The London Ballet Circle - Promoting interest in dance and kindred arts

Bruce Sansom
Director, CentralSchool of Ballet
11 February 2008
Church of Scotland Hall, London WC2

Robin Key, Chairman of the London Ballet Circle, welcomed Bruce Sansom. Robin began by asking Bruce about the main projects being worked on this term at the Central School.

BS: Ballet Central is a touring company for our third year students and everybody is currently rehearsing for the tour. We had an event on Friday evening for some of our friends which was a little bit of a preview so now we work for the next few weeks to get everything up and running for the opening night.

RK: Tell us a little bit about the everyday business of the School.

BS: Everyday business is mammoth! I think when I took over the School I had no idea how many staff there were. There are about 60 – although many of those are part-time staff who perhaps do just one class a week.

We have three year groups and mostly each is split into two classes – ladies and men. I made a point when I first arrived that we were not going to call them girls and boys any more, primarily because at the age of 37 when I left the Royal Ballet I was still being called a boy!

The teachers working with the first year students try to make them understand the basics. That might sound strange – working with 16 and 17 year olds on understanding the basics - but often a lot of them have not been in full-time vocational training so it is about raising the standards for them and making sure they are very secure about what they are doing.

In the second year it is much more about development and pushing them on to get them ready for the third year of the course when they are really turning into performers.

I find that a lot of my time is spent running the School rather than actively engaging with the artistic and teaching element. I get to do it occasionally and I get to watch it occasionally and it is always a joy because it means I can get away from my desk. I have a very strong administrative and artistic staff and I know that they are getting on with business very well.

RK: Tell us about the background of the School.

BS: This is the School’s 25th Anniversary so it is a big and important year for us. The School has been based at its current building for the last 23 years – we were two years working at The Place. In fact it was the School and the RambertSchool that were going to create one body, then there was a shift in approach and Christopher Gable and Ann Stannard formed Central themselves.

Christopher’s reason for establishing the School was, I think, a little bit of a reaction over what happened to him over the first night casting for Romeo and Juliet. Obviously he was very hurt by what had happened. Christopher’s reaction was that it was all about the balance of technique with artistry - he wanted to instil back into the training curriculum a sense of artistry. That was the core purpose of the School – to redress the imbalance with technique, where it had been thought that artistry would come later. He wanted artists to become technically proficient and that is what we still strive for at Central.

You would expect the three main ballet schools in London: The Royal Ballet School, The English National Ballet School and ourselves, to be very competitive but in fact we all recognise that we are all trying to train different students – sometimes for the same ends but sometimes for slightly different ones. This allows us all to look at students with different eyes.

Central was in further education until about four years ago when it transferred to the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama and in effect became a higher education institute, which means we are the equivalent of a university. We have 16 year old students coming to us with their training paid for by the Government as if they were at university. They can come out after two years with a foundation degree and if they complete the third year they get a BA Honours. We are the only ballet school that offers this opportunity.

Our advantage is that we can take students who would normally have to pay the full fees themselves. Instead they pay a contribution to their training and this has opened up an opportunity for people who would not otherwise be able to consider vocational training. This has been great because there are a lot of very talented people out there. The change of status also meant a huge change for us at Central because it made us much more focused on process. We are validated by KentUniversity, our awarding body, and it is very stringent. All the students have to pass modules and the assessment criteria are very strict. Rather than one assessment every term, they have a multitude of assessments every term across all the different styles of dance training.

The student numbers haven’t changed much. We have 105 students – about 35 students in each year. My aim has been to redress the balance of female to male students – we currently aim to achieve a 2:1 ratio.

RK: You arrived at the School in 2006. What have been the main changes you have brought about?

BS: The main one I am working towards and that I hope will come to fruition is to move the School to a new building.

We don’t own our current building – we rent it from the local Catholic Church and our lease runs out in September 2010. We have identified a site and are working with a partner for a new building in Southwark, just over BlackfriarsBridge. It would be wonderful for everybody involved as there is a climate of culture there that our students could interact with. I have spent the last year working on that and will probably spend the next three or four years working on it.

