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.