Melody

It costs 30p to spend a penny these days? Well, there's inflation for you.

Too easy to forge, apparently. Can't think why people would bother, when it's probably easier to forge the paper money, but whatever works. Apparently something with 12 sides and different metals will be more challenging than the current pound coin.

I'm probably missing it, but I'm not seeing on the Acceptable Use page where political or religious discussion is prohibited. Could someone point me to what it says on that topic? Thankies...

Oh, sigh. I'm seeing a four-part version all by the same person. I wonder why two of them aren't available in the UK if the other two are.

You might find it on YouTube if you go and have a search.

And Winter's Tale is 28 April in the USA if I remember right.

I don't think the entire cast has been published yet but there are some educated guesses in this thread (see post 87): http://www.balletcoforum.com/index.php?/topic/6104-ballet-in-the-cinema-2013-2014/page-3

Yes, I gather that was the case with Tamara Rojo and the Sugar Plum Fairy. It's just (and I hope I'm not going off topic here) that a couple of interviews with Ms Yanowsky suggest that she felt she'd been sidelined a bit, which suggests to me that she wouldn't be refusing roles like the Lilac Fairy. But I know that's just supposition.

I must say it surprises me that when you have a principal with the stage presence and natural authority of Zenaida Yanowsky, season after season goes by when she doesn't appear as either Lilac Fairy or Carabosse. If they aren't ever going to cast her as Aurora (which, given her height and maturity, is understandable), it's sad that they can't even cast her in one of the other main roles in their signature ballet once in a while. If ENB can give the Lilac Fairy role to Daria Klimentova, surely RB can give it to a principal every so often.

Honestly, when you have a motivated student who's doing well academically as well as playing a musical instrument and dancing to a high level, and holding down a part-time job, and not falling apart under the stress of it all, the teachers ought to be bloody impressed, not complaining about things. They ought to be focussing their ire on the lazy students who don't have the excuse of serious extracurricular activities, not on the ones who are self-motivated and achieving. I wonder if this biology teacher had some sort of dream as a youngster that didn't pan out. Those people very often seem to want to spoil it for others rather than encourage them to succeed where they themselves failed.

Well, it sounds as though there are some supportive people at the school. If you can get your mother to intervene on your behalf so they realise that you have parental support, that might help. It's so depressing that schools seem to pay much more attention to extracurricular sport than extracurricular arts or sciences.

53. Pretty sad if people have only read six; there are a lot of classics in the list.

It was lovely to see her passing on her knowledge to Laurretta Summerscales. This is a brilliant argument against the people who say that we should give the old classics a rest for 10 or 20 or 50 years so that the new choreographers have a chance to shine. Ballet depends so much on the current and recently retired dancers coaching the up-and-coming ones, that a long gap in that process would be really damaging. I saw a few comments at various forums when Rojo took over ENB that it was a big ego trip for her, but that isn't how she came across. Hopefully this programme, as well as giving some wonderful insight into Swan Lake, gave a good insight into what it takes for dancers to develop into artists in these roles and how much work goes into putting on these performances.

That programme must have been an eye-opener for people who think ballet is just a bunch of random steps to the music. She was showing how the steps told the story if you know what to look for. I think this might have been a more interesting introduction to ballet than Darcey Bussell's programme.

Going back to Anjuli_Bai's question about what can be done with the information coming from researchers - obviously a teacher can only do so much with her own pupils, although I'm sure an inspirational teacher can encourage at least some of her students to make changes in areas where she isn't directly involved. However, it seems to me that any change is going to be very minor unless the researchers and the teachers who support them have access to the decision makers at a national level. The major ballet organisations need to have scientific advisors for topics like physiology, psychology, and nutrition, and they need to take them seriously (not necessarily agree with everything they say, but not just have them for window-dressing). It must be a hard decision for a teacher to not teach something because she agrees with researchers that it's damaging, but to then have her pupils go for auditions to vocational schools, companies, or international competitions where these movements are part of the audition class. As long as the class structure is set in rock because it was good enough for dancers 50 years ago (a situation not helped by the attitudes of octagenarians like Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne), it's hard to see how things can progress. But the sheer number of injuries these days among professional dancers is getting staggering. They talk about having two or three surgeries during their careers as though this was bog-standard normal, and it shouldn't be. Documentaries about ballet schools showing 14-year-olds on crutches as part of the rite of passage ought to raise a massive red flag, but instead it seems to be a badge of honour. It's particularly frustrating when solid research is showing that there are less destructive ways of reaching the goal, only to run head-on into the attitude of "oh, but this is art, you wouldn't understand" and especially "it worked for us back in the 1930s, what's the problem?"

