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Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Christopher Wheeldon's real gifts lie in abstract dance
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today's dance world, but I'm yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I'm praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde's downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent. The Royal Ballet's programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his strengths. Let's get the misfire out of the way first – The Two of Us is set to four Joni Mitchell standards, prissily sung live on stage by Julia Fordham (to do her justice, she was struggling against a faulty sound system). Lauren Cuthbertson and Calvin Richardson are wasted as they mooch around in shimmering pyjamas without ever establishing any compelling counterpoint to the implications of the lyrics or the mood of the music: they might as well be extemporising, and there's just not enough interest in the movement they come up with to hold one's interest. But everything else on offer gives much pleasure. Fool's Paradise, first seen at Covent Garden in 2012, is richly melancholy – perhaps subliminally a meditation on how relationships between three people inexorably gravitate into two, but more obviously a beautiful example of Wheeldon's neoclassicism. His aesthetic has been influenced by his long sojourn in America and his choreographic style reflects that of New York City Ballet luminaries such as Jerome Robbins and Justin Peck as much as it does that of his Royal Ballet precursors Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan: sleekly athletic, clean in line, devoid of jerks and twerks, milk and honey for dancers with fluent classical technique.
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Royal Ballet's Steven McRae: ‘I instantly thought: this is it, it's all over'
'Doi-unnck!' is the sound Steven McRae heard when his Achilles tendon snapped on stage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Manon, back in October 2019. A principal dancer with the Royal Ballet since 2009, the 39-year-old Australian now remembers 'looking down in horror – even through my tights it seemed as if something had bitten a big chunk out of my leg'. An audience of 2,500 heard him 'screaming in agony' from the wings. Through the burning pain, he recalls the cold clarity of the thought: 'This is it. It's all over.' The excruciating, inspiring story of how this fallen 'semi-god' (as one reviewer described him) ended up flying across that stage again two years later is tenderly told in Stéphane Carrel's documentary Steven McRae: Dancing Back to the Light. It's an arresting, exposing film that shows McRae stripped – literally – naked and broken before chronicling his gruelling rehabilitation via surgery, physio, gym, ice baths and relentless, frustrating rehearsal. It's ballet's answer to a Rocky-style training montage, made all the more moving by scenes of McRae limping around the south London home he shares with his wife (and former Royal Ballet soloist), Elizabeth Harrod, and attempting push-ups in a toy-strewn lounge with their three small children on his back. 'I agreed to the documentary when I couldn't even walk. So when we started filming, we had no idea how the story would end,' says McRae today. Precise in both speech and movement – making laser-like eye contact – he's come to meet me in the office of Kevin O'Hare, the Royal Ballet's director. He says it's 'thanks to Kevin that I only wasted 20 minutes thinking my career had ended, panicking about how I was going to feed my children [who were four, two and five weeks old at that time]. I don't come from the land of privilege and silver spoons. But Kevin told me right there and then, backstage: 'You'll dance again.' The medical team spoke to the surgeon while I was back in my dressing room and booked a scan for the next morning. The mission had started.' Although McRae strikes me as a man who has always been on a mission – and quite a steely, singular one. I last saw him on stage – deranged sparks flying – in the Mad Hatter role created for him by Christopher Wheeldon for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Today, he flashes a Cheshire Cat grin as he says he's always resisted watching recordings of Baryshnikov and Nureyev in the roles he dances to ensure he's not influenced by them. McRae likes to do things his own way. Born in Sydney in 1985, he's the son of a drag racer and mechanic father, and describes himself as 'a shy boy, always hiding behind my mum'. The eye contact he's making now? He was scared of that. He couldn't even speak to strangers, let alone look at them. But he was inspired by his sister, seven years older, 'pushing the boundaries with gymnastics and then dance'. When he himself was seven years old, he asked his parents if he could 'have a go at dancing' and was 'hooked' from his first class. 