Poppy, Rose and Lilly - Our Next Guest at the Stage Door

Balanchine analogized different styles of dance with gems. I prefer flowers.  Shannon Lilly who is our guest at the Stage Door this Sunday started her career in California,  Its state flower inspired Pavlova's Californian Poppy. one of her loveliest ballets.  She has however spent much of her life here which qualifies her to be an English rose. She spent the finale of her first career as a performer in France, aux fleurs de lys or lilies. And she is, of course, a Lilly.
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The oldest and one of the most prestigious companies in the USA is the San Francisco Ballet,  Shannon entered that company in 1986 after learning her art at Contra Costa Ballet.  A question that I shall put to Shannon is whether she would agree that California has its own style that is as distinct from that of American Ballet Theatre and New York City as English ballet is from French or Danish from Russian. The West Coast companies have their own schools and as they showed on last year's visit to London a very exciting repertoire (see San Francisco Ballet in London 2 June 2019 Terpsichore).

Shannon did very well in San Francisco progressing to principal by the age of 23. She danced Princess Aurora and Bluebird in Helgi Tomasson's production of The Sleeping Beauty, the ballerina in Jerome Robbins's Concert. and many other leading roles that had been created by some of the world's leading choreographers.

In 1994 she came to England.  Christopher Gable was artistic director of Northern Ballet Theatre as Northern Ballet was then called.  The company had grown to a point when it could stage full-length classical ballets such as Swan Lake, Cinderella, The Wonderful World of Don Quixote and Romeo and Juliet. Shannon joined the company and danced in all of the lead roles in those ballets. 

The last part of her first stage career was spent in Mulhouse with the Ballet du Rhin. There she danced Odette-Odile in Bertrand d'At's Swan Lake as well as works by Forsythe, Tetley, Gielgud. van Manen and many other choreographers.

I saw first stage career for Shannon emerged on the TV programme "Britain's Got Talent",  Largely because I have never got round to replacing my TV or configuring a digital signal adapter when the analogue signal was switched off I missed her performances when they were first broadcast but I have seen them on YouTube and they are impressive.  Classical ballet cannot be an easy sell on prime time telly but she and her partner seem to have appeared week after week to thunderous applause.

Shannon has built up yet another successful career as a teacher and choreographer.  One work that I particularly admired was her production of The Nutcracker for Manchester City Ballet, the performance company of the Northern Ballet School.   She was due to tour the UK this Autumn in Chantry Dance's production of The Little Mermaid but that has had to be postponed for a year owing to the pandemic.

If you want to talk to this remarkable artist you can register here if you would like to speak to her over Zoom.   If Zoom lets us down as it did last Sunday I shall transfer the meeting to Google Meet.  If you have a Gmail account you will already have this application, I shall ask Shannon a few questions to start the ball rolling and then invite questions from the audience.   We are not charging for this service but we will invite members of the audience to contribute to a ballet or dance education charity or good cause of Shannon's choice.

Next Sunday, that is to say, 31 May at 15:00, we shall meet Sarah Kundi of English National Ballet who is one of my very favourite artists. Sarah's charity is her company which has just celebrated its 75th anniversary.  It gave its first performance at the Opera House in Manchester in 1950 so has a very special link with the North.  A connection that Dame Beryl Grey told me the company values very highly.  I, therefore, invite all attendees to dig deep for that cause,

David Plumpton will be back on 7 June 2020 and this time you will hear him one way or another.   On 14 June we shall say "Gooday" to Lachlan Monaghan of Birmingham Royal Ballet who will join us from Australia. He is a wonderful dancer but he is also an excellent photographer and I hope he will want to discuss both art forms.

Next Saturday Jane Tucker will give us our second-anniversary class (albeit online) on 30 May at 11:00.  She and David will also lead us back triumphantly back into the Dancehouse the first Saturday after it reopens,  Sophie Richardson has kindly agreed to give us an online class on 13 June at 11:00.

Looking slightly further ahead Shannon has already agreed in principle to give us an online master class on a day to be fixed and a conventional class in a studio as soon as we are allowed back into one.

So there is a lot to look forward to despite the lockdown.  Our art form has survived Russian and Spanish flu, the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges and two world wars.  This multicoloured microscopic Scotch egg of a bug won't win,

See you on Sunday folks.