TerryAmos

I find the way Elmhurst runs it's end of the year shows is fine so why do people, some of whom never seem to have gone there, want to change it. What possible advantage would be gained by hiring a bigger theatre except to lose money. Incidently the shows do not always sell out. There were seats available this year.

16 promotions is quite a shock - it must be a record. I am pleased that the ones I most wanted to be promoted and who most deserved it have been promoted. Given the large number, I don't think there is much to quarrel with. However, I hope there is money left for next year since I can easily envisage that a number of dancers who were not promoted this year will have very strong cases for promotion next year. Also, I hope there will be some room to employ some of the students graduating next year. Both the Royal Ballet School and Elmhurst have dancers in this year's 6.2 (next year's graduating year) that I would like to see join BRB. I am surprised that Sheila Cross thinks that Momoko should come back to BRB as Principal. Is it not the usual policy that a dancer who leaves a company and then returns in a very short time should return with the same rank he or she held before leaving? Anything else risks displacing a dancer who has stayed with the company and that would be most unfair.

This is a report on BRB’s South-West Mid-scale tour. I saw all the performances – three at Poole and three at Truro. It was very successful and very well received with good attendances and enthusiastic audiences. I can’t resist quoting what a friend overheard a lady say to her companion after the final, Wednesday evening performance in Poole. “I wish we had come last night then we could have come again this evening and seen it twice”. I am sorry that this posting is so late. But since there has been only one other posting on this topic I thought it was a case of better late than never. BRB now seems to have settled on a suitable format for programming the mid-scale tours. It is to take two complete one-act ballets plus a number of shorter pieces, mostly pas de deux. This does work very well and appears to be what audiences want. For the SW tour this year the short pieces were an excerpt from the gypsy camp scene in The Two Pigeons plus two pas de deux : from the white Act of Swan Lake and from Concerto. This almost became the Celine Gittens – Tyrone Singleton show for they did all three at different times and were outstanding in every one of them. If I have a favourite it was the White-Swan pas de deux. Almost as busy were Natasha Oughtred (and it was good to see her back on stage) and Jamie Bond who danced the two pas de deux. I can make it nice and symmetrical by choosing the Concerto pas de deux as my favourite from them. I had wondered how The Two Pigeons excerpt would work when taken out of context but it was fine. I think it helped that all the dancers in this, and there were three casts, had recently been in the full ballet. Preceding this and opening the programme was Take Five and the finishing ballet was a revival of The Grand Tour. However I will consider them in the opposite order. The Grand Tour was choreographed in 1971 for what was then Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet by Joe Layton a choeographer and sometimes director of Broadway musicals. I think it is not unfair to say he was not in the very top rank but he did some good work and had a decent career. The most famous show he worked on was The Sound of Music for which he did the choreography. If you have seen that show, and who hasn’t, you will realize that it contains very little dancing. You could say the same about The Grand Tour. The scene is set on a liner such as those which many years ago people used to get from Southampton to New York. On the liner are eight stars and celebrities of one sort or another, who were very famous in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Even in 1971 most of these were of distant memory and so Leyton needs his dancers to sketch out their characters. BRB dancers are very good at this sort of thing but Leyton gives them very little to work on. In the end, it seemed to me that what we got was caricatures. Many of these people were very considerable artists or writers and I think they deserved better than that. However, the ballet was well received by audiences who laughed a lot and applauded a lot. It did stand up to multiple viewings and I think most people will find parts of it amusing. Maybe because the score was an arrangement of Noel Coward’s music and it was not good policy to annoy him, he and his chum, Gertrude Lawrence, came out best. I liked Matthew Lawrence and Robert Parker as Coward and Elisha Willis and Samara Downs as Lawrence. One highlight is when the Coward on stage has to mime to the recording of the real Coward singing “Half-Caste Woman”. Matthew Lawrence does this so well that it does look as if he is singing and not just miming. The leading role is actually none of the celebrities but an American Lady tourist. Victoria Marr was very good in the role as was Jade Heusen. It may well be the biggest role I have seen Jade dance and I was pleased she had been given such an important part and that she had seized the chance so well Take Five is one of a series of one-act jazz ballets which David Bintley created a few years back. Most are very good indeed and it is difficult to pick out the best. But Take Five is surely in the running. I find it fast, fresh and fun and when it is danced as well as it was in the South West it is exhilarating to watch. My only regret is that it was programmed as the opener. I would have preferred it to have ended the show. The ballet has a small cast which I would describe as three supporting girls, three supporting men, two leading girls and two leading men. One of the latter has what I suspect is the hardest thing to do namely Flying Solo which is long, fast and must be exhausting, not that the dancers show that. I usually find that when that goes well so does the whole ballet and this is what happened. The role was shared by Jamie Bond and Joe Caley and I guess we were entitled to expect fireworks from them and that is what we got. Flying Solo is followed by Two Step which is almost a pas de deux. It was beautifully danced by Elisha Willis and Robert Parker in one cast and in the other by Celine Gittens and Tyrone Singleton (those two again!!). I started with a quote and I’ll end with one. There was an event on Saturday lunchtime in Truro when Jamie Bond kindly answered lots of questions from BRB Friends in the SW. At the end a lady made what I thought were some charming remarks. She said, and I paraphrase:” It was so good to have a visit by a company of the quality of BRB as in the far South West they felt a long way away. She hoped that BRB would continue to come to Truro as these visits were very much appreciated”. I think that shows how significant these mid-scale tours are and how important it is that they continue.

