Melody

Maybe I'll forgive Fathom Events; looks as though they're carrying the Royal Ballet 2014/2015 season after all. Manon in October, Alice in December, and Winter's Tale (finally!), Swan Lake, and Fille next year. Plus the Bolshoi. Two Swan Lakes fairly close together; should be interesting. http://www.fathomevents.com/event/the-royal-ballet-season-2014-15/more-info/201415-royal-ballet-cinema-season

Well, I haven't gone that far, but I have occasionally let my books fake me out into believing one of them has disappeared for good so I've bought a replacement, and then the original has popped out of its black hole looking innocent.

More from Graham Watts at Twitter (@SuffolkBroad is Assis Carreiro's Twitter handle): Press release just received from @SuffolkBroad - rather more dignified than her erstwhile employers - she says that contract was terminated....on 1st day back from holiday and no formal reasons were given b4 going on to express her sadness and thank her team and staff and listing..a formidable series of works performed by the company over past two seasons - she concludes by wishing her team "the best of luck" ....

Graham Watts seems pretty unhappy over at Twitter. He said, about the email from the Royal Ballet of Flanders, that "..it's s bad that it looks like a malicious April Fool but regrettably it is clearly true. To lose 2 women artistic directors in 2 years.....can't be good whatever the circumstances"

It's a bit ridiculous not to allow people to book single tickets online when you can see the available tickets while booking and there are very often only single seats available. You'd think they'd be happy to get rid of them. As for single and joint friends, that sounds ridiculous. I can see allowing people to have a small discount for a joint or family membership but I don't see why that should give any more of an advantage in booking.

All the best, Regattah; I hope DD's heart sorts itself out. Hang in there, and look after yourself as well as everyone else.

Sometimes I despair. I've been looking for a particular book for weeks (my books sometimes have this habit of disappearing down random black holes for months on end and then reappearing all of a sudden), and it just refused to be found. So we started on this programme of rationalisation and sorting, meaning that we now have boxes of books to go to the charity shop, and some room on the bookshelves to accommodate at least a few of the random piles of books around the place. But the book I was looking for was still not anywhere to be seen. Finally found it last night on my Kindle. Sigh...

So glad things are going well with both of them. This must have been so hard on you, especially with the surgery taking longer than expected. I hope DD1 continues to enjoy her time at ENBS and DD2 carries on improving.

I imagine that the promotions might also affect the leavers - if they don't think they're moving up the company fast enough or if the types of promotions are sending messages that their particular contributions may not be the flavour of the month, that might factor into their decisions too. I hope Yuhui Choe isn't getting discouraged by the lack of promotion to Principal when so many people keep saying she's overdue for it. Hopefully one of these days...

Speaking of Anton Dolin, he was born on 27 July 1904 (as Sydney Healey-Kay). So today would have been his 110th birthday. I remember reading his bio of Spessivtseva a very long time ago; I must have got it out of the library because I don't have a copy here. I thought his books about Spessivtseva and Markova were a little more self-centred than they could have been, but still very interesting insights into the ballerinas.

According to this article, regular chorus members are making around $200,000 a year. http://www.dw.de/new-yorks-met-faces-social-rejection-of-opera/a-17595752 I wonder what NYCB and ABT corps members make.

Yes, that's true; however, in the thread about UK training over in Doing Dance, there's been some concern about how schools like RBS are concentrating on these competition winners in their upper schools, possibly at the expense of some of the local talent. However, I hadn't thought about whether some of these more popular TV shows (Dancing With The Stars and the others) were having an effect on what audiences wanted to see when they visited the ballet. Not the balletomane core, obviously, but audiences in general. I remember reading about a study where people were shown pictures of stick figures in various dance poses, from low arabesques all the way up to the six-o-clock version and similar for other poses, and apparently in every case their preference was for the most extreme. To me (brought up on ballet in the 1960s and 1970s), some of these extreme poses look ugly, and I've often wondered where this preference for acrobatics comes from - I assumed it might have been from watching Olympic gymnastics or Cirque du Soleil-type shows, but the influence of dance-type reality competitions on TV hadn't really struck me, mostly because I never watch them. The reason I posted this article here, although the author isn't a well-respected critic of long standing (although I know some people here think some of said critics are a bit of a waste of space) is that the Royal Opera House linked to it on their Facebook page last night (well, this morning in UK time, I suppose) and wanted to know what people thought. So I figured that if ROH thought it was a conversation worth having, it was probably a conversation worth having.

