FLOSS

I seem to recall that ticket sales for Coppelia were quite slow at first. Tickets for the performances to be given by the few dancers with whose names non ballet goers were familiar sold quite well. Ticket sales for other casts only really picked up after the reviews came out. The main problem with Coppelia was the Christmas ballet goers' lack of familiarity with a ballet which had also been out of the active repertory for far too long.In the case of Coppleia the absence from the Covent Garden stage was the best part of two decades. The Royal Ballet on that occasion seemed to operate in the complacent belief that its reputation would sell tickets and that there was no need to take active steps to market a work which had become unfamiliar through long term neglect. They were lucky with ticket sales for Coppelia. It remains to be seen whether they will be equally lucky with ticket sales for Cinderella after the reviews are published..

So here are the current problems with this revival. The first is the place of the founder choreographer's works  in the company's repertory. Ashton's Cinderella,a ballet whose revival was long overdue, has slipped from the active repertory and the general audience's collective memory.It has become part of the company's vast holding of major works which have become unfamiliar through neglect. A great number of Ashton's ballets fall into this category. People understandably tend to be hesitant about buying tickets for unfamiliar, neglected  works no doubt working on the basis that there must be good reason for such neglect.It does not help the Ashton cause that so few of his works are programmed in any season and unlike MacMillan there is not a single one of Ashton's works which has a guaranteed place in the regular turnover of repertory. By my calculation you have to be at least  fifty years of age to be in any way familiar with the full range of his output.

Then there are the effects of Covid. Most arts venues rely on a regular audience to keep them afloat financially, They are experiencing difficulty in attracting audiences back.I am not sure that it is fear that is the problem here. I think that the root of the problem is the fact that the regular audience has got out of the habit of going to the theatre. Those in charge at the Wigmore Hall are working on the basis that it will take at  least two years to rebuild their audience. I don't think that the Royal Opera House is immune from the loss of an habitual audience.Indeed it seems that the organisation is determined to make matters worse with massive price hikes for both opera and ballet performances. Thus making the theatre increasingly inaccessible to those on modest incomes . The opera company's problems are largely of its own making. I am not sure that the same is true of the ballet company.  I don't think it was a mistake to programme Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the same season but I think there are too many performances allocated to Cinderella and we could have done with an Ashton  mixed bill along the lines of the one we enjoyed last season. In my opinion the more Ashton the company dances the better.

It is very sad that a ballet that was once a staple of the company's repertory should be absent from the stage for so long. Perhaps it is me  but I find it a little unsettling that the powers that be at the Royal Ballet, or perhaps it is the marketing department, seem to feel the need to present this revival in the context of a significant anniversary. The fact that it is seventy five years since Ashton's  Cinderella was first performed is no indication of its inherent qualities. It does not make it a better or a worse ballet but it does suggest an element of concern that the work needs special pleading and cannot hope to succeed on its own merits. In the days before Dowell introduced, the Nutcracker tradition to the Royal Ballet Cinderella was the company's Christmas ballet and it wasn't unusual to see it, and, or Sleeping Beauty, programmed over Christmas and the New Year.

As far as Ashton's  classicism is concerned  Ratmansky identified him as "an heir of the old Russian tradition" in an interview he gave at the time he was working on his reconstruction of Sleeping Beauty and had been studying the Harvard manuscripts and the Stepanov  notation. Ratmansky went on to describe  Ashton "as may be the closest of all " (to Petipa) pointing out that he had been inspired by Pavlova  and had studied with former imperial dancers.

As I have said elsewhere, after the war Ashton decided that the company needed to move away from the sort of expressionist works that Helpmann created and appeared in and establish its credentials as a classical ballet company. In an interview which I think he gave in the mid 1940's Ashton said in defence of the classical tradition which the interviewer suggested was old fashioned and irrelevant-

" All ballets which are not based on the classical ballet and do not create new dancing patterns and steps within its idiom are, as it were, only tributaries of the main stream."

 After creating Symphonic Variations which according to Anita Young was created from identifiable elements from Cecchetti 's daily classes, Ashton created two works which display his understanding of Petipa's classical vocabulary; its idiom and demonstrates its continued  potential as a source of inspiration and creativity. In Scenes de Ballet he gives Petipa  a decidedly modern twist while with Cinderella he takes Prokofiev's recently composed score and creates a nineteenth century ballet with it. The ballroom scene includes allusions to the Swan Lake which Nicolai Sergeyev had staged for the company, As far as performing  Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the same season is concerned the two ballets used to feed off each other in performance. 

This revival is being staged against a social and financial background over which the Royal Ballet has little control but the theatre's administrative arm seem to have gone out of its way to make matters worse. The marketing effort has been pathetic. It is difficult to believe that no one noticed the lack of sales in the lower part of the house at a much earlier stage. I can't help thinking that the real problem in Bow Street is that the Chief Executive is a money man  whose skills lay in raising money for the Tate rather than someone with hands on experience of running a theatre or arranging concerts and other forms of entertainment for a paying public where it is essential for success to understand the audience's interests and tastes. It is noticeable that Sir David Webster who was in charge of the theatre from 1946  to 1970 had experience of running a department store and arranging concerts for a paying public before he arrived at the Garden. I believe that all of Webster's successors until Alex Beard's appointment had practical experience in theatrical and other forms of entertainment. Mr Beard's predecessors would have recognised the truth of Garrick's lines that "Those  who live to please must please to live."

Sadly Mr Beard seems to be of a different opinion. He seems to believe  that the paying public must conform to his ideas of how to run the organisation and how to communicate with his potential audience. Being of the opinion that communication with potential audience members should be by electronic means he has failed to exploit the marketing opportunities which the new extension to the building provides.

A company generally takes years to establish itself and even longer to achieve recognition as a world class arts organisation. Each season brings the opportunity for the company management to renew its reputation and standing and the danger that it may lose it if it makes too many poor decisions. Up until the closure of the theatre for redevelopment it was possible to say of both resident companies and the opera house administration that although they made some pretty spectacular missteps on occasions all three groups  seemed to understand the need to keep audiences happy; not to treat them as an awkward but necessary inconvenience and at the very least not to treat  audiences as if their only significant role was as a ready and unquestioning source of income,

The current regime seems indifferent of not oblivious to the danger of alienating its loyal audience members by its take it or l eave it attitude to complaints about the provision of poor essential service such as the website and the ever increasing feeling that Mr Beard and his immediate circle as technocrats are indifferent to the alienating effect that their sweating of the assets has on its regular audience.

I sincerely hope that the company does not take a massive financial hit with this revival and that if it does Mr Beard recognises that most of the fault lies with those parts of the organisation for which he is responsible. The last thing the ballet company needs is to be subject to greater control over its choice of repertory which is already far too narrow in its range for the continued creative and artistic health of the company. The last thing that we need is for the administration to get the idea that "Ashton does not sell " firmly lodged in its collective corporate consciousness.

 I can't help thinking that it is a mistake to judge the quality, effectiveness and the aural acceptability of a score written for use in the theatre  solely on the basis of whether it appeals to you on first hearing if you encounter it out of its intended theatrical context. The composer of a ballet score expects the audience to encounter his music in the theatre where they will experience it in the context of stage designs; the choreographer's response to the score and the dancers'  interpretation of the music and dance text. I think that ballet scores can really only be fully appreciated and judged in performance in their intended theatrical context. The score of Cinderella is particularly difficult to appreciate in its first eleven or twelve minutes without some idea of what sort of stage action the music accompanies as deprived of its theatrical and narrative context it can seem full of unconnected apparently random bars of music.

The first two and a half minutes of the score are an overture in which we meet several themes we will encounter later in the ballet. The first few bars, it seems to me, are an expression of Cinderella's profound melancholy a theme we hear repeated several times in the first scene. Much of the ten minutes of music following the overture are used to introduce and establish the character of the step sisters, their quarrelsome nature; their selfishness; their relationship with each other and and their relationship with Cinderella and her father  all of which is depicted in short sections  of stage action.

I can't help thinking that if the opening bars of the overture had appeared towards the end of the score of a serious ballet that included a death or two in the third act scarcely anyone would object to the dissonances those bars contain. It seems to me that it is the fact that these opening bars are unexpected and somewhat startling in a ballet score devoted to a fairy tale which lies at the root of the difficulties which some seem to have with the music for this ballet.Perhaps it is a problem for anyone whose ideas about what is appropriate to ballet music have been formed by early and regular exposure to ballets like Don Q and Nutcracker. What we have to remember us that by the early 1940's Prokofiev had extensive experience of working for the theatre and would have been fully aware of the ballet audience's musical expectations and equally aware that that audience would be over represented among the commissars who sat in judgement on his artistic endeavours and those of his fellow composers.

The score he produced is an unapologetic mid twentieth century score written by a twentieth century composer who had experience of writing music for opera and ballet as well as for the concert hall and cinema. In other words he knew how to create theatrically effective scores.Of course the music for Cinderella is not the sort of undemanding, tuneful score you might have expected to be churned out by one of the nineteenth century musicians employed as ballet composers in  St Petersburg such as Minkus or Pugni and their ilk and we should be eternally grateful that the score is as far removed from a schmaltzy Disney film score as it is possible to be. It is a score by a twentieth century master musician which self-consciously observes many of the conventions of nineteenth century ballet dressed in a twentieth century sound world which he uses to depict the ballet's characters; their emotional states and the stage action. In order to judge the score you really have to experience it in the theatre.