Other things have included tidying up and strengthening the administrative side. I see myself doing a dual role – I am in effect both Monica Mason and Anthony Russell-Roberts. I am in charge of the artistic side and I am in charge of the administrative side. That is very challenging but also very rewarding. I have been building a team. The artistic staff has changed a little bit but not much but the administrative team has been strengthened a lot.

RK: Have you changed the core approach to teaching?

BS: I had not done a lot of teaching beyond teaching professional dancers. My own training days seem so long ago, my only feeling was that I didn’t want to put them through some of the same things.

What has changed is the way students are approached and trained. There is far less emphasis on perfection in the sense that if you don’t achieve it, you have failed. It is not about rewarding people for doing things badly but ensuring that they have the opportunity to achieve their full potential. It can be a very damaging art form in that we are all such perfectionists. You see a lot of young students and even young professionals in a company environment who are beating themselves up about things unnecessarily. There are so few who are perfect that within any company there is scope for those with a range of different skills, standards and abilities. Take a company like the Royal Ballet, with Alina at the very top, then you have principal character artists then the corps de ballet. So you have to think what people can offer and it is also about managing their expectations.

RK: The School has a fantastic roster of Patrons, Governors and Friends. Do you find it easy to harness their input and ideas?

BS: I think I am fortunate in that I know quite a few of them from my professional career. I use them as and when appropriate but I tend to use far more dancers from the Royal Ballet and invite them to come in to rehearse and coach. This has far more of an effect on our students. Our students are 16 to 19 years old, they don’t even know who I was – never mind people much older than me! So I have had a lot of fun using former colleagues. It also gives them an insight as to what it is like to work with students; how to motivate them and how difficult it is to work with students compared with professional dancers. Professional dancers understand very quickly whereas students take time. It can be quite tough at times - you can take three steps forward, then two and half back but you keep hoping that it is going in the right direction.

RK: Remind us how you came into ballet. Did you come from an artistic background?

BS: No, not at all. My father was a scientist and my mother was a nurse. We lived in Newbury and I was the youngest of four children. I had an older brother and two sisters. On Saturday mornings my parents would do the weekly shop and would take with them my brother who was five years older than me because he could behave. They would take my two sisters to a ballet class and I would be pinned to a seat to watch my sisters. But no three year old is prepared to be pinned to a seat so I just got up and joined in. Eventually the teacher turned to my parents and said “It is either 50p or take him shopping!” So 50p was exchanged and I started dancing. Over the next three or four years my sisters gradually stopped but I kept going.

RK: What got you to the Royal Ballet School?

BS: I really got a kick out of doing ballet. I can’t remember how old I was but my father would drive me up every Saturday to the old dance studio that is now The Sanctuary – Danceworks? I would come up and all I really remember is a teacher called Jo Carr who was really severe but good fun and the fantastic milkshakes at a bar with a massive aquarium!

My teachers thought I was good enough to audition for the RoyalBalletSchool. I didn’t really know what it was but I came up and did the first audition and passed it. At the second audition I realised it was something I really wanted and so I was thrilled I when got in.

I went to the RoyalBalletSchool for eight years. I was in the same year as David Yow, Jonathan Cope and Simon Rice so it was a good group.

RK: What did you enjoy most about your time at the Royal Ballet School?

BS: A lot of my colleagues say they would never go there again which I find extraordinary. I got some pretty good training, I got what I wanted out of it and I got a job at the end of it. There were some horrific teachers – these days you wouldn’t let them in a studio – but they knew how to teach. However, the teacher-pupil relationship has shifted so much since then.

I employ one of my graduate teachers – he is the Artistic Director of Ballet Central, Bill Glassman. It should feel strange but it is really fantastic. It is a good and easy relationship. Patricia Linton is a great lady. She is in every week teaching the students Dance Studies so they understand the context of when ballets were created and how it reflected society at that time.

RK: How did the news come through that you were joining the main company?

BS: I had danced in the School’s end of year performance and had partnered Sandra Madgwick who got a contract quite literally as the curtain came down. Peter Wright offered her a job. I have to say that was one of the most deflating moments of my life - I was a second year and there was no way I was getting a job but ...

