Melody

Oh dear. They seem to be trying to make this out to be a nationalist thing. I hope that isn't true although these days it seems to be very easy to whip up strident nationalism just about anywhere. Was Johan Kobborg the first non-Romanian artistic director (or whatever they've been calling him) that they've had there?

I think it's also true in France although I don't know details about how it applies to international students.

Thanks, but I am aware when Petrouchka was premiered. I've just had a look through a couple of my books on the Ballets Russes (haven't got time to dig out all of them at this point), and the descriptions of Petrouchka are referring to the use of folk dance and crowd scenes as something new and different even for the Diaghilev repertoire.

It may be that I've seen it performed rather than just as still photos, which is all I know of some of his other early pieces (apart from ballets like Les Sylphides and Spectre de la Rose, which are very balletic), and I thought the crowd scenes looked very un-ballet-like in a way that the photos of Cleopatra and Scheherazade didn't.

It's news over here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxcuhdIeO6M

I remember being completely enthralled the first time I saw Petrouchka because of the crowd scenes, which in a way didn't seem like ballet (it certainly didn't look anything like a corps de ballet I'd ever seen before) but at the same time somehow seemed to get to the essence of the dance and lose the artificiality while still remaining within recognisable limits. At first I couldn't believe it was the same choreographer as Les Sylphides, but on further viewing it had the same organic feel to it, so different from Petipa's choreography. The Ballets Russes audiences in the early 20th century must have wondered what on earth they were watching! And what a good thing Fokine put his foot down about Mathilde Kschessinska and insisted that, unlike at the Mariinsky at the time, it wasn't all about the ballerina. We ended up with a fascinating repertoire. It's interesting that Diaghilev apparently thought that Fokine peaked in 1910 with Scheherazade and got rid of him in favour of Nijinsky, because he produced some real keepers in the years after that even if they weren't quite as shocking and different as the stuff Nijinsky was creating.

Since they requested an inspirational name with a connection to the ship's future as a polar research vessel, I hope they'll respond with a "that was fun, and thanks but no thanks" to Boaty McBoatface. Apparently the guy who came up with the Boaty McBoatface name voted for RRS David Attenborough. At least this competition has given a lot of publicity to a vessel (and a whole field of research) that people wouldn't otherwise know about, so it's done some good.

Well, that was fascinating. I don't even particularly like Rite of Spring but that interview has made more sense of it for me, so hopefully I'll get more out of it another time. I sort of gather from things she's said about life after retirement that she might be wanting to branch out into something completely different. Which would be a shame in a way because that clip suggests that she might make a really good company coach.

So basically, between this thing and the Twitter bot that went Nazi after a short time in the real world, it would appear that we're not in danger of being totally replaced by AI any time soon.

Thanks from me also - it's lovely to have this connection to home.

Not until November. And in the meantime we have the conventions in July to look forward to. The Republican convention is shaping up to be a major omnishambles, with factions getting ready to shut Donald Trump out of the nomination even if he does have more delegates than anyone else; should be quite entertaining for people who aren't already burned out.

This is awful for the dancers of the company but Johan Kobborg really didn't have any other viable option. When you get these politically connected people with no thought beyond their own advancement, ready to smash everything in sight in order to rebuild in their own image, that's not an environment any sane person would want anything to do with if they had other choices. I wonder what'll happen to the company in the future, especially the non-Romanian dancers. Some of them must really be seeing the writing on the wall.

Well, if management is going to allow people to take food into the auditorium, the obvious next step is that they're going to eat during the performance. It would be nice if crisps weren't sold in theatres if food is permitted in the auditorium, but nice salty crisps are a good way to get people to buy more drinks, and that seems to be the object of the exercise. I suppose that with subsidies being cut everywhere you turn, theatres have to make their profits somewhere.

So after all that he's been given the power he (and everyone else) thought he had all along?

I have no idea, but my post was about his current predicament, not the RB situation.

OK, when a "mistake" like that happens and the new guy comes waltzing in, demanding that everyone speak Romanian and whatnot, there's more to it than just an oversight about job titles regardless of the damage control being done today. Seriously, if they weren't either trying to get rid of Johan Kobborg or at least trying to send him a message about how precarious his position was, they'd have fixed the problem with his job description before doing anything public. Presumably he took over this position from someone else, who took it over from someone else etc, and there was never a problem until yesterday, when someone with, apparently, an ego the size of a certain gentleman currently running the Vaganova Academy, decided to throw his weight around. Trouble is, they can fix job descriptions once they realise they've bitten off more than they can chew, but it's not going to be nearly as easy to fix the actual issues.

