FLOSS

I tend to think that the neglect of works like Job, Checkmate,The Rakes's Progress and the Prospect Before Us has far more to do with Kevin's personal taste and his ambition to be remembered as the company's great moderniser than their innate quality; theatrical viability or the audience's personal taste, although this nebulous concept of audience taste is often invoked in support of a director's decision to neglect a work or a whole tranche of once popular repertory. No one ever confronts the artistic powers that be to ask how they have arrived at their conclusion about the current audience's taste in the absence of audience surveys or to point out that it is rather difficult to have a worthwhile opinion about the quality of a type of repertory or an individual work that you have never seen in live.performance in the theatre with a decent cast. I am not convinced that any of de Valois' surviving ballets are any more old fashioned than Balanchine's Prodigal Son which Kevin programmed for revival only a few season's ago. The Prodigal Son like the de Valois ballets I have already mentioned is a work which is concerned with narrative and the depiction of character which uses a dance vocabulary based on a combination of recognisable dance steps and a mixture of grotesque and natural body language rather than a display of classically based choreography Of course you may easily be persuaded that a work has passed its sell by date and is "hopelessly old fashioned" if you are repeatedly told as much and you then see a revival where more care has been given to casting popular dancers and securing healthy box office receipts than anything else. if an unfamiliar work is staged after years of neglect but insufficient care is given to capturing the work's mood and little or no effort has been put into getting the casting right the audience may well end up believing that.what they have been told is true and the work is weak and its neglect well justified. If you had only encountered Checkmate with Bussell as the Black Queen or The Rake's Progress with Kobborg as the Rake you would have found both works weak and theatrically ineffective and you would have wondered why anyone had bothered to revive them. However the problem had little to do with the viability of the works and everything to do with the casting. Both Bussell and Kobborg were hopelessly miscast. Those who saw Kobborg as the Rake did not see the character or the ballet that de Valois had created.Those who saw Samodurov in the role were far more fortunate but I always suspected that Samadurov was really a demi-character dancer rather than a danseur. Neither Bussell nor Kobborg progressed beyond reproducing the steps as if their accurate reproduction was an end in itself rather than merely being one of the choreographic elements from which de Valois intended her dancers to create her characters. Indeed I seem to recall that Clemebt Crisp was so unimpressed by Kobborg's performance that he declared that the company was no longer able to dance The Rake's Progress.That was not entirely true but it did seem that the Kobbirg cast was unduly burdened with self conscious dancers most of whom seemed far from convinced that what they were being asked ro do was worth their time and effort. Morera as the Betrayed Girl was fine but was not able to counter the impact what was going on around her. The second cast led by Samodurov was much more effective largely because both he and Hatley, his Betrayed Girl, had a firm grasp of the essential nature of the work which de Valois had intended to be evocation of Hogarth;s version of eighteenth century London. Statements from management that a work is "outdated" or is "old fashioned" seem to me to be little more than feeble attempts to justify decisions in artistic terms which have been prompted by the demands of the marketing department or the personal taste of the artistic director. I can't help wondering whether such statements influence the audience's opinion of works to which such labels are attached? One thing that puzzles me is when and in what circumstances Ashton's ballets began to be described as "twee" and to which of his ballets this label is to be applied? I don't recall this description being in circulation in the late eighties when MacMillan's ballets began to be promoted and the amount of stage time allocated to the Ashton repertory began to be reduced. I recall reading an article by John Percival in which he reported that he had heard dancers being encouraged by colleagues to "camp up" the Ashton choreography which they had been learning. Did that lead to his works increasingly being thought of as "twee" and "silly"? Having seen nearly every surviving Ashton ballet the only works that I can think of which might be thought to deserve being categorised as "twee" are the cloyingly sentimental Nursery Suite which was created for a royal celebration and was not intended to have an after life and The Tales of Beatrix Potter which Ashton created for a film and did not intend should be staged.We have Dowell and Ashton's nephew to thank for the artistically ill judged decision to stage Beatrix Potter an action which has probably done more than anything else to tarnish Ashton's reputation as a serious choreographer since at one time it was probably the one Ashton work that an unsuspecting audience was most likely to encounter on a regular basis.

