Jarkko Lehmus Diary

"The Dog Ate It, Miss."

Me: "Err... David? You know the bird mask?
I was coming to rehearsal this morning
and I dropped it and a car ran over it."

Dave: "Is it still ok?"

Me: "It's a bit flat..."

Just the kind of conversation that you need to get the last day of rehearsals into a swing. Like a hole in the head... Luckily dear Dawn from our stage management department saved the day and worked her magic and fixed the mask during the day. the end result looked so good that I put it through it's paces by dropping it about six times during the show the next day. Well done.

The show of Dave's Red Room was a month ago to date and it was the culmination of a couple of months of seven day working weeks followed by a ragged few days of shuttling between Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Edinburgh and eventually spat me back into rehearsal in Glasgow on the Friday morning like nothing had happened. The strangest experience that was a great experiment in communication, but ultimately left me feeling like I only filled in for someone else rather than truly contributed. The reception and the feedback afterwards was glowing, so I guess I did good. Tomorrow I'll do even better, because I know I can.

This blog has been two months in the making. My apologies for that. Please refer to excuses above. It won't happen again until the next time. Honest.

This blog has also been five years in the making: in December 2003 the company was getting ready to unveil The Nutcracker, Ashley's first ever full-evening's work and the first story ballet to boot, Mr Page was still on his first year of his directorship and I'd only been in the company for a few months. It was all new and exciting and there was a lot of buzz about the big changes afoot and Bruce, the editor of ballet.co, latched onto it and contacted the company to get some nice little ballerina to write a blog of what was going on in the company that everyone was talking about. The note about the blog hung on the notice board for a couple of weeks and it seemed that there were no takers, so I popped down to PR's dungeon to express my interest. I think Bruce's initial reaction was: "You've got to be joking."

In a way the genesis of this blog is a very characteristic story in my life, and so is Bruce's reaction. I'm sure similar thoughts went through the minds of the directors of Millennium when they saw my application for the school in the spring of '99 and through my fellow dancers' minds when I popped in to audition for the company on the first holidays from the army in the spring of 2003. Also the "No takers? I'll do it." - scenario is all too familiar. It's kind of how I ended up dancing in the first place and lately very much how I landed as the Equity dep of the company. I don't necessarily always want to do things that need to be done, but also know that they really need to be done and no-one else is going to. I more than often do things badly to begin with and cause unnecessary hassle, but, being to stupid to stop, end up learning the hard way and eventually even end up getting some things right. The older I've got the more I've learned and the less I fear. God help you, poor world...

The last five years and the rest of my life aside, what's happened during the last couple of months? Firstly the Autumn Tour saw us revisiting Petronio's Ride The Beast and Trisha Brown's For MG: The Movie and Hamming up Ashley's new Pennies From Heaven. On top of our usual Scottish dates we popped down to London for quick hit-and-run during Dance Umbrella to wow the crowds in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Great audiences and a nice enough stage, but getting on it and back off was a right royal pain in the arse; big companies and converted concert halls with elevated stages don't mix well. All is well that ends well seems appropriate at this point, though, since everybody survived the weekend and the reception was well worth it.

After the tour was wrapped up, I popped down to Guildford for the first weekend seminar of the BA(Hons) Theatre conversion course I'm doing at the moment. I was a bit concerned, having doubts about my vocabulary and generally just feeling like I'd destroyed too many brain cells over the years to make any sense of the course material. It was a great relief when the first topic of the meeting was the fact that every other person on the course was reading Fortier's Theory/Theatre with a dictionary too. Good times. By this time the first formative essay has come back with distinctly average marks, I'm making some sense of the book on the second reading, only need the dictionary on every second page and didn't feel too daunted about the second seminar weekend last week that saw us applying the theory of psychoanalysis to the Shakespeare's Henry V and a couple of it's film versions. All in all a good start. I've got another essay to write during the coming week in the run up to the first night of Sleeping Beauty. No pressure.

