FLOSS

MAB,

Perhaps I should have put artistically astute in quotation marks but that is the way the story will be told and it will be great fun for the professional critics to play one AD off against the other. As if no AD ever makes mistakes over commissions and stagings and we don't need really good ADs heading both the RB and ENB.

As far as the world class ballerinas are concerned I would have thought that it was a bit of an overstatement to say that Kevin has "delivered the goods". If you are referring to Hayward and Naghdi then surely we are talking about a subtle mixture of innate gifts and excellent training. These dancers have natural ability, including musicality and physical aptitude and seem possessed of a burning need to dance which Cope said was the greatest gift a dancer could have. It seems to me that in them we are finally seeing the fruits of Gailene Stock's labours at the RBS.

 I believe that both dancers were actually recruited by Mason rather than Kevin. That is not to say that Kevin played no part in developing and building on their ability and their training. In many the AD's part is the most crucial as he has to know what to do for his dancers as individuals, selecting the right coaches and repertory, the right roles, the right opportunities for development. at the right time and speed.I am not seeking to diminish Kevin's role in all this I am simply trying to get the balance right. Perhaps we should be grateful that Kevin's career as a dancer was with Peter Wright from whom he seems to have learned a great deal

.Creating and maintaining a great ballet company is a cumulative enterprise. After several false starts and unfortunate directorships in the last forty years it is to be hoped  that the remedial work Mason undertook and Kevin is building on will not be undone in the future.

I have been to some of  the Met's streamed performances. I am in the fortunate position of being able to go to the  encore performances which are marginally cheaper than the initial streaming. I have also been to a few of the Bolshoi's streamed performances. The prices you quote for the RB's streamed performances seem in line with the sort of price charged for the Met and the Bolshoi.Although I expect that the Met and Bolshoi performances will cost more for the 2017-18 season because of the drop in the value of the pound.

It would be interesting to be able to compare the prices charged for the RB's performances in this country with those charged for them in the rest of Europe.As far as the RB's coverage across Europe and North America is concerned the ROH website enables you to check to see which communities have

 cinemas showing the streamed performances. I imagine that coverage and attendances are somewhat greater in areas with large expat communities than they are elsewhere.

Coverage does not seem to be that extensive in North America. If you look at the  Ballet Alert website you will find that there are complaints about the limited number of cinemas showing the RB's performances.The comments about the availability of streamed performances are a real eyeopener and suggest, not for the first time, that all is not well with the ROH organisation which handles such things. There appears to be  someone who is a "Cinema Account Coordinator"  but whether he or she actually co-ordinates anything is anyone's guess. I bet if you asked either the coordinator or the  ROH's international distributor who was responsible for the shambles they would blame each other. But then if the ROH came rather late to the  table it has to pick up the crumbs which are available. It no longer has the major international opera company that it once had.As far as streamed performances are concerned I have no doubt that the ROH is more interested in streaming opera performances with Sir Tony conducting and sometimes, less than ideal casts, than ensuring that ballet performances given by a truly world class company are seen by the widest possible audience.  For me the title "Cinema Account Coordinator" has a certain nebulous quality to it suggesting that the incumbent may not have a great deal to do.

My understanding is that we are getting the reconstructed third act of Paquita in the Contrasts programme this week. It's what we were told by Xander Parrish at the LBC meeting last week. He also said that the Mariinsky were performing in St Petersburg while part of the company were in London. As it has somewhere in the region of three hundred dancers in its ranks the tour does not affect its ability to perform on its home stage while a foreign tour is taking place..From what we were told it would seem that the Vladivostock company are essentially a self contained group of dancers and the Mariinsky stylistic connection is largely maintained by dancers from the St. Petersburg company guesting there.

I would agree that the ticket prices for Peter Wright's production of Nutcracker(1984 ) with a top price of £125 will give you some idea of how much your Swan Lake tickets are likely to cost. I don't think that the company will want to be seen piling on the costs too much at least as far as the Amphitheatre seats are concerned although management might be tempted to go for some sort of high price Gala for the first performance. 

As to where you should sit I would simply say that for Swan Lake you have to sit where you can see the floor patterns for the corps de ballet as the corps is as important as the dancers appearing in the main roles.

As far as Scarlett's Swan Lake production is concerned the Insight Evening at which Monica Mason interviewed him last season allayed some of my concerns.As someone in his very early thirties Scarlett came across as a very level headed individual. At the beginning of the interview, without being prompted, he said that he had been frustrated by some of the decisions which Mason, as his director, had made but that he now saw that she had been right. Interestingly he said that he only agreed to be interviewed on condition that she interviewed him. He seems to be very conscious of the company's traditions and his place in its development without being overwhelmed by the past. He said that he was conscious of the responsibility of staging the company's new Swan Lake and that he was currently doing his research for it.

As far as the "choreography by Ashton " is concerned it might merely mean including the Neapolitan Dance which was sorely missed from the Dowell production in its early years. If we are lucky it could mean including one of his act 1 Waltzes, his Dance of the Guests ,his Pas de Quatre and Spanish Dance in the third act and his entire fourth act. We might even get Dame Ninette's Peasant Girl pas with the Tutor which was very like Ratmansky's reconstructed version. For me the ideal solution as far as the fourth act is concerned would be to stage the Ashton version and the original Ivanov in alternate seasons. That would be a real treat.

I had always understood that when POB began to be run on a commercial basis in the early nineteenth century the management found it necessary to generate followings for individual dancers to stimulate ticket sales.  Marketing performers was one of the great inventions of the actor David Garrick who was painted in famous roles and whose portrait in prints and ceramic representations were in wide circulation during his lifetime.

Commercial imperatives encouraged the POB's early nineteenth century managers to take the audience's interest in its performances and its artists a stage further than Garrick had done by hinting at rivalries between its artists and stimulating and encouraging dansomanie (balletomania), fans and fandom as a way of shifting tickets. I think that so far the current discussion has not degenerated into the sort of thing that you might find in a mindless magazine directed at creating and maintaining celebrity status. The current discussion merely suggests that ENB has a following interested in its future development and viability not one that is interested in the lives of its dancers. It is possible to be superior about a company's loyal supporters who buy tickets for everything that it does and get concerned about lack of promotion and high turnover among its dancers  but it has to be acknowledged that a ballet company is not going to get very far without them.

It is interesting to see during the course of this discussion evidence that Kevin has been transformed in the space of a couple of seasons, in the eyes of ballet goers, from the man whose artistic taste was suspect, to say the least, into the great AD. This transformation appears to have been achieved pretty much on the basis of a single season in which we saw considerably more classical and neo-classical choreography than we have for some time and injury gave unexpected opportunities to young male dancers. Let us remember that much of the "adventurous " casting we saw last year was the result of having two male principal dancers injured for the entire season. I somehow doubt that we would have seen quite so much of Ball and Clarke or that they and others would have had the same development opportunities if Kish and Golding had been fit and able to perform. 

I think that we should also remember that "Untouchable "which was one of the Turkeys which Luke Jennings was writing about at the end of 2015 is due for revival this season and that the all Bernstein mixed bill includes the revival of The Age of Anxiety which was not that highly regarded in its first season .The season as a whole has several opportunities for Kevin's artistic judgement to be called into question in the form of the new works due to be premiered in the season's mixed bills and a very high profile new production of Swan Lake with over twenty performances allocated to it at the end of the season and, no doubt, somewhere in the region of a further twenty allocated to it in the 2018-19 season,sight unseen. It is quite possible that by the end of the season 2017-18 all the good work and development opportunities which the Kevin is now being praised for will have been forgotten and the questions raised in 2015 about his control over the quality of the new works being staged and their cost will have been renewed. Meanwhile Rojo whose man management skills are currently being called into question will have resumed her position as the most admired of ADs on the basis of another  season in which she  has demonstrated how artistically astute an AD  she is to critics and ballet goers alike. 

