Melody

Well, apparently the idea these days is to homogenise, and the Russian style is the standard by which everyone else have to compare themselves. I wish RB would have a bit more confidence in its own style and standards.

Oh, my goodness, what an awful shock. I remember some of her work back in the early 80s when we'd just moved to the USA and I was still trying to keep up with what the company was doing. I still have a copy of The Colourful World of Ballet, from the late 1970s, where she and another RBS student were featured in an appendix showing all the basic ballet steps. It said that they were first-year upper-school students. I always think of her as that teenage student demonstrating the steps in that book.

I think today's crop of dancers and coaches would be well served to remember that technique exists to serve the art, not vice versa, and that "degree of difficulty" isn't a thing in ballet, regardless of its importance in gymnastics competitions. It's such a disservice to Tchaikovsky to play those great ballets of his as though the audience was sitting through a funeral service.

I'm not sure I agree with this comment of Wayne McGregor's: "Baffled why an 'experienced' dance critic cannot understand that a body can be abstract: pure form, pure line, pure kinetic." When you put a 20-something girl in a skimpy costume, sort of flesh-coloured with high-cut legs and no tights, and with her nipples clearly showing, and create choreography like in that photo, my reaction to his comment would be, yes a body CAN be abstract, pure form, pure line, pure kinetic, whatever, but that particular body isn't. If he's really that keen to make a body abstract, why isn't he putting the girls in body stockings of a colour that doesn't show every detail of every contour, instead of in something that provides minimal coverage? Reminds me of the rationalisation of the school bully after reducing a sensitive kid to tears: "can't you take a joke?" Well, yes, but that wasn't a joke.

Well, between this and Black Swan, I'm wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to join a ballet company. Good thing it's fiction... (although some of Agony and Ecstasy had some parallels, so maybe not quite fiction)

That's a shame but, as already mentioned a few times, not really surprising. When a dancer is continually not cast in the repertoire, it must be disheartening. What's the difference between leaving (without somewhere else to go to immediately) and retiring for a dancer already in his/her 30s like Marquez or Rupert Pennefather, who also left the company this year? It seems that dancers who retire from one company still turn up dancing with other companies, so it isn't as though they're necessarily giving up dancing altogether.

I saw this Australian police transcript on Facebook and immediately thought of this thread: 21/11/2015 Wollstonecraft 2.00am. Police received numerous calls in relation to a violent domestic, with reports of a woman screaming hysterically, a man yelling “I’m going to kill you, you're dead! Die Die!!”, with the sounds of furniture being tossed around the unit. Numerous police cars responded to the address and began banging on the door. A man answered the door, out of breath and rather flushed with the following conversation: Police: “Where’s your wife” Male: “umm I don’t have one” Police: “Where's your girlfriend” Male: “umm I don’t have one” Police: “We had a report of a domestic and a women screaming, where is she?” Male: “I don’t know what you’re talking about I live alone” Police: “Come on mate people clearly heard you yelling you were going to kill her and furniture getting thrown around the unit” At this point the male became very sheepish. Police: “come on mate, what have you done to her.” Male: “it was a spider” Police “Sorry??” Male: “It was a spider, a really big one!! Police :”what about the women screaming?” Male: “Yeah sorry that was me, I really really hate spiders” As it turns out the male was chasing a rather large spider around the unit with a can of mortein. After a very long pause some laughter and a quick look in the unit to make sure there was no injured party (apart from the spider) we left.

OK, the notion of Lauren Cuthbertson being Sir Fred in drag is a mental picture that's going to stay with me a lot longer than I want it to. Thanks, Vanartus...

Let's hope he hasn't already decided. If the company is going to be basically MacMillan, a dash of Balanchine, and a parade of contemporary choreographers (with the occasional Petipa blockbuster to bring in some cash), my recently reawakened interest will be going back into hibernation.

I don't know how well it's aged, but I enjoyed seeing Glen Tetley's Voluntaries back in the 1970s. I may have fond memories because I like the music rather than anything to do with the ballet itself, because I've just googled it and seen some lukewarm reviews, but I normally don't like abstract ballets all that much so it must have had something I could connect to.

Belated congrats to you and your DD. Are you both still smiling?

No wonder people don't realise the House of Hanover was descended from the Stuarts. And really, the Hanoverians are her area of expertise (at least I think they are), so that's a bit of a jarring parting comment. Maybe we should get her to do some ballet presenting, she'd be able to tell us how the Royal Ballet was made in Russia or something, which would be as simplistically correct as the royal family being made in Germany.

