Melody

I do hope there's going to be a DVD, although I'm not sure it would have a wide audience. Hopefully "filming" means that those of us who can't go will have an opportunity to see it on screen somehow. Looking at the whole Flickr set, I must say she looks uncannily like some of the portraits of Queen Elizabeth in some of those photos. One thing I'm wondering - she seems to have quite a lot of costume changes, and those costumes are fairly elaborate (including jewellery and whatnot), but I assume she's on stage most of the time. How do they manage that? Is she changing costumes as part of the performance or are there a bunch of quick changes in the wings?

I'm glad to see that Guardian review mentioning that the film didn't really make clear the battle between the conservatives and modernists (although they aren't all that modernist!), because that stuck me too while I was watching it. It seems to be one of the main reasons for the existence of the faction headed by Nikolai Tsiskaridze, so I thought it would get more of a mention. I was left wondering whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that Vladimir Putin doesn't take much of a personal interest in ballet.

The problem is that they don't look like shrouds, they look like normal Act 2 costumes that have gone limp. The women in Act 2 are supposed to look ethereal and otherworld-ish, and not to be too hampered by earthly things like gravity, and I don't think those costumes are helpful in that respect.

I do like the speed of the Fonteyn-Nureyev pas de deux, although I didn't think Osipova looked ungainly. For me the worst part of the current production is those dresses in Act 2 which are so limp they look as though they could use some starch or fairy dust or something. Not only do they give an unflattering shape to the dancers, but they seem heavy on account of just hanging there like sheets, and that's not a look that Act 2 of Giselle needs.

I remember the first time I saw a Russian performance of Swan Lake and was amazed at all the times the action stopped during pas de deux (and all sorts of other times) so the dancers could stride up to the front of the stage and bow and curtsey and acknowledge all the applause. It made the dance look like a bunch of set pieces instead of one organic whole, and it really didn't help the story line or the atmosphere. Together with the slow music, it must have added half an hour to the running time of the ballet. I was sorry to see that same thing start happening at RB, although fortunately it doesn't seem to break out quite so many times during a ballet. Simon, regarding standing ovations, when we lived in Silicon Valley and had season tickets to San Francisco Ballet, it seemed to be tradition for every premiere of a new ballet by Helgi Tomasson to be greeted with a standing ovation from the audience, and honestly some of his works weren't that brilliant. I just flat refused to stand to applaud some worthy but boring effort, and I remember being given the evil eye by several people standing nearby. So one day I just said, in response to all the evil eyes, "well, it wasn't that good..." (a sentiment with which the SF Chronicle critic agreed in his review the next day). I mean, if you do something like that standardly, what are you going to do when there really is something outstanding? Bungee jump from the balcony?

I don't know why shops think customers are more likely to buy clothes after they've been humiliated like that. I mean, let's face it, communal changing rooms are basically a way of saying that we don't trust our customers and we don't care about making them feel uncomfortable. I'm just glad I'm a fairly standard size for basic clothes so I can buy online from Lands End and LL Bean and whatnot. I can't remember the last time I bought clothes in a shop.

I thought it was pretty sad that several dancers from the Vaganova Academy went to the Bolshoi rather than the Mariinsky company because the Mariinsky apparently had problems (at least that's why I thought the likes of Evgenia Obraztsova and Olga Smirnova went to Moscow). If the goings on at the Bolshoi really are less bad than the state at the Mariinsky, the latter must really be in trouble.

That's weird. But at least it does work (except when I try to do it!). Thanks for that.

Mine didn't (the one with our Christmas video in Swanprincess's Merry Christmas thread in Doing Dance), It's just a link.

I thought there used to be a link that we could use to embed YouTube videos in our posts so they showed up as videos, not plain links. When I was trying to post a video a couple of days ago I couldn't find the link. Am I imagining things or did it get removed at some point?

Merry Christmas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg01-wiWgXY (check out the Nutcracker tree at 2.20, with Clara on top!). ETA: I couldn't find the link to embed the video, but it's our 2015 Christmas decorations.

No! Please! Dislike buttons are an absolute curse. I've seen two or three forums destroyed by them.

I've seen many critical comments about the above dancers and about other dancers, as well as about productions, companies, and directors. That's completely different from attacking, snide, spiteful, and/or dismissive. Maybe there are a few of the latter, usually pretty well dealt with by the moderation team. But to claim that such things are "countless" is to conflate those descriptions with simple criticism. If we aren't allowed to be critical, this becomes a sugarboard or fansite, which might please some but would mean sacrificing most of the interesting conversations here. You really can't learn much about a topic if the overwhelming majority of posts are simply "wasn't she lovely?" "oh yes, totally lovely, perfect in fact," "yes she's brilliant at everything, and so beautiful," "there isn't a role she can't dance to perfection" and the same about every other dancer, every teacher, every company, every production. Plus, the positive comments about one's favourite dancers actually mean more when coming from people who are allowed to be (and often are) critical than coming from a community where negative comments are frowned on.

I wonder how far his newly awakened respect for ballet has been driven by his new relationship with Natalia Osipova, rather than being the result of a more mature rethink of his youthful impetuosity.