I have always understood that it is the fact that the six dancers remain on stage for the entire duration of Symphonic Variations combined with the fact that there are points during performance when all six dancers are required to perform as an ensemble rather than as soloists which is what makes the work so challenging to perform. It is an extraordinary work and it is a real challenge for everyone on stage because of the level of concentration required of the performers. Sibley is on record as saying that in comparison with the choreography for the side girls the Fonteyn role is a piece of cake. I assume that this is because while the central role created on Fonteyn seems like an expression of serenity the choreography made on Shearer and May contains quirky odd counts which must appear serenely straightforward. You might have thought that by now the artistic director of the Royal Ballet might feel in a position to draw up a list of say twenty or twenty five works created for the company by its first three choreographer directors or acquired for it by them that deserve to be described as twentieth century classics because of their quality and their continuing importance to the development of dance. Ashton's Symphonic Variations, Scenes de Ballet, Fille, Cinderella, Daphnis and Chloe, The Dream, Month,Monotones and Enigma Variations would be on my list as would MacMillan's true masterpiece The Song of the Earth. Among the acquisitions I would include Nijinska's Les Noces, Balanchine's Apollo, Serenade, Ballet Imperial , Symphony in C and the Four Temperaments as well as Fokine's Firebird and perhaps controversially Petrushka. Fokine's use of the corps de ballet in the crowd scenes in the latter work is an object lesson in the depiction of socially differentiated groups and individual members of a crowd. The works on the list would be treated as essential core repertory and regardless of the cost of staging them and the objection that one act works do not sell they would be revived on a fairly regular basis so that they remain part of the company's active collective memory as its dancers and audiences experience them in performance rather than reading about them and searching for clips of them on You tube. I don't think any of us know whether Kevin was appointed as a safe pair of hands or as a moderniser. His public statements and his own commissioning and programming policies make it clear that he sees himself as a moderniser whose overriding ambition is to restore the company's reputation as a creative force and to provide its dancers with a new repertory. While he is a product of the RBS, danced for BRB and worked as an administrator for the company he now runs I don't get the feeling that he is particularly attached to the company's twentieth century repertory whether in the form of the works which his predecessors created for it or those they went out of their way to acquire for it. Of course Kevin's apparent indifference to the company's historic twentieth century repertory may simply be a reaction to the number of significant anniversaries marked during Mason's directorship but it seems to go deeper than that.., However hard an artistic director tries to hide his or her personal taste when it comes to repertory choices his or her likes, interests and dislikes soon manifest themselves in what gets staged. In addition there is always the question with an outside appointment of just how interested and committed they will be to works of which they have no personal experience as either performer or audience member. Although Kevin is a product of the RBS, dancing with SWRB/BRB exposed him to different versions of the classics from those on show at Covent Garden as well as a different range of one act works. Finally he is faced with the purely practical problem of covering the company's operating costs. This must add to the temptation to follow the economic model which the company has employed to achieve solvency since the nineties when the company came close to being disbanded.If you want to know the reason for the narrowing of the repertory then I think that it was the company's near death experience at this time which made it ultra cautious in its programming policy. Now I happen to believe that it is perfectly possible to accommodate new work and productions in the schedule if you are prepared to revise and tweak what has become the no thought required programming of twenty plus performances of the annual Nutcracker the annual MacMillan dram ballet and one or more of de Valois' nineteenth century classics. But given the financial crisis which is affecting everyone and the abject failure of the marketing department to sell tickets or set sensible ticket prices I think it unlikely that the ROH Board will be inclined to support what it will see as an unduly adventurous programming policy when it comes to scheduling twentieth century classics. I just hope that the Ashton programmes at the end of the season buck the trend; sell well and cause questions to be asked about the company's current dull and overly predictable programming policy

