The Royal Ballet School

I don't think I'd ever been to Richmond Park before my visit to the Royal Ballet School a couple of weeks ago.  It's rather spectacular: 2,500 acres of land in south west London which could almost be open countryside, except that it's more picturesque, with groves of ancient oaks that could have come out of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.  It also famously has a large herd of deer, and a dog called Fenton, but I didn't see either of them as I made my way from the station.  

My destination was the White Lodge, a beautiful Georgian building which stands alone in the middle of the park.  It's a former royal hunting lodge, built for George II, and used by successive British monarchs (Queen Victoria was fond of it, and Edward VIII was born there) before being handed over to the Royal Ballet School in 1955. 

But it doesn't always look as ominous as it does in my photo! Sometimes it looks like this:

                                                                                                                              Photo: Royal Ballet School

The White Lodge is actually the Lower School, catering for pupils from 11-16 years old: after that they move to the Upper School, next to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.  The students have all gained their places there because of their dancing skills, and come from a wide range of backgrounds.  In addition to their ballet training they study all the usual subjects, and the English department like to invite authors in to encourage reading.  I spent the morning talking to  years 7,8 and 9, and then in the afternoon spoke to some of the year 10 students.  

I've taken recently to drawing a few pictures during my talks, to demonstrate the sort of thing I used to do all the time when I was working as an illustrator.  The evil alien Gollarks from Kjartan Poskitt's Murderous Maths series are pretty well suited to drawing big on a flip-chart, and since I was at the Royal Ballet School I decided to do a ballerina Gollark...

That opened the floodgates, because when my talk was over and book and random-bit-of-paper signing time rolled around, everybody seemed to want a ballet Gollark.  I've never drawn so many tutus in my life.  And in honour of the impending launch of Goblins I drew The Dance of the Sugar Plum Goblin too...

In between talks came a very nice lunch, and then Suzanne Gunton, Head of the English Department showed me around the school and told me a little of its history.  One wing houses the White Lodge Museum and Ballet Resource Centre, a treasure-trove of ballet history which deserved far more time than I was able to send there.  There were displays about the White Lodge and its inhabitants as well as about the history and development of  Classical ballet and of the school itself, with many artefacts, photographs, videos and drawings. (The red costume in the case here is from a design by Rex Whistler.)  You can take a virtual tour of the museum here. It is open to the public, but booking is essential - details on the link above.

There are other relics and treasures all over the building, including this bronze statue of Dame Margot Fonteyn.  The students have a tradition of touching her finger for luck as they pass, which is why it's paler than the rest of her.

While I was doing my talks and signings, I kept noticing the view out of the class room windows to those wintry oak-woods.  Living and learning in this beautiful building, in these surroundings, must be like going to school in Rivendell, and you might imagine that the pupils here would seem different from those I usually meet.  They didn't, though; they were normal kids; pleasant, polite, happy to giggle at a ballet-dancing Gollark, and ready to chime in with good questions and ideas when asked.  It was only as I was leaving at the end of the day that I caught a glimpse through an open door of a ballet class in progress. There were some of the children who'd been listening to me burble on about goblins and Traction Cities that morning, busy practicing their art with the most wonderful grace and discipline, a lovely image to take away with me from this most extraordinary school.

Thank you to Charlotte Taylor for inviting me, to Suzanne Gunton and Suzanne Watt Bertoni for looking after me so well, Richard Johnson for giving me a lift back to Richmond Station in the afternoon, and to Rob Green of the Maths department who helped out with my sessions and took the photos of me at work (and didn't mind too much when I said 'Nobody likes maths').  He also put together this collage of images from the day...

All images are used here with kind permission of the Royal Ballet School

Four New Books by McIntyre & Reeve!

When I first bumped into Sarah McIntyre at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago, I little realised that she was going to become one of my very best friends.  And I certainly never imagined that we would end up working together.  We have very different personalities and views on things, and there seems little common ground between her lovely comics and picture books and my novels.

But what do you know?  As we nattered away to each other, both in real life and on the internet, all sorts of mad ideas started to pop out.  It turns out that it's actually quite a good idea to collaborate with someone whose work is completely different from your own, because it forces both of you to try new things.

So it was only a matter of time before some McIntyre/Reeve collaborations appeared.  You may have read the Mortal Engines Christmas story which Sarah illustrated here on the blog, and I've already mentioned the four-page comic story we're working on for the Phoenix.  Now I'm very happy to announce that we've signed with Oxford University Press to produce four illustrated books, the first of which, Seawigs, will be published in the autumn of 2013.

