KEY POINTS:
Turid Revfeim, ballet mistress for the Royal New Zealand Ballet company, floats across the stage, softly delivering the words her dancers wait to hear.
"Pose, step, step, saut de basque, step, pose, croise, run, run, run, grand jete."
And the dancers, in their classroom couture of faded sweats and battered slippers, respond in synchronicity with their feet.
Revfeim is not your fabled cane-wielding, vitriolic ballet mistress. She's young, with flowing dark hair, her hips still intact - she was dancing on stage with the company last year. But when she speaks, her company listens.
The day before the new season's triple bill, Red, opens in Auckland on Valentine's Day, the dancers are still learning. Even on tour, they must turn up to dance class every day for a 75-minute workout at the barre and on the floor, repetitions of stretches, leaps, pirouettes and glides. It's a centuries-old tradition to fine-tune technique and sharpen the brain.
Today the 32 dancers are awestruck. Standing at the barre, moving with them is Finnish dancer Jorma Elo - one of the hottest choreographers in contemporary ballet. Elo's acclaimed Plan To A is part of the triple bill - an intense, fast flowing and quirky work in vibrant red - but for a moment, in an old grey t-shirt, he is one of them.
At the end of class there's a 15-minute break before the dancers launch into a three-hour rehearsal; and then there's barely an hour before they are back on stage, warming up for the night's performance.
"A dancer's lot is still a hard lot," says Revfeim, who grew up in Taupo and first danced The Nutcracker with the national company in 1980. "They don't just turn up at night to dance. It's a full-time career, and whatever hours we have them, they rehearse."
Michael Braun, one of the leading male dancers in the company, sleeps on the hard floor in the wings of the Aotea Centre stage - a half-hour doze between rehearsal and showtime. Australian-born Braun understands the importance of power-napping - the only married dancer in this generation, he has a toddler son and 7-month-old twins back in Wellington.
"It's not even opening night and it feels like we've been on tour for weeks already," he says. "It's extremely physical, and in a heavy season [he dances in all three acts] I'll need nine hours of sleep a night on this tour so my body can repair itself."
But Braun loves the thrill of touring, even if it tears him from his family, and admits he's become obsessed with dance since joining the RNZB three years ago.
In class, he wears a pounamu carving at his throat - given to him by Witi Ihimaera - in the shape of a whale tail, bringing protection, strength and sensitivity.
"Sometimes it hits me on the chin, or digs into my collarbone, but it's just reminding me why I'm here," he says.
Flash back 50 years. In 1958, the Royal New Zealand Ballet company was just five years old, toured the length of the country - six months on the road from Kaitaia to Tuatapere, performing classical Danish ballet. The nine dancers, including 18-year-old Jon Trimmer and his future wife Jacqui (then 15) drove three hours in a VW van to a new town every day.
The dancers helped unpack the company truck before constructing the set, rigging the lights and ironing their costumes. After going home with their local billets for a meal and a nap, they'd be back at the town hall to warm up and perform.
Straight after the show, half the dancers would head for the crowd - cap in hand - collecting subscriptions. The others would pull down scenery and pack the truck again.
"It was exhausting but very exciting. It really and truly was an adventure," says Sir Jon.
How times have changed. The 32 dancers of the Royal New Zealand Ballet now stay in city hotels, fly between centres, and are banned from going on stage to do anything but dance. The company is largely funded by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and sponsors.
Where the company once had no home - rehearsing in church halls, school gyms and the city mission - it now has permanent digs in Wellington's St James Theatre.
The pioneer of ballet in this country, Danish dancer Poul Gnatt, set up the New Zealand Ballet company in 1953. Gnatt painted houses and drove taxis in between rehearsals so his original dance troupe of three and a pianist could take ballet to small-town New Zealand. His wife sewed the costumes.
In 2008, Red travels with a full company to eight centres around the country, ending at home in Wellington on March 19 and 20.
Triple bills are expensive - three choreographers, three sets of sumptuous costumes and three lots of music royalties. The cost of Red is a few dollars short of $740,000, including $400,000 to take it on tour. The expected income from the Red season is around $650,000 - half of that from box office takings and half from sponsorship.
It's the first time a contemporary programme has been taken outside the main centres, but Amanda Skoog, the general manager of the RNZB, says: "It's part of our remit to take all our dance around the country.
"It's costly keeping the company on the road as opposed to box office income - even if it's a sell-out, it's not brilliant. But we believe it's worth subsidising these tours because we're a national company and the dancers need to get their teeth into it if they are to be successful international dancers."
Skoog, a New Zealander who danced in Europe, says it's imperative the company tours overseas each year - Red goes to Australia next month. It gives exposure not only to our young dancers but to local choreographers like Adrian Burnett, creator of Abhishsheka, the hypnotic second act in Red.
