FLOSS

Before the redevelopment the ROH was much more obviously a working theatre; details of the week's performances were displayed in a glazed frame on the wall in Floral Street and information about cast changes was displayed in the box office and on the glass of the main doors of the theatre. At that time it was financially, if not, necessarily physically accessible and its audience was far more socially diverse than it is today. Since the redevelopment the ROH has become far more physically accessible but less and less financially accessible.and its audience, at least as far as the Amphi is concerned, is much less socially diverse because of ticket prices. As far as cost is concerned the ROH organisation decided that it should reduce its dependence on its ACE subsidy, in part because the whole redevelopment plan and its spiralling costs had made the cost of running the place and its companies a real political issue. If you know that the size of the subsidy paid to your arts organisation is going to become a bigger issue with every year that passes as an argument over funding of these two companies will help distract attention from the fact that the government is not funding the arts adequately it may well make sense to reduce reliance on state funding.The downside to this approach is that it inevitably means higher prices at the box office. Mr Beard and his minions have moved away from the old policy that prices in the Amphi should be kept low to ensure that the theatre is genuinely accessible to those who are interested in the lyric theatre whatever walk in life they come from and has increasingly made the place a middle class ghetto where access to what goes on inside its walls depends on the length of your pocket. This of course means that the possibility of the audience renewing itself naturally as a result of curiosity and the ability to buy a cheap ticket without doing serious damage to the weekly or monthly budget, all but disappears. The increased cost to the paying public also leads to a narrowing of the repertory since fewer and fewer people will take a chance on buying a ticket for a work of which they have no knowledge, and the works of which they have no knowledge gets bigger with each season that passes. As far as ballet casting is concerned I might agree with the concerns expressed over casting junior dancers in major roles in what remains of the company's core repertory if I had had a bad experience with them but so far I have not done so. The worst experience, or rather the most disappointing experience which I have had, was probably Hayward's debut as Odette/Odile which sort of lost energy and petered out but one of the most satisfying in that run was the Calvert Edmond's performance. I know that I go on about casting dancers according to suitability rather than seniority but I think that is more of a problem with the Ashton repertory and with other rarely performed works where the original choreographer obviously had a specific type of dancer in mind for a particular role to give the ballet its light and shade and contrasting characters. The biggest problem comes when purely classical dancers are allocated to demi-character roles a prime example of this was the decision to cast Cuthbertson and Muntagirov as the leads in The Two Pigeons. Both dancers were far too classical in their approach to their choreography which needs to be performed far more expressively than either could manage and both have stage persona's which suggest sophistication rather than the fallibility of youth. Much as I admire Cuthbertson she would be equally unsuitable for Lise. As far as the overall costs of the organisation are concerned while I am willing to accept that the opera company needs music staff and the ballet company now employs a range of specialists whose services would once only have been available to dancers on a private basis I do not begin to understand the need for quite so many people to be employed in marketing or seemingly as support staff to Mr Beard himself. Perhaps the cost problem can be boiled down to the additional costs incurred as a result of appointing a man with no practical experience of running arts events, selling goods and services to the paying public, running a theatre or providing entertainment? Slightly off topic but perhaps we should look at the organisation's attitude to money by looking at the amount of money which the opera side of the business has wasted on staging unnecessary new productions which will never cover their costs because they are all but unrevivable and the terms on which the music director is employed which as I understand it includes a basic salary far bigger than the director of the ballet company is paid and also includes fees for every performance he conducts. When I look at the list of opera house employees there seem to be far more whose functions,to be kind, are far from obvious and in some cases whose presence seem to superfluous. I should love to know what all those people in the marketing department are actually doing. I will end by saying that I sincerely hope that the ballet company has not been persuaded that it has some sort of moral obligation to support the opera financially. At one time it dis so and it was all but bled dry by the opera company.There is only one world class company resident in Bow Street at present and that is the Royal Ballet, sadly the Royal Opera Company is a pale shadow of what it once was and is simply basking in the reflected glory of the work undertaken by irs music directors from Frankel to Haitink and its General Administrators and Directors from Sir David Webster to Jeremy Isaacs. These were men who actually understood their audiences, their psychology and what drew them to the theatre.The current regime does want to know and is not at all interested in finding out because if it did find out it might have to change its policies and that would never do.

I don't think that the author of this article or the subeditor has misunderstood anything. The way the article has been written is designed to secure an emotional response to its contents rather than to inform those who read it. It has almost certainly been devised to be misread.We need to recognise that this article has been written for a specific readership and that it could have been written in a totally different and far less culturally loaded way than in fact it was. The article could have begun by telling the reader that the school was dropping previous experience of classical ballet as an entry requirement and why it was doing so. However the author chose not to do this and instead wrote several paragraphs containing an apparently innocuous account of the origins of classical ballet before telling the reader in the last paragraph that ballet was still an element of the school's curriculum.Welcome to the world of the culture war, dog whistles and in particular the war on woke. If your response to the headline was to began to feel a mounting level of incomprehension tinged with a little anger at the stupidity of what this school was apparently doing then the subeditor and the journalist who wrote the article have achieved their ends which was not to tell you that this school has dropped previous experience of ballet as an entry requirement but continue to teach ballet as part of its curriculum which would have been a non-story but to make the reader angry about the stupidity of the effects of being woke and the danger it poses to "our culture." Try reading the article again setting out to identify just how many of the apparently purely descriptive words and phrases used in it and the sequence in which the article tells the reader about the actions the school has taken seem intended to inform the reader and just how much of it night have been devised to secure an emotional response.

I very much doubt that the BBC has ever had a clearly defined policy on whether it should cover dance or how it should do so. I strongly suspect that the BBC's reputation as an organisation devoted to promoting ballet as an art form by making it available to a wide public rests on its need to have something for its viewers to watch in the early days of the television service and subsequently on the initiatives of a number of individuals rather than being part of a long term corporate arts policy based on the Reithian principles of informing, educating and entertaining its audience. It is true that the Vic Wells company and Ballet Rambert both appeared on television quite a bit before the war but I think that the coverage of both companies had more to do with the BBC's need to fill its schedule with programmes that would appeal to its then London based audience than anything else. I should be surprised to discover that there was any crusading or educational purpose on the BBC's part at that time or later. I very much doubt that there ever has been any strategic plan on the corporation's part to bring art in the form of ballet to its viewers. I suspect that the directors of both the Rambert and Vic-Wells companies were far more aware of the potential of televised ballet performances to act as a shop window for their repertory and dancers and its potential to build an audience for them than the corporation's administrators were. Apart from a few short sections of film which include footage of a young Fonteyn little remains which documents the BBC's pre-war ballet broadcasts. We know far more about the BBC's post-war ballet broadcasts and the work of Margaret Dale. De Valois clearly saw that working with the BBC was of benefit to her company as it would help keep her company in touch with the ballet audience which had been created during the war. Dale, a former dancer herself,was responsible for producing a series of recordings some of which are of great historic interest because of the dancers appearing in them.There is a Les Sylphides from the early fifties with a cast headed by Markova with Beriosova and Elvin in supporting roles and an introduction by Karsavina and an original cast recording of Fille Mal Gardee adapted for television. Perhaps we owe even more to John Drummond (born in 1934) who seems to have worked hard to give dance a place on BBC2 when it was the corporation's arts channel. He was responsible for a two part Diaghilev documentary which used filmed interviews with surviving members of the company and introduced a number of initiatives to the channel's schedule with ballet documentaries and occasional series such as Dance Month and Dance Makers.. I suspect that many of us have a more positive view of the BBC's commitment to dance broadcasts than it perhaps deserves largely as a result of seeing the programmes shown during Drummond's time with BBC 2. Not every broadcast was motivated by the desire to make ballet available to its viewers sometimes it was technological advances which prompted a broadcast. As I understand it the Sibley, Dowell Cinderella was the result of the BBC's wish to experiment with outside broadcasts in colour. There was a time when there seemed to be a great deal of classically based dance on television but this was attributable to a number of factors specific to a particular time and place. Many of those in positions of power and influence in the world of arts administration and broadcasting in the 1970's and 80's, including John Drummond, had grown up in an artistic world which took ballet seriously.t. Buckle's 1954 exhibition to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of Diaghilev;s death had rekindled interest in the works that he had commissioned for his company. I can't believe that Drummond did not attend. The pioneers who established ballet as a serious art form in this country were alive and well and still actively engaged in the world of dance that they had created. They were taken very seriously, their opinions were sought and their views were treated with respect as were the works which they had commissioned. They had not at that time been reduced to mere caricatures or the source of amusing anecdotes.Then there was the so called ballet boom which was essentially popular interest in ballet prompted initially in this country by the Ballets Russes and rekindled after Diaghilev's death by the pioneering work of Marie Rambert and her choreographic discoveries who included Ashton, Tudor and a number of other important choreographic talents working at the Mercury Theatre and de Valois working at the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells. The Wells eventually became the home of de Valois' ballet company where she worked with Lamberst and later Ashton to create the company which we know today as the Royal Ballet. These and other companies sustained interest in ballet with the new works they created. The desire for entertainment during the war added considerably to the ballet going audience while the creation of new works kept the interest alive. Ballet had not been reduced to a museum art form as the major western choreographers of the twentieth century were actively engaged in making new repertory and would continue doing so well into the late 1970's and early 1980's. The audience for ballet could not easily be characterised as an elite following an elite art form at that time as the ballet audience encompassed a much wider range of socio-economic groups than is the case today. Subsidies ensured the arts were accessible This was the art world before Thatcher and the Murdoch press. It was a time when it was not fashionable to sneer at the arts as elitist or complain that subsidies only benefited the middle classes. Perhaps most importantly it was long before John Birt became Director General. His populist tendencies were to do untold damage to arts coverage at the BBC. I can't imagine that he would have cleared the schedules to broadcast a sizeable chunk of the second act of Giselle Fortunately Mr Birt lay in the future. Ballet at this time was not just accessible financially it was also accessible geographically because companies toured far more extensively than they do today. Men like John Drummond, Clive Barnes and Clement Crisp would have encountered ballet at university if they had not done so earlier. ACE had not at this time rationalised and rationed access to ballet by giving companies tour schedules which spread them too thinly across the country to establish a critical mass of ballet goers in any one place. De Valois company in its various forms toured to both Cambridge and Oxford where the arts administrators of the future are educated.Both university cities were on the tour schedules of other ballet companies such as Ballet Rambert and companies on tour performed a far wider range of their repertory at each venue than they do today. All these factors meant that in the 1960's and 70's ballet could not easily be dismissed as an elite art form. That accusation only became viable as subsidies were reduced and elements of the audience were priced out of the theatre. As far as televised ballet performances in the 1970's and early 80's are concerned we should perhaps bear in mind that there were any number of significant events and anniversaries to be marked as first Rambert and then the Royal Ballet marked their fiftieth anniversaries. Looking at the Royal Ballet televised performances between 1978 and 1981 the company celebrated de Valois' eightieth birthday, marking it with a broadcast of her new production of Sleeping Beauty; Ashton's seventy fifth birthday was marked by a documentary and a number of programmes of ballet performances. The fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the company in 1981 was marked by a documentary and a broadcast of MacMillan's new ballet Isadora. In addition to these company focused events there were also royal celebrations which took place at Covent Garden and found their way onto television. There was the gala to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee and finally the Queen Mother's eightieth birthday which saw a revival of Mam'zelle Angot and the premiere of Ashton's last major work Rhapsody. I can't help wondering whether these royal events were televised because they were seen as newsworthy rather than for any significance they might have as arts programmes. That it was thought worth while to televise ballet performances is evidenced by the fact that commercial stations also became involved in doing so from time to time As to what is different now. The commissioning process is reportedly far more bureaucratic than it was forty years ago. The BBC is being required to make swingeing cuts to its programmes which must mean that programmes about elite art forms are unlikely to be seen as being of much interest unless a human interest story or two can be woven into the programme. The last two programmes that I can recall on the BBC which included full length ballet performances were the all Ashton mixed bill broadcast in 2004 to mark the centenary of his birth and the broadcast of Bussell's farewell performance. Neither was issued in full on DVD although some of the centennial programmes was subsequently issued commercially. The most important performance in the all Ashton programme, the long awaited revival Daphnis and Chloe in the Craxton designs was inexplicably omitted. It would be fascinating to know precisely what prompted those decisions and why the Royal Ballet stopped working with the BBC and took everything in-house. Does cinema streaming generate more income than the BBC can offer and more importantly does it really reach a wider potential audience in this country than a broadcast on terrestrial television at Christmas would secure? Perhaps things are better handled elsewhere but publicity for Royal Ballet streamed performance in cinemas near me seems haphazard at best.

