FLOSS

The film is far less guarded than I had anticipated it might be and I can't help thinking that must be because it was made for the Ashton Foundation rather than by or for the company where people have professional reputations to maintain as specialist Ashton coaches and custodians of the much reduced Ashton repertory. I find the film is as interesting for what it doesn't say as it is for what does . It managed to provide a lot of useful information and provide some very useful archival material which we might not have seen if it had not been for the Pandemic. If things had been normal we might well have had today's dancers performing the choreography and that would have been a great loss. Here are a few thoughts on its contents. The first important point which is rarely mentioned or considered today is what it means to be a company's founder choreographer and the sort of power such an individual has over the company which employs him. I think this is often seen today simply in terms of the company developing to the point at which it was in a position to employ a choreographer rather than in terns of what he did for the company by creating and developing its unique style, its unique repertory and when Markova left developing its next ballerina with a mixture of new ballets which played to her strengths as a lyrical, expressive dancer and works which challenged her technically and artistically helping to develop her as an artist. Bintley, a practising choreographer and outstanding character artist, makes some important points about Ashton as a working choreographer emphasising his singular originality and invention while drawing attention to the way in which, as a practical man of the theatre, he assists the performer who cares to think to create the character he is to portray through the interrelationship of apparently unconnected but strategically placed bits of stage business. Bintley's enthusiasm for the man and his works is infectious and it provides an effective antidote to those who see Ashton , or wish to treat him, as little more than a necessary but unimportant precursor to the Royal Ballet's towering genius, MacMillan whose works today are central to the company's repertory with Ashton reduced to a walk on supporting role. Again I think that Seymour who is often seen simply as a MacMillan dancer, although Ashton made three major roles for her, makes an extremely important point when she talks about Ashton's centrality to the company's creativity and talks about "Ashton's children having strong bones" thus making it clear how much she thinks the next generation of choreographers which included MacMillan, Cranko and Darrell owed to Ashton the choreographer. I have to say I hope that there are many more hours of film of both Bintley and Seymour talking about Ashton. Then there is now the section on Symphonic Variations which I think makes it clear that at some level the ballet in the form it was finally staged still retains elements of the devotional writings which are said to have inspired Ashton to make the ballet, even if they are now evocative and diffuse rather than literal and specific. It is good to see people who danced it in the ballet's initial seasons emphasise its joyous nature and the sense of freedom it gave its early casts as a ballet full of barely expressed feelings which Sibley once described as what it must feel like if you had died and found you had gone to heaven. I think that we should all be grateful for the two things which made that ballet possible. The first is that Ashton got the idea of staging ballets based on literary and allegorical sources out of his system with his wartime ballet The Quest which was based on Spenser's Faerie Queene. Second that he became a born again exponent of classical ballet largely in reaction to Helpmann's expressionist ballet but I can't help thinking that when he expressed his commitment to the cause of classical ballet and rejected ballets based based on literary sources he was also speaking about himself.As a convert he remained committed to the cause of ballet using the classical idiom until his death. It was interesting to hear from people who were immediately involved in the creation of his ballets. Sleep was right to give the viewer an understanding of the range of Ashton's experience in the commercial theatre working for men who would not have accepted the second rate or the self indulgent from anyone,but wrong I think to pray in aid British pantomime for the presence of travesti roles in his ballets. Although this belief might explain why his performances in Cinderella were so brash and vulgar,he ought to be aware , but clearly isn't, that travesti roles are part of a very ancient theatre tradition which is not confined to the British Isles. What Sibley had to say about the Dream not being based on pure classical movement should help point the way for those who coach the work as should her description of Titania being a really sexy fairy, as she has of late become far to straight laced and demure. Such comments are useful at a time when much of the expressive detail in Ashton's choreography is smoothed down to make his choreography conform to the sort of classical choreographer those in charge of the repertory in the rehearsal studio believe him to have been rather than the one he actually was. If it was interesting and useful to hear the dancers of the past speak about Ashton's ballets seeing dancers on film whom he would have coached should have come as a revelation as there is just so much more vibrant detail on show in them. The fairies in the Dream did not just make a polite ballet gesture to indicate that they were listening they looked as if they were straining every muscle to hear, and so it went on. The excerpt from the 1962 recording of Birthday Offering showing the solos with Seymour describing the special qualities of each dancer that Ashton sought to showcase should have made virtually everyone involved in the last revival hang their heads in shame, while the film of Nimrod with its original cast was a wonderful reminder of Beriosova's unique qualities of serenity and simple graciousness. While Lynn Wallis who made a good job of staging Birthday Offering in Argentina made it very clear that there is far more to staging Ashto than getting the steps right, but then most of us have known that for a very long time. The one aspect of the film that was more than a little disconcerting was the extent to which certain guardians of the works were prepared to talk about the changes they have made to the choreography. All in all it is a very useful document which should be followed up by a Seymour film and at least a Bintley one about the ballets.

In an evening devoted to a single dancer's career especially one as singular as Fonteyn' it is inevitable that few, if any, of the excerpts staged are going to be cast with dancers capable of capturing the essence of the performance style of the dancer being honoured or even hinting at it in any way for two very simple reasons, every dancer is unique and the company's performance styles has changed a great deal since Ashton's death. It was inevitable that we would find that for many of the dancers on stage that evening the only thing they had in common with Fonteyn was the fact that they were members of her home company. But of course the purpose of such an evening is not to highlight change but to evoke memories among those old enough to have seen the dancer being celebrated and for those too young to have seen the dancer being honoured in live performance to provide a selection of excerpts from works associated with him or her with no guarantee that any of the works being shown are going to be seen in full in later seasons. I found the excerpt from Apparitions intriguing and I should love to see the ballet in full, if only because the floor patterns for the corps look really interesting. But to answer your question directly I did not think that Cuthbertson was ideally cast as the Woman in the Ball Dress however my assessment may be of limited value as it is based on seeing her in the ballroom scene, on a single evening. Matthew Ball was not ideal either but in his case I think it may well have been a lack of maturity and experience that was the problem at that time. Ball in 2021 is a very different dancer from the Ball of 2019 as his performance of the Fisherman's solo from Le Rossignole shows. At present I should be torn between Ball and Bracewell if I were asked to cast the role of the Poet. At the moment I would say that the real problem with Apparitions is finding the right dancer to cast in the Fonteyn role. I think, that like her role in Les Patineurs as one of the two dancers dressed in white, the Woman in a Ball Dress calls for the sort of presence that lights up the stage and compels your attention and those I think are personal gifts rather than ones that can be learned. I say this because I strongly suspect that the roles for Fonteyn and Helpmann in Patineurs were devised to exploit and build on their success of the previous year. In Patineurs they appeared as an intriguingly glamorous couple who compelled the audience's attention however much or however little they did in the way of dancing. When it comes to technique and other skills that can be learned Cuthbertson is excellent. She is well worth seeing in Sylvia and Cinderella and I should like to see what she would do with the Fonteyn role in Scenes de Ballet,but those are ballerina roles created and danced by Fonteyn when she was .at the height of her powers. They call for technique while the role of the Woman in the Ball Dressthe stage, I suspect,depends more than anything on extraordinary stage presence and the ability to create an air of mysterious,compelling allure. Cuthbertson can do many things but mystery and allure are not what you think of when her name is mentioned. I think if Kevin were to revive Apparitions then Hayward would be an obvious candidate for the Fonteyn role as I think she would also be for the roles of Chloe and Ondine, if he felt compelled to have a second cast and wanted to be radical he might think of Hamilton who can be strangely compelling in the right role. l think what the Fonteyn Gala really showed was the range of roles and styles which she was capable of encompassing and, even allowing for the fact that she had a choreographer on hand whose task it was to transform her into a ballerina by providing her with roles that suited her but would also encourage her technical and artistic development, her range was extraordinary as was that of her choreographer Frederick Ashton . He of course from the 1960's onward would create an equally extraordinary range of ballets for the company's next generation of great dancers. The great pity in all this is that Kevin, in his pursuit of newly created repertory, seems oblivious to the choreographic treasures of which he is merely the temporary custodian.

My suggestions begin with three autobiographies Karsavina's "Theatre Street", "Dancing for Diaghilev" the recollections of the English dancer, Lydia Sokolova of working for the great man coauthored by Richard Buckle, and the first volume of Bronislava Nijinska's autobiography. I would add Richard Buckle's biographies of Diaghilev and Nijinsky. While the scholarship may have dated a bit Buckle, a ballet critic who studied ballet to understand it, and staged the first great Diaghilev exhibition to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of the impresario's death in 1954, was the first to write seriously about both men and of course he had met and knew a lot of those who were involved with Diaghilev's company over the years.