I am far from sure how a thread which began with expressions of regret about dancers leaving ENB this season which developed into a discussion about what is perceived by those who know the company well and can put the current departures into an historical context,and is seen by them as abnormally high, has turned into a generalised one about the benefits of regular churn.

No one is suggesting that dancers should be seen as the equivalent of indentured servants. No one is suggesting that individual dancers should not pursue their own artistic goals and move to companies where they feel that they can do that. Everyone who posts here is, I am sure, acutely conscious that a dancer's life as a performer is incredibly short when compared with those of singers and actors. But what we are talking about here is a specific company with its own history and culture. A company which many people who post here have been following regularly over decades rather than for a few seasons.

I think that the long term observers of ENB are in a much  better position to identify what appears to be a radical shift in its corporate culture from relative stability to one where personnel changes are the norm and that they are better able to comment on it than those who have perhaps only been following the company since its current AD was appointed and those who only want us to embrace the exciting future which this change of personnel is said to promise.I am not sure that generalisations about how companies operate elsewhere necessarily sheds much light on what is currently happening at ENB

Some companies have a culture in which regular changes of personnel are the norm others do not. Until recently I think that most of us would have put ENB at the stable end of the corporate spectrum. We know that  in some countries it is the accepted norm that when a new AD is appointed they are allowed to get rid of the dancers they have inherited from their predecessor.That is not the way things are done here and generally the appointment of a new AD has little effect on the stability of a company. If the exodus had been triggered by Rojo's appointment prompting dancers to leave I would  have expected it to have taken place earlier.

It is quite possible that the main cause of the current exodus of dancers is that Munich's new AD still has money to spend on building his company. He is after all able to offer a wider range of repertory than ENB and the opportunity to dance in a beautiful home theatre rather than touring. Sometimes the simple prospect of being able to sleep in your own bed each night is in itself a  significant factor in deciding where to work. There again we none of us know what impact Brexit will have but I suspect that those who are interested in dancing in Europe will choose to move while it is relatively hassle free rather than waiting until the new post Brexit rules are in place. If this is a one off then little harm will have been done to ENB  I think that most of us would worry if it became the norm for the company as it would affect the company's ability to continue to work at the highest level and from that perspective retaining ballet masters,teachers and coaches is as important as retaining dancers

Forgive me but I think we need a bit of a reality check here. Rojo is not the first director of ENB who has tried to raise its artistic profile although a lot of people talk about her as if she was. It seems to me that however ambitious you are artistically you won't get very far if you find yourself forced to rebuild your company at regular intervals.

 I seem to recall that Wayne Eagling also set himself the task of widening the company's artistic horizons. He seemed to be doing rather well at it as far as I could see and he also seemed to be well respected by his dancers. Of course he came to the company as an experienced AD.His problem was with the company's board or at least members of it. This is Rojo's first experience of running a company and perhaps the problem is that she is inexperienced when it comes to man management skills. I do not believe that anyone who has posted here wishes the company anything other than it should thrive. I suspect that the reason that people have remarked on the recent spate of leavers is because they know that classical ballet is at its strongest in London when both ENB and the RB are in rude artistic health. Excessive churn in a company is a threat to its ability to produce work at the highest artistic level.

Melissa I am glad that you find so much to be positive about in the announcement of so many departures from ENB. A high regular annual turnover may be the norm in many companies across the world but in my experience it has not been part of ENB's corporate culture and experience. This number of departures from ENB is really unusual. ENB has a history of being a pretty stable company with a comparatively low level of turnover where most of the changes in personnel would be anticipated by the company's fans and clearly attributable to natural causes.This looks more like a mass exodus than anything else.

The ENB which Rojo took over from Eagling looked like a company in rude artistic health capable of tackling anything the director chose to stage. I am not sure that it looks like that at present with this number of departures. If a top tier company with an exciting innovative repertory and a history of stability as far as its personnel is concerned suddenly changes into one with a high turnover rate it suggests that the company's dancers are not happy being there. As has already been said in any other organisation this number of departures would  lead to serious questions being asked about management style, company morale and general working conditions. At the end of the day the AD is responsible not only for his or her choice of repertory but for fostering and maintaining working conditions in which everyone feels valued for the contribution they make to the company's success.

My experience is that in any organisation if people feel valued and believe that they are getting development opportunities they tend to stay where they are.If they don't feel valued they move.Unfortunately as far as ENB is concerned it looks as if it may suddenly have become interesting for all the wrong reasons

During the course of the talk which Yanowsky recently gave to the Ballet Association she said that she had a number of projects at various stages of development and that one that was definitely on the cards was a revival of Elizabeth. It is just possible that it is Elizabeth which will bring Yanowsky back to the ROH as a guest artist and that this time she will be partnered by Bolle rather than Acosta. I have no further information about this except that when she mentioned it she spoke about it as something that was definitely going to happen.

It is of course pointless to speculate about what else she might appear in and the general gist of what I have heard her say suggests that she is interested in doing new works but the fact that she is appearing as a guest artist this season may mean that she will do so for a few more seasons. This means that I do not have to entirely abandon the hope that we may have another chance to see her appear as the Hostess in Les Biches in a later season.

Lizbie 1 I don't think that I suggested that all was for the best in the best of all Parisian worlds or that the recruitment system in place at the POB was perfect. The recruitment systems in place in a company are the product of its corporate history. The POB's systems seem to be devised to ensure that dancers are 

recruited and promoted on the basis of merit rather than influence and favoritism which says quite a lot about the company's history and its past corporate experience. A secondary effect of the system is that it ensures that the majority, if not all, of the dancers which it recruits have received a training which guarantees that the company has a uniformity of performance style which few companies outside Russia are able to boast.

The problem for the POB is that however good a recruitment system may be at selecting the very best performers that in itself is no guarantee that the works which a company stages will be of any great quality or will be well cast or well danced. That depends on the artistic director his/her taste and his/her ability to control what goes on in the company.In the past in the case of the POB this boiled down to the relative power of the director and the company's star dancers When it comes to the choice of repertory it is the director of the company who has the greatest, if not entirely exclusive, influence over what a company's audience sees on stage but at the POB the Etoiles seem to have had a considerable power and influence over what they danced. There are stories that in the past Etoiles were in the habit of telling choreographers which steps they would be prepared to dance with the expectation that the choreographer would provide them with the choreography they had ordered. MacMillan is reported to have had a hard time when he went to the POB to stage The Song of the Earth and The Four Seasons. The Etoiles refused to dance in Song of the Earth because it was not sufficiently classical for them and would only dance in The Four Seasons. MacMillan was forced to assign the younger dancers to Song of the Earth and cast the senior dancers in The Four Seasons.

It has always seemed to me that the POB's weakness lies not in the method in which it recruits its dancers but in its corporate culture and its attitude to repertory. As the first ballet company ever established the POB seems to have great difficulty with outsiders appointed as its directors. History suggests that directors who are not part of the company "family" by training and tradition tend to have a hard time. Nureyev certainly did with the established senior dancers when he was director. Then there is its apparent obsession with the latest fashions in ballet. The fact that Lifar who was an outsider had a relatively easy time as the company's director until after WW II is almost certainly attributable to the fact that he was seen as the standard bearer of the Ballets Russes and therefore the latest thing in dance.Each director brings changes to a company's active repertory but with the POB these changes seem more radical than most where it appears to be quite normal to jettison the bulk of the outgoing director's.acquisitions. In spite of the number of works created for it during the nineteenth century very few of them were in its active repertory at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the few that survived was Coppelia .The company had managed to lose Giselle and did not reacquire it as a repertory piece until the 1920's. A choreographer director can be a strength but it can also be a weakness if, as in the case of Serge Lifar, the director is not that good a choreographer. I leave it to you to determine the main reason for the company's periodic weaknesses.

