Tim Couchman, assistant to the internationally sought-after British choreographer David Dawson, was a guest with the National Ballet Academy from 2 to 7 November. He taught Dawson’s ballet 5 to 23 students on the pre-professional programme and all the dancers of Dutch National Ballet’s Junior Company. The students will perform this virtuoso work at the Holland Dance Festival in Welcome Canada!, an exchange programme with Canada’s National Ballet School, and at the end-of-year performances. The Junior Company will be dancing 5 this spring in its new touring programme.
David Dawson’s 5 was originally the ‘wedding pas de cinq’ from his acclaimed production of Giselle, created for the Semperoper Ballett in Dresden, in 2008. For his full-length production, Dawson chose to use the traditional Giselle score, composed by Adolphe Adam, but his choreography was far from conventional. It is a display of Dawson’s fresh, new dance idiom, in which he often stretches the boundaries of the classical ballet technique to their absolute limit. In 5, this leads to virtuoso dance fireworks, produced by a dizzying combination of speed, playfulness, flexibility and a waterfall-like structure of movement sequences. Jean-Yves Esquerre, artistic director of the National Ballet Academy, says: ‘In the space of ten minutes, you get to see everything that makes Dawson’s approach to classical technique so special’.
On 1 February, students of the National Ballet Academy will dance 5 as part of Welcome Canada!, an exchange programme organised by the Holland Dance Festival, in which Canada’s National Ballet School will be performing alongside the three main dance academies of the Netherlands. www.holland-dance.com.
The piece will also be performed in Ballet Bubbles, the new touring programme of the Junior Company, and at the end-of-year performances Dansers van Morgen.