By the next end of year performance for some reason my year group got very, very agitated about whether we were going to get jobs. In those days you were not encouraged to go off and audition. There was an assumption that if you went off and auditioned elsewhere, you were showing that you weren’t interested - so we didn’t do it. We almost did a union-effort where we went in to see the headmistress, I think it was MerlePark, to ask what would be happening to us. Then we were reassured that everything was fine. I think we were told before the School performance. I was actually quite badly injured at the time of the School show so I was glad I got my job beforehand!

RK: What are your recollections of joining the Company? Did your early roles live up to your expectations?

BS: We had all done a few performances as students which had been great. I loved the atmosphere in the Company. There was a wonderful sense of hierarchy and so when you went into the studio you had to pick your place at the barre with care! I had the same place at the barre the whole time we were at Barons Court. It was territorial and it was a comfort zone, you found where you wanted to be. You really got the sense that to jostle and to promote yourself was not the thing to do but I didn’t give a damn. I was happy to be just a bit pushy. I was physically very slight so no-one expected anything of me but I just kept on making sure I was doing what I needed to do.

I remember a solo as Floristan which was absolutely fantastic then I did the Pas de Quatre from SwanLake on tour in Japan and it was phenomenal. Other opportunities came along. Fred got me to do Fille which was during my second year in the Company. We did that for the Queen Mother’s birthday. We did the matinee performance and in the evening Anthony Dowson was suddenly called in at two days notice to replace Jay Jolley with Ros Whitten. This meant there was no pressure on me, I had done the role – I did the role in the School performance and I knew what I was doing – it was hard work and I was going to be lucky to get through it but here was someone who literally had two days to learn it. That meant that I could divert my attention and give him as much help as a little diddly squat corps de ballet member could – that helped to calm my nerves.

RK: One of the features of your career was the number of contemporary choreographers you worked with. How does that have a bearing on what you do today?

BS: Quite a lot have a bearing on what I do now. Richard Alston did a piece for me and Ashley Page which we did at Riverside Studios about 30 years ago. At that time I had no concept of who Richard Alston was, which was a shame because it was an interesting process and I enjoyed it but I didn’t realise at the time how important that was.

Of the others, probably the most significant was Siobhan Davies. Siobhan had had no relationship with the Company whatsoever up to that point. She didn’t know our working practices, she didn’t know our skills – apart from Deborah Bull who had gone to work with her. Sue, as she is known to us, was getting us to improvise and I just could not do it. She would give you a little bit of guidance. For example, she would get you to spell your name out using your limbs – carving letters in the air. It was such a source of anxiety but she created a wonderful duet for me and Deborah. Then I sort of got it and started to discover things about myself and by the last couple of performances I went completely wild. I discovered exactly how freeing it was to leave behind your classical technique and let your body and the information that you carry with you, take over. It was really liberating and I never thought I would say that about doing contemporary work. It is something that I really cherish and treasure and try to instil in my students. You need to transfer skills from your classical technique into your contemporary work but especially the reverse. You will see students in their classical technique pulling up and up, away from the floor and it is almost the reverse in contemporary work – but you can be both at the same time.

Will Tuckett – fascinating. How many people saw Turn of the Screw? How many people liked it? That wasn’t the impression we got at the time! It was quite a process he went through. It was the only time I played a female role. It was quite a journey for the whole cast. We all knew exactly what Will was trying to do. Here is the lesson – we all knew what he was trying to do so we couldn’t understand why the audience didn’t seem to get it. The premiere was at Sadler’s Wells and there was a dinner afterwards for the sponsors and we were all placed on tables. Here were all the people who had supported the ballet and yet not one of them talked about it. Not one! They liked the other two pieces on that evening but ... it was really bizarre. There was an example of where you can be so involved in a piece but one which has no resonance with the audience. I have a lot of time for Will and I think what he does is fascinating. He doesn’t always get it right but then I am not sure how many people do. He has a really interesting determination to do narrative work which we miss out on a lot these days.

RK: Tell us about working with Macmillan on Prince of the Pagodas.

BS: OK – four Kings, each one with a slight personality disorder – that’s about as much as I want to say!

Kenneth was not a particularly healthy man at this point in his life and it was a time that was very arduous for him and the dancers. He was also battling with the Britten Foundation about trying to re-order the sequence of the score but they refused. I think they made a grave mistake and it really hampered him. If they had allowed it, the story could have been much more clearly told. It would have been a much better ballet if they had allowed that to happen.