"Dance is an international art form and if we stayed here all the time, we'd get stale. Unless we keep on our game, we will lost at the box office," Skoog says.
The company isn't in the red financially - although it's been on the verge of collapse a few times in the last 55 years - but raising enough money to survive is a "constant challenge", she says.
"We're in a small country, competing for the corporate dollar but where ballet offers something different is that we are a truly national company and that's attractive to a lot of sponsors," she says. "We're always looking at diverse ways of raising funds."
There are now individual performance sponsors - companies subsidising a performance evening of their own, and individual dancer partnerships. The Friends of the Royal New Zealand Ballet help foot the bill for more than 1000 pairs of pointe shoes the company imports each year.
The dancers are paid a salary, are looked after with accomodation and receive a small living allowance. Skoog stresses small: "You still don't dance for the money, that's for sure."
From somewhere in the dark at the back of the theatre comes the imploring voice of the company's London-born artistic director Gary Harris. "You've really got to hold that last position, Abi. Squeeze everything you've got."
On the eve of opening night in Auckland, the technical run-through gives choreographers the chance to make final tweaks; notes posted on a corkboard offstage are memorised by the dancers, or scribbled on the back of old paper bags.
It's now all about split-second timing and pinpoint spacing. Braun confides he's worried he hasn't done enough preparation. But the show must go on, and that's never changed.
In 1959, touring the Far North, the RNZB's faithful VW bus lost control and plunged down a bank, landing roof-down in a mangrove swamp. All of the company's dancers scrambled from the van.
"We just jumped in the back of the company truck with the set equipment, and drove the winding little roads to Kaeo. We arrived shaken and carsick, but we had to start setting up for the night's show," Sir Jon Trimmer laughs.
In the 80s, Revfeim recalls, the company was on the road four times a year, for two or three months at a time.
"We needed to perform more often because we didn't have the financial backing," she says. Today, the dancers have six weeks to rehearse and six weeks on tour; they don't leapfrog productions like other international companies.
Gary Harris sees 2008 as a red-letter year - the colour theme continuing through the two storybook ballets to follow, Romeo and Juliet and Don Quixote. Harris went all-out designing the spectacular blood-red tutus for Red's opening act Paquita, one of the great classical works of legendary Russian choreographer Marius Petipa - he took his inspiration from a collection of couture Valentino gowns he saw in Florence.
One of England's leading dancers in the 1980's, Harris loves the honesty and versatility of the young New Zealand company and their new, improved, approach to the art. "They don't drink and smoke as much as we did," he says. "Dancers dance better today; the whole thrust towards fitness is greater. We never learned the physiology of dance, but now cardio, gym, pilates is all part of one's training.
"Still, there's a fine line between artist and athlete. I don't really care if they can run a mile without losing breath - I want to see good dancing and good art."
Lucy Balfour, one of the female stars of today's New Zealand Ballet, leads her fellow dancers through a cardio work-out every morning before dance class begins. On the Aotea stage, they get their hearts thrumming to the beat of the Black Eyed Peas.
"You have to be extremely fit now to cope; in some of the pieces we do [like Elo's feverish Plan to A] you're gasping for air," says Christchurch born Balfour, in her fifth year with the RNZB. "It's helping - I'm still puffing through the piece, but my recovery's a lot faster." There's no way, she says, they would have the energy to hang the velvet curtains as well.
"We look after them a lot better than we ever have," says Revfeim. "My main aim is to give them longevity."
For that they have no better role model than their lead artist 68-year-old Sir Jon, who sat out Red but rejoins the company to star as Don Quixote in his 50th anniversary. So what does he make of this generation of artists?
"The young dancers work very hard, but they're lucky they have more time to rehearse than we ever did. I admire them and I admire how they all get along - it hasn't always happened; we've had our fair share of divas."
He's thrilled when he looks out into the stalls and sees a diverse sea of faces - not just the billets, their families and friends filling half the school hall.
"We get such a mixture of people in our audience now; a lot of younger fans," Skoog says. "A programme like Red, with classical and contemporary dance, is exciting because it draws in new people for the first time."
On opening night, Abi, captivating dancer Abigail Boyle - "squeezes everything" and performs her final pirouette in Paquita. Braun gives three scorching performances, despite his concern he wasn't ready. The audience, aged from 13 to 93, rises to its feet in ovation. Some things stay the same - after more than half a century, the passion for the ballet has never dimmed.
The production of Red is currently travelling throughout the country, opening in New Plymouth tomorrow night then Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch before finishing its tour in Wellington on March 20.
