FLOSS

There was a time when the Nutcracker did not dominate the Christmas programme at the Royal Opera House four years out of five.I often wish that it was not such a regular Christmas fixture. Nureyev's was not seen every year and inevitably at Christmas.I sometimes wonder whether showing a wider range of child friendly ballets at Christmas might not encourage a greater interest in ballet? Please note I am not suggesting that The Tales of Beatrix Potter should be programmed. It was never intended for the stage and I am sure that the decision to stage it did real damage to Ashton's reputation as a great choreographer. i am talking about ballets. like Coppelia, Cinderella and La Fille Mal Gardee which many would enjoy and would provide a bit more variety for all of us..

I doubt that any mild rebuke was intended. We each of us like certain ballets and dislike others and no amount of analysis or explanation will shift us. That is life. Those who dislike Two Pigeons don't have to see it again. Although I am intrigued by the comment about not liking the choreography I am not asking for an explanation. I will simply say that not all the casts brought out what is at the heart of the ballet. Personally I thought that Salenko and McRae were least successful in getting to its heart their performance was very efficient but general rather than specific. I did not expect Salenko to be miraculously transformed into an Ashton dancer but her portrayal of the Girl was a generic balletic young girl and would have served equally well for Swanhilda.The best balanced and most effective cast was the youngest one of Takada, Hay and Magri.Morera was one of the finest Gypsy Girls that I have seen but Cuthbertson was not right as the Young Girl too sophisticated perhaps? Hay and Takada on the other hand were pitch perfect as the Young Man and Young Girl and Magri was a very good Gypsy. It was the performance that for me put the heart back into the ballet. Just as those who don't like Two Pigeons don't have to go and see it again so I don't have to go and see Different Drummer, My Brother My Sisters.Playground,Valley of Shadows, Judas Tree or Rituals again. It is nothing to do with the subject matter of the first five works.It is simply that I don't think that they are very good ballets. Different Drummer is a pale shadow of Berg's opera Wozzeck which is a masterpiece and if you want to see a ballet about war and its horrors then Tudor's Echoing Trumpets is the must see ballet. It packs a punch that MacMillan was striving after but never achieved.My problem is that management is unlikely to make up a triple bill of three of the six MacMillan works which I have named at any one time.They will inevitably be programmed with works that I do want to see and I will have to decide whether or not the other ballets are a sufficient inducement to make me part with my money. But that is part of ballet going you like some you dislike others.

Geoff, The ROH performance database is far from complete and seems to be compiled from several sources, programmes, cast lists and the occasional stage manager's report. I think that the cast on this recording are, in fact, the first night cast in this production.There is a photograph that turns up from time to time on the walls of the Amphi corridor of Merle Park and David Wall sitting on the thrones used in the production with de Valois standing between them. The interesting thing is how much performance practice has changed in the space of forty years without anyone remarking on it.We should not be surprised as the change has, for the main part, been happening gradually.The change seems to be from a style closely modelled on the style of dancing that originated in Russia before the Revolution to one closely aligned to the modern Russian "heroic" school. As far as the RB is concerned a change in performance style occurred during the Macmillan directorship things slowed a little as his choreographic style became the dominant one. You can see this by comparing the Nerina, Blair recording of Fille with the Collier, Coleman one made a few years after MacMillan stepped down as director but that change is nothing compared with the difference between the Collier recording and the Nunez, Acosta one. I think that a number of factors were at work in the change of performance style at the Royal Ballet the lack of a choreographer at Covent Garden, after MacMillan's death, able to impose his vision on the performance practice of the company as a whole and lack of sensitivity to different choreographic styles in revivals. Ashton and MacMillan were both very sensitive to differences in performance style and the need to ensure that they were observed in performance.The lack of a choreographer at the head of the company or indeed in any other company able to channel technical changes and maintain the aesthetic of technique at the service of the choreography rather than choreography at the service of the dancer's technique.The emphasis on technique not only results in an emphasis on tours de force it also seems to produce many performances where bravura technique cannot be applied in which the dancers are so concerned with performing the steps correctly that they forget to dance the ballet. The emphasis on technique rather than interpretation had been of concern to many involved in the dance world in the 1980's. It is what Danilova described as a" display of dancing". But as the great choreographers of the twentieth century died and were not succeeded by anyone of comparable stature the emphasis on technique as an end in itself rather than a means to an end came to dominate performance practice across the world.The dancer's obsession with technical display came to dominate performance practice. I am sure that you remember the programme about Swan Lake in which Rojo and Cojocaru seemed far more interested in duration than musicality. Nothing apparently can be too slow and protracted. Conductors Play a large part in all this. There are a large number today only too willing to indulge the dancers with slow tempi. Emmanuel Young used to do this which is why I used to try to avoid his performances because they were so sluggish and dull but by comparison with what we hear today they were positively sprightly.. In this context the decision to employ Russian conductors to conduct the Russian repertory may not have been a very smart move as that is standard performance practice in Russia. What else is relevant to this discussion? The school and changes in syllabus and changes in emphasis on what is taught.There were intermittent problems at the RBS going back at least the 1960's which were generally resolved by de Valois sorting them out. Park's decision to employ a large number Russian teachers at the school and in effect to import the Vaganova system which leads pupils to believe that the way steps are taught in class is how they should be performed in any and every ballet has had its impact too. I think that most people are aware that, for a number of years, Ratmansky has been engaged in revivals of Petipa's ballets based on the novel idea that every effort should be made to dance the choreography which Petipa created in a style that he might actually recognise.His most recent revivals,Paquita and the Sleeping Beauty, have recovered the choreography by using the Sergeyev collection and applying historically informed performance practice to the manner in which the dancers perform the choreography. it is interesting to note that in one of the countless interviews about this activity he has said that he has come to the conclusion that of the twentieth century choreographers with whose work he is familiar Ashton's choreography is the one that it closest to Petipa's. I wonder when and if the RB will ever become interested in returning to its roots as far as performance style is concerned?

