Why 2020 was supposed to be a celebratory year for Northern Ballet

Since lockdown began, I’ve been taking you on a weekly tour of our theatres, from the coasts to Steel City, I’ve examined the venues with which we are blessed. This week, I’m cheating.

I make no apologies.

Northern Ballet is most famous not for its little Stanley and Audrey Burton venue of course, but I’m setting the rules here and it would be weird, frankly, to not include this vital organisation in my virtual tour.

Northern Ballet has a couple of ‘homes’ in its home city. Some of its work it premieres at Leeds Playhouse, some at Leeds Grand Theatre and it’s all made in the company’s impressive home at Quarry Hill which opened a decade ago this year.

The beautifully impressive Northern Ballet building, a huge asset to the city and region, is home to the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre, which is why I say it qualifies to be on the list of places I’m visiting during lockdown.

Northern Ballet’s artistic director is Canadian David Nixon. “Our theatre is in Northern Ballet’s Leeds city-centre home, so it’s a real hub for creativity,” he says.

“Northern Ballet is the widest touring ballet company in the UK and we are renowned for creating unexpected original story ballets offering something different for ballet audiences.”

He speaks with great – and deserved – pride of the company. All theatre buildings, companies, organisations are having a tough time right now, but for Northern Ballet, 2020 is particularly painful.

“This year Northern Ballet is supposed to be celebrating its 50th anniversary. Our building and the Stanley and Audrey Burton theatre also turns 10 years old. It was supposed to be a huge, celebratory year,” he says.

Back in 2001 Nixon was artistic director of BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio and was approached by Mark Skipper, the chief executive of Northern Ballet Theatre (as it was then called).

“I came to Leeds and was impressed with the company’s ambition and ethos of creating new narrative ballets. As a choreographer that was incredibly appealing to me.

“I’ve now been here almost 20 years and the progress the company has made over that time has been extraordinary, including having our own amazing building and the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre.”

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, the theatre in Northern Ballet’s building is not, obviously, one of our ‘main’ theatres in the region. It is genuinely being used as my excuse to write about Northern Ballet.

It is also well worth a visit – a place, when we can return, where you will see some wonderful world-class work.

“The theatre is important to the city because it gives a platform for audiences to see world-class smaller companies for whom the city’s larger venues are not appropriate. We have

received companies from as far afield as New Zealand,” says Nixon.

Northern Ballet began its life half a century ago as Northern Dance Theatre with another Canadian, Laverne Mayer, at the helm. In 1987 film and television star Christopher Gable took over from Robert de Warren, who had established the company’s international credentials.

Gable’s Romeo and Juliet is one Nixon chooses as a defining production for the company, alongside recent creations including Jonathan Watkins’ 1984 and Kenneth Tindall’s Geisha. His own Dracula is an impressive piece of work too.

“We are one of the five large ballet companies in the UK and the only one based in the North of England. We are not afraid to push boundaries, present stories that people might think were not an obvious choice for ballet and strive to push our art form forward.

“We hope people across the region are proud to have our company on their doorstep.”

Me too. “Our entire industry is facing an immensely challenging time. During our spring 2020 tour, Northern Ballet was due to reach 33 towns and cities across the UK with more than 120 performances.

“We were only able to hold one performance this season, the world premiere of Geisha at Leeds Grand Theatre, before theatres had to close their doors. We are facing financial losses of over £1m.

“The current restrictions on social distancing make it both impossible for our dancers to rehearse and improbable that the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre, or any theatres on our tours, would be able to accommodate enough audiences members to be financially viable.

"We are watching the situation closely, contributing to conversations with the government and hope that we will be able to raise the curtain again soon.”

This week Theatre Royal Plymouth announced it was having to make plans for redundancies. It is not a good time for the theatre industry and it is hard to know what to say to and from within the theatre world.

Nixon is not sugar coating the situation. “We’re now turning our attention to our autumn tour, which had close to 100 performances scheduled,” he says.

“Some have already fallen by the wayside and there remains great uncertainty as to whether the rest can go ahead and, if they do, reduced audience capacity with socially distanced audiences could make our tours unviable and create further losses.”

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