I finally got round to reading Luke Jennings' review and noticed this comment in the section on Monotones: "While all six dancers acquit themselves impressively, with only momentary wobbles reminding us how little real ballet the company has performed this year, Marianela Nunez's starry femininity elevates the piece to the realm of the sublime." Just wondering what exactly he means by "real ballet," but this does reinforce what several people have been saying about the inadvisability of trying to dance the Ashton repertoire without enough preparation.

While Lynn Seymour is so well known as being one of Kenneth MacMillan's muses, between Two Pigeons, A Month in the Country, and Five Brahms Waltzes, I must say Ashton really did her proud.

For what it's worth, Zenaida Yanowsky, who's no slouch in the "tall" department, said in a radio show that A Month in the Country was one of her favourite ballets. Although this may be more of a problem for the corps than for the principals.

The AD of the Royal Ballet had to be persuaded to revive a major work by the company's founder choreographer? That's pitiful. Like I said, I think Ashton is getting perilously close to being a lost cause. Such a shame.

FLOSS, I'm afraid we might just have to accept the sad possibility that the decision has been made somewhere that RB is, if anything, a MacMillan company these days, not an Ashton one. I think I've said before that the modern attitude to Ashton seems to be similar to the attitude to Sullivan's music - something that's a lot deeper and more difficult than it appears on the surface is, these days, being judged only by the surface impression and found wanting compared with things that are more overtly flashy, emotional, or obviously difficult. So Ashton is being treated as the optional appetiser or the pretty dessert while MacMillan, Balanchine, and contemporary choreographers are the main course. Judging from tweets by the dancers during rehearsal and performance, I don't think Ashton is unpopular with dancers, far from it. However, his work is more idealised than the nitty gritty of MacMillan and more pretty and joyous than the "this is serious ballet business" Balanchine rep, and maybe people these days are too jaded to see beyond that. Especially since the difficulty of some of his ballets means that the standard of dancing by the corps isn't always all that it could be (then again, if the training is directed toward the current fashion for huge extensions, deadly slow music, and Russian expansiveness, it's going to be at odds with the speed and lightness required to perform the Ashton repertoire well). There just seem to be a lot of things lining up to basically mean that the easy decision is to sideline Ashton and just show one or two of his ballets now and then as a sort of vague wave of the hand toward the existence of the company's founder choreographer, and then breathe a sigh of relief ("OK, ticked that box for this season") and go onto what really matters, which is basically stuff with more overt sex and violence (and of course acrobatics) in it.

I can't believe that a basic industry like farming is so dependent on the EU. Although these days things are getting idiotic enough that I suppose this would be just one more example.

I prefer the look of the new headgear; I found the more elaborate ones distracting. I'd somewhat prefer to see what it looks like without the headgear, though, because I think it makes the costumes look like something out of a low-budget sci-fi TV series.

I loved Till Death Us Do Part. I'm surprised Warren Mitchell wasn't older, though; I thought he was in his 70s or something back when that series was on.

Terrible news. I hope the intelligence services will learn from this attack and be able to prevent future ones.

I think people would have more of a right to a refund if the cancelled performances by these international superstars cost significantly more than performances by regular company members. But if it's just a matter of being unlucky with the dates on account of injury or industrial action and the tickets cost the same as for the other performances, then the situation regarding refunds and whatnot should be the same as for those other performances. If we have a situation where a superstar is booked and then pulls out for avoidable reasons, that's largely between the performer and the organisation. Presumably if that happens on a regular basis, as I think it did with certain high-powered opera singers in the past, the company might want to consider whether the resulting ill will from disappointed audiences is worth the risk when making casting decisions in the future.

I wonder how many telescopes they'll be selling this year.

I second (third, fourth, whatever) the suggestion to go to your doctor. Some types of vertigo are easy to deal with by doing physical exercises, but some are a lot more tricky. It would be a shame to live with it for months and then find you could have fixed it all along if you'd just been to the doctor. In the meantime, I hope you get to see that Swan Lake performance one of these days, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it more for being healthy when you're watching it.

If you have to go for a long stretch without eating in the future, it might be worth carrying an energy bar or something with you, which contains sugar, salt, nuts, and grains. It might not just be sugar that was low; you could also be in need of salt and protein.