© John Slater Ballet into the 21st Century Conference Ballet.co magazine coverage Ballet into the 21st Century forum... to link with the second Ballet Artistic Directors conference. Go and have your say in where ballet should heading. Introduction to Snape Conference Deborah Bull interview when she was a recent guest of the Ballet Association. Includes more Deborah Bull related links

Deborah Bull, the artistic director of ROH₂ (a range of small scale performance initiatives at Covent Garden) is a most articulate advocate for dance. While not herself a company artistic director, she has already established her leadership credentials in her determination to communicate her art to a wider public. A member of the Arts Council of England, she is also on the steering committee that advised Dance East on its rural retreat for artistic directors at Snape.

Bull is a key player in the Royal Opera House’s management of its future creativity. She accepts that ballet has an endemic problem, as the very nature of ballet training can tend to exclude creativity. Because ballet is such an exact art form, dancers are trained to understand a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of doing things. “If they are writing off the ‘wrong’ way, they are writing off their own creativity. Essentially you are trying to reproduce exactly the positions and dynamics of the ways of moving that people have produced before. It is the antithesis of creativity. There is a problem, but the problem I am particularly interested is the problem within the training.”

Developing choreographers

At the Royal Opera House, Bull’s particular charge is to create space and opportunity for the emerging generation of creative artists, whether their future work is for the Royal Ballet, Royal Opera, or outside the organisation. Some of these artists may already be dancers within the Royal Ballet, others not. “What you have to do for ballet dancers who want to choreograph is to offer them opportunity, a structured development programme, encourage them to be very eclectic in their influences, encourage them to find something individual to them, and to understand the difference between craftsmanship and creativity.”

“The choreographers who ran this company found that the twin demands on their time, energy and intellect were probably not ideal in terms of their creativity.” Deborah Bull

Monica Mason, having worked closely with Ashton and MacMillan, has, Deborah Bull says, an acute sense of the Royal Ballet’s creative inheritance. I asked Bull whether the company ideally needed a director/choreographer. “Not necessarily so”, she replied. “The choreographers who ran this company found that the twin demands on their time, energy and intellect were probably not ideal in terms of their creativity. David Bintley in Birmingham is very much an exception. Dividing his time between his various roles works for him. It might not for everybody”.

Ballet’s ‘creativity problem’

Creative and interpretative artists may have different training needs. Many of dance’s next generation of creative artists are, in Deborah Bull’s view, emerging from institutions such as The Place, which have a more flexible training regime. She sees this as a more effective incubator of creativity. “If you want to train ballet dancers to be as brilliant as Darcey Bussell or Marianela Nunez, then you have to train them exactly and rigorously from a young age. There isn’t room for going down cul-de-sacs. In contemporary dance there is much more fluidity about training. Creativity seems to be built in.” Embedding a similar creativity in ballet training is, Deborah Bull accepts, highly problematic. Because classroom training is, of necessity, strict, the impulse to play with the grammar of ballet has to be located within choreography courses or in other parts of the syllabus.

Because, in part, of this severe focus on technique, the world of ballet can be intensely self-referential. Bull finds

“The choreographers I find most exciting are always talking about things that they have seen, movies they’ve seen. They are increasing and enriching the mix.” Deborah Bull

most rewarding the work of those choreographers, who succeed in transcending that inner-looking world. “People like Kenneth MacMillan were forever out and seeing other stuff. The choreographers I find most exciting are always talking about things that they have seen, movies they’ve seen. They are increasing and enriching the mix.”

Bridging the divide between ballet and contemporary dance

Deborah Bull has been a bridge-builder between the two traditions of ballet and contemporary dance. She has worked actively to overcome a legacy of distrust between them, inviting contemporary choreographers and performers to work at the ROH with dancers from the Royal Ballet. In his recent Ballet.co interview, Reid Anderson of Stuttgart Ballet conceded that he less frequently spoke about ‘ballet’, preferring instead the generic word ‘dance’. Deborah Bull accepts that the word ‘ballet’ may in some ways be problematic. Feelings can run very deep and, she agrees, these can be driven less by aesthetic arguments than by the great disparity in public funding for the two forms.

