As you get older, you start seeing history repeating
itself. Just as the US repeats the
mistakes the British made in a previous century in Iraq, so Ireland’s ballet
history is repeating itself. Ballet
in Ireland, inconveniently from the capital Dublin’s point of view, was
founded in the country’s second city, Cork, in the 1940’s, by Joan Denise
Moriarty. She built her ballet
edifice up by putting on annual amateur performances of the classics at the Cork
Opera House, with guest international dancers and choreographers. This eventually embarrassed the government into funding a
national ballet in Cork. Eventually,
the problem of having the company based in Cork when the TV stations,
orchestras, and most of its audience were based in the capital, caused the
country’s Arts Council to close the company in the eighties.
Disgracefully, this left Ireland as one of a tiny number of European
countries without its own national ballet.
Bizarrely, the pattern appears to be repeating itself.
Alan Foley, a student of Miss Moriarty’s, is busy rebuilding a company
in Cork from the ashes left behind by Moriarty.
An intelligent ballet entrepreneur, he recreated a web of children’s
ballet schools across Cork which fund and feed his 14-year old Cork City Ballet. This year’s production of The Kingdom of the Shades
demonstrates that he is well on the way to recreating a decent professional
company in Cork. La Bayadere
exposes a female corps de ballet to greater scrutiny than almost any other
classical ballet, but they rose well to the challenge.
Dragos Mihalcea, guesting from the Dutch National Ballet, was a dashing
Solor, but his costume was not up to standard. His Nikiya was the lovely Korean
ballerina, Eun Sun Jun, from the Royal Swedish Ballet, who, whilst technically
competent, gave a cold interpretation of the role which omitted her love for
Solor.
The
rest of the programme was a mixed bill of new choreography and excerpts from the
classics. The real gem was
Balanchine’s “Who Cares?” to Gershwin.
This was a short but beautiful dance of flirtation in which Eun Sun
Jun’s warm femininity could not fail to trap any passing handsome man, and
Dragos certainly responded in kind. Alan
Foley’s choreography for three men in “Gira Con Me” to music by Josh
Groban was simple and effective. Todd
Fox and Leighton Morrison, with their clean nice lines reflected the
choreography perfectly.
Bodyguard, with jazz ballet choreography by former
Irish National Ballet ballerina Patricia Crosbie, and music by Paul Simon, was a
great crowd pleaser and a perfect vehicle for the company at this stage in its
development. Gone was some of the
slight nervousness from some of the female dancers in some of the classical
variations, and in came a bright sexy vivaciousness which drew wolf whistles
from the appreciative audience.
Foley is at the brink of having a professional company
that will do Irish Ballet proud. The
question is, what will the country’s capital-based arts establishment do about
this conundrum that history has again presented them with?
My instinct is that Foley has the business sense not to repeat
Moriarty’s mistakes and will take this all the way to a fully-fledged national
ballet with a decent national ballet school attached.