As I said earlier in this discussion an artistic director is the director of an entire ballet company not merely the director of its most talented members or the most recent recruits. He or she has to operate within budgetary constraints which may mean that once they have paid the salaries of existing members of the company they do not have sufficient funds to appoint a new recruit at a higher level than artist Remember the company is required to cover its costs and an overspend is more likely to result in a call for tighter budgetary control; a reduction in company size and an even more limited range of repertory than a helpful bale out from the government. A director may recognise the talent and the potential of a dancer but feel that the individual would not be a good fit for the company at that time. Kevin has spoken about seeing wonderful dancers but feeling that they were not right for the company presumably because of an unlikely fit with its core repertory which is more concerned with the creation of character; mood and expressiveness than the circus of bravura technical display. I think that it would, for example, be difficult for the company to accommodate a dancer like Ivan Vasiliev who is essentially a bravura technician. In addition to the financial impact of appointing an inexperienced dancer at a more senior level than is usual there is also the impact on company morale of such an appointment. Appointing a young inexperienced dancer, however talented he or she might be, over the heads of more experienced dancers who have given loyal service without any apparent recognition.of their talents will almost certainly adversely affect company morale. Before anyone suggests that such dancers must obviously be lacking in talent and deserve their obscurity and lack of recognition I would point out that a dancer can, in a company the size of the RB, be almost too useful at a relatively lowly level with the result that they are overlooked by management when it comes to promotion. This is what happened to Laura Morera who for years was seen as an exceptionally useful soloist and Ashton dancer . She was eventually promoted but was told that she would still be dancing the same repertory after promotion. She.reported that when she attended class the day after her promotion the company applauded her and many dancers told her that her promotion made them feel that all their hard work was worthwhile. At the time that Muntagirov went to ENB and Bracewell joined BRB Polunin was not the only talented young dancer whose career was being watched over by the RB management. McRae was in the early stages of his career and there was a dancer called Zachary Faruque who made his debut as Solor a few days after Polunin did. Faruque left the company and the world of dance soon afterwards almost certainly for cultural reasons. I seem to recall that he told a Ballet Association meeting that his father would have accepted him being a footballer but struggled with the idea that his son was a dancer. The thing that most young dancers crave at the outset of their career is the opportunity to dance and some will choose that over joining a prestigious company. They are after all free agents and tend to take more control over their careers today than perhaps they did in the past.Seasons on tour with both BRB and ENB provide much better opportunities to learn repertory and then consolidate that experience than working in Bow Street at the lowest level in the company.. I am not sure how long either company's tours are these days but even as the most junior Albrecht on the rota a dancer might get at least ten performances of the role on tour which compares very favourably with the two on offer at Bow Street once you are deemed ready for the role. BRB offered not only the opportunity to learn repertory but the opportunity to work with an established choreographer who regularly made new works for his company.This at a time when the resident company was doing very little new work. In addition Bintley made his ballets using a classically based style which emphasised expressiveness rather than technical display. The opportunity to work in a creative company which held out the prospect of created roles must be an attractive prospect for any dancer. In his Ballet Association interview in 2022 Bracewell said that after winning the YAGP he had three job offers and chose BRB because of the opportunities it gave to learn repertory, its size and its reputed friendliness. It seems he felt that it was the company that would suit him best in the initial stages of his career. There is no danger in a company of the size of BRB of getting lost in the crowd, overlooked or sidelined.If you show aptitude and application you will be given performance opportunities some scheduled some not You dance a role for the first time in one town and the next week you dance it somewhere else before a new audience who do not know or care how badly or how well you danced it the week before. Each time you gain greater knowledge of the role and consolidate the experience and so on throughout the tour. Joining BRB in its current or earlier incarnations has always seemed like a smart career move to me. It is obvious that there are those who think that Mason made the wrong decisions when it came to recruiting dancers but that is to ignore the state of the company at the time she took over the running of the Royal Ballet.The company had been demoralised by Ross Strettin's short lived directorship during which he had chopped and changed casting at short notice; sidelined established dancers; given leading roles to dancers who were not yet ready for them; ignored the company's traditional repertory and staged ballets which did not suit the company and hardly anyone wanted to see. The dancers looked miserable on stage and were threatening to strike largely because of Stretton's alleged misconduct. After his departure the company needed and was given an extended period of calm and a sense that there was order rather than turmoil at the top. All very dull no doubt but, at that time, absolutely essential for the well being of the company as a whole. The other thing Mason needed to do was to ensure a great deal of repertory that had been neglected over the years was restored to the stage. A director can only make decisions in the context of the time in which they are running a company. They know the constraints under which they are working. Constraints which may not be obvious to an outsider at the time let alone more than twenty years after the events in question. Unlike some continental countries an incoming artistic director is not at liberty to get rid of the existing company and hire a completely new group of dancers. Given the state of the company at the time Mason took over I don't think that she would have wanted to exercise that power if it had been available to her. I have been attending company performances for many years. I remember the company during Ashton's directorship when it buzzed with creativity and talent and I experienced its slow decline under his successors. I can only say that whatever mistakes you may feel she made during her time in charge I think that Mason stopped the rot and handed over a very healthy company to her successor. The theatre is not a world in which one often finds consensus or support from other practitioners. I therefore find it interesting that Sir Peter Wright thinks so highly of her and her directorship. I believe he regards her as a great director. No director gets every call right. This is a fact that we have to accept. What matters is that they have a high batting average when it comes to major decisions.

