Latest news with #RoyalBalletSchool
Telegraph
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
King swaps cancer stories with student at garden party
The King swapped cancer stories with a student as he hosted a Buckingham Palace garden party in sweltering heat. The monarch, who was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer last February and is still receiving weekly treatment, chatted to Stamford Collis, 22, an international relations student at Exeter University, who is also suffering from cancer. Mr Collis said afterwards: 'He was asking me about the treatment I have starting in June and spoke to me about food and diet. He also asked me if I had undergone radiation treatment, which I had earlier this year.' The King, 76, was heard to say: 'It's sometimes about the diet and what you eat. It can help.' The King and Queen shook hundreds of hands at the garden party, the first to be held for those working in the education and skills sector. Guests including Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, were treated to a performance by students from the Royal Ballet School as well as music from the British Army Band Catterick and the Band of The Royal Air Force Regiment. The Queen, 77, expressed concern for those dressed up in their finery under the blazing sun, telling one guest: 'I hope you aren't too warm. I do hope you have had the chance to put your feet up and have a drink.' Meanwhile, the King was said to be 'in his element' as he chatted to one guest who founded a charity that teaches endangered heritage arts and crafts and delighted another when he recognised her Nigerian heritage. Patricia Alban from East Kent, set up Sammy's Foundation in memory of her son, who was a talented carpenter and upholsterer but suffered from Prader-Willi Syndrome and autism and died in 2020, aged 13. She began the foundation last December, on what would have been her son's birthday, and has been helping young people suffering from neurological conditions learn high-end craftsmanship such as weaving and upholstery. 'I told Sammy, 'One day I will meet the king and tell him about you,'' she said. 'And here I am. I can't believe it. He would have been so proud. I feel quite emotional. I feel like he is there. It's been a dream of mine. 'His Majesty was in his element talking about crafts, it is something he is passionate about. And he was suggesting people and organisations I could talk to.' When the King spotted a group of ladies wearing colourful traditional dress, he told them: 'You must be from Nigeria?' 'Yes!' said Prof Adetoro Adegoke, from Buckinghamshire New University. She said afterwards: 'I was vibing him to come over here. He told me he had been to Nigeria and it was vast. How amazing that he recognised Yoruba immediately. Wonderful man.' The King also met popular social media teacher and influencer Tom Egleton, who goes by 'Tommy T' online and has millions of followers on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Mr Egleton, a special educational needs specialist, described how he started posting videos in lockdown to help his students at City College in Norwich who were struggling but found himself to be a social media sensation.
Otago Daily Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Top young dancers to grace stage
Wānaka dancer Isabel Martin (15) will feature in the ballet this weekend at the Lake Wānaka Centre. PHOTO: SUPPLIED Some of Aotearoa's best young dancers will be taking to the stage in Wānaka this weekend for a special, one-off tour of the inaugural Ripple showcase. Eleven dancers from the New Zealand Youth Ballet Company will perform a mix of classical ballet, neo-classical and contemporary dance, designed to highlight the dancers' technical skill with innovative choreography in collaboration with local dance school Centralpoint Dance Studios. The line-up includes Hamish Giddens, Tamison Soppet and Wānaka's Isabel Martin (pictured), who have all had successes at an international level. Hamish recently secured first place in the senior men's classical division at the Youth America Grand Prix (YAGP) semifinals in Sydney and won the Asia-Pacific preselection of the Prix de Lausanne. At the YAGP Finals in New York, he received scholarships to several prestigious schools, and has just been accepted into London's Royal Ballet School. Tamison was the 2024 Sydney regional junior Grand Prix winner and junior overall winner at the prestigious YAGP finals in New York. Isabel, 15, began studying full-time towards a NZQA Level 4 certificate in dance in Christchurch at the start of 2025, under the tutelage of NZYBC founder and Convergence Dance Studios owner Olivia Russell. The two Ripple performances will be held tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon at the Lake Wānaka Centre. They will also include three pieces by dancers from Centralpoint Dance Studios. About 23 local dancers will perform excerpts from Centralpoint's end-of-year show, The Nutcracker Remixed and a part of Foundations, performed at this year's Festival of Colour. Ms Russell said Ripple was planned as a one-off experience. "While there are currently no tour plans, we look forward to exploring future opportunities to showcase our talented dancers. "Wānaka holds a special place in my heart; my father was a pilot who loved the arts and believed deeply in people's dreams," Russell said. "I like to think I share those qualities in his memory." Ripple
Daily Mail
03-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: The top actress who was sedated and given electric shock treatment to cure anorexia