Of all the ballet versions if Cinderella I have seen,and I have seen quite a few, I still think that Ashton's version of the ballet is the most imaginative and theatrically effective of the lot. Ashton embraces and uses the music's quirkiness to create character. Where others  hold back he is not afraid to use the big tunes and luxuriate in Prokofiev's waltz music. Prokofiev was a dab hand at writing really memorable waltzes. In fact it often seems to me that one of the problems for Royal Ballet alumni who set out to make their own version of Cinderella  is that they spend a great deal of time and energy avoiding the big  tunes in order to avoid comparisons with Ashton.  Ashton's Cinderella is a work in which the choreographer uses the composer's  homage to the past as a way of justifying his return to Petipa style classicism. The score enabled him to harness the past in order to build a firm artistic foundation for the company in which expressionism would  play little part.

Persevere with the score. Each stage of the narrative is accompanied by music which is appropriate for the action depicted and the characters who are involved in it. The Jester's quirky character is depicted in equally quirky music. One of the musical highlights of the score has to be at the end of the second act as the clock strikes midnight.At this point the tone switches from happiness to nightmarish and menacing as Cinderella tries to escape before her clothes turn back into rags but finds all escape routes are barred.

I have no idea whether i shall like the new production. The last one Ellis-Somes staged was marred by some pretty garish costume designs and some coarse and unfunny stage business for the step sisters which no one staging a provincial pantomime would have found acceptable.That being said I am looking forward to seeing Ashton's choreography restored to the Covent Garden stage. I hope that this time round the Jester's costume and make up encourage the dancers cast in the role to create a character rather than play him as a soviet style leg machine.None of the roles in this ballet are merely about technique. I am certainly looking forward to seeing the version of the Summer solo which Vyvyan Lorrayne danced again.

The only commercially available recording of the ballet in a stage performance, as opposed to a recording of the ballet adapted for television, was filmed in the late 1960's.Its age should not put you off buying the DVD as the entire cast led by Sibley and Dowell dance the choreography idiomatically. At this point Alexander Grant was still able to do justice to his created role of the Jester and if Ashton and Helpmann are a little past their prime that is forgivable in the circumstances. 

Prokofiev learned a great deal about writing scores for full length ballets from working on the score for Romeo and Juliet. The score for Romeo  and Juliet was devised for what turned out to be the greatest of the Soviet dramballets. Cinderella on the other hand owes a great deal to the conventions  of the nineteenth century ballet repertory. Its libretto follows the model provided by those ballets. Prokofiev produced a score which is very  aware of the debt to the formality of the late nineteenth century tradition. This is a theme which Ashton picks up and uses in his choreography. Even  with the Step sisters usually performed as travsti roles, part of a long standing theatrical tradition rather than British pantomime, it is a ballet about dance and has classical dance at its centre.

Ashton gives us  his take on classical dance vocabulary's ability to express emotional states as in Cinderella's first act solo with the broom; create and express character as evidenced by his choreography for the Jester and the sisters. Above all he displays his profound knowledge of classical vocabulary and empathy with the classical tradition as demonstrated in his use of Petipa's vocabulary and style in his own choreography. In this ballet Ashton displays the technical skill and creative imagination which led Karsavina to say of him that he was blood of Petipa's blood and bone of his bone. The choreography for the Season Fairies is brilliantly inventive  as is the first act choreography for the twelve strong corps de ballet, but for me the high point of the ballet is the act two ballroom pas de deux for Cinderella and her Prince which if it were the only piece of classical choreography in the entire ballet would be worth the price of admission.

Following Prokofiev''s musical cues Ashton gives his dancers and audiences a twentieth century take on the nineteenth century classical tradition. I find the slightly acidic dissonances in the score totally appropriate to the story and its characters. In fact I think that the score for Cinderella is just as theatrically effective as that for Romeo and Juliet and far more structurally sure of itself. Fortunately for us all the score was written at a time when Prokofiev had relative artistic freedom.

I can't help noting that Ashton  produced Scenes de Ballet and Cinderella. at a point in his career he was actively engaged in an artistic crusade to  ensure that classically based dance rather than Helpmann style expressionism was established as the basis for the company's future creative activity. We have to remember that the world of ballet in the twenties and thirties was one in which choreographers were expected to use new music fpr their ballets as a matter of course. Although Lambert was on hand to provide advice on all things musical and would have objected to music  which he considered third rate Ashton was his own man. He had been exposed to quite a bit of new music whether by attending performance by the Ballets Russes or while he worked for the Ida Rubinstein company. According to his own account he chose the Stravinsky score for Scenes after hearing it on the radio. I am nor sure how he became aware of the Cinderella score but as it was  written and had its premiere at a time when we were allies with the USSR it is probable that a lot of people in the West knew about it. Elvin who by 1948 was a member of the company would certainly have known about it.

It seems very apt to me that Ashton should use scores by Stravinsky and Prokofiev for what could be described as his "manifesto" ballets in which he had set out to establish the continued value of the classical tradition in dance . What better way to do it than to set nineteenth century classically based dance steps to scores by two composers who had once been the enfants terrible of the world of music.

Cinderella is a muc

Marian Smith the author of Opera and Ballet in the Age of Giselle says that if you follow the account of the mime for Giselle as recorded by Henri Justament the French words which he has written down are a perfect fit with Adam's music as recorded in the violin reduction of the score that was used for the first St Petersburg production of the ballet.We miss a great deal in modern productions of Giselle which only ever contain the edited highlights version of the dialogue; changing the characters of both Giselle and Bathilde by reducing Giselle to weak docility and making Bathilde an unpleasant class conscious aristo thus depriving both of something approaching their original characters and dialogue. Again if Ratmansky is to be  believed, the Hilarion we see today is not the man we were originally intended to see on stage. The argument in favour of the character transplants caused by cutting the mime is that audiences today are really only interested in the dancing ignoring the fact that choreography includes all the movement which the choreographer set to the score which means it includes the mime as well as dance.  

It is a great pity that Ratmansky is not keen to release recordings of his productions of the Petipa ballets because he regards his productions as work in progress rather than the finished product. The fact is that having had the good fortune to see his stagings of Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and La Bayadere in which he persuaded  his dancers to adopt an historically informed performance style I encountered the extraordinary musicality of Petipa's choreography which transformed Beauty into a ballet of enchantment and charm. Performances in which the score is not distorted in order to accommodate the dancers' desire to display their modern technique has an extraordinary impact on the audience's experience of these works. It seems to me that it is the willingness of conductors, coaches and directors to distort the music to accommodate high extensions and other aspects of the"improvements in technique" of which we hear so much, which  goes a long way to explain why these ballets so often seem dull in performance.  A large part of the problem quite simply is that the display of technique approach to these works often shifts the emphasis away from those elements of the work which Petipa intended to be thehighlights of individual acts and the culmination  of the work as a whole. Modern aesthetics and performance practice has done great aesthetic damage to these works. Ratmansky's Beauty is cut but with greater sensitively to the effect the cuts will have on the narrative than the current RB production. In the Prologue Ratmandky's Catalabutte's has sections of mime which indicate the joy with which Aurora's birth is greeted rather than the choreographic equivalent of polyfilla  and the miss-timings we see at Covent Garden. It ends with a tableau in which the king forbids the presence of spindles and other sharp objects in his kingdom which makes his response to the knitting women in act one appear far less arbitrary than in the RB version of the ballet.

More modern works, or at least works created within living memory also suffer from coarsening, aesthetic indifference and  downright sloppiness on the part of stagers and coaches. As far as the Widow Simone is concerned if a dancer does not care enough about the choreography's relationship with the music to dance accurately then perhaps he should not be cast as the widow. If they really cared those responsible for coaching and staging the ballet should deal with a sloppy dancer by replacing him. Sadly I think that sloppy performances of Simone and interpretations of Alain which today often suggest that he has special needs is symptomatic of a  lack of respect for the company's founder choreohrapher, his repertory and the characters he created with his choreography. Osbert Lancaster's designs for Alain's costumes make it clear that  Alain's social awkwardness is a mixture of self-conscious gawky adolescence and being forced to wear ill fitting clothes. When Alexander Grant danced the role he made it clear that Ashton had created a character rather than a caricature  it was clear that Alain's physical ungainliness was caused by his failure to adjust to a recent growth spurt which was emphasised by a jacket which he could barely fasten across his chest with  arms that were far too short for him. In other words in Alain  Ashton had created the portrait of a socially awkward gawky adolescent while in Widow Simone he presented us with a tough peasant woman torn between her love of money and her love for her daughter. The fact that a masterpiece full of humanity has been reduced and to caricature and coarsened by sloppy performances and broad comedy reveals a want of taste  and aesthetic sensitivity and a lack of respect for the Ashton repertory and its musicality which is best evidenced by a lack of interest in getting ballets like Fille and Pigeons looking right in performance by beginning with casting these ballets with musically sensitive dancers who have the stage personalities appropriate for their allocated roles .

Any regular opera goer knows that Rhinegold is a through composed one act opera with no obvious break point.It seems to me that part of the problem at the Coliseum is that in its desperation to be audience friendly, welcoming and non elitist ENO's management decided to allow audience members to take drinks into the auditorium where they can slurp their drinks and rattle their ice cubes to their heart's content. ENO's management decision in itself shows that it is less concerned about the quality of the audience's musical experience than its bar receipts. I think that audiences pick up on where a company's priorities lie and that in itself influences behaviour in the auditorium.

Once an opera company makes it clear that its bar receipts are much more important than the quality of the musical experience which its audiences have at its performances; that the sort of annoyingly intrusive sounds which ice cubes generate are an acceptable accompaniment to the  efforts of orchestra and singers then it is difficult to see how anyone can expect restrained and considerate behaviour in the auditorium as there is no longer any obvious distinction between auditorium and bar area. Audience members particularly those who have not been adequately socialised in the etiquette of theatre going will easily come to the conclusion that as far as behaviour is concerned anything goes at the Coli.