It is foolish to assume that the company can recruit every talented dancer who graduates from the RBS. The director may not have the vacancies to make this possible or may not be able to make the sort of offer that an ambitious young dancer finds attractive. You need to remember that a director has a duty to look after the careers of all the members of the company not just those of the most recent recruits however talented they may be. A director may be reluctant to disrupt his or her company by recruiting too many dancers who need to be fast tracked through the ranks. Polunin was the dancer whom the company were hothousing at the time of Muntagirov's graduation. A dancer may have very good reasons for not joining a prestigious company at the beginning of his or her career. My understanding is that Wayne Eagling who was ENB's director at the time was able to recruit Muntagirov by offering him the role of Albrecht in his first season with the company as well as plenty of opportunities to dance. As far as Bracewell is concerned it is quite possible that Bintley was simply able to offer him more opportunities to dance and take on roles than would have been possible as a member of the resident company. BRB, formerly SWRB and before that RBTC was originally established as a training ground for talented dancers which would enable them to learn major roles and develop their technique and stage craft well away from the gaze of national critics. It was always able to offer more opportunities to young dancers in terms of performances and opportunities to learn roles and stage craft than would be available in Bow Street. Of course the second company long ago ceased simply to be a training ground for the talented to learn their craft but that has not stopped individual dancers from treating it as a stepping stone in their careers.

I accept that both opera and ballet are labour intensive art forms and thus expensive to stage at the best of times and that there is no way that either resident company can escape the effects of inflation. As both companies are, at the very least, required to cover their operating costs some increase in ticket prices was to be expected.I assume that the ROH received some financial support from the government while the house was closed during covid and that at some point it will be required to pay back the money the government lent it. Whether you are talking about the opera or ballet the repertory on offer this season is far from enticing.The ROH has been reduced to papering the house for both opera and ballet performances. Both resident companies seem to have lost touch with their audiences as far as repertory choices are concerned and neither seems to be aware that many people who used to attend the theatre on a regular basis lost the habit of regular theatre going during the pandemic. If either company wants audiences to attend their performances they have to offer something more enticing than operas in lacklustre modern productions which stage the opera the director thinks the composer and librettist should have written rather than the one they actually wrote and a ballet season largely based on Kevin's commissions of new works and new productions of after Petipa ballets. i am sure that there are those who will disagree with me but I don't think that it is the casting which is keeping audiences away from ballet performances but the actual choice of repertory combined with what feel like pretty substantial price hikes. The Royal Ballet is a company whose core repertory consists of ballets in which classically based dance vocabulary is used to create mood, character and express emotions.I am not sure that it needed to acquire Don Q a work which during the twentieth century was reduced by Soviet choreographers and ballet masters to little more than a "display of dance". Acosta's staging is awkward and over elaborate and does not make a convincing case for it. In addition it has been allocated far too many performances.Kevin had many other works in the back catalogue that he could and should have revived this season beginning with Fille perhaps followed by Sylvia. As far as The Cellist mixed bill is concerned. Marston's Cellist is far too long and only manages to use the corps as so much moving scenery. She has great facility at creating steps and movements but for me they are devoid of meaning, characterisation or emotional depth. I congratulate those who manage to find something in it to cry over. Anemoi is a decent enough piece which does its job in providing an opportunity for the junior ranks of the company to show what they can do but it needs a much stronger companion work than The Cellist can provide. The Nutcracker still has not sold out its post Christmas performances and then there is the misconceived wrongheaded Swan Lake which Kevin commissioned from the late Liam Scarlett. All in all this is a lacklustre season which only picks up with the Ashtonfest with which it ends. I just hope that the powers that be do not try to recover all their losses with these performances.

Kevin has chosen to mark the centenary of Nijinska's Les Noces not by programming the work for revival during the course of the current season but by holding an extended insight event in the relative obscurity of the Clore studio where seating is limited. This decision and the lack of flair and imagination in the choice of repertory for the bulk of most seasons prompts the question , to what degree Kevin really follows de Valois' precepts when it comes to respecting the past? De Valois' guiding principle when it came to choice of repertory and programming was that her company should respect the past, welcome the future but concentrate on the present. Of course things were no doubt easier in the early days of the company when, apart from the nineteenth century ballets which she had selected as a means of developing her company's technical and artistic standards and then maintaining them, there was not a great deal of old repertory to worry about. Just as importantly there was consensus among those at the top of the company about the importance and artistic utility for the development of the organisation of the works de Valois chose to describe as the "classics" and a willingness to swim against the prevailing artistic tide which at that time when it came to ballet expected and prized new works and new ideas. I am not sure that programming revivals of MacMillan dram ballets to timetable;reviving a mere handful of Ashton's later works or treating the Nutcracker as a near annual fixture because it makes money really amounts to "respecting" the past. It seems more like an unimaginative bureaucratic approach to programming since it makes no attempt to expand the exposure of its audiences or dancers to the full range of the company's classically based repertory. A repertory which includes works created by its first three directors all of whom were choreographers as well as careful collectors of masterpieces which they expected would receive regular revivals for the benefit of the company's dancers and its would be choreographers and the aesthetic education of its audience.The current mix which this season includes Don Q, a ballet which de Valois rejected when Nureyev offered to stage it for the company, and revivals of recent works by Marston, Wheeldon and McGregor may well suggest to some a company suffering from an overall lack of quality control by the artistic director rather than a company which is firing creatively on all cylinders.Let alone one which respects its own artistic past or that of ballet as an art form in the twentieth century

