden the horizons and expectations of the students who are so ingrained in the system of classical ballet. In addition to the improvisation required by the piece, it also needs the dancers to be in the moment of the movement and completely present, physically reacting to what they see on the screen.
In another leap into the unknown, in order to prepare the ballet students to perform the new work, Stream, NBS instructor Shaun Amyot has tried to teach his class to improvise, which is not a regular occurrence in the disciplined and precise world of classical ballet. For the conference itself, the dancers in Toronto were required to improvise, reacting to a screen showing dancers in Amsterdam performing to music. Amyot collaborated with Amsterdam-based choreographer Michael Schumacher to create Stream, and the Dutch National Ballet Academy danced the work in the studio in Amsterdam to fill the screen, which was proportioned to the height of the human body.
Dirty Dancing Set To Return!
The hit West End musical that went on to tour the UK, Dirty Dancing, is set to replace Viva Forever! at the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End, depicting a story of talent shows and friendships set to the music of the iconic Spice Girls. Despite this pull, the new musical is set to close its doors later this summer and welcome Dirty Dancing, which previously played in London at the Aldwych Theatre from 2006 until 2011 and has since been touring the UK. The much-loved musical will finish touring in June at the Manchester Opera House before returning to London and opening at the Piccadilly Theatre from July.
Beginning as a hit film in 1987, the American romance hooked the world with its lead protagonists Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey who played Johnny Castle and Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman respectively. Dirty Dancing then became the longest running show in the history of the Aldwych Theatre, having sold out for the first six months of its run before it opened! The classic story on stage went on to break records in Germany and the UK for having the highest advance ticket sales in history.
Dirty Dancing on tour was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, Australia in November 2004. Following this, the production went on a national tour of Australia and New Zealand, visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Auckland and the show had a sell-out season of 18 months throughout Australia and New Zealand. The show has gone on to perform across the world in Toronto, Canada; Utrecht, Holland; a North American Tour including Chicago, Boston and LA and the production continues to play to sold-out houses and recently sold its one millionth ticket. Following the reinstatement of the iconic Dirty Dancing to London’s theatreland, a new UK tour of the musical will be launched in March next year.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Life After Training
After three institutionalised years at performing arts college, the big bad world on the other side of the studio door can seem a little daunting. Many students will graduate from college alongside their peers, only to be greeted with the graduates from all the other acting, musical theatre and dance colleges all over the world, all battling for the same jobs. This is even without considering graduates from years before the current year, in addition to the professional dancers already established within the industry. When auditions are looming, it could seem that a fresh-faced graduate is ultimately a minuscule fish in a huge high-kicking sea.
This is not to say that new graduates are unable to obtain jobs in theatres and on projects, as this decision lies purely with the casting director. Your pirouettes may have been the best of your third year, but if your hair colour and height are not what fits the production bill, the job may go elsewhere.
Alternatively, many graduates lean towards the teaching disciplines, eager to apply their three years of training and experience to a different venture and help young dancers to prepare for their future dancing years. Many institutes of higher education and examination boards such as the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, the Royal Academy of Dance, the International Dance Teachers’ Association and the British Ballet Organisation are able to provide professional dancers with the qualifications they need to take up teaching jobs and help pass on their knowledge of performing arts. It is arguable that the satisfaction gleaned from teaching and aiding young students is equal to that of performing on stage, the buzz of applying yourself to the job immeasurable.
There are ultimately many different avenues of work for performing arts graduates, and all waiting for a fresh influx of young professionals later this year!
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
English National Ballet and the The Coronation Festival
It has been announced that English National Ballet will take part in three Gala performances in the grounds of Buckingham Palace as part of the Coronation Festival in July this year, performing Tempus, a specially commissioned piece paying tribute to Her Majesty The Queen to celebrate the 60th anniversary of her Coronation.
Tempus, choreographed by Associate Artist George Williamson to a new score by composer Christopher Mayo, will be danced by Artistic Director Tamara Rojo, alongside other Principals and Artists of the company such as Esteban Berlanga, Daria Klimentová, Vadim Muntagirov, Fernanda Oliveira, Zhanat Atymtayev, Bridgett Zehr, Ken Saruhashi, Ksenia Ovsyanick and Junor Souza. The work will be inspired by incredible era of change during her reign and a sense of transition and memories in order to celebrate the Queen’s years and simultaneously look to the future of the art form.
The Gala will form part of the Coronation Festival , which is to be a unique public event hosted by The Royal Warrant Holders Association and will encapsulate the Festival’s themes of excellence and innovation with a particular focus on youth, in a celebration of the past 60 years of performing arts. The Festival will be open to members of the public from Friday 12 to Sunday 14 July and the Galas will be broadcast on TV and radio, with a Royal Preview on Thursday, 11th July for invited guests.
The Coronation Festival is being hosted by The Royal Warrant Holders Association, and will showcase over 200 of the companies who have supplied goods or services for at least five years to the Households of The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh or The Prince of Wales.
The Big Dance Pledge
Artistic Director of English National Ballet Tamara Rojo has begun leading the Big Dance Pledge, an initiative to be performed by thousands of people all over the world on the weekend of 17-19 May. She was joined by her dancers from ENB and young dancers from Chingford Foundation School, London, to raise awareness of this fantastic project which they hope will go global.
Organised by Big Dance, the world’s largest biennial festival of dance and with the support of the British Council, the Big Dance Pledge has been taught, learnt and will be performed by over 32,000 people this weekend in hundreds of places around the world including India, Lebanon and Brazil. The Pledge has been specially choreographed by English National Ballet’s Creative Learning department (specifically by artists Laura Harvey (Creative Associate) and Jenna Lee (Soloist) and is a 3-minute dance routine that anyone can do – regardless of age or experience.
