Lynne Charles: revolutionising pointe work at English National Ballet School

Lynne Charles, artistic director of English National Ballet School, is wrapping up a pas de deux class, which I have been watching for about 45 minutes. The students are hanging on her every word. Corrections are absorbed and acted upon with instant results. Afterwards, in her modest office, she tells me how she started in ballet and how she fell in love with teaching.

“I never wanted to be a ballet dancer, I wanted to be an English professor,” she explains over tea and rose flavoured biscuits. “I was in love with Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the whole Tudor era. Mary Queen of Scots was my idol. I loved literature. My dad left us when we were very young. He had a beard and used to smoke a pipe with vanilla tobacco, so I had a dream that I would marry a professor with a beard, who smoked a pipe. And we would live on a campus and I would teach English.”

Ballet did not feature until her teens. “I grew up on the streets of New York and was always hanging out with the boys. I was extremely athletic and played football and baseball. I had an abusive stepfather and I think my mother wanted to keep me out of the house but off the streets, so for my 13th birthday she gave me ballet lessons. I had a certain amount of natural aptitude because at the age of 16, I was already in ABT II.”

Although Charles danced with ABT II, it was her teacher Bob Scevers, who eventually suggested she went to Geneva. “He was Patricia Neary’s partner, and she was directing Geneva Ballet and he thought I should audition. So I went to Geneva and that was my first company in Europe.

“I used to go to him every night and I would hang onto the stove (as a barre) and the dancer that I became was because of him, because he retrained me.” I wonder what she means by ‘retrain’. Did she have to ‘unlearn’ everything she had been taught?

“He taught me what articulation is. He taught me the fundamentals. He was the most influential person in my life in dance. I had to relearn that everything comes from the feet. Because I had started so late, I had learnt to do everything on brute strength, with raw talent. Not developed technique.”

“I was sitting in his house one night,” she continues. “He had a Time magazine on his coffee table and there was an article about Misha Baryshnikov. It said that John Neumeier wanted to create a new Swan Lake for him in Hamburg. I turned to Bob and said, ‘I need to go to Hamburg. I’m the perfect partner for Misha!’ My teacher looked at me doubtfully. But I went to Hamburg, auditioned and got the job just like that. And at the end of my first season I danced my first Swan Lake, though in the end Misha never came.”

Charles stayed in Hamburg for 12 years, for much of this time as Neumeier’s muse. “I had been guesting for Erik Bruhn in Canada and Peter Wright in London. They both said if you ever want to do anything other than John, you need to get out. Otherwise you are going to be stereotyped. I went to John and asked for six months leave of absence, so I could experience some new choreographies. I believed I would come back and be even richer and a better muse. But he didn’t want that, so I left. I wanted to develop.”

She danced with Roland Petit’s Ballet national de Marseille, English National Ballet, for Maurice Béjart as well as touring with the Kirov and became an internationally sought after ballerina. I’m curious to discover how Charles came to teaching and more importantly, how she created and developed 4Pointe, a teaching method specifically tailored to strengthen pointe work.

“The first time I started teaching was when I was pregnant with my son. I was working with Roland Petit. I was told that if I didn’t teach the company, I wouldn’t be paid. I liked it but I did it because I had to.” Charles speaks frankly: “While I was pregnant, his dad left me, then Roland fired me because I’d had a baby. In those days in France you could! His father said he didn’t want anything to do with the baby. I got kicked out of France because I didn’t have a visa. It was a really hard time in my life. It made me hate ballet and everybody in it.”

“I took odd jobs, worked in a jewellers, went to school and learnt computing,” she continues. “For six months I did a course to learn sign language. I was trying to do something else but I couldn’t get a job. Only in ballet. I had people calling me to teach and to dance and that’s why I went back to ballet.”

After taking short contracts (“I didn’t want to join a company because I wanted to be a mother”) Charles ended up working for Bridget Breiner in Gelsenkirchen and at the Volkwang University of the Arts in Essen. She elaborates: “I realised that working with today’s choreographers such as David Dawson, William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor and pushing dancers to their limits, there was something like a 35% increase in foot related injuries due to changes in repertoire. I spoke to an orthopaedic doctor who used to be a dancer. I made my first teaching videos there in Gelsenkirchen. Then Covid came. People were really suffering and I decided to make a lot of videos where people could access classes online for free. I literally had thousands of people from all over the world thanking me for saving them during Covid.”

Charles realised there was a need for something like 4Pointe. “Top dancers like Alina Cojocaru, Sara Mearns, Alessandra Ferri – I rehabbed them back on to pointe. And people who had just had a baby. I brought them back. There are all these methods: RAD, ABT, Vaganova but there’s no pre-pointe teaching. Nobody talks about three-quarter pointe – the balance as you go through your foot. I’ve developed exercises for specific parts of the foot and put them in a specific order.”

She is adamant that switching from the classics to contemporary choreography needs to be managed. “In our day this extremity was non existent. But that’s how companies work today. We can’t change that. They go from Inger’s Carmen to Deane’s Swan Lake. It can cause too many injuries, cost the company too much money, we need to make changes now.”

We go back to talking about ENBS and she tells me, “My vision for the school is to be unique. I don’t want to be better than the Royal Ballet School. There’s nothing ‘better’ than anything anyway – there’s opinion. I don’t think I need to say I’m a good teacher. I’m good at sharing knowledge.

“I have an incredible eye. I can see your weak areas. I can see your alignment, teaching is all about chemistry. I was a good dancer, but I am a better teacher because I think that’s what I always wanted to be. My calling is to be a teacher. I had to dance and do what I did in my life in order to get to this place. Everyone has potential, but maybe not what you want them to do. Not everyone wants to be a ballerina. Some people are just happy being in the corps de ballet. They just want to dance and you can’t impose your wishes on them.

“This year I wanted to focus on regrouping the school, trying to create a syllabus, our own syllabus. Trying to get to know the teachers and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Make the school a unit because for me the most important thing is a sense of community.” She explains, “Most students will spend the first five years of their careers in the corps de ballet and if they can fit into that community without losing themselves, they will have a really good time. You won’t feel punished or neglected, you will feel part of the group. It can be a wonderful thing to know that people have your back.”

But there are strict rules. “Phones are forbidden. Anything that makes you one person, I forbid. I want them to socialise. You can see in my class, there’s no bitchiness. They support and help each other. I want them to flourish within this environment.”

She concludes with sincerity, “It’s so much harder to be a teacher today. All the dance forms are merging at an incredibly fast pace. Everything is changing and what dancers want is changing. Without being a tyrant, how do you allow them space and still discipline them? It’s very tricky. It has to be tough love. You can’t do this job without discipline. They have to feel that it comes from a good place and that you care. I can take them to the door but they need to walk through.”

Applications are open for September 2025 entry at ENBS Senior School.

This article was sponsored by English National Ballet School.