Jane S

https://theshed.org/program/219-madeline-hollander Brilliant film of David Hallberg!

How I would love to see Francesca Hayward dance it!

It was a passing comment in an article I read yesterday, and has since been removed.

Word from Denmark is that she's just doing a year in Hamburg. Neumeier has always liked her and cast her in his ballets so maybe she's just going for his last year. (And of course Copenhagen and Hamburg are only about as far apart as London and Leeds so she's not going to be losing touch!)

Before August slips away, I'm reminded that it was in August 1996 that Bruce Marriott's ballet.co - the forerunner of this site - made its first appearance. 25 years! The internet was a very different place then, thinly populated in general and with almost nothing about ballet. ballet.co was originally a single-thread page, dominated in its early days - so far as I remember - by discussion of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, with particular focus on Adam Cooper (anyone who was there will remember the Cooperettes, and the sheep joke) - but it rapidly expanded and added a magazine to the discussion pages. It was huge fun but hard work even for contributors, let alone for Bruce - for instance there were no dance photographs online so to illustrate an article you had to find your own hardcopy - uncredited to satisfy Bruce's rules - and scan it in, in my case using a hand-scanner to start with. But we were really pioneering - I can actually remember thinking that if anyone was going to tell the online world who Margot Fonteyn was, it might as well be me! So thank you, Bruce - ballet.co changed my life. And of course thank you also to those who run this site, in a far more complex and more competitive environment.

Whilst looking for something else, I just came across Katherine's contribution to a thread called 'How did you come to be a ballet watcher' and thought it would be good to add it here: I like to brag that I went to ballet school with the great ballerina Evelyn Hart. Admittedly, the only thing we had in common was the bench in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School's changing room. But I am thankful to the RWB and convinced it can be proud of us both (ok, maybe prouder of Evelyn than of me), for ballet transforms all of its students, professional and recreational, famous and anonymous, I am grateful to the RWB for more besides. A subscription was my annual birthday present starting at age nine, and its eclectic mixed-bill repertoire launched my education as a serious balletomane (I also devoured ballet books). For instance, at age 12 I was moved to tears by John Neumeier's Nutcracker. Mind you, I was crying because there were no snowflakes in it, like the ones I had seen at my first live ballet performance, London Festival Ballet's version in 1965. Before that I have a memory of seeing The Dream on the BBC at about age 5. I soon came to appreciate that Neumeier's gifts more than make up for such unconventional and (it seemed to me) unforgivable snowlessness. The National Ballet of Canada came through on tour with the big story ballets, and eventually I moved to Toronto. My big revelation was seeing Robert Tewsley in 1992, who embodied ideals of ballet I didn't even know I had. When he left for Stuttgart and subsequently other companies, I started travelling to see his performances wherever they were, and this exposed me to a much wider repertoire (and also, unbeknownst to me, trained me for my current occupation as a ballet holiday organizer). As a child, I longed to do ballet, but at the ripe age of 13, I was convinced that I had missed the boat for starting classes, which for some reason I believed had to begin at age six. Seven was already over the hill. Apprehensive at the prospect of a beginner class filled with six-year-olds, a friend and I arrived nonetheless at an "I'll do it if you do" pact, and off we set to the RWB's then unglamorous studios in a former furniture store above a drugstore. Lo! The class was filled with... other 13-year-olds. I remember how my first teacher insisted we finish our exercises with our heads properly poised and our arms and hands curved just so: "You never know. The audience might be watching you. Maybe that's the only time they'll be watching you!" It must be said that no ballet audience has ever had the misfortune of having to watch me do anything. “Your arms in pirouettes are like the flaps on the wings of a jumbo jet,” he used to say. “Let them drop and you will crash.” I probably looked more like a jumbo jet than I wished to acknowledge. Many other teachers – and ballet pianists – have inspired me since then. Did Louis XIV ever think that a young girl on the frozen prairie would have something to thank him for? I thank the Sun King, but above all I thank the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School for allowing an unlikely swan – plump, bespectacled, uncoordinated, too old – to start ballet classes. Forty years later, I'm still all of those things, yet I still squeeze myself into tights and leotard (for a laugh on special occasions a tutu and tiara) four or five days a week and head off to make like a ballerina. Forty years from now, I hope I'll still be doing ballet. And when I finish, I will poise my head and curve my arms and hands just so. The audience might be watching.