Speaking as another PhD scientist (albeit in a topic that has nothing to do with dance) and as someone who's been engaged in the science-religion-politics debate for years, "general consensus" and "might be due" are just examples of the way scientists convey their results. This is something that's drummed into us from very early on, even about topics that you'd think were pretty much settled. Errors and uncertainties are always included in reports of scientific research but, like a lot of other scientific terms, they mean something a lot more narrow and precise in scientific language than in everyday language. So it should be possible, as long as you understand what the scientists have done and why they're talking the way they are, to explain it to parents in terms of developments in research on physiology without getting too far into the language being used. Unfortunately, with the way that education has been structured over the years, many people don't have a lot of experience of science past the GCSE stage where it does tend to be presented more as rock-solid received wisdom than an ongoing voyage of discovery; a lot of people also don't get information about the difference between uncertainty and error in a scientific context, which isn't the same as in everyday speech. Also unfortunately, quite a lot of the popular press doesn't have any more of a clue than most other non-scientists about what scientists really mean by these tentative statements. The result is that in a lot of the topics that find their way to the public, especially topics that are ideologically controversial but scientifically noncontroversial, like evolution and global warming, the press hears iron-clad certainties on the denier side but "general consensus" and "might be due" on the scientist side, and this is translated in layman's language as "the scientists aren't sure, unlike the other guys." Mostly the uncertainty is in the details, but this isn't how it comes across to the public. It doesn't help that a lot of media outlets don't have science correspondents any more (it's always fun to get my husband started on an interview he gave about his solar research, where at the end of it, the poor sports correspondent who was sent to the scientific meeting looked at him helplessly and said, "erm, what's helium?"), which usually results in a degree of nonsense when the articles are published in the popular press. The same thing tends to happen in reports about health and medicine. The ignorance of a lot of the reporters, combined with the need of the media outlets to grab people's interest, often by creating controversy and conflict where none really exists, means that by the time a piece of research gets to the public it's often almost unrecognizable when compared with the original research article. It often does come across as "until yesterday, scientists thought A was true; now they're saying A isn't true but B is true," when, if you go back to the source, things are a lot more subtle. This is why it's often helpful to read popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American to get an idea of the state of research in various topics, because the newspapers and general-interest magazines really aren't reliable. IMO this isn't really going to change until scientific education changes, both in school and in the way that science is presented to the public. And that isn't going to happen while the educational system in particular and society in general (and unfortunately far too many scientists) persist in looking at science as something divorced from real life. In the meantime, people who understand the research on physiology and nutrition are stuck with having to explain it to parents who just read scary headlines in the Daily Mail and don't really know what's actually going on.

So NYCB is coming here with a programme stuffed full of Balanchine. RB is coming here with not a single work by Ashton or MacMillan. Sigh...