I have, apparently, exhausted my free access to the Spectator so I could not get past the first page, if that, of IB's review. Perhaps someone could tell us whether in the course of her article IB tells us proles what ballets we should be watching, Playground, Rituals or Valley of Shadows?As K Barber has pointed out the indications are that very few people read the arts sections of newspapers and periodicals.Perhaps IB has,until now, taken the public's silence on her views about the RB's repertory as tacit agreement with her view of how the world should wag. It must come as a bit of a shock to discover that the people who she sees as the beneficiaries of her pearls of wisdom are capable of independent thought. For those too young to remember the fifties it was a time when the eight o'clock news brightened the lives of its listeners by telling them about the latest underground nuclear tests and the strontium 90 readings in cows' milk. I am not sure how complacent anyone was. I think that most people were happy that they had survived the war and had a job. .

Who should be cast in the Fairy Variations and in Birthday Offering are very interesting questions and ones that require careful consideration.I really think that the starting point as far as the Prologue is concerned and the rest of Sleeping Beauty come to think of it, is to adopt period informed practice at least as far as arabesques are concerned and to assume that as the score is the result of close collaboration between choreographer and composer it should be played at the tempi indicated in it. It is not a score that had to be created from a score written for a production in which Petipa had no part and should not be treated as if it was. If everyone observes the low arabesque rule the music will not have to be slowed to a snail's pace to fit the choreography into the music.It goes without saying that the Rose Adagio will have to be performed in a manner that does not suggest that the dancer is trying to set a new world record for the duration of her balances. The current,how slow can you go? fashion inflicts terrible damage on the score and renders the Grand pas de Deux in the third act a disappointment. a damp squib rather than the culmination of the ballet. If you want some idea of how de Valois and pretty much everyone else thought that the Prologue and the rest of the balllet should look you should try to find the 1978 recording of the company dancing de Valois' new production at Covent Garden as part of her eightieth birthday celebrations. As it was not a film made for television, but a recording of a performance, it includes the Prologue.The images are rather fuzzy but you get a good impression of the way the ballet should look and how it should flow. If you are interested in searching it out try searching on Youtube for Wall and Park Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty.See what you think. The first variation in the Prologue should not look like the balletic equivalent of the ministry of funny works.It is a slow variation but it should be elegant rather than awkward which it often seems now. On the first night of the Messel production the variation was danced by Moira Shearer.In later performances and in later productions it was danced by people like Vyvyan Lorraine.Lynn Seymour ( during Ashton's directorship); Jennifer Penney ( during MacMillan's directorship);. Marguerite Porter (on the first night of de Valois' 1977 production) and Genesia Rosato (on the first night of Dowell's production).. It is a role that calls for beautiful,elegant flowing movements.Who is the most elegant female dancer in the company? I will post somethong about the rest of the ballet and Birthday Offering in due course.

Of course as a critic Ismene Brown is not seeking to impose her views on others.I wonder whether the problem is that as a critic she sees herself as merely expressing the views of well informed ballet goers and as such entitled to say what the company should and should not be dancing? If you don't agree with her enlightened view of things then you are reactionary..And we wonder why the Russian audience gets its knickers in a twist over what seems to us to be interesting attempts to recover some aspects of performance practice when reviving nineteenth century classics.such as recovering the choreography which Petipa set while not imposing the nineteenth century style of dancing it. i wonder where she stands on issues such as historically informed performance practice as applied to nineteenth and twentieth century ballets or how she would react to an announcement that a ballet company was about to revive a Henri Justament ballet?

