Holidays

Season Greetings Everyone!

I hope you all had a safe and happy Christmas where ever you were.

I had a very quiet Christmas myself. Most of the day went while skyping the family and the rest was spent watching Star Trek and eating junk food. Not a bad Christmas day in my book.

I spent the days leading up to Christmas in bed with a case of the flu that knocked me around quite a bit. So I was grateful just to be able to enjoy Christmas. The only real loss was the two days of work that I had lined up, but had to call sick on.

But this is all incidental. I got an email the first day of being sick that really turned my head. It was an invite from the English National Ballet to take company class on the 30th of December! I've been begging that company for a class for at least 3 months, and all my previous advances where simply ignored. For some reason, they suddenly want to see me. I think God has been pulling strings again.

However reality check, this audition is only three days away and I haven't done a class in a week! So I'm really going to have to pull a trick out of the hat to make this one work. There are classes tomorrow and the following day so I will be able to make it to those. Today, I'll do a barre in my room, which added to the barre I did yesterday should be enough to get me out of the post Christmas slump.

That's all the news really. I've got some pictures of Oxford and Regent Street's Christmas lights up. You can check them out at the usual place.

Hope you all have a happy and prosperous New Year.

Rodney Cuthbertson

DreamChaser

Let it snow....

Hey Everyone,

You may have heard that it's been snowing in London. It began snowing Friday evening and followed up with a decent dump on Saturday. As a result my back yard now looks like this!

From Blogger Pictures

To be fair, I took this picture on Saturday and some of it has now disappeared. If we get another bit of snow, we might have enough to give us a white Christmas!
Unfortunately, that is last thing that all the people trying to get home for Christmas want to hear. The last lot of snow wasn't a great deal, but it is an unusually large amount for London. So the infrastructure just isn't here to deal with it. London transport deals with millions of commuters every day, and the slightest sneeze is felt by hundreds of passengers. So anything that is slightly above a sneeze means that the transport system goes belly-up in spectacular style.
London transport has been able to recover fairly well and I haven't been put out that much. But I also have only been leaving the house when strictly necessary. The people most put out are the people at the airports and especially at Heathrow. Once again, the infrastructure is just not there to deal with the snow and because Heathrow is one of the world's major cross roads, the impact is global. I've got friends as far away as Singapore trying to get home for Christmas who have had flights canceled due to the snow!

Enough about the weather. I did the Peter Schaufuss Ballet audition last Thursay. It was one of the hardest auditions I've ever done. A two and a half hours of solid, technically challenging ballet class, then an hour break followed by an hour and half of repertoire that was mainly danced on the knees. I was quite sore the next day! There where three cuts through out the day and I made it through all of them. A group of us where then called in to talk to Peter where he told us that he couldn't offer us a contract at that point, but would keep us in mind. The next day I got an email from them offering me a part in his I'm Bad Micheal Jackson show. It wasn't the most inviting contract. One month work for a thousand pounds is not really enough to live off. But I wrote back saying that I was interested in the contract, but didn't have a European passport. I haven't heard back from them since then so I'm assuming that it's dead in the water.
It was nice to get the offer after doing that major audition, but there is nothing I can do about my passport so I'm not losing any sleep over it.

I launched a major CV bomb at a heap of European companies last week. I ended up writing to at least ten companies! It was very exciting seeing the responses come back. Some haven't replied, some said no, some maybe and two said yes. So I've got invites from a companies in Poznan, Poland and Bordeaux, France. At the moment, I should be able to make it to both of them. Bordeaux has said that they don't have any contracts, but I was welcome to do class. So the priority is definitely going to be on Poznan. I wrote to them a couple of days ago just to check that my passport wouldn't be a major hurdle, and I'm still waiting to hear a reply.

So that's the news from London. I wish you all a happy and safe Christmas, and I'll speak to you all before the end of the Year.

Rodney Cuthbertson
DreamChaser

No Rest for the Wicked

G'day Everyone,

I bet you all had forgotten about me, supposing that I had finally been swallowed by the internet swamp. I am admittedly late, but I have good cause and hope that this week's mammoth episode will satisfy you.

