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Royal Ballet Insight and In Rehearsal discussion


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On 05/02/2019 at 23:24, loveclassics said:

Can anyone tell me about the January 31st Insight?  It was described as 'Masters of Ballet', so could  refer to choreographers, companies or dancers

and I was hoping it would be filmed but it isn't on YouTube.

 

Linda

Sorry to be late with this - Zoe Anderson spoke about Petipa and Ivanov with illustrations with RB video clips. She spoke well and I found it interesting but I think it was an impossible task to do justice to the two choreographers in the time. I didn’t know that Petipa’s first ballet was the Pharaoh’s Daughter and he produced it in 6 weeks. More on his relationships with the composers would have been appreciated. 

 

 Ivanov was particularly hard done by, given that his ballets are probably the best known to the public. Really it would need a series of lectures to properly cover the ground - are there any- I would love to be better educated. Zoe compared the Kingdom of the Shades entrance to that of the White Swans in Swan Lake. I would have liked more of this analysis but there just wasn’t time.

 

there followed a Q and A with Monica Mason about her views of the sleeping beauty and its importance to the company from the perspective of a dancer and director. 

 

There was a short time (not enough) for audience Q and As. 

 

I would go to another event like this. It’s a shame it’s not online.

 

 

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Thank you.  I'm sorry I wasn't able to go even if it was a rather superficial look at arguably the most influential choreographers in ballet.

 

I remember when there were Insight Days which could cover a subject in depth instead of the brief evenings (usually less than 2 hours) we get now. 

 

Such an important subject would be better covered in a full day but perhaps people can't spare the time or is it that the ROH management is trying to attract a younger audience with a presumed shorter attention span?

 

Linda

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I have fond memories of the Bayadere and Onegin Insight days I attended. Sorry to keep going on about it but when you're travelling 200 miles and need an overnight hotel stay for anything in the evening, the idea of coming just for something that may last just over an hour isn't affordable. I would LOVE to attend the Gary Avis talk but can't justify the expense. That is why it's so great the Insight evenings are being filmed and can be enjoyed by everyone. Would be fabulous if the discussions could be filmed too but I suppose I mustn't get greedy! I assume the powers that be think there isn't enough interest for them (or the 'right' young audience wouldn't be interested; only us pesky regulars).

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8 minutes ago, jmhopton said:

Would be fabulous if the discussions could be filmed too but I suppose I mustn't get greedy! I assume the powers that be think there isn't enough interest for them (or the 'right' young audience wouldn't be interested; only us pesky regulars).

 

Or that people who have paid for tickets deserve a bonus.

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35 minutes ago, jmhopton said:

I have fond memories of the Bayadere and Onegin Insight days I attended. Sorry to keep going on about it but when you're travelling 200 miles and need an overnight hotel stay for anything in the evening, the idea of coming just for something that may last just over an hour isn't affordable. I would LOVE to attend the Gary Avis talk but can't justify the expense. That is why it's so great the Insight evenings are being filmed and can be enjoyed by everyone. Would be fabulous if the discussions could be filmed too but I suppose I mustn't get greedy! I assume the powers that be think there isn't enough interest for them (or the 'right' young audience wouldn't be interested; only us pesky regulars).

 

It's a simple limitation exercise as ROH has no control over whether questions from audience members are suitable for live transmission.

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I could be wrong, but I think John and BBB in the last two posts may have got the wrong end of the stick - I read jmhopton's post as being about the fact that performance-based Insights are streamed but In Conversation-based Insights are not, rather than about the fact that those Insights which ARE streamed are taken off-air before the audience Q&A segment.

Edited by RuthE
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Although I suppose that the same might apply.  Bear in mind that the Ballet Association always sends its reports of interviews to the interviewee for approval (editing/deletion) before they're published, to give them a chance to retract anything controversial/tactless etc.

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3 hours ago, jmhopton said:

I have fond memories of the Bayadere and Onegin Insight days I attended. Sorry to keep going on about it but when you're travelling 200 miles and need an overnight hotel stay for anything in the evening, the idea of coming just for something that may last just over an hour isn't affordable. I would LOVE to attend the Gary Avis talk but can't justify the expense. 

 

I feel the same & I only live 60 miles away. It's still over £20 train & tube fare to get there. Hence I feel that money is better spent on a full-length evening at a theatre or, when possible, doing matinee & evening performances on the same day (not usually of the same show!). I was hoping the Avis interview would be streamed but given the comments about talks not being streamed then it sounds like it sadly won't be.

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4 hours ago, RuthE said:

I could be wrong, but I think John and BBB in the last two posts may have got the wrong end of the stick - I read jmhopton's post as being about the fact that performance-based Insights are streamed but In Conversation-based Insights are not, rather than about the fact that those Insights which ARE streamed are taken off-air before the audience Q&A segment. 

 

Yes you are right Ruth. I was rather bemoaning the fact generally that insights are streamed but discussions aren't. However, I do take the points made by John Mallinson and bangorballetboy that if you're prepared to pay for a ticket it may be annoying to find it live streamed where anyone can watch for free. Also that the questions and answers may not be suitable for live transmission and people may not be as keen to participate if they knew their answers are being broadcast worldwide. Anyone can make a slip in a live transmission and regret it afterwards. However, I suppose if they were filmed they could be edited later and eventually transmitted subject to the interviewees approval.

