Youngsters bring The Nutcracker to the Eastbourne stage
South Coast Ballet, an amateur youth ballet company which grew out of the immediate aftermath of the lockdowns, offers its second major production.
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00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers.
00:05 Lovely to speak to Rachel Mitchell this morning. Now, Rachel, in the last couple of years or so,
00:09 you've created something really fantastic, haven't you? And it's South Coast Ballet,
00:13 and you'll be doing the Nutcracker at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne on November 25th.
00:18 But the wider context for this is this grew out of something that was really horrible, wasn't it?
00:23 The pandemic was a time of misery. But coming out of the pandemic, you created South Coast Ballet.
00:29 Why was the need there? Why did you do that?
00:32 Yes, well, just me and along with other fellow dance teachers around, we spent months still trying to train our pupils via Zoom.
00:41 So from our living rooms and our pupils' living rooms, trying to keep their ballet training going and their enthusiasm.
00:48 But we could see that that was starting to lack. And because the other side of your training,
00:55 obviously you can then use that training to go into performances and competitions and to develop it further that way.
01:01 But due to the COVID restrictions, obviously all those big gatherings were completely cancelled.
01:07 So you were just trying to be in your living room or your kitchen doing all your basic exercises with nowhere for that to go to.
01:15 And we were seeing people were dropping classes and enthusiasm was just was not there.
01:21 And then out of that, when we were finally able to get these bigger groupings again,
01:25 just decided we wanted to just show these dance pupils to kind of remind them of why they love their dancing.
01:32 And it's about reigniting the fire then, clearly, isn't it?
01:35 Absolutely. Absolutely.
01:37 And you had your big debut show last year, didn't you? This time last year.
01:41 Yes.
01:42 Pitfix Potter. That gave you a good platform for now, didn't it?
01:45 Oh, absolutely. Yes. So we had 25 dancers in our debut production last year.
01:51 This year we've gone into over 60 for Nutcracker.
01:54 So we've grown considerably and it's fabulous to have so many amazing children to be working with and young people.
02:00 So how do you explain that expansion?
02:02 What's your feeling of what the youngsters are getting from doing this? And you've got quite a wide age, haven't you? Wide age range.
02:08 Yes. Your youngest dancers are eight. And then we've got dancers going up to age 23.
02:15 We also have a couple of adults performing us, performing character roles as well.
02:20 It's been brilliant to get dancers from across the South East just together.
02:25 So they're meeting people from different dance schools, different backgrounds, just making new friends right across the way.
02:31 It's been brilliant to see them all working together.
02:33 Yeah. And you will expand into workshops next year then?
02:37 Oh, absolutely. Yes. We originally, before we had our first production, we started off with workshops introducing classic choreography from the classic ballets,
02:47 for example, we did Coppélia and Cinderella and things like that.
02:50 And we, once we've got our show out the way in November, in the new year, we will look to opening up again some one-off one day events for children and young dancers to come and be a part of.
03:04 So good luck with that and good luck in the meantime. Time with Nutcracker, Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, November 25th.
03:11 Rachel, lovely to speak to you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
03:14 Thank you.