'It was instant,' he recalls. 'The teacher said, 'Jump as high as you can. Spin as fast as you can. Explore.' A whole new world just exploded in front of me.' Soon, he was going three times a week. He says that, despite the macho Aussie culture of the 1980s, he didn't suffer much Billy Elliot-style bullying for being a boy in tights. 'I remember being at the race track with my dad one day and a driver came over and said, 'What's this? We hear your son's dancing?' My dad didn't even hesitate. I can still hear him now. He said, 'Yeah, he's really good. You should come and watch him.' That was it. The end of the conversation.' McRae invites me to fast-forward a few years and picture him starting high school, aged 12: 'I was tiny, scrawny, with red hair and braces, and this kid – aged 16, size of a man – came up and asked if I was a dancer. I didn't want to be bullied for the next two years, but I remembered my dad and said, 'Yeah. Apparently I'm really good. You should come and watch me.' They left me alone!' Although he grew up tap dancing, with Gene Kelly as a hero, it was a VHS tape of the pas de deux from Manon (recorded from the television by his dad) that turned McRae on to ballet at 14. 'I watched Sylvie Guillem and Jonathan Cope dance that eight or nine times. My teacher said I could aim for the Royal Ballet. I think my parents thought that was in Melbourne!' It came as a shock to them when he won the Prix de Lausanne, aged 17, in 2003 and was snapped up by the Royal Ballet there and then. His plane ticket back home was swapped out for London, where he says 'there was no hiding my ambition'. Soul-sapping homesickness was a price he was prepared to pay to 'be part of an art form that can rip the hearts from the audience's chests when you get it right'. He pushed through the embarrassments of not having grown up steeped in ballet culture: 'The first time I went on stage in Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations, I asked people if Ashton would be in the audience. I didn't realise he'd been dead for decades!' His unswerving mission was to 'Get the best training, get a contract, get this role, that role, the next. Manon!' Carrel's film captures all of McRae's wild fire – but also sees him reflecting on how close he came to burn-out. It's a documentary that challenges a culture in which dancers seldom get a break. While other high-performance athletes all have periods of down-time as they work towards sporting events, the ballet calendar can be relentless, and the applause addictive. We watch McRae push his body beyond sane limits, popping painkillers just to walk. 'But the lessons are transferable to any profession,' he says today. 'Especially in a city like London, where everyone is always go, go, go! Nobody wants to miss out. I would have performed every night if I could have.' These days, McRae's mission is to change ballet culture so that dancers can take better care of themselves. With O'Hare, he's been working to schedule breaks in the calendar. Having found the gym so helpful in his recovery, he's also trying hard to 'bust the myth that lifting weights will cause dancers to bulk up and ruin their 'line'. It's just not true. No dancer has enough hours in their day to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.' McRae is clearly proud of his newly muscular physique – his ripped torso fills much of his social-media feed. Carrel's camera catches the flash of pride when he can no longer fit his old, jewel-encrusted jacket from Romeo and Juliet over his pecs. I get to witness a form of push-up in action as he leads me downstairs through the opera house and – instead of walking down the stairs – hoists himself up on the steel bannisters and slides gleefully down them, a flight at a time. Evangelical about how 'a new culture of self-care' can extend a dancer's longevity, McRae has been known to say he may never quit. But he's earned both a degree and a master's in business in recent years. He talks passionately about policy and philosophy: about the NHS course for people suffering problems with their mental health that the Royal Ballet has been hosting in its basement ('allowing dancers to express feelings that might otherwise have been locked into them'), and about ensuring children from all backgrounds have equal access to the arts. Is he after O'Hare's job? He laughs. 'I do want to stay in this profession,' is the diplomatic response. Do his own children – now 10, eight and five – all dance? He nods, cautiously. 'They all have a go at a dance lesson,' he says. 'But because my wife and I became so focused on our passion at such a young age, I think we've gone completely the other way with our kids. They do football and gymnastics. But only one after-school activity each per week. We want them to come home from classes and just be kids.'
