Melody

The thing that worries me about these people is that this mindset is unlikely to stop with opera. When are we going to be told that the ballet companies need to drop all repertoire that involves tutus and turn into contemporary dance troupes or that Shakespeare plays must be reimagined to be set in present-day third-world countries or that Gilbert and Sullivan operas are banned in all forms because otherwise they aren't relevant? Apparently when the Greek government shut down the Greek National Orchestra for lack of funds (and presumably because orchestras aren't high on the priority list), the orchestra played Elgar's Nimrod as its last orchestral composition in its final concert before signing off with the Greek national anthem. When our government via the Arts Council decides to get rid of symphony orchestras in the UK because they aren't "relevant," we'd better hope that Elgar's music hasn't been banned as being elitist so that the last orchestra can at least play it on its way out.

I remember seeing a Christmas Carol ballet by Northern Ballet, if memory serves. I enjoyed it a lot, but there's something about that story that doesn't seem to translate to ballet as easily as some others. Drama always seems to be more important in the arts than comedy, from novels to plays to dance to music. I remember reading a biography of Sir Arthur Sullivan, where people were constantly telling him he was wasting his time writing the G&S operettas and ought to be concentrating on serious music if he ever wanted to really make his name. I also remember interviews with Sigourney Weaver and Allison Janney, both of whom are somewhere in the region of 6 ft tall, where they said that early in their careers they were told that all they could expect in their careers was to be cast in comedy (and science fiction), because nobody wanted to see tall, gawky, not conventionally beautiful women as dramatic leads. I'm wondering if the people who make the decisions about what's important in the arts are taking serious material more seriously because it makes them feel more serious and important.

Original post deleted. Just wanted to say that I think that while it may be a worthy endeavour to hire more directors and producers who can create more diverse modern productions that speak to our current culture, we're still somewhat restricted in terms of producing what audiences want to see. We know what the bums-on-seats shows are, and they're generally traditional and generally European. Hopefully we can tolerate having top-rate performers from anywhere in the world cast in roles that were originally written for Europeans. As for how far we go to make actors of one race look like characters of another race is a different and currently pretty thorny issue, but it's no reason to avoid the production or the particular casting altogether.

I was rather concerned to read that some companies, both amateur and professional, are being advised not to stage The Mikado (generally considered G&S's best work) because it involves Japanese-ish makeup and is basically a caricature that could be considered offensive. Same thing with portraying Othello (in plays, opera, and ballet) in blackface. I know this is a different issue from some ballets being dropped because they don't appeal to current tastes, but it's rather worrying that pieces which are considered some of the best things written by their authors/composers are on the chopping block because of these issues.

For example, would ballet have been better off if Lynn Seymour hadn't existed? Unfortunately, today's Lynn Seymours probably aren't going to have careers in ballet. Personally I don't think that's a good thing. One of the greatest Juliets was Galina Ulanova in her 40s, and she looked like a woman.

Unfortunately, there seems to still be an element of wanting to grab the shiny object of a young foreign dancer doing well in international competitions, and to do that they have to assess out a home-grown student. I don't see that stopping, although I think it's a shame that home-grown dancing students seem to be regarded in so many ways as expendable. I think it'd serve several purposes to have these junior schools not be boarding schools - they could take more pupils, some of whom might at some point in their school life be able to transfer to a track that led to a career in the industry but not necessarily as a performer; it'd give children the ability to spend more time outside the hothouse and with supportive parents/relatives/friends who can keep track of their experiences more easily; it'd be cheaper than boarding school for families that can't afford the full boarding fees; and it'd be altogether less elitist and just more normal. But the UK seems to have a culture (not just in performing arts) of boarding schools being regarded as giving the best education. I don't think it'd make a lot of difference for people to boycott the ballet companies, especially in a city like London where there are always loads of tourists who want tickets and have no idea what goes on in the schools. I'm reading in other threads that the ROH seems to be making it harder for core enthusiasts to buy more tickets because they want to encourage a wider range of new audience members. As long as the tickets are selling out, regardless of who's buying them, boycotts by core supporters might not be effective anyway.

