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Lindsay

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  1. Lindsay
    I think that the usual 'repeat' audiences are sitting out Frankenstein in large numbers and that is a huge contributing factor to the drop in sales. I know from friends working at the ROH that the ballet 'faithful' attend far more performances of a production than the opera 'faithful' (understandably since they want to see different casts) so repeat business is currently more important for ballet sales than it is for opera. I'm afraid that I am less generous than Floss and think this Frankenstein is an out and out turkey, which I resented sitting through even once. And I suspect that I am far from alone in that. So, while I might have gone and taken friends to see one or two casts if I had enjoyed the first run (meaning two seats on one or two nights 'unsold' because I'm sitting it out) I'm guessing there are many others who would have gone to most performances and are leaving far more seats unsold that would have been occupied by 'faithful regulars' in the usual course. The marketing does seem extremely disorganised but it wouldn't have made any difference to me or to others I know if they had bombarded us with Frankenstein PR from morning til night - the ballet is just not good enough. 'Nothing' music, derivative choreography and utterly inept storytelling.
  2. Lindsay
    I think the difficulty with *some* Ashton works (am a huge fan of Symphonic, Rhapsody, Monotones and Fille before anyone accuses me of being a 'hater') is not that the settings or costumes are dated, it is that they are "period pieces" without sufficient heft or universality (whether through characterisation, narrative or musical choices) to strike a chord of recognition in modern viewers. I went on Tuesday, despite having been bored by Pigeons at the last revival, because I wanted to see the new Scarlett RBS piece. That I found extremely dull and ordinary. I remain completely baffled as to the continual commissioning of Scarlett - once you've seen the running on the spot (caucus race nicked from Wheeldon in Alice, foxes this time), and corps twirling on pointe (lab assistants in Frankenstein, random insects here) and the story told by being L-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y T-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y acted out scene by scene, you seem to have reached the end of his very limited imagination. After that, it was a relief to get to Pigeons, which at least had a coherent dramatic structure. Of course Ashton's choreography, particularly for the corps in the gypsy scene, stood up very strongly against Scarlett's work but I still found the piece overall far too twee and generally irritating to enjoy. Grown women pecking around like infantile birds are not expressing a universal emotion in the way that Lise is in Fille, or the lead ballerina in Rhapsody. Ashton's great works are in an entirely different class to Scarlett's work so far, but that doesn't mean that his whole output has to be uncritically received.
  3. Lindsay
    Which other venues Anna? I have not had my bag checked when entering the Festival Hall, National Theatre, Wigmore, Almeida or Barbican lately. Do you mean West End theatres?
  4. Lindsay
    Grand Tier gets Hotel Chocolat from a butler. Balcony get to pass around a box of Quality Street.
  5. Lindsay
    Hmm, I would say that those reviews with anything positive to say (notably the Guardian and the Times) are what I would call damning with faint praise. And neither likes the undressed men in the final scene.
  6. Lindsay
    Taking a sideways segue back to Infra casting, I was reflecting a bit further on the new cast as against the original and why, despite some really good performances, I left feeling very slightly unsatisfied. And I think I have concluded that it is the absence of Edward Watson. Nothing against Calvin Richardson who I thought was excellent on Tuesday in the role created by Watson, but McGregor's idiom is so closely related to Watson's appearance and style of movement (and much of it, including this role, created with him in mind) that it was strange for me watching the work without Watson opening and closing as the exemplar of the style. I suppose we all simply have to adjust over time but it has left me with some sympathy for those who can't "tolerate" Marguerite & Armand without the original cast or who saw Seymour create Macmillan roles in which no-one else can ever be the same for them.
  7. Lindsay
    Thanks Fonty, that is very interesting. And the fact that the reviewer thought McMillan's concept "slightly more facile than it should be" makes me wonder what the hell they would make of The Unknown Soldier !?!?
  8. Lindsay
    It is Poulenc, but the Gloria in G Major rather than the Organ Concerto
  9. Lindsay
    For me, the commissioning of McGregor is a breath of fresh air and hardly a symptom of insularity, since he is the only 'house' choreographer who was neither at the school or the company, or even a classical dancer. I could live without any more Scarlett ever and recent Wheeldon has been underwhelming - although I absolutely love Polyphonia and wish they would programme that more often. As Monica Mason was heard to exclaim after the premiere of Woolf Works - "thank goodness for Wayne!" and I agree. He is the only regular choreographer who dares to challenge the audience to think and who sparks an audible reaction (as last night) from younger people, who after all the ROH will desperately need as we, their current audience, fade away.
  10. Lindsay
    I would have liked Gloria too Vanartus. And yes, Cathy Marston would have been a much better choice. There is a lingering insularity about RB commissioning which can be rather depressing, given the money they have to spend compared to smaller companies who are often commissioning far more interesting work on shoestring budgets.
  11. Lindsay
    Me three. And frankly even if bags weren't searched I see no reason why anyone should feel more nervous sitting in the ROH than they would be on a busy train or bus, where they are surrounded by people with luggage that hasn't been checked. But some people just seem to enjoy righteously complaining - if the ROH provided a tray of chocolates served up by a personal butler to their seat some posters would doubtless moan that it was encouraging unhealthy eating or discriminating against the lactose intolerant. ....
  12. Lindsay
    I absolutely agree Anna. And what I found moving about that documentary is that its maker refrained from an obvious, authorial voice and let the soldiers speak for themselves (expressing a wide range of points of view) so it did not feel manipulative of the viewer. Also, looking at some of the soldiers portrayed, and the state of their physique and teeth, it is clear that the working class population driven into the trenches were very far from the well-nourished, healthy young dancers on stage last night. Which was yet another reason why that final scene seemed to me rather disrespectful and inappropriate.
