Hilary (or ‘Lent’) Term can be bleak with its freezing weather and public examinations, so the 7th Annual Varsity Dance Competition on Sunday, at the start of Oxford’s Fifth Week, was a high spot of energy and warmth. This year, Oxford University Contemporary Dance (OUCD) was host to Cambridge University Dance Competition Team (CUDCT) for the event in St John’s College Auditorium, which buzzed with chatter as friends, families and dance fans crammed in. There were tantalising glimpses of competitors, with hair ready dressed and costumes concealed by their team tracksuits, and the audience was bursting with excitement by the time the Presenter, Leah Aspden, took the stage to open the match.
Varsity Dance pits each troupe against the other in seven categories: Tap; Jazz; Solo/Duet/Trio; Contemporary; Street; Ballet, and ‘Wildcard’. The winner must take at least four of them, and both teams were clearly ‘in it to win it’. Supporters cheered them on, whooping at virtuosic feats and applauding wildly after each dance. The judges sat alone and slightly apart from the tumultuously enthusiastic audience in their reserved row of seats, and without knowing which team was which, used clear scoring criteria to award marks for choreography, technique, performance and execution.
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The Varna International Ballet dancers are youthful, energetic and engaging. On Monday, they danced Coppélia, one of the three great nineteenth century ballets that they brought on a three-day touring visit to Oxford (the others being Giselle and The Nutcracker; they are also presenting Swan Lake at some venues). This is a very hard working company and orchestra delivering performances to a terribly demanding schedule: they were in Darlington the previous week, and opened in Ipswich immediately after Oxford, in a tour that takes in 23 theatres in about ten weeks.
Monday evening’s show was an opportunity to see a version of Coppélia with choreography credited to Alexander Gorsky and Gergana Karaivanova that is markedly different from the more familiar English productions. Gone were most of the mime sequences, the traditional national dances and some of the corps de ballet set pieces. Other changes included the introduction of a tricky pointe solo for the dancer playing the doll, and the substitution of a more visibly virtuosic repertoire for the variations in the third act; there were a great many fouetté turns! These choices distanced the ballet from its origins at the end of the French romantic era, and gave it a very different flavour.
I did not feel that the production was true to the style of the original ballet, but it was bright and cheerful, fully costumed (the women in gauzy romantic tutu skirts lit with bright colours), and staged with a projected background, but otherwise a full set. The illustrated programme included an article about the composer Léo Delibes by Philip Ashworth, and brief biographies with photographs of the soloists, who had trained in a range of schools and styles. It is unsurprising, given the rigours of touring, that overall the quality of the dancing was somewhat variable, but there was lovely upper body movement to be seen in some of the corps de ballet dancers’ ports de bras, and the best of the soloists delivered buoyant grand allegro, strong pointe work and dynamic pirouettes.
The company played to a good house and the enthusiastic applause demonstrated that, post-pandemic, there is an audience eager for full-length classical ballets in Oxford.
Maggie Watson
5th February 2023
Oxford Dance Writers 