Can the Northern Ballet Sinfonia survive?

When an organization restricts comments on its social media channels, it’s a sure-fire sign that something is not right. So it proved when the Northern Ballet closed comments on their season announcement in early February. An update on the company website confirmed that, rather than using the Northern Ballet Sinfonia, the company was to perform some of the ballets in the new season to recorded music.

Northern Ballet is a touring dance organization based in Leeds. Founded in 1969 as Northern Dance Theatre, it describes itself as “the UK’s foremost narrative ballet company,” with an emphasis on storytelling alongside classical ballet. It’s the definition of a touring company: as well as performances in Yorkshire (in Goole, Bradford, and Barnsley, as well as Leeds), its upcoming season goes truly cross-country, with performances from Barrow-in-Furness to Canterbury. Alongside a company of dancers, a tech team, and backroom staff, Northern Ballet—a designated National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), in receipt of regular annual funding of £3.28 million from Arts Council England from 2023 to 2026—employs the Northern Ballet Sinfonia, an ensemble that fluctuates between 26 and 28 members.

In September 2023, Northern Ballet announced that they had made the “difficult decision” to enter into negotiations to reassess the amount of live music in touring productions from April 2024 onwards, citing an “incredibly challenging financial environment where inflation and rising costs have made our traditional touring model unsustainable.” On February 6, when announcing their spring tour, Northern Ballet also announced that they would shift to a new model: “performing to a mixed programme of live and recorded music in the coming year.” The move from ballet with live music to ballet with recordings is a huge artistic shift, particularly for the dancers. “They’re going to be going through the motions,” Sinfonia oboist Mary Gilbert said. “Each show is going to be exactly the same; they know they can’t take any time, there’ll be no flexibility and no spontaneity in how they perform.”

I spoke to four musicians from the Northern Ballet Sinfonia. Two of them, Gilbert and percussionist John Melbourne, are the designated stewards of the Musicians’ Union, the union which both said represented the “vast majority” of the orchestra. Two others—sub-principal second violin Laura Concar, and sub-principal viola Hannah Horton—have been with the company for 17 and 20 years respectively.

The musicians I spoke to have all seen Sinfonia work and income decrease significantly because of the switch from exclusively live music to occasional live work supplemented by recording sessions and royalties from performances. Though expressing some sympathy with the financial pressures faced by the company—particularly during a cost of living crisis, when the expense of touring has drastically increased—they said that recent programming decisions from Northern Ballet management had also contributed to the current financial situation.

They described the move to significantly reduce the orchestra as one that Northern Ballet’s management has made out of convenience because the Sinfonia was “an easy target,” and said that Northern Ballet management has “explored the possibility” of outsourcing recording work to foreign orchestras. (Morris Stemp, a representative from the Musicians’ Union, confirmed this.) The musicians expressed disappointment at both the lack of public support from the Northern Ballet management regarding the future of the orchestra and the tone of its financial appeals. They also added they thought part of the reason the management weren’t fully supporting the orchestra in public was because they didn’t want to upset Arts Council England, whose funding they rely on. 

Northern Ballet declined to comment on the record on any of the 31 questions sent by VAN, citing ongoing negotiations with the Musicians’ Union. Instead, they pointed to their public statement published on February 6, which says, “Live music remains central to the artistic vision of Northern Ballet and we are working to ensure that our Sinfonia will perform with us on our national tours as much as is possible.”

The musicians I spoke to described a significant decrease in pay because of the change in model, as it offered them both less work, and less well-paid work. Though figures depend on rank within each section, the musicians say that, from an annual income from live Sinfonia playing before the pandemic of around £20,000 (based on around 22 weeks of live work), they expect to earn an income of around £5,000 from live work (based on the seven weeks of live work currently planned until the end of the season).

Originally, the Northern Ballet’s plan to shift from live to recorded music did involve employing the Sinfonia to record their soundtracks. (Whether this will occur is currently being discussed.) But the proposed income that players might expect to earn from this work is much less than if it was live. In a concert, players earn around £100—opera and ballet orchestras are metered differently to other orchestras, meaning rehearsals are weighted more than concerts. With recordings, musicians have received a provisional starting offer of around £28, based on the current royalty rate for overseas tours without orchestra. (Negotiations are ongoing. The current Musicians’ Union position is to push for a full fee for all of the players listed in the orchestra guarantee when each recording is used.)

In September 2023, musicians were told that Northern Ballet was in “serious financial trouble.” In a public statement that month, Northern Ballet cited “rising costs across the board, with inflation, the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine causing drastic uplifts in the cost of everything” as reasons for entering negotiations on the amount of live music going forward. However, according to the Sinfonia musicians, these were not the only factors at play in the company’s financial difficulties. 

