Last week one of my adult ballet class students gave me, as a joke, a twig of blossom she’d picked on the way down to the studio. Immediately I was reminded of The Rose Adagio, a dance I learnt at least forty years ago at the Hammond School of Ballet, and miraculously still remember.
The Rose Adagio was the crowning glory of the RAD New Syllabus, devised in the mid-seventies for teenage girls who had basic ballet training but were never going to make it in the ballet world. Inspired by the lithographs of ballerinas like Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler, it was a pastiche of Romantic Ballet, and whilst maintaining some of the rigour of ballet training, it was intended to satisfy our need to feel we were really dancing. Lord knows what any teenage boy would have made of it – it was so camp. But there was no necessity to devise such a syllabus for boys. Any young male who braved ballet school was taken very seriously, and was sure to be training for the real thing. We all had to bring an artificial rose to class. My rose was a large red plastic affair, covered in a kind of fabric like flock wallpaper. It lacked subtlety. The rose was held between the fingers and thumb of the right hand, and we gazed at it as we linked arabesques with glissades and running steps, and in one glorious moment knelt to drink in its scent. I have a vague recollection of sprinkling mine with eau de cologne. Finally, sinking down to place our rose on the floor, fingertips just touching our left cheekbone, we shook our heads – sadly. The whole narrative of love – gained, lost and recalled in solitude – was over in twenty four bars of music. One day Mrs Hassall informed us she was going to choose someone to dance The Rose Adagio solo as part of the school show at the Gateway Theatre, so we were all asked to dance it through several times under her scrutiny. I knew it in my sleep, and thought I was in with a chance, especially as I’d been praised a fair bit that term for my expressive quality – until I heard her whispering to the pianist, ‘Just look at Catherine Bird. So lovely!’ Catherine Bird was a small, neat girl, very intelligent and musical, and she was duly given the part. I remember watching her, rather wistfully, from the wings of the theatre, and feeling somehow as if I’d been denied a great honour. I couldn’t understand what it was that marked her as special. I didn’t realise then that Catherine just looked right before she even started to move – unlike the rest of us gangly pubescent girls. That goes a long way in the world of ballet. It was all long ago, but I’m left with this ridiculous little dance so deeply rooted in my body that I can sing the music as I dance it through – and despite my sense of irony – an understanding of the many facets of the strange world of ballet – the beauty, the cruelty, the absurdity of it all.
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Last night I completed the final version of The Green Table and winged it off to my publisher, expecting to feel great relief and celebration. I wasn’t prepared for the sense of loss, emptiness and sadness I felt instead. What now, I wondered? How do I let go of those characters I’ve lived with so long? I knew it was irrational; after all they’re only fictional characters in an imaginary world. But the act of creating something over a long period of time has a powerful influence on the mind – the characters are like friends, strange as that may sound. As much as I was responsible for creating them, they, in turn, have entered my world and affected me.
Writing The Green Table was mostly a joyful experience. I learnt a great deal, both about my subject matter – the Nazi Occupation of The Netherlands, and the history of dance in that time – as well as about the art of writing fiction. Along the way I’ve received insightful criticism from other writers that has helped me to see my work with more clarity. The germ of an idea for a novel set in Nazi Occupied Holland began over thirty years ago, when I lived and danced in Amsterdam. As I walked around the city, or sat in cafés, I could sense the shadow of World War 2 and Nazism in a way I never had growing up in England. Then, in 2005, I attended an Arvon Course – writing fiction for young adults – led by Celia Rees and the late Jan Mark. Our task that week was to begin a new piece of work. For a long time I’d been captivated by the true story of the