ENB hopes to inspire as many people as possible to take part and embrace the art of dance as a chance to learn something new and engage in a community experience after the fantastic success of Big Dance 2012. Last year the cause reached millions of people all over the country through the Big Dance Festival, which will take place again in 2014. The Pledge therefore aims to continue this success and remind everyone of the power of Big Dance to enfold communities in performing arts.
The Big Dance Pledge ultimately strives to build on the legacy left by last year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games in involving all in a worthy and motivating cause, inspiring and encouraging people to make dance a bigger and more enriching part of their lives. With Tamara as one at the helm, who is an International Ambassador for Big Dance, it seems that Big Dance will continue as the ultimate dance experience in bringing dance to as many as possible in unexpected ways.
The Pledge is available to learn now and will be performed during the Pledge Performance Weekend (17-19 May). Watch the video below for more information.
Alina Cojocaru For Hospice of Hope
Alina Cojocaru, back in 2008, launched the fundraising for the Bucharest Hospice Appeal through her first gala for Hospice of Hope, a Romanian charity operating to prevent the abandonment of sick children. This donation of so much of her time and effort is in an entirely different vein from her Royal Ballet status.
Now for 2013, Cojocaru will be providing Sadler’s Wells with another unique evening in the completion of the project and another gala performance in aid of the charity. This incredible evening of artists will work to celebrate the past, present and future of dance, and will include highlights from classical repertoire in addition to some rarely seen works , such as those choreographed by Marius Petipa, Tim Rushton, and her fiancé and dance partner Johan Kobborg, amongst others.
The programme will include 101, Don Quixote, Carmen Fantasie for Violin and Orchestra, Excerpts from Sleeping Beauty, Salute (UK premiere), Dying Swan solo and Les Lutins amongst many more. In turn, dancing these pieces on 12 May will be internationally renowned dancers, giving the gala audience the chance to see many talented stars of the classical ballet industry perform under one roof and for one night only. These stars include Isabelle Ciaravola (Paris Opera Ballet), English National Ballet Principals Erina Takahashi and Vadim Muntagirov, Steven McRae, Johan Kobborg, Akane Takada, Frankie Hayward, Marcelino Sambe and James Hay (Royal Ballet), Sergei Polunin (Stanislavsky Ballet), Xander Parish (Mariinsky Ballet), Matthew Golding (Dutch National Ballet), Ana Sendas and Stefanos Bizas (Danish Dance Theatre) and violin virtuoso Charlie Siem will also take to the stage.
Alina recently travelled to Bucharest to see the progress of the Hospice of Hope building site, in addition to The National Ballet School of Romania, in which some of its students will perform a fragment of Johan Kobborg’s Salute.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
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Gillian Lynne: A Dance Legend
Beginning as a soloist under Dame Ninette de Valois in the original Sadler’s Wells Ballet, going on to become a star dancer at the London Palladium, acting opposite Errol Flynn in films and dancing on television, it seems Gillian Lynne has done the lot!
Gillian’s career took off when she danced the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake aged 16 and was spotted by de Valois. She entered Sadler’s Wells Ballet aged 17 and rose through the ranks to become a leading dancer, with her roles including the Lilac Fairy in Sleeping Beauty, one of three ballerinas in Symphonic Variations, Queen of the Willis in Giselle, Black Ballerina in Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, and Black Queen in de Valois’ Checkmate. Gillian went on to set herself on the dance map as a performer, choreographer, director and innovator.
Gillian was instrumental in the development of jazz dance in Britain and her distinctive style, which is a fusion of classical and jazz, lead to her fantastic work on the world famous musical Cats – for which she is probably most well-known – and also on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s worldwide hits Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love, which she staged and choreographed. Aside from these huge hits which took the West End by storm in their heyday and continue to do so today, Gillian has also worked on shows such as Cabaret, Pickwick, Hans Christian Andersen, My Fair Lady, Songbook and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and for the Royal Shakespeare Company, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Boyfriend and The Secret Garden. In addition to the West End stage, her ballets included The Bröntes, On Such A Night (Northern Ballet) and Journey (Bolshoi Ballet), and feature films include A Wonderful Life, Half a Sixpence and Gillian also staged many of the famous Muppet Shows.
Gillian still has the same vigour and passion for life in her late eighties, most recently being awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Olivier Awards and giving the keynote speech at the Royal Academy of Dance’s Dance for Lifelong Wellbeing conference, the syllabus under which she originally trained. Gillian was honoured by the Royal Academy of Dance with the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award in 2001, and was awarded the CBE in 1997.
Image courtesy of shakespearetheatreco (Shakespeare Theatre Company) on Flickr.
Choros – A Pas De Trente Deux!
Today we are highlighting an incredibly hypnotic short film called Choros. Filmed in 2011 by Michael Langan & Terah Maher, Choros is a dizzying combination of music, dance and cinema where a single dancer (Maher) is “layered” over herself 32 times… in effect, a “pas de trente-deux”! Set to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the result is surreal, highly inventive and just plain beautiful to watch.
The filming of Choros references a historical technique called chronophotography, whcih used multiple photographs to enable the scientific study of a subject’s movement. However, Langan and Maher have advanced the technique in Choros through digital innovation, which has lead to multiple international awards since its launch.
Watching the full work requires freeing up some time as it lasts for 13 minutes, but we urge everyone to watch this truly stunning film… it is inspirational!