toursenlair

actually, I don't want to seem cranky (or elitist or snobbish or any of those other things!), but I wouldn't consider that wonderful and intimate interaction. It would have driven me crazy. I was at a performance of Fille one time where I took five-year-old twins who had never been to the ballet before but were as good as gold. Behind me a mother was giving a play-by-play to her son. "LOOK! There's a pony!!! Can you see the pony??" It's pretty hard to MISS the pony in Fille. I felt like turning around and saying, "He sees the damn pony, ok?". The kid himself never let out a peep. She kept this up the whole show, even to the point of commenting on Lise's beautiful necklace in the last pas de deux. As if an 8 year old boy would care. I think kids are more capable of understanding a ballet than we give them credit for.

I think I read that the exhibition catalogue is in English and French, which suggests it might be going to Paris.

also it doesn't work outside the UK, so if anyone could summarize if he had anything interesting to say...

The PNB book is called "Where Snowflakes Dance and swear".

Apollo's Angels is a very thorough history of ballet, but the author has an agenda. It's telling that her history of ballet ends the year of Balanchine's death. Many people in the US have an almost cult-like reverence for Balanchine, as if he were the be-all and end-all of ballet. In her last chapter she rants on about how ballet is dead, and I can't agree with her. You in the UK will be quite astounded by how dismissive she is of MacMillan. Here's a sample "it remains the central fact of MacMillan's career that he cosistently sacrificed his talent ot an obsessive desire to make ballet something it was not...His balles showed too many lapses in judgment and taste. By the end, he had reduced ballet's eloquent language to a series of barely audible grunts."

!!!

it's pretty gorgeous, isn't it? The Tewsley book is gorgeous too. Come to think of it, we SHOULD give them to ourselves instead of to other people!

Oh how I WISH I could have seen it. Sigh. Oh well, now I'm working on a trip to see Aladdin in February, plus 2 Royal B triple bills, ENB's Sleeping Beauty, and Ballet Black.

4* for BRB's Swan Lake: http://www.telegraph...ome-review.html

"Peter Wright’s Swan Lake just gets on with it. This is an understatement, certainly, in the context of such a resplendent production. But, in a world groaning with ego-driven demolitions of the 19th-century Tchaikovsky classics, it is also the ultimate compliment."

I LOVE it!!!!

The French Danse magazine has just published a lavishly illustrated 5-page interview with Roberto Bolle: http://www.robertobo...a/170_Danse.pdf

The interview is in French but you don't have to be able to read French to appreciate the pix!

Anjuli, if you want to see it for yourself, it's being shown in the US on October 7th, I believe.

And I fear that the Bolshoi claque was as much in evidence as ever, and I'd swear I now recognise the voices concerned. Applause at the lift in which it has become clear that the Sylph has been killed? I'm afraid so.

I was annoyed by the disruptive clapping too.

I haven't seen the Royal B but have seen the Royal Danish B. I felt also that the Bolshoi was less Bournonville and I was trying to analyse why. It seemed to me they didn't plie as much on landings and their upper bodies were stiffer, less epaulement than from Royal Danish dancers, esp. in those classic Bournonville grands jetes. Did anyone else notice this? When I saw Gudrun Bojesen of the Royal Danish Ballet I felt she really was made of air!

I agree about the Mikhailovsky, which has no name recognition in Canada. Also early June is a hard time to sell shows because people are involved in end-of-school-year activities with their kids. RWB will do fine with Nutcracker; Nutcracker is always an easy sell. Since both it and the Chinese Swan Lake are part of Ballet BC's subscription series, that will guarantee a certain number of seats. That's pretty much how touring companies operate here; they piggyback on the resident company's season. It's a win-win because it allows the more contemporary companies like Ballet BC and Les Grands to offer their subscription audience someting classical that they themselves would not do. After Vancouver, the Chinese are moving on to Montreal as part of Les Grands Ballets' season with Raise the Red Lantern. There is also a very large Chinese population in Vancouver so they may well come out for the National Ballet of China. Ballet Jorgen always dances in small theatres in cities that otherwise don't get ballet so I think they do pretty well.

great minds, as they say...

If you get rid of those unwanted smileys when you're typing a posting, click on More Reply Options and then uncheck Enable emoticons which is on the right of the text area.

Thanks for the tip, but I didn't actually know it was going to turn into a smiley! I assure you the Tresor de la langue francaise does not use smileys! I just pasted over from their entry and the smiley appeared once it was posted.

