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Christopher Hampson,
Communicating... in Silent Estonian | |||||||
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Christopher Hampson, a dancer and young choreographer with ENB, has been keeping a diary for us since November 97. Initially he covered the creation of his new ballet ‘Country Garden’ but now he has lots and lots of other things on the go.....
Here is a link to the previous column in the series.
November 1st 1998 The title of the new work is Notturno, the music is by Schubert, the designs by Fido and lighting by Mark Cooper. Working with these principals has been a lesson in trust, tailoring, Estonian and marriage guidance counselling. It was a team effort all thanks to Tom and Ag’s enthusiasm: they were involved from the beginning on everything - the choice of music, designer and finding rehearsal time. As we were all involved in Cinderella, most rehearsals for Notturno were done either after a full day’s work, in lunch breaks, or on Saturday with all three of us at varying degrees of injury. Yet there was never once cause to cancel or cut short a rehearsal. This may not seem particularly odd, but it is often the case in scheduled rehearsals that dancers begin to lose concentration, start looking at the clock and are more likely than not to say "It’s OK, I don’t need that Saturday rehearsal". And when I say that it was a lesson in marriage guidance counselling I am not being rude - it’s true. It is a well-known fact that these two have known each other from school days. People who have a partnership that goes that far back develop a form of silent communication that can’t be heard by humans. Arguments would flare up from nowhere and then be resolved as quickly as they started. These tiffs would sometimes drag on, but I’d tell them to shut up and we’d be back on course. It’s nice to be part of a team like this - I may not be able to speak Estonian, but at least I have learnt to communicate silently. The company went to Oxford on 20th October for the opening week of the Autumn tour. I was still off with a healing ankle, and although I was frustrated at not being able to perform, I used the time to finalise the lighting and costume designs for Notturno and to rehearse Tom and Ag whenever the stage was available. We continued like this for another week until we got to Liverpool. On Wednesday night they drove back to London after the show and flew to Stuttgart the next morning. I haven’t heard anything from them since then. They’re either very busy or they’ve lost my ballet at the airport and are too frightened to tell me. And on the seventh day He….. The National Youth Ballet meets every Sunday at Arts Educational School in Chiswick, and I was invited recently to watch them work. A chance to see what the standard of training is like from all around the country (inevitable, considering who I work for) and time to take a back seat and watch other choreographers creating. I had been watching for an hour or so when the ballet mistress who was working on "Wonderland - Scenes from Alice" was taken ill. I suddenly found myself in front of 60 children rehearsing the Underwater Scene . I’ve never worked with children as young as seven and had no idea how to talk to them, so I just treated them as I’d treated Tom & Agnes: listened to them, trusted them, and occasionally - told them to shut up. As chance would have it, it is exactly a year since I wrote my first diary on this site. Apart from being a year older and having a few more ballets under my belt, not a lot has changed. I’m still going to Southampton tomorrow, I’ve still got a bag full of CDs and my foresight in choosing music by Grainger which could be easily orchestrated has paid off, since Country Garden will be performed with orchestra next year. I’m going to go on holiday in January. I’m just trying to find the right music… | ||||||||
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