Ballet for everyone: Pupils get a chance to dance

"Up and back and swing and turn," chants Rhian Robbins, dancing across the community hall in Hammersmith. "Ready and up and turn and down."

Behind her a dozen local nine-year-olds dance in a ragged line, not yet sure of the moves for the performance they will be putting on at the Royal Opera House later this year. Yes, that's right. The Royal Opera House. Because these novice dancers, despite barely knowing their pliés from their petits jetés, will soon be dancing in a specially-commissioned classical ballet, with dancers from the Royal Ballet, at one of the most famous venues in the world.

And Albjon Morina, for one, will take to it like the manor born. Head up, hands graceful, he moves with ease around the room. "Look at him," says one of the class's teachers, Patrick Lewis, "he's just got something. You can tell."

Albjon, nine, is from Albania, and goes to Bentworth Primary School, where he does a lot of sport, and enjoys ballet "because it helps me with my muscles and body strength."

Like all the children in the ROH's outreach programme, Chance to Dance, he has never done ballet before. "I really like it," he says. His fellow student Precious McNally-Boyde, nine, says she's learnt how to point her toes properly. "I feel like a real dancer when I skip across the room," she says. Monica Banda, nine, says, "I've done general dancing and fun things before, but never real ballet."

Her mother, Juliette Shirley, says it has improved her confidence and poise "and she's always practising her moves at home."

Chance to Dance is a major programme in the Royal Opera House's array of educational outreach activities, and has the twin aims of taking the world of ballet out to youngsters who wouldn't normally come across it, and helping to expand the supply of dancers and audiences of tomorrow.

"One of the things we want to do is widen the participation in, and understanding of classical art forms," says Paul Reeve, director of education at the Royal Opera House. "And to do that we aim to work with communities who are not normally exposed to the world of ballet."

It has been going for 16 years and given more than 20,000 London children and their parents the opportunity to take part in ballet workshops, auditions, classes and shows.

The programme works with 46 primary schools in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, and Hammersmith and Fulham and, from workshops and auditions, chooses talented children who could benefit from free classes. These children then go into weekly classes for up to five years, and also get the chance to visit and perform in the Royal Opera House. This summer they will be performing in the Linbury Theatre at the ROH a ballet by choreographer David Fielding that relocates The Carnival of the Animals to a school canteen, complete with dancing dinner ladies.

"It's challenging work," says Lewis, who also teaches at the Royal Academy of Dance, "but challenging in a positive way. You have to be more flexible in how you teach classes like this. The students have to learn listening skills and concentration, and the parents have to be supportive as well. We can find that parents are oblivious of everything that's going on until something goes wrong."

More than a thousand children have so far learnt ballet this way, and a handful have gone on into professional training. At the last count, 29 students had managed to get into vocational dance schools with the help of grants and bursaries, while one dancer, Shevelle Dynott, became the first Chance To Dance dancer to go to the Royal Ballet Upper School and join the English National Ballet. More than 40 students have joined the Royal Ballet School's associates' programme, while 50 have gained places at the Central School of Ballet and the contemporary dance centre, The Young Place. Chance to Dance graduates have also performed in a number of West End shows including The Lion King and Saturday Night Fever.

Now the programme aims to develop many more practitioners who can take ballet out, in innovative and creative ways, to the community, whether that means working with nine-year-olds or 60-year-olds.

"There has never been a better time for dance education," enthuses Reeve. "For one thing there is a lot of general excitement about dance, so you are starting with a known when you work with children, and then you gradually take them to the unknown and to something they are less comfortable with.

"For another thing it fits with important agendas. There's the question of obesity and encouraging health and fitness, which is increasingly important to government, and the social agenda, too. Dance is a brilliant way of keeping young people together. And then there's the question of identity. Most cultures have their own form of dance and it can be a way of helping children know who they are and where they are from.

"And we need that input of new creativity. The ballet world is desperately short of good choreographers. It is crying out for the next Kenneth MacMillan or Frederick Ashton."

The programme sits alongside other initiatives to take ballet out to the people. There are regular school visits to Opera House performances, a small touring ballet, and various family events and workshops.

"One of our aims is to increase diversity," says Martha Ming Whitfield, ballet education manager at the ROH. "That has changed quite dramatically in the past 15 years. There are now many dancers from Asian and other backgrounds. But none of them are British, unfortunately, so there is still a way to go."

"I see our work like that of a premier league football club," says Reeve. "We work with schools partly to work in the community, and partly because we want to be out there spotting talent. But we have to be realistic. Most of the children are not going to be professional dancers. Only a very, very small percentage are talented in that way, and professional training is very expensive as well. What we are doing is developing them as people. They learn discipline, team-working, so many things. There are a lot of stories from teachers about children whose work has improved and who are more at ease with themselves because of our classes."

Chance to Dance has become an established part of the ROH's ballet world, with growing contact between the professional dancers and the young students.

"One of the great sea changes here is that education is no longer seen as an obligation that comes with getting a large chunk of public funding, but as something integral to what we are and what we do," says Reeve. "It's now seen as something that benefits us, rather than just some social service we're lumbered with providing."

'When I dance I feel really glad'

Vernon Anderson, 11, lives in south London and attends Clapham Manor Primary School. But from September he will be starting at the Royal Ballet's lower school, White Lodge, in Richmond. "People came to school and chose some of us to participate in ballet classes," he says. "I was one of them. I can't remember how they decided. I think they just asked us to point our feet and things like that."

Vernon didn't know anything about ballet, and at first his friends teased him. "They said ballet wasn't for boys. They were quite rude, but now they can see that you have to be really strong to do it."

He does four hours of ballet a week, an hour after school in a Chance to Dance, and three hours on Saturday in Covent Garden, where he is a junior associate of the Royal Ballet. "Which is really good because we might learn new steps, and you never know what you're going to have to do."

No one in Vernon's family knew anything about ballet when he started, he says. "But my mum and dad really want me to do it. They're very proud that I have got so far, and my brother, who's nine, does the same class after school that I did, and my older sister, who's six, is looking forward to starting as well.

"When I dance I feel really glad. You have to be really strong and fit and healthy. And I'm really happy to be going to White Lodge. People from all over the world go there, and I think they only take something like 12 boys and 12 girls.

"I think I might go as far as becoming a professional dancer, but I know it's hard. I've been to lots of performances and starred in some productions, too. And I was in Sleeping Beauty, at the Royal Opera House, with the Royal Ballet. I was one of the pages."

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