Melody

Which is very convenient for the shop if you have to keep buying new ones.

Margot Fonteyn. For me, nobody else has ever come close.

I suppose it's a good thing on the whole that they're biodegradable but it does have its drawbacks apparently! I have a bunch of the Tesco bags with ladybirds on them, which we'd buy when we visited the UK so we had a carrier bag available without having to take one over, and they're quite popular with the checkout staff at our local supermarkets. I had one lady accost me while I was shopping a couple of weeks ago, asking "are those from Tesco? I remember them from my trip to the UK." The last time I was over there, the ladybird bags didn't seem to be available, though, which is sort of a shame.

Like Fonty, I remember a time when you could just drive there and walk among the stones. But I also remember the stones having quite a bit of graffiti already (many decades ago!), so I can understand why they'd want to protect them. But the idea of building a bypass so you can't see the stones without having to pay is just awful. I could sort of understand it if a diversion was necessary to protect the stones, but just to grab money from people? I know it's fashionable these days to turn everything into a commodity, but that's very mean-spirited. I mean, this is a famous part of our heritage, and it should at least be accessible from a distance.

Yes, it is, although I must admit I might be mixing it up with another Balanchine ballet where the girl wears a plain black leotard. San Francisco Ballet did a lot of Balanchine ballets when I was a regular ballet-goer there, and I could be remembering the costumes from one of them and the rest from another. The ballet I mean is the one where there are two dancers on stage, along with a pianist and violinist. I just remember thinking that as long as I was going to have to sit through a ballet with a piano on stage, I'd much rather be watching The Concert. And if I didn't know better (if SF Ballet was my main source of knowledge about ballet), Ashton's The Dream, which I really like, would have been firmly on the list. I saw them perform it (or at least an excerpt) soon after Helgi Tomasson had taken over and was reshaping it into a Balanchine company, and they made the most appalling pig's breakfast of it. It was so frustrating to hear comments during the interval about how Ashton must be a pretty third-rate choreographer because my goodness what a mess, when actually the problem was that the company didn't have a clue how to dance it. I'm surprised they were allowed to go ahead with it, but then the Ashton repertoire never did have the ferocious gatekeepers that the Balanchine one did.

Just about anything by Ashton, but especially Symphonic Variations, Les Patineurs, and A Month in the Country. Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, and (slightly lower down the list) Swan Lake. Les Sylphides, The Firebird, Giselle. Michael Smuin's Carmina Burana.

Clowns will do that...

Duo Concertant. Didn't like the music, the dancing, or the setting. It always reminded me of a couple of people in their underwear doing physical contortions in an empty warehouse to the sound of cats being strangled.

Oh, sure - and I mean, I think some of the suggestions were hilarious; I particularly liked RRS It's Bloody Cold Here. You're always going to get these off-the-wall suggestions with a poll like this, but it beggars belief that there seem to be so many people who seriously think this name would be in any way appropriate. Mind you, having said that, I gather the guy who came up with Boaty McBoatface had originally suggested it as the name for the new UK-Channel Island ferry that ended up being called the Condor Liberation. And considering the way that vessel has lurched from one disaster to another since it was put into service, I think maybe Condor Boaty McBoatface (or Condor Boaty McRedface) might have been a better choice.

That'll teach them to ask people to vote. They're looking for names like Shackleton, Endeavour, or Falcon, and they end up with Boaty McBoatface. Seriously, one of the criteria is "... we would like the name to be inspirational and about environmental and polar science, to help us tell everyone about the amazing work the ship does"; that name should have been disallowed the minute it was suggested. Honestly, this would be like the ROH having an online poll to name one of its new dance studios after the grand reopening, hoping for something inspirational about dance, and instead of something like the Ashton or Fonteyn Studio, they're stuck with the Silly Billy Jillywiggle Studio because a bunch of people on Twitter, who don't know or care about dance, thought it'd be funny. People who do care about these things are the ones who have to live with the names in the long term. What in the world is social media doing to people's common sense and IQ? Maybe in the future they should come up with a bunch of alternatives and let people vote among them, rather than allowing something completely open-ended in this day and age of nonsense going viral on Twitter.

Definitely unrealistic but firmly based in folklore. This is the Wiki article on Vila (or Wila), and dancing men to death seems to be one of their specialities: "The voices of the Vilas are as beautiful as the rest of them, and can form large gusts of winds that can lift houses into the air. Despite their feminine charms, however, the Vila are fierce warriors. The earth is said to shake when they do battle. They have healing and prophetic powers and are sometimes willing to help human beings. At other times, they lure young men to dance with them, which according to their mood can be a very good or very bad thing for the man. They will kill any man who defies them or breaks his word. Vila rings of deep thick grass are left where they have danced; these should never be trodden upon, as this brings bad luck." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_beings_in_Slavic_folklore#Vila This is (at least I assume it is) the same source for the Veela that feature in the Harry Potter novels (Fleur Delacour is part Veela, as poor Ron found to his embarrassment).

