Royal Ballet Research Articles

УРОКИ КЛАССИЧЕСКОГО ТАНЦА: ТЕХНИКА ПРЫЖКА В КЛАССИЧЕСКОМ ТАНЦЕ. ВОПРОСЫ МЕТОДИКИ И ПРАКТИКИ

Galina Konstantinovna Polishchuk – a teacher of classical dance, is known by our teachers and students as the author of the book "The History of Karaganda Ballet". As a teacher of classical dance, she once received training from representatives of the Moscow and Leningrad schools in the GITIS internship assistant (Prof. R. Struchkova, E. The Pearl) There she also got acquainted with the methodology of European schools from trainees from the Danish and English Royal Ballet, which provided a huge material for independent pedagogical work and the development of her practical techniques for different classes from junior and experimental to senior. Working at the Odessa Choreographic school next to the famous teacher Yu. She became interested in his experience of retraining students, and then ballet dancers who received insufficient training for the academic stage, developed her own methodology and later applied it in the practice of working with students and with theater artists. She has worked abroad, taught at ballet schools in Japan. Her students took part in International ballet competitions in Italy, Hungary, Russia, Korea, and Kazakhstan. They have danced and taught in Russia, Ukraine, the USA, Germany, Poland, and Japan. In 2020, G.K. Polishchuk published a textbook "Classical dance lessons". In this issue, a continuation of this work is published – a fragment of a chapter devoted to the methodology of work on teaching the technique of jumping classical dance. The results of many years of work on the training of ballet dancers are summarized and systematized at a high professional level. The author typologizes the types of jumps, explains in detail the physiology of the jump, gives a comparative analysis of the methods of teaching jumping in classical dance. The style of writing the article is recognizable: the abundant use of ballet terms alternates with excursions into the history of ballet pedagogy, interspersed with comparisons of different choreographic schools, and, without weighing down the text, allows both a novice teacher and a teacher with experience to understand the essence of the problem.

Channels Through the Humane The Exiled Body in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern

Abstract: This article examines contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite’s celebrated work Flight Pattern (2017), created for the Royal Ballet, which depicts an unspecified group of refugees as allegory for the “human” condition. In striving to choreograph exile outside of place and time, Pite rewrites the refugee as a purely bodied condition of transience, and thus corporealizes what Alexander Weheliye calls a “travelling theory.” The work thus strategically obfuscates the political in the image of the refugee, serving a State-run stage; moreover, it downplays the significance of race to the refugee crisis in complement to a predominantly white company. Reading this dance against key texts of biopolitical discourse, I show how the refugee figures as a symbol of the magnitude of biopower and as such is ontologically tied to the notion of the population—yet the refugee is never engaged at the level of embodiment. Flight Pattern thus offers a critical intervention: how does the West envision the refugee as an individual body? On the dancerly body, this entails citations of Western concert dance’s conventions of aestheticized alterity, raising the specter of the “relatable abject”: a figure that is Other to its audience and yet invites their empathic projection. Flight Pattern thus raises important questions for researchers about the implications of aesthetic inquiry into biopolitical crises: what dance can capture—and what it erases—of the experience of refugitude and the struggle for recognition and legibility on the stage of international politics.

Data at the Ballet

Abstract Ballet isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when you think of data analytics. But those tasked with taking care of dancers’ health and well-being depend heavily on statistics to make the best decisions. Adam Matiussi and Joseph Shaw of The Royal Ballet explain

Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works

Abstract: As the last two decades have seen a steady increase of contemporary choreographers drawing on modernist literature, interdisciplinary modernist studies must create new and additional lines of communication not only across disciplines, but also including the public arts sector. In 2017, I attended the Royal Ballet's revival of Woolf Works , a ballet based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf and interviewed choreographer Wayne McGregor and dramaturg Uzma Hameed. I draw on my background as a former dancer to explore how we can use McGregor's choreographic and Hameed's dramaturgic approach to analyze the ballet and the embodied aspects of Woolf's writing. By focusing on the first section of Woolf Works ("I now, I then"), and Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway , I consider the ways in which the characters of Clarissa and Septimus embody predominant themes in the novel: memory, trauma versus peace, support, and time.

Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works

Abstract: As the last two decades have seen a steady increase of contemporary choreographers drawing on modernist literature, interdisciplinary modernist studies must create new and additional lines of communication not only across disciplines, but also including the public arts sector. In 2017, I attended the Royal Ballet's revival of Woolf Works , a ballet based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf and interviewed choreographer Wayne McGregor and dramaturg Uzma Hameed. I draw on my background as a former dancer to explore how we can use McGregor's choreographic and Hameed's dramaturgic approach to analyze the ballet and the embodied aspects of Woolf's writing. By focusing on the first section of Woolf Works ("I now, I then"), and Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway , I consider the ways in which the characters of Clarissa and Septimus embody predominant themes in the novel: memory, trauma versus peace, support, and time.

The Concord of This Discord: Adapting the Late Romances for the Ballet Stage

This essay engages with Alan Brissenden's claim that Shakespeare uses dance as a metaphor in his last plays to indicate a complex interplay between concord and discord, virtue and vengeance. While Brissenden deliberately does not address the ways in which this interplay might have been embodied through movement on the early modern stage, this essay analyzes two recent ballet versions of The Tempest (American Ballet Theatre, 2013) and The Winter's Tale (Royal Ballet, 2014) to demonstrate how choreographers can realize this dramatic conjunction through dance. Choreographers Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon emphasize the destructive anger of Prospero and Leontes, and both ballets end on notes of sadness, longing, and loss. Yet each also incorporates harmony and hope, primarily through the redemptive relationships between the young lovers.

Rehearsal and Performance Volume in Professional Ballet: A Five-Season Cohort Study.

Few studies have published data concerning the longitudinal rehearsal and performance demands experienced by professional ballet dancers. We aimed to describe the rehearsal and performance volumes undertaken across five professional ballet seasons and identify factors associated with inter-dancer and inter-production variation in dance hours. Scheduling data were collected from 123 dancers over five seasons at The Royal Ballet. Linear mixed effects models were used to evaluate differences in: 1. weekly dance hours and seasonal performance counts across sexes, company ranks, and months; and 2. factors associated with the variation in rehearsal hours required to stage different productions. On average across the five seasons, a peak in performance volume was observed in December, whereas rehearsal hours peaked in October and November and between January and April. Differences in weekly dance hours were observed between company ranks (p < 0.001, range in means: 19.1 to 27.5 hours per week). Seasonal performance counts varied across company ranks (p < 0.001), ranging from 28 (95% CI: 22, 35) in principals to 113 (95% CI: 108, 118) in the rank of artist. Rehearsal durations were considerably greater in preparation for newly created ballets compared with existing ballets (77.8 vs. 37.5 hours). Rehearsal durations were also greater in preparation for longer ballets, with each additional minute of running time associated with a 0.43 hour increase in rehearsal duration (p < 0.001). Full-length ballets, however, were consistently the most time-efficient to stage due to their long performance runs compared with shorter ballets (16.2 vs. 7.4 performances). Training principles such as progressive overload and periodization should be implemented in professional ballet companies to manage the high and variable rehearsal and performance loads.

Royal ballet school

royal ballet school

Dance, mobility and social change in Billy Elliot: The Musical

Billy Elliot: The Musical addresses the issue of class that, while seldom analysed as a theme in Broadway musicals, has been a key trope of the majority of British musicals since the première of The Shop Girl in 1894. The article examines how the dialectic of dance as an emblem of individual freedom opposed to the rigidity of the British class system is expressed through movement within the mining community of Easington. By utilizing various aspects of Rudolf Laban’s effort theory, including the kinetic personality patterns of his associate, Warren Lamb, the article examines the cultural gendering of movement via the strict regimes of boxing (for boys) and ballet (for girls). With brief references to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Brecht’s praxis of Gestus, the article illustrates how Billy’s ability to embrace a supposedly ‘feminine’ kinetic vocabulary constitutes the flexibility to free himself from the rigid and inherently homophobic definition of conventional masculinity. In promoting movement beyond the confines of an outmoded tradition of working-class behaviour, Billy embraces a classless notion of postmodern masculinity represented in the bohemian milieu of the metropolitan artist. By ‘dancing’ his freedom for the Royal Ballet’s audition panel in ‘Electricity’, Billy embodies his own liberation from the repetitive pattern of movement that inevitably sends the miners to early graves while he flies upwards to defy the typical destiny of a miner. The article explicates key moments of movement and dance in order to exemplify the embodiment of the musical’s central tropes in kinetic terms.