I wonder how many people remember that one of the Tory governments which have been running the country for the last thirteen years, I think it was the government led by David Cameron in his own right, cut the grants it gave to local authorities at the same time that it gave local authorities the power to raise additional funds by increasing the community charge they set. The idea being that local authorities would either make themselves unpopular by increasing local taxes or fail to raise them enabling central government to say that if local authorities were short of funds and failed to use the powers they had been given they were being irresponsible if they did not adjust their spending to reflect the sums they were prepared to raise. All very cynical of course but understandable if your political ideal is a small non interventionist state and low taxation and you are prepared to ignore the range of statutory duties which central government requires local authorities to provide. But then if you don't use those services and can't imagine ever needing to do so I guess it is not that difficult. Now when it cones to the black hole in Birmingham's finances, accounts that I have read suggest that the missing sum is almost the same size as the amount docked from its central government funding. I am afraid that while the Times is not as bad as the Sun when it comes to promoting the Murdoch vision of the world it comes from the same journalistic stable and from time to time the owner's views creep into the paper's content. A certain anti Labour stance is to be expected from both papers.As far as the equal pay claim is concerned Birmingham council was foolish to go on fighting that claim for as long as it did and even more stupid not to make attempts to pay the women concerned the sums they were owed with far greater alacrity than it chose to do. The council's overall course of conduct does suggest a degree of misogyny in the system. I don't feel equipped to say whethe it is "Labour misogyny" or just good old fashioned "misogyny ai play here although I suspect it is the latter. As far as arts organisations in Birmingham are concerned it all looks pretty bleak. I can't help wondering how much grass root commitment to BRB there really is in Birmingham and the surrounding area. I hope it now has very strong roots in the locality as that sort of commitment may help BRB survive.I always wonder in the case of a company grown and developed in one part of the country and then transported to another fully formed how long it takes for it to become an unquestioned part of the local arts community. In the context of such a swinging cut having an artistic director who is so newsworthy and so well known outside the supposedly "elite" world of classical dance can only be an advantage. to become part of the local arts scenery then very strong. It should be given the quality of the work the company produces season after season. the Being given an instant company

I seem to have missed Macauley's "dig at the Royal Ballet".I don't think that is inaccurate to suggest that Australian Ballet's presence in London dancing Jewels has provided a far more interesting and engaging end to the 2022-23 ballet season than the triple bill with which the Royal Ballet chose to end its season. I would say that to express such a sentiment is simply "fair comment". Perhaps it is me but I found the choice of a mixed bill of Corybantic Games, Untitled 2023 and Anastasia Act III, even with Morera's farewell, provided a dreary downbeat end to the season. While I don't approve of the way in which Ashton's one act works now seem to have been relegated to the end of season slot they do at least provide a choreographic and artistic high on which to bring the season to its conclusion. A programme of works by a major choreographer or choreographers full of artistic and choreographic imagination and invention is a fitting end to a ballet season as it provides the promise of pleasure to come in the coming season. This season's final mixed programme seemed like a dreary afterthought when compared with the way in which the company closed the 2021-22 season. The Autralian's performances of Jewels have provided the positive end to the season which the Corybantic Games programme failed to provide. Jewels provided an opportunity for London audiences to see a good part of the Australian company in action as did the Gala programme which seemed far more of a .company prospectus showing the stylistic range of the current company than a retrospective programme. It is going to be interesting to see whether the choice of pieces for the company's final programme reflects a commitment on the AD's part to look to the future while embracing the company's past or whether it is his intention, as far as possible, to cut the company's ties with its past. I was not that taken with the modern pieces on display although the dancers gave fully committed performances in each extract. It may be of interest to be told that a choreographer whose works have not, as yet, struck a chord with you, has created one of the first masterpieces of the twenty first century, it does not make other works from the same source or extracts from them any more appealing. I found the excerpt from Harlequinade particularly interesting. Yet again Ratmansky 's exploration of the Stepanov notation reveals a Petipa whose choreography is far more sensitive to the music to which it is set than much of the "after Petipa " choreography we usually encounter. Harlequin's choreography was impressively virtuosic and varied. I was equally impressed with Joseph Caley's account of Nureyev's choreography for Basilio which struck me as far more varied than the version set by Acosta. I have to say I would like to think that we might see this company on a regular basis. I am curious to see how they develop under Hallberg's leadership.

