Home & People Tasty ‘mixed grill’ of ballets

Press, 2 December 1978, Page 8

Home & People Tasty ‘mixed grill’ of ballets

By

TUI THOMAS

For its Christmas programme the Southern Ballet Theatre will present a variety of three works, planned by the artistic director, Russell Kerr, to meet a widening range of public taste. For those with a preferi ence for purely classical I ballet, Act II of “Swan Lake" has been chosen, with David Peake and Fiona Tonkin in the lead roles of Prince Siegfried and Odette. Mr Kerr’s newly formed Junior Theatre Ballet will do “Once Upon a Christmas Time,” a pantomime ballet he has created specially for his younger dancers.

The comedy ballet is “Ballesque,” which he has choreographed in modern idiom to well-known themes from the Beatles’ music. It includes the Beatles’ “Cracker Suite”

to which the dancers spoof the divertisements from the second act of “Nutcracker.” Other parts of the frolic bring out what Mr Kerr calls “comic relations” between the dancers. They are, David Peake, Deborah Olley, Fiona Tonkin,

Susan Trainor and the Company’s new male dancer, Glen Harris. “I enjoyed creating 'Baliesque’ tremendously after 28 years of working on serious Christmas ballets,

such as ‘Nutcracker’ in its traditional form,” he said. The new type of programme is known as a “mixed grill” in the theatre, he added. Its value lies in presenting ballets which have the widest possible audience appeal and in enabling the company to show its versatility. The season will open at the Repertory Theatre on Wednesday and will include four evening performances and one matinee. '