One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars
‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top.
I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so much beauty and so much strength and power in that company,” says Sambé. “There has been a surge in this younger generation,” says Ball.
Why this wealth of talent has arrived right now isn’t easy to pinpoint, but they definitely spur each other on. There’s healthy competition – ballet boys can’t resist a pirouette-off; Corrales’ record is “at least 15” – but they all talk about how secure they feel because each dancer is very different.
Liverpool-born Ball, 26, who trained at the Royal Ballet School from the age of 11, is the tall athlete-poet with a flair for drama. He took leave from the Royal Ballet to make a dazzlingly seductive turn in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake and his interests lie in character and storytelling. “He’s almost dancing with his brain,” says Sambé. “There’s always something so intense going on; he’s bubbling, bubbling, bubbling.”
Ball and Sambé have been friends since the latter joined the Royal Ballet Upper School at 16. “Marcelino is so full of energy and vivacity and life,” says Ball. “That’s his personality and his dancing matches that. When you see him move it’s like a fish to water, it just makes sense.” Sambé’s joy as he springs and bounds has made him an outright audience favourite, although he admits his beaming smile was originally a mechanism for coping with nerves. “The one thing that made me feel comfortable was a big smile, to connect with the audience,” he says.
Corrales, at 23, is the virtuoso prodigy. The son of Cuban ballet dancers, raised in Canada, he joined English National Ballet aged 17, was a principal at 20 and moved to the Royal two years ago. “He’s a real firecracker,” says Ball. “He certainly pushes us to achieve one more centimetre higher or an extra turn. People often talk about British dancers being controlled or mannered and that’s something I personally don’t want to buy into.”
A notable line in Men at the Barre comes from ballet master Christopher Carr, who was a dancer in the Royal Ballet in the era of Rudolf Nureyev. He says that if Nureyev was around now, he wouldn’t be such a big star: “There are now better dancers.” Corrales takes issue with that. “Nureyev was on another planet!” he says. But it’s true that while Nureyev was ahead of his time, and had blazing power and charisma, there are technically better dancers with every
generation. The expectations on young dancers now are much greater than their predecessors. Everything is bigger, faster, higher; training draws on hitech sports science, and they must master not only the exactitudes of classical technique, but be versatile enough to perform the most contortive contemporary moves. They don’t just follow directions, either, but help develop movement with choreographers. “It’s very different to other generations,” says Corrales. “You need to have that skill of contributing, bringing ideas to the table.”
With two ballet dancers for parents, Corrales had the genes and the setup for a smooth career path. In Cuba dancers are revered, with footballer-like status, but growing up in Canada he experienced bullying, “especially since I was the smallest in the class,” he says. He could laugh, because “they just had no clue” about dance, but at the same time he thinks that spurred him on to literally jump higher. “All those negative comments, the bullying in school from a young age, gave me that power and explosiveness to become who I am today.”
The teasing Corrales experienced probably chimes with most people’s expectations about the lingering stigma attached to boys who do ballet – mocking comments made by US television presenter Lara Spencer about Prince George doing ballet feature in Men at the Barre. But it’s not everyone’s experience. Ball, whose mother is a dance teacher, remembers “leaving school halfway through the day to go and audition in London and all the lads giving me high fives and wishing me good luck. I was actually quite supported, which some people might be surprised by, especially in Liverpool which is such a football city.”
Unlike Ball and Corrales, Sambé doesn’t come from a dancing background. From a poor family in Lisbon, his construction-worker father died when he was eight and he was fostered by another family with a daughter at the Lisbon Conservatory, where Sambé studied. His earliest dance experience was in African dance and he first saw ballet on YouTube. He wouldn’t have found his calling without it, he says, especially seeing black dancers such as Carlos Acosta. “An incredible moment, thinking, yeah, of course you can do this.”
The internet has inevitably had a huge impact on this generation of dancers, and on the reach of an art form previously confined to the stage. Having a social media profile is part of the job for dancers now, and the combination of gorgeous bodies and photogenic grit and strength has turned out to be catnip for brands looking for ambassadors and influencers. The dancers’ Instagram accounts reveal superhuman tricks and off-stage candour (Sambé has an account dedicated to his beautiful backstage shots of colleagues). You can check out how they’ve all been spending lockdown: Corrales and principal dancer girlfriend Francesca Hayward giddily laughing their way through multiple pirouettes; Ball and his partner, fellow dancer Mayara Magri, filming their plyometric fitness routine in the park. When we speak, Ball has just taken delivery of a shoulder rig for his camera, using the time off to explore his other creative interests – he thinks there’s a lot of potential to better capture dance on film.
Sambé has been painting and gardening, he tells me, and working on his own choreography, some of which can be seen in a film made (pre-lockdown) with Cloakroom magazine, all undulating muscles and sharp turns. It’s a hint of what’s to come, the choreography connecting to Sambé’s first experience in African dance, a meshing of dance identities he wants to pursue. “To be able to explore incredible ballet dancers’ bodies doing this kind of movement I think will be really cool.”
Ballet can be so much more than its traditional image, insists Sambé, but it means this generation breaking out of the ballet bubble. “I believe the art form is still in its infancy,” he says, “and there’s so much more to explore. We need to look out at what is happening in the world, from politics to arts, and bring that into the ballet world.” More than ever, young dancers aren’t just empty vessels, he says. “There are so many layers to being an artist this way. The process is so rich and intense and visceral. The sacrifice brings such a specific grain and incredible strength. I feel there’s a misconception that we all just go on stage and look pretty, but no, there’s so much more.”
Men at the Barre: Inside the Royal Ballet, is on BBC Four at 9pm on Wednesday 27 May.
All those negative comments, the bullying, gave me the power and explosiveness to become who I am today
Cesar Corrales