Sophoife

I'm sorry @capybara but I beg to differ here. The last time we had any Ashton was 2015 and we haven't had a full length (Fille) since 2004. Christopher Carr staged The Dream here eight years ago, and he's done it again. We are so so lucky to have him here! This double bill is insultingly short but still asking full prices ($333 for a premium seat, which is 85% of the stalls and the front two rows of the circle). I'm spending two nights in Sydney plus flights (just too much driving and the train takes far too long) plus three performances, because the Ashton bill is not being shown in Melbourne next year. Under the tenure of Mr Hallberg we've had some real rubbish, some hold-overs that were financially committed to before 2020, a "revamped" traditional Swan Lake cutting out a bunch of traditional bits and with no mime to speak of plus an underwhelming ending, and a couple of cool things (Kunstkamer, Everywhere We Go). Annoyed in Albury

Thank you @Bluebird - my go-to guru 😘

Absolutely fabulous 😍🤩 especially if you look at my avatar.

AusBallet's streaming model is WEIRD and at $29AUD quite expensive to only be able to watch once. Watch once on one device. No swapping between devices. Set up your device to be already streaming or already connected by cable to your preferred screen before you start the stream, is my advice. I would of course never advise anyone to capture the stream as that would be Very Naughty. Very odd they're streaming a Tuesday performance with, IMHO, sub-optimal Titania and Oberon. But it is the retiring Amy Harris as Marguerite. Casting as scheduled: Marguerite Amy Harris Armand Nathan Brook Armand's Father Steven Heathcote Duke Joey Romancewicz Conductor Barry Wordsworth Pianist Andrew Dunlop (ex Northern Ballet, now our "Principal Company Pianist & Head of Music Staff") Titania Ako Kondo Oberon Chengwu Guo Puck Brett Chynoweth Bottom Luke Marchant Hermia Rina Nemoto Lysander Hugo Dumapit Helena Valerie Tereshchenko Demetrius Mason Lovegrove Conductor Barry Wordsworth

🤣 Graeme Murphy made a piece in about 1980 for the great Australian dancer Kelvin Coe, called Beyond Twelve. It has three dancers playing the central character: boy larking about and playing footy with his mates, young man working at ballet and meeting with his first love, and mature dancer close to retirement (nothing lasts forever). The second movement is used for the mature man and at the end he walks off alone upstage, the backdrops parting to reveal (particularly in Melbourne) a vast empty backstage space. With the right dancer (and I saw Kelvin several times in the role, and only Andrew Killian and Steven Heathcote ever approached him), it's a beautiful piece. And the rearrangement works 😉 https://youtu.be/HLFa_oHjKAg?si=0WbwqICvfwCi7-UU from 40 seconds.

Thank you for these considered and thoughtful reports @SheilaC! We hardly ever get any Robbins here 🇦🇺 and it's so lovely to read about performances of his work. I remember seeing En sol in Paris in 2017 and being completely confused, as the other ballet I know to that music swaps the order of the second and third movements.

I said to Mr. G. that having watched the stream I was awfully glad I hadn't been asked to judge (as if!!) 🤣 He said that "judging is so hard when it's at that high level" and that the winner was "very refined".

If it's named after Phyllis Bedells, why do they keep calling it the Bedell's Bursary? 🙄 #NitPickersNotSoAnonymous 😉 Dan Gaudiello very very pleased with Ed Cooley's bronze medal.

I'm so pleased a boy who's had some coaching from Daniel Gaudiello has made the final. Makes a change for Dan from choreographing The Red Shoes: Next Step 😂

I present to you Guo Chengwu and Ako Kondo of AusBallet who embody that statement. IMHO of course. I'm so lucky, I had them for my one live Swan Lake. I'm getting them for one of my The Dream casts, too. Whoopee 😐 😐@Dawnstar I am so sorry to hear you had to leave - I know you wouldn't have done so if you had felt okay, so you did the right thing for yourself. And coping with rail replacement buses under those circumstances...! Please enjoy the best kind of hug I can offer - a virtual one 🤗 (probably your preferred kind anyway 😘)

2, 3 and 6 December for us in 🇦🇺 At least I'll know the casting in advance 😉

I noticed that the whole video focused on sound. Fantastic, but what about sightlines?! I mean, some of the SCS standing places have tall stools in front! Fabulous for the stool sitters, not so much for the stander.

I know they're a bit old, but if you do a search on this site the reviews for Ellison Ballet summer schools are rather positive! And @Ruby Foo I didn't mean it as a "correction", sorry if you saw it that way, I meant it as an expansion. That's why I said your comment was "not accurate", rather than "wrong". Because yes, POB take their own first, at the internal audition. Sometimes they take their own at the external one, too, but they do take complete outsiders as well. Who then, of course, have to work massively to absorb "le style parisien" (I'm told the parts of the TV series L'Opéra showing the étoile coaching the seasonal contract holder in company style are accurate).

I will be seeing Amy in her penultimate performance, as Marguerite, on 22 November. Can't believe the casting is available so early 😉 The other Marguerites I get are Sharni Spencer and Robyn Hendricks. I'm excited to see all three.

That's not accurate. Paris Opéra Ballet has two entry auditions: the internal one for students at their school, and the external one open to anyone from anywhere, including unsuccessful candidates from the internal audition! Current étoiles (all three of whom trained elsewhere and in two cases danced professionally before attempting the Paris audition) who entered the company through the external audition are Ludmila Pagliero, Park Sae-Eun, and Hannah O'Neill. In 2022 the sole female dancer awarded a full contract had been a principal at Pennsylvania since 2016, and started at the bottom again in Paris in 2020 with short-term contracts. The top ranked man (of two engaged) had danced with Boston for some years. So @Boyballetdancer if your DC decides Paris is an option, it's not impossible.

