Melody

Going back to the dance-actress thing - it shouldn't be impossible to combine a strong technique with good acting ability, but if dancers and artistic directors are getting the message that acrobatics go down better with audiences than less showy techniques coupled with emotional projection, then I suppose it's going to be tempting to emphasise technique. Especially since that seems to be the major requirement in contemporary dance, which seems to be dominating repertoires more and more. I think part of the problem is that if audiences rely on acrobatics to be satisfied that they've watched something good, then they'll get bored unless the acrobatics get more and more showy and dangerous, which is a nasty slippery slope. Whereas when you have good acting and good dancing together, that touches the emotions in a way that doesn't need to be constantly ratcheted up. I remember the almost awestruck response on this forum (and in reviews) to Yasmine Naghdi's debut as Juliet, and it wasn't because her technique was a million miles better than anyone else's.

We've put the hummingbird feeder out, and after a slow start we seem to have a couple of clients. It's amazing how they can hover in place while feeding, even in a fairly strong wind.

There's been some talk by the government of introducing more private higher education, but at this point it's only talk. That Norwegian site may be referring to the acedemisation of schools rather than to universities with their "big business" comment, but schools don't issue bachelor degrees and even the academies still offer A-level and Baccalaureate programmes, they aren't doing their own thing in that respect. It sounds as though the Norwegian Student Loans organisation is either confused or being deliberately misleading.

I am getting very tired of the constant (daily) reminders to upgrade my computer to Windows 10. Apparently now you can't even dismiss the box by clicking the x at the top right-hand corner because Microsoft has changed that from "dismiss" to "accept." I tried the upgrade a few months ago, it buggered up my internet connection (a problem that's apparently not all that uncommon), and I'm not trying it again because I need to be able to access the internet without the connection dropping out ten times a day. But this bloody reminder box just sits there in front of all the other pages and can't be dismissed - I can't even use the Task Manager to dismiss it because five minutes later it's back again. All I can do is to drag it to the bottom of the page and try and ignore it. I'm just waiting for the day when Microsoft realises that people are doing that and fixes the box in the middle of the page. At which point I think I'll go out and buy a Mac.

Or dancress. Ack!

Wow, so they took it really seriously by the sound of it. Does the current curriculum at the RBS include acting lessons?

I agree with all that, but I don't recall Margot Fonteyn being referred to as a dance-actress, yet she could inhabit a role better than almost anyone I remember seeing. When she danced Aurora or Juliet in her mid-40s, I was seeing a teenager on the stage, while her Marguerite was all woman and Ondine was very other-worldly.

I've been reading the reviews of the latest RB triple-bill, and I was struck by the number of reviews (not just of this triple-bill but also previously) referring to Zenaida Yanowsky as a "dance-actress." I'm wondering if this is some new subdivision of dancer, because I thought that being an actor was an intrinsic part of being a dancer (or opera singer). I suppose this goes back to the argument about whether pure technique is becoming paramount, and the tendency for contemporary ballets to be abstract to a greater degree than a few decades ago, but it seems strange to me that the ability to act is being called out as something apparently different from the norm. Is ballet training these days de-emphasising acting in favour of spending more time on pure physical ability and technique, or is this "dance-actress" business just a currently fashionable catch-phrase?

Well, this is the dilemma we've been talking about for ages. For me, part of the problem isn't just the business of taxpayer funding of the arts and arts education (which seems to be getting cut every time you turn around anyway), it's the standardisation of styles among countries so that graduates of ballet schools around the world can fit interchangeably into companies from Europe to Asia to America. I suppose in this day and age of globalisation it's getting hard to avoid worldwide homogeneity in any field, but those of us old enough to remember when British, French, Russian, and American ballet styles were identifiably different are maybe having a hard time seeing those identities getting submerged in a tide of global sameness.

Presumably they want to make sure the UK is available to the top international stars who are looking at moving from where they're currently working. Since it's probably not easy, or advisable, to specify that they want to make it easy to attract the Rudolph Nureyevs and Sylvie Guillems of this world but not the lower grades of dancer, they have to list the profession as a whole.

I seem to remember reading something about the 12-year-old girl who's doing so well this year, because people were saying she shouldn't have been eligible because she's had professional training. Even though having professional training isn't a problem apparently, it does suggest that people think there's a ban on professionals entering. Did it start off being for amateurs only and then broaden its scope? I mean, I remember some controversy about the Hungarian act that won in 2013 and the French guy with his talking dog last year because they weren't British and wouldn't have been allowed to enter in earlier years, so I assume the conditions change. It just seems weird that a programme advertising itself as a talent-spotting contest would allow established professionals to enter, because they've already been spotted.

I haven't been following BGT recently, but I'm surprised that professional ballet dancers would be allowed to take part and present a dance routine even if they're retired. I thought BGT was for amateurs.

Well, I think it was an American writer who claimed her sister had misheard it - maybe she didn't know what a green was. We have a small reindeer toy thingy as well as a life-size-ish one among our Christmas decorations; after hearing the wonderful mondegreen in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, we've taken to calling the small one Olive ("Olive the other reindeer, laughed at him and called him names...") Sad, really, but there it is.

I wouldn't be pleased to see bats. Dunno why, but they give me the creeps.

Oh dear, earworms with Mondegreen complications. Sounds nasty...

