Article by:
Lyndsey Winship
The Red Shoes is a story of obsession. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film, Moira Shearer plays gifted ballerina Vicky Page, forced to make an impossible choice between love and career, her life and her dancing.
When that story is re-invented on the Sadler’s Wells stage next week by choreographer Matthew Bourne, two young dancers will take on the leading role. While Ashley Shaw is not about to throw herself in front of a train like Page does (sorry, spoiler alert), and ballerinas these days aren’t forced to choose between career and marriage, she more than understands the character’s obsession with her art. There’s barely an hour in the week when Shaw is not dancing or thinking about dancing. “My whole world has been created around dance,” she says. “I came here from Australia for dance. All my friends are dancers, I met my boyfriend through dance, the reason I live in this country is dance. It becomes the centre of your universe. I can see how it can be all-consuming and potentially tragic. When I can’t dance anymore I’ll struggle to find my place in the world.”
At 27, Shaw probably doesn’t need to worry about that just yet. Her career is in full bloom as a regular leading lady for Bourne’s company New Adventures, and she’s looking forward to playing Page in a show that channels classic movie glamour, with designs by regular Bourne collaborator Lez Brotherston and a cinematic soundtrack of music by Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. It is “very true to the story of the film”, says Shaw, “but with that New Adventures kind of quirk.”
Shaw shares the role of Vicky Page with an even fresher face, 23-year-old Cordelia Braithwaite. The two of them are hailed by Bourne as real stars but they’re very different dancers who took different routes to end up in the spotlight. Shaw was always certain of her path. Growing up in Nelson Bay, a coastal town north of Sydney, she danced from the age of three (her two sisters and brother are also dancers), and at 15 she sent audition tapes to ballet schools all over the world. She was accepted at Elmhurst in Birmingham and had no hesitation in moving halfway around the world to pursue her dream. “Looking back it seems more of a big decision now than it did at the time,” she says.
Braithwaite, on the other hand, never planned to become a dancer. “I wanted to be a vet,” she says. She comes from an un-artsy family in Leighton Buzzard (her mum is a science teacher) and liked dancing as a hobby but it was her teacher who recognised her talent. “I was going to quit and she wouldn’t let me,” says Braithwaite. “She pushed for me to dance. I kind of coasted through college and thought, yeah, maybe this is something I want to do.”
Their paths and personalities are reflected in the dancers they’ve become. “Didi [Cordelia] is one of the most natural dancers I’ve ever seen,” says Shaw. “She has a very free quality. She just shines on stage, without having to try.” Braithwaite squirms in her seat embarrassed by the compliments. “Ash has an incredible computer brain,” she responds. “In rehearsals, she helps me through counts — I’m a bit slow with counts — and she’s impeccable, she makes everything look beautiful and clean, whereas I can be a hot mess when I first learn something. It’s so precise with Ash, that’s a great quality.
“We work so well together but we’re so different. If you walk into our dressing room, Ash has got loads of pretty pink things and I’ve got, like, black,” she laughs. True to form, when we meet in a café near Euston just before they jump on a train to Manchester to perform, Shaw is dressily turned out and perfectly made-up, whereas Braithwaite comes in casual all-black (both of them are extraordinarily pretty, though).
Despite being so different, the pair found common ground and bonded when they discovered a mutual love of real-life crime series — they binged on Forensic Files between shows of Sleeping Beauty — and it’s clear that the kind of back-stabbing rivalry of ballet fiction such as Black Swan just doesn’t exist.
The two are incredibly close. When Braithwaite’s boyfriend, the dancer Jonathan Ollivier, was killed in a motorbike accident last summer, Shaw was “like a sister to me”, says Braithwaite. “It’s really made our bond strong.” The loss of Ollivier is still very raw. “The company picked me up when I felt I couldn’t really carry on,” says Braithwaite. “It’s hard to express how much they’ve done for me.”
The girls talk about the strong sense of family at Bourne’s company, again so different from the kind of authoritarian rule and fear and friction shown in films such as The Red Shoes. That closeness is partly a result of the amount of time the company spends touring together all around the world. They have a strong following in the US and in Asia — the Japanese fans are particularly eager, Shaw says, always waiting at the stage door after the show. “They’re lovely, they give you presents,” says Braithwaite, although sometimes those presents can be a little unnerving. “The strangest one was when I was given a scrapbook of pictures of me at the stage door,” says Shaw. “But as I got further into it, there were pictures of me on the street, at Starbucks, close-ups of my feet...”
Braithwaite isn’t keen on being a star, she’s not interested in fame, but Shaw thinks it would be nice for dancers to get a bit more recognition. “There are famous singers and actors but if you ask someone to name a ballerina they probably only know Darcey Bussell. You pour so much of your heart into it, your physical self, you pour everything into it,” she says. “Dance deserves to have more stars.”
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