I don't dispute the fact that certain works in the Royal Ballet's repertory cost a lot to stage because of the musical resources they require but I think that if the director wanted to do so he would find a way to stage them. Cost increasingly seems to me to be little more than a convenient excuse for not staging certain ballets in the company's twentieth century repertory as it is one which it is very difficult to challenge without access to the accounts. If Kevin wanted to stage works like Daphnis and Chloe, Les Noces and The Song of the Earth on a regular basis he would find a way of doing so. If he valued these works he would programme these ballets on a triennial revival schedule and either ring fence money in his budget to cover the cost or try to establish a syndicate of people who would be prepared to assist in covering the cost of such revivals.

Hearty congratulations to both men. Their promotions are richly deserved. I don't think that these promotions will come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the company for any length of rime. The important thing is that it gives the company two male principals who were born to dance the roles created for danseur nobles and in this they are very different from the last two men to be appointed Principal both of whom for me belong to the category of demi-character bravura technician rather than being the princely type. Again with these two men there will be no need to find small partners to dance with them. I think a really interesting question is whether Kevin will promote any dancers to the rank of First Soloist or whether he will find that he can free up enough money to promote three or four dancers to the rank of Soloist. While I can see several candidates ready for that sort of promotion I cam't see anyone who is really ready for First Soloist status in this round of promotions.

I imagine there are quite a few people who are not that familiar with Scenes de Ballet because it has been out of the repertory at Covent Garden for several years. I think it was last performed in 2014.There is an excerpt from the performance televised in 2004 at the time if the Ashton centenary available on BBC Arts. In addition Scenes was the subject of an Insight event yesterday. In it Christopher Carr led a rehearsal which centred on the choreography for the male corps of four men as well as the choreography for the ballerina and her partner. The dancers involved in the rehearsal were Dixon, Dubreuil,Rovero and Ella as the male quartet and Naghdi and Muntagirov who are not due to appear together in performance. It sounds as if the Ashton triple bill may turn about to be one of those programmes where we get to see any number of unscheduled combinations of dancers. I am sorry that Cuthbertson is no longer involved in Month but I am very happy that Morera is getting more than one performance as Natalia Petrovna. In addition I am happy that we are going to get to see three ballets by the man whom de Valois described as "A real choreographer". It is a pity that management did not have enough sense to trim a couple of performances from each of the four works which have been given fifteen or more performances next season. A real mixed bill of ballets which included a couple of neglected twentieth century ballets which people actually wanted to see would have helped lighten my mood quite considerably and would have suggested that the season's programme had been put together by someone with a bit of artistic imagination.

When Rojo took over at ENB after what at the time seemed to be a strangely truncated selection and appointment process she had the benefit of a great deal of support from dance critics and others for whom she could do no wrong as a dancer and who I think as a result felt very positive about her directorship. I think that her directorship has largely lived up to those early expectations although her management style seems to have prompted at least one outstanding dancer to find mote congenial working conditions elsewhere.The professional dance community has always been a somewhat small and very interconnected one in which its members tend to be able to find out what is going on in other companies with relative ease through their personal connections with former colleagues and one time fellow students. As far as Rojo's time at ENB is concerned I don't know whether there was a greater turnover of personnel during her directorship than under her immediate predecessors although I did get the impression perhaps somewhat erroneously that there was a greater degree of instability in the upper ranks of the company than there had been under Eagling. Whether or not the departures from SFB have any connection with Rojo's imminent arrival is difficult to know. The news of departures from the company at this time does not look good and is made all the worse by the additional detail which at least one dancer has chosen to give to the effect that they had not been offered a contract for the coming season by someone who has never seen them dance. Being appointed to succeed a director who has run a company successfully for several decades is difficult enough at the best of times as the new director needs to demonstrate to those who appointed them that they are a worthy successor. The last thing they need is adverse publicity and media coverage.The news of these departures is the sort of thing that a new director must dread because it looks so bad. Rojo has a tough act to follow and a lot to prove and at San Francisco she will be working without the supportive group of dance critics and dance goers she had in London. It seems to me that the news of these departures and the fact that she is bringing dancers with her will make her task as director more difficult since it could easily be interpreted as a lack of concern for the company's own traditions. Perceived lack of respect for a company's traditions, repertory and performance style is something which has been the downfall of more than one director in recent years. It will be interesting to see how things work out for Rojo at her new company.

Returning to the theme of the strange decision to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Friends and then to celebrate it with an expanded version of a work Wheeldon created for Kings of the Dance ,a new McGregor and crown it all with Diamonds suggests that Kevin has fallen into a similar trap to that Ross Stretton fell into with his celebratory Gala which simply served up what the company was dancing at that time. It may not be quite that bad but every gala needs to have something special about it ,a bonne bouche if you like, which sets it apart from other performances during the season and encourages the ballet audience to purchase tickets . This is something which Ashton understood and was perfectly capable off providing when called upon to do so. His ability to whip up a gala piece explains all those short entertaining pieces which get aired from time to time in all Ashton mixed bills, sadly often danced with dogged determination rather than the flair and idiomatic facility which are prerequisites for such display pieces. Each is as Ashton put it when asked how long a ballet should be " As long as it needs to be". I am really surprised that Kevin does not seem to understand that a gala audience is unlikely to be made up of fans of contemporary dance and will not necessarily want to pay through the nose to see the types of works that they can see on other evenings at other London theatres or that Diamonds, once described as "pure paste", on its own might not be quite enough of a tasty morsel to make up for sitting through the rehashed Wheeldon or the new McGregor. If he had any sense I think that Kevin would be offering the new McGregor, as it is probably too late to cancel the commission, and announce a major Ashton revival of some sort. It isn't as if he would not have a wide choice as so many Ashton works have been languishing neglected over the years. I accept that staging a revival of Birthday Offering and trying to get the casting pitch perfect would be far too obvious for such an event. So here are a few more adventurous suggestions beginning with an antidote to all the dour earnestness currently on offer in Bow Street, beginning with a revival of Facade which has nor been seen in Bow Street since 1994. If that does not suit Kevin then a revival of Apparitions in its entirety, a revival of A Wedding Bouquet or a revival of Daphnis and Chloe would be equally acceptable and far more enticing.

