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Today the 50 year old company, currently on a short UK tour following a successful week at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre, is flying high and it is not just thanks to the dancers’ muscular leaps. With a healthy balance sheet and rocketing attendance figures RNZB is throwing down the gauntlet to the international dance community with a new £1/2 million production of Romeo and Juliet and a record breaking programme of one act works. “It’s time we moved up a league in the international hierarchy,” claims RNZB’s General Manager Sue Paterson, not at all coy about claiming her part in the company’s turn around. “When I took over in December 1998,” she explains, “the company was £1 million in debt and we were in an artistic vacuum.”

Thanks to serious under funding the company’s annual ratio of government subsidy to box office and sponsorship was then 25% -75%. Compare that to Northern Ballet Theatre’s 42% - 58%, a similarly sized British business in a nation notoriously niggardly with public funding. Today RNZB’s annual turnover of £2.8 million is based on a 40% hand out from the New Zealand Treasury.

But the key to success for any ballet company is bums on seats and the company repertoire then was a clutch of mainly home grown produce about as inspiring as a mouldy Kiwi fruit. “First of all I bought Michael Pink’s Dracula from NBT,” says Paterson, “and coined a slogan – `Go to the bloody ballet.` It caught on and the public flocked.”

Next to pack them in was modern dance wunderkind Mark Morris’s global hit, Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes. In 1998 RNZB’s box office takings were £500,000; last year they exceeded £1 million. Flatteringly the company’s repertoire catalogue now reads like a British ballet company with works by UK based choreographers, including another Pink work The Hunchback of Notre Dame, plus Didy Veldman, Mark Baldwin (current director of Rambert Dance Co.), Javier de Frutos and Christopher Hampson, the last three of whom have choreographed all four works RNZB present in London.

Paterson also had the nous to hitch her ballet company to the public’s insatiable appetite for reality television. “In 2001 we had cameras following us on a tour of the most outlying settlements in New Zealand,” she recalls. “Then last year it was 50 Years On Their Toes to celebrate our half centenary, all about the dancers and their relationships back stage.”
 

“The Southern hemisphere is a long way from the London scene,” is a note of caution from Alex Wagner, 28, who dances Romeo in Hampson’s new production. “Is there is any relevance between the two?” The company’s sensational Juliet, Jane Turner, 30, who retires in September, has more intimate concerns. “My bedroom scene duet with Romeo,” she muses, “is very sexy with lots of kisses and my real life partner Geordan (Wilcox, 33) plays the villain Tybalt who fights with Alex as Romeo half way through the story. He uses very authentic looking daggers and I worry one night he’ll get over enthusiastic and it could be a very short ballet.” Adds Alex, “Or a very short Geordan.”

Last year’s tour of New Zealand of the Triple Bill (Saltarello, Hampson; Milagros. De Frutos; FrRENZY, Baldwin) seen in Britain was a sell out and raised local audience levels by nearly 50%. “On the back of that programme,” says Paterson, “RNZB has been invited to the US, Mexico and China.” Now it’s our turn.