[Servalan]

Diesmal hat es etwas länger gedauert, weil ich nach Berichten gesucht habe, aus denen hervorgeht, wer bei dem Ballett-Manga für was verantwortlich gewesen ist.

Steven McRae (Jahrgang unbekannt) wurde in Australien geboren und begeistert als Primoballerino des Royal Opera House in London seit 2003 sein Publikum. Sein Interesse am Tanz wurde durch seine ältere Schwester geweckt, als er sie mit sieben Jahren zum Unterricht begleitete. Sein Vater fährt Drag-Car-Rennen und zu McRaes Hobbies gehört ebenfalls der Motorsport.
Als Tänzer tourt er durch die Welt, wobei er regelmäßig nach Japan kommt, und sammelt dafür Preise wie andere Briefmarken:

Prizes include the 2002 Adeline Genée Gold Medal, the 2003 Prix de Lausanne, the 2007 Emerging Male Artist (Classical) and the 2012 Best Male Dancer Awards at the Critics' Circle Dance Awards, and in 2014 he was named Young Australian Achiever in the UK by the Australia Day Foundation. He has performed as a guest artist with ballet companies all over the world, including the American Ballet Theater (as part of a dance exchange programme), National Ballet of Canada, the Australian Ballet, Tokyo Ballet and numerous international galas.

Seit dem 5. August 2013 erscheint bei Shinshokan Japan die fünfteilige Ballett-Manga-Serie Ballet Hero Fantasy, gezeichnet von Takafumi Adachi. Erwerben ließ sich diese Serie zuerst in Japan über Amazon, später in den Läden für Tanzbedarf Chacott, Sylvia und Fairy. Ein Vorabdruck erschien im Dancin' Magazine.
McRae wuchs mit den Cartoonserien von Hanna-Barbera (The Flintstones, The Jetsons) auf und entdeckte auf seinen Reisen nach Japan die Mangas für sich. Zuerst begeisterte er sich für Sailor Moon.
Die Ehefrau des Mangaka Takafumi Adachi ist ein McRae-Fan, und als das Ehepaar den Backstagebereich betreten durfte, entwickelte sich ein Gespräch zwischen Adachi und McRae.

On my many travels to Japan to perform, I began seeing more and more Manga. I fell in love with Manga as it is artistically beautiful. I wanted to develop a project that combined the artistic qualities of Manga with Dance. I was approached by the great Japanese manga artist, Takafumi Adachi, and together we have developed this Ballet Hero Fantasy.

Den aufschlußreichsten Bericht über die Manga-Serie gibt es in der Dancing Times (20. August 2013):

After the show, Takafumi Adachi, an acclaimed manga artist, and his wife came backstage to meet Steven. The artist’s wife is a fan who sees McRae each time he performs in Japan and she had told her husband about the dancer’s interest in manga. “Takafumi was really excited to talk to me and I jumped in straightaway and suggested that we produce a manga together.” The ballet dancer and manga artist exchanged email addresses and batted some ideas to and fro across the globe before their concept for a new superhero with balletic powers finally emerged. (...)
While Adachi draws the manga cartoons and a partner works alongside him to develop the story (although the early episodes use the pre-existing narratives of the classical ballets on which they are based), McRae determined an over-arching set of strategic principles. “I want the underlying message behind any of the stories to be inspirational,” he tells me. “I came from not a very privileged area. The suburb that I grew up in was full of kids that knew if you wanted to better yourself you had to work your butt off. You didn’t have to be the best at everything, but you had to put in the work. So you would be in class and if a teacher said, ‘right, first two come forward’ there would be ten or 20 of us fighting to go first. This desire to prove yourself appears to be dwindling now. I don’t feel that the same hunger is there, anymore. Instead, I see energy being spent on negative issues. Young people are more inclined to say ‘I can’t do that’ rather than work hard to prove they can. In my manga, I wanted the message to be that you don’t need to be the best, but you can succeed and you have to work your butt off in the effort to try. Each episode will have that subliminal theme.”
The series is called Ballet Hero Fantasy. It will have an initial run of five episodes (each around 45 pages long). The first concerns The Nutcracker and was published in August and the next, featuring Swan Lake, follows in November. “Plans for a further three episodes in 2014 are taking shape and eventually there is scope to create new stories,” says McRae. These episodes will then be unified into a self-contained comic book, which McRae hopes will be produced in multiple languages, including an English version that will be available in the UK. Meanwhile, a Facebook page is being developed and the first story (in Japanese) can be purchased online. “The plan is to progress the project as far as it can go,” he says, adding, “The hope is to produce animated films in due course." (...)
“I am myself in each episode,” he continues, “and this young student, Dan, is watching me dance in the studio when he and I are magically transported through the mirror into the story of whatever ballet it is I’m rehearsing. Dan then sees me using my dance powers to combat evil. So, in The Nutcracker, for example, we are confronted by the Mouse King and his entourage of rats and I use dance to defeat them. Instead of picking up a gun and shooting them, I do something like three barrel jumps to knock them over! And I have to teach Dan all the different steps in order for him to be able to protect himself, which is an essential part of the journey. I teach him a step and he falls over and says, ‘I’ll never be able to do it’. I pick him up and say ‘of course you can’ and eventually he gets it. The message is encouraging.”
As we end our conversation, it occurs to me that the moral of Ballet Hero Fantasy is essentially Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes series updated to the modern age. (...)

Seine Idee scheint aufzugehen, zumal McRae in einem Interview mit The Ballet Bag über den weiteren Verlauf der Serie plaudert:

TBB: Coming back to Ballet Hero Fantasy, the first volume of Dancin’ Magazine has just gone out on sale in Japan, right? How is it doing?
Steven: Yes, last week. I spoke to the editor and she said it has been selling very well. Probably better than they had anticipated because it is a brand new publication. It is not an established magazine so she was very positive and said it was a fantastic start. They are already working on the second episode, so it must be doing ok.

TBB: And how many volumes will there be each year?
Steven: This is the August number. The next one comes out in November, so it is quarterly. We are hoping to do five and then put them all together in a book. The big plan is to eventually have it animated once all the characters and story have been developed. It has been a really pleasant experience. Of course these are the initial stages, but you have to start somewhere!