Masterclasses with the Royal Ballet
Tchaikovsky Experience, BBC4

Shirley Dent
posted 26 January 2007

Last Autumn, a Channel 4 documentary Ballet Changed My Life: Ballet Hoo! followed disaffected youth from the Black Country as they trained with the Birmingham Royal Ballet towards a production of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. The series was half inspiring/ half frustrating: the inspiring half was the dance and the frustrating part was the involvement of the Youth at Risk project.

The pomposity and well-meant indulgence of Youth at Risk was exemplified in a scene where youth workers insisted that a group of teenagers who were strangers to each other talk about their innermost fears and secrets - including one girl whose father had murdered her mother - as as an enlightening step to building self-esteem. I think they should have cut such intrusive nonsense and stuck with the dance, which truly did inspire these kids. That's the thing about ballet - you may think it's mincing about in tights but once you come into contact with the sheer skill and artistry involved, it is absorbing, enthralling and uplifting. One comment which stuck with me from Ballet Hoo! was the excitement of one boy at just being challenged by people 'who really know their stuff'.

That 'knowing your stuff' is the powerful manna at the heart of the Royal Ballet 'Masterclass' series, produced as part of the BBC's Tchaikovsky Experience season. Taking three of Tchaikovsky's ballets - Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker - luminaries of the ballet world pass on their knowledge to a new generation of dancers. Watching a ballet lesson amongst masters is even more engrossing in many ways than the actual performance. From the director of the Royal Ballet, Monica Mason, taking dancers through the character role of Carabosse (the baddie from The Sleeping Beauty) to Sir Peter Wright putting the charming dance partnership of Caroline Duprot and Ludovic Ondiviela through their paces in his own production of The Nutcracker (I think I fell in love with the pair of them), these masterclasses illustrate how ballet preserves its tradition by making it fresh again in new and different dancers.

This is most striking in the pick of the masterclasses: British ballet legend Sir Anthony Dowell coaching Royal Ballet star Carlos Acosta in the adage solo that Frederick Ashton created for Dowell in Act II of The Sleeping Beauty. What is fascinating - though probably not that unexpected - is that this artistic mentoring has little to do with the mechanics of technique. Of course there is some technical fine-tuning, and watching the exactitude of getting the 'knack' of the adage solo, as Dowell puts it, is a real treat for balletomanes (by the by, Sir Ant has a great turn of phrase that really adds to his charm as a teacher - from urging Acosta to 'Go on throttle yourself' to his 'This is the Groucho Marx moment' in the Swan Lake masterclass).

What the Dowell/Acosta masterclass shows is how one master conveys to another the essence of something they know inside out, but which will also be different in the hands (and legs!) of another principal. This isn't about marching to the drum-beat discipline of technique, although that discipline informs and underpins everything that passes between Dowell and Acosta, the very language of their conversation. This is about the fluidity of translating a tradition. Dowell and Acosta are different dancers: Dowell the arbiter of elegance and line, Acosta acclaimed for his athleticism and expressiveness. Acosta puts it in a nutshell when he says, 'I will never be Anthony Dowell. I can't imitate him - it's never going to happen - we are two different individuals. But what I can do is listen to the feelings behind the steps and then project them with my own feelings'. This should not be mistaken for a self-indulgent 'I'm just a bundle of feelings' artistic temperament - this is what transforms physical craft and aptitude (being able to jump high or spin fast) into that wonderful, human thing - a universal art, that touches our emotions and reason, giving us insight beyond ourselves. As Anthony Dowell says, the real mastery of this art is 'getting to express through these movements what you're feeling - it's not just the steps, the slow turns - there has to be a spirit about it'.

Screening details for the masterclasses can be found on the Tchaikovsky Experience website.