Category: Pictures


The ‘Dumpy’ costume.

Filed Under: Pictures, Videos
May.05, 2011

Carol-Anne Millar as DumpyIan on Facebook asked us about the ‘Dumpy’ costume, and what stopped us making the character even fatter.

He wondered if there were issues of manoeuverability for the dancer playing the part, which is indeed one contributing factor, as was a desire to move away from the pantomimic tone of previous productions of the story. The characters deserved to be laughed at, but they had to retain a realism in order for the threat that they posed to the heroine to be believable.

David himself explained another factor however. ‘There wasn’t a way of making their hands or the heads any fatter, so if we’d made the bodies bigger and bigger and bigger, eventually the character would have looked ridiculously out of proportion. We can pad every other part of the suit, but not the hands and especially not the head.

Here’s another chance to see one of David’s earliest video diaries, recorded nearly a year ago, in which he discusses the roles of the sisters.

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The invitation to the Prince’s ball

Filed Under: Pictures
Apr.11, 2011

With the Cinderella tour now over, the sets, props and costumes have been put into storage. This gave us a chance to grab you a close-up of a prop that will until now only have been seen from afar: the letter that Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters receive inviting them to the Prince’s ball!

The original design for the invitation was composed and hand-painted by John Macfarlane, and from this master copy duplicates were made for the various performances throughout the tour.

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New poster artwork

Filed Under: Pictures
Mar.10, 2011


With the show having opened at Birmingham Hippodrome we’ve now got a wealth of production images, as you’ve already seen. This of course means that we’ve been able to produce a new poster design for the remaining Cinderella performances in London at the end of March/start of April.

Here you can see the newly designed poster, featuring the heroine in her carriage and the Fairy Godmother waving her off to the Prince’s palace. We’ve included a few more images along the bottom showing other scenes too.

We’ve also been able to add a few more stars to the sky above her head – specifically in the top left of the poster(!)

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How Cinderella challenges the dancers

Filed Under: Interviews, Pictures
Jan.12, 2011

In mid-2009, David Bintley discussed his dual responsibilities as both a Choreographer and Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. ‘I use my pieces to bring people along’, he said, ‘to support the dancers’ development.’

With Cinderella going on tour this month to Salford and Plymouth, we asked how he hopes his latest work has stimulated the Company.

‘It’s a ballet with a lot of roles for women, rather than the men,’ David says, ‘Cinderella herself is a nice role for the girls because it’s quite varied – not only technically, because they’re working barefoot and en pointe, and with big set pieces in the second act – but also because of the long passages where they’re just alone by themselves. They have to create and maintain a character that really endears itself to the audience, who have got to empathise with Cinderella, otherwise the show doesn’t work. It’s really carried on her shoulders.

‘Then there are a lot of subsidiary characters like the sisters, which are comedy roles, and there aren’t a lot of those for women in ballet. I feel that these characters work: there’s a freedom in them that allows the dancers to add their own personality, but there’s a good solid framework and the audience gets the jokes.

‘Then there are the Seasons, which are challenging solos full of difficult steps. They’re deliberately difficult, I didn’t want to make them easy. And I’ve tried to get a number of the girls into those roles from Principals to Artists. We’ve already had Nao [Sakuma] as Autumn, and Natasha [Oughtred] as Spring, and Elisha [Willis] as Winter. All three of these are also dancing Cinderella in other shows. But I’ve also cast Artists like Yvette [Knight] and Kristen [McGarrity] and Delia [Mathews], all of whom I wanted to challenge. And they’ve responded brilliantly.’

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A clean sweep

Filed Under: Pictures
Dec.10, 2010

A moment alone in her dingy kitchen home sees Cinderella imagining herself transported to the Prince’s ball. As a prop in her game, she draws a face on the straw bristles of her broom, so that it can become her dancing partner.

While it may seem a throwaway moment, it’s one that creates work for the prop department, who must ensure that the face is gone in time for the next performance.

But the solution is slightly cleverer than simply scrubbing it clean, or replacing the head of the broom each time.

A photograph of one side of the broom head has been taken, and scaled up to actual size. For each show, a copy is printed out, and a panel cut out and lightly spray mounted onto the broom itself. This means that the dancer playing Cinderella can easily draw a face on the paper panel, and that it can be swiftly removed and replaced in time for the next show.

‘We’ve also been trying different ways of disguising the edge of the paper panel’, explains Arthur Lewis, Senior Stage Technician.

‘Initially it tapered into the bristles, as you can see here, but in the end David Bintley himself suggested just using the line of the coloured stitiching as the cut-off point, and that’s been working very well.’

Here you can see a selection of the faces which have been drawn by dancers in stage rehearsals and the opening performances of Cinderella !