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On 05/02/2019 at 07:21, Jan McNulty said:

 

The only technical knowledge I have is that a fouetté is only a single turn.

 

I never count and I don’t know why fouettes seem to make or break a performance for a dancer when it is one step sequence over in a minute or so.

As far as I'm concerned it's quality not quantity that matters!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Although it is true that the Ballet Association enables its guest speakers to check the official account of the meeting at which they spoke in order to edit out indiscretions before the text of the meeting is made available to members I don't think that is the reason why the question and answer section of the Insight events are edited out. I suspect that the real  reason why the question and answer sessions at the end of Insight events are cut is not to encourage free debate or eliminate indiscretions but to save audience members  embarrassment as these sessions tend to reveal that a lot of the nice middle class people who attend them can not readily distinguish between questions and statements and do not know how to transform a statement into a question. I don't go to many Insight events because I don't find them that insightful but on the rare occasion that I do attend one the questions that are asked would tend to suggest that very few people listen that attentively to what the speakers have had to say. Of course just occasionally an audience member comes up with a question that the speaker can't answer immediately and unlike professional trainers and lecturers that can completely throw the non-professional speaker. Someone asked about the original score of Swan Lake at the Petipa Insight evening because he had noticed marked differences between the entire ballet score as played in the concert hall and the revised score used by Petipa in his 1895 production of the ballet which is the form in which most of us hear the score in ballet performances today. The speaker was not expecting the question and I thought she floundered a bit in answering it.

Edited by FLOSS
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It is not just Insight events where inattention rears its ugly head. I used to attend a great number of training events in a professional capacity and we trainers used to wait for the daft questions keeping our fingers crossed that whoever it was who asked the daft question or questions was not someone whom we had been directly involved in training that day in one of the subgroups doing the case studies and that it was not someone who came from the centre at which we worked on a daily basis.

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I've not been to any RB Insight events but I've been to pre/post event talks from other companies. While audience members asking really obvious questions can be a bit annoying, I find it much worse when people use the guise of asking a question to assert their own opinions in as longwinded & dogmatic a fashion as they can get away with. I don't feel that a Q&A session is an appropriate occasion for that sort of thing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Does anyone know if the insight tonight was filmed/streamed? Just had mention of it from a friend who attended, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything from ROH/RB news page or social media, so assume it was not broadcast. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I really enjoyed this evening's Romeo & Juliet Insight livestream, especially the sword fighting rehearsal. I find Christopher Saunders the most engaging of the coaches I've seen on the Insights. I liked what we saw of Reece Clarke's Romeo, which is good given I'm booked to see him with both his Juliets, & Nehmiah Kish's Tybalt, who I'm guessing I'm also likely to see given he's rehearsing with Clarke.

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Particularly good Insight this evening. I always enjoy watching Christopher Saunders rehearse-don't think he's the easiest taskmaster but he certainly gets results. And Ed Watson proves,to be an excellent coach. His comments were relevant and helpful. Will watch this again.

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Unfortunately, Firefox decided to mess me around so I lost the first 15 minutes of this, but it was obviously well worth watching, so I'll catch up with the bit I missed later.  Good to see that Kish is at least doing Tybalt now he's not doing Romeo any more.  Both coaching sessions were quite fascinating.

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A good Insight - lovely to see Beatriz Stix-Brunell and Reece Clarke  happily taking on all sorts of  detailed corrections from the wonderful Edward Watson (a new Company role for him?)  and Leanne Benjamin. She really seemed to know her stuff, having been instructed herself, I gather, by MacMillan. 

And clearly (despite a sore throat) Christopher Saunders was having a lot of fun getting Reece Clarke and Nehemiah Kish exhausted through rehearsing their  sword fight!

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I too really enjoyed the Romeo insight and like others really enjoy Christopher Saunder's rehearsals. I could listen to him all day (even when he's got a bad throat!) He seems to me the epitome of a good coach in that he explains everything clearly and with some humour and proves that you don't have to shout or be aggressive to dancers to get great results (as according to tradition might have been the case many years ago). He and Christopher Carr are my 2 favourite coaches but it's interesting to see others doing it and especially someone like Leanne Benjamin who's so much experience of performing the role. It was great to hear her tell Beatrix to be less 'classical' and to tell the story by her feelings as well as the steps. Ralph Fiennes as Pushkin in White Crow said something similar about acting the steps not just executing them and I wondered if that was something he actually said or something David Hare wrote for the film. It's just that I've felt for a while now that Russian dancers seem to place more emphasis on technique rather than acting and that might be one of the reasons I increasingly would rather see British Companies rather than the Russian ones as all British companies place a very high emphasis on acting as well as technique. Obviously technique is still important but it is there as a basis to better let dancers portray their characters rather than being the most important element.

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I've just caught up on the Juliet/Paris section - Benjamin and Watson proving as good a team on the coaching front as they did on stage.  A really good insight evening - I wish I could have been there.  And it no doubt helps that Watson has performed Paris as well as Romeo (and Benvolio, and heaven knows what else).

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