Link of the Week - 1990 Royal Ballet School Documentary: “A Place to Dance”

Photo © Internet Archive WayBack Machine

This documentary about the Royal Ballet School is a terrific piece of London ballet nostalgia and a spot the young dancer/choreographer game… and where they have got to all these years on.

Filmed 34 years ago, A Place to Dance shows the Lower School at White Lodge and the Upper School at Barons Court (in Hammersmith), which is also where The Royal Ballet was based at the time. It features lots of little quotes from both the students and staff. Merle Park was in charge of the school at that time.

Here are some of the students you might recognise: Christopher Wheeldon, Christopher Hampson, Laura Morera, David Dawson, Monica Zamora, Robert Parker and many more.

For many years the video was on YouTube, if oddly in 2 parts: one 27 minutes long (the link given here) and a separate one for the final few minutes. Sadly, both videos seem to have been taken down, but the 27-minute video has been preserved on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20140118174855/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECaAxDhJguU&gl=US&hl=en or https://web.archive.org/web/20150810114731/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECaAxDhJguU

If anybody is aware of a full version of the documentary on the linkable web, or just the final few minutes version, do contact me, and I will link to it from this page. Thank you.

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