Cambridge University Ballet Club - Giselle

[thewinelake]

Don't suppose anyone else here saw it?

 

Really not a bad effort at all from a bunch of students. Some of the dancers are seriously good and the others put together a credible corps. Hard to believe that some of them hadn't danced before (obviously their moves were restricted to the basics). Given that the workload at Cambridge is high (on account of short terms), I'm struggling to work out how they could have had the required rehearsal time.

 

One slightly annoying thing was that the recorded sound track was a bit distorted at times. I'd have hoped that a music venue such as West Road would have a decent audio system.

 

If all their shows are of this standard, I would recommend them to anyone vaguely near to Cambridge (for future years, obviously).

[Quintus]

Is that club a fairly recent development? The webpage doesn't say but I can't remember it among the myriad of societies when I was there many years ago - shame, as it would have opened my eyes to ballet far earlier.  Will have to keep an eye out for future productions.

[thewinelake]

It wasn't there in my day either!

 

Here's a pic - note that they had no wings or curtains, but managed to tape a Harlequin-style floor on top of West Road's normal wood parquet.

Edited February 19, 2017 by thewinelake

[thewinelake]

Some MUCH better photos from dress rehearsal here: http://photo.johanneshjorth.se/giselle/

[Don Q Fan]

How fabulous is that?! Good on them????

[LinMM]

Wow this looks like a good amateur Company.....lucky dancers and audiences in the Cambridge area!

[Ian Macmillan]

Well, I've sung with Cambridge Phil lots of times in West Rd and I wondered about the hard-used floor for dance, having hauled risers etc etc across it during many concert setups.  That Harlequin-style surface looks fine and that backcloth makes the place look quite different.

[Terpsichore]

Thank you for starting this thread, thewinelake. I regret I did not see this performance but I have bookmarked the Cambridge University Ballet Club website and will try to attend their next show.  

I also googled several other universities to see whether they have ballet clubs too.  Oxford seems to have a ballet club too though its website at http://www.oxuniballet.co.uk/ seems rather dated.

I was particularly pleased to find a Facebook page for a St Andrews Dance Society because I helped to found a society by that name when I was an undergraduate there between 1968 and 1972.  Like the Cambridge students, we had classes on Monday night in a new sports centre.  Our teacher was a biochemistry student called Sally Marshall who had either performed professionally or trained to a high level.  I remember how she trained us to do grands jetes by clapping her hands slowly as we galloped across the studio.  I still have that clapping in my mind's ear when doing grands jetes now.  We even had a pianist.

 

I don't think we ever contemplated a show but we did organize coach trips to nearby cities to see visiting ballet companies.  

 

One of those companies was Western Theatre Ballet which moved from Bristol to Glasgow in 1969.  Before they came to Glasgow there was not much dance in Scotland.  I think our Professor of Fine Arts, John Steer, may have had something to do with the move as he came to use from Bristol where he know the company very well.   It was through Prof. Steer than I got to meet Peter Darrell and many of the dancers.  Indeed, I once ferries them from the Whitehall theatre to their lodgings when they visited Dundee.

 

I think the most ambitious thing I ever did was to bring Western Theatre Ballet to St Andrews for out first university arts festival.  They came on 15 Feb 1971, the day we introduced decimalized currency.  The reason I remember that was that date is that I had to sell programmes at 2/6 or 12 1/2p.

 

I was also a dance critic for 'Αιεν our student newspaper.   I remember having to think of something nice to say about Darrell's Beauty and the Beast or rather Thea Musgrave's score.

I stopped dancing when I went to graduate school in Los Angeles.  In those days there was very little ballet to be had in Southern California and there was certainly no ballet society or even a ballet teacher on campus in the early 1970s,  I resumed ballet in 2013 thanks to a wonderful  teacher in Huddersfield called Fiona Noonan who encouraged me to apply to Northern Ballet#s over 55 class in Leeds.

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[Michelle_Richer]

These guy are running mostly 2 classes a night over 6 days a week, I will be checking them out in the next week or two. They seem to be a very significant amateur company and their classes are open classes.