Please note I am not suggesting that the RB provides a better model. It has not reached its first century yet. Whatever its weaknesses POB has been around since the late seventeenth century and shows every sign of being able to continue for another couple of centuries without too much trouble. It is just possible that it is the strength of its feeder school and the way in which it selects its dancers which is the secret of its longevity and continued health as an institution. These after all are less subject to the whims of fashion than allowing 

the artistic director to recruit a company's dancers and  choose its repertory seems to be 

Capybara, I am sorry if you think that I was stating the obvious about the effect which the POB school as feeder school for the company has on the way in which the company recruits its dancers. but at least one person posting about Joseph Aumeer seems to believe that the system is unfair.

 At the RB, as with many other companies,the recruitment process lacks transparency as offers of employment seem to be entirely in the gift of the artistic director and reflect his or her personal likes and dislikes. A change of director can mean a change of the type of dancers recruited. At the POB the recruitment process is transparent and the rules are known to the candidates. As part of the recruitment process all the candidates are required to perform a set variation in front of a panel of dancers drawn from the company. This in itself avoids the recruitment of dancers who give their best performances in class and ensures a certain level of quality and technical ability among those who join the company. The fact that the POB has survived for several centuries and has managed to maintain technical standards suggests that the systems it has in place work for it. The RB is less than a century old and has not always managed to maintain satisfactory technical standards within its ranks. 

The panel drawn from the company's dancers, including etoiles, assesses the ability and quality of the candidates seeking to fill vacancies in the company. The fact that it uses a two tier concourse system does not make it unfair as long as it applies the same criteria to both groups of candidates.The fact that it gives preferential treatment to candidates from its feeder school in order to preserve its style by holding the internal concourse first does not make it unfair either.The internal concourse is the one which really matters as it is the primary source of new dancers. The external one seems to be at best a way of topping up the recruits if the school does not produce enough dancers of sufficient talent in any one year and at worst a sop to those who believe that the school should not have a complete monopoly on providing recruits for the POB.

 As far as Joseph Aumeer is concerned I believe that he is a very talented dancer. I am sorry that he has not been appointed to the company but as I understand it the number of company vacancies for new male and female dancers in the forthcoming season is determined by the number of male and female dancers who have retired during the season. This year there were a limited number of vacancies for male dancers and there were none available to the external candidates. The fact that Aumeer was at the top of the list of external male candidates means that it is more than likely that he will get work at the POB if he remains in Paris

It is late in the year as far as job hunting is concerned but as I said in my earlier post he has time to apply to join ENB. I hope that he is not dwelling too much on what might have happened if he had taken up the offer of the RB apprenticeship. I am sure that his time working in Paris has given him valuable experience and that it won't be too long before we hear more of him. .

I think that we have to remember that the POB school is the feeder school for the company and that the organisation prides itself on having a company made up almost entirely of dancers who share the POB style because they share the same training.. 

According to the Dansomanie website Aumeer is far from being the first dancer with real potential who has failed to gain admission to the POB through the external concourse after working as a supernumerary for the company. I assume that the company will be willing to use him next season as a super. It will be interesting to see whether Aumeer decides to stay in Paris and try again next season or whether he decides to apply for a place in the ENB corps. The company is anxious to recruit a number of male dancers and the closing date for applications is just over a week away.

I suppose it depends on what you think the function of the Holland Park performances and the main stage performance are.Is their function to give all the pupils a chance to show family, friends and teachers what they have been doing during the year and the progress they have made ? Are they an opportunity to gain precious stage experience in front of a supportive public that may be prepared to make allowances for inexperience? Are they a celebration of the work which the pupils have done during the year? Are they a shop window for the organisation? I suspect that the answer is a bit of all of these.The performances began in the late 1950's as a way of celebrating the work of the school and showing it to a wider public than might otherwise have the opportunity to see it but even then it acted as something of a shop window for the organisation. The cast of the school's very first main stage performance was led by dancers who had recently graduated rather than that year's graduates.

For many years the main stage performance was primarily concerned with the graduating year. The programme would open with White Lodgers performing dances indigenous to the British Isles with Scottish and Irish dancing as staple features and sword dancing making regular appearances.The rest of the programme was generally given over to a two or sometimes a three act ballet.I seem to recall that Two Pigeons was staged with great regularity, but there were years when Coppelia was staged and others when the choice fell on Giselle and one exceptional year when Sleeping Beauty was chosen with two dancers sharing the role of Aurora. 

The format of the programme has changed quite markedly during the last twenty years with a wider range of works being performed. During this time RBS programmes have shown a shift to one act works, single acts of nineteenth century ballets and excerpts from one act works with far less emphasis on performing works which are part of the RB's repertory. It has been suggested that this shift in emphasis is closely connected to the school's change of function under Gailene Stock from being primarily the feeder school for the Royal Ballet companies to being a school which produces eminently employable dancers.Others may be better able to say whether the Holland Park performances have given the second years less opportunities to be seen this year than in previous years and whether the "star pupils" are being given undue exposure but I would point out that what the school does varies from year to year depending on the dancers it has available to it at the time of the performances and it is therefore perhaps dangerous to assume that what happens in a single year or a couple of years can be taken as an accurate reflection of what happens every year.

A great deal can happen between deciding what to programme and actually getting the ballets selected onto the stage.There have been seasons when the school's star pupils got no exposure at the end of their final year. There was the year not so long ago when the school had to borrow an Oberon from BRB because all three dancers who had originally been allocated to the role were injured and there have been occasions when the school's outstanding pupils played no part in it at all because they had already been taken into the company. I believe that this was true of both Hayward and Naghdi.I have no idea whether their absence meant that second year pupils were given greater prominence at these performances than would otherwise have been the case. But being taken into the company early is not always a barrier to appearing in the main stage show. I believe that Clarke was released by the company so that he could appear in the main stage performance.

I don't think that anyone who attends these shows underestimates the amount of sheer work, application and effort that each pupil puts into their training or the mentally draining effect that the assessment process has on the school's pupils. Whether or not they get prominent billing in these performances I think that everyone who attends these performances appreciates the amount of effort that every pupil who appears on the Holland Park stage has put into being in a position to appear there.

For me Yanowsky was the outstanding performer in Sylvia. I think that she has been the only dancer who has managed to encompass the Sylvia who Ashton created , the tough no nonsense huntress of act one, the would be seductress of act two, played tongue in cheek, and the nineteenth century ballerina of act three. Yanowsky said that it was like dancing three different ballets and when she danced it,it looked just that, as each act gave the audience a different Sylvia. I found Nunez, by comparison,  brought little variety to her portrayal of the role in each act. She was far too one note,she smiled and was charming but she was not Ashton's Sylvia.