Ballet is an ephemeral art form and while it is true that ballets wither and die through neglect because of the damage neglect does to a company's collective memory of them and their specific style and the way it disrupts the chain of transmission, there is one thing worse than neglect and that is staging the revival of a long neglected work with a stellar cast who, for one reason or another, are ill suited to their allotted roles. Miscasting manifests itself in any number of ways, the most obvious of which in the context of the Ashton repertory is giving a role created on Helpmann,a dance actor, to a dancer who is more of a bravura technician than an actor. Casting leading dancers in the revival of a neglected work may help sell tickets but it does not guarantee that they will be effective in the roles they are required to dance. Indeed with some dancers the more eminent they become the less able or less willing they seem to be to enter the stylistic and imaginative world of unfamiliar works, even when their choreographers are on hand to coach them. It can be difficult to know whether a lack of interpretative malleability reflects an innate rigidity and lack of creative imagination and adaptability on a dancer's part or whether, in the case of a dancer who is well established as an outstanding exponent of the art form, it arises from an attachment to the interpretative style which propelled them to the top in the first place and which they can see no reason to change. It is over thirty years since the London revival of Apparitions failed to stir its audience.That night in the Coliseum audience there were some, including critics, who remembered the ballet and were disappointed by the revival. Today it may be difficult to understand why a revival of a work with a cast headed by Markarova and Schaufuss could possibly have failed unless the the problem lay with the ballet or its designs. My recollection is that the critics engaged in lengthy discussions about whether it was the designs or the choreography which were at fault. I don't recall that there was much discussion about whether the Coliseum was the right venue or whether the leading dancers were well suited to their roles but I think that would have been a good place to start. I think the real problem with the revival was a combination of the cast and the venue.The point here is that because of their star status no one, not even the critics, seemed able to bring themselves to ask whether two such eminent performers, who were at the time leading figures in the world of dance, might themselves have been the reason why the revival caused such disappointment if not its out and out failure. It was not as if there was no clue to the types of dancers needed in the leading roles or its suitability for performance in a large theatre. I know that it is fashionable to ignore dancer types and emploi because they are thought to place too many restrictions on dancers' careers but there are occasions when such details matter. The fact is that neither dancer involved in the revival was an ideal physical match for their allocated roles. Schaufuss, a stocky dancer, had an uphill struggle to convince the audience that he was Ashton's Poet, a role which calls for expressive dancing and acting rather than a bravura technique while Markarova failed to establish her character's mystery and allure and danced the choreography in her own idiosyncratic way rather than something approaching an Ashtonian style. It may well be that it was this lack of malleability and adaptability which caused Bedells and, I believe, Ashton himself to try to disassociate themselves from the revival. The hint that the work might not have been suited to a large theatre comes from the fact that after 1953 it disappeared from the repertory at Covent Garden. One thing that is certain is that bad and approximately cast revivals can do more harm to a choreographer's reputation than mere neglect can ever achieve. The works which are most vulnerable are those created by choreographers whose works have been neglected for ages with the result that audiences are not entirely familiar with their style while the dancers are not all entirely comfortable with reproducing it idiomatically. if you add to this the current state of the choreographer's reputation which in Ashton's case, it became fashionable to question or even denigrate as "camp" and "old fashioned" from the late 1980's when compared with the works of rebellious younger dance makers then you have yet another barrier to be surmounted before successful rehabilitation and restoration to the repertory can be achieved. Ashton's reputation has suffered far too often from casting decisions apparently made in order to give seemingly under used dancers something to do rather than based on their suitability for the roles they are to dance. Having said all that I would be happy to see another attempt to stage Apparitions at Covent Garden with a carefully selected cast. I suspect that it is another one of those Ashton ballets, like Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe, which are not workaday ballets which can be staged using a range of dancers more or less suited to their roles but one that needs the right cast to make it work. At present I think the company would probably find the Poet easier to cast than the Woman in a Ball Dress.The work is a narrative one in which a poet sees a woman in a ball dress, becomes obsessed with her( perhaps she represents his muse),loses her and kills himself. At the time of its premiere the ballet was judged by local critics to be a far more effective evocation of the Romanticism of the 1830's than Massine's Symphonie Fantasque. Today, it is mainly of interest it is because the Woman in a Ball Dress was the first major role Ashton created for Fonteyn. The only benefit to come from the revival of the late eighties is that it was recorded. I don't think that anyone who saw that revival in the late eighties can really claim to have seen a performance of Ashton's Apparitions, I think that in order to have a festival you need something to celebrate, such as several year's hard work restoring a range of Ashton ballets to the stage and developing a company capable of dancing his choreography idiomatically rather than one where that is the preserve of a few specialists. Regardless of what Kevin says about the company's dancers having Ashton in their DNA I would consider it a great advance if the company was once again full of dancers who don't baulk every time they are confronted with one of Ashton's tricky combinations of steps like horses at a show jumping event faced by a particularly troubling gate. Slowing down to get things right is not how Ashton was danced in the past and it should not be how it is danced today, as it simply draws attention to the dancer's difficulties. In addition I think we need to remember that contrary to the current popular view of Ashton he favoured fearless dancers not demure, cautious ones. While it is true that his works can seem small scale, demure and more than a little anaemic in performance that has more to do with the fact that he suffers from a lot of compromise and tone deaf casting. Sadly remarkably few of the company's dancers seem equipped to use their bodies in the way his choreography demands while many lack the capacity to enter the interpretative world of his choreographic imagination which is rarely, if ever, simply about the steps or the position of the hands, arms or head. I know most people like to think that their favourite dancers can do everything but the sad fact is that few,if any, dancers have the ability to encompass the full range of Ashton's ballets or the styles in which he worked. Compromise and approximate casting can reduce Ashton's ballets to pale imitations of what they should be in performance. Those who saw the last revival of Two Pigeons but did not see Morera as the Gypsy Girl will have no idea what a full blooded account of the role looks like or how exciting it can be. The point is that the Gypsy is a character and not simply a set of tricky combinations and yet that is all most of the Gypsy Girls managed to deliver in the last revival of the ballet. As far as the Young Girl is concerned only those who saw Stix-Brunell in the role saw Ashton's character as he intended her to be encountered in the theatre. Then there is the last revival of Birthday Offering which , although it was performed by dancers from the top two ranks of the company, was at best an anaemic version of what this celebratory work should look like in performance. Both casts seemed full of cautious dancers who had either been allocated the wrong solo or should not have been in it at all, with most of those cast doing the steps, rather than dancing the ballet. While I think that an Ashton Festival might appeal to the current management as a way to deflect criticism about its sustained neglect of the Ashton repertory, I don't think there would be any long term benefits from holding a festival at this time. It would simply enable the powers that be to tick the box marked "Ashton repertory" and then ignore it for another five years or so until they had to start thinking about the company's centenary celebrations. Even Kevin,if he is still in charge then, is unlikely to overlook that significant anniversary. What I think is needed at the moment is a cadre of dancers who can actually dance his choreography idiomatically and an expansion of the Ashton repertory to include his surviving prewar works.At present he is served by the revival of a small selection of his works performed over six to eight evenings towards the end of most seasons as a sort of consolatory afterthought once the company has got the serious business of the season, performing the core repertory, out of the way. This is not the way to preserve the Ashton repertory or sustain a healthy chain of transmission from one generation to the next. It is a programming policy which will result in the bulk of this important repertory dying through neglect. A policy designed to ensure that the Ashton repertory really is in the dancers' DNA and survives as part of the company's living artistic tradition for future audiences and dancers requires considerably more than a festival or the occasional revival of a long neglected work or works. Even guaranteeing the revival of three Ashton ballets each season isn't going to help if they are to be chosen from a shortlist of five or six titles at most. Securing the future of the Ashton repertory calls for a long term commitment to the task and a steady and consistent approach to getting Ashton's ballets back on stage as part of the company's active repertory. Putting it bluntly the company needs to revise its programming policy so that it includes regular revivals of Ashton's two and three act works and guarantees regular revivals of his one act ballets so that they are part of the regular turnover of repertory. While I am tempted to say that the company should begin the process by staging revivals of Ondine and Daphnis and Chloe as the company has at least one dancer in the form of Hayward who I think would be ideal in both works I think that as a first step management ought to set out to identify its demi-character dancers and those with potential to tackle demi- character roles among the ranks of the company. It could do this without doing any damage to Ashton's reputation by staging Facade which provides ample opportunities for potential demi-character dancers to reveal themselves. Ashton used the rules of emploi in modified form in many of his narrative ballets and at the very least roles created, or inherited by Alexander Grant need to be cast with demi -character dancers if they are to work in the theatre. In an ideal world management would commit to abandoning compromise casting when staging rarely seen works like Daphnis and Chloe, Ondins and Apparitions. It would put together exemplary casts at least in the initial season to ensure that audiences and dancers alike have a firm grasp on what these works should look like in performance. My recollection is that during Ashton's lifetime Daphnis and Chloe was only revived when a suitable cast was available, getting the casting right with a work like that meant that management could only have one cast and it accepted that fact. As the London revival of Apparitions and the recent main stage revival of Birthday Offering show there is only one thing worse than neglecting the Ashton repertory and that is reviving his ballets with ill chosen casts. Strangely unsuccessful revivals of Ashton's ballets rarely result in criticism of casting decisions,the dancers or their coaches. The most popular panacea for such disappointments is to suggest that all that is needed are fresh designs. Many of us have experienced the effect of ill-judged new designs on Ashton's ballets. In the case of Les Rendezvous the new designs c. 2004 failed to establish the ballet's mood with a confusing mixture of periods in the costume designs while making nonsense of Ashton's floor plan by removing the gates and railings which define the area available to the dancers. In the case of Daphnis and Chloe the new designs first seen in 1994 significantly reduced the impact of the dancers' movements as well as destroying the original idea behind the Ashton, Craxton creation which was to set the action of the ballet in modern Greece c.1950 in a landscape in which the ancient gods were still powerful. The 1994 designs did the very thing that the creators of the 1951 production had sought to avoid. It set the ballet in the ancient world and in doing so it destroyed the poetic evocation of the Greek landscape , removed any sense of immediacy and made the ballet's action and choreography suddenly seem distant, remote and extraordinarily artificial. One thing that needs to be understood about the company's somewhat ambiguous relationship with its founder choreographer is that the reduction of stage time allocated to Ashton's ballets according to Jeremy Isaacs was not a response to the audience's declining interest in them. Isaacs' autobiography makes clear that the Royal Ballet became a MacMillan company as far as its core repertory is concerned soon after Ashton's death as the result of a policy designed to give MacMillan's ballets more stage time because he was able to make new works for the company. At present the company's core repertory seems to consist of the following elements all of which management seems to deem essential, an interminably lengthy run of Nutcrackers,an inordinate number of performances of the MacMillan dram ballet timetabled for revival that season and far too many performances of the nineteenth century ballet selected for revival plus MacGregor's latest oeuvre. The first step in restoring the works of the founder choreographer to the stage as part of the company's general repertory would I fear require special Ashton classes comparable to the Bournonville classes given by the RDB; an overhaul of the current established formula for programming revivals and the removal of at least one, if not both, of the after Petipa "classics" acquired since de Valois' directorship. Reducing the number of nineteenth century ballets retained in the repertory to those selected by de Valois plus a staging of La Sylphide which she always wanted for the company would be a good place to start. De Valois'"classics" were acquired and staged in order to establish and maintain high technical and artistic standards in the company.They were never intended to dominate the repertory each season as they tend to do now . Another useful change would be to reduce the number of performances allocated to MacMillan;s dram ballets each season. It really is not necessary that every senior dancer should give us her Manon or that most of them should give us two or three bouts of their Juliet either, when the effect of allocating so much stage time to three MacMillan dram- ballets is to push Ashton's works to the periphery of the repertory giving it the status of an optional extra rather than an essential element of the company's present and future. I would like to see this change in approach to programming for a very selfish reason, I want to see the missing Ashton ballets and I want to see them danced well. I think that exposure to them and the other major twentieth century works mouldering in the company's archives would benefit the company as well as its audience by expanding the range of experience of both. I think that the place to which the world of classical dance has drifted in the last thirty years is one in which ballet has become an increasingly arid display of technique and perfectly formed steps not that different from the current state of ice skating but without the skates.What got lost in the campaign to persuade the company's dancers and audiences that there are two separate and inherently irreconcilably opposed approaches to choreography exemplified by Ashton the establishment man and MacMillan the rebel is the influence that Ashton had on the generation of dance makers to which John Cranko, Kenneth MacMillan and Peter Darrell all belonged, as an active, innovative and original choreographer working in the classical idiom. The idea proposed by those who seek to place Ashton and MacMillan in opposition to each other with Ashton as the exponent of formal, reserved, polite, old fashioned,derivative, small scale and on occasions slightly twee choreography and MacMillan as the original, rebellious and untamed dance maker does audiences and dancers alike a great disservice. It is plainly wrong and it limits the range of works available to inexperienced young choreographers at the very time they need exposure to a wide range of approaches to dance making if they are to escape from reworking the same tired choreographic vein of insipid abstract works which has dominated the repertory for decades as far as new works are concerned . If Ashton and Balanchin could find inspiration in Petipa perhaps today's aspirant choreographers could find inspiration from greater exposure to the company's twentieth century repertory and above all to the full range of Ashton's inventive and original choreography? I can but hope. Among the works I would stage as part of the restoration of the Ashton repertory are Apparitions, Foyer de Danse, A Wedding Bouquet, all of his entertainments including Jazz Calendar and the atypical Illuminations and Dante Sonata. I would give a permanent home to Ashton's Romeo and Juliet as its approach is so different from that chosen by MacMillan. I an see no reason why the company should not have two very different ballets on the same theme. They could be revived alternately as the triennial Romeo and Juliet revival slot came round. In fact I think it would be easier to list the works I would never dream of reviving and those which need an extended rest. The works I would mark out for oblivion are Nursery Suite and The Tales of Beatrix Potter while those which I think would benefit from an extended rest of five or more years consists of Marguerite and Armand and Voices of Spring. Restoring the Ashton repertory would require a lot of hard work perhaps even the introduction of special Ashton classes to prepare the dancers to perform his ballets which might encourage them to think of his choreographed combinations of steps in terms of phrases and sentences rather than individual perfectly formed steps. In other words it would help transform the company into one which dances Ashton's choreography idiomatically. It would of course take several seasons of hard work in the studio and on stage to learn and master a wider and far more varied twentieth century repertory than the one to which the company has been accustomed during the last thirty years. I am concerned that the idea of an Ashton Festival might well appeal to management as a quick fix requiring far less effort and resource than a long term programme of restoration would require. Kevin would only need to stage a slightly wider selection of Ashton ballets than usual and describe it as a festival in order to gain the reputation of a man committed to securing the future of the Ashton repertory replacing the impression that he is a man with little sense of the history or traditions of the company which he now runs. The problem is that however good he may be at telling amusing anecdotes about him at insight events Kevin seems far more interested in commissioning new works than he is in preserving the works and the performance style of the company's founder choreographer. I can't help wondering if Kevin ever thinks about de Valois' guidance on the way her company should be run, honouring the past, welcoming the future and working in the present, because the past he chooses to acknowledge and honour is an extraordinarily limited one. It is in essence the company's core repertory which currently consists of de Valois' classics derived from the Sergeyev stagings, two more recently acquired after Petipa stagings, the three successful MacMillan dram-ballets ,Cranko's Onegin and based on whether a ballet is or is not guaranteed regular revivals a mere handful of Ashton one act works which bizarrely include the Margot Rudi vehicle Marguerite and Armand and the divertisement The Voices of Spring while far more substantial works are treated as expendable. I know it's not likely to happen because Kevin's real interests lie elsewhere but I can hope. I don't want to see the company reduced to a museum of choreography but at the same time I don't want to discover that the new works come at the heavy cost of the loss of the Ashton repertory or the loss of Song of the Earth, Les Noces and what remains of the company's Diaghilev repertory. I can't help thinking that the company managed to achieve a much better balance between old and new works during the sixties and the seventies when it was a truly creative company with two in-house choreographers of distinction than it does at present. I wonder how everyone will feel, if in fifty years time it becomes clear that the Ashton repertory is almost entirely lost and that few of the works which replaced it are more than minor period pieces of little lasting significance. I am not sure that I would want to go down in history as the person who almost single handed destroyed the bulk of the company's twentieth century repertory and virtually eliminated the entire Ashton repertory. But then perhaps he believe he will be forgiven as the man who introduced works like Raven Girl to the repertory.

