CityLife

Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers get ready to fly

Rachel Peppin as Titania and Andrew Murphy as Oberon in The Dream

THERE are two performers in Birmingham Royal Ballet’s troupe for its visit to Salford from Wednesday that director David Bintley can never be quite sure of.

“I’ve known them land on the head of a man on the front row, or even poo on the audience,” he says.

The miscreants – and, truth to tell, they did neither of the horrors he’s talking about when I saw the show in Birmingham – are not his dancers. They are their feathered friends in the ballet, The Two Pigeons.

Yes, it really does have two live pigeons in it. In fact, there’s a team of six, so all eventualities are covered.

Ballets can have their behind-the-scenes dramas. On the night I saw the show, the male lead dancers in two out of the three casts had been injured and Joseph Caley had to learn the part and go out and do it on a day and half’s notice. He was fantastic, incidentally.

So how does all this relate to a night at the ballet? The Two Pigeons is a classic two-act piece created by Sir Frederick Ashton, that greatest of all English choreographers, for this very company. It was Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet then, and Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable danced the original leads.

“It’s one of our great showpieces,” says Bintley. “And I’ve always loved it. It’s been criticised for being rather sugary, but I think Ashton is saying something rather profound about love.

"When I was younger I could barely watch a rehearsal without being moved to tears.”

He could have added that it’s also very entertaining: Ashton in his best whimsical rusticity mode, at times a little reminiscent of that farmyard fantasy, La Fille Mal Gardée, which is always a hit when BRB put it on.

There are multitudes of movements based on birdlife: strutting walks and fluttering – even broken – wings. And round upon round of the circular and lines-of-couples style that Ashton developed from English country dances.

Plus a sexy gipsy camp sequence that the dancers clearly relish.

Bintley has paired The Two Pigeons with a more formal one-acter by Balanchine called Mozartiana (using Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations of Mozart): hence the programme’s title: Sir Fred And Mr B.

The other BRB show, which opens their visit at The Lowry on Wednesday, is called (equally bafflingly) Love And Loss, and contains another Ashton masterpiece, The Dream.

Pure joy

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is – Shakespeare’s story boiled down to about 40 minutes of pure joy, with the music taken from Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental pieces.

If you have never seen a man dance en pointe, then here’s your chance, as Sir Fred decided to make that a mark of Bottom’s translation to an ass.

I saw them do that bit in rehearsal, and the girls were fascinated – and impressed – by seeing a guy do what is normally their speciality.

The other two ballets in the first programme are Galanteries, a plotless evocation of youthful mores, and The Dance House, a fascinating meld of classical grace and the jazzy quirks of Shostakovich’s concerto for trumpet and piano.

They are both by David Bintley himself, and it is this ‘Mr B’ who is the guiding hand of all that BRB does – as he has been for the past 14 years (in which they’ve won the M.E.N.

Theatre Award for dance at least half a dozen times – there are more of our statuettes proudly displayed in their trophy cabinet than any other sort).

Bintley is 51 now and the unchallenged leader of the British classic choreographic tradition. He says it’s a ‘huge weight’ to be saddled with the label of successor to Ashton and Kenneth Macmillan – but he bears it relatively easily since, as he says, ‘It was first used when I was 19.’

He’s still got a restless mind, though, and has recently taken on the job of director of the National Ballet of Japan, in addition to his BRB role: he will give Japan 120 days a year and do a great deal of admin work from his laptop.

He’s still creative, too, and his current project for BRB is called E=MC2 – unsurprisingly, about Eistein and the atom.

He’s fascinated by the great mathematician’s spiritual beliefs, so there’s much more to it than maths.

David Bintley lives within walking distance of the Birmingham theatre, in the leafy suburb of Edgbaston, but he’s really one of us – a northerner.

Born in Huddersfield, he spent some of his formative years (before full-time membership of the Royal Ballet School at the age of 16) travelling across the Pennines to Manchester’s Muriel Tweedy school of dance (now the Northern Ballet School).

Birmingham Royal Ballet are at The Lowry from Wednesday, July 1 until Saturday, July 4. £18 - £37. Call 0870 787 5780.