The comment made earlier in this discussion expressing concern that Ashton's treatment of Cinderella might be too "child friendly" brings home the effect that a decade's neglect can have on the collective knowledge and experience of a ballet that was once a regular feature of the Christmas repertory.But of course that was before Dowell's time working in America which had the effect of turning Nutcracker into a seasonal fixture at Covent Garden. Ashton's Cinderella belongs to the period of his post war classical crusade during which the choreographer set out to provide a clearly classically based repertory for the company in its new home and quietly eliminate the expressionist style ballets which Helpmann had made for it during the war.While Ashton may not strike one as the sort of choreographer who would publish an artistic manifesto but there is a point in the immediate post war when he does just that when he reportedly says words to the effect that only ballets based on classical technique are really of value. Cinderella has been televised on at least four occasions and two of those performances have been preserved on DVD. The earliest recording is a version made for US television which was broadcast there in colour in 1957. It was cut and adapted for television by Ashton with linking scenes which don't appear in the ballet itself, that,. and the commentary on the action, suggests that the network had a very low opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It also suffers from the effects of some technological experiments which may have worked well in the original broadcast but don't work in the current format which is a pity as the dancers dancing the Fairies were major members of the company. In its favour it preserves Fonteyn's performance of the title role, you see Grant at a point in his career when he was still on top of his choreography and Ashton and MacMillan do not overdo things as the Stepsisters. It is available from VAI music and seems to be on offer at present. The next recording was made by the BBC in 1969, I believe, as part of its experiments in outside broadcasts in colour. The cast is led by Sibley and Dowell, the Stepsisters are played by Ashton and Helpmann,Leslie Edwards plays the Father, Alexander Grant the Jester, Georgina Parkinson is the Fairy Godmother and the season Fairies are danced by Penney,Lorrayne, Jenner and Bergsma. The colour may be a bit washed out, no one has spent money on restoration, but the dancing which is what really matters is impeccably idiomatic and the recording gives a real idea of what the ballet should look like in performance. This recording was reissued on DVD last year and is well worth getting as everyone in it knows what they are doing and their performances would have been supervised by Somes and Ashton himself. Helpmann and Ashton may seem a bit over the top but they are performing before a live audience in a theatre which seats over 2000. The ballet was recorded again in 1979 with a cast headed by Collier and Dowell, Sleep appears as the Jester, the Stepsisters are Coleman and Shaw and the Fairy godmother is danced by Monica Mason., the season fairies are danced by Penney , Derman, Park and Wylde, This recording sometimes turns up on Youtube. It has never been issued on DVD. Cinderella in a new production was broadcast on 2nd January 2003 with a cast headed by Cojucaru and Kobborg. The Fairy godmother was danced by McLeekan and the season's fairies were danced by Salerno, Cuthbertson, Morera and Yanowsky. This you might think would have been a strong argument in favour of issuing the recording on DVD. Unfortunately here were problems with some of the performances. The first is that Martin as the Jester is not a character but a mere leg machine. His make-up does not help.. You could not see his expression because of the thick make up he was required to wear. I am not entirely sure that it was the performances given by Dowell and Sleep as the Stepsisters which put an end to any thought of issuing a DVD. It is quite possible that it was their coarse and excessively unfunny performances which decided the issue. However the company did not issue a DVD of the centennial mixed bill which was televised in 2004 either. Bits of that celebratory mixed bill including Scenes de Ballet were eventually issued on an all Ashton DVD but the great loss was the failure to issue Daphnis and Chloe in the Craxton designs on DVD. For anyone who is interested elements from the 2003 performance can be found on You tube. The most important piece of the ballet which can be found on You tube is the section in which the Fairy Godmother and her fairy colleagues dance their variations. My problem with it is that while it is very beautiful it is all just a bit too slow and just a bit too deliberate and careful to be described as idiomatic.The choreography is in charge rather than the dancers. I hope these comments are of some use to those who who are not familiar with Ashton's Cinderella and persuade them to find out more about a masterpiece.

I don't think that I have felt this before but it seems to me that the ballet programme announced for the 2022-23 season is aimed at two very distinct audiences, something which has not seemed quite so obvious in the past. One is an audience which it sometimes seems Kevin might prefer to lose but it is the one the company needs to keep it afloat financially the other is an audience more interested in the shiny new present and the future than the past. The problem is that the latter audience which Kevin seems so keen to attract has a natural home in Islington and is unlikely to be attracted by the lean contemporary pickings available in Bow Street. The danger is that if Kevin increases the number of performances he allocates to contemporary works many of which seem lacklustre and intended for smaller spaces he is likely to lose some of his regular ballet audience particularly as so little quality control seems to be exercised over the new works the company stages .Perhaps Kevin needs to come to terms with the fact that few of the new works which have been commissioned during the past fifteen years or so have proved to be of lasting interest. The list of duds is longer than it should have been. I think that at the root of the problem is that the company seems to give every choreographer it commissions the sort of respect only due to experienced choreographers with a proven track record who clearly know what they are doing. I can't help thinking that a little more intervention on the part of management might have spared us some of the choreographic duds we have been asked to endure over recent years. I wish I could forget Strapless,The Wind, Medusa, As One, Rushes, Corybantic Games, Hansel and Gretel and all those aimless, seemingly structureless, choreographic doodles by the likes of Alistair Marriott being passed off as abstract ballets. The recognition that not everyone who can put steps together in a pleasing manner has a real grasp of structure or a developed sense of theatrical impact particularly in the early years of their career would be a good place to start. While I welcome the return of Ashton's Cinderella after a gap of twelve years I find Kevin's choice of repertory depressingly limited in its range and the number of performances allocated to all four established repertory pieces somewhat excessive. I am sure that the company needs them but does the audience really need 15 Mayerlings. 31 Nutcrackers,28 Sleepjng Beauties or 28 Cinderellas? Apart from Nutcracker, will there be an audience for quite so many performances of each of the works which are clearly intended to do the heavy lifting as far as generating the company's income for 2022-23 is concerned? I think that the revivals of Mayerling and Cinderella will prove to be of interest because of the number of opportunities for debuts they offer, but that does not mean that they will necessarily sell that well. While we may be able to guess who the new Rudolphs will be when it comes to Cinderella, it has been out of the repertory for so long that nearly everyone involved will be dancing their roles for the first time. Although the contemporary pieces only account for 25 of the 120 ballet performances allocated to the main stage during the season the contemporary section of the programme seems to loom large perhaps because it includes nothing I really want to see. I feel no need to reacquaint myself with Woolf Works. I think that Crystal Pite's idea to expand Flight Patterns runs a real risk of destroying a very powerful one act work by over extending it. As far as the triple bills are concerned I never want to see Corybantic Games again and Anastasia Act III lives or dies according to who is cast as Anastasia. I don't feel any great need to see that programme.while the programme marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Friend's organisation just strikes me as weird. Perhaps it is just me but I would have thought that a selection of pieces with which the company is closely connected would have made more sense. I love Diamonds but the Royal Ballet is not a Balanchine company and it is a comparatively recent acquisition. I should have thought that anyone who had a real grasp of the company's history and its development since 1962 could have come up with a better selection of works to stage and would have found ir possible to identify works whose initial production or significant revivals had been supported by the Friends, or had first been seen at a Friends' Christmas party. I find it strange that the company has not found it possible to revive a single major twentieth century one act work created for it nor anything from its Diaghilev repertory. I find it worrying that the company seems to feel the need to tie revivals of full length works into significant anniversaries as it seems to show a lack of faith in their quality as works of art and a lack of interest in making a wide range of works available to its dancers and its audiences each season. Perhaps it would find less reason to apologise for its revival policy if it dropped the label "heritage work" for its twentieth century repertory and took to describing works like Daphnis and Chloe,Fille, The Dream, Enigma Variations,Les Rendezvous,Les Patineurs, Symphonic Variations, Scenes de Ballet,The Song of the Earth, Gloria, Requiem, Les Noces and Les Biches as "twentieth century classics". I don't imagine that de Valois believed that the company would only ever have nineteenth century classics in its repertory. Her acquisition policy and that if her two immediate successors suggests otherwise. Her hope was that the company would create its own classics and acquire some of the greatest works created by the other major choreographers of the time. In 2022 the company's management should be comfortable with acknowledging and celebrating the creativity and innovation of the twentieth century without apologising for staging such works. While I am relieved that the Royal Ballet's management and the rights holder have finally resolved their differences I shall reserve judgement on the new production of Cinderella until I have seen it. I am more than a little concerned that the design team does not seem to have experience of designing for ballet. Ballet design is a specialism in itself which always involves creating costumes in which dancers can move with ease and an understanding that the designs will need to be read throughout the theatre and not just in the first eight rows of the stalls. In the case of a narrative work designs need to do a lot more. The truth is that while good design can do much of the the dancers' work for them by establishing the time and place in which the work is set and its mood poor design can do untold damage to a work and its reputation. The 2003 -4 production of Cinderella was, I believe, the first one for which Wendy Ellis Somes was entirely responsible for staging and presumably chose the designs used.in it. Those designs were a disaster. Cinderella's rags were far too pretty and fussy, those of the stepsisters failed to establish their wearer's contrasting characters and would have bee rejected by anyone staging a pantomime. At the moment I would happily settle for the Walker costume designs from the 1965 staging because they were approved by the choreographer and were for the main part restrained and clear. The designs for the sister's costumes clearly reflected their contrasting personalities but they stayed within the historic bounds set by the designs for the corps de ballet in neither case did Walker exhibit the vulgarity on display in the 2003 production Cinderella is the ballet in which Ashton channelled his inner Petipa before trying his hand with a French ballet pompier with Sylvia. It contains some wonderful choreographic set pieces in the choreography for the stars, the divertisements for the Seasons Fairies and the choreography for the pas de deux for Cinderella and her prince. The role of the Jester is a demi-character role devised for Alexander Grant which calls for the depiction of a character rather than a Soviet style leg machine. I am not sure that I would ascribe the characterisation of the stepsisters in Ashton's Cinderella to the English pantomime tradition. That I think is an idea which has considerably more to do with the right's owner's lack of imagination,taste and discretion than Ashton's original conception of the roles or his choice of dance styles which were clearly intended to express the essential contrasting nature of the two characters. I think that the DVD of a performance staged for US television starring Fonteyn in which Ashton and MacMillan play the step sisters makes this abundantly clear. I hope and pray that neither Sleep nor Dowell are allowed anywhere near the roles or coach them as they were singularly unfunny, vulgar and crude in their interpretation of the roles. I am rather hoping that they might try female dancers in the roles as the company did at one point during the 1950's. It has been said that great ballet directors are ones who have a strong sense of their own company's history as an organisation as well as its place as part of a living artistic tradition and it is with the announcement of the bill of fare for the 2022-23 season that we are forced to recognise how little personal connection Kevin actually has with the history of the company he is now running. This may have been of assistance when it came to developing his dancers' careers since he has not felt constrained by the company's way of doing things but his limited sense of the Royal's history[; his predecessors' acquisition policy and his limited interest in the development of ballet during the twentieth century can now be seen for what it is, a dangerous weakness. Kevin has a firm grasp of the mechanics of developing and maintaining his company but his neglect of its twentieth repertory is a dangerous weakness.I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that each of the major twentieth century works which de Valois, Ashton and MacMillan added to the company's repertory wither by creating them or through acquisition,is in its own way, as important as de Valois' acquisition of her five nineteenth century classics.