Choreographing neutrality: dance in Cambodia’s Cold War diplomacy in Asia, 1953–1970

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of dance in Cambodia’s Cold War diplomacy in Asia from 1953 up until the establishment of the Khmer Republic in 1970. It explores how Sihanouk leveraged Cambodian dances to enact Cambodia’s neutral stance during the Cold War and forge cordial relations with other Asian states. Through an examination of the myriad of dance performances of the Royal Ballet and other Khmer dance troupes within the context of Cambodia’s diplomatic relations in Asia, this paper demonstrates how dance afforded a space for Inter-Asia referencing amidst the Cold War tension in the region. Premised on an interdisciplinary approach, this paper underscores dance as an active political space where two historical phenomena merged: decolonisation/nation-building and the Cold War. In doing so, it places dance as inevitably entangled with diplomatic history and sheds light on its role in reifying the newly constructed, albeit nebulous, national identity of postcolonial Cambodia.

Sun Through Broken Screen: Murakami and Gutai

Sun Through Broken Screen: Murakami and Gutai

Decolonizing costume: Unpicking ballet’s racist and colonialist stereotypes through Sidney Nolan’s costumes for The Rite of Spring (1962)

This article attempts to unpick colonialist and racist stereotypes in costume, in an effort to think through decolonization in relation to costume design and research. Examining Sidney Nolan’s costumes for the Royal Ballet’s 1962 production of The Rite of Spring, which misappropriated Australian First Nations cultures for visual (and choreographic) inspiration, the primary aims are to articulate the complexities of the production’s oppressive colonial roots, and to situate it within the wider context of recent challenges from scholarship and discourse around traditional ballet that have reframed it as a potentially racist art form. The discussion positions the costumed dancers from this production in relation to problematic binaries articulated more recently in scholarship around modern dance. A consideration of the damaging perpetuation of stereotypes the costumes propagate offers a way of understanding the ongoing impact of ballet’s colonialist history, and the role costume (and those who create it) plays in this.

Historical schooling: ballet style and technique

ABSTRACT Aiming to challenge the notion that the ballet lexicon is ahistorical, this study focuses on the ballet classroom. Training plays a vital role in how ballets are performed, and past choreography needs a different approach from that of contemporary ballets. Previous studies of classroom movement, while acknowledging different Schools, have not dealt with the effect on the dancer of diverse training systems. To explore this, I filmed three students from the Royal Ballet School, who learned sections from a syllabus, constructed by Ninette de Valois in 1947, to investigate how aesthetic values, implicit in the syllabus, differed from those of today. Contemporary source material was used to examine the values of the era revealing the extent to which those principles significantly influenced the syllabus. To test this, the study compared the English values with those of George Balanchine and contemporary American writers. Balanchine’s classroom technique was also largely constructed at about the same time as de Valois’s. The findings show that embodying the past through earlier values can be an effective way of communicating with today’s dancers, highlighting how such principles change.

Keeping Britain ‘in the Fore’: The Establishment of the British Council in South Africa and Its Contribution to the 1960 Union Festival

ABSTRACT This article discusses the establishment of a British Council presence in South Africa through the appointment of a cultural advisor at the British High Commission in 1958. It analyses the role of cultural advisor, what policymakers hoped to achieve by creating it, and why they were initially hesitant about establishing a British Council presence in South Africa. The article will highlight how the decision to appoint a cultural advisor was predicated on fears that the rise of Afrikaner cultural nationalism jeopardised British interests in South Africa. It, therefore, contributes to the emerging scholarship which positions Britain’s relationship with the independent Commonwealth members in the 1950s and 1960s within the established literature on the political decolonisation which was taking place at that time. The article also analyses the cultural advisor’s initial work focussing, in particular, on Britain’s contribution to the 1960 Union Festival. The debates over how best to represent British culture at the festival will be highlighted, and the reasons why a tour by the Royal Ballet Company was ultimately chosen as the main contribution will be discussed. Finally, the article will analyse the controversies surrounding this tour, and how the British government responded to them. This included the omission of Johaar Mossaval, a South African-born ‘coloured’ dancer from the touring party, and the decision to complete the tour as planned in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre.