MAB I am not saying that the AD should not cast Principals. I am simply saying that casting Principals does not guarantee that a particular ballet or role will be performed well or in a stylistically appropriate manner.A successful revival requires the people casting it to be familiar with the ballet's mood and know how it should look and be performed and to cast it in light of that knowledge. The coaches need to be equally knowledgeable about the ballet and able to communicate their knowledge to the dancers they are coaching.The dancers need to be amenable to that coaching and able and willing to dance the steps as choreographed in the required style. .I should love to see the Prologue Fairies cast with real thought given to what the function of those roles is.There is a tremendous gulf between treating them as Petipa seems to have done as an opportunity to display the depth of his company by casting senior dancers as exemplars of the different types of dancers which were to be found in the Mariinsky company and treating them, in large part, as a training opportunity and casting them on a one size fits all basis. Casting Principals might help improve things.It would restore the status and importance of the variations and should improve their performance.But if you are going to restore their impact then real thought would have to be given to the type of dancer required in each variation.What did each of the original dancers bring to their variations? What did their successors at Covent Garden in 1946 bring to the roles? If you don't want to go back that far looking at who de Valois cast in those variations in her 1977 production should help to get the allocation right. I think that ensuring that each variation is danced at the correct speed would help no end.It would reveal the contrasts in the variations which are far from obvious in current performance practice.It should bring to an end performances of the variations which, with a few exceptions, are dull, dutiful and flat when they should be full of life. I wonder whether we may be in process of experiencing another change in performance practice in which some roles which were were regularly danced by Principals are now increasingly danced by more junior dancers? The Fairy Godmother in Cinderella was always danced by a Principal but it is some years since that was the case. The last revival of Giselle did not have a single Principal cast as Myrthe. It will be interesting to see whether that trend continues.It will be very sad and vastly reduce the impact of the ballets concerned if we arrive at a day when such roles are thought to be too lowly for a Principal dancer to perform. It is sometimes suggested that it is the case in some foreign companies.

Jane, I would not be too sure that the dancers originally cast as the Red Knight would necessarily have been any improvement on the dancers we did see in the role. I am afraid that I don't think that casting Principals always guarantees a stylistically appropriate performance or even an accurate reproduction of the steps. There are occasions when it seems to me that management is far more concerned with employing its Principal dancers than ensuring that we see performances of ballets which are likely to work because they have been cast with care.Management have little to lose in doing this. The ardent fan will happy to see the dancer or dancers who are the objects of their enthusiasm and because they are fans they are unlikely to notice any defects in performance. Those who have gone to see a long neglected work out of interest will no doubt decide that it is the weakness of the ballet which is the root of any failure rather than the dancer's and will assert that the failure occurred because the ballet is old fashioned, not relevant; not a great work or a piece of fluff.No one is likely to notice that the dancers, whose technique is so much better than those who created the work, are incapable of dancing the piece at the correct speed and by slowing it down have destroyed the contrasts and effects that the choreographer expected his dancers to display in performance. This certainly seems to be the root of the problem as far as the 2012 revival of Birthday Offering is concerned.

I don't think that I saw much evidence of miscasting in my early days of ballet going and I don't think that was because of my lack of experience.There might have been miscalculations when giving a dancer a chance to show what they could do in a major role in a major two or three act ballet. Ashton famously cast Sibley as Lise and then decided she was too aristocratic to play a peasant.In another season Dowell danced Colas but only in thatone season. It is one thing to have a Colas who is a gentleman farmer but it strains credibility to have one who is essentially a prince.Perhaps Ashton was merely curious about what the ballet would look like. I think that more care was taken about suitability for roles and about securing the right balance of dancer types in an individual ballet than is now the case.I am not limiting my comments to the casting of the major roles in a ballet, they extend to such minor details as casting the Prologue Fairies with care so that the audience experiences a real contrast in the choreography created for each dancer. Casting is not simply a question of identifying dancers with the ability to reproduce steps mechanically.It extends to identifying dancers who possess real musicality who understand and appreciate the different dynamics.and quality of movement required in each variation and can dance in the required style. In the past those casting ballets seemed to have a more secure grasp of the the different choreographic styles of each ballet they cast. Perhaps the problem is that too much compromise casting blunts the ability to identify the styles of individual choreographers and secure their reproduction. Ashton was particularly careful with revivals of other people's ballets and MacMillan tended to follow suit.It meant that everyone who saw revivals during their directorships or were involved in them had a very accurate impression of what the ballet should look like in performance. If dancers have only seen or been involved in indifferent revivals of a ballet that will becomes the norm if those dancers stage the work themselves.

