Dancer Maureya Lebowitz is in Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of Aladdin at Sunderland Empire and loves the audience interaction, as she tells Steve Pratt

BIRMINGHAM Royal Ballet dancer Maureya Lebowitz is getting used to people asking her about pantomime. Born in California and raised in Canada, this peculiarly British art form is alien to her.

But audiences for BRB’s new production of Aladdin are giving her an idea of their enthusiasm for the story.

“At some shows the dancers come out on stage at the end and there’s this huge applause for every character – and as dancers we really feed off that.

The audience interaction makes our enjoyment so much more pleasurable,” she says.

“It’s quite a colourful production. The music is great, the costumes are beautiful and it’s a real show. I’ve heard people leaving the theatre and they’re quite overwhelmed by the energy of the dancers.”

BRB is giving four UK premiere performances of David Bintley’s new version of the classic tale of Aladdin on the current visit to Sunderland Empire.

The ballet was created for the National Ballet of Japan in 2008 with choreography by BRB director Bintley and music by Carl Davis, composer of the company’s Cyrano and writer of numerous ballets, TV and film scores, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for which he won the Bafta award for best film music.

The fact that this is a UK premiere is one reason why the 22-year-old Malibu-born dancer finds the project so exciting. “Even though David Bintley had done the ballet in Japan, when he came to do it here it was a clean slate. He came in and tried things and made little changes,” she says.

Her Princess, who attracts the eye of the lamprubbing hero Aladdin, is “very sweet”, she says. “I’d say she’s a woman with girl qualities. She starts off quite sheltered and under the palace watch. When she meets Aladdin for the first time, it’s outside the palace walls and when she steps outside, she starts to experience new things. He shows her a whole new world.”

Her first dancing experience was in California when her mother noticed her daughter “really moved to the music a lot”. She thought of putting her daughter into something like African dance because of the strong rhythms but eventually decided, as she’d done ballet when younger, to enrol young Maureya into ballet class.

When the family moved to Montana, her mother searched out a ballet teacher for her. “I loved it so much. There’s not a point in time when I was young and said I am going to do this for the rest of my life.

I just always knew that’s what I wanted,” she says.

From Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, she joined Royal Winnipeg Ballet in 2007, becoming the youngest dancer in the company’s history to perform the title role in Rudi van Dantzig’s Romeo And Juliet. Coincidentally, that was the first full-length ballet she saw.

“When we lived in Montana, my parents made the decision to take my brother and me on trips to different cities and my mum would take me to the ballet everywhere we went,” she recalls.

“I saw Romeo And Juliet in San Francisco and it was so enjoyable. That was the first full-length ballet I saw and the first full-length ballet I danced in Canada.”

Maureya’s always had an interest to dance in Europe and, despite her young age, decided to give it a try. While on tour abroad she used a week’s break to audition for ballet companies in England and Amsterdam.

David Bintley signed her up for BRB two years ago.

“It was strange coming here at first. It was out of my comfort zone, but that was what I was looking for. I didn’t have any expectations, only an open mind about moving to different country,” she says.

“In Canada I was in a touring company as well and loved that aspect of the work. Every day it’s different.

People say how do you like living in Birmingham?

I say it’s great, we have a great theatre and great facilities.

“It’s very exciting and I appreciate it more and more. Age is a great thing, but I want to get as much in as I can while I’m young. I feel in the two years I’ve been here, I’ve experienced all different aspects of the repertoire.”

  • Birmingham Royal Ballet UK premiere performances of Aladdin: Sunderland Empire, today until Saturday. Box office 0844-8713022 and online atgtickets.com/sunderland