Kristen McNally Weblog

Blog 6

I'm so annoyed and disappointed and irritated and angry and upset, and any other words to that effect, with myself tonight. Arrrggghhhhh.................

We have a programme of Insight Evenings at the Opera House which allow the public to see the Royal Ballet away from the main stage in a much more intimate setting. These events take place in our studio theatre where the audience and performers are very close. They cover all sorts of different subjects, from dancers being rehearsed in upcoming repertoire to talks with our conductors. Tonight, along with Liam Scarlett and Sam Raine I'd been asked to talk about being a young choreographer (a label in my mind i'm far from being worthy of yet but that's by the by!) We weren't prepped so could only guess what the probing questions might be although the lovely Kevin O Hare was chairing the discussion so i knew he'd take care of us! Being a dancer doesn't often call for public speaking situations so I'm not at all practiced but once I get going, tell everyone I was Miss Dance of Great Britain 1999 and that the X factor was the inspiration for a piece of mine i'm generally alright! Don't get me wrong, the evening as a whole was a great success but the answer or half answer I gave to one of the questions bugged me for the rest of the talk and has continually bugged me ever since. I had a thousand thoughts but couldn't form one opinion. Arrgghhhhhhh. It's horrid when you start answering something with an idea you haven't fully formed in your own head and there's no way your thousand thoughts are miraculously going to make sense in that second you need them to. Instead you end up not making sense at all because you've gone off the point and can't get back on it and you don't even slightly answer the question that's been asked. I guess i'm so mad because this particular question, and tangents off it, occupy my brain a lot. It's the key question i've been asking myself as a 'choreographer' for a while now and i haven't found the answer, so why i thought i'd be able to answer it in front of 300 people i'll never know. Maybe if i write down my thoughts then i'll be able to make some kind of intelligent thread and answer better next time. Let's see what you can do for me blog...................

The Question................ Christopher Wheeldon is currently creating a new full length narrative ballet on the company. The first in 15 years. Why in recent years do you think choreographers shy away from narrative works, what is the future for narrative ballet and would you like to choreograph one?

My thoughts.................. Considering classical ballet was based on narrative as an idea then it's a big worry for the longevity of the art form if nobody is choreographing narratively. MacMillan and Ashton were two of our last great narrative choreographers and if you look at their works against those of their predecessors you can see how greatly they progressed the art form. They were still telling stories but it looked new, the audience hadn't seen anything quite like it before. The recognized classical vocabulary was still there but how it was put together had evolved. Hence, 15 years on I want the art of telling stories to evolve again.

It's safe to say that every ballet that has been choreographed and also notated, will always be there to be performed if we wish, so we're looking to try and create something new and relevant in our time today. We have to remember that the world outside ballet changes too, our audiences are knowledgeable, they've lived life in those 15 years and are prepared to view, question and witness different things. We have to think how story ballets sit within popular culture and more importantly make them have a place in popular culture. We need to be in touch with our age in the practice of our art.

Take Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes back in the early twentieth century, they were collaborating with a young Stravinsky, Chanel, Picasso, Cocteau, all of whom were at the same time attracting attention in their own artistic fields away from dance. This helped make ballet relevant in the popular culture of the day encouraging these artists own fans to become interested in their association with dance, this in turn encouraged a wider more interested audience. In recent years this has been an important agenda at the Opera House. How do we make ballet more accessible? We need to keep people coming to the ballet and enjoying dance. The public (most of whom have never set foot in the Opera House) love dance right now, why? and how do we capitalise on this at the Opera House? Take Strictly Come Dancing, watched by millions on a Saturday night; witnessing every celebrity falling in love with the joy of dance. Here, the viewer feels an accessibility to themselves; it's a social dance form, a natural form, a form that can be done in public by the public and can easily be watched and enjoyed by the public without having undergone years of intense training. My Nan and Granddad have never had a dance lesson in their lives but would happily waltz around a Blackpool ballroom and I'd happily watch them. However if you're not in a major ballet company then I don't want to see you doing Swan Lake in public. These skilled balletic practitioners are out of public view and are seen as being unreachable; they don't roam in the public domain. Of course we do but it's not put out there so you have to make the public appreciate the art form and not the celebrity. It's difficult because once you get beyond doing ballet as a child then you either carry on the love and enjoyment in a class behind closed doors or you watch a professional ballet company, there's no in-between public watchable factor. Yes, lots of the positions we make are unnatural for our bodies and therefore take drilling, skill, knowledge and lots of hard work and even after all that they can still look awkward but let's not forget that in essence this perfected technique is to be used simply to say something without words. Many people are alienated by an image of ballet as high brow, stiff, over-funded, pink and immature. Such stereotypical impressions can hinder the positivity of a rich dance tradition.