I did not manage to see Cuthbertson when the ballet was last revived but if I could only see one dancer's performance I would go for the Cuthbertson cast as I think that she has a closer artistic affinity to the classical style of Ashton's Petipa based choreography of Cinderella and the third act of Sylvia. The ballet was created to display Fonteyn's range. The grand pas de deux of Sylvia's third act was created to  celebrate the art of his ballerina , he gave her and the audience a pas de deux firmly rooted in late nineteenth century conventions. I think that Cuthbertson dances Ashton's choreography more idiomatically than Osipova manages to do.The review of Cuthbertson's debut seven years ago is intriguing.and the reference to her old fashioned approach to the choreography suggests that she was spot on as far as style is concerned. I always get the feeling that Osipova is trying very hard to get the style right but I am always aware that sections of choreography including fast footwork and swift changes of direction have to be thought about. The choreography of Sylvia calls for elegance and nuance, the art which disguises art, it is not about raw power.The added bonus for me is that the Cuthbertson cast includes Clarke as Aminta.

Aminta does not have much to dance but his solos need to be elegant and his solo in the third act pas de deux needs to be compelling.Clarke is a developing dancer who is maturing with each performance he gives.He is on the way up while Bonelli seems to have entered that phase in his career where, as a mature dancer, his performances are somewhat more variable. and the third act solo is one of those terribly exposed bits of Ashton choreography where the dancer is either right or he is wrong. It does not make any allowances for an off night. 

Remember that Sylvia is a role which it is difficult to get right. Whichever cast you see, bear in mind that you are only seeing one dancer's account of the role and that a single performance is just that, a single performance.I nearly gave up on Sylvia after the first night of the 2004 revival and if I had only seen Bussell or Nunez my view of the ballet would have been that it was an interesting exercise in reverence to its creator but that it was an exhumation rather than a successful revival. I was given a ticket for the first performance which Yanowsky gave and the difference between her performance and that of Bussell and Nunez was extraordinary. She made it a totally different ballet but she also made it clear how difficult the ballet is to dance really well. She gave a compelling account of the role which revealed the Sylvia of each act and squeezed every ounce out of the text which Ashton had created.It was the difference between oil painting and a water colour.

Sarah 1987 Sorry if this is not as helpful as you might have wished. There is no hard and fast answer to your question. Osipova is a star and she will no doubt give a stellar performance while Cuthberston will almost certainly be more at home with the choreography and dance it idiomatically. It is possible that neither dancer will fully meet the challenges of the role and give an effective account of the role Ashton created.

Ian thank you for the link to the Pappano article.Does the new Otello really require this publicity? But then perhaps Pappano is insuring himself against the possibility that we may not appreciate the director's approach to the new production.It is interesting to read Pappano's views on the audience's reaction to some of the less appreciated productions which have been staged during his tenure. It would seem that it all boils down to the audience's inability to appreciate the directors' application of their intellect to the subtext and there I was thinking that the problem was that the director was staging the opera which the librettist and composer should have written rather than the one that they actually did.

If the real problem is that the audience is not bright enough to understand and appreciate  what the directors are doing when they stage their new productions perhaps we should be given some sort of IQ test before we are permitted to buy tickets for something like the artistic mess that was described as a production of Idomeneo with its new libretto and arbitrary treatment of the musical score or Holten's Boris or Meistersinger?

We can always hope that Pappano gets Munich if only because eighteen years is a long time to be in charge of any opera company. After about ten years however good the Music Director is, their prejudices, their enthusiasms and their abilities across the repertory begin to impinge on the repertory the audience is permitted to experience. Britten has not played much of a part in the ROH's active repertory during Sir Tony's tenure apart from that appalling village hall production of Gloriana during the centennial year. There is a lot of serious repertory that has not been seen on the Covent Garden stage for years. A new Music Director would at least mean artistic obsessions other than minor verismo composers and minor Puccini it might even have the effect of realigning and enlarging the company's artistic horizons.

It is possible that Kevin will defer making any appointments to the rank of principal dancer until well into next year. There are so many really talented dancers in the company that he may well want to avoid making mistakes about appointing new principal dancers as any appointment he makes will have the effect of blocking advancement to others who may prove to be even more worthy of that status in the near future Perhaps we shall have to wait until after the 2018 performances of Giselle and Swan Lake for the next principals to be named. 

The most obvious candidates for promotion to the rank of principal based on the quality of their work during the 2016-17 season are Naghdi and Hay both of whom have shown real artistry throughout the season and given exemplary performances in classical and classically based roles which have frequently outclassed those given by far more experienced dancers. I suspect that Hay will have to wait a little longer for promotion if only because there are already two shortish male principals.

As far as Hamilton is concerned I don't know whether she is eligible for promotion this year or not. While she has in past seasons  been outstanding in some parts of the repertory, she has also displayed serious technical shortcomings in the more exposed classical roles which she has danced such as the Queen of the Dryads where she ran out of steam and technique before she completed her variation and in the 2014 revival of Symphonic Variations where she was too slow and was clearly challenged by the choreographic text. As she has come so far in her career through her single minded determination to be a dancer I assume that her time at Dresden was part of a carefully considered plan on her part to develop and widen her experience and strengthen her technique. It will be interesting to see the effect that her time at Dresden has had on her abilities as a performer. I suspect that Kevin will  want some evidence that she has polished up her technical skills before she enters into his promotion calculations. On the face of it the 2017-18 season seems to play to her strengths in a way that the 2016-17 season did not. I think that she will need to show that she is clearly in command of the technical skills required to perform the classically based repertory at the highest level before Kevin considers her for further promotion. It is possible, of course, that because of the wealth of talent further down the ranks that, for Hamilton, as for Choe before her, the time for further promotion has already passed.

As far as other candidates for promotion are concerned I shall be really surprised if Ball, Clark, Sambe and Sissens don't each move up a rung. Sissens has been outstanding drawing the eye by the quality of his dancing in the corps throughout the season.His appearance in the Brian Shaw role in Symphonic Variations was a fitting  end to a successful season. Among the women I shall be surprised if Gasparini, Magri and O'Sullivan don't each go up a rung. Some of the other dancers who have been mentioned by others may have to wait another season for promotion. I think that Katsura is one of that number. She is an outstanding dancer with enormous potential but she seems to be taking time to adjust to being in the company. Her first soloist role was more tentative than I had expected. In her case perhaps another year in the relative obscurity of the corps will.give her the experience and confidence she needs.

The type of dancer which a company recruits and promotes reflects the type of ballets which are in its repertory. In an ideal world companies which stage the nineteenth century classics would feel the need to establish and maintain a company which includes the full range of dancer types which a choreographer like Petipa would have assumed would be present in the companies which staged his ballets. The reality is that most Western companies skimp on some of the specialist dancer types required in such works for reasons of economy.A company will generally have a sufficient number of dancers able to  perform the choreography for the corps and enough dancers sufficiently technically accomplished to perform the ballerina and danseur roles but they will probably not have demi-character  and specialist character dancers in sufficient numbers to produce the sort of theatrical effect which the choreographer intended. Indeed they may not have any specialist character dancers at all. 

At the time when he was staging his reconstructed Raymonda in Milan the late Sergei Vikharev drew an analogy between the types of dancers required to perform Petipa's late nineteenth century ballets as he intended them to be seen, and a cake made up of layers, each of which plays an essential part in the creation of the finished product, A company which dances nineteenth century and Diaghilev repertory needs the types of dancers for whom the roles in those ballets were created.if it is to provide the audience with the sort of theatrical experience which the ballets' creators intended. It can try to stage these works without demi-character and specialist character dancers but the result is a one dimensional, diminished account of the work lacking the flavour, colour, range,contrast and clear narrative framework which the choreographer intended it to have.. 