choreographer, Kurt Jooss, who had to flee Germany in 1933 for refusing to dismiss his Jewish composer. So this is where I began – with a passionately anti-Nazi German dancer exiled in Holland, and her young students. On the final night I read out the first pages of The Green Table to the rest of the group. I loved the period of intense research that followed – Dutch history, dance history, a visit to the Resistance Museum and Theater Museum, translation of Dutch newspapers, and discoveries about the moral struggles of Dutch medics during the Occupation. Slowly the characters emerged, and a narrative took shape. The Green Table as a book for teenagers never quite made it. Two agents tried to sell it – including the wonderful Pam Royds, children’s fiction editor with Andre Deutsch for many years, who persuaded me to redraft a version with a stronger heroine, and call it Dance for Your Life – which I wasn’t keen on. At least two editors were enthusiastic, and one accepted it, but it was turned down by the marketing departments. It was never going to make big money. So in the end I abandoned it for three years and went off to do an MA. But I could never quite let go. I had the notion that if I were to redraft it as novel for adults there would be scope to go into greater depth with the material. I’d first met Jan Fortune, Cinnamon Press, on the Arvon course all those years ago, and reconnected her when she published one of my short stories. She’d loved the opening pages of The Green Table, and I was delighted when she agreed to mentor me, and subsequently accepted the reworked novel for publication later this year. What I hadn’t bargained for was the immense struggle involved, how much material from the original I had to eliminate, and how often the early work hindered the development and deepening of my characters. It came together, finally, when I spent a week alone last August, house and cat-sitting for Jan in Wales – something like solving an intricate puzzle, I could at last see the form, the shape of it. So now I have to let go – no more revisions, no more corrections. In a few months something that has belonged essentially to me, will become public. Those who read it will like it, or not, and, where it’s noticed, some kind of judgement will be made. I’ll try not to mind whatever comes my way. Writing The Green Table has been a fulfilling and absorbing task, and has given me much joy. The act of writing, though personal, has seemed, at times, to reach far beyond the self, and the imagination to be profoundly connected to the heart, or to whatever it is we call the soul. I have loved the journey. Friday 6th March, our first warm day and the sun shining – glancing out of my studio window as I was teaching I caught a ripple of movement in the pond. I looked more carefully. The surface of the water was broken by a multitude of heads, shining in the sun, some decorated with duck weed. The frogs have arrived, and now the orchard is full of the sound of croaking. They arrived with the full moon of March, and at last spring is on the way.
Last week I went with my art group to visit Hillside Cottage in Windley, Derbyshire, the home of artist and engraver, Rosalind Bliss. Beyond Turnditch, a few miles from home, the road from Ashbourne to Belper seemed to form a boundary – dry-stone walls gave way to hedges, buildings built of brick instead of limestone, the hills more rounded, with deep, tree-filled valleys, so the whole landscape appeared softer, less stark. We reached a dip in the road and there was Hillside Cottage, with its white rendered walls and blue paintwork, towering topiary and undulating yew hedge sheltering the front windows, and a garden full of snowdrops sloping down the valley looking towards Gunhills. This lovely house was the holiday home, and later permanent home, of Rosalind’s parents, artists Douglas Percy Bliss and Phyllis Dodd, both successful and acclaimed painters before the war. Douglas Bliss was for many years the director of Glasgow School of Art, as well as an authority on the history of wood engraving. As we wandered around the garden and the ancient orchard beyond it, we came face to face with strange and humorous heraldic beasts, reminiscent of children’s writer, Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things, and a little further on a pig, cast in concrete escaping through a brick wall, all created many years ago by Douglas Bliss after his retirement.
