To reinvent a ballet company
Pouring their very heart and soul into his exciting inaugural production, I Got Rhythm. By
indelible mark, creating 13 new works in 20 years. His wide-ranging ballets, not all of which were loved by critics (both his Nazithemed Hamlet and an “intergalactic” Sleeping Beauty raised eyebrows), generated excellent box office successes and tended to always look gorgeous, thanks to his unfaltering visual sense.
Stretching the dancers
Nixon seems to have a fingeronthepulse artistic acumen, too, knowing not only what draws audiences, but also what dancers require in order to be stretched.
“My work is strongly balletbased but also very physical,” he said. “The dancers have to be physical with their bodies and they have to be fit to do it. And there’s an articulation. The whole show has a cleanliness, a sophistication of movement that brings a crispness – a clarity – to what’s on stage.”
According to the Cape Town City Ballet dancers, Nixon has been quick to stamp his mark on the company. “It’s very different to what I’m familiar with,” said Fanelo Ndweni (24), who grew up in Joburg’s CBD. “I’m used to doing ballet or contemporary or African. But David’s choreography requires a mixture of styles. It’s probably one of the toughest things I’ve done.”
Ndweni said he sometimes feels himself losing energy during rehearsals, as if about to crash. “I push through, though, because everyone else is pushing through as well.”
Later in the rehearsal, after the big ensemble number, Ndweni was pushing himself again, this time in an exhausting twohander danced to I Got Rhythm.
“It’s two guys being competitive with each other,” explained Nixon, “done in a goodhumoured way so the audience can engage in the game of ‘I’m faster, quicker and can jump higher than you’ with them.”
It’s fastpaced with strutting and leaping, and a jokey showingoff that ends with both dancers collapsed on the floor.
“What’s your heart rate?” asked assistant director Tracy Li. “Seventynine,” Ndweni said, smiling cautiously.
His answer produces a sea of disbelieving frowns and laughs until another dancer went to check the BPM reading on Ndweni’s watch and shook his head. “He’s lying,” he announced to more laughter.
These are the kinds of things these peakoffitness dancers find funny, despite the reality of the physical demands placed on them. Never mind the injuries and muscle ache, the anxiety of learning new choreography and then the pressure of getting it right, again and again, in front of an audience – and the requirement do it with grace, effortlessly, smiles blazing.
To help fasttrack the learning process, Nixon has, along with his wife, ballet mistress Yoko Ichino, developed a training method that
they’ve used for years to build dancers to a certain level. Ichino, who started dancing professionally in the early 1970s and in her career partnered with, among others, Rudolph Nureyev, spent two weeks taking the company through a rigorous backtobasics bootcamp in preparation for Nixon’s choreography.
“It was humbling,” said Hannah Ward. “As you get older, your body just doesn’t necessarily respond as easily. Sometimes you lose a bit of range and flexibility. Yoko’s method has been incredibly helpful – it helps you use your body more wisely.”
“It’s hard at first,” said Nixon of the journey he’s put the company on. “But if you train your body properly, you become stronger and can dance at a certain level.”
Mental challenge
Of course, it’s not only physical stamina and prowess that’s critical. Much of the journey is mental.
Casey Swales, a tall, gifted dancer from Durban, where there’s no permanent ballet company, said there’s an unmistakable mental intensity during the rehearsal period. “There’s no going home to chill and switch off. I obsess easily, tire my brain by constantly thinking through what I’ve got to do,” he said.
“It’s allconsuming because you want to give everything you’ve got to it.”
Swales said the obsessive aspect of rehearsals is inherent to the often quite ferocious and always demanding process of the brain taking in new moves, trying to synch those with the body. “Last night I literally woke up in the middle of the night from a
choreography dream while going over Rhapsody, the music playing in my brain.”
Speak to any ballet dancer and there are the stories of injury, dancing through pain, putting their bodies through something akin to hell. There was nary a dancer I spoke to after the rehearsal who didn’t recount some or other hair-raising “incident”.
“I’ve just come back from a serious foot injury involving the ligament of my bunion bone,” said principal dancer Kirstél Paterson. “It’s from dancing two seasons when I shouldn’t have been dancing at all.”
There were other issues, too. “I have arthritis and degeneration in my big toe joints which comes from dancing 20plus years on pointe.”
Swales broke his toe just before he was due to dance the lead in a huge Cape Town production of Spartacus; he had to sit out the run, weeks of work put on ice. Ndweni twisted his ankle in December while doing a double saut de basque during a rehearsal for A Christmas Carol. He was in a moon boot for 12 weeks. Chanté Daniels, his partner in
the Rhapsody number, is only recently back after a hip operation. “I have to gently throw her from side to side without hurting her,” he said.
Despite these endless physical hazards, these dancers are unwavering in their commitment.
“We had such an intense rehearsal now,” said Oleksii Ishchenko, a 38yearold dancer originally from Kiev, Ukraine, who struck me as being on a huge high after rehearsing.
“The choreography is so meticulous, a second’s hesitance and you’re out of the momentum of the entire routine. But when you’re getting it right and you’re perfectly in synch with your partner, that feeling is unmatched,” said Ishchenko.
Paterson said it comes down to the incomparable feeling of dancing on stage. “Being on stage is the only time I can express myself completely. My soul is on that stage – it’s a sacred space and what audiences see is me having the time of my life up there.”
“I love doing this,” said Ishchenko. “And because I love it, I tell myself, uhuh, you’re not giving up, no matter how difficult it can seem. Because this is what I want to do with my life: dance.
“It’s a journey, from weeks of constantly being challenged, pumping new information during rehearsals until eventually you nail it and it’s programmed into your body and you can start enjoying it. Then you’re on stage, looking at the audience with those calm eyes, showing them that you’re in control, telling them, you watch me, I’m here to perform for you! That feeling of being on stage – just talking about it gives me goosebumps.”