Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Behind the Scenes with the Royal Ballet

It's a lifestyle, it's not a job.

For me, this isn't a job. It's a lifestyle.

I'm a dancer when I wake up, I'm a dancer on Sundays,

when I have the day off, I'm consistently a dancer.

Whether that means nursing something that I'm going to need on a Monday,

or doing Pilates on a day where you might not be working...

It's a lifestyle.

I couldn't imagine actually... having a job.

I was waiting for my sister when she was taking ballet classes.

I was an American football player.

I went into the class, I started taking class

for probably about a month and a half.

It was sort of love at first sight.

I loved ballet in particular

because it was really clear to understand for me.

There was no grey area, things were right and wrong.

Things were really easy to understand.

I started dancing when I was 14.

After that, I moved to ballet boarding school,

started dancing professionally.

It's difficult for me to break movement down individually.

So I try and remember choreography as a sentence,

as if I'm speaking to you, so that I don't go

"Where... did... you... go..."

So the transitional steps play in like you speak normally

in sentence form.

And if it's a sentence, it's easier to remember for me.

Sounds bizarre, but, yeah.

I think even beyond the physical skills,

you need a dream and a lot of focus.

I have a dream for myself. I envision myself

doing great things in dance and developing myself as a dancer.

That vision, it's very much tunnel vision.

It's, "I'm going to dance, I'm going to dance well

"and this is what I want to do."

Anything I've got to do to make myself do that, then I'm on it.

So, everyone close up, close up, this way.

What you need as a dancer is a good technique

and the most important of all is, I think, it's wanting to dance.

Because it's a hard career, it's a hard training career.

It's a lot of hours in a building,

It's a lot of competition between the artists.

So you need to have a big, artistic soul

to overcome all the mountains that, you know, will face you.

You gain a self-control. You gain, I think, a discipline

that many people lack in the real world.

And we have that from the age of eight.

-She takes it from you...

-And we go one, two, three...

'As an artist, if you aren't versatile,

'you may just fall into repetition

'and you may just get bored. I think it is important'

to always move. Move on, or move side, or move back,

whatever you want to do, but just always move.

And so, for that, I think a dancer should be

as versatile and flexible as possible. Within their characters,

within their techniques, within their style, within their movement.

I think it gives you... It makes you richer as an artist.

When Chris approached me and said that he was considering

tap shoes for the role of the hatter, or the mad tapper,

I was so excited. I started tapping when I was about eight years old.

It was one of the first things I really focused on.

My family's not in the arts world.

I come from a motor sport family

in the suburbs of Sydney.

So probably the furthest place that you can get from here.

My sister was a gymnast and she inspired me.

She was always so competitive, but in a good way.

Wanting to achieve more and more and more.

She's seven years older than me,

so it was a good example to have around at a young age.

So I went along, did a jazz lesson where she was doing a bit of dancing

and that soon became tap and ballet as well.

I just loved it.

I've seen dancers who have everything physically...

naturally...but they're lacking something and that, I think,

is just sheer determination.

You have to want it.

You have to want to be the top of your game,

you have to want to do a step,

"OK, I achieved that, but I can do it better."

Dancers always have niggles and injuries that you're dealing with.

There are so many rewards that come with being a dancer as well.

As a child, you know, you fall in love

with that feeling of dancing around.

It really is an incredible feeling, you feel free.

In Billy Elliott, in the film, like, he really does explain it well.

It's like electricity.

And to be able to do that as your profession,

to be paid to do that,

and to explore yourself and your artistic qualities

on a daily basis is something that, I think,

dancers really, really cherish.

Face this way.

You come out from behind,

And you say, "That's my baby!"

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...

'For me, I approach most things'

with the movement side of my brain

and, I think, for a story ballet,

you need characters that can be, er...

very well communicated through movement.

'So that's one reason why Alice seemed like a good choice to me.'

Just disappear like that. That's it, yeah. Good.

As soon as I was asked to make a full-length ballet

for the Royal Ballet and I chose Alice,

I knew that I'd love to work with Joby Talbot again.

We'd worked on a piece called Fools Paradise for my company Morphoses

and the world that he created

for that abstract work

was so full of fantasy.

The orchestral colours, the sort of textures

that came out from the pit, were so unusual

and had such imagination,

that it gave me the confidence to say, "OK, I'll do Alice in Wonderland

"if I can do it with Joby."

And on top of that, I knew I needed to work

with a really experienced theatre designer.

And someone like Bob Crowley,

who I could share my vision of Alice with,

but who ultimately would give this Alice

a real personality of her own.