Yes, I understand that, and I'm not saying that the processes shouldn't be followed, obviously. It's just that there are some fairly major differences between ballet school and music school, largely that a lot of the tuition in a music school is in much smaller classes or individually, where there's much more scope for abuse with no witnesses; plus music teachers can often be current high-level performers (hence people with a lot of clout in the music world) and I assume you have a larger faculty because you need specialist teachers for each instrument, so it's not quite such a small world. I could sort of see a mindset when, just as a fairly random recent example, Daria Klimentova (with her years of being a popular teacher at her own summer school) was joining RBS as a new teacher, the administration at the school might not feel that there was any sort of potential threat and that the relevant paperwork was just a matter of going through the motions (although, just to be clear, that's not an excuse for not doing it). I think this sort of situation is a bit different from what you might see at a regular school or possibly even a music school for the reasons mentioned above. As I said in my previous post, this sort of familiarity isn't a reason for not going through the correct procedure, but I still think that the more relaxed attitude, while not optimal, is understandable. And without knowing any of the details of why they had this inspection, I think that makes it very likely that it was simply a matter of lax procedure (possibly first noticed during an earlier routine inspection, with this emergency inspection as a follow-up) rather than an actual personnel issue.

For US-based members, it's on HBO tonight at 9 pm. Sorry for the short notice, but I've only just seen it listed.

Gosh, that's horrible. Using children as collateral damage to make a point in a power struggle. Whatever next? Given how hard it is to get into these top-flight schools, it's wonderful that he managed to get into another really good school without too much trouble. That certainly attests to his talent and his work ethic. I hope he thrives there and that you and your DH don't have too many extra grey hairs as a result.

It sounds as though one of the criticisms was that staff aren't adequately vetted for potential problems before being hired. But in a way that might be a less serious problem for a vocational ballet school than for a regular school, since presumably the teachers coming into RBS have been known for a long time by the current staff and administration because they're almost always professional ballet dancers, and it's a fairly small world. That isn't a good reason to bypass procedures nevertheless. It also sounds as though there are some issues with the assessing-out procedure, and making that process less traumatic (if possible) might be helpful. On the whole that review seemed pretty positive.

I remember reading about how dance teachers these days are having to be really careful about touching students, partly because of the perception of corporal punishment and partly because of the possibility of it being misconstrued as sexual assault, and that it's much harder to explain a problem verbally than to use hands-on correction but that's sort of how things are going. So I can sort of see a teacher deciding to go hands-on with corrections if it's the easiest way to make a student do something right, and even using a stick or something to avoid the personal hands-on thing which people seem to be so sensitive about. But I'm just wondering how often a hands-on correction would involve a student's bottom rather than legs or arms; whacking a kid across the bum, especially so hard that it leaves marks, is nothing but corporal punishment. And using hands-on correction as an excuse to mete out corporal punishment is going to make it harder for other teachers to use genuine hands-on correction, which would be a shame. If this teacher isn't the director of the school, the director should know what's going on, and also explain why this teacher started bringing the implement back into class when there had obviously been previous problems. Seriously - "this is dance training so we can spank our pupils"? Good grief.

According to a forum I was reading where people were complaining about this problem with Windows 10, it also happened with Windows 8 (as you found out!) and took Microsoft over a year to fix. It's hard to believe that after that experience with Windows 8, they went ahead and released Windows 10 with the exact same problem and seem to be taking every bit as long to fix it. The annoying thing will be if it isn't fixed before the offer of the free upgrade expires. But I'm not holding my breath at this point. I know it's a problem that doesn't affect everyone, so they probably see it as less important.

...apart from the little problem of losing the internet every couple of hours (still feeling aggrieved about that, and very glad there was a simple way to go back to Windows 7).

Microsoft!!!! I upgraded my computer to Windows 10 last night. Bad move. First, I was getting weird error messages on every page of this forum, as well as some other annoying glitches. Then the internet kept dropping out although other computers were fine, so it wasn't the modem or the wifi. So I did some research online (in between crashes) and found that this is a fairly common problem, Microsoft appears to be ignoring it, the suggested fixes don't work, or at least not for long, and the only solution that actually worked for anyone was to revert to the previous browser (assuming Windows 10 had been installed less than a month ago and was an upgrade from a previous operating system). Which doesn't help people who have this problem on brand-new computers. Fortunately I was able to go back to Windows 7 without any problems (so far), but I do wonder what people can do who've spent significant money on a new computer that does this constantly and for which there isn't a permanent fix. Microsoft doesn't seem to have learned its lesson about releasing major upgrades with major bugs; no wonder Macs and Chromebooks are getting so popular. Anyway, if anyone is thinking about upgrading to Windows 10 - erm, good luck...

It's working fine in Firefox. I think there might just be something about the upgrade that's buggering things up in general, because my computer keeps losing the internet while other computers in the house aren't having problems. I'll have to research some of this stuff and see if I can find suggestions for fixing it. Thanks for checking.

San Francisco Ballet still casts Clara from the young students at the school. I appreciate that might be a fairly long trip from where you're located, though.

I upgraded the computer to Windows 10 last night, and when I use Internet Explorer I'm getting this weird error message on this forum, and it's happening every time I go to a new page, which is a pain. A box comes up with the message "An error has occurred in the script on this page Line: 1 Char: 9 Error: Expected identifier Code: 0 URL: " with the choices to continue or not continue to run the script. It doesn't seem to matter if I say Yes or No, it then reverts to the page. But it's happening on every single bloody page. Not sure if it's just this forum because I don't belong to any other IPB forums, but it's not happening on the vBulletin forums where I post, and it's not happening in Chrome, just IE. Do the IPB support forums have any information on things getting buggered up in IE after the Windows 10 upgrade? ETA: it's not happening at BalletAlert, which is another Invision board.