© Oliver Lim Jeffery Taylor interview wirh Wayne Eagling (08/05) English National Ballet reviews Hong Kong Ballet reviews Dutch National Ballet reviews Natasha Rogai reviews

Natasha Rogai caught up with Eagling in Hong Kong this summer - shortly before his new directorship of English National Ballet was officially announced...

Wayne Eagling has been a frequent visitor to Hong Kong this year, creating a short work for a student performance at the Academy for Performing Arts in May (Poulenc’s Troppo Allegro, subsquently also performed and well received at the Yorkshire Ballet Seminar Gala), and reviving his full-length ballet The Last Emperor for Hong Kong Ballet’s Spanish tour in August.

I talked to him during rehearsals for The Last Emperor. The former Royal Ballet star and Artistic Director of Dutch National Ballet was in characteristically articulate and outspoken form, holding his trademark cigar, discreetly unlit. (It seems that puzzled security guards had been seeking the source of mystery cigar smoke in the non-smoking corridors of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.)

The Last Emperor is based on Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film about China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, and was created by Eagling for HKB in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule. One of the most successful works commissioned by AD Stephen Jefferies under his policy of having two new full-length ballets each year, it has become a signature ballet for the company, notably on tours abroad.

Eagling has enjoyed revisiting Last Emperor and doing some re-working – he believes that ballets should continue to evolve, at least while the choreographer is still around to do it. He is impressed by HKB’s progress: “The level of the company is far superior to when I came in 97. They’ve got a really good team of ballet masters and teachers, and a really good-looking corps de ballet, most of them quite young, and very good.” He was enthusiastic about the company’s team spirit, and their “fantastic work ethic – you see them in rehearsal and it’s not like you see in a lot of companies, where everybody’s marking. I invited Vivi Flindt [former Royal Danish Ballet star and renowned expert on Bournonville], who was here. She came and watched a rehearsal, and said “it’s amazing, it’s only a rehearsal but they’re doing it full out.”

Since leaving Dutch National in 2003, Eagling has been freelancing as a choreographer and coach around the world. This experience has done nothing to change his concern about the lack of originality in the international ballet repertoire, and the dearth of new works. He commends Hong Kong Ballet as a “shining example” of a company which commissions new full-length works regularly. Most directors will not do this, he says, because the financial risks are too great and if there is a failure, they will get the blame. They are “looking for success, and it’s easier to get a success with old ballets, which kind of guarantee you’re not going to be accused of making a terrible mistake. If you do Onegin, and it’s not successful, it’s difficult for people to say that it’s not a good ballet. Nobody’s going to criticise Cranko, are they? Whereas it’s very easy to shoot down anything new. You can’t criticise Balanchine any more, or MacMillan or Ashton. The critics can just say if you did it better or worse. The same with traditional productions of Nutcracker, or Swan Lake or whatever.”

Eagling is adamant that subsidised companies in particular have a duty to commission new work and develop new choreographers, otherwise “Where are the new classics coming from?” The last new full-length work at the Royal Ballet was Twyla Tharp’s Mr Worldlywise (not a success “but I take my hat off to Anthony Dowell for having the courage to try”). Before that the company had probably not staged a new long ballet since Mayerling, now itself a classic. In contrast, next year the RB will put on yet another version of Sleeping Beauty, this time going back to their original 1947 production. My comment that at least it was interesting to revive such a seminal production, brought the rejoinder “So why get rid of it in the first place? Imagine how much money they’ve spent on different productions – we’ve had five productions in my time … Maybe it’s because the press start saying “It’s time for a change, it’s boring for us to see the same thing”, but there are always new generations of audiences to watch a production, and new generations of dancers to dance it. Why spend money on another version of Sleeping Beauty when you could spend it on a new ballet, and perhaps get another Manon or another Mayerling.”

Although the situation is much better for the creation of short works (“Much less risk - less money invested, less time invested – and [acknowledged with a wry grin] less audience, which is a shame.”), without doing long ballets choreographers do not develop the skills needed to work with large numbers of dancers. Having star dancers doing pas de deux or pas de trois, with a maximum of 8 couples or so, is much easier. “It’s very difficult to work with large groups of people. Making a pas de deux is a doddle – get two good dancers and my mother could choreograph for them. It’s much harder to make corps work interesting – Balanchine was the last master of that, I guess.”

Despite his criticism of directors for not commissioning more new work, Eagling is well aware of the pressures they face. Throughout his 13 years at Dutch National Ballet, “every time I submitted the artistic plan, which was every 4 years, the financing was cut.” This increases the pressure to obtain corporate or private sponsorship, which has its own drawbacks. And financial pressures are not the only ones. Directors may face criticism over everything from programming to their selection of dancers. “Without being disrespectful to Boards in general, most Board people don’t really know what it’s like to run a dance company, or what’s important. They may have ideas of what they think should be done, but the actual day to day functioning is way beyond their reach.”

It is dangerous, he feels, to change directors for the sake of changing, or because they have been in their posts a certain number of years. “It’s not like business. I think all the really good, important dance companies keep their directors, and keep the stability and the artistic vision for longer. If you keep swapping round every few years, when the new person comes in, they’ve got to re-learn everything.”

The question of changing directors saw Eagling in the news a few days before we met when the Daily Telegraph reported that he had been appointed as the new AD of English National Ballet. Although he was unable to make any comment on the appointment at that time (“The best thing is to call English National Ballet”), it has now been officially confirmed by the company.

Eagling told me he had not seen much of ENB in recent years, but was very positive about the wealth of good ballets in their repertoire and the quality of their dancers. He was impressed by Simone Clarke and Yat-Sen Chang at the Yorkshire gala, and described Thomas Edur as one of the finest classical dancers of his generation. After Matz Skoog’s rather sudden departure, there is a feeling that in view of ENB’s grave financial woes and high staff turnover the AD job is less than desirable – dance critic Ismene Brown described it as “an ejector seat”. Interestingly, Eagling does not believe it is necessarily a drawback to inherit a company in difficulties. When he took over from Rudi van Danzig, Dutch National was already a success, and it took all the more time and effort to take them to an even higher level. “It’s actually easier to stop a slide at a company that’s in trouble than to make a good company look better.”