For Alice, it was necessary to be quite prepared structurally.

So Joby goes away and writes a passage of music

and within that passage of music, there are certain plot points

that have to occur. Let's take, for example, when she first falls down

the rabbit hole.

She has to come to,

regain consciousness from banging her head on the floor.

She has to have her first encounter with the Queen of Hearts

and the Knave of Hearts and the White Rabbit.

And then we just go about making that all come together with movement.

There's very little prepared,

as far as the movement is concerned, before I get in the room.

I'd much rather work with the dancer and discover that together.

A four, a five, a six, a seven, eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...

'I became a dancer because I saw a production'

of Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee, a ballet that's been in the repertoire of the Royal Ballet

for many years. And then I went to a local ballet school

and I was good at it.

When you're good at something and encouraged you start to learn to love it.

But I think I loved it pretty much from the beginning

and it's everything that I've known from the age of eight.

I went into choreography at school, was encouraged.

At the Royal Ballet School, it was part of the curriculum and, again,

I must have shown some talent early on because I was really, really encouraged.

That's all I needed, really.

'A sort of push forward on the path of being a choreographer.

'I stopped dancing when I was 28,

'which is more than 10 years before I needed to.

'But I did it because I was really passionate about choreography

'and I think I had danced enough. I felt like I'd danced enough.'

Read. And...

'When you look at a traditional classical ballet vocabulary,

there are only a certain number of steps and it's up to you'

to combine those steps creatively and find new ways of...

New angles of showing those, you know, that catalogue of steps.

And then, on top of that, finding the right ones

to describe a personality or a situation.

A narrative full-length story ballet is a huge undertaking

and you have so many elements competing for your attention.

You have music, lighting,

you have costume and then you have to sit back again and say,

"OK, this isn't working and this is pulling my eye

"to the wrong part of the stage. I'm telling two stories,

"but one needs to have more volume on it than the other,

"so one has to recede because we need to know exactly where to look."

So the only time you really know

that you've got it right or not,

really is when the curtain goes up in front of an audience

and they react.

And with a full-length story ballet like Alice in Wonderland,

the most terrifying thing is it happens on opening night.

My job, as composer,

is to try and find something new

and present it in a new and extraordinary way.

Obviously, I have the extraordinary orchestra

of the Royal Opera House at my disposal and it's very exciting.

My idea is the moment the curtain goes up, I want the music

to be completely, extraordinarily magical.

So it's not scored for simply a normal orchestral set-up.

There's voices in there as well

and some other slightly odd orchestration

and every percussion instrument ever invented.

Three, A...

You know, two hours is a long amount of music to construct

and there needs to be through-lines and an awful lot of variety

within that, but all within this strange, magical world

that Lewis Carroll set-up.

I always thought my music might go well with dance.

When I was at college, I did some things

with choreographers and enjoyed it.

And then I met Chris

and he seemed to very much like working with my music.

I guess what choreographers like about it

is that it's got a kind of strong sense of rhythm.

Rhythm is very much to the fore, but at the same time,

it's not completely cold. I mean, it's also quite emotive.

Having worked in both classical music

and dance, and also film music,

I have experienced all the kind of different avenues

I need to be exploring in this. Film music sits behind the action.

Of course, in ballet, in dance music, it's in front of it

and they are dancing TO the music.

I mean, it's there in front and everything else is unfolding.

It's kind of triggered by it.

I found it quite hard to get my head round to begin with.

I kept thinking, "OK, so I'm going to do falling down a rabbit hole.

"Well, I've been told that lasts between one and two minutes, maybe.

"So, I'll write some..." and I'd write some music

and then, "Let me get the picture up, I'll see how it sounds

"against the images." And then "Oh, hang on.

"There aren't any images."

No-one's choreographed anything or done any design or anything at all.

So when I was writing the music I was trying to find something

that had... Kind of has

one foot in the 19th century and one foot in the 21st century

and is very magical and odd

and seems to have some inner logic,

so that you feel that you're looking into

Wonderland, where things work differently but they do work.

My job is to try and write very characterful music

for the different characters, so we have a musical theme

for Alice herself.

She's a bit more grown-up in our version than in the book.

I think she's probably more like 13 or 14,

which means that she can have all this beautiful, romantic

yearning orchestral music.

And the White Rabbit has a sort of scurrying,

celesta, nervous thing. And also, he's always checking his watch,

which is a great device musically, because you can have clock-ticking

whenever he comes along.

She'll be in a scene, talking to whoever,

and he'll appear, so you can hear this tick-tick and his little melody.

