Viviana Durante, Artistic Director of English National Ballet School: “Follow Your Dream and See Where It Takes You!”
Viviana Durante. Photo provided by English National Ballet School.
Even talking on Zoom from her office at English National Ballet School, Viviana Durante exudes that special something that made her one of the most celebrated dancers of her generation. Born in Rome, she trained at the Royal Ballet School from age eleven and joined the Royal Ballet aged seventeen. Promoted to Principal Dancer at twenty-one, she danced all the major roles before embarking on an international career guesting with major companies all over the world. She was also a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, La Scala Milan and Japan’s K-Ballet. Since 2020, she has been the artistic director of English National Ballet School (ENBS). TWoA talked to Viviana about leaving home at age eleven to train in a foreign country, her vision for dance education, the importance of giving meaning to every step, and much more.
From Rome to London
Viviana Durante started ballet like many little girls: she was around seven and her best friend in Rome was doing ballet. Viviana thought it looked nice and asked her mom to allow her to give it a try. She had never seen a ballet before, but, like many little girls, she used to dance around the house, and loved music and putting on little shows. Her mom took her to a wonderful German lady, who gave ballet lessons in a garage which she had converted into a little studio. After a year, her teacher suggested to her parents to take Viviana to audition for the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. She got a place and joined the school.
Two years later, fate met her in the shape of Galina Samsova and André Prokovsky, who were staging their production of The Sleeping Beauty for Rome Ballet: “In their production, they wanted little girls to take the part in the third act scene with the cats – instead of the pas de deux they had three little girls. They also had little knitting girls in the prologue. They came to see us in the school to cast it, and they cast me for both roles.” Before long, Samsova and Prokovsky suggested to her parents to take Viviana to audition for the Royal Ballet School in London.
She was only ten years old: “Off we went to London, my mom and dad, my brother and me. We couldn’t afford to fly, so we took the train. The season had already started at the Royal, so it must have been after September when we arrived. Barbara Fewster was director of the school at White Lodge (the Royal Ballet School’s Lower School), and my mom and I went in to meet her. We didn’t understand a word, but Galina came with us and spoke a little Italian. I wasn’t asked to do a class, which was just as well because no one had told me to bring my ballet things with me. Barbara trusted Galina’s judgment and before I knew it she told me I was in! We asked to think about it because we didn’t really know what it all meant.”
Big Decisions
It was a big step for Viviana’s family. Her brother was two years older than her, her family was very close-knit, and none of them spoke English. Viviana was of course too young to decide herself: “I can’t say it was my decision, I don’t think anyone is able to take a such decision at ten and a half. In the end it was my parents’ decision to allow me to take this step and see what it would lead towards. All I said to them was: ‘I love dancing.’ Of course, they knew that I was utterly passionate about it, I was devoted to it a hundred percent and I worked really hard as well, practising nonstop. That is the drop of advice I have when I talk to my students: you need to have that passion, that internal drive to do this, because the career is really hard.”
Follow Your Dream
It must have been a very hard decision for her parents to take. How do you know as a parent whether it’s the right moment to let your child go to study away from home? “As a mother myself, I think you never do know. I have spoken to my parents about it. It was also a shift in the energy within the family for us: I was very close to my brother, we were a very close family, we still are. It was just very strange for them suddenly to have me not there – I’m the youngest – and for me to be away from them in a different country where I didn’t speak the language. The decision was massive. None of us were ready for it. I don’t think you are ever ready for it. In the end it came down to this: I had a dream and my parents supported me to achieve that dream. There were times where we all thought: this is crazy, we just want to be together, this is insane. But then that feeling came back: ‘Darling, if that’s what you really want to do, that’s the best place to be!’ For me, when I was in a rehearsal, when I was in a studio, I did have that drive. That’s where I wanted to be. It was just outside the ballet classes that I felt that I needed to go home.”
Is there any advice she would give to young students and their parents contemplating to take this big step? Viviana’s response is matter of fact: “I don’t have a simple answer. Everyone is different. I can only say from my own experience, I believe in following your dream and seeing where it takes you. For us, it was great in the end, but it doesn’t mean to say that the whole family didn’t suffer, because you do, especially if you are a close family.”
Homesickness and Family Support
Moving away from home to train might mean accepting homesickness as a part of your daily emotional landscape. But this shouldn’t necessarily prevent you from taking the big step, especially if your family relationships are close enough to flourish despite a geographic separation. Viviana states that she felt homesick most of the time she wasn’t in a ballet studio, but she clearly looks back to her time at the Royal Ballet School as a happy time: “It was exciting: it was what I wanted to do. I wanted to dance, even though I was very homesick, probably most of the time outside the ballet studio I was homesick. But apart from that it was lovely, and I was fine.” When TWoA asked her how long it took her to overcome her homesickness, she conceded: “Well, I didn’t. I’m still homesick now. The distance didn’t make us grow apart, it fortified what we already had: wonderful relationships in my family, the love that brings us together, it just became deeper. You need to have a very supportive, grounded family. Even though I was away, I felt as if my parents and my family were still with me. For me, that was important to cope with the distance and to sustain what I was doing. Without that I don’t think I could have done it.”