I think that you will find that it is the RB's liberal attitude to guesting which has enabled the company to retain the impressive roster of dancers it has. It was widely understood at the time that Muntagirov moved to the RB from ENB that the move had been prompted by the new management team at ENB restricting his ability to guest with other companies.

Congratulations to all those who have been promoted. I do wish that management would tell the punters who it is planning should dance major supporting roles such as Lilac Fairy and the Jester and who is to appear in major soloist roles before booking opens. Management must know and that information might generate additional ticket sales. As it is, whether you get to see debuts in roles that may indicate or alter the trajectory of a dancer's career is very much a matter of chance. I have to say I think that Kevin has spent the money freed up by Morera's retirement very wisely. He is under no obligation to have a set number of dancers at any rank in the company and given the outstanding performance that so many of the Artists gave last season it comes as no surprise that we shall start the 23/24 season with more First Artists than Artists. Last season's choice of repertory which included both Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella provided ample opportunity for dancers in the lower ranks of the company to show what they could do when faced with challenging classical and neo-classical soloist roles but whether or not you got to see the performances which earned these promotions was a matter of luck. I was fortunate enough to see both Buvoli and Mullova-Barley as Lilac Fairy and both were impressive as they seemed actively involved in every aspect of the role and their miming was dramatically effective. I also caught Boswell as a Jester who did not reduce the character to a mere leg machine. As far as Gasparini is concerned she has more than earned her ranking as First Soloist. At this point Kevin is keeping the troops happy. These promotions will boost company morale as they recognise and reward hard work, talent and loyal service.I have no doubt that the casting during the coming season such as Mistress and Manon will give a clearer indication about who is in the running for further promotion.

I am not sure that it is reasonable to expect that every senior member of rhe company should appear in a McGregor ballet or that they would want to do so. Principal dancers do have some say in what they appear in. Guillem danced a wide range of the company's repertory but largely steered clear of Ashton and while she danced Forsythe amd other modern choreography she was always insistent that she should have a big enough gap between performances when changing genres to enable her body to adjust to the demands of a specific style, a luxury not accorded to the foot soldiers in a company. I recall that during the course of an interview that Liam Scarlett gave at the time he was to embark on his production of Swan Lake he expressed serious reservations about the long term impact that performing McGregor's choreography might have on a dancer's body. The impression I got was that he considered long term exposure to McGregor style of movement posed a potential threat to the body of a classical dancer. We need to remember that Watson who was a great exponent of McGregor's repertory and style was not look like a conventional classical dancer physically. He was fortunate in that he was someone who seemed confident in his ability to straddle a varied range of repertory and styles. Perhaps the truth is that Muntagirov does not much like McGregor's dance works or style of movement and has reservations about the impact that dancing his ballets would have on his performances of the classical and neo classical which are his core repertory.