The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock (Bridge Street Press £25, 432pp) An airless hospital dormitory in perpetual semi-darkness, day and night. A musty smell of sweaty slumber and human breath. Occasional moans of bewilderment. Eight young women, some as young as 14, lie in a state of drug-induced sleep for weeks at a time, 20 hours out of every 24. They're known as the 'Sleeping Beauties'. Every six hours, they're chivvied awake by nurses and led stumbling to the lavatory. Without their knowledge or consent, they're given frequent bouts of electro-convulsive therapy, causing them to jerk and twitch, rubber plugs jammed between their teeth. This is not science fiction. It really happened, to hundreds of patients (most of them girls and young women) in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the Sleep Room in Ward Five of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. The theory was that 'deep sleep therapy', or 'continuous narcosis', combined with ECT, would 'upset patterns of behaviour and re-programme troubled minds'. The doctor who ran this dystopian hellscape was William Sargant, the tall, striking physician in charge of psychological medicine at St Thomas' Hospital, of which the Royal Waterloo was an annexe. He believed that mental ill-health was a physical condition, which needed to be treated as such. He had no time for Freudian talking therapy, or what he called 'sofa merchants'. His control over the sleeping patients was total. With the 'Sleeping Beauties' safely in their sedated state they wouldn't be in a position to protest. Who would send a daughter to such a place? The answer was middle-class mothers at their wits' end when their daughters refused to eat, or get rid of an 'unsuitable' boyfriend; or who was stubbornly recalcitrant, wayward or depressed. Sargant promised parents that his treatment would be like a re-set of their daughters' brains. Sometimes it worked for a short time, but Sargant had no interest in long-term results. Often, there was a relapse. 'Sargant still features in my nightmares,' says the actress Celia Imrie, one of six former Sleep Room patients who provide their raw testimonies in Jon Stock's horrifying exposé of Sargant's Sleep Room. Imrie was sent to Ward Five by her mother in 1966, aged just 14. She was suffering from anorexia that had started when, after applying for a place at the Royal Ballet School, she had discovered a rejection letter on her mother's desk, saying she was 'too big ever to become a dancer'. She was so heavily drugged with the antipsychotic Largactil (which so dulled the senses that it was known as 'liquid cosh' or 'the chemical straitjacket') that she had double vision and couldn't stop shaking. 'I was injected with insulin every day, too,' she says. 'I think I had what was called 'sub-coma shock treatment' – you weren't given enough insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma, but it was enough to make you drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.' Once, Sargant took her with him to a hospital lecture theatre, to be his exhibit. 'I had to take my clothes off so students could see how thin I was.' She has tried to find her hospital records, but they have 'vanished' or been destroyed. So she's not sure whether she had ECT, though she guesses she did. She was powerless under the treatment of the 58-year-old Sargant, with his piercing eyes 'like washed black pebbles'. He was treated like a god, breezing in through the swing doors, worshipped and obeyed by everyone. She realised the way to get out was to eat. 'My recovery had nothing to do with him or his barbaric treatments.' 'I didn't wake up for six weeks,' recalls Linda Keith, whose parents checked her in to Ward Five in 1969 when she was a 23-year-old Vogue model. 'My parents always referred to me as being 'ill' rather than the more accurate description of me: a pleasure-seeking, music-obsessed drug addict. What they wanted was a tame, house-trained lapdog.' What they got, after submitting their daughter to Sargant's treatment, was a woman 'without a mind. I'd been rendered completely helpless.' During the narcosis, Linda was subjected to 50 sessions of ECT. The result was that she could no longer choose anything and needed help with the simplest tasks. 'I wasn't happy or unhappy. I wasn't there.' She had also forgotten how to read. After being discharged, she went to see Sargant at 23 Harley Street, and asked him when she might read again. He said he didn't know. Then, she recalls, 'he came on to me. He tried to hug me and kiss me on the mouth. I ducked and hit him so he went over onto the ottoman pouffe.' Before being sent to Ward Five, Linda had an affair with Keith Richards (who would later write the song Ruby Tuesday about her) but left him for Jimi Hendrix. A few years after Sargant had stopped treating her, she bumped into him in Bond Street and called him 'a monster' to his face. To read this disturbing book is a stifling experience. Stock powerfully evokes the eerily subdued atmosphere of the Sleep Room and brings out the sinister creepiness and the arrogance of Sargant. He discovers that Sargant himself had been admitted to Hanwell Asylum in 1934 for depression. It was here that he became convinced that 'insanity' would one day be perceived as a series of physically treatable disorders. He wanted to save people from being incarcerated in asylums for months or years (that was an admirable aim) and he believed that a short, sharp, 12-week shock would do the trick. All very well in theory – but as this book shows, the results could be disastrous. Another patient, 15-year-old 'Sara', suffered terrible memory loss, a kind of 'severe Alzheimer's', and the antipsychotic drugs left her with a permanent Parkinsonian tremor. Stock also suggests that Sargant shared his research with, or might even have been partly funded by, Porton Down, the MI5, MI6 and the CIA. In the 1950s, Porton Down conducted LSD experiments on young corporals, who took part in exchange for a bit of money. The aim was to disorientate people so that they 'forgot how to lie'. It's all very murky, and Stock doesn't quite nail Sargant's involvement. By far the most memorable aspect of this disturbing book is the unforgettable image of those drugged, sleeping girls incarcerated in the top floor room overlooking Waterloo station.
