Photos: Michael Groenewald
CLAIRE SPECTOR
Cape Town is a world-class city, and yet one of its greatest assets, Cape Town City Ballet, (formerly CAPAB), is in serious financial difficulties and needs your help to survive.
Cape Town is the home of top local and international executives, celebrities and a sophisticated population who appreciate the finer things in life. It is also a destination of choice for international travellers. But to be truly on a par with cities such as Sydney or Vancouver, Cape Town needs a resident ballet company to provide one of the essential cultural elements that all other world class cities have. A city without dance is a city without soul. Today, the priceless art form of classical ballet is being kept alive by a small group of generous donors and a very loyal audience, but the loss of some key subsidies is making this harder and harder to sustain. The city cannot afford to lose this vital element of its cultural scene, one of the cornerstones of artistic life in Cape Town.
Why support CTCB?
Why would you want to support CTCB? Maybe you prefer rugby, soccer, swimming or golf – but they will survive, CTCB won’t and once those hard-won skills, jobs, institutional memory and carefully preserved repertoire, costumes and sets are gone, they are gone forever, never to be replaced. The company both creates and contributes to many jobs: dancers of course, but also musicians, theatre and studio staff, admin staff, costume and set makers and designers, fabric shops, orchestra jobs, as well as jobs in teaching ballet.
If there is no ballet company, there will eventually be no ballet studios to teach children. Which means that your sons or daughters, and those of your current and future CEOs and top-rank employees, would not have the chance to learn this art form which, apart from fitness, coordination, discipline and social skills, teaches grace, an appreciation of music, and provides innumerable benefits for their academic careers (sequential learning, spatial skills, problem solving, mental flexibility).
What parent would want to live in a city, beautiful though it is, which would so limit their children’s choice of activities or even career and deprive them of what many people consider to be a crucial part of a good education? No dreams of the Sugar Plum Fairy or the Nutcracker Prince for them. Would you be able to recruit top-level staff who have their pick of jobs all over the world if their spouses and children would be deprived of this activity?
Claire’s Story
My name is Claire Spector. I am a dancer with CTCB and I am writing this letter because CTCB really needs and, more importantly, in my opinion, deserves help.
My mother tells me I saw the ballet Romeo and Juliet on TV at the age of 18 months and sat glued to the screen: my fate was sealed. From then on, all I wanted to do was dance, so after a year of nagging by me, she finally found a teacher who would accept me – nappies and all. Over the next 15 years, I trained with many teachers, did countless exams, courses, extra lessons and cross training before joining the South African Ballet Theatre in Johannesburg. And that was only the end of the beginning.
I eventually left SABT for the more varied repertoire of CTCB and found my home here in Cape Town. An opportunity unexpectedly arose some years ago which allowed me to go and live and train in Germany, which meant I could directly compare CTCB to many different European companies. I realised that what we have here at CTCB is something quite unique and precious and I very much wanted to be part of this company whose driving force is to make a real contribution to society, on many different levels. The commitment, integrity, humility and selflessness that I had not even noticed in CTCB suddenly came into focus when I was away from it.
Where else in the world would you find a ballet company that concerns itself so closely with the lives of underprivileged children, with keeping them off the streets, out of crime and off drugs? Where else would you find a ballet company that puts on productions almost non-stop from August to April, with every member on stage for every performance, performing at malls, in tiny theatres and big, open-air venues, as well as the Red Cross Children’s Hospital? What other ballet company performs, on a shoe-string, the great classics, in costumes older than most of the dancers’ parents, and at the same time puts on the most avant-garde modern ballets, as well as every style in between? Where else would you have the challenges, excitement, opportunities and variety of this company and, to top it all, feel that you are making a difference in your community?
High standard on a tight budget
As you can see, CTCB, itself a Section 21 non-profit organisation, plays its part in the upliftment of the community. It puts on live shows of a consistently high standard, on a tiny budget. It provides employment for many people, and brings joy to many more. I do not think that this company should be allowed to die, because if it does, Cape Town will lose something of great beauty but, more importantly, a very real force for good.
CTCB is currently enjoying great success with a full house of standing ovations with its magnificent staging of the ballet Mozart & Salieri (based on the play Amadeus) with gracious and generous funding by Pieter Toerien. This demonstrates that the Company is capable of putting on world-class productions (ranging from classical and neo-classical to jazz and contemporary) if they have adequate funding. Some years ago John Neumeier, considered by many to be the greatest living choreographer, put on a season of his memorable ballets, even going so far as to gift the Company with the rights, and had high praise for the quality and attitude of the dancers. It is a heart-breaking to see the number of talented South African dancers who leave the country every year for employment all over the world when they should be entertaining audiences here. Cape Town City Ballet is a great asset to the city but to be able to put on another production of this standard, it needs the support, in terms of ticket sales, publicity and funding, of business and private individuals.
Contact: If you would like to help in any way, become a member of the Friends or just stay in touch, please contact Suzette Raymond, the Chairperson, at friends@capetowncityballet.org.za or me at c.spector17@gmail.com
Visit: Cape Town City Ballet
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