A company which performs abstract works throughout the year with Nutcracker at Christmas can probably get away with pressing a non specialist into playing Drosselmeyer but a company whose staple repertory is a mixture of the nineteenth classics and major twentieth century narrative works cannot hope to do so except in the short term. To extend Vikharev's analogy to perform the great nineteenth century ballets without specialist dancers of the type required at each level of the company's hierachy is a bit like using substitute ingredients in a recipe. You can only get away with a limited number of substitute ingredients before a dish ceases to be what the cook set out to make.  A company which performs a wide range of repertory from the nineteenth century and twentieth century narrative works may be able to get away with substituting dancers for character dancers in the roles which require them as long as the audience does not know what the real thing looks like. It's a bit like using vanilla essence in a recipe which calls for vanilla. The substitute ingredient provides an approximation of the flavour but it does not deliver the flavour which the creator of the recipe intended. Where a  choreographer creates a work which calls for character dancers who are expert at performing dramatic roles substituting young comparatively inexperienced dancers with limited acting skills does not deliver the same effect. Their performance will not deliver the the dramatic contrast between purely dance roles and character ones and it will not have the theatrical light and shade which the choreographer intended it to have.

Of course most western companies don't have significant groups of specialist character dancers. The Danes have been the only western company which has had them in any number as the Bournonville repertory requires them. The first act of Napoli is largely mime. As MAB has said the Danes have drawn their character dancers from the ranks of the older company members rather than selecting them at the outset of their career as happens in Russia.  I suppose the idea that character dancers are an unnecessary luxury makes sense in the context of a company which dances abstract works during the year and performs the Nutcracker at Christmas. That sort of company can get away with pressing the ballet master into service as Herr Drosselmeyer but a company which has a significant number narrative works requiring character dancers in its repertory can't hope to get away with such practices in the medium to long term or can it?. 

I read recently that the Danes had got rid of a number of their older experienced dancers which suggests that the director may have decided that as the company acquires a more modern repertory and dances less Bournonville than it once did   character dancers are an unnecessary luxury. I can see the attraction of this idea for artistic directors faced with calls for economy. Getting rid of the older dancers who perform character roles enables the company to employ more young dancers to perform the non narrative works which form the bulk of most companies' active repertory. Although it is the audience rather than management who can say whether the diminution of the theatrical effectiveness of performances of nineteenth and twentieth century narrative ballets is a price worth paying in order to employ more young dancers or to cut costs, the reality is that they are unlikely to say anything as they have nothing to compare it with.  .

 I know that there are those who regard the rules of emploi as an unnecessary fetter on artistic endeavour but a great deal of damage is done to the performance of a ballet and the reputation of its choreographer if roles are cast on the basis that anyone can do anything with roles subject to compromise casting or out and out miscasting. If a ballet fails to work as a piece of theatre the average audience member will not ascribe its failure to miscasting particularly if their favourite dancer is performing in a role which does not suit him or her. They will assume that casting has been undertaken with consummate care and not unreasonably they will believe that the failure lies with the choreographer and the ballet he has created,.

As far as the recruitment of dancers to the Royal Ballet is concerned I think that we ought to be far more concerned about the limited number of demi-character dancers who are recruited to the company and the small number of them who actually want to dance demi-character roles  than we currently need to be about character dancers. At the moment nearly every male dancer seems to have  ambitions to be a danseur and only Paul Kay seems to really appreciate the opportunities that the roles created on Harold Turner and Alexander Grant provide. At present I should have thought that it is the demi-character roles rather than the character ones that are most in danger at the Royal Ballet but that does not mean that all will remain well as far as the ranks of the character dancers are concerned. Somehow I get the feeling that Kevin's experience of working as a dancer in a company which was forced to engage in compromise casting because of its size has resulted in his having acquired a slightly hazy view of the type of dancers required in some ballets. The fact that most Western companies get by quite well without employing specialist character dancers must register strongly with directors desperate to keep costs down. I imagine that attending international meetings of artistic directors most of whom do not have specialist character dancers encourages the idea that they are an unnecessary expense and above all that character principal dancers are a costly indulgence...

The right's holders have a long and seriously inglorious history of redesigning Ashton's ballets. None have been an improvement on the original versions. I much preferred the original Dream designs. The current ones were devised for SWRB because the original sets were not suitable for touring. However that does not explain why it was felt necessary to redesign the costumes as well. The original designs succeeded in evoking the golden age of Romantic ballet and the world of Victorian fairy painting but the costumes also had a certain stream lined simplicity in them for example Oberon did not have puff sleeves. 

 The 1978 recording to which Petunia has provided a link will show you all sorts of essential  detail which you don't see in performance today. The recording it seems to me reveals the Dream to be a ballet whose choreographer was more concerned with effective story telling and creating character than the performance of unmodified classical steps. Somehow over the years some of the clear narrative details have been lost and a smoother more obviously classical ballet has been created which now takes 55 minutes to dance compared with the 51 minutes it took in 1974. The main exception to the smoothing down process are the "rustics"  whose portrayal has become so coarse that they now look as if they would be more at home in a cartoon.

I did not intend to post it in that state, I was not even aware that I had done anything to post it.

Our response to the performance of ballets and  performances by individual dancers is a very personal thing. It inevitably depends as much on our earliest ballet going experiences as it does on our experience of the ballet in question and the strength of the impression our first cast made on us.

 According to an interview which Ellis-Somes gave when she was staging Symphonic Variations for Australian Ballet in 2015 she selects the casts for this ballet and what is important is that the women are fairly evenly matched as far as height is concerned. On paper the cast led by Nunez and Muntagirov is the better of the two and they give a fine account of the text. But I found that I got far more from watching the second cast led by Cuthbertson and Clarke was it because it was fresher, slightly softer and less obsessed by crystalline purity but it had something special about it perhaps that something was Joseph Sissens. It is an extraordinary work which manages to look fresh every time it is revived on the Covent Garden stage because it is totally at variance with dance fashion. Made as a riposte to Helpmann's dance melodramatic dance dramas it now rebukes ballets which are full of technical tricks for no apparent reason and performers who are happy to distort choreography and music to display their favourite feats of technical skill and asymmetry. As a polemical ballet it should be boring and yet it is the most perfect  fusion of dance and music,calm and still where other choreographers would feel the need to let the cast show off. and always satisfying for its understated elegant, and apparently effortless,pure dance. 

None of the casts of the Dream are ideal. McRae is the only experienced Oberon on stage in this run but while I can't fault him technically, for me he is not Oberon,because he remains resolutely Steven McRae an exceptional technician but not much of a dance actor, which is strange after his exceptional Rudolf. Oberon's changing mood and his a story telling through dance and gesture fail to register clearly because they seem to be subsumed into balletic gesturing. Takada gave a fine account of the role of Titania but to me she was not as at home in the choreography as Hayward who made her debut the following day.  Hayward gave the audience an account of the role that was a close to Sibley's account as I have seen at a debut. Morera, the one experienced Titania in this run, is an exemplary Ashton dancer. All of the detail which Ashton put into the choreography including the voluptuous movements at the end of the reconciliation pas de deux are in her account of Titania and she makes all of the choreography look totally natural.

I think that we all have to understand that the Dream is an exceptionally difficult ballet to get absolutely right and the last few revivals have involved largely experienced casts. I have been told, by those that were there, that even the original cast of Sibley and Oberon took some time to get it looking absolutely right. I suspect that it is one of those ballets which the dancers playing Oberon and Titania are pleased to have got through their first performance. For that reason it is best to see debuts in the leading roles as work in progress rather than the finished product.

