Black Swan

Northern Ballet’s Cleopatra has just premiered in Leeds, Black Swan is still making it well-nigh impossible to park anywhere near Harrogate cinema of a Wednesday evening and I have loved dance ever since mastering ‘good toes naughty toes’, aged three.

With this in mind, here’s yet another collage featuring some of the awesome Northern Ballet dancers and a self portrait by Sylvie Guillem. There’s also a wee nod to Alexander McQueen in there.

I interviewed Northern Ballet’s artistic director David Nixon OBE for IdeasTap and The Leeds Guide recently and, of course, couldn’t leave without at least one trite question as to whether he had seen Black Swan. This could have gone one of two ways. He says ‘yes’ and we have a sheepish moment in which we both remember that scene where Vincent Cassel sends Natalie Portman home to flick herself off in front of her mum in order to ‘really get into character’, or whatever, and I then bumble out a question as to how real to life it is, thus likening every one of his dancers to a paranoid schizophrenic. Or he says ‘no’. Probably just as well it was the latter, really.

The background comes from an ad in Harper’s Bazaar for high-end jewellery brand Annoushka, the director of which I’ve also interviewed, thus affording me another chance for brazen self-promotion with a link.

The English National Ballet dancer in the top left hand corner is from a gorgeous fashion shoot in Stylist – oops! I did it again.