Jarkko Lehmus Diary

A Happy Bunny Roast

I wasn't a particularly happy bunny last time. I felt very strongly about the whole process and wanted it to be as good as possible. A couple of extra rehearsals and some pep-talking later the piece was on stage. Spacing was a breeze and the ligting came together pretty fast as well thanks to Grahame Coyle, the techie, being on the ball. I was happy to wish the dancers good luck for the show and let the piece from my hands. It was theirs now.

Watching a show as a choreogiraffe is always strange. You're nervous and excited, but there's nothing you can do anymore. You're just sitting there while other people are doing the work that your name is attached to. As dancer it is much easier: you make the best of what you are given and if the choreography is rubbish, it's not your fault. Being on stage you still have your spoon in the pot all the way to the end. Being a choreographer... Imagine that you've got a bunch of your friends over and you're cooking for them, but you're not eating yourself. It's like being a commercial chef. You're getting paid for cooking people food, you do your best, but the only thing you've got to go on how well things are received is the customers' faces.

So there I was all dressed up building a nervous patch of sweat on my seat. The piece kicked off and was over before I knew it and the crowd went wild! I was so happy for the dancers. I was relieved for myself, but the main thing was the kids on the stage. A job well done then.

Other than that the work has been keeping me just busy enough. Stephen's piece is just about getting there. It'll be a bit puffy once it's all done... The Trisha Brown people came in today and we've got a provisional casting for the piece. It'll be something a totally different again. I'll be in the thick of it, but we don't know all the details yet. As long as I'm not the bloke who stands the whole 25 minutes facing upstage...

Outside work I've cultured myself by talking about the finer points of stalking haggis with the Phoenix guys in Stirling and feeling moved by the arty Belgians of Les Ballets C de la B in the Tramway. It's good to feed the brain a bit to stave away the cabin fever.

Ten days of work left and I'll be getting on the bike to burn some rubber around some pretty Alpine passes. I might have to get my day-glo Speedos, the horned helmet and shades out and go for a little summer skiing on the glaziers. That'll be a Kodak moment...

It Didn't Turn Out Quite Like I'd Wanted It To

Ladies and gentlemen. Today I have failed. I have failed to deliver a performance piece of five minutes and fifty-two seconds for sixteen dancers in ten hours and thirty minutes of rehearsal time.

The vast majority of the dancers involved are students. It is their end of the year show. It is a big thing in the early life of a performer.

I have been in a situation where I have been cast and employed for my specific skills for such a long time that I feel that I've expected too much, failed to understand the capabilities of my dancers and not supported them enough.

I have one extra rehearsal slot squeezed in on Tuesday to finish the last two entrances and polish the whole piece as much as is humanly possible. The show is on on Thursday. During that singular rehearsal I need to not only to make sure the technicalities of the piece are in place, but also to make sure I inflate the morale of the performers im such a manner that the whole show is a as good as it can be.

As a performer I've always given suggestions and questioned the material I've worked on to try to make sure I, and my fellow performers, understand what we are aiming for and are trying our hardest to make the choreographer's or director's vision to become true. I haven't always succeeded, have frequently over-analysed and miscommunicated. My bad. But I have always tried the best I can and beaten myself up to learn from my mistakes.

I might seem an arrogant asshole at the best of times, but I do care what I do. How do I make that understandable in a helpful manner to others around me is a constant challenge of communication.

In the past I've shunned responsibility and hoped that bad things go away if I stick my head into the sand, but i n my present situation I am perceived as a person that is not afraid of a challenge and gets things done. I have ended up as the Equity rep and the spokesperson for the dancers (there weren't any other takers for the post, and someone has to do it) and I'm trying to give birth to a support network for the injury prevention, diagnosis and rehabilitation all the while doing the best I can to put as much effort as possible to justify the reasons for my employment. I'm a bloody lumberjack working in a ballet company, for crying out loud, but I'll be damned if I don't work my hide off to live up to the trust that has been given to me!

The transformation from holier-than-thou Mr Know-It-All into a humble and supportive human being is a long and slow process of being skinned alive...

Yours truly sings off to vanish up his sorry arse for the night only to emerge like a brown phoenix to fight another day.

Take Aim... Fire!

