Birmingham Royal Ballet is off to America to perform and fly the flag for the city. Roz Laws discovers just what it takes to send a £1m show Stateside.
Technicians at Birmingham Royal Ballet load lorries with sets for Coppelia
For all the muscles that flex so impressively on stage, many more have been hard at work behind the scenes to bring a ballet to an audience.
And it takes even more effort if the ballet is being performed in Norfolk, Virginia, and you have to get 110 people and 2,000 items across the Atlantic.
It’s all elegance and beauty on stage, but it starts in the less than glamorous surroundings of an industrial estate in north Birmingham.
In a huge warehouse, men are loading scenery on to a 40ft long truck, with one of three containers to be shipped to America.
They will contain costumes, sets, backdrops, props, sound equipment, lighting, wigs, shoes, make-up, portable ballet barres, physiotherapy equipment and wardrobe equipment like steamers, irons, washing powder and sewing boxes.
In one container alone are 196 costumes on 31 rails, 215 pairs of boots and 10 wicker baskets of wigs and headdresses.
They will take up to three weeks to make the journey by sea freight and overland, allowing for customs clearances.
The items are all for the ballet Coppelia, which will be performed at the Virginia Arts Festival in Norfolk, US. It’s the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s third visit to the festival, which this time they are headlining.
Peter Wright’s Coppelia, an ever-popular enchanting celebration of love featuring magic and a living doll, will be danced three times from April 19 at Chrysler Hall. Dancers will also perform in schools to bring ballet to a whole new audience as part of BRB’s education work.
The Coppelia costumes are stored in Dudley, in a climate controlled environment at a constant temperature.
But the scenery and props are stored in a anonymous-looking warehouse in north Birmingham, into which they expanded in 2000. I find a group of burly men loading the ‘flattage’ – large flat pieces of scenery. Some are beautifully painted but some are plain black. These will be used to create a false proscenium arch, a black frame downstage.
In the middle of the vast space, hanging from a ceiling that’s 30 feet high, is the ‘flown cherub dressing’ which comes down at the end of Act Three of Coppelia.
The warehouse is a treasure trove of props and objects, like an old, fabric covered chair from Sylvia that’s officially ‘dead’ – no longer needed in the production – but which isn’t really, because they never get rid of anything. Recycling is the buzzword here, so it might have another life in another show.
Over here is a large bell used in the Coppelia wedding scene, over there are parts of a garden set and the doll’s chair.
On a case is written Japanese calligraphy which means ‘This way up, do not tip’.
Doug Nicholson, head of scenic presentation, explains: “Because we don’t throw anything away, we are running out of space again. We are fortunate that most of our ballets are successful, so we need huge areas in which to store all the scenery and props for more than 100 productions.”
It’s not as if they are gathering dust, waiting for the next time BRB brings them out of storage to perform them. Far from it, as companies around the world hire them out at a ballpark cost of around £40,000.
They use their own dancers but the production is very much a BRB one and an increasingly source of revenue for the company. They even fly Birmingham staff out to help out with tricky technical details – senior lighting technician Chris Hooley is on his way to Atlanta where Carmina Burana is being performed.
“They have a different voltage in the States,” he explains. “They run at half the voltage, which means lights appear dimmer. Sometimes that’s the effect we want but at other times we need huge transformers to up the voltage.”
This year alone, the National Ballet of Japan is hiring Take Five, Penguin Cafe and E=MC², and the Sarasota Ballet of Florida is staging La Fille Mal Gardee.
Four containers full of Romeo and Juliet scenery and costumes have been to Korea and are due to go to the Queensland Ballet in Australia and Uruguay next year.
Romeo and Juliet is a Kenneth MacMillan ballet, first performed by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1965. The choreographer was artistic director of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet, the forerunner of BRB, which was actually performing his Romeo and Juliet at its home at the Birmingham Hippodrome on the night he died in 1992.
Doug says: “Our Romeo and Juliet is especially popular abroad. We have other ballets like Checkmate which go back to the 1940s. We have ballets that other companies don’t have and our stock of British repetoire is unique.
“We have acclaimed Peter Wright productions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, as well as Coppelia.
“Our current artistic director, David Bintley, is becoming a very sought-after choreographer so we’re increasingly hiring out his productions like Carmina Burana and Penguin Cafe.”
This version of Coppelia, first performed by BRB at the Hippodrome in 1995, has been to Japan six times and Germany twice.
It’s a £1 million production, including all the costumes, so everything has to be carefully looked after and constantly repaired.
BRB take their own cushioned dance floor with them, loaded last on to the trucks so it comes off first. They also ship their own ballet barres, as the company has daily classes. Normally in studios they would be against the wall, but on tour they hold the classes in the middle of the stage.
The dancers are expecting a warm welcome in Norfolk, where arts lovers are particularly impressed by the Royal in the BRB’s name. Having the Queen as a patron doesn’t do them any harm, while they also carry the City of Birmingham name across the world.
* Coppelia is also performed at Birmingham Hippodrome from June 4-8. For tickets ring 0844 338 5000 or go to www.birminghamhippodrome.com.
Sounds very interesting.
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