Well, like many of us, especially young and enthusiastic ballet students, she's probably relying on YouTube and DVDs for some of the older performances. Hopefully twenty-somethings are allowed to have opinions about the development of ballet over the years, even if they weren't there to see it happen in person.

Just saw an article on Huffington Post talking about how ballet is getting more like competitive sport and concentrating less on artistry, largely because of competitions. She's talking about ballet competitions like YAGP as well as the more popular Dancing with the Stars and the like. Couple of extracts: "In recent years, the performance of dance has changed. The phenomena of dance competitions has pervaded the ballet world. These competitions, such as the renowned Youth America Grand Prix, ruin the art of dance and completely remove the soul and emotion necessary in the art of ballet. This is how ballet and other forms of dance have become closer to a sport than an art. Art is not something that can be judged on a scale of 1-10 because the judgment takes away the passion and creativity. Competitions simply highlight the athleticism of ballet and limit dancers to only performing tricks." "Dance competitions have also spilled over into mainstream television, with shows such as Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. These programs eliminate the artistic side of dance and skew America's perception of the dance world and what dance truly is. On So You Think You Can Dance, aspiring professional dancers perform roughly one-and-a- half-minute routines and are then critiqued by a panel of judges, oftentimes actors or other celebrities who have absolutely no knowledge of dance and technique. Each instance in which a dancer kicks her leg above her head or does a quadruple pirouette, the studio audience erupts in applause and cheers. In actual ballet and dance performances, a dancer is expected to have these skills and enhances them by adding his or her own emotional performance to their perfected technique. For many, So You Think You Can Dance leaves viewers believing dance is a competitive sport. " http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brittany-kottler/ballet-is-an-art-not-a-sp_b_4718929.html I'm not sure about the criticism of competitions like YAGP because many of them have been around for a long time, but I know we've talked before about how audiences seem to want to see more and more acrobatic dance (higher extensions, riskier lifts, exaggerated movements), and I'm wondering if that has anything to do with programmes like Dancing with the Stars and how they're catering to short attention spans and a need for more and more stimulating content at the expense of overall artistry.

Just noticed in our electricity bill that there's a surcharge starting this month for what they're calling "reliable" electricity service. The state is allowing the company to do things (I assume like trimming trees but I assume not like actually burying the cables) that make power cuts less frequent and shorter, and apparently we have to pay extra for this because it appears that reliable service isn't part of the basic contract. And here's me thinking that was what service was all about. Not these days...

I totally agree with your comments about cinema relays. Considering how convenient it is to go to the local cinema and (usually) how much cheaper, you'd think RB might take the risk with relays of some of the triple bills rather than constantly showing the big full-length ballets, to the point that we get repeats of last year's Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty rather than any of the new triple bills. Maybe if they showed some of their triple bills via cinema relay and people in the provinces went to see them, they might realise that they actually were worth seeing, and that might make it easier to sell tickets when the touring companies came along with their live performances of something slightly unusual.

I think comparisons with New York are a bit dangerous. The two major companies, NYCB and ABT are quite different - NYCB has practically all American dancers, taken from their school, and rely heavily on the Balanchine-Robbins repertoire and other contemporary choreographers. ABT is full of foreign dancers, especially at the top, and a wider repertoire including more popular pieces. At the moment it looks as though RB and ENB are going after the same audience, with a makeup a lot more like ABT in both cases and an ENB artistic director who's just been imported from RB. There may be competition while they try to outdo each other, but they're basically fighting over the same turf, artistically and commercially. I can see why ENB is reluctant to tour, especially with so much of Britain's wealth and disposable income concentrated in London these days, and I gather the provincial touring was part of the reason Vadim Muntagirov decided to jump ship, but when government funding for things like arts is getting smaller and smaller, it's going to be hard to make a case to subsidise two companies that increasingly look like one company performing in two London theatres.

