A Quiet Month

by Cassa Pancho

It has been a quiet month. Everything seems to shut down over the Christmas and New Year period and that includes fledgling ballet companies. Things are starting to get back on track now, and we'll be into regular company class and rehearsals within the next week or so. Our main priority is to get our eight dancers looking like a company. If history books are to be believed, it took Arthur Mitchell two years to train the dancers (some with no previous experience) who became the Dance Theater of Harlem. I've given us a year. At the moment, we have a mix of people in full-time training, some who haven't done classical for a couple of years and others who are trained in ballet, but are more focused on contemporary dance. Its quite telling that though some of our dancers always wanted to do ballet, they felt they could only choose commercial or contemporary routes.

We will soon have a permanent home for the weekends, which will allow Denzil and me to choreograph and rehearse our ballets, but we're still in need of somewhere during the week for good old-fashioned ballet classes. I think it will be a case of an hour here, an hour there until we find somewhere affordable, or someone donates some space to us, so until then we'll be all over the place.

Our other concern is funding. Venetia (PR) and I are currently scouring what seems like the entire planet to find additional sponsors to those that we have already. As well as this, I've given an interview over the telephone (oh how showbiz!) to a magazine called Live Listings, which is a Time Out for black and ethnic minority events, and have put together proposals to take to potential theatres for our first performance. It turns out you can't just book a theatre as you would a haircut. Who knew?

So, it may have been a quiet month but at least no church administrators died - no one got into a fight - and no sleazy agents asked me for £500…perhaps things are looking up…