Coated

Wow, and I nearly didn't book. Very nice to get a little Mayerling reprise in there, I was having some withdrawal symptoms.

Yes, she was pretty impressive. Hoping I get to see them both again in the other programme. There were other dancers I really liked, but I think I need binoculars or tickets in the front row to figure out who was who.

Great Shots! I was raving about 'Plan to B' and the Boston Ballet in general in another thread, I though it was really worth seeing and snapped up another ticket for Friday.

I second the Boston Ballet recommendation. They were beautiful to look at and the Balachine sets felt like an ensemble moving as one. I really liked the middle set, the Faun was a nice 'historic' intro to modern dance, followed by 'Plan to B' an amazing piece by their resident choreographer Jorma Elo. The music was brilliant for a fast, energetic and elegant modern ballet and I didn't want it to end. Jorma Elo is now on my list of choreographers to stalk. One dancer who stood out for me (and who I *think* I identified from the cast list...) was Misa Kuranga, very precise and strong and amazingly graceful at the same time. The Boston Ballet seems to have quite a few clips of or about their dancers online, the link is to a short clip about her dancing I really hope the Boston Ballet won't leave it another 30 years to come back.

Nice, just booked a dress circle ticket for the 11th with the code. Since I already had a ticket for the 12th I'll be seeing it two nights in a row, but I guess I'll just have to cope with that...

Having learned my lesson from being a bit late for the ballet booking, I was ready for 10am on the dot for opera booking. Overall I was in and out in 15 minutes, with a few error messages that disappeared on a refresh. My order placed emails included an estimate of when the confirmation will arrive, increasing in time for each order (I've stopped putting all my eggs into one basket after having it all fail because of accidentally exceeding the ticket limit for a production), which seemed to indicate that the website was getting overloaded. I don't quite understand the 'order placed' emails - seems like a way to uneccessarily increase processing time on servers by adding another step. All in all it wasn't too bad in my opinion, and I prefer the ROH to spend their money on ballet dancers instead of forking out for extremely high-end tech to cope with a few days very busy days per year. Though I suspect I'd feel different if I ended up with none of the tickets I wanted.

My glorious little run of Mayerlings is now over (sniff), finishing with Soares / Hamilton / Nunez who were just wonderful tonight. Soares felt like the most sensitive, elegant Rudolf of the one's I've seen and I could have watched his solos for hours on end. Nunez played Larisch with the best little smirk which cracked me up completely and Melissa Hamilton just IS Mary Veretsa for me now. She had incredible stage chemistry with Pennefather when I saw them (If they could bottle it, they'd make a fortune. I had to watch their Mayerling twice, just to make sure that it was as awesome as I thought it was. It was even more awesome the second time around.) and was great to see her dance just as passionately and beautifully with another partner.

One of the Acosta/Nunez Don Q was part of a mini package and pretty booked up already yesterday (decided a bit late to do the package). Performance-wise the website was awe inspiring, couldn't tell that there was anything out of he ordinary going on whilst booking despite the swarm of ticket hunters descending at 10am. I got there at 10:15 and didn't find any of the cheaper tickets I was hoping for, but reasonably happy with my haul (my bank account might have a different opinion, but hey) I've learned my lesson for he next booking session and will be online by 9:50... I ended up getting more affordable tickets after public booking opened for the last period, and by checking regularly for returns, but that never included stalls circle standing.

I'm not ready for the hip hop version. The score for the ballet is beautiful, and I would have loved to see what Kobborg and the RB and Danish Ballet make of it.

Thankfully I did manage to watch Bratfisch's first turn, and Ricardo Cervera did very well indeed.

I wish I hadn't read these last few posts, I've now gone off and acquired a ticket for the Soares Mayerling and pretty much blew through my yearly ballet allowance. Soares has been amazing in everything I have recently seen him in, and it's my firm believe that he could partner a tailor's dummy and make it look amazing. I saw Watson on Saturday, and never mind his dancing - he managed to give off such palpable despair just sitting at the table that I forgot to watch Bratfisch.

I liked Ravengirl despite the overly long cycling / letter sorting sequence at the start, but they really need to sort out the lighting / net curtain effect. I sat closeby enough to be able to see most things, but I wouldn't even want to contemplate seeing this from the back of the stalls or the amphitheatre. The one thing that strangely annoyed me was the lettering taking forever and a day to resolve. It wasn't that interesting or informative, so please, just get on with it. The overall imagery was strong (and I can see why it's not everyone's cup of tea), and with a fair bit of editing this could work really well. Cutting the first 10 minutes and replacing them with sad postman dancing might help, as would cutting down on some of the gimmicks. It did feel a bit like ballet-does-multimedia. Happened in theatre, so it was probably only a question of time until it hit other art forms. Though thankfully the theatre seems to have recovered from the worst excesses, so there's hope. Seeing it again next week and looking forward to it. Symphony in C just made smile from ear to ear, it was picture perfect tonight. I think I might be turning into a Soares/Nunez groupie, they were just delicious. I have a few old 100w bulbs floating around to get around the 15w energy savers when I actually need to see something instead of feeling it. Not that I'm trying to put thoughts into any choreographer's head, I'm not ready for invisible ballet.

Same here, I've booked a few performances particularly for new stuff after seeing the photos. I don't tend to buy programmes one way or the other since I'll never look at them again once I'm home (and often enough they won't even include images of the cast you saw on the day) and not having cast pictures online won't change that but I will miss the chance to find out who Corps girl #28 was. And then maybe booking a performance where she has a bigger role, cause hey, wasn't she the one who I looked up after she did a nice variation in ballet x? I really appreciate the 'insight' clips ROH posts on youTube, and I can understand if they decide they don't want to lose copyright, editorial input or commercial opportunities for pictures not published by them. Perhaps they could look at including the galleries on their own site, posted by 'approved' photographers so they can retain editorial input and control release dates of images. Losing the galleries altogether would be a shame.

I'm considering posting some spare lightbulbs to the ROH before I go to see it, in case they meant to light it up but ran out of bulbs.

I loved Steven McRea's Sandman, 3 parts creepy, one part sad, 100% awesome. Sure, there is room for improvement for the overall production, at the same time I liked the storytelling and quietly threatening atmosphere. I wasn't too bowled over by the music. At times it was fitting, but there seemed to be long periods of the same motif being repeated over and over with little variation. For the first 20 minutes I couldn't quite shake the expectation that they'll either break into song or start talking any minute.

I haven't really got anything to add about the Pennefather/Hamilton matinee on Friday that hasn't been said before - it was amazing and deeply involving and I'm just plain flabbergasted at how much I loved it. I've just gone off and booked for their other performance on the 10th of June. And because I'm very very lucky, I even managed to get a decent seat again without having to sell my soul.

I saw the matinee with Soares, Kobayashi and Choe yesterday. Soares managed a nice stage chemistry with Kobayashi despite the last minute switcheros for the performance and he and Choe made the dancing look easy. I wasn't too keen on Choe prior to this performance, but I now very much get why people love to watch her dance. Her dancing and acting (she does haughty and somewhat evil very convincingly and then looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth) was perfect for the role and she got a huge applause at curtain call. The orchestra was also in fine form and I could go and see La Bayadere just for the violin solo. The 'wild men' and their dreadlocks were a bit distracting and some point I just watched the furry mass hanging of their heads and started to wonder about moths and other creatures instead of watching the actual dancing.