Jane S

Good to see that Konservatoriet has been staged and coached  by Diana Cuni - many will remember her as a wonderful Bournonville dancer, and her own performance in the pas de trois from the ballet (with Gudrun Bojesen and Ulrik Birkkjaer) was one of the highlights of the RDB dancers' brief visit to the Peacock Theatre in 2015, just before she retired.

If you didn't understand Harlequin in April I'm not surprised - nobody else did either!

Cranko didn't help by prefacing it, in the programme notes, with the opening lines of T.S.Eliot's The Wasteland - 'April is the cruellest month...'  - giving rise to endless critical speculation about how this had influenced the choreography and what it all meant - and then, when the ballet was revived some years later, he admitted that it didn't have much to do with it at all and dropped the quotation.

(I never saw it but once wrote a long piece about it for Dance Now)

Something to do with pay scales, perhaps?

Some curtain call photos from this afternoon's performance here

(thanks to chien en peluche on dansomanie for the link)

My own first memory of Laura Morera goes back to the mid 1990s, when Twyla Tharp was making Mr Worldy  Wise for the Royal Ballet. One evening there was an open rehearsal - a Friends' do, I guess, anyone else remember it? - in one of the studios (we had to go in through the stage door - big thrill!).

Tharp was working with some of the younger dancers and at the end she drew Morera and Ricardo Cervera forward and said something along the lines of "These two are in the corps de ballet at the moment but I guarantee that you will very soon see them both moving up through the ranks" - so I kept a look out for both of them from then on and was delighted to see that Tharp had a sharp eye for talent!

Footnote, nothing to do with this actual performance but startling to me: I just read that today is the 95th anniversary of Apollo - so it's closer in time to Giselle than it is to Untitled and if it no longer looks  'modern' it's not surprising!

32 minutes ago, KyleCheng said:

 

Unable to attend myself, I would love to hear some thoughts on this piece from folks who have seen the performance: do you agree? Just from reading the piece, I cannot quite see how the titular conclusion was drawn. I would think that one triple-bill is not enough to represent a company's competency in classicism.

The title will have been added by a sub editor (or similar) without any consultation with the author, and on Alastair Macaulay's Twitter page he says that it's too sweeping a statement.

On 18/04/2023 at 15:51, Jane S said:

Lendorf has more or less abandoned his dancing career after struggling against an injury for several years.

Rarely more happy to eat my words...

Lendorf is dancing Roland Petit's Le Jeune Homme et la Mort in Copenhagen in August, with Cassandra Trenary from ABT

Details, and some video, here

12 hours ago, Emeralds said:

If it’s any help, Sylvia only had one cast (Fonteyn, Somes, Farron, Alexander Grant) for years- not just in the first run, but also the second, the third.....etc etc. No idea what they did to cover injury- logic suggests there were covers (understudies) who prepared by watching but imagine being the poor souls who learnt the tiring lead roles and never ever got to dance them! 

Do you maybe mean Ondine, Emeralds? Sylvia had several casts right from the start, but it was a couple of years before a second cast of Ondine went on.

I remember someone telling us at a Ballet Association years ago that the real killer for the corps in Sleeping Beauty was the number of costume changes - a different outfit for every act for some of them, I guess?

2 hours ago, Ondine said:

 

I said the answer would be out there!  Thank you.

 

 

 

 

It's also listed in David Vaughan's Ashton book, if you have it - always my starting point for Ashton queries up to 1999!

Mildly relevant, on the topic of increased prices - I just came across this in Richard Buckle's Ballet magazine in 1946, under the heading 'A Complaint':

Dear Sir,

From the prices at Covent Garden it would seem as if the Sadler's Wells Ballet has abdicated its position as the People's Ballet and that a class on a a different income level is now expected to support it: but in attempting to catch the "Upper Middles" it stands some risk of losing the "Lower Middles" who have stood by it so well.

We are all, of course, excited and pleased that the Company has stormed the West End ... but it seems we are to see them neither so freqently nor so close.

The provincials, the suburbanites, the shop- and office-girls... have been pushed off the end of the seat. These "regulars" who went once or more every week were the backbone of the audiences ... their loyalty and their money were surely of some use.

Now they are like poor relations... they can read of and enjoy [the company's] success [but] they can  no longer take a personal share in it - they must view their ballet from a dimmer distance or go less often.

Yours, etc.,

.....

(I don't think Covent Garden replied!)

22 minutes ago, James said:

I think that when the Messel production was revived in 2006 Peter Farmer created new costumes for some of the characters, including the wolf and, notably the Lilac Fairy. After a few years the Farmer costumes were replaced with ones that more closely replicated the original Messel designs, including that of the wolf. 

That would make sense, as Loots and Pickering did the fist night of the 2006 revival.