I also did the Salamander – I think I only did two or three shows. Anthony fainted one day - it was the only time he collapsed backstage – but it was just before Bonnie Moore and myself went on to do our leading roles for the first time in Prince of the Pagodas. I thought it was rather an extreme way of avoiding our performance! I loved doing that role. Doing the King of the East was torture. I don’t know if you remember the solo? I watched the video up to the end of my solo and had to turn it off and I have never gone back to it. There is some fantastic stuff in the ballet but during my solo the whole Company would fall asleep on stage – they would send me up rotten! There was I, trying to look in my mirror, and they would all be snoring! When Anthony finally joined in with that, I gave up! But I loved the scene I had with Darcey – that was a fantastic piece of theatre.

RK: Which were your favourites from amongst the classics?

BS: That’s always a dangerous question. I know what my least favourites were. I found Albrecht really tough – not just physically but emotionally. I felt too lightweight for it. I didn’t have the gravitas or the physicality I think it demands. I loved doing it but I felt it was a step too far for me but I would never have admitted it at the time. Looking back, that was probably my least favourite.

I was one of the very few who loved doing Sleeping Beauty. I think it is an absolute gem of a ballet and I get worried when people start adding bits to it that just are not necessary. It is so pure and so perfect. I got a kick out of it. I would wear brand new white shoes every third act – normally you would live in your shoes for quite a while but I would live in them a couple of days with socks over the top to keep them perfect! Everything was immaculate – it sounds barking mad now – but it was really important to me.

I did my first Swan Lake with Lesley Collier – what an opportunity that was – at the Kennedy Centre in Washington. She was naughty! I don’t quite know why but she would never let me run through Act Three. There would always be something wrong and we would either stop or have to start again - so I never knew what it was like to run though Act Three. When we finally got to it I thought ‘in for a penny – let’s go for it’ and it was fantastic! Everything worked, everything was great and I came off and said “Let’s do it again!” I had all this energy and I had had all that worry about whether I could get through it but it was a doddle!

Most of what we do is hard and it is tiring but you have a huge rehearsal period to prepare for it. If you haven’t done your prep, then it is tough but that’s your fault. I am pretty brutal about that. I loved rehearsal and I loved preparation and I loved running things so when I got on stage I knew that if something went wrong, it would be chance and not because I had not done the work on it. For example, at the end of my career, Romeo and Juliet was a complete thrill but it really is tiring.

RK: From time to time you worked with other companies. Did you enjoy engrossing yourself in a new company and working with them?

BS: The main company I worked with was San Francisco Ballet. During my time with the Royal Ballet there were a lot of people who said that they just wanted to get away but didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t want to leave but I did want to see what it would be like elsewhere. I managed to establish a relationship with San Francisco Ballet right at the time when I could go away for a year and still keep my job when I came back.

It was fascinating. Companies tend to have an internal persona and an external persona – countries do as well. In England we tend to think of Americans as brash, aggressive and unpleasantly competitive. The reality in San Francisco was quite the reverse. The company worked incredibly hard. It did eight programmes per season and their season would start in February and go through until May. They do three world premieres per season and three new acquisitions per season so that is six works they have to learn along with revivals of works they have done recently. In fact this year they are doing ten world premieres as part of their 75th Anniversary and I am going to go over to see them because they are doing all of them in a week.

Just working where you are different is quite fun. At that time they didn’t have many narrative works so that was something I brought that was different, along with a less athletic approach and a more refined style to the classics. I go out there as often as I can.

RK: When did the realisation come about that you would have to look for something else after being a principal for so many years?

BS: There was a whole series of things. You look around and see your colleagues getting older then you look in the mirror too! I never wanted to be in the position where someone would come to me and say “That wasn’t a great show.” I wanted to be in control. I didn’t want someone else to have to orchestrate the diminishment of my work. I tried to become a character artist but no-one was interested! I really wanted that but it didn’t happen. I realised that I could only be a classical ballet dancer for so long. New, young choreographers were coming in and they were working with the younger people who were coming up. I had had some great opportunities. I had worked with David Bintley and Siobhan right at the end but it became clear that all I would be doing was repeating roles that I had done for the last five, eight, twelve years. The danger there is that, rather than becoming more proficient at it, your ability diminishes. It is that typical thing just your artistic credibility grows your physical attributes decline. So I thought about how to deal with it and about what I wanted to do.

