Royal New Zealand Ballet dancing around the regions

The title Tutus On Tour is nicely self-explanatory. Even if you have only a vague concept of what ballet involves, you probably know that it generally features dancers in tights and tutus. And if they're on tour, you can probably guess that they're going to bring their tights, tutus and dance performance to wherever you are.

“The name definitely coins quite the iconic image,” says master ballet dancer Nicholas Schultz of the Royal NZ Ballet (RNZB). He is also part of the team producing Tutus On Tour, the RNZB’s current twelve-date jaunt around Aotearoa, which stops in the South Island at Ashburton, Oamaru and Wanaka.

But the tour pirouettes past Christchurch and Dunedin, as well as giving Auckland and Wellington the swerve. The stops are strictly places that the RNZB wouldn’t normally take a ballet production: smaller communities, where they hope to reach audiences who wouldn’t usually find professional dance on their doorstep. “It’s so wonderful to get to those small cities that don't get the mainstage tours,” Schultz says. Lately many performance arts organisations – orchestras and the like – have started consciously reaching out to underserved communities. But Tutus On Tour has been running regularly since 2003, and the underlying concept has been in the DNA of RNZB since it formed over 70 years ago. “They got in the van and they drove around the country,” Schultz says of his predecessors, “and they put on shows in small communities. They built the name of this amazing organisation by getting out there and showing everybody what it was.”

This iteration of Tutus On Tour offers a mixture of snippets from the classic ballet Swan Lake, with introductions to lesser-known works Prismatic and Clay. But even audiences new to ballet will recognise Swan Lake, if only from Tchaikovsky’s score.

“That music is iconic around the world, it's used on TV for everything. People hear that song, and they start dancing like a ballerina,” says Schultz. And he’s confident that Swan Lake’s striking visuals will also be a touchstone for many: “The imagery of that white or black tutu with the beautiful dancer’s upper body that mimics a bird – that's what they're coming to see.”

To fit the production into smaller regional venues, the RNZB takes fewer dancers than usual. But they get closer to the audience, creating a more intimate experience and allowing people to appreciate the hard work that the dancers are actually putting in.

Schultz is keen that audiences unfamiliar with ballet just come and see, and emphasises that it won’t be the stuffy experience they might expect. “You'll never know if you don't try it,” he points out.

He’s also open to the fact that an evening at the ballet won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

“We do a mix of work, so something on this program might strike your fancy,” says Schultz. “But our goal is to make you feel a strong emotion. Of course, we always hope you like everything. But even if you don't like something, you end up talking about it and it lives with you for a long time.”

As long as audiences have a reaction one way or another, Schultz is happy.

“If you leave the auditorium feeling indifferent, then we haven't succeeded.”