An unusually short break between the posts this time gives you a hint of the pace of things at the moment. Ever since I got back to work I've been stacking so much stuff on my plate that it's just about to open it's floodgates straight into my lap, so I'm choosing to do a pre-emptive strike by flinging the plate with it's contents to the ballet.co fan, taking photos of the results and following in the footsteps of Jackson Pollock to become a misunderstood genius and dying in a high-speed crash.

Now that my plans for my personal development are clear to all and sundry we can get on with what's going on in the company. The spring season is done and gone and the new rep is well and truly upon us: Ashley's Fearful Symmetries was roughly crunched together by Amanada Eyles and Ashley in a week to pave the way for the entrance of Mr Petronio. Watching Amanda work was a true pleasure. Her skill of communicating complex choreography at speed is truly amazing and the groundwork she has laid leaves Ashley in a very good place to start his artistic tweaking process almost four months before the piece is on stage. It has also enabled him to dip his toe in the water with forthcoming Christmas production of Sleeping Beauty. I've seen Antony's designs and it does look pretty cool to me. Let's see how it'll turn out after financial and technical reality has sunk it's teeth into it...

I'll let the bosses wrangle with that beast while I'm fully occupied by riding a new one that Staphen Petronio is conjuring out of the dark depths of his imagination. For those of you who don't know who the man is, I suggest you plonk his name on google and see what comes up. All I know is that the last time I worked with him I ended up wearing a corset, a jockstrap and full make-up, with lipstick and all, and running about the stage kissing anybody I could get my hands on. The new piece's tittle is Ride The Beast and it is the first new commission for the company under Ashley's rule. For me it's a welcome departure from the predominantly baletic repertoire of the year gone by. Staphen flew in on Friday with Gerald Cassel, one of his former dancers, and started t mess with our bodies in earnest from the word go. Saturday went in a blur of material while he was choosing his cast and yesterday and today was spent clearing the wreckage and gorging with some more body-squiggles. From my own point of view it has been a relief to realise that I'm not just a bit rubbish ballet dancer, but I've actually got some strengths on fields that have been under-exploited for a fair while.

Before I go any further let's make this clear: I find it pretty difficult to produce pretty lines, especially with my legs, and usually I'm so preoccupied by creating the right form, that the actual steps and the flow of the choreography slips by my teflon-coated brain. So, in baletic terms I'm no great technician and I was getting occasionally a bit frustrated, but eating into the material over the past days and watching the other dancers struggling with the whole concept of moving outside their natural vocabulary was a relief. It also made me feel humble: they work really hard in the face of a new challenge.

Watching the group has been very much like watching people trying to make themselves understood in a language that is alien to them. If you have a good understanding of the structure and the mechanics of the language you use is a good starting point for learning a new one and having an understanding of multiple languages from different language-families will give you even more points to relate to. On the flip-side, if you only know your language, but have never really given it that much thought, it's very easy to a) think that the new information you've given doesn't relate to anything that you've ever known resulting in a lot of shouting and hand waving or b) to try to modify the new language to suit your own so you end up with a bastardised version that's fairly understandable, but will annoy the hell out of the French waiter.

In dance terms this translates more or less into people either slowing down and really trying to understand the inner workings of the new movement material and to assimilate it into their bodies before they start going crazy with it, throwing everything they've known out of the door and launching themselves into their perception of the movement given and masking the lack of clarity with excess energy and risking serious injury while doing so, or, finally, doing their best to stay on their comfort zone and only doing the pretty shapes that they know well enough to execute properly while skipping all the perceivedly insignificant bits in between.

88 words in a single sentence. That's a personal record.

From the point of view of injury prevention and trying to make the choreographer's work easier this latest observation speaks in favour of cross-training and certainly poses a few challenges for the management of a company with such a varied repertoire as ours. Us dancers should be the malleable material of the artist that the choreographer is, so he can use any choreographic tool he chooses without us imposing him/her any unnecessary headache.

That leads me to my extra-curricular activity of choreographing a jazzy-contemporary mish-mash of a piece for a group consisting mainly of dance students in part-time dance-education. I've spent such long time working with hardened professionals that adapting my expectations and not appearing too harsh has been a challenge. So far I've chosen the old school of hard knocks and am pushing the kids beyond their limits, so that, hopefully, they can smile at their new skills when it's all over and they are licking their wounds in the summer holiday sun. I've got sixteen dancers, just under six minutes of music and five hours and fifteen minutes of rehearsal time left. Crunch time it is, sir.

There are a few other things on foot in the company, but before I'll let the smoke settle on those before I report. Until that day...