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joy for 'working class' West Midlands family as son gets place at prestigious London ballet school
A West Midlands family have been left in disbelief and pure joy at their son securing a place at London's prestigious Royal Ballet School. Type 1 diabetic Carter J Mundon only started learning ballet two years ago but his talents were quickly spotted by local dance teachers who encouraged him to audition for a boarding space in the Royal Ballet School in London. Despite battling a life-changing condition, Carter J underwent a gruelling training schedule to reach the final stages of auditions in London last month. Last week, the family, from Netherton in Dudley, received word that Carter J would be leaving behind his life in the West Midlands for the Royal Ballet's White Lodge residential school. READ MORE: 'We're a normal working class family but our son is Birmingham's answer to Billy Elliot' Get breaking news on BirminghamLive WhatsApp "The first day in the morning I was quite nervous, the second day I was a bit more calm, I knew what was going to happen and I knew some of the teachers" said Carter J of his two-day audition which ran from February 27 to 28. The Black Country schoolboy added: "I didn't know if I would get in but when I was walking around I was really hoping I would get in, the facilities [at White Lodge] are amazing, it is a massive place." Describing themselves as "normal working class", Carter J's family explained that the schoolboy trains at Debonair Dance Academy in Cradley as well as the Royal Ballet in Birmingham across three days in the week. On the audition process, Carter J's mum Biba Mundon said: "The children went in on the first day and on their own. The parents went in on the second day, they showed us the dorms. For myself and Wayne we were overwhelmed at the place at what he would be getting." Biba works as a school support assistant and Carter J's dad Wayne as a civil servant, something which Biba said was a world away from dance and ballet. Carter J was whittled down from a whopping 1,300 children to 29 at the audition stage in February. The family found out on March 5 that he was one of 12 to secure a coveted spot at the school - making him one of the top 1 percent. Carter J will be heading to the opulent surroundings of Richmond Park-based White Lodge school in September as he embarks on five years of education, secured until he is 16. Alongside dance training, he will study all the same subjects as any other secondary school student and live on-site. Carter J explained: "My dance teachers have been really excited and really proud of me, saying it is an amazing achievement. My friends have said the same as well and have been sad I am leaving." Speaking previously of his challenges with diabetes, mum Biba said: "We nearly lost him. "Type 1 is a challenge for Carter, with his insulin. I think dance helps with his mental health. [It's] what he has achieved and obviously having type 1 diabetes is a challenge. He absolutely loves dance it is where he can express himself." The family said they were pleased with the support Carter J would get with his diabetes while he lived at White Lodge. Biba said: "It is worlds apart from what we are used to and where he would have been going to secondary school and his diabetes it is a big thing. "They do a normal class for the audition, they don't have to audition a piece, it is seeing what potential they have got. "He will live at White Lodge for five years, they do lots of things so children don't get home sick." Carter J said the thing he was most excited about was the chance to do performances and shows throughout the year. Speaking to BirminghamLive last year as Carter J embarked on his audition process, Biba explained: "It is crazy to think, my husband has always been football-orientated, to get his head around his youngest son loving dance, it makes him emotional to watch Carter J dance. "When you are not from the dance world and you see your child get an audition for the best ballet schools in the country we have been over the moon. We are from Netherton, we are a normal working class family it is just amazing, we are so proud." She said this week it was "surreal" to think that their son had reached the dizzying heights of the Royal Ballet. "It shows he can do anything, the sky is the limit. It is just not an opportunity he thought he would be having" said Biba. "Every parent wants the best for their children. "We are so proud we can't believe it."
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Light of Passage – a mesmerising meditation on loss, grief and hope
An accidental Crystal Pite festival sprang up last week, following Figures in Extinction, the results of an exceptional four-year collaboration with Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater with a revival of Light of Passage, made for the Royal Ballet in 2022. It's a sweeping, powerful piece, combining three separate points of departure into its 90-minute running time, all set to Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, conducted by Zoi Tsokanou and sung with passion and poise by Francesca Chiejina. The first section, Flight Pattern, was originally a standalone work and the pulsating intricacy of its portrayal of a mass of refugees, moving in great swaths of misery before emerging in solos and duets of individual sadness and resistance, remains overwhelmingly strong. The single moment when a woman is laden with the burden of many coats is a searing image of grief and loss and the young dancers of the Royal Ballet dig deep into its patterning, uncovering the emotion beneath. In Covenant, the dancers are even younger – six junior associates of the Royal Ballet School, all in white, use the ranks of black-clad adults as their support and their protectors in a short, soaring assertion both of their hopefulness and their need for safety as they grow to adulthood. In Passage, the last part, the liminal space is between life and death and – in the performance I saw – Kristen McNally and Bennet Gartside made the love of two people seemingly separated by that final frontier full of touching grace and shared memory. Around them, dancers flood like angels, illuminated by reflective light designed by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser that seems to take on physical form, shifting in golden, molten clouds. The serious intent of the whole work is balanced by its ability to create these moments of elevation, with Pite taking on the roles of philosopher and magician in her ability to forge dance that beautifully conveys both thought and feeling. Light of Passage is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 12 March
