Saturday, 9 June 2007
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
PAS DE DEUX BESIDE THE COWSHED
Irish Times, 31st August 1989
Definitely not the Bolshoi. Kathy Sheridan visits the Shawbrook School of Ballet, in Co Westmeath, the only residential summer school in the country and certainly the only one on a dairy farm.
It was during the break between performances, as we sipped tea and wine in the shed beside the milking parlour, that I was seized by a powerful wave of nostalgia. It only began to dissipate when I had identified the cause of it: to wit a particular chemical used to clean the milking machines which, judging by the smell, cannot have changed in composition in 30 years.
We had just emerged from what was the culmination of Ireland’s only residential ballet summer school in what may well be Ireland’s only custom-built ballet training studio, located in a farmyard at the back end of Westmeath. As several dozen well-trained cows obligingly presented themselves for evening milking next door, 15 supple young bodies – average age 14 – danced their hearts out for the misty-eyed edification of parents and siblings, each of whom seemed to have borne along about half a dozen guests.
Anyone who has had any dealings with Anica and Philip Dawson are only too keen to confirm what the casual visitor has begun to suspect anyway; that this is no money-spinning racket for a couple of weeks in the summer to supplement the milk revenue. Appalled on her arrival here 11 years ago by the average Irish girl’s poor posture and lack of confidence, Anica embarked on a personal crusade to redress the balance. The Shawbrook School of Ballet is her annual answer for students around the country.
Among the adult there whose daughters have been trekking excitedly back to Shawbrook for the four years since its inception, the consensus was that the Dawson’s hardly break even financially. For the first year, recalled Mrs Pauline O’Brien, mother of Niamh, the fee was something ludicrous like £38; someone else thought that it might have been £20. This year, reflecting perhaps the high cost of the extraordinary development taking root around the farmyard, the cost is up to£80 for the week.
For that, the girls get to sleep on mattresses in a loft; eat food which they all agree is ‘brilliant’ and get to gaze for long intervals on Philip, spouse of Anica, a conservation-minded, dairy farmer, master builder, stained-glass artist, tuck-shop supplier and barbecue administrator. Philip is indubitably a hefty percentage of the annual treat – along with, of course, some highly intensive and deadly serious ballet practice.
An eating area has been carved out of what was a ‘building site’ last year and at the back, building work is in progress which impresses even those who have grown accustomed to Philip Dawson’s Grand Schemes. At this stage the half-built stone edifice could, in fact, be mistaken for an old ruin. But it was built only in the past month using the old stone from the crumbling workhouse in Ballymahon.
This –when completed promises to be a spectacular dining and living area for the students with a huge fireplace, wall-sized windows to one side and Dawson’s own stained-glass fitted into the slits for atmosphere.
So far, the 40-ft dance studio-cum-theatre is the piece de resistance of the whole. Built in a corn store dating from around 1850, it is convertible into a theatre by virtue of its ingenious winch-controlled tiered seating which rises majestically to the ceiling when no longer needed. The dance space boasts sprung maple flooring and a sophisticated light and sound system which Dawson describes as ‘just wiring.’ The labour is almost entirely his own.
In this environment, according to several sets of parents, the girls really blossom. From the first item on the 45-minute programme, entitled ‘invitation to dance,’ with music by Berliotz to the funky ‘sleaze alley’ number with music by Paul Hardcastle (in which sultry, pouting females play the stereotypical passive role to the ‘male’ hounds), they demonstrate astounding maturity and strength before an audience that included Martin Drury, education officer with the Arts Council.
Emotions were high, giggling voluble and relentless as they prepared to scatter from Wexford to Donegal. None of them labour under the illusion that a ballet dancer’s life is an easy one. They have only to turn to local girl Penny Wilson from Longford town, for reminders of the grind. With no residential ballet school in this country where a young girl may pursue her academic studies alongside her ballet training, Anica Dawson’s pupils are shepherded to Yorkshire where for the first few years they live with a ballet mistress whose tyrannical streak is legendary.
For Penny, though now into her third year and living outside of the ballet mistresses’ clutches, the daily grind is unchanged: the day being at 9.30 and goes on to 9.30pm with at two to three hour break in the afternoon. This goes on six days a week. Fees are £360 a term and living expenses go on top of that. But the magical precedents are there. Penny was Shawbrook girl from the age of seven; a previous Shawbrook graduate made it into the English National Ballet Company after only three years . . .
Like, a bush fire, word has spread through the country. In the first week of the summer school, tailored for children from 11 to 13, candidates had to be turned away for lack of places.
Philip Dawson might not have made a profit from the tuck shop but the man who met Anica Louw in the Karoo Desert where she was teaching in South Africa nearly 13 years ago and wanted to marry her there and then has managed to keep his feet on the ground. The ballet school project has developed its own momentum and though it threatens to swamp the cows, he is much too level-headed to jeopardize the family income.
Copyright Irish Times
(Accompaning photo of Anica Dawson with three of her pupils at the Shawbrook School of Dance in Co Westmeath, by William Farrell)
Irish Times, 31st August 1989
Definitely not the Bolshoi. Kathy Sheridan visits the Shawbrook School of Ballet, in Co Westmeath, the only residential summer school in the country and certainly the only one on a dairy farm.
It was during the break between performances, as we sipped tea and wine in the shed beside the milking parlour, that I was seized by a powerful wave of nostalgia. It only began to dissipate when I had identified the cause of it: to wit a particular chemical used to clean the milking machines which, judging by the smell, cannot have changed in composition in 30 years.
We had just emerged from what was the culmination of Ireland’s only residential ballet summer school in what may well be Ireland’s only custom-built ballet training studio, located in a farmyard at the back end of Westmeath. As several dozen well-trained cows obligingly presented themselves for evening milking next door, 15 supple young bodies – average age 14 – danced their hearts out for the misty-eyed edification of parents and siblings, each of whom seemed to have borne along about half a dozen guests.