All this intellectual muscle building has been rather interesting and got me thinking about how I write, especially since I've got to pass for an academic in my papers. It's also kicking me into gear to go to the theatre to watch plays a bit more often and to read more of them too. Reading all that truly crafted writing has highlighted the distinction between real writers and literary wanderers. I would be very much of the latter ilk. Reading all that mostly literary based theory has also raised the question of how one can analyse something one quite possibly has not experienced due to the detachment necessary for analysation? Just a thought about the seductive ease by which one's intellectual head slips into one's backside.

Speaking of which I got some weird looks from the fellow punters at the Body Worlds exhibition (Yes, it's that German creep's collection of plasticined corpses) last Sunday by peering up the exhibits' backsides to try to work out which muscle's which and does what in aiding or hindering me on my guest of turning out my gammy legs. I describe my legs gammy due to the fact that I was having problems walking again. The hip injury that put me in such a state during last spring had rearer it's ugly head again in very similar circumstances to the last tour of Beauty: Working hard in a the class and doing more balletic rep, really enjoying it but forcing it and the next thing I know I can't pedal uphill, have to get off to walk, limp to a bar and get thrashed, turn up at work on Thursday smelling rank and unable to walk properly, explain to the staff from hopefully a safe distance that the hip is mashed again and lie on the floor slowly sinking into it.

That happy episode happened on the Wednesday and Thursday a week ago. The weekend in London came wearing a big red reset button on it's forehead and I hit it with all my crippled might. Francis Bacon's weird world, Michael Gambon floating in Harold Pinter's hopeless limbo and some assorted sordid night-time activity provided the sauce on the theoretical feast provided by Guildford School of Acting. A tired, but refreshed I started another week of trying to get to grips with the debilitating incapacity. Wisened up from the five months of pain I endured but eventually crumbled under last spring I stated that I still couldn't walk particularly fast and set about to contacting the people that had provided the cure the last time around with the result that I finished the week by doing a soft but passable run of the ballet as the King on Friday. Result! Now all I need to do is to learn to walk and dance again, be true to my actual bodily facility and slowly expand on it. Tedious but necessary work. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to dodge the hip replacement for a couple of decades.

The Baron, Miss Modus and Doctor No on a secret mission. ©

After days of lying on the floor I've finally emerged as ever more resolute to make the King bigger than ever. He might dance like an old man, but he sure can tell the story and the story he will tell! The movement challenge of the month will come in the form of the Romanian Prince and his wolfish antics. Softly does it, my dear padfoot...

Another earlier observation that has been driven home by the days on the sidelines is the lack of direction of the characters and the resulting indifference and insecurity that manifests in various ways in the performance of the characters. The paradox is that ballet training doesn't really offer the tools to create and bring a character to life, but every story ballet is still attempting to tell a story and the characters are the ones that are supposed to do it. I can watch technical brilliance for about fifteen seconds, but if it's emotionally devoid I fall asleep. Of course one could break down the physicality of a character into minute movements and gestures and even insert the necessary bridging thoughts resulting in a lace of delicate choreography, but this would take time and possibly restrict the individual performers, but it would also stretch them and teach them different skills if they were willing to adopt them. In the casting structure of our company time is on a premium and the characters are left to their own devices as long as they are roughly in the right place doing roughly the right things. I used to piss people off on a regular basis by trying to get them to make justice to the character they were entrusted or possibly hamstrung with, especially so if that character was created by me. Not necessarily the wisest way forward... Nvertheless, a woolly blanket might be nice and comfortable, but it lacks the texture and the intricacy of a lace throw. In other words: the choreography of the character outside the actual dancing might be minute and internal, but it's still choreography and without it the the character is hollow, the story limp and the audience gets less for it's money.

Maybe this is just me screaming into the void trying to tell myself that I am of some importance, maybe it's an intrinsic flaw in the world of ballet or maybe both. All I know is I've got an essay to write, shows to do and a sore body to tend.