Rehearsal and Performance Volume in Professional Ballet: A Five-Season Cohort Study

Introduction: Few studies have published data concerning the longitudinal rehearsal and performance demands experienced by professional ballet dancers. We aimed to describe the rehearsal and performance volumes undertaken across five professional ballet seasons and identify factors associated with inter-dancer and inter-production variation in dance hours. Methods: Scheduling data were collected from 123 dancers over five seasons at The Royal Ballet. Linear mixed effects models were used to evaluate differences in: 1. weekly dance hours and seasonal performance counts across sexes, company ranks, and months; and 2. factors associated with the variation in rehearsal hours required to stage different productions. Results: On average across the five seasons, a peak in performance volume was observed in December, whereas rehearsal hours peaked in October and November and between January and April. Differences in weekly dance hours were observed between company ranks (p &lt; 0.001, range in means: 19.1 to 27.5 hours per week). Seasonal performance counts varied across company ranks (p &lt; 0.001), ranging from 28 (95% CI: 22, 35) in principals to 113 (95% CI: 108, 118) in the rank of artist. Rehearsal durations were considerably greater in preparation for newly created ballets compared with existing ballets (77.8 vs. 37.5 hours). Rehearsal durations were also greater in preparation for longer ballets, with each additional minute of running time associated with a 0.43 hour increase in rehearsal duration (p &lt; 0.001). Full-length ballets, however, were consistently the most time-efficient to stage due to their long performance runs compared with shorter ballets (16.2 vs. 7.4 performances).Conclusions: Training principles such as progressive overload and periodization should be implemented in professional ballet companies to manage the high and variable rehearsal and performance loads.

Jacqueline du Pré as 'The Cellist' (2020)

Few musicians of the twentieth century are as recognisable as Jacqueline du Pré. Her dazzling and distinctive talent, said to have enraptured audiences the world over, was overcome by a tragic diagnosis of MS. This sense of tragedy was all the more heightened by Du Pré’s famed physicality on the stage, leading critics to use all manner of analogies in describing her playing as a physical (and even sexual) experience. Her status as a musical celebrity, further intensified as she became one half of a classical music power couple, has led to numerous dramatic retellings and reimaginings of her biography, played out in film and TV, and now on stage. The most recent example of this fascination with Du Pré is the ballet The Cellist, Cathy Marston’s new work for the Royal Ballet, premiered in February 2020 to much critical acclaim. Its score, composed by Philip Feeney, features a cello soloist and interweaved repertoire extracts that have become so associated with Du Pré. Along with the characters of Barenboim, Du Pré, and her family, her 1673 Stradivarius cello is given a starring role in the form of Marcelino Sambé, a new take that makes this a distinctive contribution to media representations of Du Pré. This article examines the interactions across this complex web of musical representations of musical personae engrained in the cultural consciousness. It considers acts of musical performance, the musical instrument as living companion, and the representation of classical musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention to key features of Du Pré’s narrative re-presented in a new artistic form.

Dance Exposure, Individual Characteristics, and Injury Risk over Five Seasons in a Professional Ballet Company.