First story off the line is the Luxembourg tour of Niobe. It was a relatively quiet and fairly uneventful trip, unlike my previous tours under the Georgia State Ballet. We arrived safely in Luxembourg on the 26th of November after a short flight without any problems. I didn't even need a visa which was a refreshing change. The hotel was a four star Novotel where we each had our own rooms! An unheard of luxury for dancers!
The hotel served a full buffet breakfast which was included with our rooms. Being poor dancers we took full advantage of it. It was very comic to see us four dancers having large breakfasts and then making sandwiches to take for lunch! We would deliberately bring our bags to breakfast and slip sandwiches and fruit into them. As time went on, we got less and less subtle about it and the opera singers and tech crew also joined in the game. The hotel's French speaking staff must have been rolling their eyes at us, but they never said anything.
The first few days we spent in rehearsal and some tourist activities. You can see the photos via this link if you're reading an email or in the sidebar to your right ---->. Luxembourg is a very pretty European city full of banks and European Union bureaucracy. There was also a fairly steady fall of snow while we were there so there is lots of it in all the photos. The down side fo that was it was very cold. I don't think the temperature got above 5 degrees and one night dropped as low as -11! To put that number in perspective, after walking 20 minutes from the theatre to the hotel I found that the little water in the bottom of my bottle had frozen. That's how cold it was!
Because Luxembourg is so small everything is very well looked after and all the people are exceptionally friendly. If you're in London, you'll be lucky to get even a grumpy growl from the bus driver, but in Luxembourg they were almost charming. We got stared at a lot because the natives were mostly reserved, quiet well dressed office workers. Contrast that with four extrovert, loud, English-speaking dancers and you can see how much we stuck out.
We also managed to do classes in the Luxembourg Choreographic Centre, for free! Turns out that the government sponsors this lovely single studio space which has class every week day for free! You'd think that such a program would be jammed with dancers, but when we showed up the class size literally doubled. We ended up doing quite a few classes there as well as our own yoga, contemporary and ballet.
After we had done the dress rehearsal the orchestra threw a 60th birthday party for their percussionist, Mitchel. Being a very creative bunch they all put together a heap of casual musical numbers for the evening. When I say casual I mean that they were performed casually, but being professional musicians they were very impressively played. We were asked to dance some improvisation for one of the pieces. We were a bit reluctant because of the short timing and the vagueness of the request, but once we were there it all just happened. Once you start dancers, you can't stop them. I filmed a short clip of Mitchel dancing with stage manager Wendy which can be viewed via this link or in the side bar. It's only short but I'm sure you'll agree that it was quite a cultural evening.
The shows were done almost as an after thought to the trip. There were no problems and every thing went of smoothly. I did want to insert this picture here.

From Luxembourg 2010

This is the infamous Blob! The 'puppet' that we used to swallow singers to get them off stage. It definitely invokes the reaction of 'what in the world?' but we all felt more than a bit silly being onstage at the Royal Opera House in an over-sized Lycra condom!
By the time we had finished, the second show we were all ready to get back to London. Unfortunately, we we delayed getting back by London's infamous fog. They ended up flying us back to Stansted Airport and then busing us into London. It was a longer trip but wasn't bad and we got there eventually.

The next day was a rough bump back into the London grind. The silly season is in full swing and I've had so much to keep me busy. However, first was finding out whether Wayne Sleep Inc was still interested in having me for their shows. I made several phone calls but none of them were answered or returned. So I resorted to pulling some strings on the grapevine. Using this old method promptly produced an answer. Wayne Sleep Inc had decided to go with the other dancer for the remaining shows. Obviously this is a business decision that they have made and I can totally understand the logic of it. What did irritate me was the way they left me dangling and didn't return my calls. In my opinion that's not only very unprofessional but downright rude.

I haven't been too fazed by not getting that job because we are starting to get into the 2011 audition season. Dance Europe is awash with auditions and I'm applying to all the ones that I can. This is one of the things that I've always wanted to do: audition for a heap of European companies. Even if I don't get any work out of it, it's all a great experience. Thanks to Luxembourg, I now also have a small stash of cash that will allow me to travel to some of them. Plus, my flight home is already booked and paid for so if everything goes belly up, I just pull the plug and go home.

The first audition is Wednesday, for Peter Schaufuss Ballet. I can't actually get this job because they need people with an European passport. (Something that I'm sure I'll hear many times.) But it's free class in the English National Ballet's studios so I'm definitely going to get out there and
make a plie or two.

In amongst all that is the catering work for Admiral that keeps me in class and rent money. Had a shift turn nasty on me last week. It wasn't life-threatening, but it was a real pain in the butt to have to find my way home from London at 3am on a Saturday morning after serving at a Christmas party out of town. London is not a pretty sight at that time of night...

Fortunately, Claire Talbot had her Christmas party that night which really perked me up. Photos tell the story much better than words and can be viewed via the link or that way ----> in the blog.

Well that raps up yet another novel length post! Two hours of writing, two hours of shuffling photos and one hour of redecorating the blog (new colours, format and pictures, check it out!). I'll get in one more post before Christmas so I'll try to get some photos of London in Christmas mode for then, if I get time.

Hope you all enjoyed and I'll talk to you next week.

Rodney Cuthbertson
DreamChaser