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Jane S

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  1. Yes - and I was really pleased to see the two dancers in the last section: Stephanie Chen Gundorph is a near-contemporary of Ida Praetorius but she had to wait a lot longer to reach the top: I think she's lovely. And Ditte Baltzer was still just an apprentice when I last saw the company but was already known as one to look out for.
  2. They only did 3 performances, plus a gala - blink and you missed it. (Or in my case, have flu and you missed it.)
  3. Well, it's quite complicated to work out, partly because they didn't do 'runs' in those days - more 'clusters', where SB would be seen most seasons, but it would be half a dozen performances over 3 or 4 weeks, and then a few more a couple of months later etc etc. But yes, for a long time Fonteyn got more performances than anyone else - it was her ballet, the one she was most associated with. Otherwise the performances were split amongst the ballerinas who did Aurora (more or less all of them), but there was often a newbie, who would get maybe a couple of shows in her first year and then gradually get more - or in some cases, would disappear after only one or two seasons. As a rough guide, in the production first given in 1946 and last seen in 1967, Fonteyn did 112 and the next most seen ballerinas did something in the range 40 - 60 each. (you need the Royal Ballet - the first 50 Years book if you want all the details!)
  4. Casting now announced: In order Dante/Virgil/Beatrice Nov. 4/8/11/16/18 Ryan Tomash/Alban Lendorf/Astrid Elbo Nov. 5/9/14/17 Gregory Dean/Alexander Staeger/Holly Dorger
  5. Baryshnikov's performances were in April 1977 - two with Jenner and one with Collier. John Percival, writing in Dance & Dancers, mentioned that Baryshnikov had danced Colas in the ABT production ("a version of such banal choreography that the leading dancers have to impose their own personality and camp everything up if they are to make any effect at all") and thought that experience might have been responsible for MB making Colas "just a little too self centred" for Ashton - but that was "the only tiny flaw in a performance that was otherwise a sheer joy to watch". He also thought Jenner went slightly better with MB than Collier, who he thought went better with Nureyev. (That we should have had such a choice!)
  6. Just to squeeze in one more - yes, it was Collier - I saw them! Edited to add: But I think he did a couple with Jenner too
  7. The RB has done at least two runs of Illuminations - with Ashley Page in the 1980s, and again in the 1990s.
  8. No - they don't normally announce casts till quite near the opening night - or, one occasion I remember, after the opening night! However I just noticed, elsewhere on the theatre's website, that Alban Lendorf is cast as Virgil! It wasn't selling very well last time I checked. even with an offer of a 40% price reduction for under 25's.
  9. Though the story at the time was that Park said she only did Swan Lake because she was tired of people asking her why she didn't!
  10. Just finished it - 300 pages in rather small print - a lot to take in! Will comment later when others have read it.
  11. I ordered the book from my local bookshop ( small country town) on publication day and they told me it should arrive by the end of this week - and they were right: I picked it up this morning.
  12. The second part, broadcast a week later, was called 'Diaghilev, The Years in Exile', and dealt with the last 10 years of his life. The format was the same, with some additional contributors. (Did Jane Pritchard show one or both of these in one of her wonderful NFT series? The second one isn't on I player but I'm sure I've seen them both a lot more recently than 1968.) John Drummond's book contains transcripts of all the interviews - fun to see how responsive different people were - some give brief, paragraph-long answers to Drummond's questions, whilst Serge Lifar talks for 2 1/2 pages of small print before needing another prompt. There's also a long and wonderful introduction about how he met the people he interviewed, including stories about how Anton Dolin left him to pay a huge bill in a bar in Cannes, how Alicia Markova was incapable of telling any story in less than 15 minutes, etc etc - it's fascinating and I confess that though I've had that book for years, I can't remember ever actually reading it before - so thank you for reminding me of it, jm365!