Transitioning to Company Life
Viviana joined the Royal Ballet when she was seventeen. She found the experience challenging: “I survived purely because of resilience and hard work, because it is quite a change. Especially from White Lodge, a boarding school in the middle of a park. Suddenly, there are a lot of people. Mentally, it is also so different to being at school. The biggest shock was that you need to look after yourself. You go in there, you need to read the timetable properly so you know what time your class is, you mustn’t miss rehearsal, you need to be very proactive and have the drive to understand where you are and what you need to do. You have to organise yourself; no one is going to organise you. If you miss a rehearsal, you get into trouble, and you can’t just say: ‘I didn’t look at the board.’ It’s about becoming an adult and a professional dancer. There’s also competition because of the casting, and it happens all the time: as you are doing class, somebody will come in and you always have to be at your best.”
Career Development Support at ENBS
Viviana had the resilience and drive to handle the transition all by herself. But as artistic director of English National Ballet School, she puts a lot of emphasis on preparing her students for the transition from student to professional. The school works with Dancers Career Development to provide research-based programmes led by prominent dancers and experts, and school staff such as the Head of Wellbeing provide group and individual counselling on career development and other common concerns such as fears surrounding performance and competition. Students get to taste company life through performance opportunities with English National Ballet, both in their main-stage productions and in an annual ENB production which is performed entirely by the school’s students. All students get many opportunities to work with leading choreographers from different genres and to perform their work alongside the classics in school performances at leading London theatres. A steady flow of guest teachers helps the students acquire the versatility required of dancers today. The school now also offers a Professional Trainee Programme for students who have graduated from a vocational school. In addition to providing further training and performance opportunities, including a showcase of new work at Sadler’s Wells, the programme prepares the students for auditions and offers support in preparing filmed audition material.
English National Ballet School. @ASH
Different Paths to Success
Viviana fosters a very realistic, positive and open approach to career development at English National Ballet School. Many company-affiliated schools inevitably foster a type of tunnel vision in their students: success is defined as a job offer by the company upon graduation. But only a few jobs come on the market every year. Viviana therefore encourages her students to explore wider options and to become open to forging their own, unique path in the dance world: “Not everybody is going to get into the company of their dreams. There are different routes to success, and sometimes on your way, you change direction. There is nothing wrong with that. I think it’s important to encourage wider thinking and I put a lot of emphasis on that.”
Collaboration: Understanding Each Other’s Needs
Viviana believes that encouraging collaborations across artistic genres is one way of educating thinking, curious, versatile dancers who will flourish in today’s dance world. Every year, students work on a choreography project in collaboration with the Wallace Collection, the Royal College of Music, and the London School of Fashion: “We are very strong on collaborations because they broaden your sense of possibility. I love this programme because it gives our students the chance to work with students from different but complementary fields and come together under the broader umbrella of the arts.” A curator from the Wallace Collection focuses the students on a specific part of the museum’s art collection to inspire their choreography. The students then collaborate with students from the Royal College of Music, who compose music for the performance. Students from the London School of Fashion make the costumes for the production. The students work on the production throughout the year: “The process of collaboration is what’s important – to have students experience what it is like to collaborate with students of their age group from other art forms. I always say to my students: the journey towards something is much more illuminating than the finale, which of course is always important. But it is the journey that teaches you and changes you and adds to you, as an artist. Then of course you have the wonderful reward at the end, when we perform in these incredible spaces and animate the entire museum.”
The collaboration is equally inspiring for all students involved: “The London School of Fashion students have been fantastic, but until they start, they have no idea what it’s like to design for a dancer who is moving around, because they’ve never done it before. For them, it’s a learning process as well which adds to their experience, and hopefully one day, some of them might end up designing a ballet. For the musicians, the experience is really interesting because the way we see and feel musical phrases in ballet, the way we interpret the music, can give a different perspective to what they’re used to. Collaborating is about understanding each other’s needs. It’s challenging, my students don’t always find it easy, but they love it.”
Dancers from English National Ballet School at the Wallace Collection. Photo by Aysa Verzhbinsky.
Establishing a Lower School
English National Ballet School is one of Britain’s leading professional ballet schools, but up to now, it provides only the last three years of ballet training for students above sixteen (four including the Trainee Programme). This creates practical limits to fostering a uniform, recognizable style: “That is a problem, coming here just for three years. We don’t have a magic wand. I can tell you what’s important for me: musicality, coordination, lyricism, understanding that you are not just delivering the steps but that there is a story, that there is technique but also something more than technique. We are doing well if we can make dancers add that to their dancing.” Part of the problem is that the school has no lower school: “If we had a lower school, I could talk more about style, it could be more recognizable. It would be easier to shape dancers beginning with that age group. But from sixteen, it can be difficult. Sometimes students come to us with habits, such as the way they hold their arms or another technical habit that take us a long time to correct.”
