BalletLORENT’s new family show The Velveteen Rabbit comes to Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis Studio during the Easter holidays from 5 – 6 April. The Velveteen Rabbit is a beloved picture book by Margery Williams first published in 1922. The Nursery toys have an unseen life, and run amuck. A toy rabbit and a boy share a deep bond forged through adventures in the nursery.
It has been adapted to stage by the balletLORENT team, led by Liv Lorent. “I think that there are times that I forget that the dancers are human and I’m in total belief that they are rabbits and toys,” says Lorent. “I get lost in the story, and it matters to me that the audience get that escapism, too.”
balletLORENT is the North East England’s leading dance theatre company founded by Lorent (MBE) in 1993, and has toured works nationally and internationally to much acclaim. Lorent started choreography when she was 20 in London, happily “choreographing on anyone who would be up for the experience. I had eclectic casts with different ages and backgrounds right from the beginning which served my aesthetic well. It has always been vital to me to create a world and invite people to it.”
Lorent trained at the Laban Centre in London, and describes her choreographic process as “always very layered and responds to story, set, music, light and costumes. Nature is always very important. The pure dance of an excited toddler, or the movement of an animal or flight of a bird. We look to be nuanced, emotionally detailed and fully engaging to adults and children – like the best family films can do. We try and make sure that the choreography makes the story happen, and doesn’t become a distraction to it.”
In 2014, Lorent was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for Services to Dance. Lorent is drawn to stories that empower the outsider. “BalletLORENT has always been a place of belonging for the ‘misfits’, and we have a long history of celebrating individuality,” says Lorent. “Like the Velveteen Rabbit, most of us didn’t find that we belonged with the mechanical toys and needed to find somewhere we could be real in ourselves and discover others who feel the same.”
Being a female artistic director is not common, and Lorent proudly leads a successful dance company in a tough economic time. “I definitely bring my lived experiences into the work,” she notes, “and stories of love, fertility and loss are a part of my life and inevitably this feeds the choreography. BalletLORENT has a maternal feel to it, and many of my colleagues have had caring responsibilities which influences the work we make, how we make it and makes us consider deeply who it’s for. We want to promote the beauty of individuals of whatever age, gender, sexuality, culture and neurodiversity. We have a long tradition of working with children and older people and supporting artists through the journey of parenting and menopause or other real life challenges that human beings come across in their working lives. I work with dancers over many years across pregnancy, age or disability, and enjoy each chapter of who they are, and their changing bodies inspire the work.”
For more information on The Velveteen Rabbit or to book tickets, visit www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/balletlorent-the-velveteen-rabbit. For more information on balletLORENT, head to https://www.balletlorent.com.
By Tamara Searle of Dance Informa.