Speculating about who will finally take over at ENB and ABT is great fun . I don't pretend to know enough about ABT to speculate who might be in the running there. As far as ENB is concerned ticket sales suggest that the company only provides limited opportunities for innovative programming on tour. I wonder whether Kobborg would be interested in taking over at ENB? He would certainly be an interesting choice and he might like the idea of being in direct competition for London audiences with the organisation in Bow Street. Ferri might be interested in ENB as might Durante but as Durante has only recently taken over at the school I can not see her being regarded as a serious contender. Here is a wild card candidate Laurent Hilaire who has recently resigned from his post at the Stanislavsky perhaps he might be interested ?

I am glad someone enjoyed this mixed bill I am afraid I did not. I found Weathering tedious, episodic, overly long with no obvious sense of structure . It ended with a lone dancer abandoned on stage and an audience uncertain for several seconds as to whether the piece had actually ended. As two much younger people in my row said "That's forty five minutes of my life that I won't get back". It might have been bearable if it had been shorter, say thirty minutes rather than the full forty five minutes it took to peter out. Solo Echo did not make the impact it had on first viewing perhaps it was simply a victim of its place in the bill. DGV also came as a bit of a disappointment. I remember it being a much better ballet. This time it felt a bit too relentless. Perhaps it is one of those pieces which really only works with its original cast and their energy? All in all a seriously underwhelming mixed bill. The Amphi on first night was perhaps one third full which is a bad sign for the rest of the run. Perhaps instead of commissioning new works from outside choreographers Kevin should do what the first three choreographer directors did and acquire pieces which have already proved their worth as pieces of choreography and limit new commissions almost entirely to choreographers with connections to the company and the school.

I was lucky enough to see Ratmansky's Swan Lake in Zurich and I have to say that for me it was infinitely preferable to the current Royal Ballet version of the ballet which seems to be informed more by the dance aesthetics of Soviet Swan Lakes than any of the company's earlier productions of the work. It was a strange experience to see in the Ratmansky what was for the main part very familiar choreography turned into something rich and strange merely through the use of period and stylistically appropriate technique which of course brought out the extraordinary musicality of the original text even where gaps in the notation meant the text danced had to be supplemented by the choreography which the Sadler's Wells Ballet is known to have danced in the late forties and early fifties. I thought that the best parts of the lecture were the filmed excerpts which Macauley used to illustrate the points he wanted to make. I actually think that the event would have benefited from a lot less Alistair being Alistair and much more film. It seemed to me that through his choice of choreographic illustrations from the reconstruction and earlier Royal Ballet productions Macauley's lecture established just how musical the original choreographic text is. By making the viewer concentrate on the original dance text's relationship with the score it emphasised just how insensitive and over elaborate Scarlett's version of the ballet actually is. This may not have been what he intended but it is true wherever you look in the production. The Scarlett production much like Soviet versions of the ballet ignores the carefully devised architecture of the original set out in the score in which the big choreographic set pieces are surrounded by simpler quieter contrasting passages of choreography which provide a breathing space for the audience encouraging it to savour the more complex significant sections of the work. Unfortunately in Scarlett's version the set pieces are in competition with a lot of rather mindless uninspired new choreography for the corps which owes a great deal more to MacMillan than Petipa, Ivanov or Ashton. Among other things it gives us Benno transformed into a close relative of the Soviet jester whose precise position at the court is difficult to judge because he seems to be more of an entertainer than an unobtrusive friend and assistant and two unnecessary princesses who behave more like entertainers than royalty. Their involvement in the floor show in act three seems completely out of place. It jars as does the lack of understanding or feeling for court etiquette which leaves the foreign princesses lined up in the ballroom as if they were trying to enter an exclusive do at a nightclub. I don't think that setting the ballet in a twenty first century vision of the Victorian era helps either. The idea behind the original designs gave the audience a late nineteenth century vision of the medieval world with which they were already familiar as a time and place in which magic was a potent force. A time and place not that different from the world in which the symbolist play Pelleas and Melisande is set. The world of medieval ballet land presents few problems or distractions for the stager or the audience since no hint of realism will ever intrude upon the action of a ballet set there. Unfortunately the designs for the current staging, particularly those for for the non dancing courtiers, are so obviously inspired by Georgiadis and contemporary images of late nineteenth century court personnel that it seems to me that there is always a danger that MacMillan style realism will intrude and break through the enchantment which holds Odette, her companions and the audience captive.

I am sorry I know that this is a site for the discussion of all things ballet but I refuse to see the fall out from invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of a single dancer however talented he may be. I am sure that the whole situation is pretty awful for Polunin but so it is for thousands , if not millions of unnamed Ukrainians who are suffering the same uncertainties and fears for friends and families with the additional threat of immediate physical injury and an uncertain future. As far as I am aware Polunin is nowhere near the war zone and not under immediate physical threat himself. If he were to lose his position in Crimea it would be a professional setback. It would not be a career ending event would it? I am pretty sure that he will be able to pursue a very satisfactory career in Russia whoever is in charge there and whatever the eventual outcome of current events. If, in the future, he is not as welcome in the West as he once was that will be entirely as a result of the decisions he has made as to where his allegiances lie. We read a great deal of criticism of the way in which dancers were , and to some extent still are, treated more like children than adults when it comes to career choices. Perhaps we should treat Polunin as an adult in this? He decided quite early on that he wanted to take charge of his career. A little later on he decided where his political loyalties lay and chose, of his own free will, to give his allegiance pictorial form,other major artists merely chose to be vociferous in their support for the present Russian regime. The problem is that in Russia now, as in the past, there is no real dividing line between the world of politics and the world of the private citizen. If someone is put in charge of a state institution or given a prestigious state award it is safe to assume that at the very least the recipient's face fits politically, until the contrary is proved. It is wilfully naive to see a man like Gergiev as a mere private citizen who happens to be a gifted musician when it comes to his post at the Marinsky. The politics may not interest many of us but that does not mean that they do not exist or that support of the regime is not an essential element in most of the arts appointments made there.

Kevin seems to see mixed bills as a means of giving a range of dancers opportunities to show what they can do rather than an opportunity to showcase a single dancer's range in a selection of contrasting ballets or a group of works in which he or she is seen as an outstanding exponent of specific roles. Kevin's approach is entirely understandable given the number of good dancers there seem to be at every level in the company and his stated intention of giving his dancers interesting careers even if he can't promote everyone.Unfortunately while a casting policy based on the need to give dancers opportunities may keep the dancers happy, even with good coaches and "dancers giving their all", it does not always result in performances which show a work at its best. Getting the best out of a piece of choreography might be thought to start with the very basic question of whether a dancer has a good enough technique to dance the work in question but I think we all understand that it does not stop there as there is always the question of whether the dancer selected has the artistic imagination required to evoke a ballet's mood and perform the choreography in the style its creator intended it to be seen.Interestingly Hans Brenaa was of the opinion that the most important thing when casting a ballet was finding the dancer most suited to the role in terms of their stage personality, performance style, artistic empathy and imagination and the type of roles to which they were most suited with technique seemingly a secondary consideration. Brenaa's argument in favour of his approach was that a dancer who was a perfect fit for a role but whose technique needed a little work done on it in order to bring it up to the level the role required was a much better choice than a dancer brim full of technique but lacking the essential qualities a role demanded. Technique can be worked on and improved but miscasting is miscasting. I accept that there are occasions on which a dancer surprises you and reveals an unexpected range but sadly my experience is that generally they don't do that they simply disappoint and do a disservice to the choreographer. I have memories of Bussell's Hostess in Les Biches and her Natalia Petrovna, and they are far from good. Her Hostess lacked the wit and sophistication of Yanovsky or the extraordinarily effective characterisation of Chapman while as Natalia she was way out of her depth in a role created for one of the greatest dance actresses of the last century. Ashton's ballets are always concerned with dance as a flow of movement rather than the exposition of classroom steps straight from class and a series of poses and photo opportunities. They contain sequences of steps that have to be reproduced in phrases which should,in performance,seem to emerge naturally and effortlessly from the music to which they are set. This means that the dancer should be thinking ahead all the time in order to accommodate the next swift change of direction and the one after that and not slowing down every time they encounter a tricky combination of steps.In interview Hay has said that when faced with Ashton's technical challenges he has found the best solution is to get on and dance the choreography. In other words Ashton's ballets involve dancing rather than merely doing steps and if performers get bogged down in trying to get the steps "right" in terms of making them conform to what is taught in class it means that they have yet to master the choreography and get to its heart as they have failed to understand that Ashton's choreography, like that of every other major classical choreographer, is based on a very personal approach to classical vocabulary which on occasion requires steps to be modified and sometimes fudged and the relationship of those selected movements to the music to which it is set and from which in good performances it seems to arise organically. Scenes de Ballet is the second of Ashton's one act manifesto ballets created to counter the expressionism which was to be seen in Helpmann's creations for the company but where Symphonic reveals classicism's warm lyrical face Scenes is concerned with a cooler more overtly rigorous form of classicism using Euclidian geometry as the basis of its floor plan. In Scenes Ashton gives his ballerina a double persona presenting her both as the embodiment of classicism's diamond sharp precision and clarity and its softer more lyrical pearl like qualities. The leading male dancer in it is essentially required to be an exemplar of compelling heroic male classicism and a great partner. It is a role which calls for a danseur noble or someone who can give a convincing impression of one, for many years during Ashton's lifetime it was one of Michael Coleman's most impressive roles. The leading male roles in both Scenes and Rhapsody call for those indefinable elements of quality and presence which can not be taught but the mood of the two works is completely different. In a great performance of Scenes there is a sense of mystery and distance while Rhapsody at its best feels like a celebration of dance. Scenes is essentially an Apollonian work, cool, reserved and remote with a leading man who commands the stage with the beauty and quality of his movement while the leading role in Rhapsody is, I think, essentially Dionysian and better suited to a demi-character dancer with an easy, unforced, apparently effortless bravura technique, or something close to it. Ideally the dancer will have a warmer, less remote stage presence than the danseur of Scenes and will understand that while the ballet superficially appears to be about technical display it is a celebration of dance as an art form in which the choreography speaks through the dancer's easy approach to the text. The minute you notice the choreography's difficulties you know that the dancer has gone horribly wrong and misunderstood what is required of him, after all at one point he seems to shrug off the work's challenges much as the Blue Boy does in Les Patineurs created more than forty years before. It is going to be really interesting to see how well Muntagirov, Campbell and Clarke cope in the cool, heroic sophistication of Scenes and whether McRae has broken free of his tendency to highlight the difficulties of Rhapsody and learned to make light of them. As to Corrales and Sambe will they manage to produce more than a box of tricks in the Baryshnikov role? I somehow think that Sambe will manage a lot better in evoking the ballet's mood than Corrales who, for me at least,always remains resolutely himself whatever he dances. Sadly so far Corrales has not managed to disappear into any of the roles I have seen him dance and I can't help wondering whether that is simply the failing of a young dancer relishing his undoubted technical skills or whether he lacks the capacity to understand that if you treat technique as means to an end rather than an end in itself your career will be far more fulfilling and you be far more likely to be able to withstand injuries and the other setbacks which form part of most dancers' careers. I am not sure that I would describe Rhapsody as an abstract work I think of it more as a ballet in a celebratory mood in which the leading male dancer is essentially the spirit of dance rather than an individual attention-seeking dancer forever drawing attention to the technical tricks he is performing.While I look forward to seeing this mixed bill I think it is a pity that in a season dominated by fulfilling previous commitments to individual dancers and choreographers and generating healthy box office receipts Kevin could not find time to revive Ondine for its curiosity value or Fille for the pleasure it gives. Both Ashron and Balanchine worked in the post Diaghilev dance world in which the one act ballet was regarded as the highest form of dance work and three and four act works and the idea of creating story ballets was regarded as hopelessly old fashioned. They had the freedom to make works whose duration generally was dictated by the duration of the music which they had selected. I think most people then as now are more concerned with the quality of a ballet's choreography than its duration. This attitude to dance works might well explain Ashton's reported answer to questions about how long a ballet should be which was something along the lines of "As long as it needs to be". I would happily settle for a mixed bill of three back to back performances of Scenes de Ballet or Symphonic Variations as long as I was sure dancers with the right qualities would appear in all three renditions, and I know I am not alone.

