Northern Ballet preparing to return to the stage in venues across Leeds and hope to regain audience confidence

Canadian dance choreographer, David Nixon OBE, is to step down as artistic director at the Leeds based company in December after 20 years but admits meeting and managing COVID regulations are taking up more time than his usual day job.

It comes as Northern Ballet prepares to return to the stage after the pandemic forced the closure of theatres and venues for more than a year.

Dangerous Liaisons opens on September 2 and runs at Leeds Playhouse for just over a week.

Mr Nixon's own adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons is a tale of two bored aristocrats as they spin a web of heartbreak and ruin. Inspired by the original novel this dramatic ballet is performed to Vivaldi’s composition of The Four Seasons played live by Northern Ballet Sinfonia.

Next up is the world premier of Merlin, which Northern Ballet will bring to Leeds Grand Theatre between November 9 and 20. It is one of the first new works created during the pandemic to visit theatres across the country.

It has been created by the British choreographer Drew McOnie. Merlin sees the young and inexperienced sorcerer master his magic to unite a warring kingdom and the ballet explores Merlin’s teenage impulses and his quest for acceptance, set against a backdrop of conflict and divide.

Mr Nixon said: "We are struggling with isolation and managing COVID rules, we came back for two days and had to isolate 32 dancers, some dancers have had to isolate three or four times.

"Merlin is the new production. That is big, there are a lot of dancers and they are on all the time, if one of them tests positive it pretty much knocks out all of them and that has been a problem but we are trying to get back to some sort of normality as much as we can.

"Dangerous Liaisons was designed for COVID. There are seven or eight dancers and we have four or five different casts and we can keep them separate and they can rehearse separate. If we lose one or two we still have cast and that was a way of developing a show even if you are dealing with COVID."

Mr Nixon took up the post of artistic director of Northern Ballet in 2001 and since then 29 full-length ballets and 23 one-act works have been added to the repertoire, as well as 14 original full-length musical compositions. He has created 13 original full-length ballets for Northern Ballet, including Wuthering Heights, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great Gatsby and The Little Mermaid, and has restaged and adapted a further six productions.

Multiple Northern Ballet productions have been shown on TV, and the Company made its cinema debut during his tenure, with several works including children’s ballets shown in cinemas nationally and internationally. In October 2019 David Nixon’s Dracula became the first Northern Ballet production to be live-streamed to cinemas.

After a glittering career in front of and behind the curtain, Mr Nixon admits this is not how he thought his last year would be before stepping down in December.

He joked: "Half the time I am a COVID police officer - this is not a celebration of what I have done, it is trying to get through the trenches."

But, "the show has to go on" he added and live performances are what everyone wants to see again - even if audiences are cautious.

He added: "It is what we do, we have been rehearsing but getting back to performing is what they want, they want to dance for an audience. That is what we are funded to do, we are not funded to sit in a studio.

"The audiences are slower to come back than we thought. In other cities in other countries, as soon as they put things on sale they sold out. I don't know why we have more of a nervousness, but it has been so long and there are lots of things to get over to gain confidence."