Mummykool

Great news, thanks for posting.I've seen Youtube clips of Ivan's Jeunne Homme and it looked superb. I went straight out online to get tickets (Upper Circle front row had already gone though ) Maybe by April I will have recovered form Friday night's Flames...... so glad I haven't got any ballet tickets until October, anything else would just pale into insignificance!

Believe it not Alison ENB are bringing Corsaire to Bristol in November We will probably still end up in London next January to see either Tamara or Alina though......

I grew up being taken to whoever was performing in Bournemouth. We saw Fille Mal Gardee the first time it travelled to the provinces and my Mother liked it so much we saw it twice. I was about 8 or 9 at the time but even then I could see there was a world of difference when we saw Doreen Wells and Christopher Gable take the lead roles. Later on I lived in New York in the glory days of Baryshnikov, Makarova, Kirkland and Bujones mentioned by Meunier .....(did we ever meet I wonder?)With such dancers performing regularly, it was an absolute no-brainer to wait until the casting was published. At $9 a seat up in the Family Circle we could afford to go two or three times a week but we were still very picky as to who we saw dance! We were even known to go only to see Bujones dance the Corsaire pas de deux..at $1 a minute it was well worth it! Now I live in Bristol and it is a slog to get to Covent Garden (or the Coliseum). It is nice to compare different dancers' interpretations, but this is somewhat of a luxury for us. Higher ticket prices and the knowledge we won't be home until 1.30 am have honed our choices down to the bone, even to the point of exchanging tickets should a our chosen dancer be injured. (We were at the Kobborg/ Cojacaru performance of Mayerling in June because I'd exchanged the tickets when Johan dropped out of their earlier performances, so that was a real bit of luck! ) If we don't know the company well I try to look up the dancers on You Tube to see what they are like. Didn't bother with the Stanislavsky having seen bits of their version of Coppelia posted there. Also Polunin never seemed to be bothered in most of the performances we saw at Covent Garden, so we decided to return the compliment! I'm finding it very frustrating that ENB are so slow to release casting information. I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot more of them with both Tamara and Alina dancing. Do Friends get more information? Obviously we have favourite ballets but we have discovered so many new and interesting things by booking to see a particular dancer (especially in New York......Push Comes to Shove, Great Galloping Gottschalk, La Sonambula etc. etc). So yes I pick by dancer every time. Osipova/Vailiev may just bankrupt me!

I've been thinking about this for days....I would want to take so many! In the end I decided I would need at least one 'old' ballet so plumped for La Bayadere with Acosta /Rojo/Nunez. I was at the performance they recorded and Marianela absolutely nailed it. Happy memories. I would also have to have something to remind me of our New York/ABT days. Every Christmas PBS would show Nutcracker with Gelsey Kirkland (now there was a ballerina) and Mikhail Baryshnikov. I think I've got two copies of that DVD in case I wore the first one out! I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned it. I would definitely need a MacMillan ballet. Manon is just too sad, (especially on a desert island), so I would take Mayerling. It would have to be the version with Irek Mukhamedov and Vivianna Durante. I felt much the same when the Royal Ballet let her get away as I do now about losing Alina Cojacaru! I definitely would need something to make me smile, so Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be on my list. Love the music and it is worth sitting through the long first act just for Steven McRrae and Eric Underwood. Zenaida Yanowsky's Red Queen was priceless. We were at that recording too, so that somehow makes it special! Finally I would have a Trock DVD as I absolutely love them. I would go for Program 2 with Les Sylphides as the adaptation of the steps for fewer dancers is just so clever. Last we saw them one of The 'Sylphs' starting sleepwalking and went clean off the stage into the orchestra pit. Priceless! I must admit however, that if they ever release the DVD of the live Bolshoi broadcast of Osipova/Vasiliev dancing Don Quixote, the Trocks would probably have to go. That or I would have to take up smuggling. In which case I'd have a copy of Fille, Corsaire and a couple of modern pieces as well!

Thank you Alison. I've been reading your forum for ages but it took the booking process to finally move me to speak out! I have no idea what the problem was.......It just came with "unknown error". Incidentally when the tragic news broke that we were losing both Johan and Alina, I wrote to Covent Garden asking if amended casts for next season would be available in time for Friends Booking and got the following reply. Cast lists will be amended for Friends Booking. Thanks, Chris Digital Content Producer When it didn't happen (unless you call TBC an amendment), I wrote again and got this reply Ballet casting can take some time to establish. We are currently exploring options and will publish details as soon as we can. Best wishes Ellen Any guesses anyone?

Slow down? Gross failure was more like it! A frog, if it's any consolation, I had exactly the same problem when booking ballet tickets on Tuesday. I got tickets in the basket only to get an error message when I tried to pay for them. I was trying for the Osipova/Acosta Romeo and Juliet performances and each time I went back into the system, tickets available were a row back from where I started. Having originally got 4 seats in row b in the amphitheatre, my husband finally got row e on his work computer while I was frantically rebooting ours at home in case it was us! This is the first bad experience I've had for friends booking, but this time around was VERY stressful.