I have no doubt that a large part of the problem is that people no longer automatically become educated in the conventions of theatre going at an early age  through annual trips to the theatre at or around Christmas. with parents or grand parents. Trips to the cinema which are a more universal formative experience today are no substitute for the early and prolonged experience of live theatrical performances in inculcating the etiquette of theatre going. Then there must be an increasing number of people who have little of no experience of being entertained in a space shared with strangers where one cannot expect to exercise the freedom of behaviour one may exercise at home.

Of course ENO could seek to inform its audiences of the form of conduct to which it expects its audiences to adhere but if it does so it will inevitably be open to a charge of seeking to impose elite forms of conduct and behaviour on its audiences. Perhaps the answer is to write about the problems with late comers, drinks and the ushers to both the company and Opera magazine explaining that what you have experienced at the Coliu is putting yo off buying tickets for other opera  performances this season.

As far as SFB is concerned I am not sure that I would take Rojo's ten years at ENB as much of an indication of the direction in which she might wish to take her new company. ENB has its own traditions and corporate culture and because it spends a great deal of its time touring outside London it finds itself wedded to a limited repertory of ballets that sell tickets outside London. It uses its London seasons to recoup its losses and build up funds. In such circumstances  would hesitate to suggest that what she has been programming for ENB is any indicator of what she would want to programme for SFB. I would not describe her as a dancer whose tastes and style were greatly influenced by her time at the Royal Ballet and her exposure to its repertory created by its own in-house choreographers apart, perhaps, from her experience of performing the MacMillan dram ballets. She may well relish the idea of being able to programme a wider range of the Balanchine and Robbin's repertory than she encountered during her performing career.

I don't think that the problem with the Royal Ballet's current production of Sleeping Beauty lies with the text being danced or the sets and costumes, although I would argue that the ballet would look much better in theatrical terms if the designs owed considerably more to Oliver Messel and a lot less to the insipid efforts of Peter Farmer which are  wishy washy in comparison with the Messel originals. Where Messel's set designs for act 3 evoked the grandeur of the baroque and made architectural sense  Farmer's vague indications of structure seem to give up the struggle and fail to establish a sense of structure,splendour and stability. But then Messel had the good sense to allude to theatre designs by the great seventeenth century theatre designers such as Tortelli and the Bibiena dynasty when he set out to create the palace of King Florestan XIV. I know that we are not going  to get a new Bibiena inspired backcloth but perhaps we could lose Farmer's anemic Pearl and Dean inspired front cloth.

I don't think that criticism of the fairy variations for their lack of variety and contrast is undeserved. It certainly does not amount to "ripping" into the company.Indeed the one thing you could argue is that what was missing on the first night was any real sense of individual character or qualities among the prologue fairies and an Aurora and Prince who while they were perfect exponents of their choreography were unable to offer the artistic interest and interpretative excitement which dancers like Sibley, Park, Penney, Wall, Dowell and Jeffries brought to the roles they danced in this ballet. Nunez and Muntagirov ought to be able to give us much more than technical perfection. Perhaps O'Sullivam and McRae managed better on the second night. I hesitate to throw Fonteyn's interpretation  into this as I never saw her in the theatre and only know of her qualities in the role from recordings of sections of the ballet 

I think that any problem there may be with this revival  lies with a failure to recognise that the roles in this ballet whether Prologue fairies or the divertisements of the third act call for more than  drilling which dwells on the accurate reproduction of a role's choreography. They require coaching which emphasises musicality, interpretative skills and artistry which  reveals rthe range, variety and individuality of these roles.In other words something more than gym mistress style drilling and the ability to get the requisite number of dancers stage ready is required if the company is to avoid dull uniformity in the prologue fairies and elsewhere. This means that those involved in preparing these roles have to bring to rehearsals knowledge of the historical context in which the ballet was created and the clear understanding that the ballet was never  intended as a simple star vehicle for a foreign guest dancer and that the plethora of soloist roles it contains were intended to be a show case to display the  artistry and contrasting talents of the Imperial company's own dancers, This means that even today  it  is not enough simply to get the show on stage with everyone knowing their roles in time.

I seem to recall an ENB revival of Beauty a few tears ago that had the benefit of two former Royal Ballet dancers as coaches. David Wall and Alfreda Thorogood  who had the ballet in their blood and possessed the artistic imagination and the cultural  and historical sensitivity and understanding of the work hey were reviving whuch enabled them to give the dancers they were coaching the sense of stylistic and artistic uniformity which enabled them  to make ENB's dancers look more entitled to lay claim to the work than the Royal Ballet's own dancers did at the time. Pehaps it is this which some have found lacking in this revival. A satisfying revival of this ballet requires much more than a technically impressive Aurora and Prince which is why it is regarded a touchstone by which to assess the depth of talent and the artistic health of a company.

A ballet going acquaintance of mine once pointed out to someone who was complaining about seeing junior dancers in senior soloist roles that they needed to remember that the technical standards of the company's dancers and their quality was such that most would be at least one rank  higher in any other ballet company. I would add that if those standards are to be maintained young dancers need to be given opportunities while they are young, enthusiastic, fearless and ready to learn.There is nothing worse than seeing dancers left until any ambition they may have had has atrophied while the technical challenges which major roles present have grown in their minds to such an extent that they have become all but insurmountable. Fonteyn certainly thought this was the case and said so in interview.

The trick for management is to judge the right time and place for such experiments in casting, The performances close to Christmas tend to be those chosen for such experiments as it is often a time when the more junior.Principals are left holding the fort. As to the non-appearance of the company's female First Soloists Calvert, Choe, Hamilton, Hinkis and Mendizabel, Calvert, Choe and Hinkis were cast as the SPF while Hamilton has been appearing in the Arabian dance. Kevin is clearly using this run of Nutcracker performances to try out some of the younger dancers by casting them in roles above their pay grade. From what I have seen this approach has paid off. It will be interesting to see if he applies the same casting policy to the important supporting roles in  Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

I was at the performance at which Dias and Richardson made their official debuts as the SPF  and her Prince. At the same performance Boswell made an unscheduled appearance as Hans Peter. I was very impressed by Boswell's efforts to create a character rather than merely dancing the choreography. H.e did the same thing in the role of Drosselmeyer's assistant.I thought that his characterisation was stronger than his partnering which occasionally seemed to succeed more by luck than design. I certainly look forward to seeing him in other roles.

There was a great deal to like about the performances which Dias and Richardson gave.They always seemed fully aware of the presence of their partner on stage.Unfortunately there was a major mishap towards the very end of the first section of the pasde deux. Suddenly Dias seemed to be far too off centre for Richardson to be able to control her movement unobtrusively. It was as if Richardson had momentarily stopped concentrating on what was happening in front of him. While he managed io avert total disaster, he did manage to retrieve the situation, but he was forced to make a very obvious and obtrusive intervention which could never have been mistaken for part of the choreography. Both dancers recovered and delivered their solos with confidence. Much as I like seeing young dancers given opportunities I am not sure that it always makes sense to require two inexperienced dancers to make a joint debut in a pas which is so technically demanding for the woman. The pas may seem short to the audience but the ballerina's choreography is strength sapping and it would have been better if Dias had been given a more experienced nd attentive partner for her official debut. An experienced partnaer would almost certainly have avoided the need for intervention by preventing things from  going wrong or at least intervening at such an early stage that few would have noticed the problem and the audience would have been spared such a jarring and obvious intervention to avert disaster. I look forward tp seeing how their careers develop. I shall be very surprised if Dias does not turn up as a season fairy in Cinderella and Richardson is not cast as one of the Prince's friends.

The Killar book is a new publication. It looks as if Amazon miscalculated about the sort of demand there would be for the book Amazon.had it in stock very recently.Although there are several books in German about Cranko and the Stuttgart company as far as I know the only other book in English on Cranko is one written many years ago by John Percival. Understandably it assumed knowledge which contemporaries would have had while being unable to provide a critical assessment pf the man and his work. The Killar bool remedies those gaps. If you get the the ISBN  reference for it you could order the Killar book from the publisher or from a local bookshop.

Leanne Benjamin gave up the exposed tutu roles of the Tchaikovsky ballets in the latter stages of her career concentrating on Giselle and a handful of MacMillan roles which are part of the company's core repertory while devoting a great deal of her energies to new works and by doing that and with the assistance of her years in Germany and being somewhat vague about her age managed to continue her career ubtil she was nearly fifty.

As far as Morera is concerned, i think that throughout her career she has suffered from her versatility and range which has resulted in management not knowing quite what to do with her because, unlike other dancers who were her contemporaries or near contemporaries she straddles categories rather than fitting neatly into one predominant type. Now while I would agree that Morera is more of a demi-character dancer than a purely classical one that should not have prevented her at least being given the opportunity to show audiences what she could do with Odette/Odile and Aurora. I am sure that we would have got far more out of her Aurora than we did from Ansanelli's account of the role. The point here is that great demi-character dancers are shape shifters who can present themselves as convincingly in roles devised for specialists in  noble roles  as they can portray less exalted characters normally allocated to the demi and character dancer.I always enjoyed her SPF, a role in which there is no hiding place and I seem to recall Mr Crisp praising her account of it. I think that there is something admirable about a dancer who is game enough to tackle roles in her forties which she should have been dancing many years before. She was already in her forties when she first danced Swanhilda, and in my opinion she gave an exemplary account of the role perhaps only matched by Hayward in the expressive range she brought to the role including the sense of genuine fun she brought to her performance as opposed to the arch comedy of some of her colleagues.

