PROPERTY
life
Fiddling
the system
Joanne Mabin was told she had to
choose between dancing and music. Her
choice was not to choose, as she tells
Roz Whistance
AS you enter the marquee for a wedding
or a black tie event you’re struck by the girl
playing the solo violin. Her authoritative
playing cleverly creates a mood that is at
once classy and intimate.
“I don’t want to seem like a jack of all
trades,” says Joanne Mabin, when asked
about her work. Now this is frankly daft. The
full proverb is “Jack of all trades, Master of
none”; it describes someone who dabbles.
And Joanne is master of everything she
chooses to do.
She’s a musician and a dancer. She is a
performing violinist who teaches music to
children, and she has two dance schools,
Article by Roz Whistance
one on the Island and one in London. “That’s
about it,” she says. It seems quite enough.
She has been in a girl band, played in
Robbie Williams’s band, and done bits
on television such as Hollyoaks and the
Parkinson Show. Hardly the sign of a
dabbler.
“I think it was when I was told I couldn’t
be both a musician and a dancer that I was
determined to do both,” says JoJo, as she is
known to her many friends. She is a quietly
spoken young woman, chatty with a ready
sense of humour, with wispy blonde hair and
an easy going manner. Maybe it is this which
makes her obvious determination to excel so
surprising.
She won a scholarship to the Chetham
School of Music in Manchester, one of
The Island's most loved magazine
Europe’s highest ranked music schools. She
was twelve, and was quite aware that she
was offering a bit of a challenge when she
turned up for her interview wearing her
ballet t-shirt – she had just been dancing
with the Lewis London Ballet. “One of the
officials on the panel said: “You know you
won’t be able to do both music and ballet.
You have to choose.” Perhaps it was just
as well Joanne’s mother had told her to
agree with everything they said. She got her
scholarship to study violin, but continued to
dance.
The dancing had started when she was
four, but even at that age she’d got a bit of
performing experience. Her parents were
entertainers in the working men’s clubs in
and around Doncaster, so performing came
naturally to her. “When I was two, my sister
Claire got up on stage and did a solo. I
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