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FRANCESCA VELICU ON SUSTAINABILITY & ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET'S GREEN TEAM I joined ENB’s Green Team to learn more about sustainability and our environment, as I felt that I had a lot to catch up. I think if you are passionate about it or just a nature lover like me, it’s necessary to try and understand what you can do to protect it. I’ve learned already so much throughout our monthly meetings. I never thought about sustainability in the ballet world before so when the question of how to recycle our most used tools—our pointe shoes—was raised, I asked friends from different companies around the world and learned that no one really had an initiative like this. We were very intrigued and determined to find ways to solve this issue and many others. One very important side to what we do is communicating our goals and achievements to everyone in the company and outside. So, it’s nice to see that more of our colleagues are now more engaged into helping the environment :) To commemorate World Earth Day in April 2024, ENB’s Green Team led an all-staff meeting to talk about all our sustainability initiatives. At this meeting, we did a reveal of our pointe shoe bin- which had a glow-up! I painted the bin to represent nature scenes, in order to create a calming atmosphere in our Green Room, while reminding dancers of the good deed they are doing by using the Pointe Shoe Recycling Bin. For female dancers, one pair of pointe shoes will usually last around one week. As you can imagine, with 33 female dancers over the course of a year, we produce a lot of “dead” shoes! We have created an initiative to help prevent these dead shoes ending up in general waste – our Pointe Shoe Bin! Dancers put all of their dead shoes in our bin and it gets sent away for textile recycling. The cardboard in the shoes gets recycled into new products, such as newspapers and office products. The satin and other items get reused if in good condition. Any items that are too damaged would be recycled into many different items, office chairs, boxing bags, essentially anything that would be suitable for that particular material. We’ve also been encouraging the dancers to re-use their elastics and ribbons, which we’re seeing many of them do. This really helps to reduce waste and improves sustainability. As a touring company, we’ve also been collaborating with the venues that we perform in on sustainability efforts. Our goal is to continue recycling our pointe shoes everywhere we go! We’ve been campaigning for a new initiative and are really excited to begin a trial for one season of using Imperfect Pointes tights at English National Ballet. Imperfect Pointes makes sustainable dancewear from recycled nylon and they produced the world’s first planet-friendly convertible tights! Usually after a season, our ballet tights have to go into general waste, so it’s a big step for us to be using sustainable tights. We’ll use them for performances and can’t wait to show them off to our audiences! On-site at the Mulryan Centre for Dance, where we rehearse, we also have our amazing wardrobe department constantly working on costumes and designs. The creation and upkeep of costumes naturally comes with some leftover materials. We have recently introduced scrap-fabric recycling, allowing the team in the Atelier to play around with materials freely, knowing they will be recycled. All fabrics put into the scrap fabrics recycling bin be sent to a company called Robert’s Recycling. There, items are shredded down and the materials are re-used for items such as draft excluders, or filling for sports equipment, like punching bags. Collecting our scrap fabrics has had a really positive impact on helping to reduce the amount of general waste we’re using at ENB. As a Touring Ballet Company, it can be hard to ensure that we’re being as sustainable as we can while not at our rehearsal venue. As a result, we have a Touring Green Rider that we send to venues in advance of our arrival, which I think it’s really cool! The Green Rider suggests ways that we can be as sustainable as possible while on their site. Some examples of requests we make in this Touring Green Rider include: - We ask that information be made accessible for audiences regarding how to travel to the site via public transportation. - We ask that only food items that have been specifically requested to be chilled get chilled, in the hopes that this reduces the need for fridges. We also request that food provided is organic, locally sourced, and not in packaging, where possible. - We ask that lights in dressing rooms are not turned on before our arrival. - We are also committed to constantly reviewing the way we travel to our venues. If on tour in the UK, we will always aim to travel via train and coach. To learn more about the environment I personally started watching documentaries and trying online courses in my rehearsal breaks throughout the day! Also, anything from the TED Climate Podcast is very informative! I think as dancers, we try to be as healthy as possible to protect our bodies and have all the energy our job requires—and that is a good mindset to use when approaching the environment! Starting small with opening the conversation, setting goals for the company and taking them step by step, is a good place to start! Francesca Velicu Title photo by: Nicholas Mackay Comments are closed.
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July 2024
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