Hayward is an interesting case. Again I think that she is essentially a demi- character dancer rather than a purely classical one and I don't think that she has been as well served by management as she might have hoped to be. I found her debut as Giselle interesting. Her  second act was much better than her first act largely because she had not really got her mad scene quite right. Her performances last season were far more convincing because the two acts were far more evenly balanced. As far as Swan Lake is concerned it seemed to me that she ran out of steam long before the final act. I believe that she has admitted that the ballet was far more tiring than she had bargained for, Having said that Hayward has extraordinary gifts as an interpreter of Ashton ballets covering a wide range of roles created on dancers as varied and technically accomplished as Nerina, Sibley and Colier. Like Morera she seems to have an innate understanding and feel for  Ashton's musicality and real interpretative imagination. With Cinderellla she will be tackling a role with combines warmth, humour, pathos and choreography, Fonteyn's account of the role makes it clear that it is capable of being considerably more than an exercise in pure classroom classicism. Hayward should be in her element dancing choreography which can be used as an expression of Cinderella's character and emotional state. There are a number of other  roles created on  Fonteyn that I should like to see Hayward perform.At the top of my list are Ondina and Chloe closely followed by Woman in a Ballgown and the forlorn Jiulia in A Wedding Bouquet. Personally I would not feel that upset if Hayward never danced Swan Lake again as long as she is permitted to dance the Ashton ballets which are hers for the asking. 

As far as missing recordings of Cinderella are concerned I seem to recall that the ballet was broadcast in about 1978 with  a cast headed by Collier and Dowell, That recording was never released on video or DVD. As far as the performance with Cojocaru is concerned  I would hazard a guess that the reason that that performance was not released on DVD  had something to do with the performances of Sleep and Dowell as the step- sisters. Their performances were difficult enough to take in the theatre because they were so coarse and lacking in nuance.

I hope to be proved wrong and find that with this revival of Cinderella Nunez will finally find the interpretive imagination and range which Ashton's choreography for the lead character demands. We have to remember that this ballet was not simply a tribute to Petipa it was an important element in Ashton's  campaign to eliminate the expressionist style dance works which Helpmann favoured from the company's repertory and place works using classical vocabulary and classically based themes at the centre of the company's artistic identity. The problem is that while the leading role does not call for acting skills it does need a dancer with a lively interpretative imagination who will reveal the full potential of the choreography, However in order to achieve that you need dancers who are willing to take artistic risks and dance on the edge rather than playing safe all the time.. The portrait of each of the main characters who appear in the ballet is contained in their choreography and its relationship to the music ro which it is set and it is up to the interpreter to .reveal this to the audience.

My problem is that I tend to find Nunez for all her technical perfection, or perhaps because of it,dull and lacking in interpretive and artistic interest. Having said that you can be pretty certain that she will have the best supporting cast on stage with her which is why I shall probably book to see her. I thought Lamb was too serious for Lise but I thought she was good in Cinderella even when dancing with a partner who proved more than a little wayward at points when attentive partnering was required. As far as the rest of the casts are concerned are concerned the title role can be danced quite successfully as a close relative of Aurora so Kaneko and Naghdi are likely to acquit themselves well but I am looking for more than that. If I could only see one cast I would choose that headed by Morera but Hayward has also proved to be a fine Ashton dancer in a range of roles created at different stages of the choreographer's career on dancers of contrasting types and styles. Osipova of course is something of a dark horse but you can be sure she will be different. I hope that Cinderella sells well, as I always suspect that there are those in management who are forever looking for excuses to stage even less Ashton than is usually permitted.

If it had been me I would have been tempted to allocate six of the performances allocated to Cinderella to an all Ashtom mixed bill based on last year's offering  of Scenes and Rhapsody with  a revival of the complete Apparitions replacing Month. As to the casting for such a revival I think that Hayward alternating with Morera as the Woman in a Ballgown and Bracewell and Ball alternating as the Poet would do very nicely.

There is nothing to say that the likes of O'Sullivan, Magri and Dias are not going to be in the rehearsal studio as covers for the title role and you need to remember that there are other ballerina roles in the ballet.These roles include the four Season Fairies and the role of the Fairy Godmother each of which demands dancers of the highest calibre.so they make their mark in the scenes in which they appear.  In the Sibley Dowell recording from the late 1960's the Season Fairies were danced by Penney, Lorrayne, Jenner  and Bergsma with Parkinson as the Fairy Godmother. In an earlier recording made for American television  these roles were taken by dancers of the calibre of Nerina, Park and Beriosova. As far as I am concerned if it is a choice between Morera, a fine Ashton dancer, finally being given a chance to dance Cinderella or a younger dancer being given a first stab at the role I know where my preference lies.

As far as James Hay is concerned I imagine we will see him again as the Jester one of the many roles  Ashton made on Alexander Grant. It is a much more interesting and varied role than that of the Prince. I also expect to see Yudes appear as the Jester in this run.I just hope that Ellis-Somes demands that those who dance the role give the audience more than mere leg machine. I can't see why we could not be told who will dance the Jester at each performance. It might help some of us decide which performances we should book to see,

Some may have had the frustration of visiting the Ashton Foundation website recently, trying to access the recordings of the events held on Les Rendezvous and Les Patineurs, only to find that they are denied access to them because the recordings are described as private. I am pleased to say that the Foundation is now aware of this problem and is taking action to make the recordings available. I have also been told that the recording of the event held on Daphnis and Chloe will be made available within a couple of weeks,

One thing you have to remember about every Ashton ballet even the earliest ones is that they are far more difficult to dance than they seem. Even in his early days with Rambert, the Camargo Society and Ballet Club he was working with outstanding interpretative artists and the occasional bravura technician such as Harold Turner and that in Markova he had a dancer who combined great technical skill with artistry. In addition Ashton's works were created working in an aesthetic world in which all the effort put into performing a ballet's choreography must never be seen on stage.

Fille may appear to be a charming unchallenging work but that is because the dancers who appear in it make it seem so. It is full of technical challenges particularly for those undertaking the roles of Colas and Lise which were made on the company's leading technicians of the time.When it was new  concerns were expressed about who would be able to dance Fille when the original cast retired. In fact the role that has proved most difficult to cast has been that of Alain which was created on Alexander Grant who was one of the greatest character dancers I have ever seen. I would think that the only Ashton work which an amateur company might be able to tackle would be Capriol Suite. I think that you need to bear in mind when thinking about staging ballets which were made nearly a century ago is that if they are still in copyright, and many are, the right's owner will want to protect the choreographer's reputation by ensuring that only companies who are up to the challenges which a work presents actually dance it.

I don't think that the current opera posters would get anyone who knew nothing about opera to buy a ticket for either Salome or Auda. The main problem is that neither production is set in  the place or time in which the composer and the librettist set their creation with the result that any poster using photographs of the productions or art work based on the productions'  designs will tell the viewer next to nothing about the work in question and is most unlikely to generate any curiosity about the piece let alone the desire to buy tickets. Neither production provides much in the way of opportunities to create arresting images that might persuade someone to do battle  with the Opera House's website  if it is in a bad mood. It does not help that while the designs for Salome date from a time when it was fashionable to allude to foreign cinema and owe a great deal to  Passolini's  film 120 days of Sodom, the new Aida continues Carsen's commentary on the US. The new production sets much of the action of Aida in a large hall which might be the Hall of the People of some totalitarian regime. The monotony is broken  by setting another scene in  a dining hall where we watch a table being laid and a tea trolley wheeled on to some of the ballet music. 

As far as the ballet is concerned I stumbled across a poster for Mayerling on Pimlici station about a week ago and while I was pleased to see that the powers that be had finally relented of their ban on posters the advertisement was not exactly prominently placed and the image selected was hardly arresting. Rather than being displayed in a part of the station where it will be seen by a large number of passengers it was displayed right at the end of the platform where it will only be seen by the driver and those in the first carriage of the train. Obviously a great deal of thought had gone into the whole problem of publicising what the ROH is doing. Perhaps we should be grateful that someone somewhere in the organisation  has finally realised that it is not enough simply to talk to the people who already know that you exist  and what you do if you really want ro sell tickets in the numbers they need to shift. It would be progress if they have finally come to realise that it is not enough simply to say " We are the Royal Opera House" and expect that statement to be enough to sell tickets.

Out of curiosity which company danced the combination of ballets you refer to Alison? My recollection  is that the main company used to pride itself on not staging an opener when they programmed  Fille and Giselle giving the impression that they thought that the demand for a curtain raiser was something of a provincial eccentricity. When the touring company came to Bow Street they maintained their normal programming practices staging an opener along with the main course ballet. The Royal Opera House performance database records a single performance of the pas de six at a gala in 1965. A friend told me recently that the pas de six was listed for performance for such a short period of time that she was unable to catch a performance of it. Having seen a performance of the pas in its theatrical context when the MIchaelovsky brought its reconstruction of the Soviet era Laurencia to the Coliseum the pas itself does seem to be a rather tired reworking of the usual Spanish style choreographic motifs.

One thing I forgot to say about Nureyev was that his interest in dance did not stop with classical ballet. He had an insatiable appetite for  and  curiosity about dance in all its forms and he had the good fortune to live and work at a time when some of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century were still actively engaged in making new works. Perhaps one of his greatest gifts was the ability to recognise when he had made a mistake. It may not have happened that often but it did happen certainly as far as Fille is concerned. I believe that Ashton approached him him about dancing Colas soon after he began working with the company only to be asked what the character did in the second act. When he heard he did a little partnering but spent most of the act in hiding Nureyev refused the role. Some years later Nureyev approached Ashton expressing an interest in dancing Colas to which Asgton's response was along the lines of "You do know you have little t do in the second acr?" And yes, Nureyev did dance in Fille.

What a missed opportunity that introductory film proved to be. Instead of getting Monica or say Dowell or Eagling whose career trajectory was  transformed by Nureyev's presence in London to talk about his impact on dancers, audiences and ballet itself as an art form we got an exercise in self indulgence by Mr Fiennes who confessed to knowing nothing about ballet, at least until he made his film about the young Nureyev. As far as the choice of  repertory for this event is concerned I think that the whole thing would have benefited from the subtitle "Nureyev in London" or possibly "Nureyev at the Royal Ballet" because that is what we in fact were shown, with one exception, during the evening.

