Sharon gets kick out of new dance company

City Lives – Sharon Vandermerve talks fitness and ballet with Bernie Ní Fhlatharta

A brand new youth ballet company is being set up in Galway by a South African woman who has decided to make the City of the Tribes her home.

Sharon Vandermerve says ballet is and always has been her passion. She is thrilled not only at having found a place she loves and can now call home but that she is finally going to be sharing her dance skills and experience with young people.

She had left Johannesburg because of political unrest years ago to move to New Zealand but a few visits to her sister, Marsha Hyland, a piano teacher in Salthill, enticed her to make another, more permanent move to the West of Ireland.

“I love it here but setting up my own youth ballet company is a dream come true and I can’t wait to get started,” she enthuses.

Sharon will be starting this weekend when she holds the company’s first ever open auditions to find dancers between the ages of 10 and 25.

Auditions are open to both male and female and all dancers must have at least three years’ experience in classical dance.

Ballet Áthas (Irish for joy) aims to stage its first performance next January and will be a pre-professional company, although members will not be paid.

A former prima-ballerina herself, Sharon, who has played most of ballet’s principal roles, has years of experience behind her. Though she has trained in the three different styles, the English (RAD), international (ISTD), her preferred style is the Vaganova Russian one, which is the one she now practises and teaches.

“Once I was exposed to the Russian style, I chose it, as it has the strongest teaching philosophy and carries fewer injuries. Their technology is very specific and they have it mastered to a fine art, almost like a physical sport,” she says before stressing that this is her personal preference and that opinions differ on the various ballet methods.

Sharon has been giving adult ballet classes in Galway since February. She hastens to add that she is not going to make a prima ballerina out of someone who starts taking ballet lessons in their 30s or 40s or older but offers it as a way of keeping flexible.

There is no physical ailment, she says, that should stop any adult from taking these particular classes.

She has personal experience of the power of ballet and its ability to help heal the body.

“Ballet is about biology and mechanics. The biology is the practice and the mechanics is the kinesiology, the human movement. And of course, it’s enormous fun to experience the beat of the music and it’s deceptively gentle.

“I guarantee that you will be reborn physically in the shape of your body. It takes a person about three months to get comfortable with the ballet movement, especially if you haven’t danced before,” she says.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.