I don't think that the problem of poor performances through inept casting is confined to student performances although in the case of a RBS performance you wonder why it was selected,if there was no one suitable to dance it.Checkmate is not a blistering masterpiece but it can be very effective if it is cast with care and well danced, the same applies to The Rake's Progress. Both ballets were made when dancers were expected to be more concerned with creating the characters and dancing the steps as set by the choreographer than reproducing classroom steps. Checkmate was last performed by the RB in the year that Bussell retired.It had two casts one led by Nunez with Stepanuk as the Red Knight , the other led by Yanowsky with Gartside as the Red Knight. I saw both casts. If you saw the cast headed by Nunez you did not really see the ballet.The role of the Black Queen did not suit Nunez and Stepanuk did not seem on top of the choreography, The cast headed by Yanowsky was spot on. The same thing happened with The Rake's Progress. The cast headed by Kobborg and Morera was strangely ineffective.I think in large part because Kobborg appeared more concerned with reproducing the steps very accurately than portraying the Rake by dancing the ballet.He was strangely uninvolved in the whole thing. The second cast were Samodurov and Hatley and they were most effective.I have no doubt that many people booked for the first cast believing that,as the first cast, they were most likely to give the best performance. If you did not see the second cast or had not seen the ballet before you would have believed that what the first cast brought to the work was the best that could be hoped for and that the ballet should be consigned to history.. The problem is that far less care is taken over casting ballets than used to be the case.Inept casting can have an exceptionally bad impact on a ballet that has not been performed for years. The general assumption will be that a company which has spent time and money on reviving a ballet will take great care over selecting the best cast it can to perform it.If the ballet fails to make an impact the assumption will be that the weakness lies with the choreographer not the artistic director's casting decisions. If you see an unsatisfactory performance of a ballet which you know you will ascribe the failure of the performance to the cast having an off night or you may come to the conclusion that one or more of your favourite dancers was badly miscast. If the ballet is unfamiliar you are not to know where the problem lies. The fact that a dancer is a principal or a guest principal with a number of companies does not mean that they will be equally successful in every role they perform particularly if management believes that it is more important to employ the company's principal dancers than to cast its ballets with care.The tendency to cast on a "one size fits all" basis has got stronger over the years and it does no one any favours, not the audience, not the dancers and least of all the choreographer whose work is being performed.

When casting a ballet the relative weight to be attached to factors such as technique, stage presence, and acting skills will depend on the type of ballet being cast. Suitability is nothing more or less than a portmanteau term encompassing what the dancer needs to bring to a particular role. Some dancers have an extraordinary range others are limited by the very gifts that make them outstanding in a particular part of the repertory. Technique looms large at present.Rather than a means to an end it has become for many dancers and audience members an end in itself.The performance of the Rose Adagio is not judged by the dancer's musicality but by the duration of the balances and, for some, a performance of the role of Odette/Odile is to be judged solely on the basis of the dancer's success in executing the thirty two fouettes.Even at a time when expressiveness was highly regarded most people,including dancers, would have put technique at the top of the list of factors considered by choreographers and skilled stagers when casting ballets. However technique does not seem to have been as significant in their decisions as people suppose.It could even be that the current obsession with technique deprives us of many fine performances as companies tend to cast principal dancers in major roles and promotion seems to be almost exclusively based on technique. According to David Drew when Nijinska was selecting the Bride in her revival of Les Noces for the Royal Ballet she did not ask any of the female dancers in the company to dance, she merely asked them to adopt a very simple pose and selected Beriosova for the role.No one who saw her in that role would argue with Nijinska's choice but Drew clearly seemed surprised by her method of selection forty years after the event.Sibley in a tribute to Ashton said that he did not always select dancers with the strongest technique when he was casting ballets but that he his decisions were always right.In his autobiography Hans Brenna, who was famous for his stagings of Coppelia and the Bournonville repertory, spoke about casting dancers for these ballets.It is clear from what he said that in selecting a dancer for a particular role their technique was a secondary consideration to the other elements that they needed to bring to the character they were playing. He could work on their technique but not on their ability to play a particular role successfully. Of course I recognise that things are somewhat different if you are casting a purely abstract work but even with ballets without any element of storytelling casting is rarely just a question of technical skill.. A dancer who is a technician may be be appropriate for one role and wholly inappropriate for another,It may come down to the quality of their movement.One role may require obvious attack another may require simple elegant apparently effortless movement.One role may require elevation another fast clean footwork. It may be necessary for the dancer to create a mood in which case he or she needs to possess the right sort of stage persona and presence. The problem quite simply is that you can't reduce how you judge a dancer's suitability for a role to five or more elements which you rank in order of importance,Even if you identify the essential elements, the order in which you rank them will not remain constant, and will vary from ballet to ballet.

