Royal New Zealand Ballet Solace: Behind scenes at ballet as it gears up for winter season

RNZB dancers rehearse High Tide by Alice Topp at St James Theatre. It's part of Solice, a trio of work, that will be on tour for its winter season. Photo / Stephen A’Court

Dancers rehearse and wardrobe prep ahead of the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s winter tour, writes Emma Gleason, while choreographers explain their work and a principal star shares why contemporary ballet presents a unique challenge.

It’s two weeks away from opening night and the headquarters of the Royal New Zealand Ballet are more sedate than you might think, with rehearsal schedules and wardrobe prep, dancers filing in and out of studios, but then it’s all in a day’s work for the employees of our national company.

Solace: Dance to feed your soul, the company’s next tour, is the fourth of the five shows this year, and presents a trio of contemporary ballets.

And a day’s work is what I’m there to see, taking a quick look behind the doors at the historic St James Theatre on Courtenay Place, Wellington into the studios, office, workroom and storage spaces that keep the whole operation going, and the people.

There are 37 fulltime dancers - more are contracted if a project requires it - and RNZB staff counts fulltimers.

They’ve been in the building since 1996 - excluding a four-year secondment to Wakefield St while the theatre received earthquake strengthening.

It all happened during the pandemic years, fortuitously perhaps, and they were back in the St James by March last year.

The RNZB’s floors are a bustling, but orderly, hive of activity. The rehearsal schedule looks, to a layman’s eyes, packed.

Infra started rehearsing on the first day of June, High Tide and To Hold kicked off four days later. Practice has been fulltime since then, with rehearsals taking place five to six days every week, alongside morning class.

Clad in an inspiring combination of leotards, legwarmers and sportswear - I spy an All Blacks jersey and countless Adidas pieces - the company are preparing for their winter season.

Contemporary is different to classical ballets like Swan Lake, which they toured earlier this year.

Mayu Tanigaito, who has been with the company since 2012, played Odette and Odile in that one, and as a principal (and the longest-serving dancer at RNZB) has a key role in Solace; performing High Tide and Infra.

Mayu Tanigaito rehearses for Infra by Wayne McGregor at St James Theatre in Wellington. Photo / Stephen A’Court.

They started preparation more or less straight after the Swan Lake tour finished. Changing from classical ballet like that to the contemporary dance of Solace was a big adjustment. “It’s a completely different way to work your body.”

While classical is a style they’ve trained for their whole lives and practice during class every morning - contemporary demands a different approach. “It’s based on classical, but you have to come out from it,” Tanigaito explains. With extreme shapes and fast movements, it can be more physically demanding. “We get sore bodies.”

Recovery is something she has to grapple with more now she’s 37 (she started ballet at age 6). “When you’re young, you don’t really think about it because you recovered somehow overnight,” she says. Now, however, “more and more you have to take care of your body”.

Half her day might be spent training. “The other half is to maintain your body for myself.” The conditioning work is rigorous. Tanigaito does stretching, Pilates, gym work, massage, physio and acupuncture.

They’re athletes and artists. It’s intimate. Close contact work, long hours and touring mean dancers have a unique relationship. “Definitely we are friends,” she says. “We are a smaller company, we have to work as a team.”

Switching off at the end of the day is hard. “I’m not that kind of person.” But it’s important to leave work at work, especially when learning a new role; the brain can get overwhelmed. “It’s not productive.”

Are all dancers perfectionists? “You have to be a perfectionist because it’s so demanding.”

And that deadline isn’t going to move. “You can’t say like, oh we couldn’t make it happen, can we push one day,” she says. “Opening night is opening night.”

Opening night at the St James was on August 1.

The show comprises three distinct works; Infra is choreographed by Wayne McGregor, with a score by Max Richter, and premiered in London in 2008; the latter two were commissioned for the show, with RNZB’s acting artistic director David McAllister enlisting alumna Alice Topp and RNZB’s choreographer in residence Sarah Foster-Sproull to create a new work.

To Hold, scored by Eden Mulholland, is about the parent-child relationship, Foster-Sproull explains, but “it’s a deeply abstract form that I’m working on”.

Choreographer Sarah Foster-Sproull at St James Theatre studios in Wellington. Photo / Stephen A’Court

She stresses that choreography is part of a performance’s whole. “I philosophically believe that a work has a life of its own when all of the component parts come together,” Foster-Sproull explains. “Part of which comes from my vision, part of which is the interpretation of the dancers, part of which is the audience.”

Topp was also invited to create High Tide - inspired by cycles of life and the music of Olafur Arnalds during its winter season and she and Foster-Sproull are at the St James as dancers rehearse their choreography.

Contemporary dance is about more than just the style, they tell me. At its peak state, dance is a “process of channelling” believes Foster-Sproull. “That’s a deep interconnection or an entanglement, with the materials of the work and the ancestry coming through them and the energy from the audience hitting back at them,” she explains. “So part of the choreographic job for us is to enable that space to occur.”

Foster-Sproull likes to challenge perfectionism. “Give permission for some experimentation and failure within the scope of the movement.”

