Jane S

53 minutes ago, Emeralds said:

. By the way, I thought Jennifer Penney (with Wayne Eagling ad Des Grieux) was second to dance Manon since some of the choreography was created on her when Sibley was off ill? 

You're right - in March 1974 Sibley and Dowell did performances 1,2, 3 (which I saw) and 4, and Penney and Eagling did number 5; then there were no more till July, when Park/Nureyev and Sibley/Dowell did one each.

There was an ensemble piece for the soldiers in Act 3 initially - don't know when that was dropped - maybe at the same time as the Gaoler's mistress?

I just noticed the review of the first performances in Dance & Dancers says that the Gaoler's mistress was glimpsed in Act 1, being carried into exile with her hair already cropped.

And you'd get to see at least 12 principals and 20 or so soloists/demi soloists.

54 minutes ago, Sim said:

Yes, those good old days, when you had to fill in that tiny form, write out a cheque (remember those?!) and provide a stamped addressed envelope for return of tickets.  When you could still rely on the mail.  As you say, Mary, the excitement of opening your returned envelope was so much fun.  I always used to add a little note requesting certain seats, and almost always got what I asked for.  

Even better for me - on the day the booking opened  I could take a slightly different route to work, drop the form through the letter-box of the Box Office in Floral Street at about 08.45, find somewhere nice for a coffee, and stroll into the office slightly late but not conspicuously so. I used to quite look forward to it and got the seats I wanted maybe 4 times out of 5.

16 hours ago, Estreiiita said:

  By the way, I was quite impressed by a new member of our danish corps de ballet, Lania Atkins, who's also quite tall - I saw her as a Fairy Godmother in "Cinderella", and she was excellent, a true queen of the ballet!

  So the tall female dancers can surely find their place even in the companies where the majority of dancers is of  average height.

Good to hear that Lania Atkins had a successful debut - I had seen her name in the company listings and wondered where she had come from: she's Australian and has been dancing with the Norwegian Ballet, where she's done Myrtha and also Gamzatti - some excellent photos of that on her Instagram pages. She was an Aub Jensen dancer with RB for a time - some comments about her on this forum here .

4 hours ago, LinMM said:

Good luck with your operation MAB 

 

It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in a flower throw but I can’t remember the Company being that involved in it. 
We mostly used to throw from the boxes and seem to remember ( but possibly incorrectly) negotiating leaving the flowers in there for the end of the performance. 
I think it was mostly ballet “fans” who organised it but in those days the flower market was still in Covent Garden so close at hand for buying flowers. 
There may have been a “chief” organiser but can’t remember and/or whether they were directly connected to the Company or not. 

I think the company may have 'facilitated' earlier flower showers but my  impression was that they were organised and paid for by the audience. I remember hearing that 'they' (a group of regulars) had collected £100 for a flower shower for Merle Park's debut in Swan Lake  - and that, 50 years ago,  bought quite a lot of daffodils!

My fondest memory of him is as Eros in David Bintley's Sylvia - an absolutely brilliant comedy act!

19 hours ago, Emeralds said:

For Les Rendezvous there is one lead couple and maybe one female soloist type role. I don't remember it being a technically formidable sort of ballet- anyone can dance it well, it's down to artistry of the lead man and lead ballerina. Eg Miyako Yoshida, Darcey Bussell and Marianela Nunez have danced the lead ballerina part. 

As well as the lead couple there's a pas de trois (1f/2m) which is very fast and completely non-stop - it's actually not much more than 2 miutes but must feel like eternity to them! (Original cast included Ninette de Valois and Robert Helpmann)

There used to be 6 couples in the corps de  ballet but I think at the last revival there were 10 - and there's also a pas de quatre for what used to be known as 'the little girls', later changed to 'ladies' - Ashton added it soon after the first performances, and one of the little girls was Margot Fonteyn.

The two leading roles were created for Alicia Markova and Stanislas Idzikowsky (the great virtuoso of his day - though he actually only did the first 3 performances) and they each had a brilliant solo.

It's a lovely piece, one of my  most favourite Ashton ballets - it would be wonderful to find they'd ditched the costumes from the last revival but I guess that for just 5 performances they won't)

(And I thought Darcey Bussell was totally miscast!)

1 hour ago, Blossom said:

There's a write up from Debra Craine in The Times this morning - see links.

And in the print edition it's in the news section rather than on the arts page

26 minutes ago, PeterS said:

 

 

IIRC I've read elsewhere that, being of short duration,  Giselle used to be preceded by another one act ballet. as such, maybe a piece to showcase the male talent could be included in the evening to balance things out. 

Wayne Eagling once made a piece exactly for this: excuse me if I quote what I wrote about it at the time (2010) in Dance View:

"Eagling’s Men Y Men, set to orchestrated piano music by Rachmaninov, is unashamedly designed to keep the company’s men interested during a long tour of Giselle. Presumably it succeeds in that – all of the cast of nine appeared properly engaged, and the choreography looks difficult enough to challenge even the best of them. But it’s not – as you might perhaps expect – a jump-and-turn fest: there are plenty opportunities for show-off brilliance, but they’re nicely placed to contrast with some very effective adagio sequences, and the mood of the whole piece is quiet enough to make the transition to Giselle, with no intervening interval, seem quite unalarming. Yat-Sen Chang, the company’s leading virtuoso, danced the most prominent role with his usual tidy vigour; the rest of the cast included some of the best of the younger dancers, such as Vadim Muntagirov who is in his first season out of school and is already dancing Albrecht. It’s nice to see that Eagling has dedicated his ballet to the late David Ashmole, who never danced with this company but was a contemporary of Eagling’s in the Royal Ballet when they were very frequently cast together in demi-soloist roles."