In particular, they cited a 2021 production of “Merlin,” the first full-length ballet by Drew McOnie, as one particularly costly programming decision. Northern Ballet was the first ensemble to return to live performance at Leeds Grand Theatre following lockdown, and one of the company’s first productions was a long run of “Merlin.” Melbourne described the company’s autumn tour in 2021 as “the longest we’ve done for about 10 or 15 years.” 

“One of the things they tell us is that they see that as a mistake,” Melbourne said. A lavish production of a new, unfamiliar work, spread over eight weeks in six different venues, at a time when COVID-19 infection rates were still high, social distancing rules were in place for theaters, and people were cautious about returning to live performance, ultimately meant the company lost “a lot of money,” Melbourne said. “We did weeks and weeks of playing to virtually nobody,” Horton said. (Northern Ballet declined to comment on its production of “Merlin.”)

The musicians characterized the decision to reduce the orchestra as one born out of convenience, as the orchestra was “an easy target,” Melbourne said. Compared to other staff, the employment structure for musicians within the orchestra is particularly frail. While the company’s dancers and back-room employees—a handful of whom have lost their jobs because of the company’s restructuring—are on payroll, the Sinfonia’s musicians are what’s best described as permalancers: musicians who aren’t on the payroll, despite having titled positions and, until recently, a guaranteed minimum number of hours per season. (In agreement with the Sinfonia and the Musicians’ Union, the clause guaranteeing a set amount of work was suspended two years ago, and was due to be reinstated in April 2024 when the guarantee rolled over.)

Though there are other self-employed people working regularly within Northern Ballet, the orchestra is the biggest section of self-employed people within the organization. They have few safety nets, like redundancy pay or a pension scheme, despite many within the Sinfonia having tenures measured in decades: Gilbert has been there for 25 years, and Melbourne for 29 years. “There’s nothing to protect us in that way because we’re not fully employed,” Melbourne said. 

It has been a turbulent period for the company. They welcomed a new Artistic Director, Federico Bonelli, in May 2022, and a new Executive Director, David Collins, in January 2023, while Head of Planning Tobias Perkins left in October 2022. The Sinfonia’s music director, Jonathan Lo, also left recently, for a job at Australian Ballet, but a replacement hasn’t been found, and currently, there is no music director of Northern Ballet Sinfonia. Though the musicians expressed happiness for Lo taking a prestigious job elsewhere, the departure “leaves us very vulnerable because we don’t really have anybody there fighting our corner when all these decisions are made,” said Melbourne. Other musicians I spoke to also noted that currently, the only non-playing representative that the orchestra has in management meetings is their orchestral manager, Ciarán Campbell, who is also on the company’s payroll. “They got us when we were at our weakest,” Gilbert said. (Northern Ballet declined to comment on negotiations with the orchestra. In their public statement, they state that they are “very conscious of the uncertainty and distress these ongoing negotiations are causing for Sinfonia members and the Company at large and would like to thank the players as well as the MU for their cooperation during this difficult time.”)

One of the key questions at the moment is who will make the recordings for upcoming shows. Currently, the Musicians’ Union is refusing to provide new recordings or to license existing recordings for the Northern Ballet’s UK shows. The tensions of this situation were made clear by an upcoming Northern Ballet performance of “Beauty and the Beast,” due to be performed in Ghent, Belgium in April. Musicians from the orchestra are not required on foreign tours—a principle previously established by the ensemble—but they had agreed to provide a recording for this overseas engagement. When the recording was made in Norwich in November 2023, Northern Ballet management asked provisionally if they could use that recording in place of the orchestra for a later run of the same show in Leeds in June. The Musicians’ Union refused, and later, the orchestra was booked for that week.

With the Musicians’ Union encouraging their other UK members not to take the recording work if it is offered, the Sinfonia’s musicians are unsure where the recordings will come from. “My own personal view is, I think, that their only choice is to go abroad,” Melbourne said. Other musicians agreed that employing an overseas orchestra to record the upcoming ballets was a possibility. And, according to Morris Stemp, the Musicians’ Union representative, Northern Ballet has “explored the possibility of doing so.” (Northern Ballet declined to comment on how it will obtain recordings for upcoming performances.) 

The musicians expressed their disappointment that Northern Ballet’s management haven’t come out in full public support of the orchestra, who are currently campaigning to keep the Sinfonia live. “We feel very unsupported in our campaign,” said Gilbert. “It’s like we’ve just become a nuisance, and I think they would really like us to go away. We are now fighting our management and the rest of our company. I don’t understand; we should all be joining together. We need our management to go really public with this and say: ‘This company can no longer go out on the road and tour.’”