Anyone who has had any dealings with Anica and Philip Dawson are only too keen to confirm what the casual visitor has begun to suspect anyway; that this is no money-spinning racket for a couple of weeks in the summer to supplement the milk revenue. Appalled on her arrival here 11 years ago by the average Irish girl’s poor posture and lack of confidence, Anica embarked on a personal crusade to redress the balance. The Shawbrook School of Ballet is her annual answer for students around the country.
Among the adult there whose daughters have been trekking excitedly back to Shawbrook for the four years since its inception, the consensus was that the Dawson’s hardly break even financially. For the first year, recalled Mrs Pauline O’Brien, mother of Niamh, the fee was something ludicrous like £38; someone else thought that it might have been £20. This year, reflecting perhaps the high cost of the extraordinary development taking root around the farmyard, the cost is up to£80 for the week.
For that, the girls get to sleep on mattresses in a loft; eat food which they all agree is ‘brilliant’ and get to gaze for long intervals on Philip, spouse of Anica, a conservation-minded, dairy farmer, master builder, stained-glass artist, tuck-shop supplier and barbecue administrator. Philip is indubitably a hefty percentage of the annual treat – along with, of course, some highly intensive and deadly serious ballet practice.
An eating area has been carved out of what was a ‘building site’ last year and at the back, building work is in progress which impresses even those who have grown accustomed to Philip Dawson’s Grand Schemes. At this stage the half-built stone edifice could, in fact, be mistaken for an old ruin. But it was built only in the past month using the old stone from the crumbling workhouse in Ballymahon.
This –when completed promises to be a spectacular dining and living area for the students with a huge fireplace, wall-sized windows to one side and Dawson’s own stained-glass fitted into the slits for atmosphere.
So far, the 40-ft dance studio-cum-theatre is the piece de resistance of the whole. Built in a corn store dating from around 1850, it is convertible into a theatre by virtue of its ingenious winch-controlled tiered seating which rises majestically to the ceiling when no longer needed. The dance space boasts sprung maple flooring and a sophisticated light and sound system which Dawson describes as ‘just wiring.’ The labour is almost entirely his own.
In this environment, according to several sets of parents, the girls really blossom. From the first item on the 45-minute programme, entitled ‘invitation to dance,’ with music by Berliotz to the funky ‘sleaze alley’ number with music by Paul Hardcastle (in which sultry, pouting females play the stereotypical passive role to the ‘male’ hounds), they demonstrate astounding maturity and strength before an audience that included Martin Drury, education officer with the Arts Council.
Emotions were high, giggling voluble and relentless as they prepared to scatter from Wexford to Donegal. None of them labour under the illusion that a ballet dancer’s life is an easy one. They have only to turn to local girl Penny Wilson from Longford town, for reminders of the grind. With no residential ballet school in this country where a young girl may pursue her academic studies alongside her ballet training, Anica Dawson’s pupils are shepherded to Yorkshire where for the first few years they live with a ballet mistress whose tyrannical streak is legendary.
For Penny, though now into her third year and living outside of the ballet mistresses’ clutches, the daily grind is unchanged: the day being at 9.30 and goes on to 9.30pm with at two to three hour break in the afternoon. This goes on six days a week. Fees are £360 a term and living expenses go on top of that. But the magical precedents are there. Penny was Shawbrook girl from the age of seven; a previous Shawbrook graduate made it into the English National Ballet Company after only three years . . .
Like, a bush fire, word has spread through the country. In the first week of the summer school, tailored for children from 11 to 13, candidates had to be turned away for lack of places.
Philip Dawson might not have made a profit from the tuck shop but the man who met Anica Louw in the Karoo Desert where she was teaching in South Africa nearly 13 years ago and wanted to marry her there and then has managed to keep his feet on the ground. The ballet school project has developed its own momentum and though it threatens to swamp the cows, he is much too level-headed to jeopardize the family income.
Copyright Irish Times
(Accompaning photo of Anica Dawson with three of her pupils at the Shawbrook School of Dance in Co Westmeath, by William Farrell)
Irish Independent article on Shawbrook 1996
Pigs Make way for farmyard ballet School.
By Willie Dillon
Irish Independent, Monday, July 29, 1996.
Anica and Philip Dawson run a thriving ballet school - from a converted pig shed. Dance pupils – some from as far away as the US and Japan – learn their steps in a real working Irish farmyard. The Dawson’s ballet school at Lenamore, Legan, Co Longford is almost certainly Ireland’s most unusual alternative farm enterprise.
The pirouettes and pas de deux are practiced literally up the yard from the parlour where the family milks 35 cows every day.
Shawbrook Ballet School is the brainchild of South African-born Anica who came to this country 18 years ago. After initially teaching in local schools and halls, she decided the way forward was to establish a full-time school on the farm.
Since then, this unique venture has gone from strength to strength, attracting a £22,000 agri-tourism grant from the Department of Agriculture, sponsorship from the Arts Council and a prestigious rural enterprise award from the AIB.
The dance studio came into being after Philip – who was brought up on the 70-acre farm – converted an old pig shed and put in special seating and lighting to allow it to be used as a small theatre.
During the year, the school caters for around 60 young ballet pupils from the locality. Anica teaches a further 40 youngsters each week in Longford and Mullingar.
Shawbrook is currently hosting pupils in a series of five week-long residential summer schools teaching classical and contemporary ballet.
Pupils stay in a former barn which Philip converted into a dormitory with room for 20 people.
The Dawsons, who have one son, Kristo (15) are also planning a dance performance in Longford town next month. With Arts Council support, they are engaging a composer and choreographer and 10 semi-professional dancers, all past pupils, to create a new piece to be staged in the Backstage Theatre.
The ballet school facilities are also used from time to time by theatrical and drama groups.
Anica says that while the school is artistically a success, the dairy farm continues to be the family’s main income generator, contributing some 80% of earnings.