I sometimes think that Ashton the "classical choreographer " is much more a construct created by the company management by limiting the range of his output which it chooses to stage than an accurate reflection of the range of his choreographic output . It is almost as if the main purpose of constructing this idea of Ashton as the creator of safe charming "heritage works" is intended to enhance the carefully tended image of MacMillan as a rebel at odds with the choreographic old guard in his effort to expand the range of subject matter which ballet might be permitted to tackle. The need to sustain this image of MacMillan as the rebel innovator at all costs would also go a long way to explain the absence of his most obviously classically based works from the stage. The Lynn Wake film is both tantalising and saddening since it really brings home how much has already been lost and how much we are still in danger of losing through a mixture of the legatees' failure to co-operate in the past; the company's preference for working with a small group of in-house coaches rather than dancers who had been part of the creative process or had at least been coached by Ashton in the ballets being staged and the decision made soon after Ashton's death to give MacMillan's works more stage time and reduce that allocated to staging Ashton's ballets which Jeremy Isaacs describes in his autobiography. I know that Ashton reportedly said on a number of occasions that his works would not long outlast him but it does seem on occasion as if he and his original legatees almost went out of their way to ensure that this prophecy would be fulfilled through a collective lack of foresight and sheer bloody mindedness on the part of at least one of those involved. I don't think that the problem is a lack of stage time at Covent Garden but a lack of interest in staging Ashton on the part of the current management. Management can always find time for the things that that interest it. For those in charge at Sarasota reviving Ashton ballets is a labour of love, at Covent Garden it is a chore. Management does not have to devote forty per cent of the stage time available to it to two ballets, it chooses to do so. In the same way it chooses to give virtually everyone in the most senior ranks of the company an opportunity to give us their Romeo and their Juliet. It does not have to so this but in choosing to allocate stage time in this way it creates a situation in which there is a contest for the remaining stage time between new creations and the old repertory which management does not regard as essential to the development of the company's dancers or its artistic identity. If you decide that this is the best way to allocate stage time you end up with dancers who want to dance MacMillan's ballets largely because they are familiar with them but lack a solid grounding in the choreographic style of the company's founder choreography or a real familiarity with his output. It also adversely affects the company's Diaghilev repertory which contains works which were of sufficient importance to both Ashton and MacMillan for them to ensure that they were revived frequently enough to ensure that there was an effective chain of transmission and they did not wither and die through neglect.