We entered a small low room decorated in frayed silvery wallpaper. Sunlight filtered through the plants in the window and over the table, lighting up a china teacup filled with snowdrops and purple crocuses, and a selection of art books – the work of Ravilious and Bawden, beautifully bound in block printed paper. The walls were hung with paintings by Rosalind’s parents – portraits by her mother, Phyllis Dodd, and landscapes by her father. There was so much to look at in such a small space. I was struck by an exquisite full-length portrait of Douglas Bliss as a young man wearing a brown suit and shiny brown shoes, leaning in a doorway, looking down at his feet, and bathed in yellow light. ‘It was my mother who persuaded my father to take up painting again,’ Rosalind told us, as she showed us his painting of a wintery garden in Blackheath, pathways and formal beds under snow, dark trees in the distance – the quiet gloom of January. ‘It was painted during the Phoney War when the snow came. That’s me in the pram. Blackheath has completely changed now, there are houses where those gardens used to be. The war changed everything.’ Rosalind was trained as a mural painter, but as ‘nobody wants murals’, she began painting screens. They are stacked in her studio across the yard, and she unfolded one after another to show us – the interior of a French church with golden arches and pillars disappearing into the distance, the rich blues and purples of Samarkand, part painted, part lino cut, a summer field gloriously abundant with daisies. It was when she showed us two small engravings by her mother of Northgate St in Chester, one looking towards the Pied Bull pub, and another taken from the canal (both scenes I know well), that we became aware of an amazing coincidence. Phyllis Dodd had spent her childhood in Chester. I asked Rosalind where her mother had lived. ‘Lumley Rd,’ she replied. ‘My father built number 13.’ 15 Lumley Rd is the house I’ve known all my life, the house my sister was born in, and where my parents, now in their late 80s, have lived for fifty-six years. When I stand at the window of my old bedroom, I look across the back garden at the domineering red-brick wall and green stained glass window of number 13, and watch the crows on the chimney pots. Phyllis Dodd left this house in the late 30s, and sometime after, the new owners must have sold part of the garden to the man who built our house in 1956. It’s good to think of Phyllis Dodd as a young girl before the war, sitting with her sketch book in her garden, where my childhood home now stands – where fifty years later my sister and I sat for hours over our art homework. ‘Down the Stream’ was the name we gave as children to the wilderness that lay between our 1950s housing estate and the Chester to Liverpool railway line. It was a hummocky undulating tract of land with a murky stream – smelling of drains – that ran along the bottom of the railway embankment, and a wide margin of stony land, dense with willow saplings, beside the railway track.
‘We’re going down the stream,’ we’d shout as we set off in our shorts and wellington boots, and except for a brief period around the time of the Moors Murders, when the adults decided we should be confined to our gardens, we were allowed our freedom. Our reckless feet trampled pathways through long grass, nettles, brambles, and the pungent Himalayan Balsam that burst its seed pods between our fingers. We found an elderberry tree that branched in four directions, so we all had a different route to climb to the top, and we spent many an hour making it sway under our weight, and peering through the leaves and heavy blossoms into the mysterious ivy-clad seat of the garden below. If we followed the stream in one direction it led to a hill, flanked on one steep side by sycamores – an eerie unsettling place where we never ventured alone. The hill dropped down to an abandoned football field, the grasses tall and shimmering in the wind, a wooden pavilion, and the brick wall of Williams & Williams steel factory, where berries of deadly nightshade gleamed in the shadows. In the other direction – when we fought our way far enough through the clumps of grass – we discovered a woodland carpeted in celandine, aconite and bluebells, bounded by a hawthorn hedge, and overhung by a young horse chestnut tree. There was the time we searched a patch of clover and found not only four-leafed, but five, six, seven-leaved stems. One year the embankment was covered in poisonous rhubarb with its elephantine leaves and fat hairy trunks, so dramatic that it was featured in the local newspaper. And once, for a day the stream turned yellow with industrial waste. Down the Stream was our playground for a long decade – an untamed wilderness, an edge-land between industry and nature, it fed our young imaginations and satisfied our need for adventure and exploration. The summer the bulldozers came and the stream was piped underground felt like the end of my childhood. A Morrisons supermarket was built at one end of the wasteland and a housing estate the other. Sometime after I left home the track was sealed off by a fence, and what remained of our wilderness became frustratingly inaccessible. Last week, after nearly forty years, pushing a way through the wire fence at the bottom of a neighbour’s garden, I found my way back to what remains – a scrap of land, a copse of trees – the rest flattened by Morrisons’ car park, people’s extended gardens, and the railway track behind a high metal fence. Below a grid over a brick inlet, I could hear the echoing surge of the stream through the huge cement pipes underground. Last week I went to the Linbury Studio in Covent Garden to watch Gandini Jugglers in their new work, 4x4: Ephemeral Architectures, choreographed by Ludovic Ondiviela, with music for a string quintet, composed by Nimrod Borenstein.
