Cassa Pancho

in conversation with Patricia Linton

Cassa Pancho: I was at the Royal Academy of Dance [RAD] doing a degree there, and for my final year I had to write a dissertation, and everybody in my class and in previous years had been doing “Anorexia in the ballet dancer”, “Pilates and the ballet dancer”, “Nutrition and the ballet dancer” and I just knew I couldn’t spend 10,000 words on any of those subjects because I found them all deeply boring.

My father is Black, he’s from Trinidad in the Caribbean and my mum is white but I look, I think, more Spanish or Italian than anything else – definitely not Black. So, I had been through ballet school from the age of two and half to then, when I must have been 18, seeing very few Black people but hearing lots of very – what I would consider to be – racist comments, but people wouldn’t realise that I was someone who was half Black and would take offence. So, people would really not have their guard up about those kinds of comments.

I got to the third year of my degree at the RAD and I decided to look at Black women in ballet in the UK, and thought, “I’ll just interview five women in companies at the moment and see what they think,” and there weren’t any Black women working in any ballet companies. This must have been 1999 or 2000 and I was so shocked. I don’t really know why, because I was going to ballets all the time and I guess I didn’t really think about it. So, I had to really rethink my whole question and go much further back to looking at Black ballet teachers, why Black parents would send their kids to school, to ballet schools, when all the marketing at the time was very centred on white people. The posters were all white, the teacher was white. Why would you send your child to a class where they’d probably be the only Black child?

So, I had to look at loads of different things. I couldn’t find any women to interview but I managed to interview Ayesha Ash who was, at the time, in New York City Ballet. The only Black woman in the company, she was in the corps de ballet. Sheron Wray, who was a contemporary dancer, but she was British, who told me things like when she was at school she was told she should have her feet broken and re-set so that she would have arches, and her bottom was too big to ever be considered to be a ballet dancer, and this was just across the board. Things I’d already been hearing. I even went to my year tutor and said, “This is what I want to write about.” She tried to put me on to the Pilates, nutrition route because she said, “Well, of course Black women can’t do ballet, their bottoms are too big, and their feet are flat.” [laughs] And she knew that my father was Black, but it was just so acceptable for her to say that. In her mind. Part of it was the culture of that place at that time, and part of it was just that it was OK for people to say, “We don’t want one Black girl in the corps de ballet, it would draw your eye in, and it would look wrong.” I don’t know if people still think that, but I know that people definitely couldn’t say it now.

I think – and the reason that Ballet Black came about – is that sometimes you have to have a bigger push at one end, so the company is six Black dancers so that you come to a show, you’re a young Black child and everyone you see on the stage is Black or Asian. Not 50/50, six whites, six Blacks. Everyone you see is reflective of you in some way and I think that is a way to get more kids into school. My own ballet school is probably 50/50 Black and white kids, and I teach them and some of the company dancers teach them, so they are always seeing someone reflective of them. That has definitely increased our numbers of Black students.

Patricia Linton: What does “Black” mean in the context of Ballet Black?

 Cassa Pancho: Well, there are three parts of Ballet Black. The top part, as I call it, is the company and six dancers. At the moment, one is Indian – British Indian – two are mixed race, white parent, Black parent, and the rest are Black dancers. Partly because of funding, we only have money for six dancers. I have six really good dancers, and they are all Black or Asian.  So, at the moment, yes, it is imperative that you are Black or Asian. My hope has always been either that the company would make itself obsolete or we would just sort of expand with a bit more money and everything, and it would become more mixed like Arthur Mitchell did with Dance Theatre of Harlem. It was Black for a long time and then he opened it up. For me it’s definitely a “role model” thing and it’s “you don’t have to be white to be great at ballet, you just have to be great to be great at ballet”.  That’s all.

Patricia Linton: So, it doesn’t have an influence over your sort of over-arching aesthetic?

Cassa Pancho: No. I think our girls are held up to the same standard as anyone else, turnout, line, and the men too. Feet. You know, all the things that you have to have. Because once you start saying, “OK, everyone in the company, if they can’t quite get up en pointe because they haven’t got arches in their feet, that’s OK because it’s a Black thing,” then I think you’re diluting the whole point of ballet.

Patricia Linton: So, you’re no different from a non-Black ballet?

Cassa Pancho: I don’t think so.

Patricia Linton: Were you aware of another Ballet Black, which was called, in 1946, [Les] Ballet Nègres with Berto Pasuka?

 Cassa Pancho: Yes. Well, part of my dissertation focused on that but he [Pasuka] didn’t have a ballet company, it was a contemporary company, so I got a lot of flack for that too.  “You’re not the first Black ballet company.” Actually, we were because we were doing ballet, and they were doing very contemporary things. He even said, in a book called Black Dance, I think by Edward Thorpe, he didn’t like ballet and the constraints it put on him and the technique and he preferred much more contemporary, modern movement. So, we are very different, but I am very aware of them, yes. I would have to be, otherwise I’d be a bit cheeky starting something without knowing what came first.

Patricia Linton: Shall we go into the mechanics now? Of how you set it up? What backing did you seek and what did you get?

Cassa Pancho: Well, I had no backing. I was very naïve and really, really, stupid, I think, at the time. I just thought I’d put up an audition notice and it was all, “Please come and work for free, we are trying to start a ballet company,” and people did!