I decided right at the beginning that it would be my last season and I spent it working out what was next. I applied to go to City University to do MA in Arts Management and got told to go away! Then I applied to Warwick to do their MA in Arts Management and they were fantastic. I had to write for them a 5,000 word paper - I hadn’t written anything since O levels so it really was a big challenge – it was on Cultural Expansion in Iceland! They offered me a place and I was absolutely thrilled. Then I had dinner with the Director of San Francisco Ballet and I explained to him what I thought I wanted to do, then a few weeks later he called me and asked if I would like to do an apprenticeship with him in San Francisco. Then I had the dilemma of choosing between Warwick or a directorship opportunity in San Francisco – so I chose San Francisco!

It was great. I worked in every department in the admin and I taught class most days and I also rehearsed ballets and was responsible for one Robbins ballet. Generally I was thrown into everything including just about every meeting – in normal circumstances you just wouldn’t get the chance to do something like this but it was hugely rewarding and an opportunity to grow.

I knew I wanted to run an organisation but I was thinking more along the lines of being the artistic director of a company. However, most artistic directors are or were choreographers so my opportunity to break into that area was limited. I needed other skills. I wanted to be a director who could understand, collaborate and participate in all aspects of the job.

RK: But you did do some formal studies.

BS: I went to Washington to the Vilar Institute for Arts Management at the Kennedy Centre under Michael Kaiser – Michael had joined there shortly after leaving the Royal Opera House. He and I had kept in touch. I told him about the fantastic experience of a year at the San Francisco Ballet but that I didn’t feel I had enough in the administrative area of my skills. He said “Check out our website in two weeks time.” When I check it out, there was this new programme which sounded perfect. It was another year working in a very different arts organisation and where I could find out much more about the administrative side but also keeping me involved to an artistic degree. So I took it up.

It was very powerful. We were the first year group and we were very much the guinea pigs. They have since re-structured it a little bit but there was a lot of value in it. The combination of the experience of both those years stood me in good stead.

RK: You had stayed in the US for quite some time. Did you consider staying there to work?

BS: I think if the opportunity had been there, yes. I like the US, particularly the West Coast and especially San Francisco. It is a very small city – it has one opera, one ballet and one symphony and one major theatre company but the community support for them is phenomenal. You feel you are at the centre of the community rather than one of many like in London. Both cities have their pluses. It is a very manageable city and you feel very at home there very quickly.

RK: But you returned to the UK, to Rambert.

BS: Yes, I applied for the position that Mark Baldwin now holds - Artistic Director – and I had a very interesting interview and I got on with everybody very well but my visions of what the company needed to be did not fit in with theirs at all.

Then they rang me up to say that they had got this job as Head of Development, a fundraiser, whose role it was to gear up a capital campaign to fund the move to Coin Street, behind the National Theatre on the Southbank. So I went in and held that position for a year to do a feasibility study and to prepare the ground. I can’t claim that I was a particularly competent fundraiser but I was pretty good at the bits they really needed me to do.

It was an eye-opener because I had no contact with the artistic side whatsoever and in the end I just couldn’t function. So it taught me that although I could do it, I didn’t want to do that , that I needed to find something that would allow me to do both.

RK: Is your current role the best of both worlds of both schools and companies?

BS: Yes and No. As I mentioned before, there is a vast difference between working with professional dancers and students. There is great value in both but my professional expertise is working with professional dancers. I would also like to think that I am pretty good at challenging students to think about what it takes to become a professional dancer. But I would not be a very good teacher in terms of taking a year group from September through to July - there are other people who are incredibly experienced, proficient and skilled at that.

What I love is the whole arc of my job. One of the big challenges is that when you are a dancer you are told what to do and when to do it and who to do it with and you kind of accept it. You don’t see any of the other mechanisms that are happening around you. Now I am making sure that all those other mechanisms are happening and I can tweak them towards the strategic vision of the School and it is that bit that I love.

I would like to see the art form moving on and keeping the artists energised through a commitment to new works.

A member asked what style of dance training Bruce preferred.