They look like the sort of powderpuff tutus that Karinska made for NYCB when Balanchine wanted a lot of dancers onstage at once and the regular-size tutus would take up too much room. I wonder if they had to make these smaller-scale ones for the TV broadcast because the studio was smaller than the stage and the regular tutus would have been too big when all the fairies were onstage together.

She buys diamond jewellery every day but can't afford a land line?

Or at least onto the front doorstep of the owners of the source.

Right, so it's your fault. Now we know. Maybe you could get the ROH to pay you to stay away on Osipova nights.

"This is why they didn't want to take you..." What a thing for a teacher to tell a student in front of the whole class.

I assume performing arts are on that list, regardless of the glut of homegrown candidates, because it makes it easier to snap up foreign stars who do great things for the box office. So, realistically, I don't see dancers coming off that list any time soon.

I guess this is one way we'll find out.

I only vaguely remember her from the 1970s but her recent character roles have been brilliant. She's going to be hard to replace.

From Luke Jennings's article I can see why he was frustrated - it doesn't sound as though the Artistic Director gets to do much directing, if he's at the mercy of all these committees and juries and doesn't have hiring, firing, or promotion responsibility. But Millepied must have known the score before he accepted the job and also must have known (at least I hope he had the sense and realism to know) that this wasn't going to change in any meaningful way, especially if it meant other people giving up power.

I think this must be a perennial problem for artistic directors and ballet masters, because it's undeniable that in a ballet like Swan Lake you do need the corps to be an actual corps and not just a parade of individuals doing their own thing to the point where it detracts from the overall effect. But I must say I felt a bit sorry for the RB corps in the YouTube video (I think it was the one about the Swan Lake corps de ballet but I'm not certain) where the assistant ballet mistress said something like "if we don't notice you, you're doing it right." I mean, more than a decade of hard training, just to be told "we don't want to notice you." But then they aren't doing Swan Lake the whole time, and there are other ballets where the corps dancers do have a chance to be more individual. Hopefully his comments about wallpaper don't mean that he sees no value in the Swan Lake-type ballets - but then again, given some of the above discussion, that might be exactly what he thinks.

At the vocational schools, do they have classes in the history of dance and other art forms? I mean, not a GCSE subject, but something that helps their understanding of ballet.

I also don't much care for the tendency for variations to be seen mostly as stand-alone showpieces these days; I assume it has something to do with the high profile of the international ballet competitions and so many of the competitors putting their entries on YouTube. It makes me cringe to see eight-year-olds dancing things like the Black Swan variation, because it looks like just a bunch of steps in a black tutu, there's no real characterisation going on. It's just another thing that makes ballet appear more like a gymnastic or ice-skating routine, and not an art form with history and context.

I think culture is impoverished if it's separated too much from its history. In much the same way that I don't especially like the trend of ballet companies concentrating on contemporary choreography, especially contemporary modern dance rather than contemporary ballet, at the expense of the classical and romantic repertoire, I wouldn't like to see orchestras and opera companies jettison - or even just sideline - the great 18th and 19th century works, or theatres stop performing Shakespeare on account of drama has moved on, or Tate Britain be closed because after all we've got Tate Modern and that's all we need. I don't see, really, how you can fully understand and appreciate the modern works without also being exposed on a regular basis to the classics that the modern works rest on. I don't know enough about the technicalities of dance training to know whether students wanting to specialize in modern dance can do it without a grounding in ballet training. But I do wonder whether 7 and 8 year old girls start going to ballet school with the hopes that one day they'll get into a company where they never have to put on a pair of pointe shoes. Since modern-dance troupes exist in some profusion, it seems like unnecessary duplication for ballet companies to be inviting contemporary choreographers to create the same sort of thing that they create for their own troupes. It would be like a symphony orchestra inviting composers to create chamber music for them - it doesn't use the full scope of the orchestra, and chamber orchestras do exist if the composer wants a vehicle for his work. I don't quite know what possesses the people in charge of ballet companies when they hire artistic directors who are known to rather despise the classical ballet repertoire and don't believe that the heritage of a company or a country is particularly worth preserving. Like it or not, ballet is a cultural art form with a very relevant history, and the wrong artistic director in place for a few years can do irreparable damage (which is another way of saying that I have no idea what the hell they were thinking when they invited Ross Stretton to lead the Royal Ballet). Also, just in terms of pure practical sense, these days arts organisations are pretty much expected to pay their way, and, like it or not, generally speaking it's the classics that put bums on seats. When orchestras experiment with whole seasons of basically modern music, they're very often playing to a succession of half-empty houses. I just wonder what sort of position RB will be in financially at the end of the season if it really does programme a whole season of 21st-century works (or whatever it was that Kevin O'Hare was thinking he might like to try). I'm sure it's frustrating for artistic directors to have to serve up regular helpings of Swan Lake and Nutcracker, but if that's what the audience wants, then at least the companies should be in a fit state to do a good job of it.

That parallel also occurred to me (although it doesn't sound as though the POB dancers were quite as far along in open rebellion). I hope Aurelie Dupont works out well for the POB, combining its wonderful tradition with newer work going forward and also maintaining and improving the technical standard.