I think that we have had this discussion about the brevity of both Scenes de Ballet and Symphonic Variations, and the possibility of squeezing another short work into the programme to add more dance time to the programme, in the dim and distant past. I think you are going to have to accept my assurance that Scenes de Ballet is an extraordinarily compelling and substantial piece of choreography which, if well cast throughout, does not need any sort of make weight and whose effect would be much diminished by the addition of a few divertisements somewhere in the programme. You need time to digest Scenes and savour it. In 2014 Kevin staged an Ashton mixed bill which included both Scenes and Symphonic. Perhaps Kevin thought it would be an interesting experiment to put the two works on stage in a single programme but it did not work for me as it led to far too much approximate casting although it helped to explain why it was never, to my knowledge, attempted in Ashton's lifetime. I don't think that you can hope to put Scenes de Ballet and Symphonic Variations on the same bill with any hope of success even if you have no intention of double casting either work. Kevin's experiment did not reveal a depth of hidden talent in the form of purely Ashton style classical dancers in the company's ranks,on the contrary it had the effect of showing where the supply of such dancers ran out. My recollection is that both ballets were double cast and while one of the Symphonic casts was fine the rest of the casts in both works were less than ideal being only good in parts. The reason for this variability was that double casting both ballets resulted in the most suitable dancers being far too thinly spread across the two works. The problem is that when it comes to casting these two ballets there is a terrific overlap between the dancers most suited to both works. Symphonic is a killer for everyone involved in it as the entire cast of six remains on stage throughout the entire ballet. Scenes is a little more forgiving but everyone appearing in it including the entire corps has to be needle sharp and precise in every movement they make and recognise the absolute necessity of keeping the floor plan clear throughout. In my limited experience of poor performances of Scenes it is usually the four men, who at various times act as moving scenery,the ballerina's cavaliers and living sculpture, who let the side down by being ragged and slightly out of sync with each other. The best performances field a corps composed of mature senior dancers who can be trusted to understand the need for complete accuracy and precision throughout. Rhapsody was created as a bravura display piece for the greatest male dancer of his generation and I suspect that it took that dancer to the edge of what was physically possible then and now. It is the length dictated by the duration of the music to which it is set and the dancer's stamina and endurance. Clearly Kevin thinks that he has three dancers who can do the work's pyrotechnics justice and wants to show then off. I fear that all three men will approach the choreography as an opportunity for tackle its challenges rather than displaying its undoubted beauties which is why I am sorry that Hay is not dancing with Hayward in this revival because they are one of the few casts that I have seen who make it look beautifully Ashtonian. While A Month in the Country is a great work I should have loved to see Kevin staging a revival of the full Apparitions. I can't help wondering why Kevin is so helpful to the Ashton Foundation when he shows so little interest in staging any of the ballets they have worked on or on staging any of the works which we saw excerpts from at the Fonteyn gala.

Of course telling Mr Beard how easy it is book tickets elsewhere in the world is exactly what Alec and his complacent underlings need to hear.The whole organisation is a joke as it wallows in the reputation earned for it by the sound artistic decisions made years ago by Sir David Webster and Sir John Tooley; the opera company's music directors; the ballet company's directors and the choreographers who worked for them. But at the same time as these people made important decisions which added lustre to the resident companies' artistic reputations those in charge of the organisation never lost sight of the dirty commercial side of things. They never forgot that they needed to please the paying public and needed to sell tickets to a socially diverse audience by keeping amphitheatre prices affordable. Today those running the Opera House behave as if they are running a temple to the lyric arts rather than a theatre which needs to sell tickets to survive,(currently it is meant to cover 80% of its costs at the box office). It is quite simple the ROH is run by the sort of people who make it to the top in arts organisations today and they are people whose core skills seem to be the art of schmoozing and the ability to persuade the rich to make generous donations to the organisation for which they are working rather than hands on experience of undertaking the essential tasks in an organisation of the type they are to run.They know the right people, they have generic managerial skills rather than the specialist knowledge and skills required to run the organisation which they have been appointed to run and the very last thing they know anything about or are interested in is the commercial side of the operation such as effective publicity and selling tickets. I know that they have underlings who perform these tasks for them but their lack of personal experience in these areas has always seemed a weakness to me as it makes the manager more likely to accept assurances that all is well at face value when new systems are being introduced. The organisation's greatest weakness, it seems to me is that it is impossible to imagine someone today with the sort of background the first General Administrator Sir David Webster had, running a department store in Liverpool and running musical concerts in the city,ever being considered for the post he once occupied. While we are telling the powers that be what is wrong with their website perhaps they should be asked why they persist in listing both ballet and opera performances and other events in such a haphazard manner in each booking period? A friend of mine once asked about the listing of events on the website and was told that the list sets out the events in the order in which they will take place thus if an event such as a Glitter Tour, whatever that is, or Dance with the Royal Ballet is the first event in a particular booking period that event will take precedence over the first night of a run of ballet or opera performances which occurs the following evening. I don't understand why they don't take the logical approach of beginning the list with the theatrical performances occurring at the Opera House during the booking period listing all the performances in the following order, main stage performances; Linbury performances; any performances in the Clore; followed by open rehearsals; insight events; tours and miscellaneous events. I don't much care whether ballet and opera are listed separately or not. I object to scrolling through so much dross to find what I am looking for. I can't help thinking it would be a great advance if the Royal Opera House could bring itself to admit first that it is engaged in the theatrical business and as such it is in trade and second being in trade it recognises the need to adopt a more businesslike, orderly and logical approach to publicising its theatrical activities. Given the amount of money it has lost in sales during the covid enforced closures I don't understand why it does not behave more like a real theatre by attempting to catch passing trade by displaying details of what's on and ticket availability in the new extension which is supposed to lure the public in from the piazza and prove that the organisation is open and accessible to all. Did I miss something but I assumed that all the fuss made about the building and its name deterring people from crossing its threshold let alone buying tickets meant that the new accessible area was going to be used not just to to entice people to buy refreshments but to buy tickets and attend performances? After the farce with the website I think they should keep a box office desk in the area by the stairs to sell tickets manned by people who are able both to sell tickets and to provide information about casting. As far as appreciation of ballet is concerned whether it is Alec Beard talking at a meeting of the Ballet Association about his interest in ballet being kindled by seeing Bussell in Manon or someone engaged in market research for the ROH expressing a keen interest in the art form it never quite rings true . I think it is something do with the fact that such statements generally lack supporting detail and tend to sound more like something the speaker thinks they should say or has been advised to say. I sometimes wonder whether in such circumstances the statements are being used as a way of establishing rapport with the group they are talking to and are in effect no more than a psychological trick intended to improve communications a bit like mirroring is supposed to do. The circumstances in which such information is imparted differ widely Mr Beard's generally wants to persuade his audience that his decisions however unpalatable they may appear are those of a fellow balletomane while the market researcher merely wants to put her group at ease and reassure them in order to get their full assistance.