Copyright, Irish Independent.
By Willie Dillon
Irish Independent, Monday, July 29, 1996.
Anica and Philip Dawson run a thriving ballet school - from a converted pig shed. Dance pupils – some from as far away as the US and Japan – learn their steps in a real working Irish farmyard. The Dawson’s ballet school at Lenamore, Legan, Co Longford is almost certainly Ireland’s most unusual alternative farm enterprise.
The pirouettes and pas de deux are practiced literally up the yard from the parlour where the family milks 35 cows every day.
Shawbrook Ballet School is the brainchild of South African-born Anica who came to this country 18 years ago. After initially teaching in local schools and halls, she decided the way forward was to establish a full-time school on the farm.
Since then, this unique venture has gone from strength to strength, attracting a £22,000 agri-tourism grant from the Department of Agriculture, sponsorship from the Arts Council and a prestigious rural enterprise award from the AIB.
The dance studio came into being after Philip – who was brought up on the 70-acre farm – converted an old pig shed and put in special seating and lighting to allow it to be used as a small theatre.
During the year, the school caters for around 60 young ballet pupils from the locality. Anica teaches a further 40 youngsters each week in Longford and Mullingar.
Shawbrook is currently hosting pupils in a series of five week-long residential summer schools teaching classical and contemporary ballet.
Pupils stay in a former barn which Philip converted into a dormitory with room for 20 people.
The Dawsons, who have one son, Kristo (15) are also planning a dance performance in Longford town next month. With Arts Council support, they are engaging a composer and choreographer and 10 semi-professional dancers, all past pupils, to create a new piece to be staged in the Backstage Theatre.
The ballet school facilities are also used from time to time by theatrical and drama groups.
Anica says that while the school is artistically a success, the dairy farm continues to be the family’s main income generator, contributing some 80% of earnings.
Copyright, Irish Independent.
Shawbrook, in European Dance News 2004
BALLET IN A BARN
It started with a dance school in a grain barn for local and regional students. Now Shawbrook is also a hideaway and retreat centre for dancers from around the world.
By Laura Peters
European DANCE news.com September 2004
Among the green fields, woods and old farms in rural southern central ireland lies in a hidden haven for dancers. Once a family-run dairy farm, Shawbrook is now a succesful dance institute where amateurs and professionals from around the world train, perform and experiment.
Dance educator Anica Louw founded Shawbrook with her husband, Philip Dawwson, in response to what she felt was a great need for serious dance training in Ireland. From its humble beginings in 1979, when the Shawbrook Ballet School operated along side the dairy farm, the institute has grown to include a summer school, retreat centre, weekend intensives, choreoghraphed-composer workshops and international dance exchange programmes that afford students the opportunity to study across Europe. ‘My first and foremost goal is supporting Ireland’s dancing - to help the programmes, to give them space to grow,’ says Louw. She achieves this, in part, by cultivating her extensive contacts in the European dance community. ‘It’s very important to know people. Especially for us, coming from Ireland where there is a lot to be done for the dancing. It’s all word of mouth; we don’t have a website, and it’s working very well so far.’’
Louw met Dawson in 1976 in her native South Africa. She had been teaching dance in a small town near Sutherland, South Africa, and when Dawson inherited his father’s 30-hectare mixed-livestock farm, the couple moved to ireland. While Dawson worked the 300-year-old farm, Louw began offering ballet lessons in the local primary school.
\
As enrolment grew, the need for some more suitable dance space also increased. Since the couple felt the farm buildings weren’t being used to their full potential, they decided to start a ballet school there.
They began by converting the limestone barn into a dance studio-theatre. Dawson installed sprung-maple floor, barre, mirrors and fifty-seat structure that, at the touch of a button, could be hoisted to the ceiling when not in use. In 1979, the Shawbrook School of Dance opened and began building a strong reputation for innovation, creativity and high standards in dance education. Locally and regionally, more students flocked to the sc hool.
After a cuple of years, Dawson started converting the other farm buildings. One stable loft became a flat for visitors, teachers and artists, other a dormitory with bedding for twnty students. The cow pen became the student shower area, the calving house a costume storage area and sewing room. Dawson also built a catering and dining annex using salvaged materials, including the remnants of an old suburban train, a demolished churchand a shop in a local town. In 1984, after completing the renovation, Louw and Dawson launched the Shawbrook summer school. Today, this school is recognised as the foremost summer school in Ireland for pre-professional danced students. Each year, several hundred dance students come from across Ireland - as well as from the United States, Swedon, Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Briton and Japan - to study with internationally renowned teachers and artists. Faculty members have included Sonya Rafferty of the Laban Centre in London, Stuart Beckett of the Royal Ballet and Berlin Ballet soloist (and former Shawbrook student) Marguerite Donlon.
In addition to the Summer School, Shawbrook offers weekend intensives and workshops during midterm breaks. These are geared primarily towards Irish students, whom Louw feels need special help breaking into the professional dance world.
‘Dance is not integrated in everyday life ór the Irish school system. There isn’t even a third-grade dance education,’ she says. ‘It’s a big step for students to travel. I want to support them in choosing a school and help them get in touch with teachers of the school. I regularily visit schools throughout Europe to see what they’re like. It’s important to find out where Irish students can go. We can’t just let them go to an audition blind.’
In 1997, Louw formed the LD Dance Trust, which receives funding from the Irish National Arts Council, and two years later, after almost 20 years of farming, Louw and Dawson shut down the farm and began operating Shawbrook solely as a dance institute. The cows were sold and the grounds where they grazed were turned into a forest of beech and oak trees.
Among Louw’s many dance programmes is the Irish National Youth Dance Company, a modern dance troupe that consists of two groups – the senior group (18-19 years old) and the junior associates (13-14 years old). The company , which perform at the Backstage Theatre in County Longford a couple of times a year, provides an opportunity for Irish students to gain performing and creative experience. Funding from the Irish National Arts Council allows the company to employ professional guest choreographers.