51 minutes ago, Emeralds said:

I wonder if they meant Makarova’s 2003 production for the Royal Ballet, but it was only in the repertoire for a short time, so not many photos of it are online. It’s definitely not the Dowell production from the 1990s, and after those two, there’s only the current one we have. It was designed by Luisa Spinatelli, and the Wolf & LRRH costumes do seem to be in her signature style. It’s also possible that they got the company wrong - the photo isn’t clear enough for me to identify the dancer dancing LRRH under hood and wig with 100% certainty! 

If I'm looking at the photo you mean, a LENS search identifies it as David Pickering and Iohna Loots, taken by John Ross for ballet.co. So presumably the Makarova Production?

I think they did increase the rake of the stalls somewhat - I remember being delighted when I queued up for the opening booking period after the rebuild and managed to get  Row A centre  in the Stalls Circle - my favourite seats up till then - and then being hugely disappointed when I discovered that that no longer guaranteed a clear view of the stage. So presumably they couldn't do much more without reclassifying the whole of the Stalls circle centre block.

I wonder if there's anyone here who was introduced to the ROH via the Midland Bank Proms? They seemed very popular at the time but I guess there's no way of knowing how many prommers became long term customers.

Wasn't Nadia Mullova-Barley the RBS girl who was featured in the documentary about Nutcracker a few years ago* - doing Snowflakes for the first time? Nice to see her come through.

* the one mostly about Hayward's debut as Sugar Plum

On 19/04/2023 at 08:53, Bruce Wall said:

Nice to see that NYCB note that they will be 'streaming' the programme they did in Madrid - 

 

In 2024 PBS will stream and broadcast the US Premiere of “New York City Ballet in Madrid,” an evening of three ballets – Balanchine’s Serenade and Square Dance, and Peck’s The Times Are Racing – recorded at the Teatro Real in the Spanish capital in March 2023. 

It's available now on medici.tv - subscription required but I think you can get a free trial, or sign up for a month for £9.90 and there are some other nice things you could watch while you are there.

46 minutes ago, Emeralds said:

 

2) The first change of cast was in mid March 1961, when Anya Linden replaced Farron as Berta, then on 30 March that month when Svetlana Beriosova and Donald Macleary took over as Ondine and Palemon, and danced it for several more performances with either Linden or Jacqueline Daryl as Berta (Alexander Grant seems to have been the sole interpreter of Tirrenio till he retired, unless some performances weren’t documented in the archive).

 

I found this interesting because ever since the ballet was revived by Ashton in 1988 (with Maria Almeida and Anthony Dowell as the leads), Ondine has always been danced by a petite ballerina (eg Almeida, Wildor, Yoshida, Rojo, Ansanelli, Marquez etc) yet here is evidence that Ashton cast a tall couple to dance the leads in the first change of cast - Beriosova was known to be (along with Beryl Grey) one of the tallest ballerinas in the company in the 50s and 60s. 

 

 

I saw Beriosova and Macleary in Ondine at a Saturday matinee in December 1961 - with, incidentally, Ronald Hynd as Palemon - not the best choice of occasion as Macleary had hurt his foot and was dancing with a heavily strapped ankle because Michael Somes was in America and no-one else knew the role. (And, even more incidentally, his foot injury had taken him out of the matinee of Fille a week earlier and David Blair had had to dance Colas twice in one day).

On the question of whether a taller dancer could do Ondine it's interesting to read Peter Williams in Dance & Dancers:

"... no question about Fonteyn's supremacy ... On the other hand nobody need feel particularly cheated if they land up with tickets for the performance I saw... Beriosova's interpretation is different but no less right. Physically more statuesque than Fonteyn, she exchews the playful movemnets and the feyness of the creature; in their place she presents a strange aura of unreality...She even manages to invest her wonderful arabesques with an aqueous quality, as though she was still moving in the water which is her natural domain. Less mobile than Fonteyn, Beriosova has now acquired the art of making stillness equally telling."

(I liked her too.)

Or they just needed a short, send-'em-home-happy piece to close a long evening on a long day.

And this revival reverted to the original sets and costumes.

Cuthbertson did Cinderella in the 2010 run, with Bonelli.

The gala on Coronation day consisted  of

Le Lac des Cygnes Act 2

Homage to the Queen

Facade

I think it's really fun that after the stately tableau at the end of Homage to the Queen, the Coronation Day gala ended with Facade!

I never saw Bintley as the Rake, but I do remember him very clearly as the Tailor, completely absorbed in his sewing. There's a film somewhere of de Valois rehearsing Checkmate with Bintley as the Red King, and as I remember it she doesn't appear to know his name and addresses him throughout as what's written on his t-shirt - Chicago or something. He was an outstanding Petrushka, too.

(This Rake film was a Margaret Dale production for the BBC in 1961, with de Valois collaborating. Donald Britton is the Rake and Elizabeth Anderton is the Betrayed Girl - also it's good to see Brian Shaw as the Dancing Master - unexpected, too, as almost everyone else is from the RB touring company of that era.)

Laura Morera did the Betrayed Girl in the RB's last staging of it - a very good role for her!