That exception was the Prince's solo from The Sleeping Beauty and it is not an example of Nureyev at his best as a choreographer. He made it to the music which Ashton used for the "awakening pas de deux" and which the Mariinsky perform in their version of the ballet with the curtains closed. Nureyev;s solo shows him at his most fidgety, fussy and unmusical. It is a classic example of Nureyev stuffing as many steps into the music as he can and more than the music can sustain. It is not a pretty sight and you have to be a superb artist at the top of your technical and artistic form to make it work aesthetically. Muntagirov would probably have got away with it. I think I understand why it was chosen but I think it was a bad choice.

The rest if the first half included two relatively safe choices, excerpts from works little known to contemporary audiences and so unlikely to be severely criticised in performance as the audience has little to compare them with. Gayane and the pas de six from Laurencia fall into this category, the pas de deux fron Flower Festival is more familiar and the Shades scene, even more so.

Nureyev staged a stunningly beautiful Kingdom of the Shades for the Royal Ballet fielding a corps of thirty two dancers which held the stage between 1963 and 1985 before it was replaced by Markarova's staging of the full work. The problem with the pas de deux from the Kingdom of the Shades is that it does not really work torn from its context. The slightly hypnotic effect of the descent of the corps de ballet down the ramp is intended to establish that what we are seeing is Solor's opium based vision of his beloved Nikiya and heightens the impact of the pas de deux which follows. Without that theatrical framing device it does not amount to much. Parish got the epaulement right but his Nikiya was efficient  rather than affecting.

Gayane was originally  a serous ballet concerned with the conflict between love and patriotism set in Armenia. Bits of  the ballet can be found on a BBC studio recording, The excerpt which we saw with its continuous references to pseudo -ethnically based folk dance suggests it is a jolly romp involving jolly happy peasants. The Laurencia pas de six should work reasonably well removed from ts original theatrical context as it is a diverisement. Sadly it does not work that well out of context as a free standing piece. Perhaps the problem is not so much under rehearsal as the fact that the choreography is not that distinguished and cod Spanishness smoldering which  seem to appeal so much to Russian audiences does not travel that well. Nureyev's staging for the Royal Ballet's was only seen in 1965 after which it disappeared.. The presence of Corrales and Osipova did not manage to generate the heat that Chabukiani's choreography requires.Once you remove the smoldering and the Plessitskaya style leaps it is all rather uninspired and dull. The irony is that the best danced piece in the first half was The Flower Festival pas de deux. A charming piece staged by Erik Bruhn in a style which Nureyrv tried to master and never succeeded in dancing idiomatically.

The second half opened with the grand pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty which I found a dull exercise in technique rather than a celebratory experience.The Giselle pas de deux with Hayward and Bracewell managed to create  a sense of atmosphere, purpose and a sense of emotional attachment between the characters. Neuemeier has always seemed to me to be a Marmite choreographer whom you either get and admire or leaves you cold. I am afraid that my rare encounters with his choreography have not impressed me over much. The dancers in the excerpt from Don Juan are both extraordinary artists but I remain unconvinced as to the choreographer's genius. The Corsaire pas de deux in its unreformed gala format worked well enough. Corrales astounded with his technical skill and Naghdi did not disappoint on the technical front. What was missing throughout the evening was the presence of a strong stage personality and theatrical presence combined with a sense of intense artistic endeavour and stylistic awareness which Nureyev at his best brought to his performances. Like everyone Nureyev was a bundle of contradictions embodying an unending contest between  the showman and the artist but he was always a compelling stage presence even at a time when the stage had abandoned him and he should have retired from dancing.

The Three Ivans would not be that difficult to stage. It was danced by the Royal Ballet for years and it was filmed at least twice..It evenly. made its way into de Valois' 1976 staging of Sleeping Beauty at least in its initial season. There must be quite a lot of former dancers scattered across the globe who know the choreography.The problem is that it means you lose the coda to the grande pas de deux. There is also Nijinska's version of Violente's solo from the Prologue it is the version which Nijinska herself danced and which De Valois also danced for Diaghilev.She used that version in her 1978 staging of the ballet and it is seen in the 1978 recording danced by Laura Connor.

As everyone seems to be concerned by the lack of works by female choreographers perhaps Kevin should bite the bullet and look at the company's back catalogue. Of course that would mean he would have to stage some pf de Valois' ballets as well.My choice would be The Prospect Before Us which BRB revived most successfully about twenty years ago plus Howard's La Fete Etrange which was ill- served by a dimly lit revival during Mason's directorship. I recognise it raises the awkward question of why there is nothing later than a work created in the 1940's? But perhaps it should be asked. For the avoidance of doubt I don't think that Cathy Marston is the answer to that question. The Cellist was, for me, an idea that did not really work in performance. I don't like dance works which are full of padding and fail to use the corps intelligently.

I, for one, would not be unhappy if I never saw the Makarova production of La Bayadere again. As to what might be seen as culturally insensitive in a ballet which is essentially Giselle transposed to the banks of the Ganges with the Bathilde figure transformed into a jealous murderess I suspect that the problem in Bow Street is the blacked up dancers who appear as the fakirs in the first act. At least the Royal Ballet does not don't have to explain away the Manu dance or the drum dancers who in their current Russian incarnation look more like a cabaret turn than something devised by Petipa or his assistants. The real problem it seems to me  is that La Bayadere is clearly a nineteenth century orientalist ballet. In the Markarova version with its revised narrative it is reduced to an orientalist nonsense and its heavily adapted and modernised choreography means  it cannot lay claim to the protection sometimes afforded to authentic nineteenth  century theatrical works of art .

As staged by Ratmansky using the Stepanov materials La Bayadere is far more coherent; does not make Nikiya's death scene compete with high octane dancing provided by Solor and Gamzatti and its version of the Kingdom of the Shades is not staged as a super smooth production number. Instead  that scene suggests that we are seeing Nikiya's image being refracted by raindrops which I believe is what the scene was intended to convey to the audience. But however interesting and culturally sensitive a staging of this ballet may be and the Berlin staging seemed very sensitive to me the fact remains that the depiction of some of the characters in La Bayadere causes difficulties as some, such as the aya and the fakirs, seem  to verge on caricature. I would happily settle for a fine staging of the Kingdom of the Shades with thirty two shades as an acceptable substitute whether it is Nureyev's version of the scene or that staged by Ratmansky in Berlin. It is this scene which is the choreographic masterpiece and needs to be seen not the orientalist hokum which surrounds it.

If we lost La Bayadere and Don Q. which was ineptly staged and does not suit the company we might be able to make a stronger case that we should see more of the company's twentieth century repertory and in particular see Ashton's longer works on a more regular basis.All the time recent versions of La Bayadere and Don Q. are protected by the label of "nineteenth century classic" and are not recognised as recent adaptations of old works they will be treated as being of greater cultural value than works created by the company's founder choreographer.

I suspect that it's worse than that as the questions will almost certainly have been devised to give the organisation the answer it wants and has already prepared for. They know that they do not make mistakes and they already know that their new opera audience wants new productions and that it does not want to see old productions. Now how or why a newcomer to opera is going to be more concerned about seeing old productions than about seeing a wider range of repertory each season is quite beyond me but I feel pretty certain that the survey will simply endorse their current pricing  policies and their repertory decis.

Perhaps the ROH should stop talking about staging "world class opera" and actually stage some? As far as I am concerned the description "international opera house" means a theatre which, season after season, stages revivable productions and consistently gives opera performances of the highest musical and dramatic quality; demands all singers turn up for rehearsals and finds and makes its own stars. It does not  mean an opera house which stages gimmicky productions ; employs foreign singers regardless of their quality including those who take comprimario roles and occasionally hires  a couple of big names who are not necessarily required to turn up for rehearsals and are notorious for either failing to turn up at all or pull out half way through the rum. Given Kauffman's record of not turning up and apparently demanding a new production as part of the price of his appearances in Bow Street I would question whether it is worth hiring him at all. He is not in the same class as Alva,Aragall, Bergonzi, Bonelli,Carreeras, Collins, Craig, Domingo, Gedda, Kraus or Vickers to name but a few.Finding a few directors who can actually be bothered to read the libretto and see themselves as the servants of the librettist and composer who wrote the piece they are have been hired to stage rather than treating composer and librettist as the servants of the director, might help.

I can't help thinking that both de Valois and Ashton would be appalled by the way in which the resident company's twentieth century repertory, especially the Diaghilev ballets,  is being treated by the management of both Royal Ballet companies. Sadly neither Kevin, nor it seems Acosta,appear to have much of a sense of ballet history and choreographic genealogy or much interest in the history and traditions of the companies they now run. Acosta's apparent lack of empathy or interest in BRB's performance tradition and its core repertory is more understandable than Kevin's attitude towards his company's repertory and performance traditions.  BRB's history and its repertory are not part of Acosta's formative experience as a dancer or his international career as a performer. It may be true that he appeared in both Ashton's Fille and Rhapsody with the Royal Ballet but that does not make him an Ashton specialist or enthusiast. He may well have been encouraged to lay out a radical policy for change when he applied for the job  in Birmingham and gained the impression that as director  he was being encouraged to jettison the past and take the company in a more accessible and popular direction as far as its repertory was concerned with more Cuban style offerings like  Don Q and less Royal Ballet style repertory. Sadly I am not that keen on the new direction or the ballets he has chosen to stage so far. Perhaps Acosta's very recent change of direction in programming which has been noted by others has been prompted by a drop in box office takings.