For me, 'an art form' which is what we're strongly trying to keep ballet as, needs the intimacy of a live performance between the dancer and spectator for it to work, especially where story telling is concerned. Of course the next best thing is to have a beautifully filmed DVD or a live cinema experience which is what the Opera House is so brilliantly putting out there but If it hasn't been specifically made for TV or film then you lose so much of the magic and people don't experience just how special it is. You want to sit silently in an auditorium filled with beautiful live music along with thousands of other excited people waiting to witness the same live moments as you. So i'm glad it's not yet turned into a competition on a saturday night!

Choreography is associated with forging a personal movement language, I have always said to myself that if I can't invent a new movement language then I see no point in choreographing. Having watched and admired the great modern dancer/choreographers of this century from whose work new dance techniques have emerged. It's been incredible. However, since realising that the problem for a ballet choreographer is not to invent a new language but to create with one that already exists has made my attitude towards choreography change.

I think modern choreographers have been sensible to stay away from stories whilst experimenting with progressing dance. The exploration of the capabilities of a dancer's body outside the classical repertoire has allowed movement to evolve dramatically. Modern art, fashion, popular music has moved forward dramatically and collaborations with these will always be new and current without needing a narrative to help it along. Simply not having a story was new in itself and with diminished attention spans, abstract short pieces are ideal to explore. New innovators of dance and experimenters of dance have to start small. Very few have the budget of an Opera House, let's say you have lighting, a black back drop and 5 dancers wanting to excite a younger cooler audience. What do you do? Not a full length narrative! This is a big sticking point of mine with story ballets. When you take them out of context and put them in an empty space, no Opera House, no big stage, no sets, no full orchestra, very few work. They need the magic in which they were set to help them along. A few of us recently went to Manchester to open an exhibition about Ninette de Valois and The Royal Ballet at the Lowry centre and we put on a little performance in a tiny theatre with no sets and a piano. Knowing how the story ballets look on the main stage, i was upset at how much they'd lost and how they looked to this northern audience. Then along came Wayne McGregor's non narrative duet from chroma to CD and it blew me away just as much as it did on the Opera House stage. It looked fresh and new and relevant and now.

I feel that with a lack of new classical narratives we forget that ballet is after all a way of dancing - of dancing as art. The technique has advanced through the refinement of common steps and moves. It is so important that the artistic aims are understood, by concentrating on mere physical fitness and technical mastery as end goals the very use of the technique is threatened and its purpose of expression lost.

Opera House ticket sales show that people are still willing and wanting to pack out the theatre for existing Swan Lake's and Nutcracker's. It's the narrative ballets that pay our wage every month so that is what we'll continue to do but there's a mass of people out there who don't come to the ballet and especially don't come to be told a story. I so desperately want them to, I want it to appeal to them, I want them to choose dance as the means of being told a story and I want us to be telling a story they want to know. I want it to affect them, I want them to experience how special a night at the Opera House is and I want them to go home wanting more. We've spent 15 years allowing our more contemporary peers to influence classical ballet relying on their help to move the art form forward. We've had our play and experimentation with ballet without its narrative and its time to use everything we've learnt in these abstract years to take those non narrative duets to CD's that look relevant and cool and now and put them to a story and give ballet a rebirth!

So those are my jumbled thoughts! Very jumbled! You can imagine how confused and ineloquent my answer on the spot was!

Kristen x

Ps Apologies for my sometimes inappropriate use of the word 'narrative'. I understand that the words 'story' and 'narrative' are not synonymous so considering the basic idea i'm trying to get across I should have just used 'story' and 'non story' throughout. This would have become tiresome in an already tiresome thinking out loud blog of mine so i threw in 'narrative' for good measure!

Posted by Kristen at December 15, 2010 08:04 PM