This study aimed to describe the relationships between dance exposure, dancer characteristics, and injury risk across five seasons in a professional ballet company. Dance exposure time and clinician-reported time-loss and medical attention injury data were prospectively collected from 118 professional dancers of The Royal Ballet between 2015/2016 and 2019/2020. Cox proportional hazards and shared frailty models were fitted to overuse and traumatic injuries; individualized robust Z-scores for 7- and 28-d accumulated exposure, and week-to-week change in exposure, age, sex, company rank, and injury history were included as time-varying covariates. Across 381,710 h of exposure, 1332 medical attention and 427 time-loss injuries were observed. Positive relationships were observed between week-to-week change in exposure and overuse time-loss (+1 Z-score hazard ratio (HR), 1.27; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.06-1.53) and medical attention injury risk (+1 Z-score HR, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.06-1.28). A negative relationship was observed between 7-d accumulated exposure and overuse medical attention injury risk (+1 Z-score HR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.66-0.84). Overuse time-loss injury risk was greater in soloists compared with the corps de ballet (HR, 1.47; 95% CI, 1.01-2.15) and in dancers with a higher previous injury rate (+1 injury per 1000 h HR, 1.06; 95% CI, 1.02-1.10). Only age was associated with traumatic time-loss (+1-yr HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.01-1.09) or medical attention injury risk (+1-yr HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.01-1.07). Professional ballet companies should implement training principles such as periodization and progression, particularly in the case of senior-ranking dancers, older dancers, and dancers with high rates of previous injury. These findings provide a basis for future prospective investigations into specific causal injury pathways.

Performance History Revealed: The Performance Databases of Rambert and the Royal Ballet

Dance archives were instrumental in the development of the first performance databases produced in the UK. This article examines the conceptual frameworks and practical components of the performance databases created by two of them: the Rambert Archive and Royal Opera House Collections, which holds the archives of the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet (up to 1997). It outlines their work-based data models (contrasting these with event-based data models), the contents and cataloguing rules of their ‘work’ and ‘performance’ records, and their online presentation of the data.

BRITAIN'S ROYAL BALLET IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, 1960

AbstractThis article reconstructs and analyses, for the first time, the Royal Ballet's state-sponsored tour of apartheid South Africa from February to April 1960. It traces the public outcry surrounding the company's decision to exclude its only dancer of colour, as well as the tour's planning, execution, and continuation through the Sharpeville massacre, local reception, and aftermath. In this episode of the post-war period, politics and high culture operated in tandem to sustain Britain's imperial connections amid decolonization and the Cold War. The article proposes a reframing of the ‘Wind of Change’ moment, analyses the role of ballet in Britain's cultural Cold War, and underscores the British state's willingness to set aside human and moral concerns for political advantage. Above all, it argues that, rather than being peripheral to, or merely reflecting, the British state's agenda, ballet enacted its politics.

МІЖНАРОДНІ ПРОЕКТИ ІВАНА ПУТРОВА В ІННОВАЦІЙНОМУ ОНОВЛЕННІ СВІТОВОГО БАЛЕТНОГО ТЕАТРУ

Mета статті – з’ясувати особливості творчої діяльності артиста балету українського походження І. Путрова в статусі провідного соліста Королівського балету (Лондон); розглянути художню структуру й творчі принципи продюсування митцем власних міжнародних балетних проектів «Чоловіки у русі», «Проти течії», «Шматочок неба» й ін. Методологія дослідження ґрунтується на використанні комплексу методів: аналізу й синтезу – для вивчення стану розкриття теми; культуролого-генетичного та мистецтвознавчого – для реконструкції творчого шляху І. Путрова; проблемно-тематичного й порівняльного – для виявлення художньої структури й творчих принципів продюсування митцем міжнародних балетних проектів; аксіологічного – для розгляду ціннісного змісту творчості І. Путрова. Наукова новизна статті полягає в тому, що в ній заповнено прогалину в науковій літературі з вивчення зарубіжного досвіду визначних майстрів балету українського походження та аналізу їхнього доробку в історичному й художньо-практичному аспектах; досліджено еволюцію культурних орієнтирів у характеристиках чоловічого модерного танцю та його видозмін у сценічно-виконавській практиці. Висновки. Творчий шлях І. Путрова проаналізовано з урахуванням його активної пропаганди чоловічого танцю як фактора оновлення тематики й стилістики світового хореографічного мистецтва, відновлення історичної пам’яті про авангардні досягнення трупи С. Дягілєва в інноваційному та мистецтвознавчому аспектах. Розкрито безпосередній зв’язок українського танцівника з традиціями іншого нашого співвітчизника –С. Лифаря. Розглянуто виконавські принципи І. Путрова в сфері хореографічної класики, що виникли на перетині київської школи танцю (заснованої в школі А. Ваганової) та англійської балетної драми, а також пластичних експериментів провідних західних хореографів кінця ХХ – початку ХХІ ст.