Kevin's attitude to old repertory is much more difficult to understand because while BRB did not share all of its repertory with the resident company there was a considerable  repertory overlap between the two companies during his time dancing with SWRB/ BRB. It is as if Kevin sees the bulk of his company's twentieth century repertory not as a valuable resource for dancers and would-be choreographers but as a barrier to further creativity. After Mason's energetic attempts to restore an impressive range of older repertory to the stage Kevin has presided over a marked narrowing of the twentieth century repertory which he is prepared to stage. The problem is that with one or two notable exceptions he seems convinced that the bulk of the company's twentieth century works should be kept in the archives and only staged when it cannot be avoided. He seems incapable of seeing these ballets as a valuable resource for his dancers and any young choreographer who may be  lurking within the ranks of the company in terms of artistry, effective theatrical structure. images and choreographic ideas that might be  stolen. rearranged and repurposed. Although Tudor's works are not really part of the company's performing tradition  he clearly had a profound effect on MacMillan's work and if Rambert,his first company,is unable or unwilling to stage his works in a way which adequately reflects the theatrical power of his work a strong case can be made for the Royal Ballet to take the most important of them on as they open up even more creative possibilities.We should be able to see the work of a major choreographer who set out to put on stage in balletic form emotions and feelings which cannot be expressed adequately, if at all,in words.

Perhaps it was the result of the time and place in which first de Valois and then Ashton became involved in the world of ballet and their consciousness of the patchy nature of the history of the development of ballet in this countrye and their recognition of the lack of a solid artistic tradition which fired their interest in the history of the development of the art form. There again it could simply be that as active choreographers both were fully aware of the incremental nature of the development of both ballet technique and repertory and the way in which the choreographers of the past influence the present and add to a choreographer's vocabulary and the range of expression available to the creative artist through allusion and conscious rule breaking. De Valois created a ballet, The Prospect Before Us, in which a number of eighteenth century ballet stars appear as characters while Ashton used identifiable elements of period dance technique and style to establish the contrasting characters of the two step sisters in Cinderella. As Alexander Grant said Ashton did not create new steps but he chose the right steps for his characters which explains why the timid sister  essentially has a dance vocabulary which would have been instantly recognisable to a dancer of the very early nineteenth century while the dominant sister attempts to emulate the style of the late nineteenth c Italian ballerina. Perhaps the real explanation for Kevin's apparent indifference to the past can be explained by the fact that he is working in a dance world in which the place of classical ballet in this country seems far more secure than it did in the pioneering days of the 1920's and 1930's when the founder of the Royal Ballet and its founder choreographer first came into contact with the great Russian nineteenth century ballets, Kevin takes the past for granted in a way the pioneers of British ballet never felt able to do.

I would counsel caution. As far as the work by Nijinska is concerned excerpts from Les Bisches seem unlikely while a bleeding chunk from Les Noces is all but impossible. I suppose it might be a reference to the solo for the Beau Gosse from Le Train Bleu which was originally danced by Anton Dolin. It is a piece of genuine Nijinska choreography which Dolin taught to at least one young dancer whose name escapes me at present. Muntagirov made the solo look so good that you rather wished you could see the entire ballet. Sadly as danced by the Paris Opera Ballet many years ago it does not add up to much,largely I suspect,  because the four leading roles are essentially demi-character ones which call for the dancers concerned to inhabit their roles rather than performing them in quotation marks.The other possibility I suppose is Nijinska's Bolero which has, it is claimed, been  reconstructed. I saw it staged. The best I can say about it is that bits of it looked a bit like Nijimska's work. The bulk I thought unconvincing. Perhaps someone has unearthed another work, after all Nijinska worked in the USA for many years and there might be someone left who could stage something really interesting. As far as Spectre de la Rose is concerned I am still waiting ro see a convincing performance of it. As for Lifar those who have seen a great deal of his work seem to think that Suite en Blanc is the only worthwhile piece he created. If  we are lucky it might be an excerpt from that work. If we are unlucky it might be something far more self indulgent such as an excerpt from Icare or his version of L'Apres Midi d' un Faune.

I think that we have to recognise that not every dancer who emerges from the school is going to want to join the main company  and not every dancer however well equipped they may be technically is going to be seen as having a natural place in the company by management. There has always been a struggle for dominance between technical display and elegance and ease of movement. As an art form originating in the royal courts of Europe it should surprise no one that for much of its history elegance and ease have been mote highly valued than bravura displays of technique and that remains largely true of the aesthetic embedded in the Royal Ballet's core repertory and would be even more the case if Ashton's ballets were restored to a key position in the company's core repertory. However the tension between technical prowess generally displayed by demi-character dancers and the courtly ease and elegance of the noble who take the princely roles remains a potent source of inspiration and perhaps this will always be the case.

The Royal Ballet does not really have a repertory which enables dancers to indulge in displays of dancing. what it needs and looks for on the whole when recruiting new dancers is a dancer with interpretative intelligence who dances expressively and will fit into a company of "dance actors" which is how Kevin describes his company. Of course when a dancer enters the company or the apprenticeship scheme there is no way of knowing with absolute certainty how they will develop as they gain in stage experience and come to artistic maturity. Recruitment to the company depends on the existence of vacancies and with no fixed retirement age succession planning is difficult. In some seasons no one retires, or too few do so to enable every dancer whom management would like to recruit to join the company. In the years before the Aud Jebsen scheme was established a lack of vacancies meant that graduates went elsewhere for a season or two on graduation only to try to join the company in later years. 

At one time, beginning in the late seventies the main company was the last place that anyone with any ambition would have wanted to go unless they were already outstanding and could be sure they would be noticed or had an active advocate in de Valois or someone senior in the company heirarchy and could be pretty sure that they would be given the opportunity to dance and develop. Each year dancers full of enthusiasm appeared on the main stage at the Royal Ballet School performance were given contracts with the resident company and that was the last you really saw of them for years. Then after years of apparent neglect they were given a debut in Swan Lake by which time their love of dance and any hint of personality had been worn away by the years toiling in the ranks while the size of the artistic challenge that the ballet represented got bigger and bigger and by the time they danced their  first Odette/Odile it had become an all but insurmountable challenge. A fact that Fonteyn spoke about in a TV interview towards the end of her life in which she said that she had been lucky to have danced these major classical roles so early in her career when there was no pressure on her ro succeed and she knew she would be given further performances which would enable her ro learn from her mistakes and develop her interpretation and master roles..

In those days the Touring Company was a much better choice for most dancers since its size meant that every dancer would be given opportunities to dance and develop and when it came to leading roles there were no make or break debuts. Instead there were debuts well away from the national press followed by a series of further performances in the role each week during the tour which might be the best part of thirteen weeks. David Wall once commented that after some weeks of being overawed by the dancers who were now his colleagues when he first joined the resident company

he realised that he had in fact far more experience of dancing Seigfried than most of his fellow male principals had. While Kevin has a far more flexible approach to what junior dancers are permitted to dance I think that the Linbury could be used far more imaginatively for the development of the company's .dancers.

I recognise this is a thread devoted to the recent RBS main stage performance and here is my contribution. When the school stage Raymonda Act III it is a sign that the school has a good collection of classical dancers in the graduating year and there were no disappointments. I think it was absolutely clear why the dancer who we saw as Jean de Brienne is off to ABT rather than joining the resident company. He will be far more at home there than in Bow Street. Yondering is a lovely ballet for dance students since it tests interpretative skills rather than bravura technical prowess.

For me the most interesting segment was the revival of Ashton's waltz for Swan Lake. I am not sure that the first year students were really up to it. It looked too soft as if it was a piece of choreography which Ashton had created for romantic ballet rather than a classical one. The gap between the soft first year bodies and the senior soloists and young talents who used to be seen in it  was just a bit too big for me. It is a wonderful piece of choreography and in its original position  it was the first bit of serious classical choreography that you saw in the company's pre-Dowell production of the ballet. It was wonderful to see it on a bare stage since it gave the opportunity to savour Ashton's skill in creating Petipa style patterns and choreography with a personal twist. For me it is on a par with his choreography for the stars in Cinderella and for the corps in Scenes de Ballet. While I accept that first year students will not look like well tuned classical dancers I don't understand all the alterations made to the choreography. I understand  the need in the absence of a prince for one of the six men to dance the prince's choreography when he dances with the women but not why there was an unnecessary alteration to the floor plan of the waltz. Why did the stagers alter it did they think it was an error of taste to break the harmony or that the notation was wrong?  There is a filmed record of the ballet in performance which shows that as originally performed the solo created for Dowell was deliberately designed to breaks the harmony of the clockwise movement of the body of the corps, The dancer, in a lovely little solo which includes the " floor polishing" steps which de Valois taught in class,  breaks free and by moving from left to right disrupts the harmony which the audience is becoming accustomed to and for a matter of seconds should be able ro dominate the stage by his disruptive behaviour and the quality pf his movement. I really missed the sheer theatricality of that brilliantly judged disruption or what Dowell once described as an Ashton "moment of madness".

 I think that the simple, if somewhat glib, answer to this question is "Not that much". For many years Ashton's home company has relied on a very narrow core repertory of Giselle,Sleeping Beauty,Swan Lake, La Bayadere and Nutcracker as its core classic repertory,with the addition of three twentieth century creations by MacMillan, Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling. These three successful dram-ballets plus four of de Valois' classics and Markarova's staging pf La Bauadere are seen regularly as they are regarded as safe audience pleasing works which are guaranteed to cover  the cost of their revival. The strange thing is that not a single Ashton full length work, not even Fille,features on this list of essential works which what a company's core repertory represents. Of course Kevin will say the right things about the company's founder choreographer when the circumstances demand it ; he will make his dancers available to the Ashton Foundation when  they are needed but he seems unable or unwilling to give Ashton's ballets the stage time they merit.

