Melody

From what I can gather, Anthony Dowell really appreciated Zenaida Yanowsky and cast her in a lot of ballets (and promoted her to principal just before he left), Ross Stretton pretty much ignored her, and Monica Mason treated her more like a soloist than a principal. It's nice that Kevin O'Hare apparently isn't bothered by her height and is letting her have an Indian summer, and that Christopher Wheeldon appreciates her theatricality, but there does seem to have been a bit of a wasted decade in her RB career. I agree with you totally about Balanchine. I like a few things of his, but most of the time I come away completely untouched emotionally and occasionally bored rigid. BTW, is it just me, or do the costumes in Serenade look limp compared to the NYCB ones? There seemed to be a distinct lack of ethereality (etherealness?) about these costumes although I'm only going by photos, being on the wrong continent to be able to see it live.

You'd think theatres would be more proactive about people taking photos and recording performances. Once a recorded performance ends up on YouTube, people will be watching it there and maybe not going to the live performance or buying the DVD (if there is one). At our local cinema when someone was recording a movie on their smartphone, an usher came in and told them to stop because it was a criminal offence to help themselves to someone else's property by recording it and they'd call the police if the phone wasn't turned off and stayed off. So at least in the USA there are legal issues involved as well as being considerate to the rest of the audience and the performers.

Trying with another browser to see if I can get the Streets of New York video to embed.

As of today my new-found ability to copy and paste (at least, to paste what I've copied) has gone away again in IE11. The quote feature is still working, though. I noticed yesterday that YouTube videos weren't embedding, which they were doing fine up until last week, although it doesn't seem to be a problem for other people. Working fine in Chrome, btw, just not IE bloody 11.

There was this article in the Mail a while back (can't believe it was 3 years ago - how time flies!) about an advert being shot in the streets of New York with a ballerina in full rig. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019667/Dancing-streets-Ballerina-stops-traffic-leaps-pirouettes-way-sweltering-New-York-summer.html This looks like the finished product. http://youtu.be/KEvr4h02JF4

Is this the one you mean? It doesn't seem to want to embed, which is weird because that feature was working for me last week, but there you go. http://youtu.be/VjY8TDp1cEM

There's also this article by Geraldine Morris. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dance_research/v024/24.1morris.html#fig01

Well, please thank him for checking and give him a bone. That problem is really minor compared with the inconvenience of not being able to quote or post links, which has been sorted.

Thanks so much, whatever you did! I noticed yesterday that the Quote function was finally working in IE. I can also use cut and paste in my posts in IE which I couldn't do before - always had to go over to Chrome to do that. [if we had an Applause or Notworthy smilie, I'd be adding it here] There's still one problem that seems to exist in IE and not the other browsers, although it's less annoying than the inability to quote. I can't edit my posts in IE without doing an extra click to go to the Full Editor page; the regular Edit button doesn't work (at least, it gives me the box I need, but nothing happens when I try to post). Is there by any chance another quick workaround?

If she really believes it's dangerous, she should throw it out or burn it, not sell it. This looks like a piece of very clever marketing. As for the scratch - wonder if they have a cat.

Up late, it's 5am. Just about to go to bed. If you want to embed a YouTube video, just click Share and a box will show up containing a URL. Just copy the URL (the one that starts with http://youtu.be...) and it should embed. If you copy the URL from the bar above the page, it won't embed, you'll just see the link.

Nice to see a youngster given an outing - maybe the whole Xander Parish business has led to a rethink of how they treat the male corps members. I also appreciated the way Anthony Dowell was explaining how Margot Fonteyn did things; hopefully that sort of coaching will mean that the Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty still has some of its own flavor and doesn't start looking like everyone else's. Here's a link to the video.

You would think. But most of the comments I saw were about Darcey's absence. I think it might have just been that one person mentioned it so other people reading the page felt inspired to agree, but I was a bit surprised that there wasn't a single mention of the two principals dancing. Maybe we've got to the point where people need to be spoonfed stuff about what they're seeing or they don't know what they're seeing. Or perhaps they weren't familiar with Yanowsky and Kish and felt cheated that they weren't being given someone famous; maybe they'd have been happier with the more high-profile Nunez/Soares cast and wouldn't have needed their dose of celebrity on top of it. I was really surprised by those comments (and unfortunately that page is no longer there), but there you go.

There wasn't a presenter at the Swan Lake broadcast that I saw in February and it was fine. They showed the three YouTube clips, and in the long interval they just showed the auditorium and were running a countdown; they turned on the lights in the cinema so we could read or do other stuff if we wanted to. I much preferred that to listening to Darcey Bussell struggling through her presenting, although I wouldn't have objected to someone who could articulate their knowledge better and had a less irritating speaking voice.

This pretty well sums it up: Graham Watts ‏@GWDanceWriter 10h Analysing all the comments about lIve relay #ROHTale there is little support for Darcey Bussell's presenting & interviewing skills....