I think that we have to understand that the "improved technique" is largely an idea that comes from watching recordings of great female dancers who were active during the fifties, sixties and seventies and seeing that the dancers concerned are not performing steps in the way they are done now. If change takes place in front of you over a number of years you tend not to notice that change is occurring . Your eye becomes accustomed to the change without you noticing it and the new quickly becomes the norm, while the traditional way of performing steps and use of epaulement soon comes to be seen as hopelessly old fashioned and staid. The aesthetic shift is complete when you find a recording of an exceptionally musical dancer from the past who makes every movement look effortlessly normal and natural;performs low classical arabesques in a way that Petipa would almost certainly have admired and seems to have all the time in the world to dance the text with the music played at near concert hall speed and instead of admiring the artistry and musicality on display the performance is dismissed with "Well she was over forty and you can see that she was a bit past it because her arabesques are far too low". I think you have to remember that the way in which ballet is taught has altered radically over the years. If you watch the recording "Teaching the de Valois 1947 Syllabus" you will find the young dancers who were involved commenting on the difference in the approach required with the old syllabus compared with what they are accustomed to doing in class today. The 1947 syllabus requires them to think ahead because some of the exercises involve performing combinations of steps to a piece of music which requires the dancers to be constantly shifting their weight and thinking ahead rather than completing each step individually and then adjusting their weight in order to do the next step. The students comment on how integrated everything seems to be in the old syllabus and on there being less strain on the body when performing the exercises. I think that at some point in the Ashton Foundation film Dowell unconsciously endorses the old approach when he tells the dancer he is coaching to think about the steps in terms of sentences rather than individual words. Watching the 1947 Syllabus film reminds me of Nijinska's reported comment on dancing being what happens between the steps. As to the speed at which dancers perform that too is largely a question of fashion and shifting aesthetics. The great go slow is partly the result of the way in which ballet is taught in the classroom bleeding into performance style, as some dancers find it difficult to adjust to the idea that how a step should be danced when performing a specific ballet may be very different from what they are used to doing in class. Finally there is the fashion for holding poses rather than passing through positions which some older dancers refer to as "photo opportunities". While there are ballets such as Symphonic Variations where the rehearsals begin with slower tempi than will be danced in performance and speed up over the course of rehearsals they are relatively few such works for the main part I think that the interest in dancing slowly is essentially a combination of changes in teaching methods and the current fashionable aesthetic.

I began my ballet going when it was widely understood that technique was a means to an end and should never be seen as an end in itself.Performance style at the Royal Ballet was then largely accepted as being what appealed aesthetically to the company's resident choreographers who still largely occupied the aesthetic world created in the West by Fokine. Ashton, MacMillan and Cranko were willing followers of Fokine in that technical difficulties were not seen as something to be put on display, they were understated and made to look as normal as possible. At that time those whose only skill lay in exceptional technical proficiency tended to be dismissed as "mere technicians". I recall Desmond Kelly some years ago describing how difficult it could be to explain to eager young dancers that when it comes to casting and promotion the decision is not based on the quantity of steps a dancer is able to squeeze into a musical phrase but the quality of their dancing,their artistic sensibility, their interpretive skills and imagination and their ability to evoke specific moods when called upon to do so. Ballet is an interpretative art form concerns about height and quantity sound to me more like the concerns of a circus performer than those of a classically trained dancer with ambitions to be a great interpretative artist. The problem is that a display of technical prowess can really only amaze an audience once. Indeed each repetition of the same set of technical tricks which is not firmly anchored in the choreographic text by the desire to achieve an artistic or emotional response is going to impress less and less with each repetition and may well come to be seen as little more than a display of vulgarity. In La Bayadere one of the things that really matters is how well the corps manage to evoke the strange dream-like mood of the Kingdom of the Shades. The performance of the Golden Idol, a Soviet interpolated display piece, is an artistic and choreographic irrelevance as far as the ballet itself is concerned. For an individual dancer it is the choice between the pursue of perfection, beauty and apparent simplicity on the one hand and the pursuit of quantity on the other. It is the difference between an Eric Bruhn or a Dowell and the latest whizz kid technician who only has one trick in his armoury the ability to excite the audience through displays of technique but has no power to move them. The power of the technician wanes with familiarity and dwindling physical strength, the power of the great interpretative artist lasts until retirement because even at the end of a career with a dwindling technique the artist is capable of giving insight into a role revealing aspects of it that until that point remained almost hidden. As a footnote I found the second act of Nunez's Giselle outstanding. If only her first act were at the same level. It is all a question of taste , I know, but I find Cuthbertson's first act far more involving than that of Nunez. Somehow with Nunez the first act does not convince, She has clearly taken great pains with it but it is, to me at least, she gives no more than a superficial carefully learned account of the first act.

I remember Cuthbertson's debut as Giselle then I marvelled at how fresh and seemingly spontaneous she manages to make her portrayal of the peasant girl of the first act and the disembodied spirit of the the second. For me it was like seeing the ballet for the first time and somehow she still brings that spontaneity to her interpretation of the role. Giselle is notoriously a ballet of two halves and there are many dancers who are better in one act than in the other. Cuthbertson performs both acts with equal authority and credibility. I have always found her portrayal fascinating for the way she really uses the stage business available to her in the first act to establish Giselle's character thus ensuring the audience know who she is. Where other dancers often seem to skim over the stage business in favour of the dance elements of the role in the first act, she keeps the elements of the first act in equilibrium. Although Cuthbertson's Giselle is as obsessed with dance as any who tackle the role she sets out to establish herself as a member of the peasant community rather than the star turn. When she is crowned as Queen of the Vendage it seems part of the way in which the community have marked the passage of the seasons from time immemorial rather than an action demanded by Wright's staging which enable the audience to see one of the most iconic images of the Romantic ballet. Bonelli is of the same mind as Cuthbertson when it comes to making every gesture and every available bit of stage business register in order to build his character and give depth to the world in which the action of the ballet is set. Neither of them lose sight of the fact that Giselle is a demi-character ballet in which the acting matters as much as the dancing. This was a performance to savour in which character and choreography are clearly delineated and integrated to produce a complete account of the ballet. Sir Peter quite rightly gives his Giselles the interpretative freedom to find their own accounts of the mad scene which you always hope will be both convincing and affecting. I thought that Buvoli made a particularly impressive debit as Myrthe. I don't suppose that anyone in the audience who is not an avid reader of the casting details published on the ROH website would have realised that Buvoli was not due to make her debut in the role for another fortnight and so must have had several coaching sessions lined up to fine tune her interpretation during the next two weeks. I am sure that her account will mature and grow in authority and I look forward to seeing that development in future seasons as I am not due to see her again during this run. I thought that on Friday night the corps' lines were a little untidy which is something I had nor noticed on Thursday. Thursday night saw a different cast and a different approach to the leading roles. Osipova's Giselle is a dancer first and foremost in both acts. In the second act she reveals a Giselle who is a far less gentle spirit than Cuthbertson's interpretation of the role suggests her to be. Indeed with Osipova's interpretation there is a hint of danger and of the demonic about her portrayal of Giselle in the second act which strikes me as a valid approach to the role since it is her enduring love for Albrecht which prevents Giselle from becoming a fully fledged Willi and in the early years of the ballet enabled Giselle to escape her allotted fate as a suicide making it possible for Giselle's soul to ascend to heaven. This detail is virtually impossible to stage as Ratmansky's recent reconstruction showed. I can't help wondering whether Sir Peter approves of Osipova's interpretation or not. If I were him I think that I would be very pleased that my staging could accommodate two such different and valid approaches to the role. Bonelli's approach to the role of Albrecht is a powerful mixture of the natural authority which years of stage experience confer on a mature dancer, an extraordinarily well preserved technique and the interpretative freedom, artistic imagination and skill which can make a dancer's performance towards the end of a career so memorable. He gives a masterclass in using the resources made available in this staging to greatest interpretative effect. Clarke's Albrecht is of course work in progress, it could hardly be anything else but already his Albrecht oozes the entitlement and assurance which comes with his status as a noble which no amount of dressing as a peasant can disguise. His dancing is extremely elegant and the slight mishap in one of the lifts was only perceptible to those who know the choreography well. I look forward to encountering this Albrecht again to see how his interpretation develops and matures. Magri's Myrthe is authoritative and would probably dominate the action with any Giselle other than Osipova. The Hilarions in these casts were Braensrod and Mock both of whom are much younger than we have been used to seeing in the role. Both did well in what can seem a rather thankless role which is little more than a character who is necessary to set the tragedy in motion in the first act and then in act two is needed to show the audience the fate that Albrecht so narrowly avoids. But while the relative youth of these two Hilarions may make their characters' motivation seem more convincing than if the role is played by a more mature performer there are potential losses too. The more mature performer is more likely to understand that he has to inject a sense of desperation into his dancing in act 2. At the moment I have the impression that neither man has grasped the need to make his dancing in act two far more expressive or perhaps at this stage in their careers they have yet to find a way to convey the required emotions. If there was a bit of a downside to these two performances it came in the pas de six where I felt more than once that we might have been better off with the traditional peasant pas de deux if only because with two dancers perhaps less is likely to go wrong or look bad. It was not necessarily that anyone who was dancing was that bad I think it had more to do with the fact that in both casts the six dancers were not always as synchronised with each other as we have come to expect in recent performances. I think it is simply the case that we were spoiled in the most recent revivals where we were presented with performances by dancers who were clearly making their final appearances in the pas. The pas de six provides an opportunity for an dancer to be seen and make his or her mark in the promotion stakes. I like Aumeer but I do not think that he is as good a fit with Donnolley as Dubreuil would have been but then perhaps Dubreuil is destined to lead the pas with another cast. Picking up on a point raised in an earlier post as far as Joseph Aumeer is concerned I seem to recall reading in the programme for the RBS' main stage performance that he had been offered a position of some sort with the company and then a little later reading posts on Dansomanie Forum which made it clear that he had decided to try his luck in France.

You could try The Gate Notting Hill Gate. They usually show the Bolshoi's live stream performances.

