The Oxford Youth Theatre Dance Company is a bit of a mouthful, but it has to separate the new company from Oxford Youth Dance, with whom Cecilia MacFarlane has being doing such excellent work for many years with children of all ages.

The new company, formed last September together with the Oxford Youth Theatre Company and the Oxford Youth Theatre Production company, has been set up and sponsored by the Pegasus Theatre, with the aim of giving young people between 14 and 19 a taste of working in a more serious way.

Watching the dance company rehearsing on the stage of the Pegasus Theatre — the rehearsal studio behind has already been bulldozed to make way for the new development— it was clear that most of the young dancers had already done quite a lot of training.

Menelva Harry told me the thinking behind the new company.

“We’re trying to give them a flavour of how life is if you’re working with a professional dance company. So they get the hour-and-a-half warm-up or technical class, and then they go through the processes of creating — either creating themselves or learning material we give them — and that’s what we’re trying to show them with this piece. They’re improvising and creating, and they’re also learning material.”

The young dancers are worked as hard as professionals. There’s hardly any let-up as Menelva cajoles, criticises, encourages, demonstrates, makes them repeat, until everything is going right.

They have to learn accurately, and they have to learn very fast, even though they’re not that experienced. I asked 16-year-old Esme Lucas whether she finds it hard.

“When they go through it really quickly you have to mark it first, and then you start looking at details, but it is quite hard.”

And 14-year-old Alice Goodger, who has been doing ballet for ten years, agreed.

“I do find it hard, especially when they teach it so fast, but they tell us it doesn’t actually matter about every single move — it’s more about getting a feel for the different moods of the piece and interpreting them in your own way.”

All the same, there are a lot of passages when the whole cast is doing the same step, so accuracy is obviously very important there.

Nicola Moses, also from Gelede Dance Company, is working closely with Menelva to create the piece.

“We discuss everything that happens choreographically, what to put into classes, who needs more attention; and I’m helping to choreograph the last section, which is the only section where we are giving them the movement from end to end. When they’re creating their own section we help tweak it here and there, and give them advice on what to keep and what to leave out.”

The piece they are working on explores the theme of loneliness.

Menelva elaborated: “We wanted to explore loneliness and how that works within a group, how it works between you and your partner or with friends; we’re looking at the different levels of loneliness, to the point where it leads to insanity. The key words in this work are loneliness and insanity, and we’re looking at the ego in relationships — how you can misread things in a relationship. So we’ve got them to play with those ideas and then just improvise, and we’ve created material from that. But it’s set at a concert, and at the beginning they’re all happy to see this band, and then we begin to see more of their relationships and their individual personalities and their insecurities.”

Later there is a section where the dancers are blindfolded.

“For me it was a way to get them to express who they really are inside, without having someone looking at them. I told them to put something over their eyes and just dance and be free. Once they’re blindfolded they’re really expressing themselves in a way that we haven’t seen since September when we started. They transform into somebody else. We actually tried doing this part without the blindfolds on, and they found it really difficult.”

The piece will be performed as part of a programme featuring other young companies. The overall theme is ‘Paradise Lost’. I asked Menelva how she is interpreting that.

“I’m trying to create a whole punk scene. Paradise Lost was also a club where The Sex Pistols performed, and where they were discovered, and I wanted to create this whole scene of tartans and ruffles, so when you see them on stage they’re all going to be punked up.

The costumes will be made by the new youth production company, and they’ll be designing them too. I’ve just given them the brief that it’s punk, and I want a lot of neon colours and lots of tartans, and I want to see some punk hair and lovely make-up.”

lOxford Youth Theatre Dance Company will be previewing their work at the Oxford Playhouse on Wednesday, March 25, and then performing it again at the Pegasus Theatre on the Friday and Saturday.