Campbell dancing Oberon for the first time to Morera's experienced Titania  was not completely in command of the choreography but he made much more of the story telling elements in his choreography his squeezing of the flower and the application of its juice was clear and was not lost in wafty balletic gestures  which I thought they were with McRae. I have no doubt that Campbell will have improved considerably by his second performance and if I had to choose between Campbell and McRae even at this point I would probably choose Campbell  because I find his assumption of the role more convincing than McRae's. Sambe made an extraordinary debut but while he seemed to be unfazed by the challenges which the choreography presents the role of Oberon is not just about dancing it is also about projecting character through dance and gesture with clear story telling through gesture. and it was here for me his inexperience was revealed. I think that it was this which made his performance  less effective than some of us may have anticipated. Zucchetti the first night Puck was less effective than I had expected him to be it was not that he did anything wrong but was as if he did not understand that some of his choreography was drawn from lines in the text and that his choreography including the gestures have to be crystal clear if they are to work. Yudes made an excellent debut as Puck with the cast headed by Hayward and Sambe .Acri looked as if he thought that he should be dancing Oberon in Campbell's place.

Bottom is an extraordinarily difficult role to get right. It is not all pointe work,pantomime and clowning, and it is a mistake to play it as if that is all there is to the role. There is the very last section of Bottom's choreography which is the balletic equivalent of the Bottom's Dream speech in the play.Here the dancer has to combine wonder at his experience during the night; feelings of profound loss and his inability to express anything about the experience and loss. It's what all those shrugging gestures are  about. Very few dancers apart from Alexander Grant have ever been able to express Bottom's thoughts after his night in the Athenian woods. Gartside with the first cast is probably as fine a Bottom as either Royal Ballet company can muster at present. But even he does not really achieve this completely. Howells appeared with the Hayward cast and was a surprisingly bland Bottom.Whitehead appeared  as Bottom with the Morera cast I have not seen him in the role before so I assume it is his debut. His account began well but petered out towards the end. His performance should probably be assessed as work in progress. I look forward to seeing him again.

I do wish the rude mechanicals were a little less doltish and cartoon like. I also wish that they would stay up stage  masking Bottom's transformation as that is their sole function. They now fail to fulfill this function moving down stage as if their mothers were sitting in the front stalls and leaving the transformation all too visible..

The eight dancers taking on the role of the lovers in the two casts are all very good and will no doubt improve considerably during the course of the short run. Ball is particularly amusing.

Setting to one side the argument as to whether or not Marguerite and Armand should ever have been revived there is something more fundamental to be asked about it and many other older ballets and that is whether or not dancing a ballet is simply a question of reproducing steps and body movement accurately or whether it calls for something more. According to the review in the Guardian Ashton towards the end of his life thought that the company's dancers were reluctant to dance his ballets full out for fear of being thought camp. If that was the case in the 1980's I wonder what he would have thought of some recent performances of Marguerite and Armand which have been either blandly correct or in Guillem's case totally unlike any Ashton ballet. you have ever seen.

Marguerite and Armand is as much a portrait of the original cast as it is the story of Marguerite Gautier. Faced with the choice of seeing this work danced with such great care that it is reduced to a series of tableaux vivants with beautiful poses but no real energy let alone pent up passion and desperation or one that is full of dynamism,fervour with the occasional slight technical error  I know which version I want to see.

I  want the vehicle that goes rather than one which stops and starts in a way which obliterate's Ashton's dynamics and is little more than the performance of classroom steps.This is one of those ballets which needs to succeed as a piece of theatre with dancers far more concerned with telling the story and displaying the emotions locked inside the choreography than anything else. It's one of those ballets in which ideally the dancers are no longer concerned with what they have learned in the rehearsal room, forget about fixating on the steps,and simply get on and dance the ballet.

Of the three casts on offer I am afraid that I found the Bonelli Ferri cast the least compelling. Perhaps if you are a fully committed Ferri fan you will discern far more in this cast's performance than I was able to find in it.I was never caught up in anything except noticing how limited Ferri's technical armoury now is. Lots of being carried about like a piece of precious porcelain and flailing arms which was what I was most aware of with this cast unfortunately they do not add up to a gripping performance of the work.It was far too static looking and the choreography did not work for me. Yanowsky and Bolle seemed considerably less concerned with producing a series of beautiful static stage pictures than Ferri and Bonelli were. I found their performance effective  because although Bolle is no actor his height and strength give Yanowsky the freedom to dance her role with great emotional abandon. I liked the Osipova, Shyklarov far more than I had anticipated I would and I have no doubt that their second performance will be even better.She has got her performance near pitch perfect he could do with being a little more operatic in approach. 

It seems to me that modern performance practice which is more concerned with freeze framing effects and not making mistakes than it is with the dynamics of ballet has robbed Margueritte and Armand of a great deal of its theatrical effectiveness. I asked myself why so often there is so little feeling of urgency in these performances and I have come to the conclusion that the lack of urgency and passion in  ballet is largely attributable to the modern dynamics of performance in which the flow of movement is not simply held almost imperceptibly and the dancers always seem to be moving, but one in which  the brakes are slammed on at regular intervals and the action is freeze  framed to capture a beautiful pose. It lacks passion because it lacks the feeling of the inevitability of the movement. If you stop the movement it suggests that the relationship between the dancer's movements and the music are not inevitable and that  there are other choices which could have been made as far as the choreography is concerned. If the movement does not feel inevitable then the  impact is lost and the work fails as theatre.

I don't think that any of us is able to identify with any degree of accuracy what is, or is not, an "obvious target" and I suspect that is the point as far as the terrorists are concerned. All that can be said with some certainty is that a significant number of the people who have been involved in committing terrorist attacks  both here and abroad seem to be men who have  been involved in petty crime and have now found religion. The form of the religion which they have embraced is an extremely illiberal form of Islam which means that there are a lot of practices and activities of which they disapprove strongly such as holding events at which the sexes are not strictly segregated, drinking alcohol,  music making and the theatre. 

The one thing that is noticeable about the last two incidents in London is that they have both included places to which the public has easy, scarcely controlled access  namely Westminster Bridge and London Bridge.The fact that part of both incidents took place at sites which virtually everyone who has heard of London knows of, is, I feel sure, intended to ensure that the incidents remain in the collective memory for a very long time. On Saturday evening Borough Market with its pubs and restaurants was almost certainly the main target with the incident on the Bridge the hook on which to hang the memory. There are plenty of such soft inviting targets in Central London.I think we need to remember the man who was caught walking up Whitehall with a bag and knives a few days after the Westminster incident.The press suggested that he was going to try to enter government offices  but there are plenty of far softer targets thereabout. 

MAB,

The most obvious meaning of your pithy comment about my recent post suggests that you believe that I have completely failed to recognise the artistic quality of what the Royal Opera has been serving up during Pappano's time at the helm.Now I am all in favour of innovative productions which actually tell me something about the opera which  I have been told that the director is staging but I am not a great  fan of the sort of radical rewriting or rearranging of the action which produces the work which the director believes the librettist and composer should have created Have I imagined the extraordinary number of dud productions which have been staged or the dubious quality of some of the singers such as the cast who appeared in the last revival of Il tabarro? Perhaps I have been attending opera performances at Covent Garden in a sort of parallel universe.

I have to say that I find the next opera season incredibly dull and while the ballet programme looked almost as dull when it was published it has been considerably improved by the casting which has been announced for the first booking period and presumably it will continue to improve in that way as the season progresses and further details about casting emerge.Unfortunately that is not going to happen with the opera season.

I have the feeling that a lot of people were wrong footed by the new Scarlett ballet expecting it to be more obviously a valedictory piece than it in fact proves to be. I know that I came away fro the first performance somewhat unsure as to what I thought about it. But to begin at the beginning.