Hopefully the dead snake was Ramsay Bolton.

During the current directorship the Ashton repertoire is celebrated in Sarasota. Unfortunately I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that'll outlive Iain Webb for long. Since Alice was turned from a two-act ballet to a three-act ballet, I think that might count as more than just minor tweaking.

I have a vague recollection of an interview where she said she dyed her hair so it was the same colour as Fonteyn's. As for Edward Watson not being believable as Romeo - there are such things as Italian and Spanish redheads (Catherine of Aragon was a redhead for one), so for people looking for verisimilitude, a red-haired Romeo isn't the end of the world. I wonder if those same people get their knickers in such a twist about Sarah Lamb dancing Juliet.

In North American bird news, we saw an indigo bunting in the back garden for the first time. https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/indigo-bunting The first we saw of it was a bright turquoise patch in the trees and we thought it was an escaped budgerigar until we realised it was too big. Then it came to the bird feeder outside the door, which is in the shade, and all of a sudden it wasn't turquoise any more but dark blue-black. According to our field guide, that intense turquoise isn't an actual colour, it's caused by diffraction of sunlight through the feathers. It's a member of the cardinal family, which is another bright-coloured bird over here. https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/northern-cardinal In each case the female is sort of drab brownish-grey. Hardly seems fair.

At least it's a better compromise than the other one being suggested, which was that David Attenborough should change his name to Boaty McBoatface by deed poll.

Not sure if it was original to him although he's never admitted getting it from anywhere else, but he'd proposed the name before, for the new Condor vessel doing the Channel Island route from Poole. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-35860760 I'm a bit surprised at the outrage about this final decision. Seems to me that it's a good one, especially when Sir David has just celebrated his 90th birthday. I can't believe so many people seriously thought that Boaty McBoatface was going to succeed, given the parameters of the competition. Giving the name to one of the smaller boats seems like a reasonable compromise. Mind you, this is what happens in the Internet age. Over here we've just ended up with Trumpy McTrumpface winning a race the experts thought he'd crash out of early, so there you go. People are going to have to recalibrate the effect that "going viral" has on decision-making in the age of Twitter and Instagram.

I'm not sure it's relevant whether it's been a PR triumph or a disaster, to be honest. I mean, in the age of stuff going viral on Twitter you have to expect humorous and idiotic entries in competitions like this, and the Internet is going to amplify the idiocy. At least the topic of polar research has been given a lot of publicity, which on balance is probably a good thing. I just hope it's been sufficiently clear that the public vote isn't binding. And I'm sure that whatever inspirational-sounding name the ship ends up with (which I hope it does), it'll always be referred to informally and affectionately as Boaty. Not sure if there's anything they could usefully have done to insist that the entries followed the remit of the event, which was to suggest names that were inspirational and relevant to polar research, without looking like grinches with no sense of humour who were censoring stuff for the hell of it. But given all that's going on in the world, this seems like a rather idiotic thing for MPs to be getting involved in.

It's probably some bureaucrat or politician wanting to leave his mark on the educational system in much the same way that dogs can't help themselves from leaving their marks on trees and fire hydrants.

Morrice, if I remember right, wanted to try and keep the company more home-grown and not depend so heavily on starry guest artists, although I don't suppose that had a lot to do with the standards of the school. Unfortunately that decision coincided with a time when the school wasn't producing dancers of the caliber of Francesca Hayward and Yasmine Naghdi. I know at some point around then, the school switched to a Vaganova-based curriculum in an attempt to raise the standards but I don't know the details of the timing - I do remember that at some point there was concern that the standard had slipped badly. The lower standards at the school might have had something to do with de Valois no longer being involved, since she concentrated on the school during Ashton's tenure as Director but I don't know how long she was a major force there after that. I suppose once the company started concentrating more on the MacMillan works than the Ashton ones, they needed a somewhat different skill set, and that might not have been so conducive to high standards in the 19th century classics. After a thread a few weeks/months ago where someone mentioned Jeremy Isaacs' biography of his time at ROH, I bought a copy of that book; I gathered from reading it that he personally had a high regard for Ashton's work but that his tenure coincided with the time after Ashton's death when MacMillan was the resident choreographer, and Isaacs was under some pressure to showcase the MacMillan repertoire on account of MacMillan was alive and kicking and still producing for the company while Ashton wasn't, and that Dowell went along with it. I suppose it was maybe a matter of MacMillan being around and having advocates and Ashton no longer being around and not having such forceful advocates, and management taking the easier route through this thicket.

"A world-renowned Russian prima ballerina has become the latest star to condemn ballet companies worldwide for putting their dancers through unnecessarily brutal regimes. Irina Kolesnikova, 35, doyenne of the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre, is calling for companies to nurture dancers, rather than pressing them to remain thin while pushing themselves to physically dangerous levels." http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/apr/30/irina-kolesnikova-ballet-companies-wrecking-dancers-bodies-physical-limits I'm glad to see dancers speaking out. Between this sort of drilling and the demands for ever more flexible and extreme physicality, we're going to be in danger of losing sight of the fact that ballet is an art form, not a competitive sport. And this sort of thing must be making the dancers wear out physically and mentally at younger and younger ages. It's such a shame to think of people training for 15 years in order to spend maybe half that time in a company before retiring with chronic injuries and thoroughly disillusioned.