There is a great deal of discussion about the virtual invisibility of female choreographers but the RB is in a perfect position to mount a mixed bill of the works of female choreographers namely de Valois, Nijinska and Howard. I think that the company owe Andree Howard a decent revival of La Fete Etrange after it got it so horribly wrong last time with the strange choice of cast, both brides were too old, and the whole thing dimly lit to hide the damage to the backcloth. I don't think that the size of the theatre had much to do with its failure at the last revival. Apparently Marie Rambert thought it worked perfectly well at Covent Garden.There are two dancers who immediately spring to mind for the Meaulnes figure of the young boy, Ball and Hay and for the bride Naghdi and Hayward. Does anyone else think it might be an idea to suggest it? What about a mixed bill of,Les Biches, La Fete Etrange and The Prospect Before Us ?

Something else, equally old fashioned and refreshing,which I forgot to mention about Pigeons, the designs, which do the job that ballet design is supposed to do; create the mood of the ballet and tell you where it is set. The characters express themselves in the steps that they dance and need do no more than dance them in the appropriate style. Morera is pitch perfect with luck the other dancers who have danced it and those who are due to do so will fully acquire the style. The Ashton biography says that the ballet was made at a time when Ashton was coming to terms with the end of an affair but I can't help wondering whether this ballet is not also another one of those occasions on which Ashton created a work which was , in part at least, a response to the work of a younger choreographer, in this case MacMillan's Invitation first seen in 1960. After all Ashton is on record saying that he thought that the choreographer "should deal with that which is spiritual and eternal rather than that which is material and temporary. " * You can't help wondering what his choreographic response to some of the dance works that have been staged this year such as Untouchable would have been.. The world created in Two Pigeons is wholly artificial making no pretence to be realistic or relevant in any way. But then all art is artificial and of the theatrical arts ballet and opera are the most artificial.In this work Ashton seems to revel in ballet's artificiality his gypsies are,intentionally and deliberately, French stage gypsies straight out of a nineteenth century ballet or opera. From the comments on this site this ballet still seems to work as far as audiences are concerned. I do wonder about the lighting, particularly that of the scene set in the Gypsy camp, I seem to recall it being considerably less "atmospheric". *Quoted by David Vaughan in Frederick Ashton and His Ballets 1976

I suspect that any ballet based on a fable by Fontaine is going to look a trifle old fashioned much as a ballet based on a story by Longinus does.The choice of late nineteenth century ballet music gets in the way of Pigeons having any chance of being modern,relevant or challenging. I find that the main obstacle to this ballet being at all modern in feeling or tone is that it was created by a choreographer who had a firm grasp of narrative, theatrical effectiveness and classical choreography.All in all it is rather refreshing after some of the pretentious dance works and inept storytelling we have been subjected to this year..We don't want too much of the sort of thing that Ashton dishes up or someone might mistake RB for a classical ballet company that dances "real ballets". So what I am going to say about MacMillan's ballets needs to be kept secret. Several of MacMillan's non narrative ballets,which haven't been staged for years also show great inventiveness with the classical vocabulary and a curious lack of desire to challenge or shock. Perhaps that is why we don't get to see them, Could it be that Lady M. does not approve of them because of their content or rather their lack of content.? It would be a bit difficult to make the case for a choreographer being an outsider because of the challenging nature of the subject matter of his ballets if the company which is the main shop window for his work were to insist on staging his pure dance works.

Terpsichore why would you wish Spartacus on anyone when there are so many fine British ballets that don't see the light of day? I have seen Spartacus danced by a less than ideal Russian cast and without the right cast it is just so much goose stepping by the corps and bombast from the named characters. For me it's like Don Q best performed by companies who can dance larger than life characters and don't give a damn about good taste.