That Guardian article was interesting but they seem to be contradicting themselves. I do agree with the observation that contemporary choreography is full of extreme technical demands but tends to be emotionally flat, and that's something Anita Young also said in the Luke Jennings article quoted earlier in the thread. But then these two ladies are rubbishing the idea that dancers have to work harder than they did in their day. Yet you can't get these extreme physical moves without more extreme training than they would have had in the 1930s. Again going back to Anita Young in the Luke Jennnings article - she said that the young dancers of today can do technical feats that couldn't be done in her day, and I assume her day is considerably more recent than Beryl Grey's day. Honestly, Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne sound a bit like old codgers going on about how regular starvation and a few good floggings never hurt them so today's youth are a bunch of cossetted wimps. Maybe surviving to 80 does that for a person! I did find it interesting that Beryl Grey thinks the extreme acrobatics with no really deep emotional involvement reflects the superficiality of modern society. I'd always sort of assumed that it was just the choreographers asking for these extreme moves because that seems to be the only way these days to do something different, but she may be right in a way that they're just responding to society at large. I remember reading an article where people were shown pictures of stick figures doing ballet moves like arabesques, and there were various heights of arabesques from the 45-degree one all the way to the six-o-clock penchee, and equivalent for other ballet moves, and the most extreme one was always the most popular. It's sad that some of the emotional depths are being ignored because today's young dancers are on a production line to flashy technique in order to do well and be noticed at international competitions as a way to get into some of the good senior schools and companies. For people interested in acrobatics, there's always Cirque du Soleil and some of the contemporary dance companies. In the meantime, when the ballet choreographers have explored the limits of physical technique and can't push things further, eventually they'll have to go back to work that excites the emotions. It'll be such a shame if young dancers aren't being prepared for that. So many of the older dancers and teachers are speaking out about the loss of the emotional essence of ballet these days that hopefully something might be done about it.

Oh, swanprincess, good luck - I know this can be difficult to deal with but at least you're aware of it, which is half the battle. I hope the British ballet schools have more sense than to encourage girls to become emaciated even if the Russian ones don't. Speaking for myself, I'd prefer to watch dancers who are sparkling with health and well-proportioned rather than a bunch of pallid stick insects. And don't forget there's life after ballet - your long-term health is more important than anything. I really think the Russian schools and companies are being a bit irresponsible about perceptions of weight. I saw a YouTube video that featured one dancer who was around 5ft10 and looked as though she weighed basically nothing, and she said a few times during the day that she hadn't had a chance to eat anything all day, just coffee, and this is how it is most days. Even if this was true - which I doubt because I don't see how she'd have still been conscious after a day of hard physical work and nothing to eat - it's not sending a good message. Then there was a video about Olga Smirnova, and one clip showed her in the canteen, spending forever toying with a forkful of food and then finally raising it delicately to her lips and taking a small nibble. In other words, if you want to be a beautiful ballerina, don't eat. This is such nonsense, and it's causing potential danger to impressionable youngsters for the sake of a bit of mystique.

It's on page 2 of the tutus: http://www.justballet.co.uk/shop/tutus/just-ballet-professional-tutu-base/

Oh, I mean things like appearing in an episode of Vicar of Dibley and doing modelling and turning up in glamorous ads in magazines and whatnot. I seem to remember that she was about as well known outside the ballet world for her looks and her personality as she was inside the ballet world for her dancing. Wouldn't your non-ballet friends know the name Pavlova? Or do they just think it's a meringue dessert? Then again, I wrote a short piece about Margot Fonteyn for a Facebook group about famous women in history, and one of the group members from Britain said something like "that was very interesting, I didn't even know she existed." Must have been a real youngster.

I wonder how many people would be thinking that Darcey Bussell was so great if she hadn't had so much non-ballet-related publicity. Actually I wonder how many people would have even heard of her, outside the small group of ballet aficionados. It almost seems insulting that she's on the list and Lynn Seymour isn't. I'm having a hard time figuring out the inclusion of Nina Ananiashvili and the exclusion of Maya Plisetskaya. Also, not that I was a great fan, but Eva Evdokimova was an assoluta for a reason. I think she's possibly going to stand the test of time better than Darcey Bussell and even Nadia Nerina. And IMO it's way too early to be including Natalia Osipova on a list like this.

Two or three of the company members were talking about the flu on Twitter. If there's an infectious bug going round the company, that might explain a few of the no-shows.

You can see the royal box marked with an EIIR on this seating plan: http://www.officialtheatre.com/royal-opera-house/seating/

I'm beginning to think it's the same sort of impulse that makes dogs lift their legs when they see an irresistible tree. Gotta put my mark somewhere on this thing, can't fool with the really famous bits, but a garland dance is fair game. Honestly, this is the Royal Ballet; you'd think its founding choreographer could have come up with a garland dance that'd stand the test of time. Call me old-fashioned, but for something like that, I can't see Wheeldon improving on Ashton. Although, to be fair, maybe they did need something for a different number of dancers or a different length of time. But even so, I can't help thinking that there's an element of the primal "need to make my mark somewhere" going on.