Melody

I was at Office Depot trying to buy large envelopes, and they had a sign up that their card reader wasn't working so they could only take cash. So I thought I'd get packets of five envelopes rather than 25, to conserve what bit of cash I had available. That is, until I realized that the packets of five were half the price of packets of 25. Sometimes I wonder if they choose their retail prices with a random-number generator.

I think I saw this production by the San Francisco Ballet years and years ago, before Helgi Tomasson took over and reworked it (and I never found his choreography particularly inspiring and I'm not a fan of Balanchine, so I never really liked his version much). I remember really liking the original production but I think I only saw it once. Thanks for the review, it brings back happy memories!

Dunno if this same billboard is around in the UK, but there's a really clever ad for J&B Scotch whisky (although I don't think I've seen it this year).

Nice Christmas scene, and the caption "ingle ells, ingle ells" followed by "Christmas isn't the same without J&B."

I was thinking specifically of the current production, with Nunez, Osipova, and Muntagirov, since so many people are being so enthusiastic about it.

Is there any chance of a DVD of this production? The nearest cinema showing it is nearly 150 miles away. Pretty sure I won't be able to talk my husband into a trip like that during the week after Christmas.

Well, there's this:

"This calls to mind how much I longed to dance the role of Marie (the equivalent of the child, Clara, in the Balanchine Nutcracker) when I was a child, but it was believed by the artistic director in that U.S. company that the world wasn't ready for a black Marie," writes DePrince.

https://www.allure.com/story/michaela-deprince-first-black-sugarplum-fairy

I tried to find a link to the actual article quoting the dancer who said she'd been refused the role of Clara because she was obviously not related to the dancers playing the parents but I'm afraid I couldn't. I do remember it quite clearly (or I wouldn't have posted about it), and will continue to search.

I was meaning this Baker Richards company, who were engaging in that spectacular corporate-speak gobbledygook about "data-led evidence based approach" and whatnot. When you have to resort to that sort of jargon, it usually means there's more style than substance going on. 

I mean, earnest bloviating about reducing the frequency of attendance??? Going to the ballet isn't the same as unnecessary repeat visits to the doctor.

This is what happens when they listen to high-price consultants - things become more expensive and less accessible.

I assume the ROH doesn't want to replace its current crop of loyal customers with a parade of newcomers who only attend once; if they've got any sense (which at this point I'm wondering about), they'll want the new patrons to become repeat customers in the future. At which point apparently they'll insult those repeat customers in another quest to find more newcomers, probably on the recommendation of another high-price consultant. This whole thing seems to not be at all well thought out, and I'm wondering how much they paid the consultants to come up with this pig's breakfast of a solution.

Maybe for the really popular shows that sell out early on a regular basis, they could have more performances. It's a bit strange sometimes to see the cast lists for a popular classic and find that half the principals only have a couple of performances, especially if management is grumbling about too many people buying tickets. I'm not sure where they're getting the idea that young people have all this spare money these days - I thought older people were supposed to be better off and therefore a more attractive demographic.

Michaela dePrince has some interesting things to say about being a black ballet dancer in this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/08/michaela-deprince-ballet-memoir-sierra-leone

She thinks the European companies are more accepting of black dancers than American companies are. I'm not sure if there are any statistics behind that or if it's just an impression based on a few companies in the USA and Europe. I think part of the problem is that the corps of a classical company is supposed to look as uniform as possible in the classical repertoire, and one or two really dark-skinned dancers in a sea of white will stand out. I remember reading an article where one black dancer (not sure if it was Ms dePrince) said that early on in her ballet life she was hoping to get the role of Clara and was told that the family wouldn't have had a black daughter so it was out of the question. Hopefully that attitude isn't common.

Not all that unbelievable - over here there are periodic blow-ups when someone correctly uses the word "niggardly" and then predictably gets accused of using a racial slur. In at least one case it led to the user being fired.

After Mamma Mia Here We Go Again, I'm being tormented by random ABBA earworms.

I have a couple of topic-specific twitter accounts (but not a personal one), including a ballet one. So every so often I find myself having interesting conversations with Alastair Macaulay, which would never have happened if not for that account. So on the whole I'm not complaining. But when I check some of my friends' twitter accounts where they get into political discussions (to use the term loosely), or my husband's when he gets into it with someone about whether global warming exists, the sheer ignorance and hatred on show by some people is very worrying.

On Facebook I tried really hard to engage with friends who have different political opinions (I used to have several hundred friends because I needed them as neighbours for games so I came across people with all sorts of political opinions), but I kept having to deal with having my posts reported when I tried to get into discussions with some of the more extreme ones, so I just gave up. One of my friends was banned for a week because she dared to go into a pro-Diana group and say that she didn't think the divorce was all Charles's fault and she was immediately reported for having nude photos on her timeline (which she didn't). But if you're selective, you can find Facebook groups with some very knowledgeable people on topics of interest, which is really nice. You just have to be careful.

One of the other dancers featured in First Position spent a year in a company and realized it wasn't for her, and went off to train in some area of medicine (I don't remember the details now).

