High up, backstage in the gloriously restored Hungarian State Opera in Budapest, a rehearsal is taking place. In a room that was once a workshop for the scene painters, students of the Hungarian National Ballet Institute are hard at work in a large dance studio, busily preparing for their upcoming performance of Little Sleeping Beauty. It is a production devised specifically for the children to perform and is based on Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet, The Sleeping Beauty.
Young performers aged five years and older, both girls and boys, line the sides of the light and airy studio to watch as 18-year-old Cecília Porkoláb practises her solo as the Lilac Fairy. Looking on are their teachers, led by artistic director Dace Radina, who advise the students on placement, positioning and technical improvements as the rehearsals progress. Their words to the children centre around details of refinement and presentation during these final moments of preparation. As Porkoláb ends her solo – to applause from her colleagues – a group of smaller children enter the space to dance, and it isn’t long before Léna Petrovics takes centre-stage for her dramatic portrayal of the wicked fairy, Carabosse.
Whilst some of the choreography has been simplified for the youngest of the pupils, anyone who knows The Sleeping Beauty well will instantly recognise the familiar dances that are being performed. For some of the older students, however, the steps remain the same as for any adult dancer cast in a professional performance – which certainly adds to the challenge.
The atmosphere in the room is one of discipline and quiet concentration, as well as a hint of excitement about the performance to come the following day, which will take place at the Hungarian State Opera’s impressive Eiffel Art Studios, just a short distance by tram or bus from central Budapest.
The Eiffel Art Studios are situated in a former railway depot that has recently been transformed by the State Opera into a vast performance, rehearsal, workshop and storage space. The company’s wardrobe staff, carpenters, scene painters and technicians are all now based in the building, and singers and dancers are able to rehearse and perform there. In the foyer of the Studios’ theatre is an original full-scale steam engine, complete with train carriage that was once used on the Orient Express, and which now serves as a bar for the audience. As well as a stunning focal point, it is a perfect reminder of what the building was once used for.
The Hungarian National Ballet Institute, launched in September 2016, is a “new kid on the block” as far as international ballet schools are concerned. It was originally the idea of the Hungarian National Ballet’s director, Tamás Solymosi. Chatting with him over lunch, he told me one of the reasons he wanted to set the Institute up was not only to give the young dancers a firm foundation in dance training, but also to give them a greater opportunity to perform on stage as soon and as often as possible.
Children enrolled at the Institute not only appear in the School’s own productions, such as Little Sleeping Beauty, but they take part in performances by the Hungarian National Ballet as well, including The Nutcracker and Manon. Solymosi sees all of this as part of their education and development as performing artists (two of his own children are enrolled at the Institute), and the students are able to make use of the excellent facilities at the Opera House and the Eiffel Art Studios, which must surely be a highly attractive prospect for any aspiring dancer.
During the first intake seven years ago, the Institute took on 76 children; by 2022, that number had increased to 140. Acceptance onto the course is by audition. At first, the majority of pupils came from Budapest and its surrounding area, but the Institute now finds that students from further afield in Hungary are also applying to attend, as well as youngsters from abroad. It’s a remarkable achievement for a School that is so young.
In addition to regular academic schooling, pupils who attend the Hungarian National Ballet Institute not only study ballet (taught to them by teachers trained in the Vaganova Method), but tap, modern, character and folk dancing too. In addition, they are also offered studies in gymnastics, Pilates and dance history. They therefore receive a very thorough grounding in dance education, and whilst watching the students rehearse and perform, one can easily discern that they are being trained to an extremely high standard.
To help support the Institute financially, as well as to promote it to the wider public, the Foundation for Hungarian Opera Ballet Students was formed in 2019. Founded by the former Hungarian ballerina, Mária Aradi, who danced with the National Ballet and at the Bolshoi before defecting to the West and joining Dutch National Ballet in 1972, the chairman of trustees is Annamária Steiner-Isky, who kindly spent much of her time showing me around Budapest during my stay.
