Within three years, Ashley Page helped turn Scottish Ballet from a divided company into a vibrant force. Michael Seaver discovers how.
Things couldn't really get worse for Scottish Ballet in 2001. After years of tumbling down a spiral of underfunding, falling attendances and uninspired performances, it finally slumped when a defeated board declared it was giving up on ballet and becoming a contemporary dance company. In response, the dancers revolted and set up their own website criticising their employers, particularly when they learned artistic director Robert North's contract would not be renewed. This campaign attracted loud support from fellow artists and the general public until finally the whole matter was raised in the Scottish Parliament and a parliamentary enquiry questioned the board over its direction and ability to manage the company.
Three years after this nadir the company has been transformed and is fast becoming the freshest and most vibrant ballet company around, scooping the 2004 TMA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance. But it has remained a ballet company. The planned metamorphosis into a contemporary company was halted, entirely due to its new director Ashley Page. During his job interviews, he convinced the board that classical technique didn't preclude innovative theatricality.
Years spent at The Royal Ballet - as student, dancer and choreographer - guaranteed Page's pedigree, and with a string of successful choreographies for the Royal and other companies he could turn up to his interview with a pile of good reviews. But he had absolutely no experience as an artistic director.
"The first interview was about policy and how I intended to 'fix' the company. Once the board accepted that, it came down to, 'Well, what will we see on stage?'. For the second interview I was asked to prepare three hypothetical programmes, but I came along with about five pages of different programmes. I just sat down one afternoon and out they came. It was obviously something that was in my head for years, long before I had any ambition to be a director. I would think: 'Why don't people put those three pieces together? They'd make a great evening'."
Before any work appeared on stage, the issue of dancers needed to be tackled; who would stay and who would go? Seven dancers had left the company with previous director Robert North and Page had earmarked about eight that he felt mightn't fit into his new plans. Rather than having a public culling, he requested about 10 months to work with the dancers behind closed doors. "They basically said: 'Well if that's what it takes, then do it'. After finding some really good dancers during the first auditions I decided to take a gamble and cut this period short with a low-key performance in the autumn."
Curiosity surrounded that first performance and so it turned out quite high profile, featuring works by contemporary choreographers Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies and Stephen Petronio, alongside his own Cheating Lying Stealing, created for the Royal Ballet in 1998. The contemporary bias revealed little of Page's vision and, at a glance, programming has remained just as scatty. He has looked back into the Scottish Ballet past with founder choreographer Peter Darrell's Five Rückert Songs and has created brand new work for the company. He has been pragmatic in launching a Nutcracker and brave in letting loose the austere theatricality of William Forsythe's Suite from Artifact. And he has been completely singular in featuring neo-classicist George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments alongside New York bad-boy Stephen Petronio's MiddleSexGorge. It may seem a mish-mash but to Page it's a clearly trodden pathway towards the style and standard of company he wants.
"The programmes don't necessarily have themes, but there are reasons why certain pieces are placed together. Sometimes it has to do with pushing the dancers in a certain direction. In the spring it was all to do with speed. A lot of the work required them to move quickly, but with great agility and elegance, not just roughly. And then there's the building blocks idea. We did the Balanchine in order to be able to do the Forsythe, so I'm really laying a path of progression for the dancers to grow through."
The Four Temperaments will return in this year's spring season, a decision made not just for financial reasons (licences to produce works only last a few years), but to constantly develop the company. "I really want to foster a company that doesn't just do works that other companies do, but that does them in a particular way. It's still authentic and what the choreographer wanted, but there is an edge to how we do things. I was delighted when all the critics picked up on that with last year's performance of The Four Temperaments."
Ex-New York City Ballet dancer Patricia Neary, who set the work on the company on behalf of the Balanchine Trust, was similarly impressed. "She had worked with other companies who might have had better technical dancers or a more uniform line of bodies but she genuinely felt that there was a real heart and pride in the performance that really touched her."
Technical standards will continue to improve as the company attracts dancers eager to be part of Page's vision. Paul Liburd, who joined in August last year after spending 12 years with Rambert, received the Outstanding Male Artist (Modern) at the Critic's Circle National Dance Awards this month.
There is good health behind the scenes as well. Cindy Sughrue, former head of dance at the Scottish Arts Council joined the company as administrative producer and the company is moving from its cramped premises to the Tramway in Glasgow. But Page is maintaining a steady growth and won't rush into projects that don't fit his plan. Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster approached Scottish Ballet to perform at last year's festival in an evening of dance works to Mahler.
"I said no, because I didn't think it was where we were going. It was [ Scottish Ballet chairman] Christopher Barron who managed to secure us a place in the festival and he said: 'But we've got to do it! We need to be in the festival.' I said: 'Yeah, but doing the right programme.' So eventually I won that battle and we've been invited to perform at this year's festival doing a programme that's right for us."
After years of decline, audiences are slowly coming back to the company. If the audience at one performance in last year's autumn programme in Glasgow Theatre Royal is anything to go by, there is definitely a sizeable younger generation drawn to the company, attracted by the theatricality without being put off by the classical vocabulary. This is a demographic that other ballet companies have lost.
Of course, there are still the letters to the newspapers bemoaning the lack of full-length classics, but many in the ballet world are envious of the repertoire and high standards that Scottish audiences now enjoy. Needless to say, the company will still do popular Christmas productions but even still, Page's Nutcracker won't be conventional and contains a few twists and turns. It will also be replaced with a new ballet next Christmas so that even the pot-boilers are constantly refreshed and renewed. Within the often conservative world of ballet this is rare. For a company to successfully trade its way out of financial and artistic turmoil through innovative repertoire rather than stagnant populism is even rarer.
* The Nutcracker runs from tomorrow to February 5th at the Grand Opera House, Belfast