I'm trying to think of what to write for the Caterpillar.

We've gone for this slightly north African, kind of percussive thing.

Basically, everything's taken me three times longer

than I thought it would

and I'm completely happy with it all.

Yeah, it's taken me longer than I thought it would.

And as regards to what I'm... I mean,

I'm learning, I'm learning so much.

About writing something this big,

about ballet in general, about story-telling in ballet.

It's really pretty.

'I knew Christopher Wheeldon from school. I'd worked with him.'

As I'd gone through the company,

he'd chosen me to be in the corps de ballet of some of his works

and then I got to do a soloists part in some of those works

and then a couple of more serious roles, but I'd never created

anything with him more than a corps de ballet role.

So I didn't really know how it was going to be, so it really was

a journey and we started at the beginning.

You know, I really got to know him and the more I trusted him,

the more he trusted me,

The more we could develop ideas together.

And I really felt like we shared the whole creative process.

Yeah, working on the bush...

I was born in Devon

and I was sent to ballet because there was a wonderful teacher

that my mum had heard of and she taught in the town hall.

I was nearly four

and she was this amazing lady that apparently

gave your children discipline and great posture.

My mum thought, "Great, that's just what happy-go-lucky Lauren needs."

Because I was a bit of a terror.

I definitely wasn't a girly-girl,

but I wasn't a complete tomboy either.

The music was always heaven to dance to.

I just could never, ever imagine doing anything else.

It just felt like the most natural thing in the world for me to do.

With ballet, there's a natural progression.

You start with a pre-primary exam and then you do a primary exam

and then you start with grade one up to grade five or six

and then you go into some different grade.

It's just the natural thing. You do one, you do well, so you're inspired to do the next,

and the next, and you watch the older girls,

you see them doing really hard steps and you want to do that.

You go and watch ballet and you get excited and you want to be as good.

There's so many different ways you can dance, your body can express.

The way you move your leg has an emotion to it as well.

So already, as a role, you think, "How dynamic is this person?"

Or, "How lyrical is this person, how soft is this person?"

And so you have dynamic through your dancing. Also, you think about,

"How would that person hold their head?"

You know... Is she...

You know, a timid, shy person?

Is she alert? Does she want...? And it's those things.

Ballet is incredibly intense, physically.

Mentally, it's so stimulating,

that to come down from a show or something, it takes forever.

And emotionally, you put everything into it

so that's also another side to it.

But the day-to-day wear and tear of a dancer's life,

I think, is what's most gruelling yet rewarding.

You know, you get...very, very little free time.

Your life needs to revolve around being the best dancer you can be.

That involves making sure you've got enough sleep,

get to bed early, eat well and work hard.

There aren't many days when a dancer isn't feeling niggles.

It's really hard because you don't want to stop.

But you know, ultimately, if you don't stop,

then you're probably putting too much strain on your body.

What's really good is, after your first couple of serious injuries,

you start to learn, "Go off, look after yourself, come back."

It's just time. There are, you know, opportunities to come.

But it's hard to learn that.

Creating a full-length ballet,

at first, is really daunting. How, from a blank canvas,

do you get to a huge production?

But actually, it does grow quite naturally

in the way that, as soon as you put a story,

or emotion, and you attach that to steps

and your muscle memory then retains those,

it becomes just a matter of just telling that story.

You know, bringing those steps to life with characters and with props

and with movement and all the different aspects

of the piece. So it feels like a really natural process.

I wish I could do every ballet like this.

Being on stage is incredible and it's so exciting.

You could do what you want on there.

You know, you've been given the stage,

you've been given the steps, but ultimately it's up to you.

When you're out there, it's freedom.

So, that's her jacket, which has been briefed in.

-We're doing the trousers in the same fabric?

-We can if you want.

We're going to use the stripe...

'I was taken to the theatre as a child.'

I just loved going to the theatre

and then... But I wasn't really conscious of design as such,

until I saw a production of Oliver! that Sean Kenny designed,

which was the first production.

And that's when he stripped all the theatre away and painted the back wall

of the theatre and exposed the lights.

Then I thought, "I've got to look into this

"a bit more," so my appetite was whetted by that.

Then I thought I'd be an actor for a while.

Then I was asked to take over in an amateur production.

The designer fell off a ladder and broke his leg

and someone said, "You can draw and paint, would you do the set?" and I went, "OK."

And then that's how it all began.

And here I am today!

It's ridiculous how these things start.

How you get started in anything, you know.

The one with the black cross...