Artistic director, Sean Gandini writes Tracing pathways in space, four jugglers and four ballet dancers share a stage for the first time. 4x4: Ephemeral Architectures is a celebration of where these paths meet. This piece is a return to our love of pure patterns and mathematics, our roots in imagining juggling as a form of dance. It was one of the most joyful as well as skilful pieces I’ve seen in a long time. The air was alive with the movement of coloured juggling balls, hoops and batons, the dancers weaving around and between, seeming to create continual yet transient patterns of lines crossing, curving and weaving through the space. Much of the performance was beautifully side-lit, and then by a chess-board of light. From time to time the dancers commented on the action, adding another playful dimension. It was clearly an incredibly complex piece, involving silent counting, and split second responses to each other and the objects in flight, but the overall effect was of something very youthful, humorous and magical. Equally entertaining was listening to Sean Gandini and Ludovic Ondiviela in interview later. As if on a mega caffeine rush, Gandini gabbled on with great energy, the mic being passed between him and his choreographer as if they were still juggling. But that’s dance at its most skilled and professional. Ballet for adults is something else. After years of teaching contemporary dance and Pilates, over the last year I’ve begun to teach ballet, albeit at a fairly basic level to a small group of adults. I’m convinced of the health benefits. There’s nothing like it for strengthening the legs and feet, and improving balance and co-ordination – all of which are essential as we get older. But more than this is the opportunity to work with music, with the shape and flow of movement, and with different dynamics and rhythm – to actually dance rather than just exercise. Teaching ballet to children, or to would-be professionals, is one thing – but what are the particular elements involved in teaching adults, who have different abilities, restrictions and requirements, but can nevertheless achieve a great deal? This is something I want to explore and develop over the next few years. Through my internet browsing I came across Kathy Mata, a teacher based in San Francisco, and found this short film of her teaching truly inspiring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtuGVjmmmAs It’s an odd experience completing the final draft of a novel, as I did last week. I winged it off to my publisher and two writers whose opinion I trust and value, went off to my ballet class, then took a friend out for an excellent fish dinner in our local French restaurant. I didn’t manage much sleep that night, overcome by existential anxiety and churning restlessness, and was woken at five-thirty by my son, who was taking the early flight to Berlin and had overslept. Too late either for public transport or an airport car-park, he needed me to go with him and drive his car home. As the electricity had failed, we dressed by torchlight, and finally launched ourselves into the dark of early morning. After a white-knuckle drive we reached the airport with fifteen minutes to spare. I abandoned him at the quick-drop-off point, only to find myself apparently locked into his car, and a queue of cars behind me. After much panic-stricken pressing of buttons, the passenger window eventually slid open, so I clambered out, threw the pound coin into the machine to open the barrier, myself back through the window into the car, and drove off.
Why the hell do I feel compelled to write novels anyway? I’ve always loved reading, but that hardly answers the question, and I’ve wanted to write for almost as long as I knew books existed. There are times, but rarely, when I read a novel that contributes to making life worth living. I finish reading and go back to the beginning again, dwelling on the characters, the setting, the poetry of the writing itself still echoing in my mind. Those times the imagination is lit up and the world seems richer, more expansive and at the same time more intimate. Novels such as John Williams' Stoner, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and most recently Philip Larkin’s extraordinary novel, A Girl in Winter are food for the heart and soul, as well as the mind. To aspire to write something of such quality seems entirely worthwhile. I have no delusions, and I know I’m nowhere near yet, but we all improve with the hours we put in. I’m in for the long haul, and perhaps, in part, this is what drives me to keep on working. Browsing in my bookshelves for something to read, I picked up ‘A Girl in Winter,’ Philip Larkin’s second novel, written in 1947, when he was still a young man and an unknown poet. It was given to me as a present by my friend Nicholas Antram, wishing me a very happy Christmas 1985. I know I must have read it all those years ago, but had no recollection, so it seemed a good choice to revisit.
