Review: Dance

Royal Ballet, White Lodge Tour

Rare. Tour of the new build, pink dormitories for years 7,8 and 9, a royal hunting lodge, the cull of a cedar tree in the recent bad weather, the steps which mask the entrance through which Queen Mary rode her horse, a clutch of studios dedicated to Pavlova, Galene Stock and Darcey Bussell, bronzes of Fonteyn, Merle Park, Antony Dowall, the death-mask of Pavlova, and the stunning Robert Macdonald bronze at the top of the steps which looks down on the avenue of trees, the museum with its time-line of dance and the lodge itself, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Renaissance man, the archetype for all ballet moves, interaction, projection, the Margot Fonteyn Theatre in which a year eight class were going through their classical class, discipline, mark, present, amend, mark, present, a lesson in showing not telling, an ordinary class showing an ordinary routine, in an ordinary life on an ordinary day who would doubt otherwise…