'Unless you're curious

'and nosey about things, you'll never become a stage designer.

'Because it's all about being a magpie, you know.

'You're constantly delving into different periods, different worlds, people's lives.

'Being able to draw and paint helps.

'It's not absolutely vital, I don't think.'

People can do that on computers these days, there are programmes.

But I'm still a pencil and paper man, you know. Still on the back of an envelope,

or the back of a beer mat kind of designer,

and I don't use the computer to design on.

I will use the computer

to manipulate things and stuff like that, but I don't design on it.

I think it's a three dimensional art to stage design

and I don't want it all happening on a screen

we go from drawings to models pretty quickly.

Model-making skills are useful.

The set comes first.

Once I have some sense of what the space will look like,

I will then know what somebody looks like inside it.

So I never do the costumes first. I wouldn't know where to begin.

I thought, "I don't know what to do with Alice In Wonderland."

I had no idea what the nature of this beast was,

because, you know, there's 100s of ways you could go about

interpreting this story.

I didn't have a way into it until I heard

more and more of Joby's score.

It's the music that inspires you as much as the subject matter.

I tried to get around the whole John Tenniel illustration side.

That's what's in my head. I grew up with those illustrations.

They're in everybody's childhood DNA.

But I then looked at a lot of films and I just wanted, you know,

to sort of re-inform myself about what had already been done with it.

I didn't see any ballets of it and I re-read the book.

And stretch. It would be nice if there was a little bit of...

I thought we had to have one reference. It would be perverse not to.

I knew it would be the Cheshire Cat,

because you'd be cheating the audience

out of the pleasure of that, I think.

And the way around that was not to do it as an illustration,

but to make the illustration three dimensional.

I prototyped virtually every single costume.

Certainly ones that might be problematic in terms of choreography.

So when Chris was rehearsing,

I would bring him in something so he could see it on somebody.

And he's only had to change a few steps.

Beautiful. OK, good.

OK, so we've got the sliders open

and the trap up, just confirming.

Good, yeah.

Alice is a very busy show.

There are so many cues.

Lighting cues, projection cues, scenery cues, fly cues, sound cues.

There are 14 scenes in Act One

and it is fast-moving

and there isn't much room

for anything to go wrong.

'So it is a big challenge.'

Can we come and re-set the bag? Thank you.

I have a team of three in the stage management.

Myself, a deputy and an assistant.

I'm responsible for running what's happening on-stage

and my deputy is calling the show on the book in the prompt corner.

Curtains up on line three...

My assistant runs one side of the stage, I run the other

and also oversee all the scene changes,

make sure we're ready to go into the next scene

in performances.

Another element is a risk assessment.

One has to write a risk assessment and, while one tries to do that

and foresee any possible risks

prior to coming to the stage,

it's only really when you hit the stage that you suddenly see

the real hazards

that are involved. So that's something that is quite big

when we come to the stage.

Lauren!

I was brought up in a theatrical family, always wanted to act.

I had an accident when I was 15, lost my confidence

and decided from then on that I was going to go behind the scenes

rather than in front of the scenes.

I was at the Central School of Speech and Drama

where I did the stage management course

and then was lucky to get a job with a company

called The Actors Company that was headed by, among others, Ian McKellen.

And I was with them for about 18 months. That was a fantastic start.

With The Actors Company, I was an assistant stage manager.

Responsible for props, setting props,

finding rehearsal props. From The Actors Company,

I went on to deputy stage manage with other theatre companies.

Musicals in the West End.

For working with a ballet company,

of course, the first thing is one has to be able to read music

because all productions are cued

using a musical score.

So you have to be able to read music.

I think getting on with people,

collaborating with different artists, choreographers, designers,

working with different temperaments in dancers,

which are all challenges.

But actually, they're quite nice challenges to overcome.

Does he need anything or is it so he knows...

-It's just if you see him.

-Cool.

I think that's very much a stage manager's job

to keep the atmosphere good in rehearsals, on stage,

in the wings, probably between the dressing rooms, as well, in a way.

If the team is good at its job,

then it creates a much easier atmosphere to work in.

Every day is a challenge,

especially working with a ballet company. You've got a different ballet

in rehearsal, in performance,

a different cast to work with many times,

so no day is ever the same.

It's not like working on a West End show,

where probably eight shows are the same a week.

I'm not sure it's a good lifestyle, really.

If you want a life outside of the theatre.

Because of the hours. It does demand quite a lot of one's time

and you never really switch off.

But I absolutely love it, so I wouldn't change it for anything.

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