Well Fonty, I suppose the answer is to join in the debate by pointing out that the low arabesque is academically and historically correct in nineteenth century ballets and in some Ashton ones too.The ideal in performance is to dance the choreography as the choreographer envisaged as that enables the dancer to show what the choreographer intended the audience to see and shows both the choreographer's and the dancer's musicality.It is not necessarily the case that dancers forty years ago did not have high extensions but that aesthetic taste at that time when the nineteenth century ballets were created and in performance practice for most of the twentieth century was for balance;elegance;musicality and quality rather than quantity and extremes.Musicality being judged by the relationship of a dancer's movement to the music performed in the way that the composer indicated in the score rather than being tortured into submission to enable the dancer to perform extreme movements which neither the composer nor the choreographer envisaged.You could add, in the case of a Petipa/Ivanov ballet that not only would the choreographers not recognise the choreography being performed in their name but they would be appalled by it.As Ratmansky said recently about high arabesques in the Sleeping Beauty "You don't show your knickers to the Tsar." Extreme movement dictated by the choreographer is one thing but extreme movement or going for gold in the duration of balances, when the choreographer did not require it,is self indulgence rather than evidence of artistry.

Sorry House of Birds is just a title and some interesting designs to me whereas Danses Concertantes, Solitaire ,The Four Seasons and Triad are vivid memories. I would push for the first three in preference to Triad because the first three use a reasonable number of dancers and are very firmly classically based which is what the company needs.The Four Seasons is a real company work. Like Ashton's Fille it was one of the few new work about whose quality everyone seemed to agree about from its premiere.I seem to recall critics like John Percival saying it was the one thing that had been missing from the company's repertory a true company ballet that could be used as a calling card when the company was on tour. Winter was a pas de trois, Spring a pas de sept,Summer a pas de deux, and Autumn a pas de trois and there is some work for the corps as well.Concerto seems to be the only one of MacMillan's classically based ballets that turns up with any frequency.I wonder is it the company or Lady M. who keeps them off the stage? As far as revivals are concerned while I think that the Ashton repertory needs to be restored to the fullest extent possible and that current ballet goers should have the opportunity to become acquainted with MacMillan the classical choreographer there are some American works that it would be nice to see again.Here are a couple of Balanchine works that were seen in London many years ago Liebeslieder Walzer (RB 1979) and Bourree Fantasque (LFB 1968).The argument against Liebeslieder is likely to be the expense,it needs singers,and it was not that popular with the audience. I have read the claim of at least one dancer involved in the Royal Ballet's performances that the only people who enjoyed it were the cast themselves,which I don't think can be true. Then what about Robbins' Requiem Canticles(RB 1972)?

I wonder how much freedom of movement the AD actually has as far as programming is concerned? He has to ensure that the company breaks even at the end of the season which means he can't afford to schedule too many mixed bills or full length works for which tickets have to be sold at"popular prices" or discounted.He has to try to keep his dancers happy and all of his present company were recruited to be part of a classically based company rather than a contemporary one.I imagine that the AD is expected to maintain the company's reputation as one which produces work of quality which sustains its reputation.Having regard to what happened to Ross Stretton the AD has to act in such a way that Lady M. does not feel compelled to intervene or is not encouraged to do so. I imagine that an AD who is able to demonstrate that he/ she has the ability to programme seasons which are successful financially and artistically is given more freedom than someone who fails to do so,even if it is only a single season which raises questions about competence in this area.At the end of the day although the powers that be would never admit it I suspect that it is financial considerations that loom largest when it comes to judging success or failure.I can't help wondering what has prompted this sudden interest in what the core audience would like to see revived. Perhaps it is the fact that the company has not had a very successful year artistically.It has had more than its fair share of turkeys in 2015.From what I have read the American tour was not an artistic success. The critics were not impressed by Acosta's Don Q and its week in New York was not a great success either particularly the programme of recent works. Perhaps the interest in the ballets which we would like revived is genuine and prompted by nothing more than the wish to please the audience and curiosity about works that were never part of the SWRB/BRB repertory.Perhaps it has something to do with ticket sales and adverse critical reactions to programmes both here and abroad."Inept", "incompetent" and "insipid" are words that were applied with some relish to works in the last two mixed bills.The current mixed bill has received plaudits from pretty much everyone that counts and has been rapturously received by the audience. However cynical we are inclined to be about this exercise in "reaching out to the audience" we won't get if we don't ask so it is up to each of us to decide whether or not to participate. I shall certainly add my contribution to those already on the ROH website. Anyone who wants to see Helpmann ballets revived needs to remember that they were created pre Benesch notation. The "revival" of Miracle in the Gorbals was more of a reimaging by Gillian Lynne than a true revival, The only Helpmann ballet which has been revived at Covent Garden in the last forty years, and so almost certainly notated, is Hamlet and Monica Mason said she had considered reviving it but had dismissed the idea because of the cost.

Most of the Rude Mechanicals over the last twenty plus years have had far too much of a good time in those roles. They come so far forward that you would think that their mothers were in the front row of the stalls and they fail to perform their primary function of distracting the audience and masking Bottom's transformation.But as no one responsible for staging revivals bothers to go up into the Amphi no one notices.

