10 September 2009

After a five-week break into which he'd crammed a summer back home in Australia and a holiday to New York, Christopher Rodgers-Wilson was clearly buzzing as he gave us his first full interview since joining the company. Chris trained with the Camberwell Ballet in Melbourne before attending the Royal Ballet School and joining Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2007.

'It did take a few months to get used to working for a professional company,' he says, despite now clearly being very settled into the routine of Birmingham Royal Ballet. 'It is a very different environment from school. You have to take on more responsibility for your own class work, training and technique and there is less time for feedback. Instead of classes and training all day, the majority of our time is dedicated to rehearsing ballets for performance. However, I love simply being on stage and performing regularly. That is the best thing!'

When asked about which kind of works he particularly enjoys dancing in, it is clear that the classical ballets are his favourite. 'The repertoire is so varied which is great. I've been able to dance in Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Giselle and also Romeo and Juliet in China last season, to name a few.'

Chris has recently been thrown into the limelight by appearing in Garry Stewart's new piece, The Centre and its Opposite. 'Garry Stewart came in 2008 and did a two-week workshop during which time everyone in the company was encouraged to take part', he enthuses. 'From those people, he picked a smaller group of us and we put together a smaller piece as a kind of project, which was then displayed to the rest of the company.

'Garry later came back to do his full piece for the spring tour,' he continues. 'To create this, we re-learnt a lot of the material we had done previously and he also created more to add to that movement vocabulary. From the 18 of us he picked to be in the piece, and using a lot of the material from the initial workshops, we started breaking down rehearsals working with different groups of people, creating smaller pieces for duets and trios, and then slowly bringing them together with music and the set.'

However, Garry Stewart had never previously created a piece for a classically trained ballet company, so this was a new experience for the dancers as well as for the choreographer. 'It was definitely a collaborative process. Initially it took few sessions to adjust, working through a few aches and pains from new style of movement and also for Garry to see how we danced, being classically trained, and how we could adapt to his material. Garry spoke to us a lot about his ideas from the outset, which was great and helped us to develop the right mood and feeling for the piece. Throughout the creation he would sometimes ask us to experiment and improvise short phrases, which would then be worked into the piece.'

Whenever works that are such a departure from the standard repertoire are performed by the company, there can be a certain degree of resistance from some of the dancers, but Chris is sure that this was not the case this time. 'I think most of the dancers here embrace new works like this one. The first workshops were voluntary but a lot of people gave it a go. The whole process was very interesting and I think most would say they definitely learnt something from it.'

Chris is clearly appreciative of the opportunities being presented to him at a relatively early stage in his career. 'When you do different styles like this you learn, straight away, a lot about your own body and how it moves. Suddenly you realise you are able to do something you didn't know you could do before. That's really exciting, and then you can try and bring that to other things you do.

'The piece is great fun to perform. The music's really full-on, and Gary wanted a real sense of confrontation with the audience; he wanted us to challenge the audience and each other with our eyes and body language which is fun, and quite a contrast to what we would be doing in more classical ballets like Nutcracker! It's hard on your body, but once we got into a rhythm during the spring tour performances, it came to feel much more natural.'

ENDS

Click here for details of Cyrano
Click here for details of Quantum Leaps