The problem they see is not necessarily that the management has been silent on the financial issues that the company is facing at the moment, but that the tone of these statements has been both too generalized and not urgent enough. “What we would have preferred is a big publicity campaign driven by the company to say: ‘Look, this is a problem; we can’t carry on with a live orchestra, and these are the kinds of decisions that we’re having to make,’” Melbourne said. There is scant evidence of this kind of approach on Northern Ballet’s social media channels, or in the press. (Northern Ballet declined to comment on their approach to publicity.)

The main expression of support by management has been in speeches given to the audience by Bonelli, Collins, and others before the curtain comes up at performances. These have been a particular bone of contention for Sinfonia members. In one of Bonelli’s speeches, currently available to view on Twitter, he explains why the orchestra was wearing t-shirts instead of their concert dress, and handing out flyers before the performance. He then outlines the challenging time for the arts industry, and the “extremely difficult choices” the Northern Ballet are having to make to ensure the company is “sustainable in the future.” It’s a strange thing to watch, as members of the management voice support for the right for its company’s musicians to protest—against decisions being made by the management. “It’s not clear,” Melbourne said. “I think a lot of people come out of that thinking, ‘I don’t really understand what’s going on there. I don’t really get what the problem actually is.’”

Additionally, one recurring element of the speeches was described as “insensitive” by Horton and “horrifying” by Concar. Of the economic factors listed by management as contributing to the arts industry’s current difficulties, the citation of the war in Ukraine particularly enraged members of the Sinfonia. “I feel like they were trying to find reasons,” Concar said. Both Horton and Concar described petitioning management to remove references to the war in Ukraine from pre-performance speeches after speaking to audience members with connections to the conflict, but the references continued. The war in Ukraine is mentioned in Bonelli’s speech online, and in the first public statement from the company in September, though it’s omitted from their most recent update. (Northern Ballet declined to comment on whether requests to omit references to the war in Ukraine were ignored by management.)

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There are many legitimate reasons why a company might not want to fully address financial issues in public: fearing public backlash—that happened anyway on social media in February—or risking driving away sponsors or audiences by drawing attention to weaknesses. But all the musicians I spoke to suggested that part of the reasoning behind the lack of public campaigning by Northern Ballet management was because of its relationship with Arts Council England.

As VAN has previously reported, cuts by Arts Council England have had a devastating impact on England’s musical culture. But the aftershock of November 2022’s decisions also revealed just how dependent organizations are on the financial support of the Arts Council, and, in some cases, how quickly things can deteriorate if that support is lost. 

Compared to 22/23, Northern Ballet’s Arts Council NPO funding for 23/24 increased by 3.72 percent—though, with rising costs of fuel and energy, this ultimately amounts to a real-terms funding cut. In 22/23, ACE NPO funding equated to 35 percent of Northern Ballet Sinfonia’s income.

Melbourne said that the company was “very reluctant” to drive a big publicity campaign, partly because “they don’t want to upset the Arts Council.” “I have said to [David Collins] so many times that we need you to go to the Arts Council and say, ‘We can no longer perform as a company,’” Gilbert said, “And he’s not willing to do that. He just says, ‘No, we can’t do that. If we carry on with this model, we can just limp on.’” (Northern Ballet declined to comment on their relationship with Arts Council England.)

Maintaining a healthy public relationship with the Arts Council has been a concern for many struggling arts organizations, and, in some cases, a necessity; in 2020, during the awarding of Cultural Recovery Fund grants, a condition of organizations accepting the emergency funding was that they would publicly welcome the support, using pre-made graphics, pre-written social media templates, and the #hereforculture hashtag. (Northern Ballet declined to comment on whether this was the case for the company, though they did publicly welcome the funding, tagging government accounts and using the designated hashtag.) 

In recent updates to the NPO Relationship Framework policies by ACE, as well as advising that “overtly political or activist statements” might expose NPOs to “reputational risk” in breach of their funding agreements, ACE also stated that “any activity undertaken by the organisation can bring reputational risk to the Arts Council, regardless of whether the activity is directly funded through your grant or not.” (Northern Ballet declined to comment on whether its relationship with Arts Council England had impacted its ability to campaign publicly for its orchestra.)

The resounding feeling is that the musicians feel let down by their management. “The thing that was so shocking to us is that they told us, ‘We’re not going to be able to use you very much,’ and then they were shocked that we reacted,” Gilbert said. 

“I just don’t think that they really properly considered just how important this work was to us,” Melbourne said. “They have made various cuts in various places, but the fact remains that we’re essentially getting the sack.” ¶

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