Christopher Marney recently received a lovely letter from Prince William and his wife. Thirty years ago, William’s mother Diana, a ballet lover and sometime dancer, was patron of London City Ballet. That company closed in 1996, but Marney was on a mission to revive it. He sent the royal family some photos of Diana with Harold King, the director of the original company, and “they sent me a lovely letter wishing me luck”. Was that all? No offers of royal patronage? “I don’t know how right it is to go this route,” Marney says with a slight smile. “I don’t know if this is unique to us.”
Marney’s vision for a rebooted 21st-century version of the City Ballet of London was originally developed in the 14th century. It breaks with some of the more traditional ideas of the art form that took shape at the court of Louis XIV. She wants a company of dancers that reflects today: a cast that is diverse in age, ethnicity, experience and body type, and – in a discipline where adults are still sometimes referred to as “girls” and “boys” – an environment that treats dancers like adults. . But it is also, interestingly, a company that consciously sticks to the past, taking on a special mission to revive the forgotten gems of genius choreographers and bring them to life on stage.
At a time when the arts are permanently in crisis due to funding cuts and inflation, establishing a new ballet company is a bold, and some would say foolish, idea. But Marney is cheerful when I meet him at the company’s new headquarters. The elevator zooms in and opens directly into the room; This makes the room look like a New York loft but is a shoebox-sized office in a community center converted from a Victorian school in Islington, north London. Headshots of the company’s opening staff are pinned to the stark white walls. The fact that guest artist Alina Cojocaru, one of the world’s leading ballerinas, is at the top of the list is a testament to Marney’s respect for the industry and the soundness of her idea, and something of a coup. The London-based Romanian was previously a star with the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet (ENB) and has danced on all the major stages around the world.
Marney recruited experienced dancers who had left major companies for more flexible careers: former ENB principal Alejandro Virelles, the brilliant Cira Robinson, formerly of Ballet Black, and Northern Ballet’s Joseph Taylor. Dancers come from companies in Spain, Denmark, the United States and South Korea, and there is emerging talent. Eight of the 16 were selected through auditions; 930 dancers from around the world submitted video footage (Marney watched it all) and 200 dancers were invited to audition in person.
On the coffee table lies a stack of old London City Ballet programs dating back to the company’s founding in 1978, which Marney bought on eBay. Marney had danced with ballet companies all over Europe and The New Adventures of Matthew Bourne, and was the director of the Joffrey Ballet. The Ballet Studio Company in Chicago could start a company in its name, but it’s a bit intimidating at the thought. He loved the idea of resurrecting the London City Ballet because ballet had a formative role in his own dance history. One of the programs was from the Queen’s Theater in Hornchurch, Essex, where Marney had seen London City Ballet perform in 1991, aged 11. At the time he was in the theatre’s representative company, doing children’s roles in musicals and pantos, but ballet, Marney says, “I realized I fitted right in with that and it was my direction.”
She and her mother would follow the dancers to shows in Basildon and Chelmsford; it is now impossible to imagine quality ballet touring so widely. Marney wants to offer something accessible. She’s signed to six theaters so far, plus a slot at the Latitude festival and a tour in China, but she hopes to tour more, “not just on a diet of Swan Lake and Cinderella,” but with a much richer spectrum of what ballet is. , past and present.
Marney met Harold King during training and they remained in contact. “It had an impact,” Marney says. This was after the original City of London Ballet closed due to mounting debts. Of course, money is the most important factor in making any of this happen. The new company’s existence depends on an anonymous Japanese sponsor and a small group of donors who provided initial financing. Marney also went through all of these old shows and wrote letters to all the sponsors and advertisers listed on them, about 60 people in total. “I had two answers,” he laughs, neither of which resulted in real money. The money isn’t enough to fund a full-time company year-round, so they have to be more agile, working on a six to seven month model, which suits some dancers who want to go and do different projects. .
Donors have embraced the idea of reviving lost works, and Marney’s research shows there is an audience for it. For the company’s first program, he is bringing back Kenneth MacMillan’s 1972 ballet Ballade, which he produced with MacMillan’s widow, Deborah. MacMillan’s works (Romeo & Juliet, Manon, Mayerling) are among the most popular works of the Royal Ballet, of which he was artistic director in the 1970s, but the Ballade was danced only once on an overseas tour 50 years ago. The subject is Kenneth and Deborah’s first meeting – they went to the cinema on Fulham Road – but Deborah has never seen it before. There was no video, so the ballet was recreated from a written score in Benesh notation (written on a stave like musical notation) that had been sitting on a dusty shelf in the Royal Opera House all this time. “It’s fascinating,” Marney says. “The partogram tells you not just the steps, but also the intent, the looks between the dancers, and the tempo.”
They will also perform the 1993 Larina Waltz by Ashley Page, a former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and director of the Scottish Ballet for a decade. Marney says it’s a classical ballet, but one that “really moves and eats up the stage.” You might ask if there’s a reason these ballets aren’t seen anymore (perhaps they weren’t that good in the first place), but Marney says it’s just that the choreographers went out of fashion and often weren’t recorded. so it doesn’t take long for the parts to be forgotten.
But it’s not just about the old ones. Marney’s 2022 work Eve is on the bill, and he has commissioned a new work from Arielle Smith. The 28-year-old Cuban-British choreographer is the very woman of our times, having recently created dances laced with humour, theatrical instincts and strong female roles for the San Francisco Ballet and the English National Ballet.
I really want to do things differently and do it right in the sense of doing it for this generation
What makes Smith so great? “I love the way he treats the dancers in the studio,” Marney says. “If it’s a creative period with positive energy, you’ll get the best results on stage. It takes people out of their comfort zones and encourages them to contribute to the process; There is no ‘mistake’, nothing ‘wrong’ in what anyone does.” This differs from some of Marney’s own experiences. “In the past you were kind of conditioned not to talk, to do what you were told.”
These days, the culture of dance companies is something directors take seriously. Ballet has its fair share of stories of bullying and abuse of power made possible by rigid hierarchies that encourage dancers to remain silent and know their place. This is changing. “I really want to do things right in terms of doing it differently and doing it for this generation. “Running the company in a way that supports everyone,” says Marney. In her own career, “I haven’t always felt like I had a lot of autonomy,” she says. She creates a code of conduct that dancers will feed into, too, “so that there’s a space where everyone can feel safe and creative.”
Now all Marney has to do is hope the audience will come to see them. “When I started, I thought: Oh my God, not doing anything ‘new’ is probably unpopular, but the reaction didn’t really feel like it.” There is enthusiasm from venues that cannot host major British companies and, since the invasion of Ukraine, no longer promote Russian tour companies.
Marney hopes he can subvert people’s expectations that ballet is “just tutus and a very long evening.” “I think about my first impression of ballet, and that’s why I still do it,” she says. “I remember not realizing that people might be capable of doing this. “I thought about what extraordinary things are possible just by telling stories through dance.”
London City Ballet is on tour from 17 July to 10 August; tour begins Bath Theater Royal.