At first sight the 2022-23 season seems to suggest something of a sea change has taken place. Cinderella is to be revived after twelve year's of neglect, it was last seen in 2011, and there are to be twenty eight performances of it. Much as I like Cinderella and welcome its revival,  I can't help thinking that twenty performances would have been a more sensible number and that the remaining eight performance slots would have been put to better use by being allocated to an all Ashton programme devoted to his one act works. And in truth there are any number of possibilities for an all Ashton programme ranging from one built around the work of the Ashton Foundation, to a repeat of the most recent Ashton mixed bill but with Apparitions replacing Month, to a revival of Fille. Another possibility would be a programme which showcased his early works which contain  roles created for Markova  Facade,Les Rendezvous, Foyer de Danse and possibly Les Masques. Such a programme would be welcome although it might require the addition of a further ballet to give it a bit more weight. Again Apparitions would be an ideal make wight as it is the  ballet which marks the point at which the company's leadership began to develop a new leading dancer to replace Markova who had left the Vic-Wells to set up her own company..Apparitions was created at the point at which a replacement ballerina had to be found or created and it was the ballet which announced the arrival of Fonteyn as a potential ballerina. There again if you were looking for an all Fonteyn themed programme and early pre-war Fonteyn, at that, then a programme of Apparitions, Les Patineurs and A Wedding Bouquet would fit the bill as each contains a Fonteyn role. Of course the two Ashton works I would most like to see at present are Daphnis and Chloe and Ondine as the company currently has in Hayward a dancer born to take over the Fonteyn roles in both ballets and make them her own by making those ballets live again.   

The breadth of the Ashton repertory provides all sorts of possibilities for the company even if it may be a bit of a headache to a marketing department trying to package him for an audience who may well not have heard of any of the works the company proposes reviving,is inherently suspicious of one act works in general and even more doubtful about rarely performed ones. I am not convinced that audiences who feel increasingly strapped for cash are likely to be prepared to invest the sort of sums now required for an evening at the ballet sitting  in the Amphitheatre.My solution would be to restore the old pre- pricing reform price structure which had been in place since 1946 in which there was a clear differential between the the price of seats in the lower parts of the house and those in the Amphitheatre. If necessary I would revert to Mason's policy of charging less for mixed bills than for full length works. I would also end the practice of offering tickets for McGregpr's full length works at prices lower than those charged for   other full length works.

Kevin must be aware of Ashton's ballets' potential to develop technical skills and artistry in his dancers; the pleasure his works bring to audiences and the rich resources they provide for choreographers at any point in their choreographic careers in terms of guidance in structure, the development of ideas, choreographic  expressiveness and eloquence and perhaps the most useful of resources the striking image and the use of allusion for comic and serious effect.I can't help thinking that Kevin really should seriously consider showcasing his more junior dancers in an annual programme of works selected from the pre-war Ashton repertory. Works from this period such as Les Rendezvous may not have been created as training material but they have been used very successfully for that purpose in the past . However these ballets can only really have a positive impact on the company if those works have been fully restored to the active repertory and the bulk of the company have an innate understanding of how they should be presented in performance. It is a question of total mastery of Ashton's choreographic style and the ability to reproduce it idiomatically and imaginatively rather than with dull mechanical accuracy . Such programming  would ensure that everyone becomes familiar with the Ashton style and has it in their bodies. It might help create a real understanding of the company's aesthetic which is at variance with the "display of dance" performance style which everyone is exposed to today, if only on the internet. Inculcating the company aesthetic and style which treats technique as a means to an end rather than an end in itself and places a premium on musicality, expressiveness, interpretative imagination and individual characterisation even in the lowliest soloist roles would benefit the MacMillan repertory as much as it would the Ashton repertory as well as performances of both Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.We might even be able to return to a performance style based on an  innate understanding  of an individual choreographer's personal style or styles; the release of interpretative imagination and skill; placing a premium on the possession of a complete and apparent easy mastery of choreography emphasising that it is artistic and expressive dancing which is required rather than displays of dance or astounding displays of technique.I was disappointed to learn that McRae was disappointed by his performance in the recent revival of Rhapsody because I thought it so much better than his earlier outings in the ballet in which he seemed  at every turm to emphasise the role's difficulties rather than its potential beauties.

I confess that I am saddened by the thought that the company's sudden enthusiasm for Cinderella may have considerably more to do with generating income and filling gaps in the schedule caused by new opera productions being abandoned, than renewed interest in Ashton or this particular work. It certainly is not evidence that the company has suddenly realised the error of its ways and is now committed to a new scheduling policy which would see the full range of Ashton's works form part of the regular churn of the company's repertory with major works guaranteed regular  revivals as part of the company's essential core repertory.

I think that the real question about Ashton in 2022 is "Apart from Sarasota does Ashton have any part to play in the arts today.?" I say this because while at the time of his death in 1988, Ashton's place in the hierarchy of twentieth century choreographers seemed quite secure his standing today is much diminished. In 1988 he was described in the Radio Times as "one of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century" but by 2017 those who write the programme descriptions  for the same publication had demoted him to a "hugely influential choreographer in the early years of the last century" which might strike many as more than a little dismissive of a choreographer whose active career spanned the best part of sixty years and whose work was admired on both sides of the Atlantic. I think that Ashton's loss of reputation is the result of a combination of factors. First unlike MacMillan Ashton had no obvious single active advocate for the revival of his works. He had seven beneficiaries most of whom were dancers or former dancers who  felt able to stage the works they had inherited  and saw no need to think beyond their own lifetime as far as custodianship and transmission of their legacies was concerned. Second,Somes' abrupt departure from the company where hw had acted as the custodian and transmitter of the Ashton repertory and style meant that the Ashton repertory suddenly lacked a knowledgeable and accomplished  custodian and stager who knew  and understood the Ashton style and its development over the years, from the inside as a dancer and was committed to maintaining it. Ashton's loss of artistic stature is closely connected to this rupture in the chain of transmission and the change in performance style which began to take place soon after his death.This change I think  reflects the generational change which occurred when four of the most important and influential choreographers working in the western tradition of classical ballet died in little over a decade. Their works and aesthetics had dominated the anglophone world of classical dance  from the death of Diaghilev until the early 1990's. With the deaths of Balanchine in 1983,Tudor in 1987, Ashton in 1988 and MacMillan in 1993 the dominance  of the choreographer's eye and aesthetic taste over performance style came to an abrupt end. As far as the Royal Ballet was concerned this meant the increasing erosion of the company's unique performance style in the classics as well as in works created by Ashton. There was less interest in following Ashton's rules of emploi and less care taken with casting the right dancers in specific roles with the result that revivals of Ashton ballets were not always as effective as they would have been with a more sensitive approach to casting.In addition the absence of a successor choreographer of comparable international status and aesthetic influence capable of dominating the dance world in the way that this earlier generation had done combined with the arrival of Sylvie Guillem and the  increased access to recordings of Soviet style displays of dance led to the dissolution of the old aesthetic world and its replacement by one increasingly dominated by dancers' artistic taste, which given their comparative youth is not necessarily a good thing. Difficulties at the school did not help. By the year 2000 Clement Crisp was saying that the company had lost all sense of the differences in style between the choreographers whose works they danced. 

I recognise the difficulties the Ashton repertory presents for the marketing department.His works are far too wide ranging and varied to be easily pigeon-holed and packaged in a way that makes life easy for them. Many would think that the fact that he was capable of working in so many moods and styles would be a compelling reason to ensure that the bulk of his ballets were in the company's active repertory so that every surviving work and those capable of restoration are part of a consistent revival schedule.

 Sadly at present the ballets of the Royal Ballet's founder choreographer are not deemed worthy of regular programming in the way that MacMillan's works are, They are set apart from the company's core repertory by being labelled "heritage works". The description does not seem designed to  stimulate interest in the works to which it is applied. Its use does not seem to me to be intended to generate a burning desire to see the works to which it is applied, rather it seems to suggest that the works in question are old fashioned period pieces without any relevance or interest to today's audiences or dancers.. I think it is telling that in contrast to Ashton's current standing with the company MacMillan's viable dram ballets have escaped the "heritage" label as have works by Balanchine and Robbins. The fact that Ashton's ballets and the company's Diaghilev repertory bear the label "heritage works" while MacMillan's dram ballets and other ballets of similar vintage are simply repertory suggests that management regards those parts of its twentieth century repertory created by Diaghilev's choreographers and its founder choreographer are irrelevant to tday's company and its development.

"Heritage work" might be translated today as "Not required on the voyage". The meaning of "heritage" seems to have shifted none too subtly over the years. When applied to repertory today it seems to mean an inessential part of the company's repertory which is at best of limited local interest and  is staged from time to time because of the part it played in the development of the company and its dancers but for Ashton "heritage" was much more important.  It was not a label but a statement about choreographic blood lines, inheritance and influences. For him it was essential that dancers should be historically and stylistically aware of the tradition in which they worked. As he said when he spoke about the artistic coup of persuading Nijinska to stage "Les Noces" for the company it was important for dancers to know who influenced who. MacMillam's attitude to this idea of "heritage" was equally positive as was made clear in an address which Sir Peter Wright gave to the RAD. He made some interesting points about MacMillan's time as director the most important of which for the purposes of this discussion are the following excerpts. "Kenneth wanted to extend the dancers' powers of expression by embracing different styles but without destroying what had been developed by Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois."........." The RB organisation has a unique heritage created by many great artists which he (KM) always insisted must never be overlooked as this is where the strength  of the two companies lay" ......"He (KM) kept a good balance between the Diaghilev heritage, the classics and new work. In other words MacMillan as an active choreographer who today is often presented as the rebel prophet of a new challenging repertory based on realistic subjects saw the need to keep the past alive through performances which ensured that the chain of transmission was kept in robust good health by regular revivals which would ensure that the company would remain fully familiar with works like Les Noces by dancing in them at regular intervals.