I don't think that the various ranks within the company have been rendered meaningless by the fact the role of Myrthe is being performed by dancers of varying degrees of seniority. The role of Myrthe is an artistically and technically challenging which does not suit everyone. Myrthes unlike some of the other roles in the standard nineteenth century repertory are not that easy to find and it is a role that should never be cast purely on the basis of seniority. Kevin has said on a number of occasions that he wants to give his dancers artistically satisfying careers even if he can't promote them. As long as we don't end up with approximate casting while he is expanding his dancers' artistic experience I have no problem with junior dancers tackling roles well above their pay grade. I would much rather see performances given by dancers cast according to suitability or perceived potential for a particular type of role than see casts put together on the basis of strict seniority without any thought being given to whether they are right for the roles they have been allocated. As we don't have the opportunity of seeing the entire company in class on a daily basis or of seeing them in every role they dance I don't think that we are any of us in a position to know what may have prompted these particular casting decisions. Obviously someone has seen something in these junior dancers which has made them think it would make sense to give them an opportunity to tackle the role of Myrthe. I would point out that several of the dancers who have been promoted in the last ten years or so have made somewhat unexpected debuts in roles which you would not necessarily regard as suitable for an inexperienced dancer. The most obvious example of the unexpected assumption of a ballerina role I can think of was when Hayward danced the role created on Collier in Rhapsody. Everyone who makes their way up the ranks of the company has to start that progression with a first step and I can't help thinking that it must help the dancer concerned and boost their confidence if that initial role is one selected on the basis of their perceived suitability for it rather than one selected from one of the company's standard starter roles. I am simply sorry that I shan't be able to see all of the new Myrthes.

I was there on the first night , saw the second cast and was present at Watson's farewell. I find the range of critical response to this piece very telling. It seems to me that nearly everyone has been very careful for fear McGregor's latest oeuvre turns out to be a masterpiece. It is going to be interesting to find out what Parisian audiences think of it when it is performed by the POB. I just hope that the fish war does not get in the way.As far as the first performance is concerned all the critics save one seem to have been at a performance taking place in a parallel universe to the one I attended. Gerald Dowler is the only critic who was at the performance which I attended. While I tend to think that I might have got more out of this work if it had been better lit and I could have seen more of what was happening on stage Dowler's comments suggest that better lighting might not have improved things that much. McGregor's love of atmospheric lighting always suggests to me that he is still not used to creating works for such a large space and that he is indifferent to whether his works are visible in the cheaper parts of the auditorium. I still cling to the outdated idea that what happens on stage during the course of a ballet performance tends to be important and should be visible to every member of the audience who is not sitting in a seat sold as having a"restricted view". I am left wondering whether the first act of this new piece is only meant to be visible from the more expensive seats in the lower parts of the theatre. I think that the score itself is really interesting and deserves more substantial and varied choreography better aligned to the subject matter which the composer thought he was depicting in his score. I particularly like the deconstruction of some very well known music by Liszt and Ades' orchestration. Whatever I may think of the choreography, and it is distinctly variable in quality as inspiration seems to run out in some places before the musical ideas do, everyone on stage yesterday afternoon danced their hearts out. I agree with those who have commented on the performances given by Sissens and Richardson. They were both outstanding on a stage populated by any number of exceptional dancers. I hope that Watson was satisfied with his final performance in what has been a long and varied career as a member of the company. He made as strong a case for the work as he could by giving an outstanding account of the role of Dante. I was pleased to discover yesterday afternoon that the Royal Opera House still awards silver medals to those performers fortunate enough to enjoy lengthy careers with the opera and ballet companies resident there when Watson received what is a small token marking the end of a truly distinguished career. I somehow thought that with the all the changes in managerial style and culture that have taken place since the theatre was reopened after its lengthy and expensive redevelopment the idea of making awards in recognition of long service to the lyric arts might have been abandoned on some pretext or other. After all if the Chairman of the Opera House Board could convince himself that the reason people were not attending the theatre was because it is called the "Royal Opera House" and had nothing to do with theatre's pricing policy then who was to say that the Board had not abolished the medal on the grounds of cost,the inappropriateness of marking achievement in elite art forms or some other spurious reason such as modern management techniques make such sentimental and old fashioned acts of recognition of long service inappropriate? According to Kevin this award was one of several due to be made to members of the ballet company during this season. For those unaware of the practice, in the past performers at Covent Garden who completed twenty five years of service with either of the resident companies were awarded the Royal Opera House silver medal. Such awards were always more common for singers than for dancers because while ballet careers start early they are notoriously short.Singers generally start their careers at an age when dancers are already mid-career and they can go on performing into their sixties and sometimes into their seventies if they look after their voices and are not tempted into repertory which might damage their voices and shorten their careers. I still remember the evening years ago when Joan Sutherland was presented with her silver medal some years after she would have been entitled to receive it. Somehow management had forgotten her pre Lucia career with the company when the powers that be had not known what to do with her and had mapped out a career for her which would see her develop into a dramatic soprano. At least if you are a dancer significant dates are less likely to be overlooked.

Few conductors can do equal justice to the full range of the standard opera repertory. They tend either to be better in the Italian than the German repertory or better at the German than the Italian while the French repertory and more recent national operatic schools tend to be best served by specialists in those genres. I suspect that Sir Charles Mackerras is the only opera conductor that I will ever encounter who was equally at home with every opera composer from Monteverdi to the major opera composers of the twentieth century and with every national school of opera. While I know that Haitink was undoubtedly a great conductor and a truly outstanding music director at both Glyndebourne and Covent Garden I think that the key to his greatness was that he knew and acknowledged his operatic blind spots and left those areas of the repertory to other equally able conductors. As to the secret of his success as an opera conductor I think that it boiled down to understanding the need to keep a proper balance between the pit and the stage which enabled the singers to deliver the text which the composer had set and having the wisdom and humility to know the areas of the opera repertory for which he had a real affinity and those for which he had little or none. I trust that this will not sound as if I am damning Haitink with faint praise because I regard this level of personal insight as a real artistic strength. It is certainly one I wish the current incumbent possessed. As far as the ballet is concerned I wish that Haitink had conducted far more ballet.Sadly most ballet goers never have the opportunity to experience a ballet performance when a major orchestral conductor is in charge of the orchestra. Most of the time we see performances in which the ballet conductor accompanies the dancers at the orchestra and indulges their every whim as far as tempi are concerned.Such musicians barely deserve to be called conductors as they do not see it as their duty to propel the performance forward. All I can say is that the presence of a conductor like Boult in the pit for Enigma or Haitink for Sacre transforms the whole experience for the audience because of the inspirational effect that music making of that quality has on the dancers on stage. It is something you never forget.

iI don't think anyone has seen this before in the context of either of the Royal Ballet companies. Of course we don't know what Acosta said about his plans to the Board which appointed him but I seem to recall a statement issued soon after his appointment in which he referred to the need to improve technical standards and that he intended to stage Don Q for the company. Now while that ballet might seem like a refreshing change of repertory and an opportunity for the company to change its image it does not strike me as a natural fit with the company's aesthetics, its traditions or its performance style it might indicate the direction in which he wishes to take the company. The last eighteen months will have made it more than a little difficult for Acosta to institute any major changes he may have had in mind when he took up the post of director and perhaps he now feels a bit of pressure to get things done. While I don't know what the age profile of the company's leading dancers is at present and whether there are imminent departures in the offing I can't help wondering what sort of impact such an announcement will have on company morale ? It is hardly a ringing endorsement of the company's traditions or its tried and tested methods of recruitment and internal promotion nor I would suggest of those currently at the top of the company. In fact it seems to me like an approach to changing the company which is almost guaranteed to destabilise and demoralise it unless handled with consummate care. The occasional external recruit can bring fresh blood and new ideas into a company but this look like more an attempt at transformation in the shortest possible time. Internal promotions endorse the hard work which every dancer contributes to a company's success but a policy in which leading positions in a company consistently go to external recruits has the opposite effect. Perhaps Acosta sees the advertisement as the quickest way to create a company in his own image and likeness as far as its performance style is concerned. He may, for all we know, have his eye on specific dancers and see this advertisement as a way to avoid accusations of poaching when he recruits from other companies. The problem is that this method of recruitment may well be interpreted not simply as an attempt to change the company by bypassing its usual system of recruitment and internal promotion but as a criticism of what he has inherited.

I thought the image on the cover was extremely inventive as it manages to refer simultaneously to both dance and writing in a single image as the shadow of the two pens is capable of being interpreted as a pair of dancer's legs. As far as the contents are concerned I too have dipped into it. Somehow I had managed to forget just how bad Stretton's ballet programmes were. Crisp's reviews of some of the programmes staged during his directorship brought that dismal disheartening time back all too vividly. Sadly I think that what Crisp said about the neglect of the company's back catalogue during that thankfully short directorship is uncomfortably close to the programming decisions made by the current incumbent. While it is true that we are not being exposed to other company's cast offs as we were during the Stretton regime Kevin seems equally capable of ignoring the company's twentieth century repertory in favour of works of dubious artistic value. His reasons for neglecting that repertory may be different from Stretton's but neglect has the same corrosive effect on all but the most robust of ballets . Crisp's great strength as a critic is that he has seen a vast range of repertory over decades of ballet going with the result he knows the difference between dross and choreographic gold and does not mistake one for the other. His reviews are worth reading whether or not you have seen the work he is writing about or the dancers performing it and he makes you think about what you have seen. I don't think that there is anyone of Crisp's calibre working as a critic in this country today. Gerald Dowler probably comes closest to Crisp in his approach to writing dance criticism at the present time. He does not hedge his bets with new works for fear that the choreographer may later be acclaimed as a genius; he does not ride obvious hobby horses when giving his opinion; he does not seek to ingratiate himself with companies or dance makers and he does not want to achieve a choreographic revolution in Bow Street as some of the current crop of critics make clear they do when they write about the Royal Ballet's activities and its repertory.

