alison

I'd disagree: the box office have previously told me that the restrictions for rows B and C are only slight, but I've found them seriously disruptive, especially when you take the people in row A into account . I sat there for ENB, I think, sometime last year and had to voluntarily move myself to the back of the balcony so I could see, and I'm only average height. Plus surely it's only a couple of seats in the ROH balcony which have any problem with a rail? Or did you mean the amphitheatre?

I think the ROH do make a great effort to make the cinema audiences feel welcome and valued. I love the extras particularly the backstage views and input from the dancers and coaches. Some broadcasts just show the ballet, that's all, no introduction, no synopsis, nothing and it does seem soulless

The ROH have plenty of experience of this sort of thing now, of course, what with having done big-screen relays for umpteen years, where they needed to do something to fill the intervals. And of course the Bolshoi have bilingual introductions and so on, plus live interviews during the intervals. I do rather get the feeling that the originators can't be bothered if all I can see is a static view of the auditorium for 20 minutes or so.

Getting back to the R&J broadcasts, I've since remembered a couple of the occasions which I thought could have been done better: various close-ups of crowd scenes where all you really got was a blur of movement; focusing on Tybalt in the ballroom scene when they really needed to pull out and also show Romeo searching in vain for his mask before putting his hand up to try and block his face from Tybalt's view; a little more time showing Juliet being told the identity of her new love by the nurse and reacting to it. Just a few little things like that which would have made the logic in how things unfolded a little clearer to the viewer. But all in all I thought it worked pretty well.

Sadly R&J was not showing anywhere near me, but the POB's La Bayadere was.

You lucky thing! Are you UK-based? I'd have loved to have seen that.

Don't know what it was about the 22nd: there was apparently a Mikhailovsky broadcast on the same date, too!

If you look at the bottom left of the page, along with the Twitter and Facebook icons, there's a print icon which appears to give you a condensed version of the page. How far it will go, I'm not sure: some forum software will put an entire thread into printable form, while other types will only do the current page. I can't see a way of printing a single post, though.

So, for future reference, would anyone like to help flesh the schedule out a bit? I'll do what I've picked up on, but it's not much:

10.30 Daily Class - including interviews with Jonathan Cope and Kristen McNally

11.35 Wayne McGregor interview

12.00 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland rehearsal - Stix-Brunell, Campbell and ??? doing the tea party scene

12.30 Dancers interview - Stix-Brunell, Choe, ???

13.05 Monica Mason interview

13:20 Prince of the Pagodas rehearsal - Nunez

13.50 Marianela Nuñez interview

13.55 Barry Wordsworth and Rob Clark interview

14.00 Polyphonia rehearsal - both casts?

14.30 Dancers interview

15.15 Street Stories - education project with East London dance students

16.10 Romeo and Juliet rehearsal - swordfighting, Watson & Avis

16.50 Dancers Interview

17.00 New Liam Scarlett ballet rehearsal - Cope, Soares

17.30 Liam Scarlett interview - surely he didn't get an hour?!

18.30 Carbon Life - including interviews with Wayne McGregor and Mark Ronson (Insights Public Event) - Watson, Cowley

Unless some of them are so inspired that they make their way over here, we may not find out

Well, I saw it in my local cinema as well - totally interruption-free, I'm pleased to say. I'd been a little hesitant about the casting, having not got much from Cuthbertson on the big screens in the O2 last year, and knowing that I hadn't thought Bonelli was back to full fitness when I saw his Romeo back in January, but clearly the cinema is a completely different matter: you could see every flicker of expression on Cuthbertson's face. Admittedly, there were times when I thought the cameras should have pulled back slightly rather than go for close-ups because there were other characters whose reactions we needed to see, but then that seems to be par for the course for live broadcasts. I must say, the ROH audience appeared to be extremely enthusiastic at the end (and so did the one in my cinema).

I missed some of the pre-show stuff while I was off hunting for the all-important cast sheet, although it sounded good. What did surprise me, though, was that they didn't appear to take the opportunity to plug the YouTube streaming the next day: I thought it would have been an ideal follow-up once they'd got the audience's interest.

Oh, and I still wonder, as I do with other companies' broadcasts, why they can't show something more interesting than the auditorium for 20 minutes during the interval. Rehearsal footage, company class, guided tour of the building? Mind you, the piece about swordfighting was interesting. Can't remember whether it was then or elsewhere that Cuthbertson brought up the story about her Romeo with blood all over his face ...