Natalie Weir was for some years listed as a Resident Choreographer of the Australian Ballet. Her 2001 Carmina Burana and Meryl Tankard's 2003 Wild Swans were the last main-stage pieces by female choreographers created for AusBallet until Alice Topp's emergence in IIRC 2015 with Little Atlas. À propos the Sydney Opera House, I remember my mum taking me to see Gillian Lynne's Fool on the Hill, originally choreographed for television, at the SOH in 1976. Ross Stretton, Kelvin Coe, and Lucette Aldous.

Amy Harris had glandular fever in 2008, possibly a bit soon to be cast as Giselle anyway, then was pregnant in 2015, so didn't even make her Myrtha début until 2018. Miss Gielgud was here for several months at that time, coaching and mentoring (it's her production we have), I guess if she'd seen Amy as Giselle, she'd have cast her.

My local cinema sells nachos at the snack bar. Just one of the reasons I'm so glad they no longer have the ballet films, despite having had to go back to the 7-hour round trip by road!! Due to the timing of the ballet films, usually 11am or 12 noon, and the fact that I am diabetic, I take a sandwich or wrap and a banana or some blueberries in a plastic box I can open soundlessly. No smell, no noise, and I don't keel over due to low blood sugar.

£26 for 200ml?! That's, like, AUD50! I mean, you can buy a piccolo Moët here for about AUD35!!

Symphonic Variations was last performed here in 2015, eight years ago. Of the 15 dancers cast overall, only Ako Kondo, Brett Chynoweth, Dimity Azoury, Robyn Hendricks (all now principals) and Amanda McGuigan are still dancing with the company - and after ten years with the company following RBS and three seasons each at ABT then HNB, McGuigan is still a coryphée. All the others have retired. Even Monotones II with only three dancers in each cast has just two available: Jared Wright (went back to HNB, now retired), Natasha Kusen (retired), Brett Simon (retired), Brodie James (still with the company), Amanda McGuigan (see above), and Richard House (went to Sarasota, now with Semperoperballett Dresden). Of course we used Aussie ponies, but Peregrine is an Icon Of The Stage 😉

Oh I've mentioned it several times. In person. No chance, particularly as Ashton is very thin on the ground over here so nothing else is prepared. The most recent Ashton programme here was Monotones II, Symphonic Variations, and The Dream, in 2015. Of the three, Monotones II had last been seen here in 1979, Symphonic Variations was a company première, and The Dream had been last shown here in 1980. As with 2015 Christopher Carr has set the Shakespeare. We were supposed to get A Month in the Country in 2020. No sign of it on the horizon. We haven't had a full-length Ashton (Fille since you ask and no, Peregrine did not appear due to Australia's animal quarantine laws) since 2004.

Hunh. That's something I've been complaining about since this year's AusBallet programme was revealed 12 months or more ago. The November Ashton programme is just The Dream and Marguerite and Armand with one 25-minute interval. Full price for "best" seats $333, $343 for Saturday nights, roughly £175. Some of these seats are so far back you need binoculars to see the footwork or even to identify the faces. That's for 55 minutes plus 35 minutes of dance, 1 hour 30 minutes. In 2017 the Royal Ballet presented these same two ballets, with Symphonic Variations in the middle. At that time when I asked him at stage door what thoughts he had when setting the programme, Kevin O'Hare told me that without the third ballet in the middle the evening would have been too short to justify charging full price. Pity he didn't ring up or Zoom David Hallberg to say the same thing!!! 😠

Australian Ballet principal artist Amy Harris has announced her retirement, to come at the end of the November Ashton double bill season in Sydney. She will be dancing Marguerite in Marguerite and Armand . Miss Harris, wife to senior artist Jarryd Madden (who will be co-hosting AusBallet's World Ballet Day stream once again) and mother to daughter Willow and son Phoenix, has been with the company 22 years. She's always been a popular dancer, winning the People's Choice in the company's internal Ballet Dancer Awards twice before winning "the big one". She joined AusBallet in 2002 and was promoted to coryphée in 2007, soloist in 2011 and senior artist in 2012. In 2018 she was promoted to principal artist on stage after dancing the secondary lead of Tertulla in Lucas Jervies' Spartacus. She's never danced Giselle, but Myrtha. Not Alice, but the Queen of Hearts. Not Cinderella, but Stepmother. Never Odette or Odette-Odile in any of the three Swan Lakes we've had during her time in the company. Not Juliet, but Lady Capulet. Not even a Sugar Plum Fairy as far as I can remember. Quite odd. London audiences may remember her as the Baroness in the Graeme Murphy Swan Lake some years ago, or in pdds from Concerto and Anna Karenina in the recent 60th anniversary gala, both with Nathan Brook, who will be her Armand. He btw is my tip for next male principal.

Oh, now I want to see that!! 🤣 And thank you @PeterS for your gracious acceptance of my 3am nitpicking 😘

As @Silke H noted up-thread, he is former dancer Andrej Uspenski. Nice to know his name as well as that he is very discreet in taking his photos! BTW "discrete" and "discreet" mean two different things, and the two are often confused, much like "horde" and "hoard". My personal hashtag elsewhere is #NitPickersNotSoAnonymous 😉 and I find myself using it more and more frequently, especially on the site formerly named Twitter. I won't say "formerly known as" because most of us still call it that 🤣 alleged billionaires notwithstanding.