I'm just glad that in both cases they took their academic education seriously enough as youngsters that they had the grounding to do this. When I see articles about some of these kids dancing 40 hours a week or whatever, I do wonder what alternatives they have for the future if their ballet career doesn't pan out.

On ‎07‎/‎08‎/‎2018 at 13:05, alison said:

 

I think the conclusion has been that she wouldn't have made it into the Royal Ballet, so probably WL would have been unlikely as well.

Somehow I find this really depressing, thinking of what we'd have lost. Considering what Ninette de Valois said about her when she first saw her, it's just really sad that those qualities wouldn't have made up for not having long enough legs or whatever. It seems as though, physically, dancers are much more uniform than they were during the mid-20th century and especially than during the Ballets Russes era. I understand that the choreography is more demanding, but there has to be a balance.

One thing that bothers me a bit, reading some of the above posts, is that I've seen a few mentions of WL looking for a particular body type as the major criterion, over and above things like musicality or even dance ability (someone please tell me if I've got this wrong). But I've also seen comments along the lines of "of course, bodies change, you don't always know what an 11-year-old will look like at 16."

While I understand that a vocational ballet school isn't going to take a spherical 11-year-old, however musical and light on her feet she is, it seems a bit short-sighted to be that focused on long legs and long neck and small ears or whatever, rather than musicality and dance potential, especially in light of how bodies change as girls hit puberty. I sometimes wonder if Margot Fonteyn would get into White Lodge if she showed up today.

I'm really looking forward to Symphonic Variations. I'd only seen it on YouTube before seeing this triple bill in the cinema, and was blown away by its impact on the big screen. I can see why Lydia Lopokova called Ashton "Frederick the Great" after seeing the first performance.

Just pre-ordered the Ashton DVD (it isn't available over here till the end of the month). The ROH has just posted an excerpt on its YouTube channel.

Given the pool of serious potential candidates must be fairly small, I'm wondering why they need to spend a significant amount of money on a recruitment consultant.

Georges Hobeika's latest collection was inspired by Swan Lake - hence the swans and feathers and Black-Swan-style eye makeup. I have no idea why they didn't use music from Swan Lake, but whatever.

10 hours ago, capybara said:

I think that, if Zenaida Yanowsky was going to get a gong for her dancing to date, it would have come last year. Whereas Principals once had OBEs or CBEs, Edward Watson received an MBE.

Maybe those on here who have ambitions for Zenaida will have to be content with Sir Simon and Lady Keenlyside - unless, that is, she adds significantly to her CV in the arts world or in terms of charity.

 

 

Oh, I don't have ambitions, I know that these days a person would have to spend half a lifetime running a major company in order to have any chance of being made a knight or a dame; I was just saying that it had a nice ring (unlike Baroness Yanowsky, which sounds like a character in Mayerling), not thinking it would ever happen. Maybe part of the problem with high-level honours in ballet is that a dancer's career tends to be short so you don't have 40 years of top-level performance to merit a CBE or whatever like an instrumentalist or singer would have.

Fonteyn getting a damehood in her 30s was a real outlier. de Valois and Markova didn't get their DBE until they were in their 50s and had founded major ballet companies.

Probably the loftiest title for a dancer is held by the King of Cambodia, who used to dance and teach ballet in Europe before his father abdicated.

16 hours ago, bangorballetboy said:

 

Possible, if highly improbable - if ZY's father or mother were raised to the peerage at the level of Earl or above!

 

Strange that you suggest Baroness Keenlyside, rather than Baroness Yanowsky. 

 

There is a dancer in the Royal who is married to the heir apparent to a barony... 

 

And let's not forget Anya Linden is a baroness and Moira Shearer was a lady!

Well, quite apart from the fact that I didn't think hereditary peerages were a thing any more apart from in the royal family - wasn't Margaret Thatcher the last PM to be ennobled? - there's also the issue of having to be a British citizen, which I'm fairly sure her father isn't.

Baroness Yanowsky just sounds weird. Although, and I'm sure Ian MacMillan would agree, Dame Zenaida Yanowsky has a very nice ring to it.

1 hour ago, bangorballetboy said:

 

By being elevated to the peerage!

 

Yes, well, I meant in the real world. It's hard enough for dancers to be made dames these days, never mind life peers. OTOH, when I wrote that I was thinking more in terms of Lady Zenaida, which wouldn't be possible (that I know of), rather than Baroness Keenlyside.

On ‎10‎/‎06‎/‎2018 at 16:39, bridiem said:

 

Baritone, who was knighted. (Maybe one day she'll be a Lady in her own right too! Wonder if she'd then be Lady Lady Keenlyside Yanowsky? Perhaps not. )

She could end up being a Dame (although that doesn't seem all that common for dancers these days, and it would depend on her being a British citizen which I don't know whether she is); I don't think there's any way for her to become a Lady in her own right.

At a size 8, she probably wasn't all that different from the Ballets Russes-era dancers. But then along comes George Balanchine with his need for stick-thin female dancers and costumes that reveal every last square millimetre- of the body, and that turned into the new normal.  Didn't Frederick Ashton say something about the modern standard of ballerinas who didn't have tits, or something equally elegant?