Although Low seems to be unstoppable, there was a time when frustrations slowed her down. ‘A couple of years ago I didn’t get excited about dance anymore,’ she says. ‘I felt I was constricted in my own little dance world in Ireland, and I didn’t like anything anymore. That was until I received invitations to come see some of my Shawbrook students who were now dancing with professional companies and doing great things. That’s whehn I got my enthusiasm back and knew that my contribution to dance (in Ireland) is important.’ This newfound enthusiasm also inspired the idea to start a retreat centre at Shawbrook. ‘Choreographers sometime run dry, thy need space, sometimes (they need to) get away from the city,’ she says. ‘In our retreat centre they can rest, get in touch with nature and relax. They don’t have to come up with anything. They can just dance and train at their own pace.’ The centre is open to both established companies and young choreographers, and in some case, the Irish National Arts Council provides funding. One of the companies that recently resided there is Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, which won the Dublin Theatre Festival’s Special Judges Award and performed in Connecticut, US at the international Festival of Arts and Ideas at Yale University.
New initiatives are on their way. This year LD Dance organised the first Longford Dance Festival, where Ireland’s first dance awards were given. Dance companies from across the country performed at the event, which Louw plans to professionalise. She hopes it will help generate a dance audience in her adopted country. ‘There’s no good audience here in Ireland. People don’t grow up with dance. I try to motivate my students to go to as many performances as possible, because they’re the audience of the future.
For more information about Shawbrook Ballet School, Shawbrook Residential Summer School, weekend intensives, choreographic-composer workshops, international dance exchange programmes, retreat centres, etc, email: Anica Louw or Philip Dawson at shawbrook@tinet.ie
It started with a dance school in a grain barn for local and regional students. Now Shawbrook is also a hideaway and retreat centre for dancers from around the world.
By Laura Peters
European DANCE news.com September 2004
Among the green fields, woods and old farms in rural southern central ireland lies in a hidden haven for dancers. Once a family-run dairy farm, Shawbrook is now a succesful dance institute where amateurs and professionals from around the world train, perform and experiment.
Dance educator Anica Louw founded Shawbrook with her husband, Philip Dawwson, in response to what she felt was a great need for serious dance training in Ireland. From its humble beginings in 1979, when the Shawbrook Ballet School operated along side the dairy farm, the institute has grown to include a summer school, retreat centre, weekend intensives, choreoghraphed-composer workshops and international dance exchange programmes that afford students the opportunity to study across Europe. ‘My first and foremost goal is supporting Ireland’s dancing - to help the programmes, to give them space to grow,’ says Louw. She achieves this, in part, by cultivating her extensive contacts in the European dance community. ‘It’s very important to know people. Especially for us, coming from Ireland where there is a lot to be done for the dancing. It’s all word of mouth; we don’t have a website, and it’s working very well so far.’’
Louw met Dawson in 1976 in her native South Africa. She had been teaching dance in a small town near Sutherland, South Africa, and when Dawson inherited his father’s 30-hectare mixed-livestock farm, the couple moved to ireland. While Dawson worked the 300-year-old farm, Louw began offering ballet lessons in the local primary school.
\
As enrolment grew, the need for some more suitable dance space also increased. Since the couple felt the farm buildings weren’t being used to their full potential, they decided to start a ballet school there.
They began by converting the limestone barn into a dance studio-theatre. Dawson installed sprung-maple floor, barre, mirrors and fifty-seat structure that, at the touch of a button, could be hoisted to the ceiling when not in use. In 1979, the Shawbrook School of Dance opened and began building a strong reputation for innovation, creativity and high standards in dance education. Locally and regionally, more students flocked to the sc hool.
After a cuple of years, Dawson started converting the other farm buildings. One stable loft became a flat for visitors, teachers and artists, other a dormitory with bedding for twnty students. The cow pen became the student shower area, the calving house a costume storage area and sewing room. Dawson also built a catering and dining annex using salvaged materials, including the remnants of an old suburban train, a demolished churchand a shop in a local town. In 1984, after completing the renovation, Louw and Dawson launched the Shawbrook summer school. Today, this school is recognised as the foremost summer school in Ireland for pre-professional danced students. Each year, several hundred dance students come from across Ireland - as well as from the United States, Swedon, Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Briton and Japan - to study with internationally renowned teachers and artists. Faculty members have included Sonya Rafferty of the Laban Centre in London, Stuart Beckett of the Royal Ballet and Berlin Ballet soloist (and former Shawbrook student) Marguerite Donlon.
In addition to the Summer School, Shawbrook offers weekend intensives and workshops during midterm breaks. These are geared primarily towards Irish students, whom Louw feels need special help breaking into the professional dance world.
‘Dance is not integrated in everyday life ór the Irish school system. There isn’t even a third-grade dance education,’ she says. ‘It’s a big step for students to travel. I want to support them in choosing a school and help them get in touch with teachers of the school. I regularily visit schools throughout Europe to see what they’re like. It’s important to find out where Irish students can go. We can’t just let them go to an audition blind.’
In 1997, Louw formed the LD Dance Trust, which receives funding from the Irish National Arts Council, and two years later, after almost 20 years of farming, Louw and Dawson shut down the farm and began operating Shawbrook solely as a dance institute. The cows were sold and the grounds where they grazed were turned into a forest of beech and oak trees.
Among Louw’s many dance programmes is the Irish National Youth Dance Company, a modern dance troupe that consists of two groups – the senior group (18-19 years old) and the junior associates (13-14 years old). The company , which perform at the Backstage Theatre in County Longford a couple of times a year, provides an opportunity for Irish students to gain performing and creative experience. Funding from the Irish National Arts Council allows the company to employ professional guest choreographers.
