BALLET: Vienna Festival Ballet in Worthing

VIENNA Festival Ballet celebrates its 30th anniversary with a UK tour which brings dancers to Worthing’s Pavilion Theatre on Friday, October 8, at 7.30pm.

Company founder, the Austrian dancer Peter Mallek is hoping that the strong reputation the ballet has built over the years will stand it in good stead in the tough times ahead.

“Until now, it has been fine,” Peter says.

“But it seems like now is the start of the recession for showbusiness.

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Until now we have been having good houses, but looking at the figures now, they are not so great.

“Usually when the recession starts, people go more into the theatre, but everything is getting more and more expensive.”

But fortunately Vienna Festival Ballet has managed to carve out a clear niche, going to venues the bigger companies can’t manage; and in places such as Worthing, has built up a genuine relationship with the audience over the years.

Shows such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker still attract the audiences, helped by the company’s track record in attracting talented dancers including graduates from the Royal Ballet School, British, Australian and Italian soloists, and guest stars from Vienna and Japan.

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Also with the company is VFB’s leading English ballerina, Melanie Cox, who has just recorded The Dying Swan for a new British film.

“We started up in Germany,” Peter recalls.

“It was a touring company. We did Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France.

We called it Vienna Festival Ballet because I am from Vienna, but it is now a British company.

“The first eight to 10 years we were mainly in Europe, but then in the past 20 years or so, we have started building up English audiences.

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“It just so happens that in the past five or so years there has been more work overhere.

“In Germany, you have got the Russians coming in – companies claiming to be Russian companies.

“You book at heatre and they come in a weekbefore.

“They were trying to kill us off. And these Russians are mostly school performances.

“They are ruining the reputation for everyone.

“People see them and if they are asked if they want to go to the ballet again,they say no.”

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Alexis Malovik will be Vienna Festival Ballet’s best French principal boy yet if pedigree is any hint.

The 33-year-old, 6ft 2in son of Chantal, a ballet teacher with her own school, Alexishasa father, Francis, who while 25 years with the nation’s leading group, Paris Opera Ballet,danced under Rudolf Nureyev’s direction.

Francis, late in his career, was La Bayadère’s Great Brahmin in the great Russian’s renowned production and Alexis names the hero Soler, in the same ballet, as the role he would most crave.

It is the classical leading male roles that grip Alexis.

He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School – the French equivalent of our Royal Ballet.

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After a year in the classics while in English National Ballet’s corps, his spells much later in Marseilles (contemporary) and Béjart Ballet (20th Century including The Rite of Spring and Boléro) satisfied him less.

He has danced the star princes in The Nutcracker and Swan Lake as well as, with Opera de Bordeaux, the doomed Hilarion in Giselle in Palermo, and three great Nijinsky roles with Schéherézade’s Golden Slave in Rome, Petrushkain Tokyo, and Le Spèctrede La Rose (plus Romeo) in the USA.

Now, after visiting friends and trying a Vienna Festival Ballet audition in London last year, he will be Prince Florimund in VFB’s Sleeping Beauty, which opens the ballet’s British autumn tour at the Pavilion Theatre, Worthing, on October 8.

Alexis had the role during his eight years at Bordeaux and said: “You have to look extremely good and dance very cleanly.

“And physically it‘s very hard to dance it every night, as I will be on this tour.”

Tickets are available from the box office on 01903 206206.