View from the Green Room: Ballet stars of the future
Some cool cats in town in Dungarvan & Waterford School of Ballet.
Encore seems the perfect title for the latest performance from Edel Quinlan’s ballet schools in Dungarvan and Waterford.
A school two decades in the making is constantly changing, adapting, inventing, re-inventing. Evolving really from humble beginnings to the school of some two hundred students that Edel trains today. So…encore it is!
Edel Quinlan has always been passionate about dance. Beginning at the ripe old age of three, Edel studied dance at Wexford initially before taking her teaching diploma from the Royal Academy of Dance. There’s not many Fulbright scholarships awarded to Ireland but Edel was awarded one to enable her to study dance, performance and choreography in the USA.
Edel has also been actively involved with Wexford Light Opera, Wexford Opera, Wexford Panto and won Best Choreographer for her work on The Phantom of the Opera with Carrick-on-Suir Musical Society in the Waterford News & Star Green Room Awards.
Edel’s experience as a choreographer really shows in the clever and inventive use of space. Every dance group from Junior to Senior Ballet wheel and fill the Theatre Royal stage in diagonal lines that shape and reshape into mini-groupings and stage pictures that are a delight.
Senior Ballet’s opening Swan Lake is poised and graceful with elegant hands and expressive poses that open to reveal a splendid solo as Princess Odette. Grade 3 Ballet give us a very special performance of Karl Jenkins’ ‘Palladio’ and they also return with a ‘Who we are’ from ‘Imagine Dragons’ that mixes slow and graceful with up-tempo attack.
There’s more from Senior Ballet in Belle of the Ball, set in deep and blue flowing dresses that lift the grace and flow of the piece. Junior Ballet are all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows that’s full of pointed toes, hops, wheels and smiles. Grade 1 Ballet are incredibly smart in their sailor suits in Anchors Away. A Sailor’s Hornpipe brings variety and energy with salutes to round it all off. Pre-primary Dungarvan are dead cute with their Emma Suite.
Individual performances are special. Ella Conroy’s ‘Broken Dolls’ is physical, angular and acrobatic, while Chloe Du Plessis’ ‘Take me with you’ is modern and interpretive and as hectic as her hectic red flowing costume. Aoife Sims’ performance of 'A river flows within you’ captures the song's intrinsic beauty. This is quality old-style classical ballet with pirouettes and jetes in flowing movements that fill the stage.
Edel mixes old and new in her soundtracks. Junior Jazz performs ‘Golden’, Pre Primary Dungarvan performs UK Eurovision Contest Clodagh Rogers entry ‘Jack in the Box’ and Junior Jazz are all surf and snazzy with their beach gear in ‘Surf Crazy’. I just loved Senior Jazz’s ‘Remember, remember, remember Fame I’m gonna live forever’ with leg warmers, funky leotards, mad pink tops and bandanas.
Finally, it was a delight to see the senior dancers help out with the smaller members of Edel’s Ballet School.