Although Low seems to be unstoppable, there was a time when frustrations slowed her down. ‘A couple of years ago I didn’t get excited about dance anymore,’ she says. ‘I felt I was constricted in my own little dance world in Ireland, and I didn’t like anything anymore. That was until I received invitations to come see some of my Shawbrook students who were now dancing with professional companies and doing great things. That’s whehn I got my enthusiasm back and knew that my contribution to dance (in Ireland) is important.’ This newfound enthusiasm also inspired the idea to start a retreat centre at Shawbrook. ‘Choreographers sometime run dry, thy need space, sometimes (they need to) get away from the city,’ she says. ‘In our retreat centre they can rest, get in touch with nature and relax. They don’t have to come up with anything. They can just dance and train at their own pace.’ The centre is open to both established companies and young choreographers, and in some case, the Irish National Arts Council provides funding. One of the companies that recently resided there is Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, which won the Dublin Theatre Festival’s Special Judges Award and performed in Connecticut, US at the international Festival of Arts and Ideas at Yale University.
New initiatives are on their way. This year LD Dance organised the first Longford Dance Festival, where Ireland’s first dance awards were given. Dance companies from across the country performed at the event, which Louw plans to professionalise. She hopes it will help generate a dance audience in her adopted country. ‘There’s no good audience here in Ireland. People don’t grow up with dance. I try to motivate my students to go to as many performances as possible, because they’re the audience of the future.
For more information about Shawbrook Ballet School, Shawbrook Residential Summer School, weekend intensives, choreographic-composer workshops, international dance exchange programmes, retreat centres, etc, email: Anica Louw or Philip Dawson at shawbrook@tinet.ie
Longford Leader Article on Shawbrook 1989
Summer Ballet School closes with a flourish.
By Geraldine Grennan
Longford Leader, 25th August 1989
The Shawbrook School of Ballet in Legan brought their highly-popular Summer School to a close for another year on Saturday nnight last with a spectacular display of dancing by over sixty students from all parts of the country.
The summer Ballet School which is the only residential school of it’s kind in the country, is run by Anica Dawson, who has been teaching ballet in Legan for the past eleven years.
This year’s fourth Summer School got underway on Augst 6th last, with fifteen to twenty students per week. ‘The basic requirement of the Summer School is that students must be over fourteen years of age or have passed their pre-elementary ballet exams,’ says Anica Dawson.
Teachers for the school came from New York, Mexico and Liverpool, and students came from as far away as Cork, Donegal and Dublin with a number of Longford and Westmeath students among the young ballet hopefuls.
The ‘Grand Finale’ of the Summer School took place in the Shawbrook School theatre on Saturday night, which was attended by Martin Drury, Director of the Irish Dance Council and Gay Tanham, director of the Dance Council.\
One of the highlight of the evening was a ballet display with was choreographed by the students themselves, and Anica says the creativity displayed by the students was ‘exceptional.’
The leading dancer at the ‘Grand Finale’ of the Shawbrook Summer School was Penny Wilson from Longford , who is currently training in the world-famous Dorethy Stevens Ballet School in England. Penny had to stand in for one of the Summer School students who received an injury during rehearsals last week.
Copyright Longford Leader
By Geraldine Grennan
Longford Leader, 25th August 1989
The Shawbrook School of Ballet in Legan brought their highly-popular Summer School to a close for another year on Saturday nnight last with a spectacular display of dancing by over sixty students from all parts of the country.
The summer Ballet School which is the only residential school of it’s kind in the country, is run by Anica Dawson, who has been teaching ballet in Legan for the past eleven years.
This year’s fourth Summer School got underway on Augst 6th last, with fifteen to twenty students per week. ‘The basic requirement of the Summer School is that students must be over fourteen years of age or have passed their pre-elementary ballet exams,’ says Anica Dawson.
Teachers for the school came from New York, Mexico and Liverpool, and students came from as far away as Cork, Donegal and Dublin with a number of Longford and Westmeath students among the young ballet hopefuls.
The ‘Grand Finale’ of the Summer School took place in the Shawbrook School theatre on Saturday night, which was attended by Martin Drury, Director of the Irish Dance Council and Gay Tanham, director of the Dance Council.\
One of the highlight of the evening was a ballet display with was choreographed by the students themselves, and Anica says the creativity displayed by the students was ‘exceptional.’
The leading dancer at the ‘Grand Finale’ of the Shawbrook Summer School was Penny Wilson from Longford , who is currently training in the world-famous Dorethy Stevens Ballet School in England. Penny had to stand in for one of the Summer School students who received an injury during rehearsals last week.
Copyright Longford Leader
Shawbrook Article, Westmeath Examiner, 1994
FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO LEGAN AND MULLINGAR
Westmeath Examiner, 3 Sept 1994
The Berlin Deutsche Opera’s solo dancer and choreographer Marguerite Donlan, from Longford, received her initial ballet training from South African, Anica Louw, who runs a ballet school at Legan, in Co Longford.
Anica who came to Ireland sixteen years ago when she married Philip Dawson from Legan, set up her school ‘Shawbrook’ back then, and today, at Legan, she has a studio and theatre where ballet classes and performances are held.
As well as atttracting local students, Anica has dancers coming from abroad for the annual Summer School, which is booked up to a year in advance.
In her native country, Anica began dancing at the age of three, and carried on until she was seventeen, when she went on to study theatre in Pretoria. She then taught Africans and drama and in South Afrucan secondary school, and when she met Irishman Philip Dawson who was travelling in Africa, the couple married and came back to Philip’s family farm at Legan.
Initially, Anica held classes in places such as Longford Rugby Club and Legan School, but she and Philip then decided to convert a barn into theatre studio, and to provide living accomadation for students.
Because of the interest among Westmeath dancers howeve, Anica has now decided to launch classes in Mullingar, and she will be accepting enrolements on . .. Anic a believes that even if a student doesn’t go on to the heights of success that Marguerite Donlon has attained, there are still immense benefits to be gained from studying ballet.