The problem is that when there's a dog-child problem, people tend to automatically blame the dog, and often it's the fault of the child or its parents. We were sitting in a park with the dog years ago, watching a cricket match (local California league) and our German shepherd suddenly bared her teeth and lunged at a kid behind us. Fortunately I was on the other end of the leash and she didn't get far, but I grabbed her collar and yelled at her, upon which someone else said, "not the dog's fault, the kid was throwing stones at her." At which point the little angel burst into tears and threw itself into mummy's arms, who of course was still blaming the dog. Not sure what the dog would have done if she'd managed to get to the kid, but on the whole she was pretty good natured. It's just that after a few incidents like that with kids who threw things at her and ran up out of nowhere and hit her, she was pretty unhappy around children so we always had her on a short leash when they were around.

Well, part of the problem is that they do what makes money. If people turned off the TV channel or refused to buy papers that indulge in sensationalist reporting, it'd be more likely to stop. I remember all the agony when Diana Princess of Wales died, and one person was getting really upset about the way the press was hounding her, and then started on about "what am I going to do now? I couldn't get enough of her and now she's gone!" and I was thinking, "well, you're part of the problem, then."

Gosh. Sorry I missed it...

Thanks for the information, Irmgard. The current production is based on the Messel designs for that postwar production, sort of a nice touch. It must have been such a delight to see this production in 1946 after the awfulness of the war; I remember reading that the lavish designs were actually created very ingeniously from cheap materials, but that Pathe film clip really does show the dancers looking quite glamorous. Anniversary today of a tragic ballerina - Olga Spessivtseva was born in Rostov-on-Don on 18 July 1895. The quintessential Giselle in more ways than one.

This source suggests 9 Oct 1949, from the shot of the poster; is that one of the dates you also found? That assumes that the opening night of the Sadler's Wells tour was also the first time they performed Sleeping Beauty; not sure how safe an assumption that is, but the backstage shots do seem to be Sleeping Beauty and I'm assuming it'd be the first night since they had the film crew there. http://www.britishpathe.com/video/sadlers-wells-ballet-in-new-york/query/fonteyne

Yes, I think that's where I saw it. A further trawl around sources has shed a bit more light on the six performances - according to this monograph about Pugni's ballet compositions http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/58157 there were four performances in London 1845 and a further two in 1847 with Carolina Rosati taking Lucile Grahn's role, and some performances in Milan as part of a longer ballet in 1846 in between the two London appearances. This source doesn't mention Queen Victoria, though. Really, this forum is brilliant! I'd been thrashing around on my own for a week, trying to make sense of all the conflicting information, and I think between us we've got it sorted.

I've also seen somewhere that it had six performances although most sources say there were four. And some sources say Queen Victoria saw the second performance while others say she saw the third. At least it looks as though 12 July is the correct date for the first performance, not for the Queen Victoria one. So far the New York Times article seems to be the most correct. I've updated the Wiki entry to give 12 July as the first performance and 17 July as the performance attended by Queen Victoria. Now I know what date to give for the premiere in my Facebook ballet history group, thanks to everyone's efforts here. Thanks for checking that, Jane! I don't see why it isn't available free in other countries - it's not as though she was only Queen of the UK. I guess next time we're visiting home, I'll need to plug into those diaries. I remember that they were put online during the Queen's diamond jubilee year, but I didn't realize the access was restricted.

Thanks for checking! Trawling through Google gives all sorts of different date combinations (although a lot of the entries aren't independent). Just goes to show how much research historians have to do in order to verify even simple facts. I see Queen Victoria's diaries are available online, and I thought that might help give a clue, but apparently if you aren't resident in the UK you have to pay for access. Not fair...