There are great musicians of the past such as Cortot who entered the recording studio and played as they would in recital and today if they are remembered at all they are remembered for the "Number of wrong notes committed to record in the name of art". Needless to say the knowledge that your legacy could well end up being your mistakes has had a dampening effect on studio recordings. Something similar has happened in the world of classical dance where today with the ubiquitous mobile phone you can never be sure whether or not someone is recording your performance for posterity. The fish dives are part of the western tradition of Sleeping Beauty having made their first appearance in the ballet's grand pas de deux in London in 1921. According to Dolin they were introduced into the text by Vladimirov who had been engaged to dance the Prince. I can't say whether or not they were Vladimirov's invention. All I can say is that a great deal of technical experimentation took place in the aftermath of the Revolution as state institutions adapted to performing to a less sophisticated and knowledgeable audience than they had previously performed for. The Russian version of the ballet remains truer to the original in that respect than western versions are. As an indication of how firmly entrenched the fish dives are in western tradition when Ratmansky staged his Sleeping Beauty for ABT based on the Sergeyev materials he felt obliged to retain them because to western audiences they are an essential part of the text. I have to say I much prefer fish dives where you don't see the mechanics at all just the effect. That is how they used to be done in the dim and distant past by the likes of Sibley and Dowell. But then those dancers worked in a world in which there was much less opportunity for unauthorised recordings than today and the dance aesthetic was governed by the tastes of major choreographers who held to Fokine's ideas about the place of technique in the great scheme of things. Basically it was a world in which technique was a means to an end and never an end in itself in which a technically gifted dancer with little else to offer would be described as a "only a technician". I think that two factors have worked together to produce this deadly dull mechanical effect and lack of apparent spontaneity in performances. The first is the way that today's obsession with perfectly performed classroom steps and enchainements has made its way into theatrical performance and come to dominate what we see in the theatre regardless of whether classroom steps are what the choreographer wanted the audience to see in performance or whether the music has to be significantly slowed down in order to achieve them. In many ways the failure to recognise and observe a clear distinction between classroom and theatre performance has had the effect of reducing far too many performances to displays of dance technique rather than displays of artistry. A second factor is the dancers' knowledge that somewhere in the audience someone is likely to be recording what they are doing and may well post it and that it will then be commented upon by all and sundry which I think must have an impact on what we see in performances. The knowledge that a single section of a performance on a day determined by an unknown recorder may well end up being a # dancer's Aurora or Odette/Odile for all eternity must have some sort of impact on all but the most tough minded of performers and affect their ability to engage in displays of apparent spontaneous artistry.

I am sorry I am not going to condemn the contents of this article or Vaziev's apparent views on the place that tradition has in the Bolshoi's stagings because I don't know how accurately what I have read represents his views or how much of the article is the work of the editor or translator. Is it a verbatim account or a heavily edited one which at points records the gist of what was said ? I ask this because what was obviously going to be the most contentious part of the article as far as a Western readership is concerned seems to be the one area which is the most peremptorily handled when compared with the amount of space allocated to the Bolshoi's need for more stage space on which to perform. Now while there is the possibility that something may have been lost in translation or through overly rigorous editing there are other explanations for its contents. The amount of space allocated to the ballet company's need for another stage suggests that the article is directed as much at a domestic readership as a foreign one and the same I think can be said of the stout defense of Grigorovitch's staging of La Bayadere. History suggests that at the Bolshoi an artistic director who pays due deference to this powerful former director's artistic legacy in the form of his ballet stagings is far more secure in his job and has more room to conduct his artistic experiments than one who appears to criticise or challenge Grigorovitch or his legacy.

At an LBC meeting years ago Anthony Russell Roberts told the audience that there had been discussion about reviving Jazz Calendar but it had been agreed that it was " too old fashioned" to appeal to modern audiences. I think this is a pretty meaningless statement which can safely be translated as, "We did not want to stage it and we think this is a plausible excuse for not doing so ". Sure, it's an episodic piece and it does seem to refer back to the beginning of Ashton's career because of its structure, but like Facade, Jazz Calendar is a highly enjoyable work and no previous knowledge of ballet is needed to be able to enjoy it. Perhaps the problem with both ballets, apart form the fact that we are currently going through a phase where dour earnestness is thought to be the way of proving that ballet is a serious art form, and they are comic works , is that their humour seems natural, completely unforced and not at all contrived. I am afraid I always feel that comedy did not come as easily or naturally to MacMillan as it did to Ashton. As a result Elite Syncopations' humour always seems constipated and contrived to me. The ability to see the funny side of things and turn that into something that is amusing in theatrical terms which bears repeat viewings is a rare gift, even rarer than the gift of apparent spontaneity. While Elite Syncopations was fun when performed by its original cast, even then it did not bear repeat viewings over a short space of time. At that time it had the distinct advantage of being performed by dancers for whom the comic ballet was familiar territory rather an alien one. Today Elite has the same effect on me as a comedian who is trying to get the audience to laugh and putting far too much effort into it. The result is that I am far more aware of the effort than I should be and the jokes barely register. A couple of years ago I went to the Derek Jarman retrospective at the National Film Theatre because it included the film of Jazz Calendar for which he had created the designs. I could see no reason why it would not appeal to audiences today if management could actually get the casting right. Beriosova as Wednesday's Child would be difficult to replace but I think it would be Thursday's Child, in the form of Alexander Grant who ends his travels lying on his side going round in circles on the floor, after strap hanging and flying who would be hardest to replace. After selecting Paul Kay, who alone seems to have a taste and aptitude for such demi-character roles as Thursday's Child for the opening night, who would you allocate to the role in other casts? I recall that Friday's Child used to produce copious pools of sweat on the floor. It is difficult to imagine anyone who would fail to be amused by the fate that befalls the latecomer to the ballet class in Saturday's Child facing a ballet master who must be based on Michael Somes. Now unlike the RB's management I have no fear of appearing frivolous. I think that Fille should at least be a biennial if not an annual feature of the company's repertory. At one time it was programmed that frequently and yet no one ever suggested that it was being done to death. It was something to be eagerly anticipated each year and it provided a simple answer to the question about which ballet to take a child to see as their first ballet. If I had the power to do so I would immediately restore Fille , Facade, A Wedding Bouquet and Jazz Calendar to the company's active repertory on the main stage and programme Capriol Suite in the Linbury. I would also revive The Prospect Before Us and let it run in as well as acquiring Tudor's Gala Performance for the company. I must admit I have never understand why management and critics in general are so dismissive of comic ballets.Comedy is so very difficult to do, let alone do so well that audiences relish revivals. Perhaps the staging of a wider range of repertory including a few successful comic works might encourage a few more choreographers to try their hand at comedy. I can always hope.

While I feel that there will be general rejoicing at the prospect of the company's centennial celebrations culminating in a sort of MacMillanfest I can't help wondering what part the first two directors will be permitted to play during the celebratory season and whether by 2031 the company will, in the absence of special "Ashton classes" based on de Valois 1947 syllabus, be able to dance the sort of works they created. I am pretty certain that the company will choose to emphasise MacMillan's dark challenging works rather than works which reveal his skill as a classical choreographer so I think it is safe to assume that there will be a series of mixed bills which include such dark and challenging "masterpieces" as Different Drummer, Valley of Shadows, Playground, My Brother My Sisters,The Judas Tree and possibly Rituals, which while tedious rather than challenging, brings the list of works up to an even number which may make it a little easier to construct the programmes which include them. There might even be a Marriott retrospective. The Linbury will host performances of dance works such as The Invitation, The Burrow and Checkpoint which work better in a smaller auditorium and of course the festival will culminate with the main stage revival of the full length Isadora. The publicity for the exciting MacMillan revival will probably go something like this :- " The centennial year's MacMillan Festival will culminate with the long awaited revival of the original three act version of his unjustly neglected masterpiece Isadora which was created to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the company's foundation by its sole choreographer of genius". If by 2031 Sir Wayne is in charge of the company then the season will include any number of mixed bills composed of his pretentiously titled one act works. Now while I have not fallen asleep during performances of any of his works I have seen I have to confess I find them , in general, remarkably unmemorable as far as their dance content is concerned. Perhaps I am alone in this but I generally find that I remember more about his work's designs and lighting schemes than the individuality of the movements he has selected for each piece. In fact I tend to find that as soon as I have left the auditorium I have forgotten everything about his choreography. If in 2031 the company is run by Sir Carlos then it is much more difficult to say what we might see during the celebrations except that the programme will almost certainly include his first main stage masterpiece Carmen.

