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Birmingham Royal Ballet
Birmingham Hippodrome
BOYS have
always wanted to play for their country at football, cricket and rugby,
be fighter pilots or astronauts as well as follow the age old pursuits
of making a nuisance of themselves with frogs, building dens, exploring
and generally keeping alive the spirit of
Just William.
Little girls want to be princesses and ballet dancers. Little has changed
except these days it is cool for boys to want to dance as well. It is
not just down to Billy Elliot,
coming to the Hippodrome in March 2106 incidentally, but through
sporting and TV stars appearing on
Strictly, through break dancing, groups
such as Diversity
and rapid growth in street dancing. Thus when Birmingham
Royal Ballet performed First Steps, a
child’s Swan Lake, the majority of
children in the audience might still have been little girls, including
one in front of me who was asking more questions than Jeremy Paxman on
speed – she wanted to know and to understand everything, which was
brilliant – but there were more boys than would have been seen even a
decade ago. Marion Tait, BRB’s assistant director did not
devise this children’s edition as a performance to be appreciated in
silence with applause at the end though, this is an introduction, an
exercise to provide a taste and an understanding of the world of ballet,
one of the truly international theatrical art forms. And children are curious, inquisitive even
demandi Their guide was storyteller Owen Young who set
the scene and explained some of the stylised mime of ballet, complete
with audience participation, to express happiness, sadness, joy and
anger and even a boys v girls contest – dragging up dads and
grandfathers, mums and grans, to mime the parts of Prince Siegfried and
Odette when they first meet.
Siegfried danced by Jamie Bond and Odette danced
by Samara Downs first tell the children what they are saying along with
the mime, then just the mime and then the boys and girls in turn try the
words and mime then mime alone for themselves. Having given a brief outline of the story we hear
some of the music and particularly the opening haunting theme and its
oboe solo and then the reappearance of the theme, more urgent and
threatening later in the ballet from a full 60-strong Royal Ballet
Sinfonia under conductor Johnathan Lo. We also see the dance of the
cygnets, beautifully danced, front of curtain, by Ruth Brill, Laura Day,
Kara Doorbar and Beatrice Parma showing not only ballerinas to delight
little girls but immaculate precision. Then it is on to Act III and the costume ball at
the palace where the Hungarian, Polish and Italian princesses arrive
with their dancing entourage hoping to snare Prince Siegfried. And it is
here we meet the evil magician Baron von Rothbart danced by Yasuo Atsuji
and his daughter Odile, the black swan disguised as Odette, danced again
by Samara. The dances are kept short and with the splendidly
lavish ballroom scene over it is back to our storyteller to explain how
the evil Baron is defeated and Siegfried and Odette reappear to live
happily ever after – which is, should we say, a happier ending than
Peter Wright’s normal BRB production. As an exercise to introduce ballet to youngsters,
boys as well as girls, it is a wonderful idea, providing leading dancers
and a full symphony orchestra and a shortened ballet all at a price much
lower than many a touring stage version of a children’s TV show – and
you even got a free programme. The queue to meet the dancers afterwards was
testament to its success - although with all the oohs and aahs and looks
of wide-eyed awe whenever Odette appeared perhaps a few more swans in a
lakeside scene, even rising from the mist, might have gone down well.
After all the swans en pointe in white tutus are the ballerinas of every
little girl’s dreams and . . . dreams are made of shows like this. Roger Clarke
02-10-15
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in their thirst for knowledge and the more they see and learn, the more
they ask, the more they will appreciate not only the beauty but also the
complexity of ballet, in this case through one of its best known
examples in Tchaikovsky’s showstopper.