But Viviana is planning on building a lower school. Starting this September, the school is planning on gradually expanding its Associate Programme into a lower school: “I’m starting it as a Saturday class, and I’ll be adding Sundays. I’ve also added a lot more courses. We are doing classical, we are doing contemporary in collaboration with Rambert, we are doing character classes. We start at eleven. I want the students to start to understand what it’s like to interpret a role, not just to think of the steps, but to understand the meaning and how that can be transformed into something more.” The new course has already been hugely oversubscribed. This should make it easier to train dancers in a certain way: “I’m very keen on a different system of training focussing on specific aspects: on lyricism, on interpretation of the movement not just the movement itself. We focus on these criteria in the senior school, but I would like to have a feeder school into the senior school which would then hopefully feed into the company. It’s a format that works for many schools and companies: the Royal Ballet, Elmhurst, and many others. We are starting step by step, listening and adjusting as we go along, and I will keep adding more days and programmes until we have a full lower school. I think it is needed: we have a great tradition to honour and develop for the future, and we’re right in the middle of London.”
Tell a Story with Every Step
Viviana was one of the great dramatic ballerinas of her generation. For her, ballet technique is a tool for telling a story: “I’ve always been interested in telling a story as an artist on the stage. I love theatre. I’m inspired by reading and theatre and of course the history of ballet itself. It has always helped my classical ballet technique to think about it with an interpreter’s element to it, so it’s not just about steps. It actually helps your technique. The music helps, really listening to the music and having the music lead you, but also interpreting even the simplest of steps. I think it’s something that just gives a different quality, a different look. It’s more engaging for an audience. I think it’s important for the students to understand this, especially nowadays that we have social media and all of that, and it’s all about who can make the most pirouettes. Of course, pirouettes are important. But to make the versatile classical dancer of today also not lose that interpretative side is very, very important for me. Otherwise, we are going to lose ourselves completely, and we are only going to make pretty steps all over the place.”
For Viviana, it’s about inspiring the students, not laying down rules: “As artistic director, I work by inspiring my students and giving them a voice to express themselves. And by doing that, you are leading them into finding their own interpretations. I always say to them: If I’m taking you for an audition or an assessment class, I really want to see you in your dancing. I want to see your personality, yourself as an individual, come through, because that’s what is going to make you a wonderful dancer.”
Audition Advice
What does Viviana look for when she auditions students for the school? “I look for students who are very alert in the studio, able to pick up exercises, which means they are engaged in what they are doing. I look for beautiful lines, a simplicity in what they do, an understanding of the progression of the class. And I look for individuality. It’s important to me that their personality engages me while I watch a class, so that I suddenly go: ‘Who’s that? Let me look at them!’ Classical dancers need to make beautiful lines, be musical, be coordinated, be transported by what they do: it’s all linked together and connects in their ability to interpret a role.”
International Recruitment and Competitions
Up to 70 percent of the students at ENBS are international, the rest are British. The school’s artistic staff go to Australia, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong, and several other countries to audition prospective students and to select students to attend the final audition in London. Viviana also goes to international competitions to recruit students: “I go to the Prix de Lausanne (where I was Vice-President of the Jury last year), to the Youth America Grand Prix and other competitions. It’s great that students from all over the world can come together and get to know each other. It’s wonderful for us as well, because as well as seeing a lot of talent, all the directors of leading schools and companies from around the world talk and exchange ideas, and sometimes important initiatives come out of it. Sometimes we can feel that we’re on our own, in our school on one side of the globe, but there’s a large community out there, and there are lots of things we can learn from each other and work on together to improve dance education globally.” Viviana also launched World Ballet School Day in collaboration with several other leading international schools as another way for ballet schools and students to join in discussing issues and showcasing their work.
Favourite Roles
Viviana talks a lot about inspiration, and about the importance of the interpretative side of dance. She now inspires young dancers as director of her school, but recordings of her expressive dancing surely also continue to be an inspiration for many. TWoA asked Viviana whether she had a favourite role: “That’s quite difficult. I guess it’s probably Manon. Manon because I love Kenneth MacMillan, who I worked with closely. But also Sleeping Beauty. It’s every little girl’s dream, isn’t it? But it goes beyond that. You can interpret it in a more modern way, with the same steps. The story is one thing, but it’s how you interpret it so that it becomes meaningful to new generations. Even when I danced Sleeping Beauty in different countries, it was received very differently. The audience’s reaction would make me think again about the role and how I performed it. Even a great classic is always alive.”
How did her interpretation of Manon evolve over the years? “With a part like that, your interpretation of the role grows as you change, as you move forward in life. You tell the same story, but it comes from a different place. Kenneth MacMillan’s work is very rewarding for a dancer because there is a lot of flexibility in how you interpret the role, and your relationships with the other characters. You grow within the role, and it changes with you. And on the stage, you always find yourself putting forward another Manon.”
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