I think that Bussell's problem in the first run of Sylvia was that she was fresh back from maternity leave and no one realised that the ballet is a marathon for the ballerina. Yanowsky said in interview that it was like dancing three different ballets and several of the dancers who performed it at the Mariinsky are on record as saying it is technically the most difficult ballet they have ever danced. As far as fast,clean footwork is concerned you only have to look at RB recordings from the fifties and sixties to see that it was the norm when the ballet was created.You can see the shift in performance style by comparing the Dowell, Penney recording of Manon with the Rojo,Acosta one. I think that we are sometimes too credulous about the improvement in technique. The emphasis has altered, speed and lightness are not now at a premium.Everything seems to be slower and performed more deliberately and the concern seems to be about being seen to execute classroom steps correctly rather than dancing the ballet as the choreographers created them.If you spend your career dancing ballets at one speed being asked to dance at a faster one is going to cause you problems.Cervera and Morea seem to be some of the few dancers who can put on a sustained turn of speed and yet I have a feeling that if we compared them to the original cast in the Neapolitan Dance we would find them slower than the creators of the pas de deux. The way in which some steps are executed has altered.Not an improvement merely a shift in taste and emphasis.

I think that ballet is a serious art form but does that mean that every ballet staged at Covent Garden has to have obvious contemporary significance or that a choreographer's work can only be serious if it contains certain types of subject matter?It is interesting that while we are allowed regular access to that part of the MacMillan repertory that fits the carefully tended image of MacMillan the outsider,the innovator who portrays challenging subject matter and the man in conflict with the powers that be at Covent Garden we are rarely shown MacMillan the choreographer who loved and respected the Petipa classics. While it is possible to analyse the works of some of the major twentieth century choreographers it is not possible to analyse the entire output of any of them and there are some, such as Nijinska few of whose works survive.Analysing some of the oldest works in the repertory must be particularly problematical since they rarely,if ever,come to us from a single untainted source.Giselle for example comes to us via Petipa and there has long been a debate about how much of what we see is Coralli/ Perrot and how much is Petipa? This debate is further complicated by the knowledge that originally the ballet contained far more mime than now and that over the years this has been cut and that the nature of the named characters and their relationship to each other altered and some of them reduced to walk on parts.Then there are the Petipa/ Ivanov ballets all said to be carefully preserved by a number of eminent companies and yet each version strangely different from one another and probably few, if any of them, recognisable to their creators. I recall once answering an exam question about whether it helped the reader of Tobias Smollet's novels to know that he was a doctor and a Scot. The answer was not very much. In the same way it does not really enhance or alter my enjoyment in watching Ashton or Balanchine's works to know about their sexual preferences while I do think that knowing that they both worked in the commercial theatre helps explain their ability to produce works that are theatrically effective and don't outstay their welcome.

If the size of the theatre was a significant factor in the success or otherwise of a performance of Antony Tudor's ballets then surely ABT would only perform them in medium sized theatres.Do they do that? I have a feeling that,as with many other ballets that are performed infrequently,if the revival is not completely successful the fault is attributed to the choreographer or the size of the theatre rather than to any failure on the part of the individual, highly regarded, dancer, casting in general,coaching or staging. We assume,although we have plenty of evidence to the contrary,that great care will have been taken over casting and that only dancers who are suited to the roles in the ballet will have been selected.The Royal Ballet last revived of Jardin aux Lilas in 2000. The first cast included Guillem and Cope the second cast included Bussell. I am not convinced that either cast did the ballet full justice. However the audiences who went to those performances and booked to see their favourite dancers will be convinced that the dancers concerned gave pitch perfect performances and that if the ballet did not work it was as a result of the choreographer's lack of skill. There is another thread in which we are asked to identify which elements of what a dancer brings to a performance are most important. It lists various elements technique/acrobatic skills,stage presence,acting ability and so on. For some reason suitability has been singled out as an element as if it existed separately from technical skill, acting ability. personality and so on.For me "suitability" is the portmanteau word that sums up what the dancer brings to a particular role it encompasses technique; sensitivity to different choreographer's styles; the willingness and ability to reproduce them;personality which influences whether the dancer will place their technique at the service of the choreographer or use the choreography to display their technique regardless of the impact that it has on the ballet;stage presence;acting skills and in some cases the dancer's height and physique. For those who dislike the idea that a dancer should be categorised as noble, demi-character or character the sad fact remains that a tall elegant dancer whose skill lies in the quality, control and beauty of their movement is unlikely to make much of an impact in a role that calls for ebullience and bravura technique where quantity is at least as important as quality. It is the difference between the White Couple in Les Patineurs and the Blue Trio particularly the Blue Skater who ends the ballet.If the dancers most suited to the White pairing were allocated to the Blue Trio I think most of us might concede that far from extending the range of the dancers concerned they had been badly miscast.If you had never seen the ballet before you would almost certainly ascribe its lack of impact to the choreographer rather than those who cast it.