I noticed on the Fathom Events website page for the Swan Lake showing back in February that almost all the comments were people complaining that Darcey wasn't presenting, and how it had spoiled the evening for them that Darcey wasn't there. There wasn't a word about Kish and Yanowsky, who were doing the actual dancing, it was all Darcey, Darcey, I miss Darcey, where's Darcey?!?!?! So apparently in the USA she seems to be one of the main reasons for people going to the cinema to watch the Royal Ballet. Can't imagine why - I found her really irritating last month at the Sleeping Beauty broadcast - but maybe it's because she's a big-name celebrity. I did notice a lot of complaints over at Twitter last night, from regular audience members and a few people in the ballet world, but I'm afraid that her celebrity status has probably got her cemented in that slot for as long as she wants it. Being pretty and famous is, these days, a better recommendation than knowing what you're doing.

Terrible news, and so awful for the family. I hope it doesn't inspire any copycat idiots - I have a niece who's a teacher, who is feeling a lot less secure today than she used to.

I suppose it wasn't surprising news, but no less sad anyway. It was nice to see so many dancers and choreographers over at Twitter saying what an inspiration she'd been to them. Obviously a life well lived.

To answer the OP, I think the notion of vocational as meaning non-academic and therefore somewhat second-rate has been around for a while. I'd assumed that after this many years of comprehensive schools, the attitude toward vocational schools would have improved since I thought the only vocational schools left in the UK nowadays were specialist arts schools, but apparently that isn't the case. I remember Kenneth Branagh complaining, back in the days of student grants, that anyone accepted to a university automatically qualified for an LEA grant regardless of how useful or useless their subject might be to their ability to get a job at the end of it, whereas people trying to get into post-secondary educational schools like RADA had to depend on the whim of bureaucrats at the education authority to decide if they got any sort of financial help. This sort of divide between an academic education, which was considered good, and a job-oriented education, which was considered less good, seems to have seeped down to the secondary-school level. Like you, Yaffa, I remember people being very snobby about technical or vocational schools as opposed to grammar schools, to the point where some friends of our family sent their son to a really poor independent school rather than have him go to a local state school that specialized in giving a technical education. People always seemed to give lip service to the advantages of the German system of apprenticeships combined with a technical education while still looking down their nose at anything other than grammar school followed by university. But in terms of the number of talented children who don't go to vocational arts schools because of parental reluctance - I think that's probably much smaller than the number of children who can't go because there isn't enough financial help.

Resurrecting an old thread to say that this was on Great Performances on TV this evening and it was a lot of fun! I thought Act II dragged a bit, but that vision sequence tends to go on too long in any performance - I couldn't quite see the point of dressing the dancers in Victorian underwear for that act, except that Matthew Bourne seems to like to put his dancers in knee-length pants. Adam Maskell played Carabosse/Caradoc and really dominated in a wonderfully creepy way. I must admit that Count Lilac reminded me somewhat of Elrond in Lord of the Rings, but it was certainly an interesting take on the Lilac Fairy, especially his vampire powers. The Aurora puppet was brilliant - I felt really sorry for the poor nurse/governess dealing with that kid (and she didn't improve a lot once she'd grown up). In some ways this ballet reminded me of Christopher Wheeldon's Alice in Wonderland with the rose motif, the movement forward in time from the Edwardian era to modern times, the contrast between the real world and some rather mad fantasy, and of course another new version of the Rose Adagio. The DVD is rather expensive at Amazon but I'm definitely tempted.

One of the more pernicious effects of the Internet is the way people seem to think that information available online is free for the taking. I used to be an administrator of a large forum where the members loved posting copyrighted photos of celebrities, and they didn't want to hear about how that was a copyright infringement. People hear some of the Silicon Valley gurus going on about "information wants to be free" and they seem to think that means everything is up for grabs. I don't know how they think photographers and journalists are supposed to make a living. Then again, I'm sure a lot of people are very happy to be able to watch full-length ballets, operas, and documentaries available on YouTube even though many of them are copyright violations.

You can always tell them that you need an aisle seat for medical reasons and that's why you always book early to get the exact seat you've ended up with. We had a friend we went to the ballet with, who needed an aisle or front-row seat because of a stiff leg; he found it really painful to sit in a regular seat, so I always made sure to book our seats as soon as they were available so we could get one seat where he could keep his leg straight. As aileen said, it's not going to kill two adults to sit apart for a couple of hours when they can meet up in the intervals. They could always have booked early if sitting together was that important.

Looking at house prices in the London area, which have skyrocketed over the last decade, I assume there's a knock-on effect on rents, as well as on house prices (and rents) in the commuter belt. It must make it impossible for young people to even think about getting a place of their own unless they're in one of the few very high-paying professions. This reminds me of when we were living in Silicon Valley, where the house prices have been insane since the 1970s, and friends of ours with children were worried because they knew their children were, with a very few exceptions, never going to be able to afford to live in that area.

And to complicate the transatlantic dessert conversation, over here "pudding" refers fairly specifically to blancmange- or custard-type desserts, it isn't used as a generic term for desserts and certainly not for baked or steamed flour-based desserts.

If she's still using the bedroom, she'll need to be careful to stay away from the areas with the ink or it'll be a lot harder to clean when you get the carpet cleaners in. If the room isn't being used, professional cleaning sounds like the safest option.