English National Ballet School

Peacock Theatre, London July 2023

The Belgian ballet teacher Robert Denvers once described to me the situation he had faced as a young dancer. “We had to work harder to get things, to find a good studio, a good floor, to have a pianist, to have the money to go to a school. I had to hitchhike to Paris to take some classes, because outside of the one teacher in Antwerp…For the dancers here, it’s fantastic, everything is done for them. And the effect is that there is less need to go for something.”

When we spoke, 22 years ago, Denvers had been invited to teach at the English National Ballet School (ENBS). His comments came back to me as I watched that school’s student performance.

In this country, ballet students begin training professionally at 16, when the law allows them to leave school. Roughly 300 audition every year to fill the 30 places for first-year students at ENBS, where the full course lasts three years. The program for this year’s performance named 87 students, nearly all of whom appeared at least once.

The school states that it “leave[s] our dancers fully equipped for life on stage and for a future beyond the stage.” Any professional ballet school might say the same. For years the Royal Ballet School prepared dancers, according to its advertisements, to be “a joy to watch and a pleasure to know.” Recently, however, these institutions have commissioned ballets expressly for the annual showcase performance, which gives all the students a chance to perform but makes it hard to asses their ability.

Everyone looks good in tailor-made clothes, and every pupil looks good in tailor-made dances. For me, those bespoke pieces reduce the youngsters’ opportunities to take stage, if they can, as potential artists. The occasions become recitals, no different from those in any town with a ballet school, and like birthday parties, where there’s always enough cake no matter how many children turn up.

Taking its courage in both hands, this year ENBS bracketed three commissions with challenging excerpts from classics of the professional repertory. Widely performed throughout the world, Bournonville’s La Sylphide (1836) and Balanchine’s Who Cares? (1970) sidestep flashy pyrotechnics—which many now find the only interesting aspect of ballet—to focus on the more elusive qualities of musicality and style. The two ballets come from different periods, involve different steps and conjure different atmospheres. So they allow the audience to appraise the students’ talent in established contexts rather than simply acknowledging their well-drilled execution of made-to-measure creations.

In the extracts from La Sylphide, staged from notation for the first- and second-year students, the dancers took breathless care with the Bournonville style, treating it like delicate porcelain as they curved their arms gently, tilted their torsos forward and let a lilting buoyancy flow through their bodies. Neat and unassuming, their manner matched the sylphs’ characteristic modesty, so what might have passed for nervous tension resembled appealing restraint.

Who Cares? needs swagger and personality as well as secure technique, so I thought the third-year dancers would feel right at home in it. But its jazzy insouciance eluded them, and the cheerful atmosphere they projected instead didn’t contain much individuality.

To my surprise, I can name on one hand the dancers who seemed eager and almost ready for a professional career: among the women, only Mayuko Iwanaga and Milei Lee in Who Cares?; among the men, Gabriel Pimparel as James in La Sylphide, Love Kotiya and George Cox in Who Cares? Despite their smiles and hard work, the rest, even in the graduating class, looked like students with no greater ambition than to complete the performance without obvious mistakes.

Writing about secondary education in the UK, an economist has argued that too many teenagers now lack “motivation, curiosity, confidence and a sense of what is possible.” Did he mean to include ballet students?

Peter Schaufuss founded ENBS in 1988 while he was English National Ballet’s director. This film was made for the company’s 70th anniversary in 2020.