Dancers fuel up for the afternoon’s rehearsal with lunch at the National Ballet’s café, Les Louises. The café offers dancers and staff delicious, nutritious food to keep the company going.

Take a glimpse behind the scenes at life at the National Ballet with our series of photo flip books. This week watch Principal Dancer Sonia Rodriguez putting on her pointe shoes as she gets ready for rehearsal.

Kevin O'Day with Piotr Stanczyk in rehearsal.

In his production of Hamlet choreographer Kevin O’Day used as his starting point the idea that sons have, for better or worse, a “genetic imprint” from their fathers from which they can’t free themselves, and that a father’s influence and his expectations shape the thoughts and actions of the son.

It is no coincidence that Shakespeare names Hamlet after his father. The ghost of Hamlet Senior commands Hamlet to avenge his death but Shakespeare makes it very clear that, if left to himself, Hamlet would do no such thing. Shakespeare also makes very clear that Hamlet and his father had very little in common: King Hamlet was a warrior king, forever off fighting battles, a man of action. Hamlet is the exact opposite: a thinker, an observer, a wit, an intellectual whose mental capacity is so enormous that he is an isolated, lonely figure towering above the other characters. Hamlet may have admired his father; he certainly didn’t love him.

And so Hamlet faces a dilemma: to act or not to act; to avenge his father’s death or not. In confronting his father’s mortality, he confronts his own; in trying to fulfill his father’s expectations of him, he must ultimately ask himself who he is and what he believes in. In the end, he goes into the duel knowing it has been rigged and that he will die. By doing this he defies his father’s expectations because he will not live to kill Claudius and take back the throne. Ironically, Hamlet does end up killing Claudius, but in a fit of rage because Claudius, in trying to kill Hamlet, has brought about the deaths of Gertrude and Laertes. In this way, Hamlet does fulfill his father’s expectations but through impulse rather than premeditated action. No matter how much a son tries to free himself of his father or believes that he is free of his influence, the father will always appear in some part of the son’s actions or thoughts.

Piotr Stanczyk, Kevin O'Day and Guillaume Côté in Hamlet rehearsal.	Piotr Stanczyk and Sonia Rodriguez in rehearsal.
Artists of the Ballet in rehearsal.	Guillaume Côté and Heather Ogden in rehearsal.

All photos by Bruce Zinger.

By Natasha Frid

All movement can be recorded using notation. Dance notation dates back to Louis XIV, who recorded his court dances using his own system of notation. Many choreographers write down their work as well as filming rehearsals.

Benesh Movement Notation is one of today’s principal notation systems, as it is used by ballet companies all over the world. The National Ballet of Canada has several Benesh Movement Notation scores in its archives. One of these scores is Elite Syncopations – this piece will be presented as part of the June Mixed Program.

Senior Ballet Master Peter Ottmann uses notation scores to reconstruct ballets for the company. The scores provide an invaluable reference, including original information that is often forgotten when ballets are passed from dancer to dancer, as movements are adapted to different physiques. Since the intent of a gesture isn’t communicated on film, this crucial information is provided in the notation score. This connects the dancer to the choreographer so that the legacy continues… and the integrity of the choreographer’s vision is retained, even in their absence.

Benesh Movement Notation was created by Rudolf Benesh, who was an artist, accountant and musician, and his wife Joan, a dancer with The Royal Ballet. The score is on a five-line staff, like music, and symbols placed on the staff show the position of body parts. Timing is divided into measures, like music. Small details, like blinking and breathing, can be recorded, as well as group formations, lighting cues, use of props…the options are endless.

Peter Ottmann’s many years with the National Ballet give him the institutional memory that is invaluable in recording and reading a notation score.

Peter Ottmann backstage at The Nutcracker.

Peter Ottmann backstage at Cinderella.

Elite Syncopations opens June 13 and runs for six performances only until June 17.

Natasha Frid is a dance notator for Marie Chouinard and Peggy Baker. She gives pre-show talks for The National Ballet of Canada and is a tutor for the Royal Academy of Dance. She runs her own piano studio in east Toronto.

Photos by Bruce Zinger.

By Jillian Vanstone, Principal Dancer

Jillian Vanstone, photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic.

After a successful tour to Ottawa with John Neumeier’s The Seagull, in which I was so happy to dance the role of Nina once more with Keiichi Hirano as a wonderful Kostya, I boarded a flight Sunday for sunny Los Angeles. I have to admit I was feeling very “Hollywood” because I was being flown down to participate in a press conference. The Music Center in downtown LA was hosting an event to announce their dance series for the 2012/13 season. I am so excited that the National Ballet is part of that season and will perform Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in October.

