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Christopher Hampson,
Choreographers Diary, Pt 5 | |||||||
Christopher Hampson, a dancer and young choreographer with ENB, is keeping a diary for us on the creation of his next piece. The premiere is in Truro on the 14th April 1998.
Here is a link to the previous column in the series. 1st March 1997 Today my very good friend Melissa is 25. This allows me a month of gloating that I am younger than she is. It is small negative pleasures like these that I'm clinging to after a hideous week in Petipa Land. Manchester has had a dose of 'Sleeping Beauty' this week and although it was a very successful week for the company, it was very hard work for everybody involved. Most of the dancers had not performed in this production before, so a 4 hour dress rehearsal on the day of the opening night was their first and only introduction to a performance in which everyone wears a different costume and wig every time they set foot on stage. I was looking forward to this tour as I'm involved in most of the ballet and have good things to do. And I have a very nice divertissement to perform with two lovely dancers. Three days before we ventured to my home town of Manchester my neck went into spasm, leaving me incapable of looking to the left. The physio equipped me with a fetching collar to wear: it looked more dramatic than it was, thus enabling me to get a seat on the tube and get a few sympathetic pints of Guinness from those friends who weren't embarrassed to be seen with me in a pub wearing a fur coat and surgical collar. Someone should start a Benesh Notator temping agency as I have been without my notator this week and I could put an ad in the Manchester Evening News asking for someone with 70 steps per minute /100 steps and able to use advanced Pencil '97 skills. Most rehearsals in Manchester were taken with seance like sessions of trying to recall what had been created 2 weeks ago. Against such daunting odds, I have now completed six sections of 'Country Garden'. Although there is still another six weeks to go before the premiere, I am anxious to finish creating the piece within the next two. This will allow me to be able to rehearse it, gain perspective on what I have created, take a step back from it and if necessary, perform some balletic surgery on any parts I feel need a "nip and tuck". . Fido, my designer, has just been through the same process. His costumes are now completed ready in plenty of time for alterations. Having the costumes finished and the ballet nearly choreographed means I can now give my lighting designer, Mark Cooper, some hard evidence of my ideas. Mark has worked with the company for aeons and he designed the lighting for my last ballet, 'Perpetuum Mobile'. Somewhere in all of this I've discovered other talents. As I was about to take another sip of Guinness, I found myself singing the third verse of "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" with a cabaret singer from Berlin. I decided to go with the flow and have a crack at singing the MC to her Sally Bowles. Has this happened to any one else recently
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