‘I will always feel that young girls should carry themselves well and to have grace and poise and I feel that ballet is a very good discipline,’ she says. She will take students as yong as four years old, and . .
Westmeath Examiner, 3 Sept 1994
The Berlin Deutsche Opera’s solo dancer and choreographer Marguerite Donlan, from Longford, received her initial ballet training from South African, Anica Louw, who runs a ballet school at Legan, in Co Longford.
Anica who came to Ireland sixteen years ago when she married Philip Dawson from Legan, set up her school ‘Shawbrook’ back then, and today, at Legan, she has a studio and theatre where ballet classes and performances are held.
As well as atttracting local students, Anica has dancers coming from abroad for the annual Summer School, which is booked up to a year in advance.
In her native country, Anica began dancing at the age of three, and carried on until she was seventeen, when she went on to study theatre in Pretoria. She then taught Africans and drama and in South Afrucan secondary school, and when she met Irishman Philip Dawson who was travelling in Africa, the couple married and came back to Philip’s family farm at Legan.
Initially, Anica held classes in places such as Longford Rugby Club and Legan School, but she and Philip then decided to convert a barn into theatre studio, and to provide living accomadation for students.
Because of the interest among Westmeath dancers howeve, Anica has now decided to launch classes in Mullingar, and she will be accepting enrolements on . .. Anic a believes that even if a student doesn’t go on to the heights of success that Marguerite Donlon has attained, there are still immense benefits to be gained from studying ballet.
‘I will always feel that young girls should carry themselves well and to have grace and poise and I feel that ballet is a very good discipline,’ she says. She will take students as yong as four years old, and . .
Saturday, 31 March 2007
Fab Beast at Shawbrook 2005 - Irish Times Article
Fabulous Beast rehearsing at Shawbrook.
Irish Times, 16th Sept, 2005
In 2003 a dance theatre company based in Co Longford provided the surprise hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Now Fabulous Beast return to the fray with an energetic, violent, full-blooded version of the ancient legent of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Belinda McKeon talks to dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan about unleashing the beast.
PHILIP DAWSON, one half of the team behind the renowed Shawbrook Dance Theatre in Legan, Co Longford, remembers a day in early summer of this year, watching the face of the dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan as the pair surveyed a building on the Shawbrook grounds. The building was a hay shed, the traces of agriculture still clear to see, since Shawbrook was, until very recently, a working farm as well as the literal home of Philip and Anica Dawson and the creative home of the many young dancers who pass through the theatre and its school every year.
Dawson doesn't use the word "dubious" as he describes the reaction to this structure of Keegan-Dolan and the other members of his company, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, originally set up in 1997. But it's clear that there were some nerves at Shawbrook that day.
Within a worryingly short space of time, this place without even any walls to speak of had to become a large-scale, flexible rehearsal room for Fabulous Beast's new production. The company was eager to get to work on the piece, an exploration of the ancient legend of the Táin Bó Cuailnge; audiences at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) meanwhile, would be eager to see the results, memories of Fabulous Beast's previous production - Giselle, the undisputed hit of the 2003 festival - still fresh in their minds. The new piece needed a space in which to grow.
And, just a few weeks later, it has. The company is in situ, rehearsing all day in the new space, sleeping by night in the dormitories usually occupied by young students, and eating together the generous meals prepared by the Dawsons and their helpers.
The former barn is now a studio, a space just as sophisticated as the other converted sheds and outhouses around the peaceful grounds of Shawbrook; Dawson turned it around with the same gusto with which he has turned a byre into a dormitory for residing students, and with which he is currently turning a milking parlour into a sauna and pool for muscles aching from hours of training and practice. And the new piece is not so much coming together as stomping its way there, bellowing itself into being. The place - not just the rehearsal room, but the midlands terrain in which it, and Shawbrook, are set - could hardly be more fitting for the piece Keegan-Dolan, its author, has called The Bull.
Keegan-Dolan, himself from this part of Co Longford - near Edgeworthstown, the birthplace of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and on the border with Westmeath - had long held a notion of creating a work based on the Táin, the tale of Queen Maeve's jealous and catastrophic pursuit of Ulster's prize bull. When, after the success of Giselle, former DTF director Fergus Linehan and the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE), London commissioned another work, he found himself wondering whether to approach the story regarded by many as having been fully and definitively told by the 1969 translation of Thomas Kinsella, accompanied by the brush drawings of Louis le Brocquy; both artists are now as bound up with the legend as is Maeve herself, or as, indeed, is the coveted beast.
But two chance sightings as Keegan-Dolan was riding his motorbike along the road from Mullingar made up his mind. "I was thinking about the piece," he says, "and didn't I see a big, brown limousin bull in the field. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I saw the sign. For the Táin Trail [ a tourist trail through areas and sites mentioned in the legend] and I thought, I'm going to do the Táin. That's it."
That, in a sense, was Keegan-Dolan's last moment alone with the idea; from the moment it began to journey towards realisation, it became the property, the focus, the endeavour, of the company. Unusually for a director, Keegan-Dolan will not talk about the piece without having as many members of the company as possible to join in the conversation. The result, for the outsider attempting to glimpse into their world, can be baffling, even frustrating. After four weeks spent living and creating together in such close confinement, the 14-member group speak about the production in a type of shorthand, and mere elucidation of the structure of The Bull, of the way in which this production reimagines the Táin narrative - though it is not, Keegan-Dolan insists, primarily a version of the Táin - is slow in coming. Mainly, the performers want to talk about the experience of working together in a range of disciplines - acting, dancing, singing, music, rhythm - and about each person's speciality is shared with and, within the piece, taken on for a time by the others.
"The group is exceptional," says Keegan-Dolan. "It's a really interesting group of people. You have an Irish percussionist. A piano-playing, acting composer from Rome. An actor from Norwich. An actress from the west of Ireland. A dancer-actor from Bratislava. A counter-tenor from Naples, an actor from Cork, a dancer from France ... very eclectic. And nobody is good at just one thing, there are no categories. The dancers are singing, the singers are dancing, the actors are dancing, the drummers are dancing ..."