Toursenlair, thank you very much for this useful overview. I hope you don't mind that I've spaced the paragraphs out so that it's a bit clearer to read

Should I post a new topic pointing to this, since it's strayed quite a bit from its Ballet Jorgen title?

I think The Mikhailovsky was a bit of a fluke, actually. They were supposed to be performing in New York, but ABT exercised the non-compete clause they have in their contracts with Vasiliev and Osipova. So I guess the Mikhailovsky or their N American impresarios went casting around for another North American city and landed on Vancouver. The performances were very poorly attended, I heard.

well, no, not really. Vancouverites might get two real ballets a year, and one of those will be Nutcracker. I'm sure they're grateful for the Bolshoi and Royal live broadcasts! Last year they got the Cubans doing Don Q, then Mikhailovsky doing Swan Lake, and this year they're getting China doing.. Swan Lake and Jorgen doing... Swan Lake.

Don Quixote: guest artists Venus Villa, Rolando Sarabia, alternating with Alessandra Amato and Vito Mazzeo

Giselle: Svetlana Zakharova, Friedemann Vogel

In the Night (Robbins). Quartetto (ch:Francesco Nappa; music: Steve Reich e Philip Glass), Aria Tango, (ch: Micha van Hoecke guest artists: Eleonora Abbagnato, Alessio Carbone,

La Sylphide: Olesya Novikova, Leonid Sarafanov,Gaia Straccamore, Alessio Rezza

Coppelia (Roland Petit): Mathieu Ganio,

National Ballet of China are bringing their Swan Lake (Makarova version) to Vancouver next Feb/March and RWB is bringing their Nutcracker, both as part of Ballet BC's subscription series (but obviously also sold separately as well).

Aileen you can tell your sister that Ballet Jorgen wlll be bringng their new Swan Lake to North Vancouver and Chilliwack (suburbs of Vancouver) in 2013.

Toursenlair, could you tell me something about the other ballet companies in Canada, particularly those serving the west of the country as my sister lives in Vancouver? I believe that Alberta Ballet is based in Calgary and Ballet BC is based in Vancouver but I don't know anything about them.

Hi Aileen, glad to.

The National Ballet of Canada is the biggest company, with over 70 dancers in Toronto. Their rep is what you would expect of a big national ballet company: the major full-length classics of the 19th and 20th c., short ballets by Balanchine, Ashton, Kudelka (who was AD for a while in the late 90s), Robbins, Wheeldon, McGregor etc. the usual suspects. It is coming to England in April, bringing Ratmansky's new Romeo to Sadler's Wells. It co-produced Wheeldon's Alice with the Royal B. It tours to Ottawa every year and this year is touring Alice to LA and Washington. This year's touring is quite unusual as it hasn't been able to afford to tour abroad for many years now.

Canada's oldest ballet company is the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. They tour a lot. Their rep is made up of classical productions (like Sleeping Beauty.) and newer productions, both full length and mixed bills. When I was growing up in Winnipeg it was all mixed bills but they are leaning heavily to the full-length story ballets now. Recent ones are Dracula and Moulin Rouge, which has been very popular with audiences (maybe not standard ballet audiences) but I thought it was pretty dreadful (sorry, RWB!). This fall they are performing Twyla Tharp's new story ballet The Princess and the Goblin, whcih RWB co-produced with Atlanta Ballet. I think there are about 25 dancers in the RWB.

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal is what you might call a "contemporary ballet" company. They do have a Nutcracker, but I don't think they have any of the other big classics. They do a lot of Kylian, Veldman, people like that. Last year they commissioned Canadian choreographer Peter Quanz, who works in a neoclassical style (and also does a lot of work for the RWB, where he has a small group of dancers called Q Dance who put on evenings of his pieces in Winnipeg and smaller Manitoba centres) to do a full-length story ballet. He used the story of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, and it was hugely popular with audiences and will doubtless be brought back.