The Sleeping Beauty as originally conceived was a ballet set in a world which bore a strong resemblance to France with the Prologue set in Fontainebleau and ending a century later in the world of Louis XIV with the final act set in the gardens of Versailles. It was steeped in French culture from the setting of each scene to the guests invited to the wedding in act 3, all of whom appear in French fairy stories written for the court of Louis XIV. The ballet originally ended with an apotheosis in which the god Apollo with whom Louis XIV was closely associated since his appearance as the sun god in the 1653 Ballet de la Nuit descended from the heavens in his chariot to the strains of Vive Henri Quatre. All these allusions to France and the world of the sun king were lost in the early twentieth century redesigns which were more concerned with painterly effects than.specificity to time and place. For an Artistic Director the ballet is as much a test of the depth and strength of a company as it is of the artistry and technical accomplishment of its leading dancers. The one thing it was never intended to be is a penance. It was created as a theatrical entertainment which showcased the latest Italian ballerina to visit St. Petersburg. I can't help thinking that there is something seriously wrong with a performance of the ballet which is boring and that the fault does not lie with the work itself but with the artistic decisions made by the company staging it. So much can go wrong with casting whether we are talking about selecting dancers to take the leading roles or those to take the soloist roles. In the early years of the century it often seemed as if the Prologue soloists had been allocated by drawing names at random from a hat for all the sense the casting made when individual dancers' skills and stage personalities were taken into account. Casting decisions and coaching methods go a long way to make or mar any ballet but they do far more damage to a ballet conceived on the grand scale than to one with a purely domestic setting or a one act work. "Parts of it are excellent" or "Good in parts" is totally inadequate for a work like Sleeping Beauty which was devised to entertain, impress by emphasising the dominance of French culture and make a political point about the orderliness of the French state. The political context ceased to be important after its first season but a revival should always entertain and impress. A conductor who moves the action on rather than accompanying the dancers at the tempi which will enable them to squeeze in an unscripted extra turn or hold a pose where the choreographer wanted a flow of movement makes the weakest case imaginable for any ballet. Having some idea of the time and care spent on preparing Cinderella's Season Fairies left me wondering what had gone wrong with Beauty's Fairy Variations in the first part of the run? They were so lacking in individuality and interpretative nuance that I began to wonder whether the dancers being prepared for soloist roles which are supposed to be showcases of classicism were being prepared in batches rather than being given individual coaching? If nothing else the fact that the company has been dancing Ashton's Cinderella and Beauty back to back seems to have had a beneficial effect on the soloists dancing the Fairy Variations in the second half of the run . Whether this is the result of individual initiatives on the part of the dancers or simply the result of more time spent in the studio with the coaches is unclear but the performances of the Variations post Cinderella seemed to have more personality, individuality and presence. They were far more lively and engaged in what they were doing than had been the case in the first part of the run. The 6th May saw the company give an exceptionally lively account of what used to be regarded as the company's calling card. Of course we must thank Mr Lo in the pit for selecting tempi that save the work from being reduced to a monument to classicism which is to be admired rather than enjoyed but there were other factors at work. There was a clarity to the dancing and it seemed that not only had a number of dancers been thinking about their roles but nearly everyone seemed more aware of the potential of epaulement to add to the quality of their movement. All the Fairy Variations seemed more organically integrated than they had during the first run of the ballet. During the first run some soloists presented their solos as sequences of steps with little sense of how they related to the solo as a whole, if dancing is what happens between the steps, then there was something wanting in those earlier performances. The same was true of the way in which the female roles in the Florestan pas de trois were performed. In the first part of the run the second soloist at nearly every performance seemed to think that her solo was about striking poses rather than moving, These solos were much improved in the performances I have seen in the latter part of the run. Perhaps it is the effect of dancing so much Ashton since March which has brought about this transformation since his choreography is always concerned with movement and transitions and never with the static pose. Act 3 is the culmination of the ballet and Aurora's solo in this act should be experienced as the high point of the entire work which was created as a homage to the ballerina as queen of the dance. It is the one point where an Aurora can reveal her attainment of artistic maturity to the audience through a musically imaginative reproduction of the choreographic text. Naghdi brought artistic imagination to her entire performance but it was at this point in the performance that she revealed her sense of creative fantasy and expressiveness in her use of the role's music and epaulement in the Act 3 solo Takada by contrast seemed to me something of a puritan reproducing the choreography accurately but unadorned. She reproduces it with great precision but to my eye without much in the way of interpretative imagination.I never got the feeling that she felt that there was potential to delve deeper, give more and impose her personality and interpretation on the role. Naghdi while equally precise possesses the sort of musical imagination which enables her to move around in the music and play with it. The music is an expression of who Aurora is and in the final act she seems to dominate it and bend the text and music to her will without distorting it or slowing down to achieve these effects. As far as the Prince's solo is concerned I am not sure that there was one in the pre-war staging for the company. After the war when Somes danced the rthe prince I believe that Ashton created a solo for him. The current solo which most people seem to accept as the "traditional" version seems to be based on the choreography which appears in Konstantin Sergeyev's staging of the ballet in the 1950's.In other words what we take to be the "traditional" version of the Prince's solo is not Petipa or Petipa derived but a bit of post revolutionary Soviet style choreography. When Ratmansky staged his reconstruction of the ballet he allowed his Princes to choose between a taxing solo full of petite batterie which I believe he found among the Harvard material and what is now treated as the "tradirional" version . Only one dancer I saw in Paris dared dance the earlier demanding version of the solo. The text of this solo looked convincingly authentic. It looked like the sort of choreography which Christian Johansson might have produced for the Legat brothers. it was full of petite batterie which looked very like Bournonville requiring the Prince to move through three hundred and sixty degrees with consummate elegance and ease while beating furiously without a single heroic step of elevation to bolster his reputation.

