Matthew Hawkins

Signing a full-time professional contract at the age of 17 (back in 1977) Matthew Hawkins had already trained for ten years. As a child, his dancing was intuitively driven - twinned with a youthful sense of adventure and discovery. Intellectual dimensions would bring their sustenance somewhat later. His continued desire to share the assets of his dance knowledge stem from a prolonged delight in dance activity, heightened by key moments of seminal experience. At the same time as he began to get serious about dancing, Matthew was also singing his heart out in a local choir. When he joined the Royal Ballet School at age 10, he could already read music and somehow he had also begun to learn the syllabus of adult ballet exams via evening classes at the Royal Academy of Dancing. His tutors expressed concern that he was a prodigy who might get bored. They need not have worried. In his first years at the Royal Ballet School, Matthew 'walked on' as a pageboy in "Giselle" at Covent Garden and here his artistic education began. From his vantage point in the wings, or centrally seated in the house at stage rehearsals, he absorbed the underpinnings and the presentation of this classic dance-dr...