BS: I sit on the Cecchetti Trust so of course I kind of like Cecchetti, however, at the School we do not follow a particular syllabus – we have our own. We have introduced RAD to our junior school. Our junior school is a community class where we have about three hundred youngsters who come through the door each week from ages 3-11. I quite like the rigour and the discipline of it but I would quite like for there to be more creative dancing in there. So sometimes I think styles like Cecchetti and RAD are about being able to benchmark and demonstrate to yourself and to your parents and your school that you have achieved certain goals but I am not sure how useful it is to me as an artist.

A member asked Bruce if it had taken him long to adapt to his new career.

BS: About two minutes! I got back to my dressing room, took my make up off and dropped my shoes in the bin – then took them out again because I thought of someone I could give them to at the stage door – it was as simple as that!

I had made the decision to stop, it had been my choice. I stopped on a debut – I did Lescaut for the first and only time – which I recommend to anybody retiring – go out on a debut because you cannot judge it against a previous performance and you are not going to go back and do it again.

I knew what I was going to do months before I told the Company I was retiring. It was the Lilian Hochhauser season and Anthony Dowell called me into the office and told me we were doing a Hochhauser season and that we were going to be doing Manon and then he asked me if I would like to do Lescaut. I thought yes, I would do it as of course it meant that I would get shot and die at the end of my career, so the whole thing was a wonderful conclusion.

However, I found my diet didn’t catch up for another couple of weeks - I was still packing in the carbohydrates then I realised I had to stop!

I really didn’t miss performing. I love seeing other people perform and I get a little frustrated when I see people doing things which are a little inappropriate. I don’t mind seeing people do things badly because they are not competent but I do mind when they start messing around with things.

Life has been pretty fraught for the last year but I have now got tickets for eight different productions over the next two months or so: New York City Ballet, Stuttgart and a lot at Sadler’s Wells – I am seeing Pina Bausch – there is a company where I nearly ran away to join the circus! I would have hated it but it would have been quite an experience!

RK: Update us on Stephanie Joyce who was our sponsored pupil at the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars last year.

BS: Thank you to everyone for that – she had a great time up there.

She is in Canada at the moment auditioning. She is one of our third year students and of course we encourage them to go out and find jobs. By not being affiliated to any one company, our students are much freer to go out and consider what their options are. So she is off with a couple of colleagues auditioning for several companies and is due back this weekend.

RK: Please send her our very best wishes. We were delighted to see her at our party and hopefully this is a successful trip for her.

A member then asked about Bruce’s partners.

BS: I did partner a lot of different people. There were key people like Karen Paisey – we did Fille and Dream together a lot. I did a lot of roles with Lesley Collier and Viviana Durante and Fiona Chadwick. I did a tiny amount of work with Darcey. I did a lot of Months with Sylvie. It was quite an experience to be working with someone like that. It was at the time when Sylvie had worked her way through quite a few casts of A Month in the Country! She would do a performance and then say “Non.” But somehow we made it work. She would look you in the eye and then you were there in the moment, not doing a performance, and there were lots of moments in A Month in the Country that allowed that to happen. Without taking risks with the choreography, you could take risks with the drama of it all. That was very special. She is like no other.

I also worked with Alina – albeit only all too briefly. It was fantastic. I think I was fortunate to work with lots of partners – it was healthier.

A member asked about the diverse mix of challenges at the School.

BS: The way students are taught has changed a great deal and something has happened which is making young people less confident – some of them come to us which a huge amount of baggage. We deal with that quicker nowadays as there are all sorts of support networks through the School. Nevertheless, it is quite worrying to see those young people putting themselves in such a stressful position. Sometimes we pick up students who have been rejected by other schools and the stress they carry with them is sometimes a chip on their shoulder. It is great to be able to turn around that situation and to have that student leave the School with a job.

As a dancer you don’t see management in practice so you don’t have any experience of how to deal with people so you have learn that on the job and I have been pretty pleased how I have dealt with it. I can’t stress enough how difficult this is nor do I think you can learn that on a course.

The other big challenge is the financial aspect – we are very fortunate that our students are supported but we need a new building so we have a massive campaign ahead of us if we are to secure it.

The Chairman thanked Bruce for his insight on the past, present and future and also thanked him for inviting members to the School on 17 April to see Ballet Central.