Having worked for more than 30 years as a dancer, choreographer and teacher —
she briefly taught Darcey Bussell — van Schoor thinks that many conceptions
about the life of a dancer are outdated. Foot injuries are still common at
White Lodge, and immature limbs remain at risk of the dreaded Osgood
Schlatters, a problem that disrupts the correct alignment of developing
muscles and growth plates. “But there have been great advances in dance
medicine,” van Schoor says, pointing out that White Lodge places great
stress on what it calls preventative physiotherapy. It employs an on-site
physio who leads the children through special exercises ahead of their dance
classes.
Van Schoor is particularly insistent that dancers no longer hit a brick wall
at 35, when most bodies start to fail. Ballet now opens the door to all
sorts of other careers, from the keep-fit industry to sports teaching. One
of White Lodge’s most famous old girls, the paralympic rower Helene
Raynsford — who suffered a catastrophic brain injury at 21 — won a gold
medal at Beijing last summer. “Everybody knows that ballet is hugely
physically exacting,” says van Schoor, “but it’s also a fantastic discipline
for the mind. It all depends on your drive and tenacity.”
These are qualities which, sadly, can’t always be taught, as 13-year-old
Tristan has discovered. He was “assessed out” at Easter and will leave White
Lodge at the end of the summer term. The son of an Afro-Caribbean single
mother from Earl’s Court, Tristan is an outwardly calm and articulate boy
who maintains that it was his decision to go.
“I find two hours of ballet a day, going over the same routines, just
agonising,” he says, agreeing that one hour “would maybe have been okay”.
After two years hot-housing at White Lodge, Tristan has gone off ballet
altogether, and he claims that this view is silently shared by half of his
year. “I wouldn’t mind dancing again, but definitely not classical,” he
says, adding that he plans to take up street dancing when his next school
has been sorted out.
According to the head teacher, Pippa Hogg, Tristan is the only child in his
year to have been “assessed out”. She is quick to say some of White Lodge’s
most promising pupils are, like Tristan, inner-city black kids from
underprivileged backgrounds. Three of the best dancers in the final year
here are Brixton boys, all set to move to the Royal Ballet’s upper school in
September. One, Isaac, is White Lodge’s head boy.
Despite Tristan’s comment about widespread discontent, discipline problems are
nonexistent in the lessons I attend, whether ballet or academic. The average
class size here is 12, which guarantees rapt attention; and the unprompted
speed with which children shuttle between dance studios and classrooms,
changing and showering as they go, suggests that morale here is high.
Forewarned about the presence of visitors — me and a photographer — several
of the younger girls have left handwritten welcome notes next to the fluffy
toys on their beds in the dorms. One says simply: “I do hope you enjoy it
here, it’s an amazing place.”
But White Lodge does have its downsides. Classical ballet can be brutally
unfair. Some pupils get “assessed out” for no other reason than that their
growing bodies have developed an un-balletic shape — a big bottom, say, or
thighs the size of tree trunks. Max, a 14-year-old day boy who’s grown 4in
over the past academic year, has been asked to leave because he hasn’t got
the hang of his taller self yet. His dancing has lost its co-ordination.
You suspect that ballet’s ruthless preoccupation with body image might foster
eating disorders, or worse, in the girls. But the school’s genial nurse,
Frances Rees, firmly denies it. “Everybody knows their bodies are tools and
they look after them.” In her 19 years here she’s only had to deal with a
handful of cases of anorexia and bulimia, “and we haven’t had any for six
years now”. There has never been a case of self-harming during her tenure,
and Rees is sure if anybody did try it, she would soon hear about it. “The
children really look out for each other.”
The big bête noire of White Lodge is the issue Tom and Grace flagged up at
breakfast: homesickness. Almost everybody I speak to mentions it without me
bringing it up. The head acknowledges that the school’s class-blind
admissions policy means “most of the families who send their children here
are total strangers to the culture of boarding schools”. One of the ballet
teachers, Hope Keelan, talks of often conducting classes at the beginning of
the school year, or after holidays, to the sound of teenage sobbing. It’s
the boys, Keelan says, who miss home most. “The girls here seem to be better
at controlling or concealing their feelings.”
I understand what she means when I meet Fay, a tiny, whey-faced 14-year-old
with a broad Scouse accent, whose assessments rank her as one of the top
dancers in her year. Fay misses home. “Me mam and daaa” crop up in almost
every sentence. But Fay doesn’t do sadness. Instead she describes nights
spent standing at the dormitory window, waiting for dawn to break over
Richmond Park. “Because I can’t sleep, see.”
Kevin, by contrast, has no use for such code. A lanky 15-year-old American,
whose family moved to Virginia Water in the Surrey stockbroker belt when he
was three, he still hasn’t got over the pain of living away from home for
eight months of the year. He talks dramatically and at length about his
“breakdowns”, while paradoxically outlining his future plans to leave home
asap and dance in ballet companies all over the world.
I’m sure he will. Seeing Kevin rehearse for the Opera House show with the rest
of the seniors is a revelation. No matter how sternly van Schoor orders
these big kids about (“In year 11, I expect to see the legs up there,
please, changez-vous!”) their energy and precision are breathtaking and I
feel a spontaneous urge to applaud.
But that’s not the White Lodge way. This being one of the only schools in the
country where the red pencil still rules and praise is not recognised as a
motivational tool, there are no accolades at the end of the last rehearsal.
As the clock nears 7 and the sun stares through the studio windows, van
Schoor sends everybody off with a brisk “There’s hope for you guys yet!” By
now, though, most of them look as if all they’re really hoping for is a good
night’s sleep.
