World Ballet Day!
Stacey MacNaught |
On October 1st we will celebrate the first ever World Ballet Day with unprecedented access to five leading dance companies. Over a 24 hour period viewers from across the world will have backstage passes to the Australian Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Royal Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada and the San Francisco Ballet.
In recent years the world of dance has striven to demystify itself and become accessible to wider audiences. The success of initiatives such as the Royal Opera House Cinema season, whose production of the Nutcracker last Christmas attracted 129,000 people, has been exceptional. The next screening will take place on October 16th and will be showing Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon. Despite these moves to bring dance to more and more people very few get to see beyond the tutus. Following on from the success of the Royal Ballet’s day in the working life event in March 2012, which was viewed live by 200,000 people and has had over 2.5 million views on YouTube, the World Ballet Day celebrations aim to provide an insight into the way different companies do ballet.
Starting in Melbourn at 12pm local time (3.00am GMT) throughout the day viewers will be treated to footage of classes, rehearsals and interviews with coaches, choreographers and dancers. In addition they will be able to ask questions via Facebook and Twitter. The Royal Ballet’s section which runs from 11am to 3pm will include a peek at Marianela Nuñez and Federico Bonelli rehearsing for Manon, Carlos Acosta coaching principle Vadim Muntagirov, Liam Scarlett rehearsing his new work The Age of Anxiety with Laura Morera and Steven McRae, a whole company rehearsal of Chrisopher Wheeldon’s Aeternum and Frederick Ashtons Scènes de ballet, as well as interviews with choreographer Wayne McGregor and the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare.
Viewers are also being asked to submit videos of themselves performing a pirouette wherever they are in the world, which will become part of the #WorldBalletDay live stream. To celebrate World Ballet Day here at Dancewear Central, we have pledged to donate a pair of ballet shoes to Danceaid for every pair we sell on October 1st. You can watch the day’s event at www.roh.org.uk/worldballetday and for those who cannot watch the events live they will be repeated in full on YouTube. Don’t forget your ballet shoes and have a wonderful World Ballet Day.