Ideas from an effervescent spring of dance

By BERNADETTE RAE

He is 27, slim as a faun, with a short shock of bleached blond hair and a high-voltage energy field that surrounds him just as tangibly as the constant spiral of cigarette smoke, the tang of his last black coffee.

Christopher Hampson, choreographer, created the gorgeous and exciting Saltarello, the crown jewel in the Royal New Zealand Ballet's Nationwide Road Tour.

He is also quite likely to be the next big name in dance history: the 21st century's new Frederick Ashton or Kenneth MacMillan.

Hampson retired from his position as soloist with the English National Ballet last year, at the ridiculously young age of 26 years, to concentrate on choreography.

He has fitted his New Zealand commission between the premiere of his first full-length ballet, A Christmas Carol, at London's Royal Festival Hall, and the restaging of one of his earliest works, Perpetuum Mobile, for his alma mater, the English company.

A Christmas Carol featured stilt walkers, acrobats and jugglers, and he loved, he says, the "total responsibility involved in setting up my own company and working with so many people.

"I am pretty proactive and positive in my approach, and I seemed to get people like that in the company. It was great. It really did feel like a big happy family."

The production itself was very traditional, says Hampson. "It was a piece of total theatre - dance theatre - that bridged the gap between pantomime and ballet. I think it was a bit of a shock for some who know my work now, as classically challenging but abstract."

Saltarello is no shock - but an exhilarating and splendid surprise in which the dancers, clad in the briefest of dramatic black costumes, leap and whirl to 14th-century music, in a spirited play on Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.

In the original story a group of young noblemen and women flee from a plague-ridden Florence and pass their period of quarantine in a huge party.

Hampson's work is not narrative, but captures the spirit of the traditional Italian dance of the time, which is characterised by energetic jumps and from which it takes its name.

It was a shock, at first, for the dancers of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, admits Hampson. At first they just concentrated on getting through it.

But he has found the company quick to rise to the challenge, "always willing, always inspiring and ready to try anything.

"I had an idea in my head for the work before I came - but I had no idea what sort of instruments I had. It was quite daunting, to come knowing nothing at all about any of the dancers," he says.

"But it was a really pleasant surprise. Versatility is one of their obvious strengths."

One of Hampson's choreographic strengths is a fierce musicality.

He seems born to create dance. His first success came in a serious choreographic competition in which he won both first and second prizes.

The feted works were his two first choreographic efforts - made for the curriculum requirement of his ballet school course and entered by his teachers, on his behalf.

But the musicality is no accident. He studied the piano until he was 18 and listens to music for 80 per cent of the day.

"I grab the Walkman as soon as I wake and it lulls me to sleep at night," he confesses. Music is his major inspiration.

"I listen to a piece until I am in it. Then I see its structure and its shape. I feel the dynamic then, but not necessarily the steps for a dance. I just keep churning it over and over in my head."

What happens in the dance studio, the creative bit, rarely results in what Hampson originally conceived.

"I might have a very clear idea in my head for a lift or a turn or a specific movement, then the dancers can't do it or I can't verbalise it properly.

"But we eventually get the essence of what I wanted - and something else on top."

The results, like the beautiful Saltarello, are firmly rooted in classical technique, but with Hampson's own twist, making them new, exciting, contemporary.

Hampson is never out to startle or be "way out."

"I have done 'way out,"' he says. "I did a piece, Concerto Grosso, to Alfred Schnittke. Actually, I quite liked it but some people couldn't get past the score.

"Shock is easy," he adds. "You can put a dog turd down in a gallery and say, 'Look at that.' That's shock.

"I push boundaries, but I am always looking for true beauty, for the most beautifully crafted whole. I think it is just human nature to look at things aesthetically.

"And it has got to be honest. You can't fake it."

And what does a young artist who has come so far so quickly aspire to in the future?

"Well, there is always the challenge of finding new outlets to do new work," he says.

"I have been really lucky so far, but most ballet companies do not have much money and have to be financially responsible, which means a cost-effective repertoire.

"But I want to choreograph in other media, as well, in opera and theatre and film."

He has already won a commission for a film project - it's a political thriller that involves a choreographer and a dancer and a spy ring.

"At first I thought the idea was just naff. But the novelist is German, and what I have read is just so clever."

To keep up with the effervescently talented Hampson, and to further track the career path that seems on an ever and upward curve, tap into his internet diaries at www.ballet.co.uk/hampson