The RDB's triple bill Giant Steps. which opens at the end of next week. consists of  3 - THREE! - plotless works : Serenade, Etudes and a new piece by Jorma Elo, Sibelius' 4th Symphony ( described as being for the company's men).

Some interesting casting, especially for the  the second male principal in Etudes  - Alban Lendorf in the first cast and very junior corps de ballet dancer Afonso Coelho in the second!

1 hour ago, MAB said:

 

 

More's the pity.

Or just as well - the last time I saw them do the Ashton R&J (summer 1990, I think) I thought they had let it go so badly that we left at the first interval - the only time I've ever done that.

The final 'Rising Stars' concert, including former prize winners Madison Young and Julian Mackay, is on Medici TV this afternoon, starting 2 pm GMT.

15 hours ago, alison said:

 

 

Am I right in thinking that that recording of the ballet also appeared in full on I Am A Dancer?  I do have that, but perhaps only on VHS.  Am I also right in thinking that this is generally regarded as the less good of the two Fonteyn/Nureyev recordings?

I don't think it's the same one - I haven't got I am a Dancer but snippets on Youtube seem to show a very different decor.

Edit:  I do have I am a Dancer and it's defintiely not the same recording.

I agree - I wish it  had been left as a legend.

The only cast I've seen that came anywhere near justifying a revival was Rojo and Polunin  - also perhaps Le Riche in

the very first performance, when I had the weirdest feeling that Nureyev's spirit was hanging around watching - the only time in my life I've ever felt something like that!

13 hours ago, Ian Macmillan said:

A difficult combination, to be sure - but a chap I once knew, Josh Mellet, managed it.  

Neat!

Apparently one of the dancers in Troy Game was Joseph Cipolla -- anyone spot him?

42 minutes ago, alison said:

 And poor Christian Duncan - agree he was too inexperienced for the role at that stage.

He was a late replacement - 'catapulted on' according to John Percival -  for  the injured Jose Manuel Carreno. Poor guy!

15 hours ago, alison said:

I have the programme - but guess what, it's still in storage   Not sure it included the Dying Swan, though?  It was a Ballets Russes programme.  Might have included Les Sylphides?

August 1992, Festival Hall? 

Dying Swan, Sylphides, Spectre, Scheherazade - though not necessarily in that order.

Just watched Part 2 - loved Wayne Sleep but the bit that really got  me was Fonteyn's Giselle - so  simple and so wonderful.

(By the way, Robert Penman's Catalogue of dance in the  BBC TV archives says they also have 3 hours of Fonteyn's complete interviews with Marie Rambert, Kyra Nijnsky, Nureyev and Fred Astaire, as well as snippets from some of the rehearsals - nice to know, although not much chance of ever seeing them .)

4 hours ago, Fonty said:

 

 

I kept fairly quiet because I was interested to hear his reaction to the various pieces.    He thought Makarova was a very beautiful dancer, "but why is it so slow?  Isn't it normally danced bit faster?"   I wasn't actually timing it, but it felt slow to me too.  Although I could enjoy her wonderful technique and exquisite arms, and the whole piece was very beautiful, for me it lacked drama.  Sacrilege to say so, I suppose!  

 

 

Not sacrilege at all - I gave up on Makarova's Swan Lake in the end as I got just so impatient with her slow tempi! And too many others copied her.

You can see some details of the Peter Schaufuss programmes here .

16 hours ago, jmhopton said:

Just got my Christmas double issue Radio Times and though I haven't had chance to go through it yet I see the Margot Fonteyn Magic of Dance programme which starts at 11.20pm on BBC4 as oncnp says, also has a brief introduction by Darcey at 11.10pm but is billed as the first of 6 programmes, so it looks as if they're broadcasting the entire series from 1979 which is great.

 

Episodes 2 and 3 are scheduled for Jan. 7th at 21.30 and 22.30

5 hours ago, alison said:

 

WAS it Cuthbertson?  I thought it was Lamb - and then there would be even more reason to choose a safe partner.

Luke Jennings, writing in the Observer in 2014:

Lauren Cuthbertson has suffered a string of mishaps, most recently a badly twisted foot sustained while rehearsing the notorious “slide” in Act 1 of Manon. This step, an accelerated, feet-first skid to the ground, has injured Cuthbertson, Alina Cojocaru, Sylvie Guillem, Sarah Lamb, Cynthia Harvey and Tamara Rojo. It is a known and wretched hazard which clearly should be modified.

Another Rudolf: Jonathan Cope - not one of the greats, but way beyond what I'd thought he could do.

16 minutes ago, FionaM said:

 

I had no buffering issues with the Fonteyn and Prix De Lausanne programmes.  

 

 

Me neither