What can you do about the woeful state of the ROH's website? Well you could message Mr Beard himself on his Twitter account and tell him how poor the website is when you try to use it to buy tickets. Let him know how frustrating it is to use it and how much easier it is to buy tickets for performances in Tashkent than to buy tickets for performances at Covent Garden because I suspect it won't change until the man at the top is told about these defects repeatedly. I have to say I find it really difficult to believe that the system was designed by anyone with any real knowledge or understanding of the Opera House's basic function as a theatre or the actual needs of its ticket buying audience,and that is almost certainly attributable to the client organisation's lack of knowledge of such basic matters. I believe that those in charge of sales "know" that most of their ticket sales are made to people who only buy tickets occasionally rather than habitual audience members who make multiple ticket purchases in one go. I have been told as much in the past by people working there. At the same time I was also told with absolute certainty that no one goes to multiple performances of a ballet and no one goes to opera and ballet performances. Of course I can'r know for sure but perhaps this "knowledge" fed into the specifications which were set when the contract for the new computer system was being negotiated, but it might go a long way to explain why the website is so poor in operation and layout. Perhaps the idea that the bulk of its audience at every performance is there for a special event of some sort explains why the organisation is so keen to publicise the availability of onsite catering.

Here is a condensed version of what I wrote a long time ago when I first joined the forum. One of the reasons that I became a ballet goer was that I was not taken to see the Nutcracker when I was a child. I always suspect that if I had been exposed to Nutcracker as a child or to any ballet set to music by Minkus I would have been put off ballet for life. The lack of a Nutcracker or Minkus experience meant that I had no preconceived ideas about what were appropriate subjects for ballets; what they should look like or sound like. Having innocent ears and eyes is, it seems to me, a great advantage when encountering ballets set to major twentieth scores by composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I was taken to the ballet for the first time when I was in my mid teens by an honorary aunt who took me to see a mixed bill performed by Ballet Rambert which at that time was in the process of becoming a contemporary dance company but still had significant early works in its active repertory. I know that I saw Tudor's Judgement of Paris on that occasion and I think Pierrot Lunaire with Christopher Bruce was also on the bill. I came away from that performance thinking that ballet was a very good thing indeed. Not long after that I encountered Tudor's Dark Elegies and was equally impressed with it. Anyone who saw the two Tudor works at the company's celebration of his birth will probably be astounded that either work was capable of making such a profound impression on anyone. All I can say is that what was shown in London in 2009 were, to be polite about them, pale imitations of the works which Tudor had created.( If you were disappointed by Rambert's performances to mark Tudor's centennial and wonder why he is held in such high regard please see post). After my Rambert experience I tried to see everything I could regardless of the company. The Royal Ballet Touring Company came to Oxford and I went to see them. I found out that if you went to the Wednesday schools' matinee you came into contact with old repertory like The Lady and the Fool, Pineapple Poll,The Rake's Progress and Les Patineurs. I worked out how to get tickets for Covent Garden and I went to see LFB at the Coliseum all the while collecting ballets in the same way as I was collecting operas and trying to work my way through the Shakespeare canon. The 1960's and 70's seem almost unreal today. It was a totally different cultural world.In those days rather than living in a perpetual present companies seemed very conscious of the development over the previous fifty years and the debt they owed to Diaghilev. Perhaps it was the exhibition to mark the twentieth fifth anniversary of Diaghilev's death which prompted the interest and the introspection or perhaps it was the deaths of some if those involved with his company which had this effect but at a time of tremendous creativity and the creation of major works a company like the Royal Ballet was able to find time in its studios and performance schedules to stage major works by Fokine and Nikinska. The works of the past were not seen as they often seem to be today merely a means of making money. Staging the great works of the recent past was not , at that time, a resented chore. The recent past was as exciting and compelling as the present and the present at that time was very exciting with Ashton and MacMillan both making major works, Cranko in Stuttgart making important works which the company brought to London and Balanchine and Robbins making exciting new works in New York. Choreographers appeared on television and on the third programe to talk about their own work and the great works of the past and then of course there were dancers who were household names plenty of whom appeared in London and many who were to be seen in Bow Street.The Royal Ballet was not the one dancer company it largely became to the general public in the 1990's. It was the company of Fonteyn and Nureyev but equally it was the company of Sibley, Dowell, Park, Wall, Seymour,Jenner, Penney, Mason, Coleman and MacLeary. Ballet, opera and theatre were more available to ordinary people then they are today. Touring arrangements meant there was a lot more ballet, opera and theatre available to the general public and whether you were in London or the provinces the arts were genuinely accessible and affordable. State subsidy for the arts had not become the political football it has become largely because it was difficult to argue that the average worker was being asked to subsidise the pastimes of the social elite because company's toured; ticket prices were low and there was an audience. State subsidy meant that experimenting and finding that you did not like a particular art form, work, composer or choreographer was not the costly experience it is today. I know that this sounds very paternalistic and almost like nanny state but the postwar consensus about society which included the radical idea that the arts were good for you and should be made accessible to those who wanted them regardless of class was still very much in place. The popular press did not think there was any mileage in pushing the pernicious idea that elite arts were only for the toffs and of course the big names from the pioneering days of ballet in this country were still alive, vigorous and vocal. Ballet was one of the arts and was covered in the arts columns. Journalists were expected to take it seriously and it was covered as art rather than showbiz. Peter Wright's new production of The Sleeping Beauty (1968) got acres of coverage, Oleg Kerensky devoted several paragraphs in the Listener to the unsuitability of the bell shaped tutus which da Nobili had designed for it. The BBC took its duty to inform, entertain and educate very seriously. it showed the occasional ballet performance even ITV chipped in with the odd performance and in the early 1970's it showed a series of half hour programmes about the development of ballet which I think was base on Brinson's Ballet For All educational programmes. It had David Blair as its presenter and used dancers from the Touring Company. Tudor Centennial and Reputation a Footnote. Neither of the Tudor ballets which I saw all those years ago looked remotely like the disappointingly anaemic accounts of them which Rambert served up at the time of the choreographer's centenary. In those early performances of fifty years ago the dancers conjured up characters and emotional states from the choreography but then those dancers had the benefit of working in the context of an unbroken chain of transmission. They had a real feel for what Tudor had set out to achieve with those works; what seemed like an innate understanding of who each of the characters in the ballets were; what they should look like physically;how they would move and what motivated them. Both works were described by Rambert as "Chamber ballets" but while I think that the new Sadler's Wells might be a bit too big for them I don't think that so much should have got lost in performance. The Judgement of Paris is a darkly comic take on the myth in which the action is set in a seedy, low bar rather than Mount Ida, Paris is not a Trojan prince but the sole customer in a the bar. The three goddesses of the myth transformed into three bored, predatory worn out hostesses all of whom have seen better days attempt to entertain the man who gets increasingly drunk until he passes out at which point the waiter and the women swoop on him strip him of his money and his valuables before he is kicked out .Dark Elegies on the other hand is a profoundly moving work in which Tudor portrays a group of parents in a small community whose children have died. As they are depicting ordinary people the dancers' movements should look heavy and grounded rather than light and dance- like,additionally their sense of loss and desolation adds greater weight to their movements as each in their own unique way expresses emotions for which they have no words and for which, perhaps, there are none . Sadly no one in those centennial performances managed to do justice to the quality of Tudor' s unique artistic and theatrical imagination,his choreography or his ability to evoke mood and raw emotion from plastique and simple movement. Everyone involved, regardless of the character they were supposed to be portraying, remained looking like the lithe athletic dancers they were. I accept that the aesthetic, the tone and the vocabulary of these works are alien to dancers today because they don't emphasise technical ability and treat technique as a means to an end rather than en end in itself but whoever staged those ballets failed to kindle in the casts that imaginative empathy which makes an old work live as a compelling piece of theatre. That failure could be for any number of reasons from resistance from the dancers to lack of adequate rehearsal time, Tudor's works require extensive periods of rehearsal if they are to work in performance.The fact is that these revivals did the choreographer and his reputation a grave disservice, as for many those performances may be the only occasion on which they encounter the choreographer and his works and pn the basis of what they saw they are unlikely to be tempted to seek out other works by him.

Ashton's 1968 Awakening pas de deux was seen in the early performances of de Valois 1977 production of Sleeping Beauty but it was dropped after a couple of seasons. Eminent critics complained that it was not Petipa and therefore not authentic but I think the real reason it was dropped was the same one that led to the loss of the Farandole in the Hunting Scene. Those short sections meant the performance went past 10.30 pm and the company had to pay overtime. The pas de deux was shown in the mixed bill performance televised as part of the Ashton centennial celebration in 2004 which is almost certainly the source of the recording.