I think that the evening promised more than it delivered but then perhaps my expectations were just too high.The new ballet by Zucchetti is a useful work which allowed a number of the more junior dancers to show what they are capable of doing which is all to the good as, at the very least, it will aid recognition of individual dancers in the future. Surprisingly given current fashion it was well lit. The middle section of the evening's fare , the divertisements was,I think, at one stage being described as representative of work by choreographers who had influenced the development of the company. If that was the original plan it seems to have been abandoned somewhere between the announcement and the performance itself. Given the fact that Kevin mentioned the company's ninetieth anniversary when he opened the evening the pieces chosen seemed more like an eclectic mix of pieces that were readily available than anything else. The divertisement section began with Morgen performed by Hayward and Corrales in which her choreography allowed her to dance while the choreography created for Corrales presented him more as a cross between a contortionist and an old fashioned muscle builder displaying his muscles than an actual dancer. This was followed by the pas de deux from Winter Dreams danced by Morera and Hirano. It is not one of MacMillan's greatest or most inventive bits of choreography. There are sections of it that are so repetitive that they look and feel more like padding to fill out the music than an expression of emotion. Having seen it on the main stage and at Sadler's Wells I think it works better in the smaller auditorium, Needless to say Morera gave it her all but Hirano is nowhere near as responsive as the role's creator Irek Mukhamedov. Stix-Brunell and Clarke danced the final pas de deux from After the Rain very beautifully.The fourth piece was Ek's Woman with Water danced by Magri with the occasional assistance of Bjorneboe Braendsrod and a table. Although it was performed with great gusto by Magri I am not entirely sure how it came to be included in the mix as the only Ek work the company has danced is his Carmen and they did not do that for long. Perhaps it is included because Osipova wanted to dance it? I would think that if the company ever stages Dante Sonata then on the basis of this performance Magri would be ideal in the Pamela May role. The section ended with Ashton's Voices of Spring with O'Sullivan and Sambe which was a bit of a damp squib. I can't put my finger on precisely what the problem was. It certainly was not a case of dancers visibly struggling with the technical side of things but it was an extraordinarily matter of fact, literal account of a piece of choreography originally devised as an entertainment to be performed for an opera audience in the middle of a performance of Die Fledermaus. It might simply be a question of fine tuning the presentation of the choreography and feeling confident enough to play with it and make it sparkle by giving it light and shade. The fact is it did not look right and it did not register in the way you would expect with dancers of that calibre. The evening ended with act three of Sleeping Beauty with Nunez and Muntagirov leading the cast and Hay and Hinkis as the Bluebird and Princess Florine and a somewhat depleted cast. Among other things the reduction in cast size required the Lilac Fairy to walk on without her retinue; the White Cat to make her entry perched on Puss in Boots' shoulder rather than being carried on stage on her usual cushion and Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf to act out their divertisement without the visible representation of the forest. It also deprived us of Bluebeard and his wife and Beauty and the Beast among the identifiable fairy tale guests and reduced the courtiers by about a half. But the most significant thing that was missing was the sense of occasion which a performance of act 3 Sleeping Beauty by SWRB under the name of Aurora's Wedding always managed to generate whatever the circumstances. All in all the performance felt a rather stodgy affair with everyone being just a bit too careful and reined in. In fact the performance felt a bit like the first post Christmas matinee where everyone is being a bit careful because they don't feel quite as fit and performance ready as they were before the Christmas break or quite as fit and performance ready as they will be in a few days time. It was the sort of tentative, cautious account of the choreography in which everyone seems more concerned with not doing anything wrong than with dancing with freedom,imagination,playfulness or apparent spontaneity. I am pleased to have seen thus mixed bill but I don't feel unduly concerned at not being able to see all the casts.

While Kevin has expanded the number of Ashton ballets he will occasionally give stage time to with the unexpected revival of Enigma Variations in 2019 I can't help feeling that given his apparent reluctance to establish any sort of systematic approach to reviving the Ashton repertory it won't be long before the bulk of the choreographer's output including some of his most popular ballets will require rediscovery. Perhaps someone can explain why with the exception of Les Patineurs he does not seem overly keen to revive any of Ashton's prewar works on the main stage? What on earth does he have against Facade and why having dangled the prospect of reviving Apparitions by staging a substantial chunk of it at the Fonteyn Gala hasn't he at least announced that he will programme the whole thing at some point in the not too distant future? I don't want anyone to think that I am criticising the operation of the Ashton Foundation. As a registered charity it can only act to further its declared charitable objectives and it has no control and sadly little influence over the repertory which the RB's director decides to programme. The best it could ever hope to do would be to shame a director into reviving specific long neglected works. But as the Foundation seems to be closely connected with the RB, shaming is not really on the cards. The Foundation's main functions appear to be recording neglected works; training approved Ashton repetiteurs and fostering an interest in ballet in general rather encouraging an interest in Ashton's output. In addition it owns Daphnis and Chloe, is reported to be in the process of acquiring Monotones I and II and Enigma Variations and looks after staging Les Patineura and Les Rendezvous for the RBS which receives the income from staging those two ballets. It has looked at the impact which recent changes in training and the shift to a more athletic aesthetic has had on the repertory as in 2013 it held a Symposium at which there was lengthy discussion but no decision, as far as I can see, on whether there was a need to devise special Ashton classes to prepare dancers to perform his choreography. Given that the Foundation has no obligation to promote Ashton's works and Ashton does not have an active advocate in the way the MacMillan does an Ashton Society could be a useful way of giving him a higher profile than he currently enjoys and perhaps a means in some way of acting as an advocate for his ballets. Interestingly in his review of the Balanchine , Robbins mixed bill Gerald Dowler commented on the dour nature of the opening programme "21st Century Choreographers " and questioned management's neglect of works by de Valois, Ashton and MacMillan. It is clear from what it says about its aims and objectives on its website that the Ashton Foundation was never intended to be the sole answer to the question of how to keep the Ashton repertory alive. It is better than nothing but there seems little point to it if its very existence and the work it does cannot persuade Ashton's home company to allocate at least a guaranteed amount of stage time to his works every season and devise a timetable which ensures that the major works have a regular and guaranteed place in the company's active repertory. Without wishing to sound despondent or unduly worried I think this is something of a pressing need as I don't think that we can assume that BRB will continue to be a safe and secure home for elements of the Ashton repertory. It is not so much the departures from the company that prompt me to say this but the places where some of the joiners were trained which suggest that a less understated performance style may be coming to BRB. Of course as director Acosta is perfectly entitled to develop the company so that its dancers and its repertory reflect his own tastes and aesthetic values. He was hired to make changes after all. But while I am sure that Romeo and Juliet is safe enough I am not so sure that works by the Founder Choreographer or by the Founder herself are as secure as they once were.

I think that looking at the age profile of the female principal dancers makes it rather clear why we start the 2021-22 season with eleven female dancers of that rank . Management knows that the most senior of those dancers are unlikely to be there for many more seasons and whether those dancers end their careers having a planned retirement at the end of a specific season, an enforced one through injury or begin to wind down their careers by gradually dropping the full range of their current repertory is in the lap of the gods. Whatever happens the company will need to have dancers who are ready to take over from their long serving colleagues when the time comes. I am sure that management knows that it is preferable to prepare and plan for this sort of generational change by enabling the successor principals to acquire repertory at a steady pace rather than in a rush. Kevin clearly does not want a repeat of the Polunin incident which it has been suggested was caused in part by him being required to learn a lot of new roles in a very short space of time. Sibley has said that years ago when Fonteyn was the company's leading ballerina she was the only dancer permitted to dance the full range of the classical ballets then in the company's active repertory everyone else was only allowed to dance a limited number of them. My recollection is that the ballets selected for each dancer were ones which played to their artistic strengths and showed them to best advantage. The extent to which this was true only became clear years later when the system broke down and senior dancers began performing a wider range of the repertory. At that point it became clear that some of the dancers would have been wise not to have enlarged their repertory and should have recognised that not every dancer is capable of performing every repertory piece with equal artistic effectiveness. I sometimes wish that repertory restrictions comparable to those of sixty years ago were in place today as they might save us from quite so many lengthy runs of individual ballets. Now while I think that there are always far too many performances of Romeo and Juliet and Nutcracker when they are programmed in an ordinary season I recognise that this season,after so much enforced inactivity, is one in which the Board will expect the company to generate as much income as it can. Given that so many dancers when asked why they chose to join the company express a burning desire to dance MacMillan's ballets and in particular one or other of his dram ballets I fear that it would be virtually impossible to prevent Miss X or Miss Y from giving us her Juliet or Mr Z from giving us his Romeo without dire consequences for the company's artistic health. Sadly today it would be all but impossible for management to restrict the repertory of most principal dancers unless a right's owner did not want them in a particular role. The result is that it is all but impossible to escape from the mono-programming of unbroken blocks of one or other of MacMillan's cash cows or the Petipa ones. When it comes to guesting I somehow think that any company which wished to retain the services of dancers of the calibre of Muntagirov and Nunez would find it almost impossible to do so without permitting them to guest with other companies. Guesting for those who wish to do so is part of the world of ballet today. I seem to recall it being suggested that one of the reasons for Muntagirov's move to Covent Garden was that the new management at ENB was less liberal in its attitude towards him guesting than its predecessor had been. I think we need to recognise that the fact that some eminent dancers choose to guest with other companies raises the profile of the RB and actually enables more junior dancers to appear in leading roles at a much earlier stage in their careers than would be possible if everyone was tied to Covent Garden throughout the season. In the absence of a second company where dancers can learn their trade in relative obscurity the performance opportunities provided by the absence of senior dancers actually benefits the company by ensuring that not every dancer is trapped by their company ranking. As far as the two productions of Romeo and Juliet are concerned they do have minor differences most of which are connected with the adaptations made to the main company's production when the Royal Opera House was being redeveloped and the company was appearing at the Festival Hall. BRB actually retains more of the stage detail for example Juliet's bedroom still has its prie dieu and the modifications which were made were authorised by MacMillan and intended to make the work easier to tour. The changes made to the main company's production have not been reversed now it is back performing on its home stage. It is as if Lady M. has not noticed that the changes made to the sets to enable the ballet to be performed on the South Bank have reduced the emotional impact of the ballet at key points of the action or make a nonsense of it. Here are the most obvious obvious examples of the changes which have not been reversed. Juliet now enters the stage at the beginning the Balcony pas de deux by coming down the well lit central stairs when she used to come down the less well lit stairs at the side of the balcony. That entrance from the side somehow prevented the audience from asking why Romeo does not simply follow her at the end of the pas de deux rather than doing all that yearning at the end of the scene. Another change relates to the loss of the window in Juliet's bedroom. In the original staging Romeo used to leave his wife through a very visible window. In its absence Juliet's frantic dash across the stage during the course of her second pas de deux with Paris has lost its emotional impact because it is no longer clear what she is threatening to do. In the absence of a visible window there is no evidence of her desperation because it no longer involves the threat of suicide. In the tomb scene the solemn candle lit procession does not work as it once did because the procession does not apparently enter from the top of the set. Another problem is that the body of Tybalt seems to have disappeared. Originally Tybalt was laid out on a slab and when Juliet woke from her drugged sleep she used to back towards the slab, bang into it and recoil in horror. It is a bit of stage business intended to remind the audience of the play text in which she describes the horrors that await her in the family tomb. In this it is comparable to the holy palmer's greeting in the pas de deux which Romeo and Juliet dance during the first act before his identity is revealed. Today in the tomb Juliet still walks backwards and recoils in horror at Tybalt's non existent tomb which was removed for purely pragmatic reasons and has not been restored. Minor losses but like some of the changes imposed on Ashton's ballets through redesigns changes which make the choreographer look less than competent. As far as the casting is concerned some of the casts are tempting others less so and a few are definitely no go areas. It is good to have plenty of time to think about minor details such as seat prices. When the annual financial report for the 2019-20 season was published I was amazed by how much the marketing department costs to run. If I was looking to save the ROH some money that would be the first place I would make cuts because it seems so useless at its basic function. I should be very interested to see whether their knowledge of their audience was any batter than their knowledge of the repertory and how to publicise it. Perhaps someone working in that department should invest in a Thesaurus as I think that they have rather overworked the word "excited".