I'm just saying that a taller dancer will weigh more than a shorter one with the same physique, and this might be why, with taller dancers being more in fashion than they were, schools and companies have encouraged the dancers to be thinner. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I don't know what the actual criteria are - whether they're trying to make it easier for men to handle some of these complicated lifts or whether this androgynous look is a requirement for contemporary dance or whether Balanchine's desire for female dancers to be rail-thin has finally become the criterion or what the reason actually is. Personally I don't especially like the look of a bunch of swans or fairies in tutus with totally flat chests and no hips, but that might be because I grew up in the days before that became the standard.

I wonder how much this really is just at the school level and how much is because a certain body type is required by companies these days, with the sort of gymnastic choreography they're doing, and that schools have to produce the sorts of dancers that the companies want. Especially now that the dancers seem to be taller than they were, which makes some of the lifts (especially involving the man walking around the stage with the woman draped around him) more strenuous unless the dancers are thinner to compensate for the extra height. With companies getting more and more homogeneous, there isn't that much scope in the ballet world for a prospective dancer to look elsewhere without leaving ballet altogether. It's sad to think that dancers with feminine bodies like Margot Fonteyn and Lynn Seymour might very well not make it through school these days, if they were even accepted in the first place, because the body type is so important. Frederick Ashton did have a grouse about the shapeless dancers he came across later in his career (what he actually said was a bit more X-rated, but that was the general idea). Honestly, when you see a dancer in profile in her tutu, from the neck down it could very easily be a boy- no breasts, no hips. But that's the style Balanchine wanted from the start, hence his baby-ballerina choices very early in his career, and that's what we seem to be stuck with. I don't know how things are in Russia nowadays, but I remember one documentary where a dancer was proudly saying at around midday that she'd had nothing to eat all day but just existed on black coffee, and it cut to a scene in the cafeteria where another dancer took what seemed to be several minutes to choke down one forkful of rice. This is giving youngsters a terrible example - being tall and thin, not eating, existing on black coffee and cigarettes, and having to deal with much more physically challenging choreography requiring all sorts of injury-risking extensions and acrobatics, is just dangerous.

I have the same problem with having my social media feed full of post from people I'm not interested in following, but I've found that if I stop opening their posts, their content pretty much goes away after a few weeks. I suppose one thing about social media is that the dancer has basic control over what gets posted, unlike depending on stuff in the tabloids, which can be very damaging because unfortunately that's what sells. But you always have the impression that what you're seeing is very curated and not necessarily a truthful version of their lives - if you can take it all with a large pinch of salt, it's entertaining enough.

Not sure if this is accessible in the UK, but it's the Telegraph obituary at MSN and isn't behind a paywall, at least in the USA. Lynn Seymour, superstar ballerina who embodied the rebellious and flawed heroines of 1960s dance – obituary (msn.com) I saw her in A Month in the Country a few times back in the 1970s, as well as in The Invitation, and she was unforgettable in both. It's always nice when a retired ballerina spends so much time helping the younger generation, and she's going to be missed by a lot of people. Interesting that, like Alicia Markova, she died within a day of her birthday.

It's really depressing that stuff like that is still being produced in great volume and still has a wide audience. Honestly, I think we've gone past the point of no return, and I'm sort of glad I'm old and have no children or grandchildren. I don't even want to think about what's going to happen when the resource wars really get going.

It's sad that we lost so many years of seriously addressing this problem, while governments were encouraging people to use energy-efficient light bulbs and increase their insulation and suggesting that that was all we needed to do, when really we've needed governments to step up and do some large-scale stuff all along. They're doing better now, but all indications are that it's too little too late.

The ENO has been doing some very creative striking back. Whoever wrote these lyrics deserves a medal.

That very observation in the Guardian article was part of why I posted this thread - I mean, we're sort of into "you couldn't make it up" territory here. I mean, fine, perform opera in car parks. Just don't expect ENO to be the company doing it. Plus, if they're serious about making opera accessible to people everywhere and performed in all sorts of new and exciting ways, we're going to need significant investment in music education at all levels in school, and from what I'm gathering from reading newspapers and blogs and whatnot, that's the exact opposite of what's actually happening.