The sad reality today if you take the programming policy of Ashton's home company as evidence of his importance to it and the world of the arts in general he does not seem to rate that highly. If his home company does not support him by giving his works regular programming slots in its seasonal schedule say by listing one of his full length ballets each season and at least one all Ashton mixed bill and the occasional Ashton and his contemporaries programme  then it is hardly surprising if he does not seem ro 

loom that large with companies abroad in terms of their active repertories. I know that people have given details here of companies abroad which have some of  his ballets in their repertory but I can't help wondering how many of the companies cited acquired those works at the time of the Ashton centenary and just how many can be said to retain them in their active repertory? 

Now of course the Royal Ballet does not entirely neglect the work of its founder choreographer but he continues to play second fiddle to MacMillan in terms of scheduled performances and sadly it always seems to be the same narrow selection of ballets that come back time after time and while I understand the reason why Symphonic Variations comes back with some regularity the institutional enthusiasm for some of the other perennials such as Marguerite and Armand and Voices of Spring is puzzling.

Marguerite and Armand is a star vehicle which needs stars to make it "go" .I still find it difficult to believe that Marguerite and Armand is the most regularly performed of the works inherited by Ashton's nephew and almost certainly the most widely performed of all Ashton's works. It is even stranger that Fille long ago ceased to be a regular feature in the company's annual programming. Sadly no one  who has appeared in Voices of Spring in recent seasons seems to understand that it is a witty response to  the Soviet gala display piece rather than an effortful, earnest attempt to emulate such a piece. As  performed by its original cast it was an effortless,. elegant, knowing, tongue in cheek, light as air entertainment. It seems that many of those who have appeared in it of late lack any real understanding of Ashton's intention, his style or that they require considerably more technical skill than the bare minimum required to get through it. It was not created to be performed with grim determination but with charm, wit and total mastery of the choreography. I miss the sense of ease,playfulness and fun which its original cast brought to performances of it.

I think that the neglect of the Ashton repertory while serious in itself is a symptom of  much deeper problems than it at first appears. The real problem it seems to me is the wilful neglect of the the full range of the company's twentieth century repertory and a failure to understand, perhaps because no one in a position of influence in the company is a choreographer working in the classical tradition, the potential for creative interaction that exists between today's choreographers and those of the past. I am sure that this potential was a factor in the company's acquisition of its Diaghilev repertory and that the first four directors all of whom were choreographers were fully aware of this.  Both Ashton and MacMillan after all  had found Petipa a very potent source of inspiration in their own works as did Balanchine. There is no reason to suppose that the innovations,  ideas about the function of choreography and imagery devised by some of Diaghilev's choreographers would not prove an equally potent source of inspiration to the current crop of dance-makers if they were able to experience then in performance. It is as if the current management in its enthusiasm for creating a new repertory has decided that with the exception of MacMillan's income generating ballets and the occasional Ashton and Balanchine revival the twentieth century is of no relevance to the company's future.

 I am far from convinced that consigning major works by Fokine, Nijnska, Massine as well as MacMillan's classically based works and Ashton's surviving pre-war ballets to the scrap heap and treating them as if they are largely irrelevant to today's audiences and dancers will in itself encourage the creation of effective ,revivable  new dance works. The policy obviously frees up stage time but treating older works  as if they are incapable of providing inspiration or useful models for the current generation of dance makers.and are essentially unworthy to share the stage with the twenty first century works which the company has commissioned and staged seems a great mistake to me. Of course new choreography needs to be encouraged but I don't feel inclined to abandon major works like Ashton's Daphnis and Chloe or Nijinska's Les Biches or Les Noces in order to give more time and space to the creation of works like The Wind, Raven Girl, Strapless, Untouchable or Medusa which in all honesty should have been killed off in the early stages of their development and never made it to the stage.

As far as the twentieth century  repertory is concerned a change of descriptive label might help. De Valois was astute enough to see that if her newly acquired nineteenth century ballets were to perform the task which she intended for them they had to be seen as having played an integral and unquestionable part in the development of ballet as an art form and that they had the potential to inspire further creativity.Those works had to be understood to be the best of their kind and of universal importance to the world of dance and its future development.The descriptison " classic " captures the sense of a work being of lasting value and one of the best of its kind . The term "heritage work"  which to Ashton suggested a sense of living tradition and the opportunity to see the effect of  inter-generational choreographic influence has been debased and has come to mean a work which is only of limited local interest and  only needs the occasional airing since it is irrelevant to future choreographic development. This attitude is all the more perplexing at a time when the MacMillan repertory which the company has for so long relied on to give it its unique artistic identity is no longer unique to it. It seems that Kevin either has not noticed that Lady M has begun adapting her husband's popular dram ballets to suit the resources of smaller companies or thought about the impact that this is likely to have on the company he runs. Perhaps he thinks that new works by Wheeldon and McGregor can provide a solution but each new work is a gamble with no guarantee of success or that the company will retain sole  rights over their performance for any length of time.

The company has a twentieth century repertory which is unique in its breadth and depth and it is strange that Kevin is unable to see the extraordinary opportunities which that repertory and above all the Ashton repertory offers it. While the director may see the founders as a source of amusing anecdotes  to a director working in an organisation which has been teetering on the edge of of becoming an arts bureaucracy for years it can be difficult to see the founders,their works and the works of their contemporaries as anything other than a bar to future creativity and a source of frustration because they are conscious at some level, although they can't admit it, that the new works which they have commissioned are not of the same quality, It is easier, it would seem, to bury the past than to compete with it..This is where I think Kevin finds himself now. It must be frustrating to know that it is unlikely that anything which you commission will be judged to be as as good as something which Ashton produced on an off day. I think this can lead to a mindset in which management can convince itself that enthusiasm for old repertory a harmless eccentricity largely confined to an increasingly older audience and among the young simply an eccentric obsession  which they may grow out of when exposed to "masterpieces" like "Raven Girl".

 If you only started ballet going in the last twenty years you  have been denied access to a wide range of magnificent twentieth century repertory and in the case of those which have been staged they have often been revived with less than ideal casts; big names who sell tickets rather than suitable dancers who will make the strongest case for those works in performance. The low points have been many and varied and I shall cite a few by way of example. Howard's La Fete Etrange where it was not just the "accident with the back cloth which was a problem but the casts chosen  to appear in it. Neither cast was ideal but a single cast composed of the most suitable dancers from the two  would  have made a much stronger case for the survival of the work. We are unlikely to see anyone attempt to re-stage the only surviving work by a prolific and much admired female choreographer, Then there was the company's 2012 revival of Les Sylphides indifferently performed by a cast who failed to establish the ballet's mood or its greatness

If next season's programming is anything to go by there is plenty of room in the schedule to stage a far wider range of works than at present. The company's repertory has become set in stone and more significantly apart from MacMillan's dram ballets and the Balanchine ballets in the company's repertory the bulk of its twentieth century repertory is treated as optional inessential works which only deserve or require the occasional revival.

I was going to say that the company's programming policy has become atrophied but talking about a programming policy suggests that some thought is given to what to stage each year but given the number of things that seem to have become set in stone such as the annual Nutcracker, the season's  nineteenth century classic and the scheduled revival of this year's MacMillan dram ballet and the number of performances allocated to each fixture there seems little room to fill and little need to think about the repertory at all. Now while it may be that the neglect of the Ashton repertory started as a policy designed to give more stage time to MacMillan's ballets because he was able to produce more works for the company the argument that led to the stage time allocated to Ashton's ballets being reduced can hardly be justified today when we are being invited to mark the thirtieth anniversary of MacMillan's death. It is shameful that so much of Ashtin's output is ignored by the company management, but it is extremely shortsighted to treat all  of the company's twentieth century repertory with the exception of a handful of MacMillan dram ballets as irrelevant and disposable as far as the company's active repertory and programming are concerned. It is as if  Mr O'Hare has decided that all that matters are the company's nineteenth century repertory and that its twentieth century ballets should be sacrificed in order to stage "exciting" new works few if which deserve their place on stage.

I think that the reference to the "great western ballets" in the article about Ratmansky is not a reference to the Tchaikovsky ballets and their performance tradition in the west but should be read as a reference to the nineteenth century ballets created in the west which were danced in Russia in productions revised by Petipa and others which were given important revivals at the Bolshoi between 2007 and 2009. The "great western ballets" are, I think,  Le Corsaire first seen in Paris in 1855 which was staged at the Bolshoi in 2007 in a production in which Ratmandky was heavily involved and contained some reconstructed Petipa; La Esmeralda first seen in London in 1844 which was staged by Burlaka and Medvedev in 2009 and Coppelia first seen in Paris in 1870 which was staged by Vikharev in 2009. In case the Bolshoi stagers made real efforts to find out what the ballet looked like before they were " improved" in Soviet times although that did not necessarily mean that everything seen on stage was pure Petipa. 

Unlike St Petersburg where the Vikharev reconstruction of Sleeping Beauty staged at the end of the century proved controversial the Bolshoi under Ratmansky who was artistic director between 2004-2008 was far more sympathetic to the idea of reconstructing old ballets to see what they might have looked like on stage in terms of both design and choreography.While the Bolshoi under Ratmansky may have been more enlightened and far more sympathetic to such acts of choreographic archaeology than the Mariinsky had been, the real explanation for the lack of controversy  I think lies with the fact that none of these production displaced treasured "authentic" versions and thus no one's professional standing as custodians of the sacred text was threatened by these stagings. 

As far as Beauty is concerned it is a little ironic that the Tsar who imposed strict Russification within his territories was forced to look to the west for military support and in order to make the alliance with France more palatable to the Slavophile element in court circles and the intellectual  elite found himself paying for a work which praised western culture even if it was in the form of the court culture of Louis XIV.