‘A Girl in Winter’ is a short novel in three sections. The main protagonist is a young woman, Katherine Lind, who’s German, or from a German-speaking country. The first and third sections are set during the Second World War in a nondescript and un-named English town in the bleakest of winters, where Katherine is in exile. Philip Larkin never tells us directly why Katherine has left her country, but we assume she’s Jewish, and consequently she’s lost her home and her family. As a result she seems at times as emotionally frozen as the winter she endures. The middle section is set in Oxfordshire in June six years previously, where Katherine, as a sixteen year old, spent three weeks with her pen-friend, Robin Fennel. Katherine’s youthful heart-searching is so minutely and authentically described, that this section could be mistaken for a ‘coming of age’ novel by a female author. It’s hard to define the theme of the novel; the disruptive influence of war; the closing down of the heart as a result of profound grief, and at the same time the way the heart can unexpectedly respond with compassion towards others; love and disillusion; profound loneliness; indifference. Subtle, under-stated and nuanced, in its weaker sections it’s as clumsy and over-written as a first draft. Yet it’s almost brilliant too – a quiet, strangely haunting read, musical both in form and in the poetry of its language. It’s full of the introspective musings of a young girl, but, despite its flaws, so beautifully written that it seeps into the imagination, leaving a shadow, or essence, as dreams sometime do. Some years ago, I wrote a short story about a German girl living in similarly lonely and melancholy circumstances in post-war London. I never wrote more than three drafts and it remains more like a fragment of a longer work than a short story. Only now, reading ‘A Girl in Winter’ – a novel I thought I’d forgotten – I recognise Larkin’s quiet but profound influence, and realise it’s been with me since first reading, almost thirty years ago. I’ve never visited Russia, but I’ve lived with a powerful imagined notion of this vast country for most of my life. It began as a child watching my father’s production of The Cherry Orchard at Chester Little Theatre and being enraptured. My father loved everything Russian before he ever travelled there – I’m afraid he might even have had a leaning towards the Soviet Regime – despite misgivings. In the cupboard there was a maquette of his stage set for the play, perfectly made, with little models of the characters in their silk clothes. I’d open the door to look at it admiringly, sometimes taking it down to re-enact parts of the play. Some years later, when I was eleven, every Tuesday evening we sat down to listen to a twenty-episode dramatisation of War and Peace on Radio 4. It was marvellous. At thirteen, inspired by the radio, I attempted to read War and Peace in three volumes of tiny print, which involved skipping the war and philosophy and revelling in the romance.
My imagined Russia was a place of vast empty landscapes, planes of snow, birch and rowan trees, and long light summers, of the wild haunting folk music that runs through Rite of Spring, of The Three Sisters and their longing for Moscow. I too longed to visit. I intended to save up to go on the Trans Siberian Railway as soon as I could. My romantic attachment was still more or less intact in recent years when I read Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes full of rich stories about the cultural history of Russia, and Helen Dunmore’s brilliant novel, The Siege, set during the siege of Leningrad. But by the time I read her sequel, Betrayal, all romantic notions of Russia had been replaced by something much darker. I can’t remember why. A crack in the illusion and the news is sobering. Reality at last caught up with me. And earlier this week I finished reading Andy Miller’s novel Snowdrops – a haunting book, powerfully evocative of the dark nature of present day Moscow. I’ll probably never visit Russia now. The desire isn’t there any longer. But I hope that the old Russia I imagined still exists at heart, if only in the richness of its culture, folklore and religion. Nottingham – College Street, up the stairs to the long narrow dance studio at night, I feel a sense of anticipation, wondering who else was selected from the audition. As we stand in a circle and introduce ourselves, I think – yes, this is exactly the right group – perfect. There’s that warm alertness, everyone open and ready to respond. Joe Moran is quiet and gentle in the way he works, but not intense – more as if he’s drawing us in – playful, about to tell us a secret.
How good it is to dance, like flowing through cool water. I relax into sharing this common language of movement. There are too few opportunities. I notice the difference between an internal focus on my own body in movement, and when I open my gaze to the room and to others. I’m so much happier in response, when gestures and phrases are echoed and bounced around the studio, when connections are made, developed, and let go again. After an hour dancing, Joe talks about his work with Deborah Hay. I wish now that I’d written everything he told us, remembered better. These words she uses – the notion of ‘What if’ – seem to open possibilities of responding to any situation with an openness that counters dogma. The dance studio is your research lab, your hours spent dancing are your research. What if your body is your teacher? What if where you are now is where you need to be? We work with these words, not as new age maxims, but with a sense of curiosity and adventure. Our performance ‘task’ is to walk, to sit, to move as one body, ten chairs into different positions in the gallery, over a period of time, from forty minutes to an hour and a half. It seems to me, after our first rehearsal, that the simplicity of the task will take on new colour, depth and tension, as time goes on – as we become more familiar with each other, listen more acutely, and explore the notion ‘what if?’ |
AuthorTricia Durdey dances, writes, and teaches Pilates. Archives
October 2017
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