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Jane S

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  1. Jane S
    And you'd get to see at least 12 principals and 20 or so soloists/demi soloists.
  2. Jane S
    Even better for me - on the day the booking opened I could take a slightly different route to work, drop the form through the letter-box of the Box Office in Floral Street at about 08.45, find somewhere nice for a coffee, and stroll into the office slightly late but not conspicuously so. I used to quite look forward to it and got the seats I wanted maybe 4 times out of 5.
  3. Jane S
    Good to hear that Lania Atkins had a successful debut - I had seen her name in the company listings and wondered where she had come from: she's Australian and has been dancing with the Norwegian Ballet, where she's done Myrtha and also Gamzatti - some excellent photos of that on her Instagram pages. She was an Aub Jensen dancer with RB for a time - some comments about her on this forum here .
  4. Jane S
    I think the company may have 'facilitated' earlier flower showers but my impression was that they were organised and paid for by the audience. I remember hearing that 'they' (a group of regulars) had collected £100 for a flower shower for Merle Park's debut in Swan Lake - and that, 50 years ago, bought quite a lot of daffodils!
  5. Jane S
    My fondest memory of him is as Eros in David Bintley's Sylvia - an absolutely brilliant comedy act!
  6. Jane S
    As well as the lead couple there's a pas de trois (1f/2m) which is very fast and completely non-stop - it's actually not much more than 2 miutes but must feel like eternity to them! (Original cast included Ninette de Valois and Robert Helpmann) There used to be 6 couples in the corps de ballet but I think at the last revival there were 10 - and there's also a pas de quatre for what used to be known as 'the little girls', later changed to 'ladies' - Ashton added it soon after the first performances, and one of the little girls was Margot Fonteyn. The two leading roles were created for Alicia Markova and Stanislas Idzikowsky (the great virtuoso of his day - though he actually only did the first 3 performances) and they each had a brilliant solo. It's a lovely piece, one of my most favourite Ashton ballets - it would be wonderful to find they'd ditched the costumes from the last revival but I guess that for just 5 performances they won't) (And I thought Darcey Bussell was totally miscast!)
  7. Jane S
    And in the print edition it's in the news section rather than on the arts page
  8. Jane S
    Wayne Eagling once made a piece exactly for this: excuse me if I quote what I wrote about it at the time (2010) in Dance View: "Eagling’s Men Y Men, set to orchestrated piano music by Rachmaninov, is unashamedly designed to keep the company’s men interested during a long tour of Giselle. Presumably it succeeds in that – all of the cast of nine appeared properly engaged, and the choreography looks difficult enough to challenge even the best of them. But it’s not – as you might perhaps expect – a jump-and-turn fest: there are plenty opportunities for show-off brilliance, but they’re nicely placed to contrast with some very effective adagio sequences, and the mood of the whole piece is quiet enough to make the transition to Giselle, with no intervening interval, seem quite unalarming. Yat-Sen Chang, the company’s leading virtuoso, danced the most prominent role with his usual tidy vigour; the rest of the cast included some of the best of the younger dancers, such as Vadim Muntagirov who is in his first season out of school and is already dancing Albrecht. It’s nice to see that Eagling has dedicated his ballet to the late David Ashmole, who never danced with this company but was a contemporary of Eagling’s in the Royal Ballet when they were very frequently cast together in demi-soloist roles."
  9. Jane S
    The RDB's triple bill Giant Steps. which opens at the end of next week. consists of 3 - THREE! - plotless works : Serenade, Etudes and a new piece by Jorma Elo, Sibelius' 4th Symphony ( described as being for the company's men). Some interesting casting, especially for the the second male principal in Etudes - Alban Lendorf in the first cast and very junior corps de ballet dancer Afonso Coelho in the second!
  10. Jane S
    Or just as well - the last time I saw them do the Ashton R&J (summer 1990, I think) I thought they had let it go so badly that we left at the first interval - the only time I've ever done that.
  11. Jane S
    The final 'Rising Stars' concert, including former prize winners Madison Young and Julian Mackay, is on Medici TV this afternoon, starting 2 pm GMT.
  12. Jane S
    I don't think it's the same one - I haven't got I am a Dancer but snippets on Youtube seem to show a very different decor. Edit: I do have I am a Dancer and it's defintiely not the same recording.
  13. Jane S
    I agree - I wish it had been left as a legend. The only cast I've seen that came anywhere near justifying a revival was Rojo and Polunin - also perhaps Le Riche in the very first performance, when I had the weirdest feeling that Nureyev's spirit was hanging around watching - the only time in my life I've ever felt something like that!
  14. Jane S
    Neat!
  15. Jane S
    Apparently one of the dancers in Troy Game was Joseph Cipolla -- anyone spot him?
  16. Jane S
    He was a late replacement - 'catapulted on' according to John Percival - for the injured Jose Manuel Carreno. Poor guy!
  17. Jane S
    August 1992, Festival Hall? Dying Swan, Sylphides, Spectre, Scheherazade - though not necessarily in that order.
  18. Jane S
    Just watched Part 2 - loved Wayne Sleep but the bit that really got me was Fonteyn's Giselle - so simple and so wonderful. (By the way, Robert Penman's Catalogue of dance in the BBC TV archives says they also have 3 hours of Fonteyn's complete interviews with Marie Rambert, Kyra Nijnsky, Nureyev and Fred Astaire, as well as snippets from some of the rehearsals - nice to know, although not much chance of ever seeing them .)
  19. Jane S
    Not sacrilege at all - I gave up on Makarova's Swan Lake in the end as I got just so impatient with her slow tempi! And too many others copied her.
  20. Jane S
    You can see some details of the Peter Schaufuss programmes here .
  21. Jane S
    Episodes 2 and 3 are scheduled for Jan. 7th at 21.30 and 22.30
  22. Jane S
    Luke Jennings, writing in the Observer in 2014: Lauren Cuthbertson has suffered a string of mishaps, most recently a badly twisted foot sustained while rehearsing the notorious “slide” in Act 1 of Manon. This step, an accelerated, feet-first skid to the ground, has injured Cuthbertson, Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Guillem, Sarah Lamb, Cynthia Harvey and Tamara Rojo. It is a known and wretched hazard which clearly should be modified.
  23. Jane S
    Another Rudolf: Jonathan Cope - not one of the greats, but way beyond what I'd thought he could do.
  24. Jane S
    Me neither
  25. Jane S
    I have a monthly subscription. which I took out in the summer so that I could watch a particular programme - I don't really get my money's worth from them but I could cancel any time so it's my own fault. I use it mostly to watch the same things over and over but there is quite a lot of dance on there. from many different companies, although they don't add nearly as much new programming as they do opera and classical music, and I should think your daughter would almost certainly find plenty to interest her. (Though she will miss their next offering, the premiere of Ratmansky's Coppelia from La Scala. which is next Sunday but I think is a one-off showing.)
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