  13. Lindsay
    Where did I say that? I absolutely respect his beliefs and can completely understand why his terrible experiences led to that reaction. But testimony is not the same thing as the making of a piece of art. I would hope that a maker of art (and expensively commissioned, part-publicly-funded art at that) would think a bit more deeply thatn Marriott seems to have done in this case about how to make the audience think about the reactions of Harry Patch, Florence Billington and others. For me what great art does is to convey ideas to the reader/viewer/listener in a way that offers them the possibility of a new perspective. That is why there is a place for history books, documents and memoirs about World War 1 and there is a place for the poetry of Sassoon and Owen. They serve a different purpose.
  14. Lindsay
    I have. He is a witness. Not an artist.
  15. Lindsay
    Sure, but they shouldn't be tasteless. I have never before seen a piece of art about WW1 where the message seemed to be "they died young but at least they left beautiful corpses". I prefer my art about useless, senseless, destructive wars to come without a pretty 'happy ending'. There was literally nothing redemptive or hopeful about the first world war and good artists have known that since during the war itself. It was ugly. Think about the work of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Or read All Quite on the Western Front or Pat Barker's trilogy. Or watch Oh What a Lovely War. Or Gloria.
  16. Lindsay
    I'm not sure that the interviewee had gold speedos in mind........ The interesting idea from that interview for me was the sheer weight of the tragedy being so much that people had a desperate psychological need to believe in life after death - there is lots of interesting research and writing about the soaring popularity of mediums, table-tappers and others who exploited grieving families during and after the war. Simply taking "death is not the end" at face value and making it the "message" for a ballet seems to me trite in the extreme.
  17. Lindsay
    It's a fashion/style publication - part of the same group that owns what used to be Dazed and Confused.
  18. Lindsay
    I think we are talking at cross-purposes them. What I was criticising in Unknown Soldier was the gratuitous, exploitative showing off of men's bodies in a way which appeared to have no clear artistic purpose beyond looking "beautiful". Exploring potentially erotic relationships between male characters is an entirely different thing and can be artistically interesting, as indeed we both clearly found it to be in Woolf Works. Even before we get to what was on the stage last night, choosing to illustrate an interview about a first world war ballet with naked pictures of the dancers seems to me emblematic of very poor decision-making all round: http://www.anothermanmag.com/life-culture/10606/boys-of-the-royal-ballet-unknown-soldier-cast-alastair-marriott-jonathan-howells
  19. Lindsay
    I know that. But it's a long way from that statement to finding McGregor's choreographic portrayal of Septimus Smith's shell shock to be home-erotic. Which was what you appeared to be suggesting in your previous post.
  20. Lindsay
    I would have hoped the same Sim and yet there it was. And I don't know what you think was homo-erotic about references to WW1 in Woolf Works? As far as I recall no soldiers took their clothes off and writhed around in speedos and there was a complexity to the choreography that mirrored well the sensitive and layered treatment of the subject in Mrs Dalloway
  21. Lindsay
    I think you must all be particularly pure of heart and mind then because to my mind putting muscled young men in tiny gold speedos and having them writhe around in slow motion under golden lighting is fairly unarguably homoerotic. There are clubs in Soho where you could see very similar things any night of the week, except that the choreography there tends to be more interesting. In this context it was incredibly crass and I'm surprised (or would have been surprised by any institution that has shown more imagination, artistic sense and common sense with its new commissions than the RB in recent years) that the piece was allowed to reach the stage in this form. Quite besides all the cliched sentimentality, I don't know how anyone can have heard the "idea" for this ballet and concluded that the literal "acting out" of yet another narrative was the right way to go, after the critical mauling that Frankenstein received. Thanks goodness for McGregor and Balanchine - they both said so much more without having to resort to spoken words.
  22. Lindsay
    Anna I would have hoped not, but the number of people in this thread hopefully posting "historical" photos and trying to find ways to justify Bayadere as "accurate" is depressing and is what has prompted me to post. As Luke Jennings said, Bayadere could (and perhaps should) be 'read' as a European misunderstanding of Eastern culture, stemming from the colonial period and its assumptions of the superiority of white civilisation. However, it seems to me that many posters here are not coming from that starting point.
  23. Lindsay
    I saw shouting down too - phrases like "PC Brigade" are very Richard Littlejohn/Daily Mail and suggest kneejerk reactions rather than thoughtful engagement. Said's writing has been around for long enough to make it surprising to me that educated people can outright dismiss the concerns raised here and by Luke Jennings. In raising such concerns, no one here is saying that Bayadere should be dropped from the repertoire (although I would say that I have friends who will go to all kinds of theatre, opera and modern dance but avoid ballet because of its continued tolerance of this kind of spectacle) but all posters seem to be in agreement that some of the changes made to Western performances of the ballet in recent years reflect modern sensibilities. There is a reason why Western companies no longer "black-up" and have cut some of the more crudely stereotypical/blatantly orientalist sections from the Russian versions of the ballet (slave dances etc.). Our Western societies have evolved to respect people of different races in such a way that such stereotypes are troubling, in the same way that certain 1970s sit-coms are no longer palatable to the vast majority of people. It's a gradual process and there are lots of grey areas but to dismiss such concerns altogether appears more than a little tone-deaf. Younger people are actively rejecting the lazy stereotypes that once passed without comment and if ballet wants to recruit its next generation of audiences, those views need to be taken into account.
  24. Lindsay
    Anna Rose O'Sullivan has a heavy workload too - in first cast of Infra, second cast Balanchine as well as her Unknown Soldier shows with Bracewell.
  25. Lindsay
    They have always done it for the exceptionally talented - Polunin for example. And that, perhaps, should be a cautionary tale for why pushing even the most obviously talented is not necessarily healthy.....
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