  13. I think even 'perfect' is subjective, unless you are only talking about technique - and even then personal preference will influence you even if you don't know it. 'Definitive' for me means a performance which may have been far from perfect but which I never expect to see bettered. Many I would describe like that were in ballets created for them - Haydee and Cragun in Taming of the Shrew, Lynn Seymour in any number of things - but my own most definitive ever was really pure accident. (Long story, skip if you've heard it before) In the 1990s the Friends of Covent Garden ran what they called the Come and Risk It queue for dress rehearsals - you could turn up without a ticket and if you were early enough - 7.30 a.m. say - you could be fairly sure of getting something, and most often in the Stalls Circle rather than in the Amphi so it was a good deal. They never announced the casts in advance, so there was I one morning queuing up for a Bayadere rehearsal, and thinking quite contentedly that we'd probably get the first cast - Yoshida and Mukhamedov - when a whisper came down from the front of the line: 'The Japanese girl is off and a Russian girl, who's done Nikiya here before, is flying in to replace her'. Could it, could it possibly be Asylmuratova? Surely we couldn't be that lucky.. maybe there's been some other Russian I'd forgotten about? Hours of suspense - but then the announcement from the stage and yes, it was her. (I think the people around me could tell that I was pleased.) She had come to the theatre straight from Heathrow and presumably had spent any spare minutes in warming up - so she wore a dark blue unitard throughout, with a white tutu over it for the Shades, her hair was pinned up anyhow and she had street make-up at best; and as it was some time since she'd last done the role here, she occasionally had to stop and ask Mukhamedov what came next, and they laughed and went on with it - and she was so wonderful that I remember thinking that if Terpsichore herself were to whisper in my ear that this was the greatest performance of this role, ever, I would easily have believed her. I was there on my own and was so excited that I was practically running round the theatre in the intervals looking for someone to talk to, and when I met an acquaintance who was doing the same thing we almost fell into one another's arms. I guess AA felt she had absolutely nothing to lose and just went for it - it was so alive and emotionally truthful, as if it was all happening to her for the first time - just astonishing, it brings tears to my eyes just writing about it now. And Mukhamedov was pretty good too (But despite all this, I can imagine someone else there thinking it was fine but nothing special, and I wouldn't argue - above a certain level of competence it really is mostly subjective.)
  14. A propos absolutely nothing: I just came across a mention of a performance of Ashton's Tweedledum and Tweedledee at an ROH gala or something a few years ago, which said that the Tweedles were Bennet Gartside and Ricardo Cervera - for some reason just thinking about this (which I didn't see) makes me laugh! Lucky Alice, too, whoever she was.
  15. The George Balanchine Foundation is putting out a lot of information, videos, photographs and links to past insight sessions on its Facebook page throughout the NYCB season - some small consolation, perhaps, for not being there
  16. And it was so! Astrid Elbo was promoted to Solodanser - the company's highest rank - after last night's Swan Lake. Would so love to see her...!
  17. NYCB brought Jewels to Covent Garden in their 1979 season - my diary tells me that I saw it then but sadly I don't remember much about it.
  18. If you take a look at the video of the rest of the show you'll get a better idea of the occasion, which started with Dido's Lament... I hope the dancers had a great time!
  19. Agreed - but if you can look at this Swan Lake for what it is rather than what it isn't. it has some interesting ideas and it frequently looks stunning. Astrid Elbo is the first night Odette/Odile and it would be really good to see her promoted to Principal - well overdue, if you ask me.
  20. The RDB has just announced the casting for a run of Swan Lake starting next week (entirely sold out) and I noticed a couple of familiar names: Joseph Aumeer, who dances Benno in one of the casts, and Lazaro Corrales (RBS, brother of Cesar) who dances the Fool (Jester) in the other one. Good to see them both progressing! (But note that this is a Hubbe ( and Schandorff) production so the roles (particularly Benno) are very different from what you are probably used to.)
  21. ABT danced The River in London a couple of times - at Covent Garden in 1970 and in their 1977 Coliseum season - I saw the later one but there was so much else going on in that week that The River was rather overshadowed - others may remember more than I do!
  22. There was a piece about how the dancers feel - see Links for 17 August.
  23. The weird thing about doing Fille and Facade in the same programme (as they did on the first night despite it having been advertised as Fille and Pineapple Poll) was that they did Fille first - I saw it a couple of days later and I thought it seemed quite wrong- a real anticlimax - and in fact I noted that lots of people went home before Facade. (I like to think that someone was worried that Fille, with those ribbons and maypoles and things, might be a dreadful flop and they'd better follow it with a guaranteed send-'em-home-happy piece just in case.) By the end of the season they'd changed their minds and did Scenes de Ballet/Fille instead, close to cup-runneth-over territory in my book!
  24. Yes, but possibly not since the RDB season at Covent Garden in 1953. (And these days they do a Hubbe version.)
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