It also lets choreographers showcase strength. In classical ballet female dancers - as dolls, birds and sylphs - are traditionally required to appear effortless and ethereal. “You are trying to make everything look so easy, so serene,” Topp says. “You’ve been a swan for six hours and you have bruised toenails and it’s so painful.”

Contemporary can be liberating. “You can put a bit of bite and a bit of grunt into it. It’s really empowering for women,” explains Topp.

It helps challenge gender roles. “That’s definitely something that I think about often,” says Foster-Sproull. “Redefining the narrative of women within contemporary ballet is a really important job, she explains, adding it’s still quite rare for women to be working in ballet as choreographers.

Contemporary dance presents freedom for the creator and for the audience. “It’s open for interpretation,” says Foster-Sproull.

Topp feels like she’s “bringing the outside world into the theatre” and knowing each audience member will have their own interpretation “is quite a beautiful thing”.

Choreographer Alice Topp, who created High Tide for the Royal New Zealand Ballet's winter season, during rehearsals at St James Theatre in Wellington. Photo / Stephen A’Court

The company’s fans are dedicated. “Our core, loyal audiences really tend to be very engaged,” explains marketing manager Mink Boyce. “Swan Lake was fantastic for us.”

It is, of course, 2024 and the landscape for promoting and communicating with audiences has changed dramatically. RNZB use social channels, traditional media and above-the-line advertising to reach their fans around the country. For some, who can’t make it to a show, watching things online is the next best thing.

“You can engage with people one-to-one and it feels a lot more personal.” Behind-the-scenes footage helps to humanise dancers and show the work. There’s an in-house videographer on staff, he’s there recording the rehearsal we’re watching, which they do a lot. “Especially for something like this, where we’re making new work,” explains Boyce. “We’ll get as much content around the making of it as possible.”

Classical ballet is a “very traditional art form,” she says. “The narrative around ballet is fairly antiquated, I think that carries through into the perception of it.”

Contemporary shows, like Solace - which will tour Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch - offer a more modern, experimental entry point, challenging notions around dance and who it’s for.

“It’s so good and it’s so new and it’s so interesting and it’s so hard to communicate what it is and how good it is,” Boyce says.

It’s a big undertaking, taking a whole production on the road.

Washing machines and dryers go on tour with the company. When they get to a new location, all the wardrobe, appliances and gear are unloaded. Dressing rooms are arranged and labelled, costumes are put out, and laundry prep is handled by touring costume manager Jessica Taunt.

She’s also side of stage at the show to ensure nothing goes wrong. “Then she does the laundry for the next day, and then picks it all up again to go to the next destination,” explains Donna Jefferis, head of costume. “She can do repairs, you know, major blowouts on the road”

Jefferis and the costume department have been busy in the lead-up to Solace.

The show requires 91 full costumes, comprising 266 individual pieces, and they’ve been working on it for a couple of months.

The costumes for Infra have to be exact copies of the originals, while the new ballets, High Tide and To Hold, allow for creative licence for new wardrobes, a collaborative process between costume and choreographers.

The costumes RNZB's wardrobe team created for High Tide as part of Solace. Photo / Stephen A’Court

“There’s been a lot of wear testing,” particularly the bias-cut skirts. “So we’re taking stuff into the rehearsal and people are doing their material.”

Do dancers still get excited putting on a new costume? “They do like it,” says Jefferis. “A lot of them have really enjoyed what Alice has designed for them, which is great.”

“We have a massive fabric store”. It comes in handy for repairing. Maintenance is a big part of the job, and lots of fabrics, details and notions - boning, hooks and bars - are specialised. Fastenings come from America, the special Lycra is ordered from Germany.

A traditional tutu takes a whole week to make - with a high cost of time and materials. The ball dresses for Cinderella - two were made - required 50m of silk.

Costume loaning is common. “We rent out entire shows just like we hire entire shows. Not every company in the world can afford to do new productions every time,” she says. “We’ve got Romeo and Juliet in Perth at the moment, and Hansel and Gretel is in America.”

Old costumes are there. “We’ve got a few pieces from the original 85 Swan Lake,” says Jefferis. “I don’t know what the oldest thing would be.”

The wardrobe department provides a unique lens on the history of the RNZB.

The library room is an important archive, for the show - each ballet wardrobe has a “Bible” of spec sheets, swatches and information - and the knowledge that underpins the work of the wardrobe.

An old women’s patterning book was a resource for Solace. “There’s a bias cut recipe in the back that I used for Alice’s piece,” she says. “That’s actually my favourite book.”

Jefferis has been with the company since 2018 and worked in costume for 40 years. There are books on shibori, Fortuny, menswear books from the 1900s to 1930s, all sorts, cataloguing the nuances and expertise of costume and traditional sewing techniques that are no longer commonplace.

They’re still turned to for costume though, brought to life again. Made modern, and contemporary, through dance.

‘Solace: Dance to feed your soul’ closes in Wellington on August 3, then heads to Auckland’s Aotea Centre August 8-10 and Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal on August 16-17. Details at rnzb.org.nz

Emma Gleason is the Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, entertainment and media.