The four greatest choreographers of the twentieth century were Ashton, Balanchine, Robbins and Tudor.Should we ask for the opportunity to see Tudor's works? He is part of the history of the development of British ballet and made many extraordinary works. Then there are the Diaghilev ballets that both De Valois and Ashton acquired. They were not acquired to provide ballets because the company had no choreographers but to provide the company and its audience with an opportunity to know the great ballets of the early twentieth century.Hardly anyone has seen a Massine ballet and Petrushka has not been seen for about twenty years. Should we be content with the lack of exposure that we have to the Diaghilev repertory or the fact that, other than Pineapple Poll, we rarely see any one act works by John Cranko? The fact that the company struggled to cast Les Patineurs appropriately is reason to keep it in the active repertory not to drop it. It was made when the company was developing and like Les Rendezvous it provides really testing and exposed choreography for all involved. There is no hiding place for those whose technique is not all that it should be.

The second cast in Monotones I are Pajdak,Magri and Hay.Only Pajdak has danced it before in the 2011 season.As Luke Jennings said in his review of the first cast of Monotones II in this revival it is easy to forget how little "real ballet" the company has danced this year.I think that the problems that this Monotones I cast experienced and various people have commented upon has more to do with the lack of "real ballet" performed by the company in 2015 than the lack of seniority of the cast.Ashton's choreography is technically difficult and physically demanding and often,as here, leaves the dancer very exposed.Just to make life difficult the dancer must make his choreography look simple and effortless.Perhaps if the second cast get the chance to perform this work when it is next revived they will show as much command of the piece as the first cast do.The first cast have all danced it before and it shows. It is interesting, but not unsurprising that the audience seeing an unfamiliar ballet ascribes all the perceived defects in a performance to the choreographer rather than to the performers.Perhaps it just shows how much we naively expect that ballets will be cast with care and that other factors such as the need to provide senior dancers with roles and the desire to show off recently acquired dancers never enters the equation and becomes more important than their suitability for a role. I think that the dancer's suitability for a role is something that an AD should always consider when casting a ballet and that it should be the overriding factor when casting a ballet which has not been seen for a generation.I think that there is more compromise casting at Covent Garden than should be necessary in a company the size of the Royal Ballet. Ashton rarely went in for obvious bravura displays of technique it is easy to dismiss his works as charmingly old fashioned.When it is well danced it looks so simple and so undemanding that the audience feels they could dance much of what they are seeing which is no doubt why there is a tendency to dismiss his work as twee and unchallenging for both dancer and audience.At a time when most members of the ballet audience seem more interested in technical skills than expressiveness and more concerned with quantity than quality Ashton needs dancers who can do his choreography justice.While I am grateful to see Pigeons back on the stage I don't think that either Cuthbertson or Salenko have done the role of the Young Girl full justice so far.Cuthbertson has turned her into an arch character and Salenko turns her into a soubrette role closer to Coppelia than to the character that Ashton and Seymour created.Why did not they ask Seymour,Thorogood or Katrack in to coach the role and give the dancers the benefit of their experience of working with Ashton.I know that Collier danced it but there is clearly something missing in the performances of the role that we have seen so far. If the lack of impact that the role has made so far is not attributable to the casting it has to be something to do with the coaching. Am I the only one who thinks that a considerable amount of stage time this year has been wasted on performances of works that have been either earnest, worthy and dull or dominated by design and that very few have really shown the company off as a classical company?It will be interesting to see what sort of balance is struck between the classics and other types of choreography in the next couple of seasons.At some point the AD will have to decide what sort of company the Royal ballet is to be.

Might I suggest that if we include in our wish list pieces that have been seen in the last five years we add them as a postscript to the effect that it would be a pity if works like Concerto were allowed to slip out of the repertory. Actually Concerto was last performed in 2012 and has been revived several times since 2000 so it does not seem in danger of being lost. There are other works such as Capriol Suite that have not been seen since the 1980's.A lot of Ashton works were revived in 2004 and have not been seen since and Birthday Offering which was last seen in Mason's final year as director was so badly danced then that it really should be revived with dancers who might actually be able to dance it.The last time that it was really danced well by the company was in the late 1970's.