Just seen this article about ENO's Arts Council grant, and the money seems to be dependent on ENO moving out of London and (good arts-administration lingo) reimagining itself. "We don’t want to bring down the curtain on ENO, but opera has to change" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/14/eno-opera-funding-arts-council-audiences Is what they're suggesting actually realistic? When a funding organisation is excusing its decisions by saying, more or less, "we aren't trying to kill you off, but...". that tends to make me suspicious. (Also wondering if they have something similar in mind for ENB at some point in the future as they look at ways of saving money.)

I think the idea of a more scaled-down coronation is probably the right way to go. After the Queen's memorable reign, and especially with the funeral so soon after all the Jubilee celebrations, the present reign is going to be more low-profile, and the coronation should reflect that. I do wonder about the whole Prince of Wales thing, though. I assume that part of the reason for the early announcement of the title being conferred on Prince William was to head off the objections from Welsh nationalists about another English Prince of Wales. An investiture would probably be an excuse for even more agitating on that subject. I hope the current Prince of Wales does spend time and show interest in Wales during his tenure, something his father did seem to at least try to do.

So now the period of court mourning is over and the royal family will be dealing with the new normal. I hope things go smoothly for them. The senior royals, especially the King and Queen, had a lot to do in the week before the funeral, with all those trips and especially with having to come up with a speech in Welsh in the middle of everything else. With the time difference between here and the UK, I think I was up for 24 hours straight on the day of the funeral - very memorable and historic. It was also interesting, a few days earlier, to see the service in St Giles Cathedral with the Scottish standard rather than the usual royal standard in evidence. I assume the coronation will take place next summer.

One of our local supermarkets has got rid of human checkouts. They claim it's because they can't get people to take the jobs - interesting that other supermarkets don't seem to be having that problem, but maybe it's just a matter of time. I hate the self-checkouts, which are complicated and buggy. We started getting groceries delivered in 2020 when covid started being a thing, so we've just carried on doing that and got rid of one of the cars.

I was reading about a heatwave back in 1967 when it got so hot in London that some penguins were taken to an ice rink because the zoo wasn't safe for them in the heat. Apparently it was in the low 80s. That's what counted as sweltering heat half a century ago - happy days! The poor penguins at Chessington Zoo these days, where heatwaves get into the triple figures. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/24/newsid_3019000/3019810.stm

So in just over two years, she'll have broken Louis XIV's record too.

This reminds me of the controversy swirling around The Mikado, which is Gilbert and Sullivan's masterpiece, because it's deemed to be offensive by parodying Japan (which is really isn't, it's actually parodying British culture) and having the cast made up to look vaguely Japanese. Then I'm hearing about Othello being offensive because of the use of blackface and The Merchant of Venice because of the Jewish caricature of Shylock, and I'm beginning to wonder where this all ends. Pretty sure that whatever you do, someone will manage to be offended, yet doing nothing really isn't an option. I hope the people responsible for programming and casting will work hard to find the most sensible middle way through this minefield, with the smallest possible number of casualties.

Also, I think Ashton is somewhat out of fashion in the UK in general and at ENB in particular. There weren't any Ashton ballets to speak of in the ENB repertoire under Rojo, if I remember right; it'd be a heck of a culture shock to bring Iain Webb in now.

I hope she brings a fresh perspective to SF Ballet. I was a season ticket holder early in the Helgi Tomasson regime, when he basically chucked out everything that Lew Christensen and Michael Smuin had done and proceeded to turn the company into the west-coast branch of NYCB. It basically became Balanchine/Forsythe/Balanchine/Forsythe with bits of seriously forgettable choreography of his own. Gave up our season tickets after a few years of that.

Not going to be able to unsee that...

I loved her in Till Death Us Do Part and in Sherlock, and those roles were a lifetime apart. For someone who didn't start out as an actress, she really did a great job of becoming a real pro. Una Stubbs: Till Death Us Do Part and Sherlock actress dies aged 84 - BBC News