One advantage of following BRB’s mid-scale tours is that it involves visiting some very attractive towns and cities. Usually the Northern tour goes to Durham and York, as it did this year, but to those two was added Buxton, a sort of mini “City of Bath” in the Peak District. Having watched the SW tour at Poole and Truro, I caught up with the Northern tour at Buxton and saw the three performances there. The town and its hotels were fine, the theatre, or at least its auditorium, was excellent. However, the stage is far from flat and attendances were not great – less than 50% in the evening although the matinee was better. In spite of this, I hope BRB will continue to go there. Regular visits will help to build up audiences and get the dancers used to the stage. The programme for the North was well chosen and made for very entertaining and enjoyable viewing. Mostly I agree with what the other people contributing to this thread have written about that and there is no point in my just repeating it. Instead I will concentrate on what is said to be another advantage of these tours namely that it gives younger dancers the chance to show what they can do with bigger roles. I hope my concentration on people at Artist level will not be misunderstood. It is not because I felt the more experienced dancers at Soloist and Principal levels were in any way unsatisfactory; quite the contrary they all performed at the high standard we have come to expect of them. When a choreographer new to BRB comes to work with the company, it is interesting to see who is chosen for roles in his or her ballet. In the two casts at Buxton and a third cast to be made up from those on the SW tour, Jessica Lang certainly picked some of the most promising younger dancers for Lyric Pieces. Among the younger ladies, I thought Yijing Zhang was excellent as also was Yvette Knight, particularly in the Peasant’s Song solo. Delia Matthews was another to shine in that solo. I liked her too in the Bethena Concert Waltz (BCW) from Elite Syncopations. She has been very unlucky with injuries but this season she seems fully fit and dancing very well. Of the five men I consider, most were in Lyric Pieces. Indeed, James Barton and Oliver Till seemed to be a matched pair since they shared the same role in Lyric Pieces and both delighted us all as Will Mossop in the Bitesized episodes from Hobson’s Choice. Perhaps it was surprising that Brandon Lawrence was another chosen by Jessica Lang since this is his first year with the company. However, he is very tall, has a huge jump and knows how to perform so maybe it wasn’t so surprising. If he continues the way he has started, he will be a terrific asset to the company. Because Chi Cao, who should have been on the tour, was injured and couldn’t go there was a shortage of experienced male dancers and this gave the younger men their chance. The two best examples of this were Benjamin Soerel and William Bracewell. Soerel found himself, after almost no rehearsal, dancing as Captain Belaye in most performances. It was not so much the quality of his dancing in this which impressed me, although that was impressive enough, but rather the way he brought forth the character. He also showed that he was a good partner with Delia Matthews in BCW. The highly regarded Bracewell replaced Chi Cao as Nao Sakuma’s partner in the Don Q pas de deux. He is very elegant with all the qualities required of a first-class male dancer and he lived up to his reputation in the Don Q, although, largely because of the stage one feels, it was danced better at Elmhurst than at Buxton as previous postings have pointed out.

It was interesting to see BRB perform in this small theatre in Birmingham. It was almost like the start of the mid-scale tour. That tour proper begins tomorrow and will include Lyric Pieces in the North and Take Five in the South-West. Therefore I prefer to leave a discussion of these ballets until I have seen them again on the tour. However, I will add that together with 9-5 they formed a wonderfully enjoyable triple bill. 9-5 is not beeing taken on the tour although maybe it should next year, so I will comment on that now. It was not universally admired but my impression was that the majority liked it a lot. That was my own view and I felt it was impressive to see how Kit Holder had no so much added to Printer Jam but rather had taken it apart and then reconstructed it as a longer piece. I do hope, though, that Printer Jam wont be lost but will be brought out now and again on special occasions. The leading role gave Joe Caley plenty to get his teeth into and he gave a splendid performance. His character was downtrodden but there was also the impression that he could not understand what on earth was going on in this awful office. I agree with Janet that Samara Downs and Laura-Jane Gibson were excellent. On Friday evening Mathias Dingman, Ruth Brill and Karla Doorbar took the leading roles and were also very good.