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The Canterville Ghost case study |
In 2006 The CHEAR Foundation, Foyle Foundation and Garfield Weston Foundation all made generous contributions to the Company’s family ballet, The Canterville Ghost. The ballet was conceived as part of the Company’s decision to produce more family friendly ballets in order to excite children and build new audiences for the future.
English National Ballet commissioned Will Tuckett, a young British talent with a track record for creating child-friendly ballets and Martin Ward, with whom Tuckett had previously worked, to create the original score alongside, and interacting with, a spoken narrative. The narrator comments on the story and the characters in order to make the production more accessible for a young audience and for those who are new to the ballet.
The additional funding also enabled the Department of Learning to expand their programme of work to incorporate workshops with the orchestra and to work more consistently over a period of time with a small number of schools. This resulted in a series of intensive workshops during which children created their own music and choreography culminating in a sharing day where the school children joined forces to showcase their work in front of an invited audience from their own extended communities and from the wider arts community. The wonderful stimuli offered by this production helped to create some truly spooky and creepy ballet masterpieces!
The success of this project means that the format of these workshops have now formed the template for our ongoing Department of Learning work and The Canterville Ghost will continue to be a key element in the Company's mid-scale tour, visiting theatres which can only accommodate productions of a smaller scale.
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