Vancouver, surprisingly for a large city, is a bit of a wasteland as far as ballet goes. Their resident company, Ballet BC, is really more of a contemporary company. Notoriously they launched a "no more tutus" publicity campaign a couple of years ago when they hung tutus on the lampposts in Vancouver. The most balletic they get is Forsythe and Kylian. They are doing a Giselle this year but it sounds like it's a modern reworking of it, in the vein of Mats Ek. The National Ballet of Canada tours to Vancouver on average about every two years and RWB and Alberta Ballet do visit. This past June the Mikhailovsky came with Swan Lake. The other option for Vancouverites is to go to Seattle (a 21/2 hr drive, which seems like a lot less for us than for you in the UK!) to see Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Alberta Ballet is located in Calgary and has regular seasons there and in Edmonton and also tours. It's also a group of about 20. They do some classics (Swan Lake for instance) but in the past few years under their AD Jean Grand-Maitre they have launched into a series of full-evening ballets set to popular songs. First it was Joni Mitchell, then it was Elton John, last year it was Sarah McLaughlin and this year it's k d lang (who is also from Alberta). These seem to be very successful with the audience. I saw the Elton John ballet (which was also a bio of Elton) and though I'm not a big fan of Elton John I did enjoy it. I noticed that the audience (here in Toronto where they were on tour) was not at all the same crowd as comes to the National Ballet, so Grand-Maitre does seem to be expanding the audience. Whether that audience will cross over into more traditional classical ballet is another question.

There are also smaller companies in Victoria, BC, Kelowna (central BC), and Fredericton New Brunswick in Eastern Canada (Atlantic Ballet Theatre).

It is a bit strange, though, that the article implies that the Ballet subsidises the Opera. In the POB annual report they provide countless analyses of various statistics, but no attempt is made to break down income and expenditure between Ballet and Opera. So too in the Royal Opera House report this analysis is avoided as far as I can see.

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I guess the journalist is showing off her "insider knowledge". By the way, not at all sure how that weird smiley ended up in the middle of the Tresor de la langue francaise article, but it kind of makes me wish I were still a lexicographer so that I could publish a dictionary with smileys in it!

Seeing as it's not long before we start wondering what to give our ballet-loving friends and relations, and even more importantly, what to say when our loved ones ask, "What do you want for Christmas?" (or perhaps, if they're not that direct, what broad hints to give), I thought it might be helpful if we suggested currently-in-print ballet books that we know and love.

Here are my two suggestions:

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes 1909-1929 [Hardcover]

Jane Pritchard (Editor), Geoffrey Marsh (Editor)

This is the companion volume from the 2010 V&A exhibition and it's gorgeous. The quality of the colour reproduction is unusually high so you can really appreciate the vividness of all those Bakst (and others') designs.

Robert Tewsley: Dancing beyond borders - Robert Tewsley: Tanz über alle Grenzen

Iris Julia Buhrle

This is a recent addition to the sadly disappearing genre of the Beautiful Ballet Book. It's coffee-table-book format, and very lavishly illustrated with many colour and black-and-white photos of Robert Tewsley, who danced with The National Ballet of Canada, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet, and the Royal Ballet, and has guested with many companies, including BRB. Text is in German and English. Great for fans of Robert Tewsley (obviously) but also if you want a book of beautiful ballet pictures of a true danseur noble or pictures of the major ballet rep. Major colour multi-page spreads of:

Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias (with Sue Jin Kang)

Bintley's Edward II (with Robert Gravenor)

MacMillan's Mayerling (with Vienna State Ballet)

Balanchine's Apollo (with Alicia Amatriain)

Cranko's Onegin

and much NYCB rep.

It's available through amazon.de or amazon.co.uk, but if you're in North America, I've found that shipping rates with amazon from Europe are very reasonable. Amazon's English site is describing it as "paperback" but it is in fact a hardback.

I would love to hear other people's suggestions!

I would have thought that the term 'productions lyriques' (lyric productions) in other words 'lyric theatre' refers to theatrical productions with music, that is both Ballet and Opera. In which case the Ballet yields a large part of the total income, which may be more or less than the Opera.

I'm pretty sure lyrique means "opera(tic)" in French. Tresor de la langue francaise:

1. Qui est mis en musique pour être chanté, joué sur une scène.

Art lyrique. Chant. Drame, théâtre lyrique. Synon. de opéra.

Comédie lyrique. Synon. opérette, opéra-comique.

Théâtre, scène lyrique. Théâtre où sont représentés les opéras, les opérettes.

a) Qui est propre à l'opéra. La déclamation lyrique a renoncé à tous les éléments de la mélodie (Arts et litt., 1935, p. 36-2).

Qui est relatif à l'opéra. L'État octroierait à une ville «une subvention annuelle d'au moins douze millions, au titre de la décentralisation lyrique» (Théâtres nat. Fr., 1954, p. 33).

c) [En parlant de pers.] Qui chante des opéras, des opérettes. Artiste lyrique. Artiste qui chante au théâtre ou au concert.

Surely no list is complete without the name Maneul Legris (currently Director of the Vienna State Opera Ballet) on it ...

Well, one can dream can't one?

He is in fact mentioned in the article. Also Eric Vu An, currently in Nice.