Seawigs will be very different from my other books.  It's a lot shorter, for one thing, because a lot of the work of building the atmosphere and describing how things look will be done by Sarah's pictures as much as my words. I did most of the writing, but its completely influenced by Sarah's ideas and sense of humour, which was great -  instead of staring blankly out of the window whenever I got stuck, I just 'phoned her up and asked what would happen next, and she'd suggest things.  Most of the things she suggested were as mad as pants, but they all found their way into the plot somehow.  It's the most fun I've ever had writing a book!

Sarah will be getting busy on the illustrations for Seawigs later this year, and we'll also be thinking about our next book together, which won't be Seawigs 2, but a completely different story.  And after that ...  well, frankly, I have no idea where our adventures will lead us. But that, of course, it what makes it so exciting!

Here's a link to Sarah's blog, with her take on the OUP announcement.

Moebius

Like most people with even a passing interest in illustration and/or science fiction, I was saddened to learn last week of the death of the legendary French comics artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius.   I think I first encountered his work among the production designs for the movie Alien when I was in my early teens, and later I sought out all the comics, published sketchbooks and collections of his work that I could find.  I'm not a big comics fan, and I don't much like the actual stories of many of the Moebius strips I've read, but his drawing - especially his line work - is extraordinarily spare and vibrant, and his visual imagination is spectacular.  (What a strange artistic establishment we have, that turns celebrity self-publicists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst into household names while dismissing a draughtsman of Moebius's skill as just a comics guy...)

But although many people outside the world of fandom may not know his name, they would certainly recognise Moebius's work.  He had a huge influence on the way modern science fiction looks, working on, or at least inspiring, many of the trend-setting movies of the past few decades.  And because product designers often take their cues from such movies, echoes of his visual ideas have crept into real life too.  

Here's a link to the best of the Moebius articles I read last week, on the Tor website (where I also pinched this version of Moebius's print Stargazer from).  It's by the Bristol-based SF author Tim Maughan, who knows far more about all this than I do, and it recounts Moebius's early career and explains how, via his work on the Greatest SF Movie Never Made, he changed the look of SF cinema for ever.  Whether you're a Moebius fan already or are coming to his work afresh, it's well worth reading:  Moebius - the Visionary's Visionary.

Read Books - Or Else! (A visit to Lampton School)

I'm very busy with the last few chapters of the second Goblins book at the moment (I know, the first Goblins book isn't even officially out yet, but it should be around soon: I hope to be posting Exciting News about it here in the next few weeks).   But I'm just taking the evening off to blog about a couple of fantastic schools I visited in London earlier this month.

The first is Lampton School in Hounslow, a large modern comprehensive which is classed as 'outstanding' by the Department for Education, and quite rightly so, as far as I could see.  The well-stocked library library seems very popular with the pupils, who had had a say in picking its snazzy red and green colour scheme.  I spoke to a large group there, who listened patiently to a version of my usual spiel about the things which turned me into a writer and the books I've written since.  They asked interesting questions afterwards, and I ended up signing quite a lot of books...

Later I had a go at an illustration workshop - the first I've done!  We didn't have very long, so I stole a leaf out of Sarah McIntyre's book and tried my hand at organising a comics jam, where the class gets into groups of four each draw one panel of a comic strip before passing it on to their neighbour to do the next panel.  And it seemed to work - we ended up with some spectacularly mad stories involving farts, aliens, and the Evil Iggle-Piggle.

Like a lummox, I forgot to take any pictures of the results of the comics jam, but I did think to take one of my hosts: Librarian Penny Randhawa, her colleague Elizabeth, and library volunteer Sue (I also met another volunteer, Ann, but she'd escaped by the time I got my camera out).  They were all wonderfully helpful and welcoming - Elizabeth had even borrowed a larger car to pick me up from hotel in, because she'd heard I was tall! (Which I kind of am, now I come to look at the picture...)

I keep hearing about schools where the library is under threat, or not used enough, but Lampton's is an example of one that's brilliantly run and genuinely valued by the pupils.  It was a treat to visit it!  Before Elizabeth drove me back to the station I did a quick Horrible Histories style cartoon for the library wall - I think this Viking ended up saying, READ BOOKS - OR ELSE!

And the following day I went down to Richmond and the Royal School of Ballet - but that's another blog post...