Vertiginous Thrill's first cast led by Nunez and Muntagirov, with McRae,Takada and Stix-Brunell was quite extraordinary in the energy they brought to their performance of the piece  which looked like amphetamine fueled  Balanchine. Even with this energy level Muntagirov  somehow managed to give the audience a display of effortless elegance.The second cast of  Menizabal, Sambe, Hay,Hayward and Stix-Brunell  were less frenetic and slightly more relaxed in performance than the first cast had been. Mendizabal fell during the first performance and perhaps that partially explains the more muted account which she gave of the choreography Hayward and Stix-Brunell  were a better balanced pairing than we saw on the first night but then they had rehearsed together throughout the preparation process while injury had led to last minute changes to the first cast. In the second cast it was James Hay dancing in the McRae role who  provided the cool elegant performance.

The next ballet Tarantella,is one of those ephemeral gala pieces which prove to have unanticipated staying power. The first night cast of Hayward and Sambe both gave extraordinary accounts of the choreography which is a test of both technique and stamina. Their performances were full of panache and character and were both exciting and amusing. At the second performance Tarantella was performed by Hinkis and Campbell. Theirs was a more subdued account of the choreography with far less character and brio to it than we had seen on the first night. It is the sort of choreography which, I think, requires the dancer to take risks rather than playing safe and Hinkis played it too carefully and far too safely for what was intended to be a exuberant display piece. It is not reproducing the steps which you have learned which matters in this piece it is what you do with them in performance which counts..The third cast was probably the most intriguing as the dancers cast in it were Naghdi and Zucchetti. Now while there was no doubt that this piece was just the thing that would suit Zucchetti down to the ground the question was how well it would suit Naghdi who has described herself as an allegro dancer by nature ? This third cast were even sharper than the first night one and they made it look even more like a tongue in cheek tribute to Bournonville than Sambe and Hayward had made it. Both the first and third casts delivered hugely enjoyable accounts of the piece which made what came next all the more disappointing.

There is nothing wrong with devising a mixed bill which displays the range of subject matter and mood which ballet can encompass. In fact I am all in favour of such mixed bills and would much rather have a mixture of works which show ballets's range as an evening at the ballet than a more narrowly themed approach. But the essential element in an evening adopting the wide range approach is that all its component parts are worth staging. Having sent the audience out of the auditorium to boost the bar receipts feeling that all is well with the company, its dancers and ballet in general management decided, in its wisdom, that we should return after the interval to see the revised version of Strapless.

 I struggle to say anything positive about Strapless and strangely with six minutes or so cut from it it feels longer than it did when it was premiered. Wheeldon is not the only choreographer who does not seem to possess an "unerring sense of what ballet can and can not do" but having discovered that the work was a failure. It would have been kinder to both the dancers and the audience if management had decided to bury it quietly rather than serve it up for a second time. But it is a co-production and presumably intended as a vehicle for the company's Russian star and perhaps it is this which necessitated its revival.

The problem is not simply Wheeldon's  choice of a  subject which it would be difficult enough to turn into a successful film treatment where you have both movement and speech to work with,let alone a ballet where you only have choreographed movement. The ballet also reveals what Wheeldon can and cannot do as a choreographer at this stage of his career. Even in its revised form Strapless seems strangely unfocused. Unfortunately Wheeldon seems to have taken MacMillan as his choreographic model  for the cafe scene. Perhaps someone should have told him that MacMillan was notorious for producing swathes of boring repetitive dancing for the corps. Unfortunately  Wheeldon does not seem to have mastered the pas de deux as a means of expressing character and emotion .The cafe scene is full of unnecessary local colour and jolly dances which look like the sort of thing you might expect to see in a west end musical including an exceptionally demure can can. As I sat there I have to confess that my attention began to wander I began to think about the sort of rumbustious characterful choreography that Massine conjured up for such scenes of local colour. I even began to wonder what de Valois Bar aux Folies Bergeres might have looked like? It also included historical characters but I bet they had considerably more theatrical life to them than the historical characters as bit players in this ballet where the dancers labour in vain to breathe life into a balletic corpse.

While the choice of subject is a significant factor in the ballet's weakness it is not the only problem. it seems to me that Wheeldon's choreographic language  which works well for abstract ballets and can be pressed into service for narrative works where the subject matter and his dance language are a good fit does not work that well as an expression of emotion and mood. The erotic encounters in this work feel like dull academic choreographic exercises rather than movement expressing overwhelming desire.  All choreographers are "snappers up of unconsidered trifles". They all borrow from each other and from the past.Both Ashton and  MacMillan knew how to make pas de deux which are effective in both choreographic and narrative terms. I doubt that theirs is a secret which died with them. Is Wheeldon's problem one of lack of exposure to effective narrative works in performance because he spent too long working in a company which stages abstract ballets rather than narrative ones or an inherent inability to create expressive choreography? Only time will tell whether Wheeldon's  dance vocabulary will ever extend to being able to express mood and emotion through the subtle combination of natural body language and the codified movement of the ecole de danse which Ashton,Tudor and MacMillan were all able to bring to their narrative works. But as I recently came across a critic writing about Ashton's 1936 ballet Nocturne as evidence of the choreographer's  development from creating glib, smart but essentially superficial choreography with great facility to real art,it may be a trifle too soon to reject Wheeldon and all his works.

 I don't know what Symphonic Dances is about. Scarlett was not that forthcoming at the Insight interview he gave.He said that it is It  is about whatever we want to think it is about. The one thing he did say was that because of the current technical strength and talent of the men in the company he felt he had to give them some interesting choreography to dance. Of course not every section of the work is at the same level and I have no idea what the sporting and sprinting poses are intended to convey.But even if Yanowsky is unable to throw any light on what the ballet is about it works well as a display piece for her.Although it looks rather different on Morera it works for her as well. It gives the men some meaty choreography to dance and the company is able to field two casts for the corps. Perhaps all that we should expect of a new ballet is that it is theatrically effective; it shows  its dancers off to best advantage; it bears repeat viewing and it is not wholly dependent on its original cast for its effectiveness. Personally I think that this new ballet fulfills all those requirements. 

It opens with the lead dancer, Yanowsky, as a figure of authority dominating the stage and an object of adoration, this is followed by a section in which she is gradually drawn in to dance with the corps and in the final section she is partnered by one of the men, Reece Clarke. I have no idea what the final image is meant to convey. Morera in the second cast does not physically dominate the stage in the way that Yanowsky does but she is equally effective in her own way , and her partner in the final section,Matthew Ball is good as well. It looks like a ballet that will bear repeated viewing and new casts. Perhaps that is enough.Only time will tell whether it is a piece which survives for a few seasons or whether it has real staying power.

I  regret to say that I don't think that the Royal Opera is an opera company of real international stature in the way that the Met, La Scala, Vienna and Munich are, and it has not been for some years. Its current status is the result of the Music Director's personal musical likes and dislikes; his abilities as a conductor;  the employment of an increasing numbers of singers who seem to come from the bargain basement and Mr Holten's valiant efforts on the directorial front.

I am not convinced that Holten's replacement is going to be much better as from what I have read it would seem that the young man in question gained his experience in the world of opera working on small scale productions in Northern Ireland and was deemed too inexperienced to be employed by ENO. I sincerely trust that this is a wholly inaccurate account of his operatic CV  but an Oxbridge degree, experience working on small scale opera productions, the belief that all productions need to be relevant to the audience plus a reported antipathy to the works of Britten does not exactly fill me with optimism about the likelihood of improvements in the quality of what is served up by the Royal Opera.