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lewis Carroll collection given to his Oxford college in surprise US donation
Thousands of letters, photographs, illustrations and books from one of the world's largest private Lewis Carroll collections have been donated to the UK out of the blue by an American philanthropist. The extraordinary gift has been made to Christ Church, University of Oxford, where Carroll lectured and where he met Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this year. The collection includes more than 200 autograph letters, some of which are unpublished. There are a number to his 'child-friends' and their parents, often sending riddles and jokes and copies of books. Some shed light on Carroll's interest in the theatre. There are also significant early editions, including the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works. A copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is inscribed to Alice's mother by Carroll: 'To her, whose children's smiles fed the narrator's fancy and were his rich reward: from the author. Xmas 1886.' Carroll is considered one of the best amateur photographers of his day and the donation includes more than 100 of his photographs. The subjects include his friends and noted figures such as the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Gabriel Sewell, the Christ Church college librarian, was taken aback when she received a brief email out of the blue from the US collector, who wrote: 'I have decided to donate my Lewis Carroll collection. It includes more than 200 letters and 100 photographs plus many obscure printed items. Have you any interest?' The email was sent by Jon A Lindseth, a retired American businessman and philanthropist, collector and scholar. Sewell said: 'It was a bit of a surprise. It's an enormous collection. He's incredibly generous. It would be impossible to make a collection like this nowadays without having an enormous amount of money. 'Such material doesn't come on to the market these days, and not all at once. When we've tried to buy Carroll photographs, we've never had enough money. They get snapped up by people with much deeper pockets.' She did not know Lindseth personally, but was aware that, over decades, he had built up a significant collection of material relating to Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose professional life was spent chiefly as an academic, a mathematician and logician at Christ Church. Having excelled at the college as a student, he received its mathematical lectureship in 1855 and remained there in various capacities until his death in 1898. He even worked as its sub-librarian for a time. His friendship with Henry Liddell, the college's dean, and his family, inspired him to write his famous children's story, first told to Alice Liddell and her sisters on a boating trip in 1862. They were captivated by the little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure, and Alice asked him to write it down for her. The unpublished correspondence reflects Carroll's frustration over the misuse of his pen name. In 1890, he fired off a letter to the bookseller Messrs H Sotheran in Manchester, who had listed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass in their catalogue, attributing them to 'Carroll (Lewis, ie Rev CL Dodgson)'. Carroll wrote that they had inserted his name 'in connection with books of which he has never claimed or acknowledged the authorship, + which no one has any right to attribute to him: he will be much obliged if they will forbear from doing this for the future'. There are also unpublished letters from Carroll to Edith Rix, whom he had tutored in logic. He reportedly regarded her as the cleverest woman he ever knew. She went on to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge and to work at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 1886, he wrote to her: 'I would love to write you a chatty letter, in answer to 2 or 3 of yours: but I've no time for this post, + won't keep you longer waiting for answers to your mathematical questions …' Sewell said: 'It is [at Christ Church] that [Carroll] produced the hundreds of letters, photographs and sketches that now return home as part of the remarkable collection expertly curated by Jon Lindseth.' Lindseth is a noted Carroll scholar, whose publications include Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll's Masterpiece. He has also written for the journals of the Lewis Carroll Society and curated two Carroll exhibitions. Christ Church has long possessed one of the foremost Carroll archives. Sewell said: 'With this unparalleled donation from Lindseth, however, there can be no doubt that the college is now the pre-eminent institutional collection of Carroll material in the UK.' She added: '[Lindseth] was very firm that he wanted it to come to the UK and he wanted it to be in Christ Church, where Carroll lived and worked … No other institution in the UK has a particularly big Carroll collection. All the big collections are in the States, and he wanted to remedy that.' Cataloguing and digitisation of the Lindseth Lewis Carroll collection has only just begun, but an exhibition displaying some of the most exceptional items is in Christ Church's historic upper library until 17 April – the first time the collection has been displayed in the UK.