She is intent on exploring the relationship between ballet’s highly prescribed technique and the contrasting “freedom from technique” that often characterises contemporary dance. Choreographers such as Siobhan Davies, Fin Walker and Wayne McGregor have evolved their own very particular vocabularies. “Contrast contemporary language with ballet technique, which is the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. A tendu is a tendu is a tendu. There is no argument about it.” Yet, Deborah Bull is convinced, the two languages can profitably borrow from, and enrich, each other. “If you try to merge those forms, and there is genuine curiosity and interest from both parties, you can come up

“The way that Ed Watson dances Wayne McGregor is absolutely peculiar to Ed. No-one else does it that way.” Deborah Bull

with yet another form of dance. It’s hard to categorise, but if it’s clearly something only ballet dancers can do, then it is very relevant to the development of ballet technique.” Bull instanced Wayne McGregor’s collaboration with the Royal Ballet dancers. “The way that Ed Watson dances Wayne McGregor is absolutely peculiar to Ed. No-one else does it that way.”

Dance and Globalisation

Along with many of the directors who will be at Snape this weekend, Deborah Bull is concerned at the trend towards

“We have become a population who like to see a Benetton in every city in the world. Maybe audiences want a standardised form of dance. I don’t.” Deborah Bull

homogeneity in dance, which, in her view, mirrors globalisation in economics and popular culture. “For God’s sake, we have a single currency now, it’s not surprising we have a single form of dance! But we have become a population who like to see a Benetton in every city in the world. Maybe audiences want a standardised form of dance. I don’t.” She echoes David Bintley’s passion for particularity: dancers, whether they be in London, Rome, New York or St Petersburg should perform in ways distinctive to them.

Her concern seems to be as much with technique and style as with repertoire itself. As a dancer she would not have wished to dance Balanchine in New York, but this was not a prescription for not dancing Balanchine in London. If choreography has depth and importance, it is valuable, she says, to see it on different bodies. “When the Balanchine ballets were first danced here (probably by people like Monica Mason, actually), those dancers would not have been “globalised”, but would have been peculiarly British. It’s not a question of saying that every company should not do Manon, but that, when it does, it does so with a different slant. You would not want it danced the same way. You do not want the MacDonald’s experience – do you? This is live art and it should feel and smell different.”

Ballet hierarchy and its implications for creativity.

Like many ballet companies, the Royal Ballet has a highly structured hierarchy. Although it is less rigid than before, Deborah Bull says this is, in part, because choreographers, such as Kenneth MacMillan, insisted on casting across the range, as they saw fit. There is a degree of inevitability about hierarchy, she argued, in that it reflects the hierarchy of the great classical works with their complex structure of corps-de-ballets - the nymphs and shepherds - soloists and the ballerina at the pinnacle. “It is the Sleeping Beauty, isn’t it, that’s what a ballet company is: designed to perform Beauty or Swan Lake.”

She is not altogether sceptical about hierarchy. Dancers develop in their careers. They begin by developing confidence in their craft on stage in the corps, moving to soloist roles, where they are supported, but not over-exposed, before eventually tackling principal roles. “The hierarchy is in some senses a growing process, which reflects the works performed in ballet companies. Ballets are not usually democratic: there are star and supporting roles. What is important within a company environment is not necessarily what happens on the stage. What is crucial is the attitude towards creativity and whether it is valued: whether dancers are valued equally by the artistic director for their brilliant fouettes, their ability to bring a character alive, or their creativity as choreographers. The emergence of creativity depends absolutely on its being valued.”

However, ballet hierarchy exists in a wider cultural context. The new generation of dancers is less instinctively reverential, than were their predecessors, towards tradition and of accepted ways of doing things. In Britain, Deborah Bull argues, this is a partial consequence of the Children’s Act. “Before the Act, children had very few rights. It was perfectly fine to beat them, literally or metaphorically, into submission. Children are educated now to believe that

“There is a new and distinct challenge for the corps-de-ballets and people leading them. “They can no longer say ‘get your leg up Smith, or you’re out on your ear’, if Smith is likely to turn around and say ‘talk to my lawyer’.” Deborah Bull

their voices matter; that they don’t have to do things just because they are told to do things by someone who is older.”

The implications for a ballet company, not to mention employers in society at large, are obvious. There is a new and distinct challenge for the corps-de-ballets and people leading them. “They can no longer say ‘get your leg up Smith, or you’re out on your ear’, if Smith is likely to turn around and say ‘talk to my lawyer’. A new form of leadership is required, one based on engagement and persuasion rather than on coercion. “You have make it really exciting to be in line and identical to the girl in front of you. You have to explain the choreographer’s vision of how it looks to the audience, seeing this row of identical girls, or seeing the girls come down the ramp in Bayadere; that it’s important aesthetically that they all look the same and that the eye isn’t jarred by an arm or leg out of alignment. If you can make them believe in their individual importance in creating the whole, you have a much richer corps-de-ballet than one that simply stays in line because they are dead scared of not being in line! Of course it won’t be long before post-Children’s Act dancers will be running companies all over the world and attitudes will shift!”