I don't suppose that the drop in the value of the pound is going to assist matters as far as casting is concerned . I think that we can look forward to more trips to the bargain basement interspersed with the odd celebrity singer circus  occasioned by a new co-production which enables even those who attend opera at Covent Garden to  experience the international stars whose services the opera house only seems able to secure with the promise of a new production or a sort of international package deal during which the same stars appear together at the houses which have bought into it. 

As to the choice which has been made between the original French version and the Italian version of Verdi's treatment of Schiller's play I imagine that the reason we are getting Don Carlo rather than Don Carlos is attributable to the music director's taste or lack thereof and the fact that, in theory at least, the Italian version is easier to cast because it is in more singers' repertory than the French one is.

 Sir Tony has seen fit to stage a number of second rate Italian operas during his tenure including  Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, Giordano's one aria opera Andrea Chenier and that jolly little double bill of domestic violence and murder Cav and Pag.  Meanwhile we have recently had no Britten except that ghastly production of Gloriana staged for the composer's centenary which treated the opera as a village hall pageant.

 Instead of exploring the highways and byways of the more obscure aspects of the late nineteenth century Italian repertory which is not normally seen outside the peninsula, and there is usually good reason for that level of obscurity, or "enjoying" our annual ration of umpteen performances of La Traviata, we could be exploring the twentieth century repertory,early Verdi and Don Carlos. the French  version.of Verdi's great opera which is indeed much better than the Italian one.

Kate_N

On the thread started by Ivy Lin about performances in the US she said that she had been disappointed by Wheeldon's Winter's Tale and American in Paris.and she asked the following question. "Do British audiences really enjoy Wheeldon's full length works?"That question prompted a discussion about the new works which have been staged at Covent Garden. That discussion was cut short by a reminder that the thread was intended to be a discussion about what was happening in the US not a discussion about the new works being performed here and whether or not we like them.

During that discussion we were told that "Dance is an international art form". a statement with which few would disagree. It sounds very magisterial and suggests that an impartial and disinterested view is being taken of the repertory decisions being made by the RB's artistic director but it does not take the discussion very far. Kate,I will accept your assessment of the artistic taste and all encompassing knowledge and expertise of the artistic director of the company resident at Covent Garden and ask a number of direct questions.

1) In commissioning local choreographers is the company's artistic management merely supporting the superficial and the second rate? 

2) Do the currently favoured choreographers  commissioned by the company produce a sufficiently consistent number of interesting and outstanding works to justify continued support?

3) Should the company spend more on existing works which have been successful elsewhere to enlarge the local audience's experience of the developments and repertory which has been created in the last  forty years? For example would it have been better if the company had acquired a couple of Ratmansky's best works rather than commissioning a new work from him?

4) Are the artistic team at Covent Garden too "in awe" of the choreographer as a creative artist to exercise sufficient quality  control over what is being created and staged for them?

Please understand my intention in focusing on the RB was not intended to suggest that no one else is commissioning new works or that what they are producing is not of interest. I concentrated on the RB because of the money that it has available to it and the enhanced artistic profile it may be thought to confer on those who make works for it. I did not intend this discussion to be one about parochialism versus the international but one about quality versus mediocrity. I hope that this makes things a bit clearer. If still in doubt read the last few comments posted on the thread about what is happening in the US.

A few days ago we were asked whether the audience liked the works of McGregor , wheeldon and Scarlett. I think that  it would be presumptuous to answer that question as if I was speaking for anyone except myself and before I set about answering that question I think that I need to acknowledge that it raises the question of what sort of new works we should expect to see on the Covent Garden stage ?

I doubt that anyone would argue with the statement that ballet is an international art form but what does that mean in practice? Does that mean that the artistic management of a company like the Royal Ballet which was established as a creative company and not a dance museum should abandon its support of local choreographers in favour of pursuit of  the latest fashionable international choreographer? If it should support the work of local choreographers or at least those with a connection with the company and the school at what point should it abandon its support of the individual? Should the artistic director take greater care with his commissions and exercise more oversight of what he his paying for ? Is it always better to commission new works from established choreographers, when you run the risk of acquiring a dud, rather than acquiring works which have been deemed successful ?

I think that before management starts filling in the extensive gaps in the London audience's experience of late twentieth century choreography it needs to give careful consideration to what the balance of its repertory should be between the nineteenth century classics and the many masterpieces in its twentieth century repertory most of which have been subjected to appalling neglect in favour of the regular revival of a very limited number of MacMillan dramballets. Once it has got that balance right it can begin to think about new commissions and acquisitions. I think that we need to remember that the RB has a corporate habit of swimming against the fashionable artistic tide. It acquired nineteenth century ballets in its earliest years and its choreographers made narrative works when no one else was doing so and the fashion was for abstract ballets. I think that the point is that what the company was doing at that time was in pursuit of a well considered artistic policy of acquiring and performing the very best of the old and creating theatrically effective new works. It was not an exercise in throwing money at a project and hoping that it would achieve some sort of artistic effect which is often what it feels like now. 

  I will answer the initial question after I have seen the second cast of Symphonic Dances. I should like to think that some others will say whether they think that by commissioning and supporting local choreographers the company is merely supporting the superficial,  the second rate, colleagues and former colleagues or whether it is doing something more beneficial for the art form as a whole.   

Assoluta,

When I used the word " conspiracy" I did so colloquially rather than as a legal term as to write about  "purposeful  marginalisation " by the establishment suggests that a large number of people have been engaged in this activity over the years. I will repeat what I said before  "If Inglesby's obscurity was the result of deliberate action then it would at least suggest that somebody cared about the history of British ballet sufficiently to want to influence the collective memory on the subject". Unfortunately I think that she is the victim of laziness and a general indifference to history and ballet history in particular.

If Ismene Brown felt so strongly about the lack of recognition of Inglesby and her achievements why has not she written a book about her or a book about the pioneering work undertaken in this country after Diaghilev's death to establish ballet as a serious art form with local roots? Why is it that we are so dependent on American scholarship to tell us about our ballet history? After all the recently published book about ballet in this country during the war and the recent biography of Markova were both written by Americans,

If the establishment were as actively engaged in burying Inglesby's memory as some would like to suggest then I would have thought that by now we would have seen a biography of Dame Ninette who, far from being some batty Irish woman, had the most impeccable establishment credentials as the daughter of an Anglo Irish career officer in the British army and thus part of the Irish Ascendancy. While there are at least three books which de Valois  penned about herself; a study written by Sorley-Walker; a study of a ballet she created for the Ballet Club and some information about her in a study of the Irish diaspora's influence on theatre there is nothing comparable to the biographies of Ashton and MacMillan. If the establishment, or the ballet establishment were so keen on deliberately maintaining Inglesby's obscurity I should have expected far more activity to have been undertaken to ensure that all the information about an establishment figure like de Valois was somewhat more readily available in book form than is actually the case. It would be a tome as not only is there her ballet career dancing and creating companies there is all the experimental theatre work which she undertook in her early years working in her cousin's theatre in Cambridge and staging Yeat's plays in Dublin to his complete satisfaction.

The fact that no such biography exists and that a biography of Constant Lambert has only recently appeared suggests to me, at least, that indifference and lack of funds are the real barrier to us knowing more about Inglesby. Here are the names of some other people who were significant in the development of ballet in this country and who have not had the benefit of biographies  Andre Howard. Walter Gore, Frank Staff all of whom were important choreographers.There is a very old biography of Cranko but nothing more recent and then there are the designers.Has anyone written anything about the designers Sophie Fedorovitch and William Chappell or about Osbert Lancaster as a stage designer?