I arrived in the city and immediately threw off my coat. The temperature low in LA had been Ottawa’s high so I was already getting a treat with the warm sun on my face. I got in a cab and made my way to the historic Millennium Biltmore hotel, an early home of the Academy Awards Ceremony and hotel to celebrities, presidents and dignitaries for the past 85 years (according to their website). It was absolutely stunning and quite honestly filled with beautiful looking people. I spent a little while exploring the architecture and checking out old photos before having a rest in the hotel lounge and then ordering a light dinner before bed.

The lobby of the Biltmore hotel.	Misty Copeland from American Ballet Theatre, Jillian Vanstone and Benjamin Millepied.
Greta Hodgkinson and Jillian Vanstone in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.	Jillian Vanstone and Aleksandar Antonijevic in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

At the press conference the next day everyone was so friendly and welcoming. The passion of those organizing the dance series was incredible, and the excitement in the room was high. I was able to chat with the organizers and also with some of the guests before the season announcement, and everyone attending, from the press to the theatre fans, were so knowledgeable and interesting to speak with. For the main event I shared a raised platform in the Walt Disney Concert Hall with Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theatre and Benjamin Millepied of LA Dance Project, both of whom will also be dancing exciting programs in the coming season. The atmosphere was fun and casual and I of course had no problem saying wonderful things about Alice. My job was made all the easier because the buzz surrounding the ballet had preceded my arrival. Everyone I spoke to had either seen it in Toronto and loved it or had heard all about it. Fantastic!!!

Having just arrived back in Toronto I can’t wait until the tour. Everyone in LA is so thrilled to have us and I am so happy that we are bringing a ballet that is so dear to me.

Jillian Vanstone is a Principal Dancer with The National Ballet of Canada and danced the role of Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the company premiere last season. Follow Jillian on Twitter @JillianVanstone.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland photos by Cylla von Tiedemann.

By Sonia Klimasko-Leheniuk, Violinist

The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra at Koerner Hall.

I am trying to recall if I ever have performed at a concert where the audience was as enthusiastic and excited as they were at The National Ballet Orchestra’s 60th Anniversary Celebration Concert at Koerner Hall.

As fellow violinist James Aylesworth and I were leaving the parking garage on the way to the concert, a group of people saw our violins and asked if we were with the Ballet Orchestra. They said they had bought their tickets a long time ago and could hardly wait. Our chatter as we walked to the hall together was eager and animated.

I have to admit that I felt a bit like Cinderella walking onto the stage to perform. After 37 years of playing with our orchestra, I was “onstage” with these exceptional musicians and for the first time, the primary focus.

The concert was a great success and everything we had hoped it would be. The repertoire our conductor David Briskin chose was representative and poignant.

Two of our dear founding members of The National Ballet Orchestra were in the audience for our concert. Violinists Olga Priestman and Mary Carr both performed at the Eaton Auditorium 60 years ago for the National Ballet’s first performance.

Founding members Olga Priestman and Mary Carr.

David Briskin conducting at the concert.

As I headed to the reception, countless audience members stopped me to say how thrilling the performance had been and how very much they had enjoyed it. What a wonderful evening.

I can’t wait to see what David Briskin has up his sleeve for us next. Last year he arranged a combined concert with his University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra that was excellent. Perhaps a yearly National Ballet Orchestra performance?

Photos by Bruce Zinger.

By Emily Burke, National Ballet Blogger

Supers Catherine, Cindy and Heather before the dress rehearsal.

Supers in ballet are kind of like the extras in movies and television. They’re the people that fill in the scene and react to the action. Except instead of just having to sip coffee in the background of a sitcom or a Tim Horton’s commercial, supers often have to put on enormous, layered gowns, heavy robes and balance tall, feathered headpieces on their powdered wigs. They have to wear all this as they glide gracefully across the stage, mounting and descending grand staircases, while some of the best dancers in the country weave around them on pointe shoes, doing lifts and leaps and jetés. And it’s live!

There are a lot of variables and no room for error.

The Sleeping Beauty, which the National Ballet performed in March, has 32 supers in all, more than any other production in the company, says Senior Ballet Mistress Lorna Geddes. Romeo and Juliet has 17 supers and Swan Lake has around 9, and Lorna looks after all of them. She selects them, assigns them a role and costume, organizes their schedule, runs their rehearsal and oversees each performance from the wings of the stage. This is all on top of her other extensive duties with the company.