That sort of narrow-minded nationalism seems to be getting more and more prevalent, but the company is going to suffer in the long term (to say nothing of the short term) if it freezes out dancers from other countries. I gather from the comments under the translated article that someone in a high place has a wife who is a ballet dancer. That might give them the idea they know a lot more than they really do about running a ballet company. I hope Johan Kobborg manages to find another position where he can use his abilities; it's nice in a way that the dancers think highly enough of him to go on strike on his behalf, but the atmosphere there sounds pretty toxic and I'm not sure he'd want to return even if the dancers do manage to force the hand of the culture minister and the acting general Pooh-Bah or whatever he is.

This is part of why I'm not so sure that it's a great thing to do as they do in the Russian system and have the same teacher year after year. It's obviously an advantage if it's a good fit between the teacher and the pupil, but if for some reason it isn't, it must be terribly destructive. And I may be reading far too much into the dynamic between that little Olya and the teacher in the Vaganova documentary that's been discussed in other threads, but it seemed to me that the teacher was creating a bit of an unhealthy atmosphere of dependence with her "you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me" attitude. This seems like rather a lot of emotional pressure for a young kid to process, especially one who's so far away from her own family.

For any Trekkies among our number: The National Air and Space Museum announces a one-day Tribble-breeding programme: http://www.startrek.com/article/national-air-and-space-museum-announces-tribble-breeding-program

A pedestrian congestion charge to walk around in Zone 1 (which includes Covent Garden). http://www.timeout.com/london/blog/walk-this-pay-theres-going-to-be-a-congestion-charge-for-pedestrians-033116

Monica Loughman was in her class when she moved to Russia to train, and she found her so abusive that she asked to change classes, which was pretty much unheard of at the time. She goes into some detail in her book Ballerina, which is available at Amazon.co.uk for £2.59 (Kindle edition). I remember seeing one documentary, though, where she'd been really tough on her students during the classes (standardly reducing students to tears), but was hanging out with them and laughing and dancing with them after their exams, and they seemed to love her. So who knows...

I loved The Two Ronnies - the humour was really clever, especially for people who appreciate the sort of wordplay they used (much of which was apparently written by Ronnie Barker). I was very pleased to see the absolutely classic Four Candles sketch on YouTube recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGpaj2nHIo I hadn't realised until recently that Ronnie Corbett was Scottish.

I was rereading Luke Jennings' article about RBS to find a quote for another thread, but while I was reading it I was struck by this comment: "But the obstacles these children will face are formidable. They will be subject to term-by-term appraisal and at the end of each year some will be "assessed out", or asked to leave. Perhaps they have failed to reach the expected technical standard, or their bodies have developed in ways that do not comply with the school's increasingly narrow physical ideal. Short-backed and long-legged, in the Russian mould, this is very different from the longer-backed "old" Royal Ballet look and there is a certain irony in the fact that many of the school's ex-company teachers, were they to present themselves today with the bodies they had as teenagers, might well not fit the mould." So apparently, at least at RBS, it is about the body in a way that maybe a few decades ago it wouldn't have been. Now the school is training prospective dancers for a worldwide market and the worldwide style seems to be converging on the Russian ideal, perhaps they feel they don't have a choice other than to just go along with it. Makes you wonder how many of the British stars of the 1930s to 1960s wouldn't have made it through White Lodge if they'd been students now.

If I remember right, the company only had one vacancy for a male dancer and they took Polunin rather than Muntagirov, partly because Muntagirov was very shy and maybe they thought he mightn't project well onstage.

None of the older ballerinas are technically comparable to today's ballerinas. However, ballet is more than pure technique. One thing I know I've quoted before is this comment by a RBS teacher about the difference between her generation of dancers and the current crop. ""They're so lovely," [Anita] Young sighs after the class. "And their legs go far higher than ours ever did. All this, though…" And here she strikes an attitude, the position pliant and alive, her arms framing her face with subtle épaulement. "All this is gone."" From this article by Luke Jennings. The thing about Margot Fonteyn, and maybe you had to see her live in order to appreciate it, was her sheer radiance onstage. She lived the roles she was dancing, she didn't just act them. And she certainly didn't put the dance, the music, and the characterization second to sheer displays of technique, which some dancers were doing in her day even though the technique wasn't as advanced or as exaggerated as it is now. If you're watching ballet mostly to see how high a dancer can do an arabesque, or how long she can hold a balance, or how many double and triple pirouettes she can manage in a piece of choreography that only called for singles, then of course dancers like Fonteyn will bore you rigid. For those of us who see more to ballet than technique, she's still one of the standard-setters. The same is also true of Galina Ulanova, who made a memorable Juliet when she was well into her 40s. Personally I much prefer Fonteyn's line in an arabesque to someone who's trying to hit the ceiling with her foot. Maybe that's just a matter of familiarity since that's the style I grew up with. But in ballet, as in many other art forms, less is very often more.