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"Now the work begins"

Filed Under: Interviews, Pictures
Dec.08, 2010

The morning after Cinderella opened at Birmingham Hippodrome, Choreographer David Bintley remarked: ‘Now the work begins’. As the ballet now enters its third and final week in the Midlands, he explains:

‘There’s such a lot of pressure and stress involved in getting a new ballet in front of an audience’, David admits. ‘It doesn’t matter what critics write in the papers, or online; it doesn’t matter what I think; it doesn’t matter what my mum thinks, or what the Company thinks. All that matters is what the audience thinks – that is absolutely the acid test. If they don’t like it, then you’ve failed.

‘And until you’ve witnessed their responses you just never know. I still don’t feel we know yet – even the first night isn’t an absolute indicator. That only comes when the piece has had its ups and downs, and it’s been performed with the odds against you, in front of a damp, cold, snowed-on audience, who lost half their enthusiasm for a night out in the traffic jam on the way to the theatre. It’s like a friendship or a relationship really. You can’t really test its validity and its strength until it’s been pushed about and seen in its best light but also in its worst light. So this whole first run will still be a period of uncertainty for me, with all the different casts and all the different audiences. It’s only at the very end of the season that I’ll be able to go: “phew!”’

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Set secrets

Filed Under: Pictures
Dec.04, 2010

Here you can see a shot of part of the set for the Prince’s ball, taken during lighting sessions prior to the ballet’s premiere. Back in the summer, we visited the carpentry section of the Royal Opera House workshops to see the set’s construction. Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Technical Director, Paul Grace, spoke to us about what we saw.

‘Traditionally the flats for our ballets would be made out of a wooden frame, with either a plywood front or with canvas stretched across it’, explained Paul. ‘This time, however, for the Ballroom we’re using new materials.’ (Click each thumbnail below to view a larger version of the image)

‘Here you can see an alluminium frame, on top of which is a plastic sheeting called Twin Wall. It’s incredibly light and strong, and that’s key. These are big flats, and if plywood had been used they would just weigh far too much. At the top of each flat there will then be relief work similar to what you can see here, and at the side will be a wooden profile which will be painted to match.’

As we have since seen, the results are striking!

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New gallery – spoiler alert!

Filed Under: Pictures
Nov.25, 2010

An exclusive new gallery of images from Cinderella has today been posted on the main Birmingham Royal Ballet website. We should warn you, however, that it does contain one or two scenes that you may want to keep as surprises for the show itself!

Click here to take a look

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A preview peek at the programmes

Filed Under: Pictures
Nov.24, 2010

With this blog, our intention was always to give an insight into the work that went into creating a new full-length ballet. At the same time, however, there are many aspects which we’ve avoided, so as to leave plenty of surprises for those of you who are able to attend a performance of Cinderella!

This was a similar consideration when designing the programme, the first batch of which arrived at Birmingham Hippodrome this morning. Publications Manager Kate Howells explained:

‘The additional week in the theatre before the premiere meant that we could have photographs taken on stage, and in costume, in time for inclusion in the programme. It’s rare that we’d have this opportunity, and it meant that we could try to make the programme a really fantastic souvenir of these premiere performances. At the same time there were certain images and motifs which we had agreed should be seen for the first time on the stage. It would be a shame for a particular scene in the ballet to build towards an amazing visual climax if people had already seen a photo of it during the preceding interval.’

You can see just some of the images from the programme here, and again we’ve been mindful to leave lots of surprises!


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Twinkle toes

Filed Under: Pictures
Nov.23, 2010

In order to provide some extra fairy-tale shine to many of the shoes worn in Cinderella, the Wardrobe Department are adding individual Swarovski crystals. These provide more sparkle than sequins, and refract the light rather than simply reflecting it.

The crystals are attached to the shoes using a process called hot-stoning. Each one is in turn picked up with a device similar to a soldering iron. This heats and melts a layer of glue on the underside of the crystal without affecting the stone itself, allowing you to stick it to the fabric of the shoe.

‘The fabric is a man-made silk, explains Shoe Master Michael Clifford. ‘The shoes arrive in plain white, and then I dye them pale grey before the crystals are attached.’

There’s no specific design or pattern for them,’ he reveals, ‘we’re just trying to put enough on to have the desired effect under the lights. We’ve got some spares so we can always add some more once we’ve seen how they perform in the stage rehearsals.’

It is important that the decorations don’t detach from the footwear mid-show, as stepping on something even that tiny could cause a dancer in full flight to slip or skid. ‘I’ve given some of the pairs a stretch and a twist to check that the crystals stay on and they seem up to the job’, says the Shoe Master.

The use of these crystals is unusual, as the process of attaching them is so labour-intensive. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever used them’, says Michael. ‘There was a ballet about twenty years ago in which we used something similar, but back then there wasn’t such a process as hot stoning.

‘The only equivalent was to turn and old-fashioned iron upside down, and place them on it with a pair of tweezers to warm them up. But you wouldn’t do that unless you had a lot of them to do in a short space of time and no regard for health and safety!’

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