The commitment of time and focus from the supers requires real dedication. They’re all regular people with day jobs and busy lives who, for nearly two weeks straight, spend 3 – 10 hours a day with the company. The week before opening night, they have a couple three-hour rehearsals, followed by a long day when they’re integrated onto the stage with the dancers and learn how to handle the props they have to carry. Then there’s the day of the dress rehearsal followed by a run of 11 performances over nine days.

The group in the latest run of The Sleeping Beauty handled it well, said Lorna. “This was a great group, Karen was very happy with them.”

Supers onstage.

Supers onstage.

I stop by for the dress rehearsal to chat with a couple of them before they go onstage. I can tell they’re nervous but excited. They certainly all look happy to be there.

Supers are paid a small honorarium for each day, but it’s just enough “to cover parking and a cup of coffee”, says one of the supers before she goes on. They’re obviously not in it for they money. It must be their love of ballet and the stage that keeps them coming back.

A few of the supers are called back each time the company does a production that needs them. Catherine Durning has been a super since 2003, appearing in most of the Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty shows since.

“I just love being up there with all of the dancers,” says Catherine as she puts last minute touches on her costume. “There’s nothing like being corrected by the very best, by Karen Kain and Peter Ottmann. You get to work with fabulous people. It’s a dream come true to be on stage like that.”

And though she’s done Beauty many times, she still gets really nervous. “When you’re trying so hard and you know that people are depending on you to get it right. And you’re expected to get it right if, like me, you’ve done before. But doing it so many times means nothing! Every time you go out there, it’s always a totally brand new thing. You always have to be focused.”

The role of the super is subtle but vital, and it’s clear they all take it seriously. Not too seriously though – they’re in it for the fun.

All photos by Bruce Zinger.

Emily Burke is a writer and journalist in Toronto. She loves the arts, but ballet in particular. Her favourite productions are Glass Pieces and Onegin. You can follow her on Twitter here.

By Paula Citron

David Briskin. Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic

This week’s blog is an article by Paula Citron that ran in the March issue of Wholenote Magazine about The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra’s upcoming concert debut on April 3 at Koerner Hall.

The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra is coming out of the pit. As part of the National’s 60th anniversary season festivities, the orchestra will give a concert at Koerner Hall on April 3. While the orchestra loves the acoustics at the Four Seasons Centre, being in the pit is not the same as being on stage. The Koerner Hall concert in a prestigious recital hall is a very big deal. Says David Briskin, Music Director and Principal Conductor since 2006: “The concert celebrates the fact that the National Ballet has had a commitment to live music from the very beginning of its existence.”

The creation of the National Ballet Orchestra is entirely due to the vision of company founder Celia Franca. By all accounts, music was very important to her because she was a gifted pianist. The very first National performance featured two pianos because Franca couldn’t afford an orchestra, but it set a precedent. One of the pianists-cum-conductor was George Crum who would become the National Ballet’s first Music Director. Briskin points to another sign that the orchestra has always been an important component of the National Ballet fabric. “Look at the company masthead,” he says. “The music director’s name is right up there with the Artistic Director and Executive Director.”

The Orchestra in 1981. Photo by Andrew Oxenham.

The Orchestra in 2011. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Jean Verch, Orchestra Personnel Manager and music administrator, deems Briskin the most hands-on music director the company has ever had. “David is very pro-development and a strong advocate for the musicians,” she says. In planning the concert’s repertoire, Briskin poured over the archives. He ultimately chose music that is connected to one or another of the company’s artistic directors in some way. There will also be a visual component with famed actor Colm Feore as host and narrator. Briskin is overseeing every detail of the concert.

The concert is made up of ballet music. That’s a given, but Briskin has crafted an exciting line-up of 11 pieces that should show off his orchestra very well. For example, Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances is a tribute both to Franca and to the National’s very first performance at Eaton’s Auditorium on November 12, 1951, when the company presented Michel Fokine’s choreography to Borodin’s fiery music.

Music Director Emeritus George Crum in 1968.

Members of the National Ballet Orchestra in rehearsal. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 honours Alexander Grant who brought Sir Frederick Ashton’s Monotones 11 into the repertoire. Tchaikovsky’s Russian Dance from Swan Lake is a tribute to both Erik Bruhn’s 1969 and James Kudelka’s 1999 versions of the famed ballet. Karen Kain is represented by Joby Talbot’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Suite, composed for Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 world premiere. There are also excerpts from works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Léo Délibes, Ludwig Minkus and Leonard Bernstein.

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By Natasha Frid

Zdenek Konvalina and Sonia Rodriguez.

The Seagull is based on Anton Chekhov’s play. Chekhov himself says:

“A play must be written in which people can come, go, dine, talk about the weather, and play cards, not because that’s the way the author wants it, but because that’s the way it happens in real life.”

