Swan Lake by the English Youth Ballet was an interesting combination of principal, learned dancers and people from the ages of 4 to 16. This is a scheme whereby travelling performances are auditioning local ballet dancers (so for Palace Theatre, within Lancashire, Yorkshire and Merseyside) to take part in a full-length performance. I felt like I was attending a recital with many, many parents.
This is the 28th year that English Youth Ballet has been running. The skill was interesting, as it seemed there was an unevenness, down to how the shoes got tighter on more learned dancers and movements were more refined. There were scenes which were purely constructed to include what were the auditionees with a sort of more upbeat style of ballet. There were some fun costume changes from large dresses of very many colours to very pristine pale shorter costumes. There were some iconic ballet sequences, where dancers join hands and move in highly synchronous movements not just to each other but to the music as well. The principal dancers heightened the uneven skills on display.
The way it works is a £20 audition which once passed incurs another cost £500 for rehearsal, excluding costumes. Ballet is noted to have exclusionary tendencies, examples being how the costume is meant to mimic skin but often is very pale and excludes skin tones which are darker, the over-representation of eating disorders in this art. There were dancers of different skin colours but all were resolutely in pale tights and pale costumes. Considering this is a performance where people/parents were paying to take part, this is not a good look by EYB. One of the many people to comment on this nature of ballet is Adesola Akinleye, an artist-scholar, who has spoken at depth in her book (Re:) Claiming Ballet, so it is a shame to see that a ballet organisation that spoke about representing people within 100 miles of the Palace Theatre still looked very rigid in its presentation and thinking.
I was expecting a live orchestra too, as I was expecting a more full production of ballet.
The brochure given does outline the entirety of the casts’ names as well as a fundraising promotion of a production of a new ballet, inspired by Alice in Wonderland. There are points where the principal dancer was also one of the paying performers in here so it is seen as a way to audition (if there were scouts or ballet schools in the audience) or to have the experience of dancing in a traditional ballet. This performance is doing more work for the ballet dancers than it is for an audience (largely made up of families of the dancers) and a sort of closed loop of work.
English Youth Ballet’s Swan Lake runs at Palace Theatre until June 6.
JADAR 