But what exactly are they drumming, dancing, singing and acting? Keegan-Dolan is loathe to reveal the details, but from the scraps of information he will concede, The Bull looks likely to glow with the same sort of humour and dynamism - and, likely too, given the calibre of the performers, with the same degree of beauty and intelligence - as did Giselle. But comparisons are limiting, and unfair; enough to say that the setting is once more the midlands, the era a modern one, and the situation seething with dark emotion. And, perhaps, that all but two of the cast from Giselle appear in The Bull, along with six other performers.
Though Keegan-Dolan sounds most excited by the possibilities opened up by the involvement in the piece of rhythm artists such as the percussionist Robbie Harris and the dancer Colin Dunne, he has created, too, a strong cast of characters. They live out the story of the Táin in starkly - and, by the sounds of it, bleakly hilarious - contemporary terms. The Maeve in The Bull is Maeve Fogarty, doyenne of one of the two families whose struggle is at the centre of the piece. Maeve, to be played by Olwen Fouéré, has a husband and two children. She and her husband also have the services of one Miroslav Kont, a hired hitman from the Czech Republic, while Maeve has the somewhat more different services of a lover, Fergus O'Rourke. "Because," explains Keegan-Dolan, "Maeve has money invested in a musical called Celtic Bitch, in which Fergus is the lead dancer". Deliciously, the role of Fergus will be played by Dunne, well known as a former lead in Riverdance, who has been leading the cast through their strides in Irish dancing for the past number of weeks.
Muscling up to the Fogarty family, ostensibly over the matter of a bull, will be the Cullens: old Mr Cullen, his brothers Donnie and Big Bernie, his son and his son's librarian lover. In the mix, too, will be a Nigerian priest and Morrigan, the goddess of death. On a mundane level, the conflict between the families is easy to grasp; it comes down to money and social standing. "The Fogartys are nouveau riche who've come up to the city," explains Keegan-Dolan. "They live in a five-bedroom mansion with underfloor heating. Whereas the Cullens have stayed old school. They're plasterers and they just live in a two-bedroom cottage and all ... live together." (The laughter that greets the last comment suggests that perversity may be alive and well in the Cullen household, but that's just a wild guess.)
It's easy now to see why Keegan-Dolan insists so vehemently that what he and the company are putting together is not "the Táin". This, refreshingly, sounds like no Táin studied by past or present generations of Leaving Cert students, or followed by readers of the Lady Gregory or even the Kinsella translation. If it is not a revision, then it is, in less loaded language, definitely a looking-again; a looking again at the deepest currents running through the legend, currents previously ignored or downplayed for reasons of decorum or fear.
"When I went back to it," says Keegan-Dolan, "I hadn't really an understanding of the story. I remembered Queen Maeve, and I remembered that she wanted a bull." That much was enough, he says, to interest him in making a piece; the "two really powerful archetypes" of the queen and the bull would have yielded plenty on their own. But then Keegan-Dolan returned to the Kinsella translation. "And I was really quite shocked at the violence in it. And then I became excited by the disparity between the version we're told as children and the version as translated."
He would have been much more attracted to the story as a child, he says, "if someone had told me the real story. It would have been fantastic. You know, all riding each other, killing each other ..."
Fouéré agrees; she finds "refreshing", she says, the fact that the action is spurred by a woman who is not just powerful but immensely and incessantly violent. "It's only fairly recently in Irish drama that women have been allowed to be monsters and to be human at the same time."
"Every generation," says Keegan-Dolan, "tries to make culture something you can take to the table rather than really what it is, which is often incredibly scary, threatening, challenging, stuff about what it is to be human. You know? So that's why I stuck with it."
Copyright Irish Times
Irish Times, 16th Sept, 2005
In 2003 a dance theatre company based in Co Longford provided the surprise hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Now Fabulous Beast return to the fray with an energetic, violent, full-blooded version of the ancient legent of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Belinda McKeon talks to dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan about unleashing the beast.
PHILIP DAWSON, one half of the team behind the renowed Shawbrook Dance Theatre in Legan, Co Longford, remembers a day in early summer of this year, watching the face of the dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan as the pair surveyed a building on the Shawbrook grounds. The building was a hay shed, the traces of agriculture still clear to see, since Shawbrook was, until very recently, a working farm as well as the literal home of Philip and Anica Dawson and the creative home of the many young dancers who pass through the theatre and its school every year.
Dawson doesn't use the word "dubious" as he describes the reaction to this structure of Keegan-Dolan and the other members of his company, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, originally set up in 1997. But it's clear that there were some nerves at Shawbrook that day.
Within a worryingly short space of time, this place without even any walls to speak of had to become a large-scale, flexible rehearsal room for Fabulous Beast's new production. The company was eager to get to work on the piece, an exploration of the ancient legend of the Táin Bó Cuailnge; audiences at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) meanwhile, would be eager to see the results, memories of Fabulous Beast's previous production - Giselle, the undisputed hit of the 2003 festival - still fresh in their minds. The new piece needed a space in which to grow.
And, just a few weeks later, it has. The company is in situ, rehearsing all day in the new space, sleeping by night in the dormitories usually occupied by young students, and eating together the generous meals prepared by the Dawsons and their helpers.
The former barn is now a studio, a space just as sophisticated as the other converted sheds and outhouses around the peaceful grounds of Shawbrook; Dawson turned it around with the same gusto with which he has turned a byre into a dormitory for residing students, and with which he is currently turning a milking parlour into a sauna and pool for muscles aching from hours of training and practice. And the new piece is not so much coming together as stomping its way there, bellowing itself into being. The place - not just the rehearsal room, but the midlands terrain in which it, and Shawbrook, are set - could hardly be more fitting for the piece Keegan-Dolan, its author, has called The Bull.