WARNING: Trying to synchronise those two videos so that the two ballerinas dive simultaneously can waste you a serious amount of time.

There's a Tucker/Eagling performance - a gala in the US, not with the RB - on YouTube.

At least Sambe doesn't have to wear the original costume! - very Spring Waters. I vaguely remember the first night being broadcast and in the second interval there was a certain amount of joshing between Eagling and Robert Tear on the subject... but Cassidy wears it with pride and looks great - and how nice to see him again! I haven't seen anyone credited with coaching Sambe and O'Sullivan - it's a pity no-one taught Sambe how to do that last lift and make it look easy.

If you watch one of the earlier performances after looking at this one, the very first thing you notice is how much faster it used to be! Dancing it so (relatively) slowly is bound to change the character of it.

Jann Parry's interview with Ek on Dancetabs says that woman with water won't be filmed because the Royal Swedish Ballet (by whom it was commissioned) has retained the media rights.

There's a description of the role and a job spec on the ROH site

A bit more detail about the Ek piece here

Last day today!

There's a piece of that name by Mats Ek - could be that? **** simultaneous post

There were cast changes from quite early on but I don't think there was ever a performance with no-one from the first cast. From the listings in the RB 50 Years book, this is how many the first cast danced (1970 - 1976): Sibley 40 Seymour 38 Mason 39 Jenner 45 Connor 51 Nureyev 33 Dowell 53 Wall 56 Coleman 59 J Kelly 15 Others who were in the cast: Marguerite Porter Alfreda Thorogood Lesely Collier Jennifer Penney Merle Park Georgina Parkinson Natalia Makarova Carl Myers David Ashmole Donald Macleary (who I think was meant to be in the first cast but was injured/ill) Wayne Eagling Julian Hosking Wayne Sleep Ross McGibbon A few of these came close to the originals but I don't remember anyone actually improving on the 7 main members of the first cast. But I only saw it 20 times. (And an extra one at Snape Maltings)

Brendan Keaney, chief executive of Dance East, gets an OBE.

Please could we have some explanation of your new system? - bit of a surprise to wake up to find I'm a Newbie. (Apologies if I've missed an anouncement and also for posting this in the wrong place originally.)

Please could we have some explanation of your new system? - bit of a surprise to lsign in and find I'm a Newbie! (apologies if I've missed an announcement)

Could it be Avril Bergen? (don't know if she was still in the company in 1969, though)

Lucette Aldous was born in New Zealand but her family moved to Australia soon after her birth. She came to London as a teenager and joined the Royal Ballet School, then danced with Ballet Rambert and the touring section of the Royal Ballet from the late 1950s till around 1970, when she returned to Australia. As Sim says, she was a lovely dancer, quite small but with a strong character. With the RB she danced Giselle, Aurora, Odette/Odile the Girl in Two Pigeons etc, but she's probably best known now (in this country) through the films she was cast in: Nureyev's Don Quixote with Australian Ballet, La Sylphide with Rambert and the tiny but spirited Lilac Fairy in a TV Sleeping Beauty with Fonteyn as Aurora. Here's a bit of LaSylphide, with Flemming Flindt as James

How about this, then? (Just came across it in one of my old scrapbooks - it's talking about a TV performance in 1960) "But it is in the transformation scenes that televison really comes into its own. In the stage version the Fairy Godmother throws a pumpkin into the wings and out rolls the coach. ... But this time the pumpkin appears to grow in size, becoming bigger and bigger until it bursts into a 10-ft-high tinsel-encrusted coach, lined with nylon fur and sprinkled with stardust, ready to take Cinderella to the ball." That's more like it. Especially the nylon fur.

Many photos and videos here

I think the role only lasted one season - and wasn't there a dance for the soldiers at the beginning of Act 3, maybe cut at the same time?

It was Collier! As far as I remember his original interpretation was so deep and revealing that all he could do was make it even more so! ( I found inside my programme Clement Crisp's review of the evening and I hope it's included in the new book - one of the warmest and most appreciative pieces he ever wrote!)