At last, their big day dawned, and the young dancers were all to be found that morning over at the Eiffel Art Studios well in advance of their performance, which commenced at 11am. Not only has Little Sleeping Beauty been devised to be performed by a large ensemble of children, it has been made to be watched by children and their families as an introduction to the world of ballet. There were many proud siblings and parents in the audience that day, and I thought the production achieved its aims remarkably well.
The presentation includes a narrator, Bori Keszei, elegantly dressed in pink, who tells the audience the story of the ballet and gives a little of its background history (I don’t speak Hungarian, but clearly heard her mention “Tchaikovsky”, “Marius Petipa” and “Maryinsky”). She then sits to one side of the stage as the dancing commences. The production, directed by Radina and her team of teachers and coaches, follows along the lines of the famous staging of Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty mounted in Leningrad by Konstantin Sergeyev for the Kirov Ballet in the 1950s.
It is a remarkably tough technical challenge for children to perform, especially the older ones, but it was marvellous to see how they all tackled the choreography so fearlessly and so successfully, and with such a clear understanding of the classical style required of them. I was equally impressed by how these young performers seemed completely unfazed when having to perform complicated sequences of steps, often on pointe – they just went for it and were nearly always successful.
Although the ballet has been shortened in length, Little Sleeping Beauty still offers the students plenty of opportunities to dance. There were no fewer than six fairy solos in the Prologue, all of them taken strongly, and six fairy tale divertissements in the final act, which is more than is offered nowadays by some professional companies.
At the matinée on 27 May, it was the turn of 16-year-old Oliva Bobvos to dance the role of the young Princess Aurora in the first act. Tiny, blonde, technically accomplished and a winner of a number of competitions, she performed Aurora’s two solos with remarkable assurance for one so young, the multiple pirouettes easily taken, and her light jumps bounding across the stage – she was like a miniature incarnation of the Kirov ballerina Alla Sizova, even down to the way she held her head and body. It was wise of the school, however, to secure the participation of an experienced professional dancer, Elena Sharipova, to portray the older Aurora later in the ballet. Sharipova danced the Grand Pas de Deux in the Wedding scene, strongly partnered by fellow professional Viacheslav Hnedchyk.
The production also included other dance styles. Whilst Carabosse does not mime very much here, she has been given striking contemporary dance movements to suggest her evil character, which were performed with relish by Petrovics. A delightful surprise was the transformation of the Hop O’ My Thumb number in the last act into a tap dance, led by teacher Dénes Kovács.
Elsewhere, there was lots of lovely dancing to admire, including Porkoláb as a very strong Lilac Fairy; the exceptionally talented Lilla Emese Varga, who appeared as the Third Fairy in the Prologue and the Diamond Fairy in the last act; the Ukrainian-born Viacheslav Hosachynskyi as the Blue Bird, who managed to escape to safety in Hungary from Kyiv along with his mother, former ballerina Nataliia Yakushkina, last year; Julianna Éva Pollák, who has taken part in Youth America Grand Prix, as Princess Florine; and Adél Pálfi and Bertalan Máté Vincze as Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, both tiny, who had me chuckling all the way through their dance.
As if to underline Solymosi’s wish to get these young dancers on stage as much as possible, many of the students were seen again that evening at the Opera House dancing the children’s Polonaise and Mazurka from Petipa’s Paquita during the Iván Nagy International Ballet Gala; what an exciting day it must have been for all of them. It’s heartening to see a success story such as this in today’s sometimes troubled world of ballet, and watching the Hungarian National Ballet Institute fulfil its aspirations filled me with hope for the future of the artform. Next season, Steiner-Isky tells me, the Institute is planning to stage Little Corsaire “to attract more boys”. Let’s hope they do.
This article and Jonathan Gray’s trip was sponsored by the Foundation for Hungarian Opera Ballet Students.