Alison, were you using IE? If so, check your Temporary Internet Files for a very large file with today's date on it. You may still be able to recover whatever you've got stored and play it as a flash video file.

Nice idea, thanks, Paul. It doesn't seem to work here - haven't got anything bigger than 2000 KB, but I'll try the home computer and see if anything's stayed on that. Fear I probably lost everything here when IE froze and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete it.

Wish I'd thought about reducing the pixel size, too - I'm not so used to all this video watching on the computer, simply because I don't have the allowance to do so. Oh well, I'll know what to avoid if they ever do it again (and I hope they will - it seems to have been successful).

Alex isn't listed on the Polyphonia performance page. Might he be the TBC?

Might be. According to the originally published casting, I'd have expected it to be whoever was dancing with Lauren, but was she there? I can't remember.

have seen observations elsewhere in the blogosphere that recent experience of online booking suggests you cannot open more than one window on one device without the ROH system realising and equalising your positions in the queue, so you do have to use multiple devices.

Or at least multiple browsers.

I could spot most of the other men (even out of focus), but Mr. TBC is still unknown.

Why am I not surprised to discover that the local library internet system is completely down and not expected to be back today? So that's now at home, at work and in the library that I can't watch it. Grrr! Maybe they'll make it available on iTunes in due course.

Did anyone get the impression that you'd be able to pick and choose what you wanted to watch from the re-streaming, or will it be a question of having to be online at a given time if you want to watch a specific bit tomorrow?

Darn it! I thought if I had the picture on Pause (as I have most of the day) I wouldn't be downloading anything very much (that's how YouTube usually works for me). I've just been warned that I'm already at 80% of my monthly download allowance, which has got to last me until the middle of next month . So I've wasted it all and still not really watched any of it

What have they done? Basically just set up cameras to cover whatever's going on in the Clore? If so, that would explain why we've currently got a lot of non-RB dancers on the site. Is there perhaps a stage rehearsal going on which they're not equipped to show?

And did anyone spot who the "TBC" in Polyphonia was, out of interest?

By the way, were there any changes to the printed casting on last night's Romeo? I wasn't convinced that everything matched up.

Just thought I'd mention there are some (generally, but not always, very expensive) returns for the last 2 performances on the ROH website.

I don't know whether I'm the only person having this problem, but every now and then when I try and post something the post doesn't go through, but I just get a "saving post" message at the bottom right. When this happens, I copy my posting text, refresh the page and then paste it in again, when it seems to work.

I'm using Windows XP, Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.xxxxx

I haven't been able to watch all of it by any means but a lot of it is not 'live' or new material

I'm assuming the dancers have to eat lunch sometime - and might prefer to do that in private

Just been interviewing Beatriz Stix-Brunell, who makes her debut in Alice tomorrow. Now showing what I presume is the Yuhui Choe footage of a couple of years ago.

Am realising that if you pause the feed you need to refresh the page to catch up with the latest, otherwise you just start again from where you left off.

I do wish The Arts Desk would go back to putting their reviews on a single page. The way this particular one is laid out, you might expect there to be 3 pages (or even more), but I've clicked numerous times on "First Page", "previous page" and "next page" and only manage to come up with 2. It's really rather confusing.

After just over 3 months of existence, the new BalletcoForum has just clocked up its 500th member: Mumofballetmaddaughter! Welcome to her, and to everyone else who's joined in the intervening time (and thank you to the Mods who've been approving membership - sterling work!). I hope we can all work together to make the new forum a success.

I've split off aileen's comments from the News thread into this one to cover the actual performances. If you were there last night and would like to leave your impressions, please do.

I've split off aileen's comments on last night's performance into a new thread in the Performances Seen section (http://www.balletcoforum.com/index.php?/topic/481-enb-beyond-ballets-russes/): please post there if you have any comments on the performance, and leave this thread for anything like casting updates and so on.

Thanks!

I thought I saw something yesterday which said that the R&J rehearsal was actually the RBS, and involved learning the swordfighting. Yet on the live broadcast last night we were told that they don't teach swordfighting at the RBS, which is all a bit confusing.

The Family Performances stopped for a couple of years but I believe they are back in similar form - now called "Welcome Performances": http://www.roh.org.u...ts/welcome.aspx

I think there's an Alice performance Saturday week which qualifies.