The current production was staged in 2004 during the Ashton centenary celebrations and last seen in 2011. Its designs are undistinguished. The costume designs give Cinderella very pretty becoming rags while the Stepsisters have costumes with such loud and coarse designs that anyone staging a pantomime in the would baulk at them. Sadly Wayne Sleep and Anthony Dowell who appeared as the Stepsisters in 2004 lived up to their costumes and gave the broadest and coarsest accounts of their roles that I have ever seen. Whether they were encouraged in this by Wendy Ellis-Somes is unclear but she did not discourage such broad playing at subsequent revivals. She seems obsessed with the idea that the sisters are essentially characters derived from the pantomime tradition. Perhaps she does not know that using men to play older women is a much older theatrical tradition than that of the nineteenth century pantomime. The performances in 2004 suggested that the stager was more interested in broad pantomime slapstick than the characters depicted in the distinctive choreography Ashton gave each of them. I know that it is usually said that Ashton rather skimped on the choreography for the Stepsisters and relied over much on the ability of Helpmann and himself to improvise their roles. I think that there is enough in the style of choreography each is given to establish their characters and that as with many other ballets he created it contains both in-jokes and references to characters which the 1948 audience would have recognised immediately. At the time he wrote the score Prokofiev was required to stick very closely to the classical tradition. He does that but he also manages to allude to his more avant garde past to spice the whole thing up. I think that Ashton was doing much the same thing with his choreography which is an extraordinary eclectic mixture of pure Petipa style classicism; character portraits based on a basic knowledge of ballet history; material derived from the popular musical theatre and in-joke allusions to people working in the theatre in the late forties. The quiet, down trodden, forgetful sister originally played by Ashton reveals her timidity by her quiet understated dance vocabulary which looks as if it is based on steps used in ballet in the eighteenth century. The forgetfulness suggests that he is alluding to Andre Howard who was, as I understand it, quite well known for forgetting the choreography she had just created but it might equally be a reference to a problem which is said to befall many dance makers in the heat of creation. The dominant sister is big and bossy and aspires to be a great Petipa ballerina. Her trick with the necklace, which rarely comes off these days, is based on what Bea Lillie did on stage. I think we are expected to see it as further evidence of the type of person she is. The short and tall partners had been part of the ballet from the beginning but they only achieved their current identities as Napoleon and Wellington in the production staged in 1965 where it their identities were intended as a reference to the theft of the Goya portrait of the Duke which had occurred in 1961. As far as I am concerned I would restore them to the anonymity they originally enjoyed as that would enable us to lose the unfunny toupee joke which must have originated at some point in a stage accident and has no place in an Ashton ballet. I think that the problem with the Bintley version is one that besets pretty much every choreographer who encountered the Ashton version in their impressionable youth. They spend so much time avoiding Ashton that they fail to do justice to the score. I have some sympathy with them as there are so much of the choreography seems inevitable.

It is a classic example of conservative programming which is intended to generate income and deal with a number of problems caused by the unavoidable cancellation of two major world premieres and a number of key debuts during the 2020-21 season. Of course the company had to stage those new full length works and keep the promises about career development which it made to its dancers a couple of seasons ago. I can understand why this particular selection of full length works is being programmed. It was so obvious that it probably did not seem to require much thought to draw it up . But that is its weakness. After the best part of eighteen months during which audiences have been without live ballet performances isn't the season just a bit too heavy? Does the entire season have to be quite so unremittingly serious? Perhaps it is a flaw in my character but I can't help thinking that many of us would have benefited from a little frivolity built into the programme at strategic points during the season as I think that we can all agree that it is unlikely that either of the new works,the Dante Project or Like Water for Chocolate, will provide much in the way of light entertainment. However while I accept that this season is one in which the company may be required to do considerably more than merely break even I do question whether we really needed 31 performances of Nutcracker ? Surely at Christmas we could have been permitted something else relatively safe as an alternative option to the ubiquitous Nutcracker such as eight performances of Fille or Coppelia or an equally lighthearted and entertaining Ashton mixed bill of say Les Patineurs, A Wedding Bouquet and Facade? At present, to me at least, the programme seems far too unremittingly weighty and earnest.

Not jealous at all. We are getting Giselle this autumn with, I would suggest, the very strong possibility that Manon will be programmed in the early part of the 2022-23 season. As far as the split run of Romeo and Juliet is concerned perhaps someone has finally realised that week after week devoted to an unbroken run of performances of Romeo and Juliet is not the best way to maintain high technical standards throughout the company as so few dancers actually get to perform classically based choreography during such a run. Developing an interesting back story may be great fun but it is no substitute for dancing exposed classically based choreography. The number of performances devoted to this one ballet seems more than a little excessive to me as it suggests that pretty much everyone in the top two tiers of the company will be giving us her Juliet and his Romeo. While I am pleased to see an all Ashton mixed bill which includes Scenes de Ballet and does not include Marguerite and Armand, I can't help thinking that Kevin could afford to be a little more adventurous in his selection. There are ballets spanning the best part of fifty years to choose from and while I don't expect to see works like Capriole Suite or Foyer de Danse on the main stage I should like the opportunity to see them in full at some point in the not too distant future. Also I can't help thinking that if we really were respecting the past rather than paying lip service to respecting it we would be offered the opportunity to see one of his two or three act ballets each season.

Watching the current mixed bill did nothing to dispel the general sense of gloom generated by the rain and cold we are currently enduring. Perhaps if the weather were a little more like what is usual for late late May I might feel a bit more positive about the first dance programme of this truncated season but I somehow doubt it. As far as I am concerned Within the Golden Hour is badly overexposed. It is a bit like Wright's Summertide in that it gets a reasonable number of company members on stage and then fails to much of interest with them. I accept that it is completely inoffensive and quite useful when putting together a mixed bill of recently created works but what it fails to do, however fine the cast, is to capture my imagination or reveal greater depths with repeat viewing. The Abrahams work is an attempt to capture the dynamics of a dysfunctional family in dance and all I can say of it is he is no Tudor when it comes to establishing and communicating emotional states in dance form. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the two works by Crystal Pite as I really liked her Flight Patterns but for me The Statement seems little more than an expressionist cartoon while the final work seems to involve a great deal of rolling around on the floor for no apparent reason. The fact that there seemed to be little connection between the movement and the music to which it was set did not help. Now I don't want to sound too negative about this mixed bill but the thought that this programme might indeed represent the future that Kevin plans for the company may please critics like Lyndsay Winship but it does not do a lot for me. In fact it makes me feel more than a little despondent. It is almost as if Kevin has decided to reverse the company's direction of travel established by Ashton immediately after the war when he wrenched the company away from the Helpmannesque expressionist works it had been performing and forced it to convert to classicism and embrace classically based dance as its route to the future. I had thought that Wheeldon and Scarlett had managed to establish the idea that classically based dance far from being redundant was alive and well if only you had choreographers who were imaginative, musical and were capable of expressing themselves fluently using a classically based vocabulary.