On 23rd April, I attended my first Cecchetti Day as a newly qualified teacher. It was held at the Royal Ballet School in the Linden Theatre. The well-attended day began with Victoria Collinson, the Royal Ballet School Junior Associates teacher. She demonstrated pilates-based exercises to enable pupils to better understand their own bodies. She showed how the physical requirements of ballet can be achieved through exercises isolating movements controlling posture and turn-out. Her simple exercises seemed effective at developing student’s physical awareness and she explained how the exercises should be followed through from floor to standing to an actual Cecchetti exercise in order for the new muscle behaviour to be fully adopted. Excellent material for every teacher to return to their schools with.
Next came a rehearsal by David Nixon, OBE, Director of Northern Ballet, who said in his introduction how much he had been influenced by Cecchetti work in his training. He rehearsed pas de deux sections from two ballets with Abigail Prudames and Joseph Taylor. Firstly a section from Nixon’s own Swan Lake, and the second from Kenneth Tindall’s first full-length ballet Casanova. The work we saw was spellbinding. At first look the initial run through was not bad at all, but when David began to go into detail about the feeling, expression and physical nuances to every part of the sequence we saw his words and demonstrations transform the dancing into something much more special. It really highlighted the painstaking work of rehearsing a full-length ballet in this much detail. I think there is great value to the younger group of us teachers seeing this artistic and creative work live. I believe that on the whole we have chosen to become teachers as a career, rather than being professional dancers turned teachers. We have therefore not been exposed to this high level of artistic work in a Company environment, which I think is essential for us to be able to work it into class with our pupils.
After lunch the winners of the Choreography Competition performed their work. I found it interesting that the dances relied heavily on contemporary content mixed with ballet. Perhaps the prevalence of dance being taught in schools is encouraging this, but it feels a bit sad that the sometimes tormented and ungraceful moves of contemporary ballet are infiltrating the purity of classical ballet. It’s not that classical ballet cannot portray touching or sorrowful themes but the students aren’t necessarily seeing that it can do this for them. Since the event, I have heard of a new initiative called Ballet Now that David Bintley has started between Birmingham Royal Ballet and Sadler’s Wells. It’s designed to encourage classical ballet choreography of major new works. You can read more here http://www.brb.org.uk/post/ballet-now. Then came the Scholars and competition winners’ dances, which were very well performed and the CICB dancers looked like promising entrants.
Then came the section on the Diploma. The Enrico Cecchetti Diploma is the highest and most prestigious award to be earnt in the Cecchetti Classical Ballet faculty. It is devilishly difficult and extraordinarily long encompassing many enchainments set over six days of the week. We began with a short panel discussion led by Dame Monica Mason, with David Yow (formerly BRB), Richard Glasstone MBE and Diane van Schoor, who has coached, rehearsed and presented the Diploma work on a new film funded by the Legacy project and the Trust. As ever Mr Glasstone’s remarks were particularly insightful; the Diploma is “the most difficult and most advanced Cecchetti work”, and is “different for every artist”. He likened the enchainments to sheet music and said that every teacher and student of the Diploma will bring their own artistic qualities to the work, just as a composer and musician would do. The Diploma work is the basis for theatre performance and we must allow artistic expression to flow from those dancing it.
It was interesting to hear how the dancers felt about the work; that it was so controlled that it made them focus on the true physical technique needed to execute the moves, rather than using free arms to help them with pirouettes or tours en l’air for example. Doing everything backwards also got their brains working hard! We also heard how the Cecchetti enchainments have translated directly into demands of roles the dancers have been given in their companies. As was said Cecchetti was a contemporary of Petipa and the enchainments were designed to prepare for performance. Surely we should be using this new film to persuade companies around the work that teaching the Cecchetti Diploma syllabus will equip their dancers to perform the classics to the highest technical standards. And in doing this we will create a swathe of professional dancers in love with the Cecchetti principles who in later years may go on to lead and teach in companies and schools worldwide and therefore perpetuate the Cechetti method more securely.