Article by:
Charlotte Lytton
It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and the English National Ballet (ENB)’s dancers are assuming their usual positions on the studio floor: Tamara Rojo, the company’s renowned Artistic Director and lead principal, always practises closest to the piano – others flock to their spot of choice by the mirror, the door, or the barre in the middle of the room in a flurry of swirling skirts and taffeta tutus.
But this is a warm-up with a difference: the cast are not rehearsing for one piece but three as part of She Said, a new trio of performances by female choreographers from various corners of the globe. The production is Rojo’s brainchild – in her two decades dancing on stages from St Petersburg to Tokyo, including 12 years with the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, she had never performed a piece created by a woman. Reaching out to Aszure Barton, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Yabin Wang, ballerinas-turned-choreographers from Canada, Belgium and China respectively, a three-pronged performance was born.
“I don’t think you can see it in a piece if it’s done by a female or not,” Lopez Ochoa muses. “But maybe the way women are portrayed is more layered, because we know our inner struggles and what we hide, why we hide it, and men are not so aware of that pain instilled in us from a young age.”
Having moved from the front to the back of the stage more than a decade ago after finding herself “without the emotional space for dance” any longer, the half-Colombian, half-Belgian choreographer has often found that male creatives get promoted more quickly than their female counterparts, reinforcing the importance of an event likeShe Said. “When a young male choreographer is talented, they get
more opportunities, so they’ll do in six years what I’ve done in 12,” she says. She is not resentful, though, because “like a good wine, sometimes you need time to mature.”
Lopez Ochoa’s narrative production, Broken Wings, charts the life of Frida Kahlo – a subject she landed upon after Rojo asked her to select a literary or historical female character who was “damned and doomed.” The famed artist will be portrayed by the company’s lead dancer – a role for which Rojo, 41, has been preparing by undertaking daily personal training sessions at 8:30am.
For 32-year-old Wang, who flits between dancing and choreography and has performed with the Bolshoi and at New York’s Lincoln Center, Medea was the obvious choice. Her retelling, M-Dao, blends western
ballet with Chinese dance, and seeks to explore the mythological sorceress’s “strong and soft sides as a human being,” Wang explains. She compares her imagining to the “traditional Chinese thinking that a woman is like the ocean – sometimes very quiet, and at others, strong and scary.”
Someone who knows this inner torment better than most is Laurretta Summerscales, who stars as Medea. The 25-year-old from Woodham, Surrey has spent eight arduous weeks preparing for the part, usually dancing from midday until 6:30pm without a break. While the physical challenges of the performance have been abundant – the piece calls for dancers to wear different-shaped ballet shoes on each foot – it is the emotional tumult that has been thorniest of all. “The fact you have to get yourself rared up to kill your own children really takes you aback, and you have to put yourself in that position to act it every time,” she says. “If we don’t do that, the audience won’t get it.
“Ballet is a way to express yourself and take an audience to another place, take them away from the life that they’re in,” she continues, “and that’s something we must really remember. It’s something special.”
It’s no wonder Summerscales sounds so dedicated to her art: she spent her childhood training at her mother’s dance academy after school every day before attending the ENB School aged 16. “I didn’t have many friends, that’s probably why I put so much into it,” she recalls. “When I think back to how much I used to do, I don’t think I could cope with that now.”
Summerscales says her time at the vocational institution was “amazing” – she quickly found like-minded friends, and for the first time she felt like she wasn’t “weird.” But the challenges weren’t over: she didn’t have the required lissom form of a ballerina until well into her training, and “nobody paid attention to me until my body started changing.”
Once it did, she was offered a contract with the main company before her course had ended, and she cut it short by a year to join full-time in 2009.
“You go from being a big fish in a small pond to feeling like you’re in the sea and you’re nothing,” she says of her transition from school to the ballet proper. Determined to prove herself, she attended every rehearsal of the ballet’s production of Gisele until a teacher noticed her watching from the sidelines and hauled her in, two days before the opening night.
The achievement still means a great deal to Summerscales, as well it should. When we meet at Markova House, the ENB’s headquarters a week ahead of She Said’s first night, she is wide-eyed and earnest, folding herself up small in her chair and sure to leave just enough time to make a punctual arrival at her morning warm-up class – an indication of how she got to where she is, and that she will not, under any circumstances, be letting that dedication slip.
When she was cast in Gisele, a fellow dancer wrote down a step-by-step guide to the mime the performance required, ensuring that Summerscales wouldn’t be caught short. It’s the kind of anecdote that dissipates a little of the industry’s cut-throat reputation: there are no sabotage attempts à la Black Swan, she smiles – even if “all of those emotions are there” – but judgement is a constant. “When I got cast as the main role in Swan Lake, a lot of people thought ‘Why her? I don’t think she’s anything special,’” she remembers. “After that month, one girl came up to me and said ‘I really didn’t think you were going to be good, but you proved me wrong.’”
Summerscales is “competitive,” she acknowledges, but is equally prone to self-doubt: when casting changes unexpectedly, for example, or another dancer congratulates her while admitting they’d love the role for themselves in the same breath, it’s easy for uncertainty to creep in. “Someone will always have a better body than me, and someone will always be able to do something technically better than me,” she says.
“What I’ve learnt is to be confident and to trust yourself.”
She Said is at Sadler's Wells from Wednesday 13th - Saturday 16th April.
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