The plot, briefly, is:

A boy and a girl are in love with each other … until the girl falls in love with someone else: a man who is currently involved with the boy’s mother. The man and the girl run off together. And then he breaks her heart. The boy is devastated that the girl won’t return to him and kills himself.

Chekhov considered his play to be a comedy.

John Neumeier understands that this is the “Human Comedy”. He extrapolates the metaphors inherent in Chekhov’s text and manifests them on stage so we see and feel the subtext with each exquisite movement on stage. And so the ballet carries us away – to Russia, yes – but also to that emotional plane of existence where dance can take us.

Greta Hodgkinson, Xiao Nan Yu and Piotr Stanczyk.

Greta Hodgkinson.

The Seagull references everything from modern dance to the classicism of Imperial Russia. Perhaps most unique is Neumeier’s use of music as inner dialogue. The dancers either move to the music, or let the music speak for them, depending on whether the dancers are hiding or showing their emotions.

Take flight with The Seagull. And get ready to enjoy more of John Neumeier’s brilliant choreography, because it will be featured again in his ballet Nijinsky, which is on next season’s line-up for The National Ballet of Canada.

Aleksandar Antonijevic, Greta Hodgkinson and Sonia Rodriguez.

Sonia Rodriguez and Zdenek Konvalina.

The Seagull opens tomorrow and runs for seven performances only until March 25.

Natasha Frid is a dance notator for Marie Chouinard and Peggy Baker.

She gives pre-show talks for The National Ballet of Canada and is a tutor for the Royal Academy of Dance. She runs her own piano studio in east Toronto. Natasha will host Ballet Talks for the run of The Seagull. Join her 45 minutes before the performance in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.

All photos by Cylla von Tiedemann.

By Emily Burke

Wandering through the darkened backstage of The Sleeping Beauty dress rehearsal on March 9 felt far more frenetic and energized than Princess Aurora’s century of sleep and dreams. In the half hour before the curtain, dancers hurry from stage left to right and back again, many still only half in costume.

“I don’t know where my cape is,” says former Principal Dancer turned Artist-in-Residence Rex Harrington. He’s dressed head to toe in shimmering gold but his thick black hair has not yet been covered by the large powdered wig of King Florestan, Rex’s role for this production. Though he’s not quite ready to step on stage just yet, he’s as calm and poised off-stage as he is on. And he still has a few minutes for the final details.

At the wig station, First Soloist Rebecca Rimsay is sitting patiently while the large, Queen Elizabeth I style wig is shimmied onto her head. It won’t be long before she’s draped in the dramatic red gown of Carabosse, the wicked fairy, casting spells and crashing parties with her posse of ghouls at King Florestan’s palace.

Along the props table, the ghouls’ creepy masks are lined up and stage-ready but at the next table over there are neatly stacked headpieces of brightly coloured feathers and tulle for the many ladies and gentlemen of the King’s court. Even backstage before the show has begun, the divide between ghouls and feathers, good and evil, is already pronounced.

In the rehearsal studio off stage right, many of the dancers are warming up, stretching and running through the steps for their parts. Principal Dancer Greta Hodgkinson, who will be dancing Princess Aurora for the evening, is in a corner of the large mirrored room, still in sweats and bending in every which way. When it comes time for her to step on stage and dance the famously challenging Rose Adagio, she nails it with grace. But she still has a few minutes to prepare before her first solo after the Prologue.

Artists of the Ballet from the wings.

Corps de Ballet member Rui Huang backstage.

Dancers dressed in ornate leotards and feathered headdresses, ready to go onstage, wait in the wings off stage right, silhouetted by the lights shining from stage left, casting their shadow in the shape of exotic birds. This production is part rococo, part enchanted forest.

By Act II, Guest Artist Evan McKie, who is visiting from Stuttgart, steps on stage as Prince Florimund and is an incredible complement to the style and dancers of the company. He is strong and controlled, and once he’s danced his first solo, the staff and dancers backstage seem at ease seeing that he takes so naturally to the part.

Guest Artist Evan McKie as Prince Florimund backstage.

Elena Lobsanova as Princess Florine and Naoya Ebe as Bluebird from the wings.

The stagehands, make up and hair people, and the rest of the backstage team are focused, fast-working and controlled. They’ve got this whole routine down to an art. It’s as though there’s a careful choreography to the backstage workings to echo that of the onstage performance.

Now it’s time for the curtain call. The music cues, the lights come up and the stage floods with light-footed dancers, the many supers strolling behind in heavy robes and tall wigs, who all take a well-deserved bow.

All photos by Bruce Zinger.