Cork City Ballet is all set to travel with a bold blend of old and new styles set to Gershwin and Paddy Casey, writes Mary Leland.
There's something about watching a ballet rehearsal that puts any potential member of an audience in his or her place. As the fouettés and bourrées are unreeled across the practice floor one realises - well, I realise - that these dancers are performing for one another. In the case of the cast assembled for the Ballet Spectacular touring production by Cork City Ballet, this seems especially true: a whipping solo is applauded, and the final attitudes of a group that flows out from the corps de ballet win cheers and whistles from those dancers who, although resting, are also watching. While ballet mistress Patricia Crosbie counts and measures every step to the beat, and director Alan Foley, splayed on the floor, lifts his head to call for an opening up of the chest and a lead with the heel on the walks, the possibility dawns that when those gorgeous divertissements and suites follow one another on a floodlit stage the performers are glad we're there, but they are really waiting for the comments of the crowd backstage - their peers and their employers.
It's the biggest - and he might say the best - group of dancers Foley has assembled in his career with Cork City Ballet, and that's before principals Chika Temma, Victor Povarov and Dagros Mihalcea arrive from Wales, the US and Holland. The company has come together to represent the Kingdom of the Shades in the second act of La Bayadère, that enchanting scene in which a procession of phantom maidens filters through the hero's drug-induced dreams. To make that succession appear unending, the plot calls for 24 dancers, and Foley has only mustered 16, but they are all professionals from all over the world and are led by Monica Loughman of Dublin. And they all - including Loughman - look about 15 years old, clad in that collection of garments that is basically careless and yet always catches the essence of chic, from leg-warmers to flared skirts or sports shorts, from leotards to trousers that are more applied than worn. The kind of working garments that give fashion a lead.
Loughman, the first Irish student to train at the Perm State Ballet School, is in a spangled tutu for a run-through of Le Corsaire; it comes from the Kirov theatre, where Foley was the first Irish student. As his full-time dancing partner, Loughman has collaborated with Foley in the photographic collection Foley and Loughman: A Portrait, which, with an introduction from Mary Clarke of Dancing Times, will be published in Cork on November 3rd.
A dressing room is packed with sparkling tutus made for the production in Perm; other costumes come for the Kirov and from the Swedish Royal Ballet, where the wardrobe department has a staff of 30 people.
For a small company such as Cork City Ballet, even one act from La Bayadère is a challenge, but it's one Foley has been determined to meet. "I know we're still building audiences here," says Foley, "but that's the way it is; it's the country we live in. You can dream about things, or you can do them, and we're doing this."
They go on doing it: the work-soiled point shoes squeak and thud as lifts are reduced to formulae, the figures assembled in sections or constructed as a series of abbreviated movements, the instructions so terse as to suggest an unspoken understanding. Le Corsaire and Cinderella are invoked for a pas de deux, Don Quixote for the grand pas de trois, Delibes and Adam and Prokofiev and Minkus give way to Josh Groban singing Gira Con Me by David Foster, or to a Balanchine set to the music of George Gershwin.
This is a company in which modern dance springs from a confident classical tradition: the Gershwin/Balanchine piece is for dancers Dragos Mihalcea and Eun-Sun Jun, Patricia Crosbie's Bodyguard is set to Paul Simon songs, there's a lot of falling and catching to Paddy Casey's Bend Down Low (which features the lyrics "Catch me when I fall") for a piece choreographed by Judith Sibley and danced with an owner's insouciance by Sibley and Leighton Morrison, and Alan Foley gives himself a dancing part in his own Gira Con Me, partnered by Morrison and Todd Fox.
"I seem to have spent most of my career standing behind ballerinas," Foley says as a way of admitting that he at least is a little more than 15 years old, and of deflecting any potential carping at his amour propre. "I thought I still have a classical line and maybe I should use it, so yes, I'm guilty, I wanted those four minutes and 47 seconds of dancing."
"Before I stop" is the hinted-at omission, but he's not ready to stop just yet. From his warm-up (or warm-down?) on the floor, he continues his calls for minuscule adjustments - a knee out here, a finger ahead of the line there, a wrist dropped just as a ballerina's outstretched hand meets her outstretched toes. Monica Loughman walks off in her deflated tutu, the corps de ballet assembles again at the ramp down which they will appear to glide, and as Patricia Crosbie reminds them to pull up out of the hips, I straighten, just a little, in my chair.
Ballet Spectacular 2006 is at the Helix, Dublin, on Nov 1 and 2, at Cork Opera House on Nov 3 and 4, at UCL Limerick on Nov 5 and at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Nov 6