Leaps & bounds

Scottish Ballet head Chris Hampson talks of how Tennessee Williams, Pedro Almodóvar, Marlon Brando and Joan Rivers have influenced the contemporary works the acclaimed company is bringing to New Zealand.

- LINDA HERRICK

It's a freezing evening in the northern English city of Newcastle, where Scottish Ballet's charming boss Christopher Hampson, CBE, has just checked into a hotel with his dancers and creative crew. They're on the last leg of a two-month tour of The Nutcracker, an ebullient reimagining of the Peter Darrell classic, co-choreographed by Hampson and his dancers. After 74 performances, they're in the mood to unwind.

Because dancers don't speak on stage, it's fascinating to hear Hampson, who's on his mobile in the lobby, talking over a racket of shrieks and laughter coming from his team behind him. "Hopefully you can hear me," he says. "The hotel has laid on some nice drinks and nibbles."

Lancashire-born Hampson, who holds the dual roles of artistic director and CEO at the Glasgow-based company, is anticipating nice drinks and nibbles in New Zealand when they tour here in March. As he says later in our conversation, he loves food and, "I can eat forever."

Rated as one of Britain's most bold and innovative dance companies, Scottish Ballet is staging two programmes here, first in Wellington with two works, Schachmatt (Checkmate!) and Dextera, performed alongside two pieces from the Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB), Limerence and Prismatic.

It then moves to the Auckland Arts Festival to present its super-charged five-star adaptation of Tennessee Williams' 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, created by Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa with American dramaturg Nancy Meckler. The work was commissioned in 2012 by Scottish Ballet by its then-artistic director Ashley Page, Hampson's predecessor.

Hampson, 51, has deep connections to this country. More than 20 years ago, he linked up with the RNZB as a guest choreographer: Saltarello in 2001, followed by Romeo and Juliet in 2003, and a witty rendering of