I can't help thinking that a significant shift of focus which threatened to turn the company into a contemporary one would lead to all sorts of additional problems for ENB over and above those it already faces as a result of covid. A company which receives ACE funding does so on the basis of the type of performances it gives and where in the country it gives them. Unless I am very much mistaken I would think that it would be very difficult for the Board and its new director to change the company's artistic direction of travel overnight without the ACE agreeing to it; an evaluation of the company's proposed size and repertory and a reevaluation of the basis on which the company is funded. While ACE may be very keen on contemporary dance, for all sorts of reasons including the fact that it is cheaper to run a small contemporary company than one of the size required to stage classical ballets, the transition would take several seasons and it would not clear its covid debt. I am not convinced that the ACE would be happy to write off the debt of such a large arts institution at the present time. As far as Rojo's legacy is concerned if past experience is anything to go by then you can be pretty sure that any changes which Rojo has made to expand ENB's range of repertory and the choreographic styles which the company performs will not outlive her departure for any length of time.The last director who was as interested as Rojo has been in expanding the company's artistic horizons was Schaufuss and he has left no lasting memorial in terms of permanent additions to the company's core repertory. Indeed you might almost argue that with the exception of a handful of core works ENB is a company which under most directors operates as if in a state of artistic amnesia with no clear sense of having an artistic identity of its own other than it tours and is not the Royal Ballet. I am not entirely sure that I would try to determine whether ABT or ENB is the more prestigious company of the two.I think that they are each unique institutions which are best understood today within their own national artistic ecosystems. Although LFB no doubt owed its existence to its founders' experience of working in the US, ABT does not have to define itself as not being NYCB but it has on occasions seemed as if LFB/ENB's main claim to having a sense of its own unique artistic identity has been that it tours and it was not the company dancing at Covent Garden. What ENB or its artistic identity is, at any one time has always had far more to do with who the director is,and what their tastes are, than anything else. In this it is more like Rambert than either of the Royal companies or ABT. The one exception so far to the general sense of stability and permanence in Bow Street has been Stretton's directorship when his neglect of the company's core repertory and his programme choices suggested that he thought that his task was to turn the company into ABT on Thames.We have yet to see what the effect of the change of director will have on BRB's repertory and style. But at ENB there are no new brooms only new directors each of whom plots their own artistic course and either runs into trouble at some point or completes their contractual term. ENB has until now been a company seemingly without much sense of its own history, few directors choose to revisit their predecessor's triumphs or seem to be aware of them, and of course unlike the Royal, Rambert or ABT the company has never had a house choreographer, let alone one of genius. As a result ENB is essentially a tabula rasa as hardly any of its ten directors have managed to leave anything remotely resembling a permanent mark on its repertory, its style or its artistic vision. Once the new director accepts that its basic nineteenth century repertory is what keeps ENB afloat financially and that as far as the Board is concerned the Nureyev Romeo and Juliet is irreplaceable, they seem to have considerable artistic freedom as to what they choose to stage. Director's either leave a lasting mark with their programming choices and their acquisitions or they don't and most don't. Grey collected Diaghilev repertory which had either never entered the Royal Ballet's repertory or was being neglected there. In the seventies London audiences got to see works like Parade, Le Tricorne and Le Beau Danube. Some works found a semi-permanent home in the company's repertory others did not.For years if you attended an ENB mixed bill it either ended with Etudes which was always danced idiomatically and extremely well or Fokine's orientalist romp Scherezade. When Schauffus was in charge he had some spectacular artistic successes staging his well regarded version of La Sylphide which he danced with Evdokimova and persuading Ashton to revive his Romeo and Juliet, but he went early and nothing remains of his time there. As to what comes next that will almost certainly depend far more on the company's finances and the candidates' financial acumen than any artistic vision or aspirations they have.The financial challenges that the company faces as a result of covid are likely to dominate the director's programmes for several seasons and limit the implementation of any ambitious plans they may have for additions to the repertory and new commissions. When it comes to the Board's choice of Rojo's successor the chances are that it won't be anyone that any of us have mentioned. I hope that it is someone who retains some of Rojo's restorations and additions to the repertory. What do I want ? I would like to see a director who manages in de Valois'words to live in the present, honour the past and welcome the future. In the context of ENB that would mean a director who recognised and celebrated the strong affinity the company has always had with the Romantic ballet whether we are talking about Skeaping's Giselle or its evocation in Markova's Les Sylphides. He or she would understands the need to treat twentieth century choreography with respect and sees the benefit of ensuring that its core repertory included some outstanding examples works from this time. Ideally the works, or the bulk of them, would not be shared with the Royal Ballet. My suggestion would be that bpth Lander's Etudes and Lifar's Suite en Blanc/ Noir et Blanc remain part of the company's active repertory along with Night Shadow/ Sonambula which it once danced and perhaps that Balanchine's Serenade,Concerto Barocco and Mozartiana, Tudor's Pillar of Fire and Graham's Appalchian Spring should enter its repertory. I hope that my suggestions are not interpreted as an exercise in nostalgia because they are not intended to be that. We see any number of new works in London which show remarkably little sense of theatre,structure or the need for variety, simplicity and brevity. My hope would be that exposure to, and familiarity with a number of great twentieth century ballets might have an impact on young impressionable would be dance makers in the way that Petipa clearly did on Balanchine and Ashton. Perhaps the knowledge that Balanchine did not see himself as an inspired creator but as a craftsman might help the young aspirant choreographer of today when they take their first steps as a creative artist. One or two people have seemed to be more concerned that the new director should commission female choreographers than anything else. I would just like to see commissions going to people with talent regardless of their sexual orientation. The apparent lack of solid choreographic talent never ceases to amaze me especially when compared with the number of choreographers whom Rambert managed to discover during the early part of her career. The list include two of the great choreographers of the last century Ashton and Tudor and several whose works were of importance to Rambert's company and might still be if they were revivable. The list from the early years of her company includes Gore, Staff and Howard with Bruce and Morrice being of importance in the contemporary phase of her company. I think it might be helpful to accept that Rambert given her character was almost certainly far more interventionist than we might imagine and that in some cases the "discovery" may have been far more of an active process on her part than we might expect in the development of a creative artist. But then perhaps what any young inexperienced choreographer needs is a second more objective pair of eyes in the rehearsal room with them. Ashton said that Fedorovitch encouraged him to simplify his ideas to give them focus while Tudor was more than willing to say that his partner, the dancer Hugh Laing,had helped him avoid any number of mistakes, by pointing out unnecessary repetition and where editing was required. Perhaps what I should really hope for is a new director who recognises this need and does something to meet it and by doing so encourages creativity within the ranks of the company. I will finish by saying that ENB should not tackle The Song of the Earth again if it can't afford good singers.

I think it unlikely that the appointment of Rojo's successor will be anywhere near as controversial as her appointment was. I think it is pretty safe to assume that the time slot for applications will be considerably longer than it was when the company was looking to replace Eagling and that has to be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how how far afield the Board looks and how smoothly the appointment process runs. As to who finally emerges as Rojo's anointed successor that will depend on what the Board thinks the company needs at present and, in the context of the problems which the pandemic has caused all arts organisations and ballet companies with permanent workforce in particular, they may well decide that the most suitable candidate this time is someone they think will be a "safe pair of hands". In this context a "safe pair of hands" would be someone who has a proven track record of artistic success running a company, whether large or small, rather than someone who has studied the theory and shadowed others. It will probably mean that they select a director or former director who is prepared to curb his or her artistic ambitions for at least a couple of seasons while they set about restoring the company's finances to health. I doubt that the Board will feel that it can afford to take the sort of gamble that it did when it appointed Rojo. I know that ENB's finances are always somewhat precarious and that the company is heavily dependent on its London Christmas season to restore it to financial health.After two Christmas seasons in which it has not been able to restore its finances I imagine that the Board will regard financial health as the new director's main objective. As a result the Board is likely to be far less adventurous than it was ten years ago. I am not suggesting that the Board will want a clean break with the immediate past, merely that out of necessity whether or not Rojo's Raymonda is a success and whatever the newly appointed director's long term plans for the company may be , in the short term we are likely to see much greater reliance on the company's back catalogue and far less innovative additions to the repertory than we have become accustomed to under the current director. If I am right in this assessment it would mean that the Royal Ballet's senior dancers who are contemplating their next career move would be out of the running and the local candidates for the directorship would be people like Hampson and Page rather than the likes of Lamb, Bonelli or McRae. I am not including Acosta in the list of experienced potential candidates as I think that the fact that he has only recently taken up the post of director at BRB rules him out. It is not the fact that covid has prevented him having much to show for his time at BRB which is crucial here but the fact that applying for the ENB post would signal an over all lack of commitment to his current company and suggest a potential lack of commitment to any company of which he became director. As far as the other names which have been mentioned are concerned as far as I am aware neither Ferri nor Durante have experience of running a company or organisation while Durante has a somewhat patchy record as far as running events is concerned. As far as what we are likely to see is concerned company revivals of Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Giselle must be on the cards as well as the perennial Nutcracker which is currently Eagling's version of the ballet. These works are safer box office when on tour in this country than Manon or Le Corsaure are, or a successful Raymonda would probably prove to be.How to get audiences outside London to part with their hard earned cash to see ballets with which they are far from familiar is a problem which is made worse by the lack of interest which the BBC shows in ballet in its arts coverage. I would not be at all surprised to discover that the BBC's lack of interest in ballet is connected to the ACE's decisions years ago to remove both Oxford and Cambridge from SWRB/BRB tours on the basis that the company could be seen elsewhere and all the audience had to do was to travel to a venue favoured by ACE. I don't think that students have changed all that much over the years. If something is on hand and can be accessed relatively cheaply they might try it. If they have to travel some distance and pay quite a lot they won't go unless the event is a pop festival. The indifference to ballet of those in charge of arts coverage at the BBC could well prove to be the unintended consequence of the ACE's decision years ago to cut ballet touring to the two cities where so many of those who end up running our large institutions still seem to come from. The company is pretty lucky as its productions of these three classics are all worth seeing. Its Sleeping Beauty is MacMillan's production. It has a solid well thought out version of the choreographic text. For me its great advantage is that at no point does it give the impression of being an edited highlights account of the text. While I have a bit more of a problem with the company's Swan Lake I find it infinitely preferable to Scarlett's ill advised production for the Royal Ballet. ENB's production seems largely based on Helpmann's 196e production for the Royal Ballet.It has additional choreography by Ashton in acts 1,3 and 4. His waltz, a pas de douze, is extraordinarily effective and would be even more beautiful if the company danced it in the appropriate style. The production provides the opportunity to hear the music which Ashton used for his pas de quatre in its proper place in the first act where Tchaikovsky intended it to be. Ashton's choreography for the third act, the dance of the guests and the Neapolitan dance are well judged as is his final act. Apart from the unnecessary opening scene performed during the overture which shows Odette;s abduction added, I imagine, at Helpmenn;s insistence my objections are to minor changes made by people other than Ashton himself.I suspect that these changes were introduced by Derek Deane. The problem is that although minor these changes jar. A classic example of this occurs when Deane has the female dancers who present posies to royalty turn their backs to the royals to whom they have given their flowers in order to add a little variety to what would otherwise be a procession. Having said that if we are to have a revised version of the ballet then this one rather than Scarlett's is the one to have. Finally we have Schooling's Giselle which seems to me the most extraordinarily period sensitive staging of Giselle that I have encountered.It seems a perfect evocation of the Romantic ballet , all done without the benefit of the magic which Ellen Terry says gas light provided because the impurities in the gas made its light vary in intensity.According to her it was the impurities in gas light which enabled a skilled lighting man to create evocative stage pictures from the controlled use of shadows and the unstable lighting effects gas provided. Somehow Sir Peter Wright's well regarded production of Giselle seems overly streamlined,business -like and rational when compared to Schooling's staging. The latter is far more sensitive to the Romantic aesthetic largely, I think, because it somehow manages to retain an element of mystery in its designs , lighting and stage action. If the company is forced to dig deep into its back catalogue over the next couple of seasons then a mixed bill which included Markova's staging of Les Sylphides, Balanchine's Night Shadow and ended with Etudes would be most welcome. It would also be nice to see Songs of a Wayfarer which I think had more to do with Nureyev and Friends than LFB/ ENB. Why do I want to see these works rather than exciting new ones ? It has something to do with a work's durability. You see for me the problem is not that I dislike new works, I don't, but so few of the exciting new works I see bear repeat viewing. Most of them seem to die between their initial season and their first revival in a later season. Quite often it seems to me it is a change of cast which proves fatal but there are occasions when it is the time at which it is first seen and the concerns of that particular year or season which make it seem relevant and moving when first encountered and hopelessly dated thereafter. The phenomenon of the one season ballet is not a new one .Cyril Beaumont writing about Diaghilev's ballets says of Thamar words to the effect that only those who saw the work in its first season with its original cast saw the ballet which Fokine had created.