It looks as if the character of the Jester may have been introduced into the narrative by Ashton himself as a way of giving the young Alexander Grant a role which would display his talents as a dancer and a creator of compelling characters. Describing the character as a Jester would not have jarred or been anachronistic in the context of the original designs which, if the designs on show in the made for American television recording from the 1950's are anything to go by,seem to have set the action of the ballet in a sort of Tudorbethan ballet land. I have no doubt that it was the presence of Alexander Grant in the company which led Ashton to create the role if the Jester in the way he did. At this stage of his career Grant was a dancer with a technique good enough to enable him to take over Brian Shaw's role in Symphonic Variations and give him a place in the quartet of men who form the male corps in Scenes de Ballet. At the same time he possessed an even more impressive line in pathos, quirkiness, shape shifting and the creation of three dimensional characters . He had taken over Massine's role of the Barber in Mam'zelle Angot tp great acclaim in the year before Cinderella was staged and his interpretation of the role woukd have been fresh in everyone's memory. I often think that it might help those who cast the role of the Jester and those who dance it from thinking of it as little more than a leg machine role if they looked at the range of roles Grant had danced by late 1948, those he later acquired from older dancers and those he went on to create for Ashton during the remaining twenty seven years of his career. It is unclear why Ashton did not change the description of the character when the ballet received its new designs in 1966. Perhaps it seemed unnecessary all the time Grant was dancing the role or Michael Somes was involved in casting and coaching the work.Given the increasingly anachronistic direction in which the current rights owner has taken the Jester in the two productions for which she has been responsible 1966 now seems like a missed opportunity to embed the character more securely in the action of the ballet by renaming him. Of the Jesters I saw during the run I think that Liam Boswell was the only dancer to capture some of the character's otherworldliness and his essential sadness. The others seemed too concerned with the technical aspects of the role, thus missing its point.

As this is, I believe, the first outing of a new BRB initiative it was inevitable that at least one professional critic might decide to review Acosta's ballet programme devised for places usually deprived of the art form. So far Acosta has been carried along on a wave of uncritical good will largely based on his reputation as a performer and the pleasure he gave to so many as a performer. From now on I suspect that he is going to be judged, like other directors, on what he programmes and his choice of casts. It really is that simple. Mr. Christiansen does not seem to think that the show is up to much as far as Acosta's choice of repertory, lighting or casting is concerned. He suggests that Acosta's choice of excerpts is based on the sort of programme that might have been seen in an Acosta and Friends programme which was essentially a star vehicle. Anyone with any sense would recognise that a showcase of ballet for young dancers would need a very different choice of excerpts from that for a star vehicle. It is not as if BRB does not have a range of works that could have been pressed into service in such circumstances. The only problem is that the works I am thinking of are from the company;s historic repertory which perhaps Acosta's appointment was intended to consign to history. None of this is the fault of the dancers. I can't help thinking that Acosta should have given greater thought to what he chose to stage and set out to show ballet excerpts more suited to his dancers' current experience and ability choosing works which would have extended their stage experience while entertaining a ballet deprived audience. I have no idea how many dancers are involved in this tour but a programme which included excerpts from ballets devised for less experienced dancers such as Solitaire and Pigeons which ended with Facade would have been far more appropriate than the fare he chose to show.

I am conscious that it is several years since this topic was last under discussion and that there are forum members,habitual browsers and "lurkers" who have discovered this forum since this discussion was last current. Given the interest shown in recent discussions about Ashton's ballets concerning the relationship between his choreography and the Cechetti method it seems to me that the time has come to resurrect this thread which contains suggested recorded examples of the style for research and comparison. These recordings may assist those who have not seen a great deal of Ashton in performance or have not seen the dancers who are generally accepted as exemplars of the style to answer questions such as what is distinctive about Ashton dancers? How you identify them and how you can know that a particular dancer will be effective in an Ashton role before they have danced it? There is now a commercially available recording of Ashton's Enigma Variations which contains performances by Morera as Lady Elgar and Hayward as Dorabella. There is a recording of almost the entire original cast which has never been released commercially which is well worth watching if you can find it. There are a number of recordings of Fille . As far as I am concerned the only ones worth watching if you want to understand the Ashton style in performance are the two recorded during the choreographer's lifetime.The first is a version of the ballet adapted for television by the choreographer which preserves the performances of the original cast. The second is a recording which preserves the performances of Collier and Coleman who were the company's first cast at the time the recording was made.. Both casts dance Ashton idiomatically and may be regarded as exemplars of his style in that in both cases the recorded casts were the best available at the time. Ashton used a modified form of emploi in his ballets to people the stage with contrasting character types, Needless to say these rules are followed in the earliest recordings in which the casts were selected and coached by him. Sadly modern recordings seem more concerned with celebrity and potential sales than the dancers' suitability for their roles and as such are really only useful for comparison. Emploi is not as rigorously enforced as it once was and it shows in the way in which characters register or fail to do so ir even worse lapse into caricature.