We were based at the Royal Academy of Dance, who gave me about six months of free studio space once I had graduated, and Denzil Bailey, whose name will probably keep coming up, had just left English National Ballet [ENB] and was looking to start being a teacher. So, he was our Ballet Master. I just sort of gave him the title, “You’re the Ballet Master.”  We had these six dancers from all different backgrounds and our free studios. I took a job as a receptionist during the day. I was a ballet teacher in the evenings and used my receptionist money to give the dancers travel fares and buy lunch, and things like that. We put on our first ever performance at the Royal Academy of Dance in the Genée Studio, the little seated part. We charged £100 a ticket, and we sold all of our tickets and that was our very first fundraiser.

Somehow, we roped in a band called Cello Man, who play electric cello that Denzil had choreographed to. I choreographed a jazz ballet and got some students from Trinity College of Music to come and play. Daniel Jones from English National Ballet, he had a piece that he had done for an ENB choreographic workshop and he let us use that. I was still dancing at that time, and I was in it. [Laughs] Quality wise, I’m not sure how good it was! 

Patricia Linton: What are you looking for in your dancers and, indeed, has that changed over the years, that you’ve been…

Cassa Pancho: Yes. In the beginning, with no money, you don’t really have a lot of choice so you just take what you can get and the people we had were good. They were.  They weren’t, you know, I suppose what you would call a classical ballet professional, classical ballet standard, at that time, but they had so much spirit and energy, and the audiences just really liked them because with only six you could really see their personalities and get to know them a little bit. Those dancers would be working their own jobs as well because all they were getting from me was £10 a week, or £40 a week when it was really good. So, a lot of them I lost to The Lion King, which came to town about the same time and was paying £400 or £500 a week, which was just incredible riches to me at the time. I couldn’t believe it, that a show could pay that much.

So, I lost a lot of them there, and then I… there was a young American boy over here who was a part of London Studio Centre, and he graduated and agreed to come and work for us and he brought something very different to the table. There is a really big difference, and I hope you won’t be offended as a teacher at The Royal Ballet School, but there is a very big difference between American dancers’ work ethic and British dancers’ work ethic. I didn’t know that until we had this American boy and he was the first one there and he was learning everybody’s parts and geeing everybody up all the time, and I was like, “Wow, this is amazing!”

He wasn’t a brilliant dancer and eventually he left, and he sent us – when he couldn’t return for the next season – a friend of his. So, I hadn’t seen this boy. He said, “Oh, I’m just going to send my friend from America. He’ll pay for his flight. Don’t worry, he’ll come over and work.” He sent us a dancer that we still have now called Damien Johnson who also was very… first one in the studio, last one to leave, would be prepared to work and work and work and work, and I’ve always found that the British dancers would always, at that time, be late, they would wait to be told to do things. They were just not very proactive, I suppose.

But it definitely became clear that American dancers were really keen to come and do this, whereas the British dancers… You know, we’d hold auditions, and no one would come, but we’d hold an audition in America, and 50 or 60 people would come…

Patricia Linton: Would you have more American dancers if you could?

Cassa Pancho: I don’t really care where the dancer comes from as long as they are a fit with Ballet Black, but it has been… the Press and the ballet world here have always seemed to take offence that there are American dancers and my defence is always that I hold the audition and nobody comes, there is nothing I can do.

I always wanted it to be a British thing but soon discovered that wouldn’t be possible straight off the bat because there weren’t enough British dancers out there. The few that were very good were probably already somewhere like The Royal [Ballet] or Birmingham Royal [Ballet] or Northern [Ballet]. And, again, we kept holding these auditions in the UK and no one would show up. Or people would come along wearing trainers and say, “I haven’t done any ballet before, but I’ve seen loads and I’m really quick at picking steps up.”  I was like, “Oh, OK. It’s not really what we’re looking for.”

It took a long time to get people to understand what we meant by “professional ballet standard”, and even now we still get masses of kids turning up of all different colours who can barely stay up en pointe on the barre, and they are very offended when we say you need to do the whole class en pointe. They say, “That’s not fair, I haven’t done pirouettes en pointe before.” “OK, I’m sorry about that but we need someone who is going to be able to do a triple pirouette en pointe,” or whatever. It still happens now at auditions; people come and say they didn’t bring any pointe shoes, and you say, “OK then, well you can leave.” They are very deeply, deeply offended by it. I’m more offended that they’ve come to my audition without pointe shoes.

 Patricia Linton: Is one of your hopes that you might be able to bring people through the school?

Cassa Pancho: Yes, definitely. But that will take loads of time. The youngest kids in our school are three and the eldest are 11. Then we have an associate programme, which is 14 to 50 plus people and we have about 200 members of that, and that’s what happens on a Sunday at the [Royal] Opera House. So, some of them… the younger ones are girls in Vocational School – like Arts Educational, places like that – who are on that cusp that they’re doing pointe work… they are just about to take the next step to full-time ballet school, and some are contemporary dancers. The cast of The Lion King now come to our classes, after swiping all those dancers in the early years. They come in and they just do class because there’s not a lot of ballet out there where you get corrections and feedback from a teacher, and it’s £3, so it’s a big plus. It’s at the Opera House and that’s a huge plus. So, it’s packed with people every week and we hope that will continue.

There’s a little gap between our 11-year-old girls at the school and our 14-year-olds in the associate programme, so we’re hoping to close that gap and, as our three-, four- and five-year-olds get older, add more classes for them. Then, eventually, you go through the school, maybe the associate programme in conjunction with your Vocational School and then join the company.

The transcript of this podcast may have been lightly edited for ease of reading.