Time out for maternity leave counts in determining length of service as does time off for injury, to treat it in any other way would amount to discrimination. Perhaps recipients of the medal are allowed to choose after which performance they they will receive it. I seem to recall hearing Arestis say that both she and Watson were offered contracts with the company but then were held back at the school for a couple of months because they had both experienced growth spurts and it was thought they needed time to adjust to their new height. If that recollection is correct that would mean that Arestis joined the company at the same time as Watson did,in which case her award is overdue.

I can not bring myself to criticise the Foundation for wanting to congratulate itself for surviving its first ten years after the problems it had in getting started so I fear I might seem a little churlish in complaining that it has not managed to achieve more during that time. I have already written on the Ashton Festival thread about the institutional difficulties that anyone endeavouring to restore the Ashton repertory faces as far as the Royal Ballet is concerned which includes the director's own ambitions for the company's repertory. I recognise that MacMillan is currently regarded by most of the company's dancers as the greatest choreographer who ever lived because of the "deep" subjects he chooses to put on stage in his works but I can'r help wishing that the Foundation's work over the past ten years had managed to achieve a bit more than a one night only compendium of snippets from ballets on which, for the most part, it has run insight events plus the full Hamlet Prelude now renamed Hamlet and Ophelia. The first question has to be will we be allowed to see Hamlet and Ophelia again before 2031? The second has to be, if it is programmed again between now and the company's centenary will it be cast with such consummate care or will it fall victim to the tone deaf, anyone can do anything, approach to casting which places far greater importance on giving dancers something to do than on ensuring that the strongest case possible is made for a rarely performed work which is in the process of being eased to the repertory? I understand that management has to keep its dancers occupied and, as far as possible,happy but there are occasions on which the need to assemble the right cast has to be the priority which means selecting dancers best suited to the roles which the ballet contains, regardless of their rank, is the only approach to the take. I think that management made an extremely good job of its 2019 revival of Enigma Variations in three casts there was only one dancer who in my opinion was badly miscast which was a vast improvement on the company's most recent revival of the work. If from now on every Ashton revival is cast and coached with such care I shall be very happy. The main points to be remembered is that Ashton, like Tudor, does not require an overlay of acting as the characters are depicted in the choreography, and all his ballets require is that the choreography be reproduced as faithfully as possible. The entire evening was devoted to works which have either been restored to the stage since the turn of the century or works which the Foundation has worked on at its insight events. I remember in the late 1990's hearing Anthony Russell Roberts, Ashton's nephew, at an LBC meeting declare Sylvia,Dante Sonata and Foyer de Danse irretrievably lost. The first two "lost ballets"have been successfully restored to the stage and on the basis of what we were shown at the insight vent on Foyer de Danse there is no reason why the same thing should not happen with that ballet as well. If only there was the same will to stage these works as there is at Sarasota. One of the most interesting aspects of the work of the Foundation has been Kevin's generosity towards it in terms of making dancers available to assist in its work and his failure, apart from this gala, to provide stage time for it. I was pleased to see the excerpt from Foyer de Danse performed with Zambon in the Markova role. Zambon had stepped in at very short notice at the insight event at which we saw the results of the choreographic archaeology undertaken on the filmed record of the ballet and it would have been grossly unfair to see her replaced by someone more senior and possibly far less suitable. The work shows is a young Ashton working for Ballet Club in 1932 with a really experienced, exceptionally well trained dancer making a ballet for the pocket handkerchief sized stage of the Mercury Theatre which had no wings. I was more than a little disappointed that we did not see the ballet in its entirety as the film record is all but complete, only the dancers' entrances and exits were not filmed. As the only way on and off the stage at the Mercury was via a staircase which features in so many pictorial records of the theatre patching the ballet to provide the dancers' exits and entrances should not be an insurmountable problem. An insight event on Ashton choreographing for Markova with someone like Geraldine Morris delivering the talk with choreographic demonstrations followed by performances of Facade, Foyer de Danse and Les Rendezvous would tempt me to part with my money If the first excerpt showed the audience Ashton working in an obviously classical style evoking the lost world of the dancers depicted by Degas the second from Dante Sonata from 1940 should have shown us atypical Ashton working in a style that owes a great deal to Isadora Duncan. Now while I am pleased to see anything from Dante Sonata the short section selected was much closer to what we perceive of as typical Ashton than the bulk of its choreography is. This to me seemed like a lost opportunity to reveal Ashton's emotional range as a choreographer. Ashton's wartime ballet reflects the strange unsettling world in which it was created. For me the distraught breast beating solo danced in bare feet with loose hair which I believe Ashton made for Pamela May as one of the Children of Light comes much closer to capturing the work's essential unsettling strangeness than the relatively placid pas de deux created for Fonteyn and Somes we were shown. I hope that we are given the opportunity to see the entire ballet as we were promised last season. Then came the short excerpt from the third act of Sylvia which should reveal Sylvia dancing in the grand style having been transformed from nymph to ballerina. Even as an excerpt this solo should be approached as the culmination of a performance and danced in the style of the great nineteenth century imperial ballerinas. Unfortunately O'Sullivan did not seem quite up to the task and came across as ingratiating rather than grand. This was followed by an excerpt from the pas de quatre which Ashton created for Helpmann's 1963 production of Swan Lake. This is a piece of choreography which I would restore to the current production, if I had the power to do so, along with all the other Ashton interpolations that survived as part of the Royal's Swan Lake well into the 1980's. We saw the men's pas de deux which seemed a bit too careful and insufficiently buoyant. When Ashmole and Eagling danced it there was always a sense wanting to display the choreography so that it was exciting and shone. In this performance it all seemed a bit underwhelming, cautious and flat. The Fairy of Joy first saw the light of day in Sir Peter Wright's 1968 production of Sleeping Beauty. Gasparini danced it beautifully but I have never understood quite why it had part of an Insight event devoted to it when there are other more worthwhile pieces of Ashton's choreography to work on. The Fisherman's solo from Le Rossignole was beautifully danced by Ball. It is a wonderful piece of choreography which we are unlikely to see in its theatrical context, a performance of the Stravinsky opera, because of the cost of staging it. This is the same argument advanced to justify its neglect of major works like Daphnis and Chloe, Les Noces and the Song of the Earth. Having been freed from unwittingly subsidising the opera company which it did for years because of the way in which the costs of the ballet and opera companies were aggregated and then apportioned on the basis of the number of performances each company had given, the ballet now only has to cover its own costs. The problem is that now that management is fully aware of the cost of staging each ballet in the repertory the price tag attached to reviving Daphnis or Les Noces seems to act as a huge disincentive to staging them. The live performances ended with Hamlet and Ophelia danced by Hayward and Bracewell in a completely idiomatic and wonderfully unforced manner. Hayward captures the lyricism and expressiveness of Ashton's choreography and makes everything look as normal and natural as breathing. Bracewell was just as natural and effective as Hamlet. A bit like in a Tudor ballet such as Jardin aux Lilas, Ashton's choreography is not about them as dancers but about them and the characters they are portraying and for that reason the technique which underpins their movements must look non-existent. Both succeed in giving every movement they dance the meaning that is to be found in the choreography when performed with an understanding of the innate relationship between the music and the movement and meaning which Ashton has attached to it. I can not make up my mind as to whether these two dancers are essentially throwbacks or whether it is the fact that they have both passed through the entire RBS training system which explains their affinity for this sort of choreography. It can't be simply the fact that the school places a premium on expressive dancing and gives awards for it that explains the special quality that they both bring to Ashton's choreography in performance. They were both outstanding in the 2019 revival of Enigma Variations in which Hayward gave a wonderfully idiomatic account of Sibley's role of Dorabella and Bracewell gave an equally compelling account of Dowell's role of Troyte.

What you forget is that when the Royal Ballet was simply a company with two active choreographers it did not have "Ashton dancers" or "MacMillan dancers" it simply had dancers. All the major MacMillan ballets created on the company were made on dancers who danced both choreographers' works with equal facility. Even today MacMillan's choreography looks so much better when performed by dancers who can still do justice to Ashton's choreography by dancing it idiomatically. I think that the descriptive division came into being as Ashton's choreography quietly disappeared from the repertory after 1988, to be replaced by MacMillan's angst ridden dramatic one act works such as Valley of Shadows, Different Drummer and The Judas Tree at that point we gained a whole generation of dancers who thought that the height of perfection was to emote and sprawl their way through a ballet rather than dancing it well. There were a few honourable exceptions to this new performance style but not enough to make a difference. As far as Hayward is concerned she is something of a throwback and all the more welcome for the fact that she seems suited to a wide range of Ashton and MacMillan repertory.