© Peter Teigen LCB reviews LCB website Graham Watts reviews

I can’t imagine how it must feel to train for years to become a professional dancer only to have that career snatched away before it has had a chance to begin. We know it happens and with the range of movement expected of today’s dancers, all too often. Christine Sundt suffered just this fate: having trained at the Royal Ballet School through both Lower and Upper echelons, she was injured badly preparing for a student show. It still hurts and she readily admits to having been “very sad for a long time” but this is a young woman with steely resilience and clear objectives. When one door closed, what may lie behind several others suddenly became attractive: Christine knew her career would ‘just have to take a different route’.

Encouraged by an inspirational academic teacher at the Royal Ballet School, she studied Politics at the University of Durham while taking every opportunity to develop and enhance a choreographic talent that had already flourished as a dance student. Amongst contemporaries such as Martin Harvey, Laura Morera and Vanessa Fenton she won the coveted Sir Kenneth MacMillan choreographic prize whilst still at school. To keep her hand in, the undergraduate Christine choreographed everything “come what may” from fashion shows to two productions of ‘Romeo & Juliet’ for the now-defunct English Shakespeare Company, run then by Michael Bogdanoff.

In due course, Durham led to a Master of Arts Administration at City University in London, where Christine chose the Royal Ballet as the case study for her thesis on managing dancers; and then onto the Royal Academy of Dance in 2003 where she was involved both administratively and artistically in their flagship dance school.

Her big breakthrough came in 2005 with the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth. Christine was born in Oslo (English Mother, Norwegian Father) and she exploited the opportunity of her Norwegian heritage to obtain funding from the Andersen Foundation to create ballets inspired by his stories. She chose to make a suite comprising ‘The Red Shoes’ and ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’: thereby becoming that most desirable of properties; a hot young choreographer with a project that comes with funding attached! Through a friend, the Director Vasko Vasiliev, she sold the concept to the National Ballet of Sofia and so went straight into a major production with a big company – she used 36 dancers - in a large-scale Opera House.

Christine confesses that the experience was fraught with interesting times, both in terms of relationships with senior management in a House where the opera is in total ascendancy and using a wholly indigenous corps de ballet that had never left Bulgaria: on the other hand, this was a mature company with a very strong classical base, honed on a diet of the Grigorovich classics, but with a recently expanded repertoire including Balanchine…and now Sundt. She spent five months in Sofia developing the two 35 minute ballets, working closely with her designer, Bruce French, and developing, with musical arranger Martin Ward, a composite score, appropriately derived from various Grieg pieces for ‘The Red Shoes’ and using Bach for ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. DVD clips of both ballets show a very fine, lyrical quality to her work with emphasis on neat, quick footwork and flexible upper bodies. The Andersen suite is now firmly part of the company’s ongoing repertoire and is back for a second season in Sofia as well as touring the Middle East in the spring of 2008. The Bulgarians liked her so much that Christine is now the company’s Principal Guest Choreographer and she plans to make a ballet from the iconic story of Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ next year. If there is a strong Ashtonian quality about the Andersen suite, then Madame B sounds very much like the kind of project MacMillan would have got round to eventually.

We won’t have to wait until next year or go to Sofia to see her second major work since Christine has been engaged this year in creating ‘The Secret Garden’ for London Children’s Ballet, which opens at The Peacock Theatre on 17 May for a four-day run that was already sold out well before the end of April. She is quick to pass on the credit for choosing Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story to the LCB’s indefatigable Artistic Director, Lucille Briance, who has an uncanny knack for picking winners. Christine followed in the choreographic footsteps of her RBS contemporary, Vanessa Fenton, who made ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ for the LCB in 2004. She worked with the composer, Artem Vasiliev (who also created the score for the LCB version of ‘The Canterville Ghost’) to create the scenario for ‘The Secret Garden’ and a dramaturge, Will Oldroyd, was also brought on board to ensure that the essential ingredients and emotional depth of the classic story come through clearly in the ballet.

The early sequences of the new ballet focus on India under the Raj, filled with parties and servants, giving the opportunity to involve a lot of dancers: an essential requirement since LCB provides a professional theatre experience for around 50 children. When the story transfers to Yorkshire these logistical challenges turn to her group dances representing the “wuthering wind” that epitomises the dourness of these new surroundings: this transition is managed abstractly through such devices as her corps becoming petals rippling across the garden. Although this was her first experience of choreographing for children, Christine found the process to be rewarding and although working with her cast just at weekends and during holidays poses obvious problems, she decided to treat the children just like professional dancers, only “bite-sized”!

The future is very bright for this engaging and ambitious young woman. As well as the next Bulgarian project, and an ongoing role as a Pilates Teacher based in North London, she has recently set up the Covent Garden Dance Company. Just five years after completing her thesis on the management of dancers, Christine will soon be able to put her principles into practice as the artistic director of her own ensemble. She has already identified Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ as her first project for the new company, with Bruce French on board to design the work.

In very quick time, Christine Sundt already has two narrative ballets for a National Ballet Company under her belt with three more full-length, story-telling works in various stages of development. She clearly feels that she has found a niche and candidly says that “there are not many people working in the medium in the way that I would want to do it”. Given the early end of her own dance aspirations, she provides a wonderful example of how to turn such adversity into triumph.