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April 21, 2005
Verity's April Diary
Dear Diary
It has been a very exciting month! We have all been working very hard to perfect our performance for the opening of our Ballet Central Tour on 6th April at the Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music in London. After two in-house preview performances the week before at Central, we had to be at the theatre on Monday morning for 9.00am ready to do the ‘get-in’. We have to do this at every venue we perform at and it involves setting up everything we will need for our show, from all of the technical things such as sound and lighting, to preparing the stage, which includes laying our own dance floor.
The next day was ballet class at school with guest teacher Yoko Ichino who is the Ballet Mistress at Northern Ballet Theatre. It is great when we have guest teachers because you can learn a lot and pick up many tips. After this we were off to the theatre for rehearsals on the stage. Firstly we had a spacing and technical run, which involved slowly spacing and then running each piece (this takes several hours). After some notes and a break we then had a full technical run of the show. We didn’t finish at the theatre until 10.00pm.
Wednesday began with ballet class on stage. I find having class on stage very useful as you get a chance to get to know the space that you are later going to perform on. We then had a few rehearsals and fixed things that didn’t go right from the day before. I danced in ‘Pretty and the Wolf’ which is the jazz piece by Lucy Potter, it was a lot of fun and it was great to be on stage, although it wasn’t enough and once I was off I just wanted to get back on! Everybody I spoke to after the performance said they really enjoyed it and we got a good review on ballet.co, no less!
The next day those who were going on tour set off on the coach for Kendal, Colwyn Bay and Liverpool. I didn’t go on this leg of the tour, and those of us that remained at school took part in filming for ‘Bump n Grind’, a programme that will appear on Trouble TV, a digital station, in May. The series is a dance competition and we had to demonstrate a ballet class to the dancers that had made it into this show. It was quite funny - the dancers had done no more than four hours of ballet before but they were great and really enthusiastic. They also each showed us a bit of what they did, which was mainly street dancing and they were amazing.
Also whilst the others were away we had a Ballet Central photocall at the London Stock Exchange. The photocall was to mark our most prestigious date in our three month tour at the Linbury, Royal Opera House. We posed in front of ‘The Source’ sculpture in our very bright costumes in the foyer area! I didn’t find this sculpture very impressive - just a load of balls moving up and down and occasionally glowing blue - but it was an unusual setting for the photos.
Those on tour are back very shortly. I can’t wait to hear how it all went - but there is no time for relaxing when they get back, as we are to perform at the Linbury in a day’s time. So that is all for now.
Verity xx
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