Keegan-Dolan, himself from this part of Co Longford - near Edgeworthstown, the birthplace of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and on the border with Westmeath - had long held a notion of creating a work based on the Táin, the tale of Queen Maeve's jealous and catastrophic pursuit of Ulster's prize bull. When, after the success of Giselle, former DTF director Fergus Linehan and the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE), London commissioned another work, he found himself wondering whether to approach the story regarded by many as having been fully and definitively told by the 1969 translation of Thomas Kinsella, accompanied by the brush drawings of Louis le Brocquy; both artists are now as bound up with the legend as is Maeve herself, or as, indeed, is the coveted beast.
But two chance sightings as Keegan-Dolan was riding his motorbike along the road from Mullingar made up his mind. "I was thinking about the piece," he says, "and didn't I see a big, brown limousin bull in the field. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I saw the sign. For the Táin Trail [ a tourist trail through areas and sites mentioned in the legend] and I thought, I'm going to do the Táin. That's it."
That, in a sense, was Keegan-Dolan's last moment alone with the idea; from the moment it began to journey towards realisation, it became the property, the focus, the endeavour, of the company. Unusually for a director, Keegan-Dolan will not talk about the piece without having as many members of the company as possible to join in the conversation. The result, for the outsider attempting to glimpse into their world, can be baffling, even frustrating. After four weeks spent living and creating together in such close confinement, the 14-member group speak about the production in a type of shorthand, and mere elucidation of the structure of The Bull, of the way in which this production reimagines the Táin narrative - though it is not, Keegan-Dolan insists, primarily a version of the Táin - is slow in coming. Mainly, the performers want to talk about the experience of working together in a range of disciplines - acting, dancing, singing, music, rhythm - and about each person's speciality is shared with and, within the piece, taken on for a time by the others.
"The group is exceptional," says Keegan-Dolan. "It's a really interesting group of people. You have an Irish percussionist. A piano-playing, acting composer from Rome. An actor from Norwich. An actress from the west of Ireland. A dancer-actor from Bratislava. A counter-tenor from Naples, an actor from Cork, a dancer from France ... very eclectic. And nobody is good at just one thing, there are no categories. The dancers are singing, the singers are dancing, the actors are dancing, the drummers are dancing ..."
But what exactly are they drumming, dancing, singing and acting? Keegan-Dolan is loathe to reveal the details, but from the scraps of information he will concede, The Bull looks likely to glow with the same sort of humour and dynamism - and, likely too, given the calibre of the performers, with the same degree of beauty and intelligence - as did Giselle. But comparisons are limiting, and unfair; enough to say that the setting is once more the midlands, the era a modern one, and the situation seething with dark emotion. And, perhaps, that all but two of the cast from Giselle appear in The Bull, along with six other performers.
Though Keegan-Dolan sounds most excited by the possibilities opened up by the involvement in the piece of rhythm artists such as the percussionist Robbie Harris and the dancer Colin Dunne, he has created, too, a strong cast of characters. They live out the story of the Táin in starkly - and, by the sounds of it, bleakly hilarious - contemporary terms. The Maeve in The Bull is Maeve Fogarty, doyenne of one of the two families whose struggle is at the centre of the piece. Maeve, to be played by Olwen Fouéré, has a husband and two children. She and her husband also have the services of one Miroslav Kont, a hired hitman from the Czech Republic, while Maeve has the somewhat more different services of a lover, Fergus O'Rourke. "Because," explains Keegan-Dolan, "Maeve has money invested in a musical called Celtic Bitch, in which Fergus is the lead dancer". Deliciously, the role of Fergus will be played by Dunne, well known as a former lead in Riverdance, who has been leading the cast through their strides in Irish dancing for the past number of weeks.
Muscling up to the Fogarty family, ostensibly over the matter of a bull, will be the Cullens: old Mr Cullen, his brothers Donnie and Big Bernie, his son and his son's librarian lover. In the mix, too, will be a Nigerian priest and Morrigan, the goddess of death. On a mundane level, the conflict between the families is easy to grasp; it comes down to money and social standing. "The Fogartys are nouveau riche who've come up to the city," explains Keegan-Dolan. "They live in a five-bedroom mansion with underfloor heating. Whereas the Cullens have stayed old school. They're plasterers and they just live in a two-bedroom cottage and all ... live together." (The laughter that greets the last comment suggests that perversity may be alive and well in the Cullen household, but that's just a wild guess.)
It's easy now to see why Keegan-Dolan insists so vehemently that what he and the company are putting together is not "the Táin". This, refreshingly, sounds like no Táin studied by past or present generations of Leaving Cert students, or followed by readers of the Lady Gregory or even the Kinsella translation. If it is not a revision, then it is, in less loaded language, definitely a looking-again; a looking again at the deepest currents running through the legend, currents previously ignored or downplayed for reasons of decorum or fear.
"When I went back to it," says Keegan-Dolan, "I hadn't really an understanding of the story. I remembered Queen Maeve, and I remembered that she wanted a bull." That much was enough, he says, to interest him in making a piece; the "two really powerful archetypes" of the queen and the bull would have yielded plenty on their own. But then Keegan-Dolan returned to the Kinsella translation. "And I was really quite shocked at the violence in it. And then I became excited by the disparity between the version we're told as children and the version as translated."
He would have been much more attracted to the story as a child, he says, "if someone had told me the real story. It would have been fantastic. You know, all riding each other, killing each other ..."
Fouéré agrees; she finds "refreshing", she says, the fact that the action is spurred by a woman who is not just powerful but immensely and incessantly violent. "It's only fairly recently in Irish drama that women have been allowed to be monsters and to be human at the same time."
"Every generation," says Keegan-Dolan, "tries to make culture something you can take to the table rather than really what it is, which is often incredibly scary, threatening, challenging, stuff about what it is to be human. You know? So that's why I stuck with it."
Copyright Irish Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)