Opportunities not just for Dancers

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When I visited Amsterdam in February I toured the studios and workshops of the Dutch National Ballet. The tour included the wardrobe department and I saw many of the costumes for Mata Hari shown in the film above (see Double Dutch Delights 17 Feb 2016). Later in the day I attended Ballet Bubbles at the Meervaart Theatre which opened with a speech by Ernst Meisner in which he said that the Junior Company provided opportunities not just to outstanding young dancers but to technicians and support staff.

My ears pricked up because one of the members of my ballet class at Huddersfield University is a young fine arts and design student with a passion for ballet who happens to be half Dutch. She has already been accepted for a summer placement with the Royal Opera House and hopes to make her career in the theatre. On my return to Yorkshire I told her about Ernst's speech and my tour of the Stopera and she asked me to find out more about the programme for her.

Yesterday the company's press officer Richard Heideman sent me the requested information.  The company recruits its costume designers from the Stichting  Meesteropleiding Coupeur (Master Tailoring Institute) in Amsterdam. The Institute runs a three year training course in partnership with the Dutch National Ballet, the National Opera and other companies much in the way that the Junior Company provides a bridge between ballet school and the senior company.

Anyone who is interested in the programme should contact the institute at:

Stichting Meesteropleiding Coupeur

Jan Maijenstraat 11-15
1056 SE AMSTERDAM
T 020 820 1153
E info@meesteropleidingcoupeur.nl

www.meesteropleidingcoupeur.nl

Yesterday I wrote about the crowd funding intuitive for the young American dancer Melsissa Chapski and the Italian Giovanni Princic (see Crowdfunding for the Ballet 25 May 2016). The donations page is in Dutch which Nadja van Deursen who is in charge of fund raising for the National Ballet thought might be a problem for us Brits who are notorious monoglots. Actually I don't think it is because Dutch is the nearest relation to English and I can understand most of what is written or said to me in the Netherlands including Ernst's speech though that may be because I studied German which even more closely related to Dutch at secondary school. Be that as it may she has suggested that those of us who are not Dutch can donate to Melissa and Giovanni's scholarship fund through this page and I have just done so.