© Stephen A'Court Earlier Harris RNZB interviews... Gary Harris - July 2004 Harris/RNZB - May 2004 Gary Harris - May 2003 recent RNZB reviews Renee Renouf reviews

Earlier this month, The Royal New Zealand Ballet were guests at San Francisco’s International Arts Festival, where they danced a mixed program at the Yerba Buena Theatre. For the last four years RNZB has been under the leadership of Gary Harris, its much-travelled British artistic director. When we met recently at The Asian Art Museum, we talked about his career and his company over the museum café’s fusion lunch selections.

Harris is a South Londoner and is a very much a pragmatic ‘can do’ type of personality. He came to ballet in a roundabout way. As a child he was interested in the theatre and dance. One day someone suggested to him that he might find ballet training useful. Harris remembers attending The Professional Children’s School in the old Police Station on Church Road in Teddington. “That’s where I started studying ballet, along with singing and drama, plus working through the schools agency for experience and extra money. At that time one's main concern was to get an Equity Card in order to work, and it was through the school that I got an Equity Contract job in a pantomime alongside dancers from the Bush Davies School in North London. I auditioned for that school, but it was outside the grant giving body of my home area, so I then auditioned for The Arts Educational School”.

He spent two years there and while still a student at Arts Educational, he came to the attention of John Field, who had moved from dancing principal roles with The Royal Ballet into directing. He arranged for him to attend The Royal Ballet School where David Bintley, now the Artistic Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet and San Francisco Ballet’s Ballet Master Ashley Wheater, were classmates.

From 1976-78 he worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, with PACT Ballet. Then he came home to London to become a dancer with London Festival Ballet, the company associated with Markova and Dolin. In 1985 he changed direction, opting for a career in West End musicals. He had a nine-month stint in On Your Toes with Doreen Wells when she succeeded Natalia Makarova in the ballerina role. He also appeared at the London Palladium in Cage Aux Folles.
 

Gary Harris
© Stephen A'Court

Around then, Harris began to reinvent himself. What he did next would be prove a useful preparation for a future career as an artistic director. He began to teach. He also became ballet master to a newly formed company of six dancers from the Royal Ballet touring Southern England under the title of Dance Advance; “It was an opportunity to work with Kenneth MacMillan, who was creating Sea of Troubles based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. He added to his portfolio by spending a year studying Benesh Movement Notation, and qualifying as a notator.

Inevitably his experiences as teacher, ballet-master and notator opened up new directions.  He went to Hong Kong Ballet as ballet master. Later he became Associate Artistic Director with the company, staying for just over two years. All the while he was returning to London to teach his old company which had now changed its name from Festival Ballet into English National Ballet (ENB). Harris also assisted Kenneth MacMillan in restaging Manon at the Paris Opera, a company for which he later set MacMillan’s Song of the Earth.

Seven years followed at the Royal Ballet where he was both notator and teacher and when he left the company he continued both to teach and to stage works from notation scores. 1996 brought a new direction. It was then that Matz Skoog invited Harris to guest teach for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. “I went back yearly until 2001 when Matz assumed direction of English National Ballet. I was in New Zealand at the time and made my application immediately for his job and was ultimately accepted. It helped, of course, that I had been a yearly visitor for five years and that I knew the company.”

RNZB has a core of 32 dancers, and a total of 48 with supporting staff and administration and Harris takes huge pride in its achievements. “The company’s spirit is really special, particularly its energy and its politeness (they are just the nicest people), They're like sponges - absolutely great team of people to work with.”

The company was founded in 1953 by a Danish dancer Poul Gnatt, who started with just three female dancers in addition to himself and a pianist. Nowadays it tours widely, averaging 100 performances a year around the two islands and internationally, and in houses which seat audiences of anywhere from 900 to 1800 people. It has a subsidy from New Zealand’s government and is based in the capital Wellington where it has had a permanent home in the Westpac Trust St. James Theatre since 1998. Harris has been ‘exhilarated’ by the positive support he has found throughout New Zealand for RNZB and its work
 

Milagros by Javier de Frutos
© John Ross

Royal New Zealand Ballet is a young company. Although it dances many abstract works, it has the strength in depth to present full-length ballets, such as Christopher Hampson’s version of Romeo and Juliet, which has been seen by London audiences. The mixed bill presented in San Francisco included Milagros by Javier de Frutos, set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. De Frutos is a choreographer new to audiences in the Bay area. “The piece is at once mesmerising, intricate, and disturbing”, according to Harris. “It was made on the company, so there's a real feeling of ownership, therefore the piece becomes extremely intense and territorial.”  The presence of a Kenneth MacMillan ballet in the programme is a source of particular satisfaction. “I wanted a MacMillan work in the repertoire. Concerto was perfect for a young company. It has everything - classy, musical, structured, music, pas de deux. It's really cool work.”  David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to My Skin completed the programme “It's like watching music, the dancers and audiences love it. Inspiring, uplifting. I wanted the company to experience that way of moving.”

Harris has taken risks in exposing his company to international audiences and to wider critical attention. The risks have been well judged. The San Francisco Chronicle was impressed by the company’s “obvious good nature and range.” Harris hopes the company will travel more. Right now it is on tour in Australia and Harris sees such tours as key to the company’s developing confidence. It takes a special kind of optimism to run a ballet company in New Zealand and from its base there to seek to build international respect. But Gary Harris’s attitude is now, as ever, ‘Can do.’