FLOSS

Well here legally you can call yourself anything you like as long as you are not trying to mislead. However in real life because of the nature of our society where your details are recorded in so many places if you want the state and other institutions to accept your new identity and get them to alter their records you would need to take the deed poll route.Given the difficulty that you can experience in trying to open a bank account or paying largish sums into existing accounts I wonder whether it may not be just a little bit more complicated now. Of course what a lot of people do is adopt a name and use it outside the wider family circle.My mother disliked her first name and it always came as a shock to hear it used, which it invariably was, when we went to stay with her aunts and cousins.To the world at large and to my father she was known by her middle name but not in the bosom of her family.Middle names and even confirmation names can come in useful. After all the only name that you have any choice about is your confirmation name,that is, if your parents are God fearing folk who believe in the seven sacraments . If you get confirmed it seems to me, that you should be just as concerned with the potential utility of the name in the future as the heroic qualities of the saint whose name and protection you adopt.Your parents saddle with your other names either out of sheer thoughtlessness or as a way of pleasing grandparents and aged relatives.Confirmation provides a young person with the opportunity to take action to undo the worst effects of their parents' stupidity or insensitivity and changes in taste. You never know when a solid sounding name may be needed and if your parents haven't seen fit to provide you with at least one you need to set about acquiring one.You have to ask what some people are thinking of when they name their children? It is clear that while a few parents think about what their child may be called at school only an infinitesimal number ever contemplate the fact that their child will one day become middle aged or become a member of a learned profession. A name which may seem wonderful to doting parents takes on a completely different aspect when applied to the middle aged or the elderly.And then of course there is school where children can be very unkind to a child with an unusual name let alone a really whacky one and finally there is the great world of work.How would you feel if you knew that doctor or lawyer was called Pixie,Peaches orJade?Would you be able to take them or their advice seriously? I don't think that we will ever see the day when one of the Law Lords is called Pixie. I was told that at one time the Registrar would refuse to register a child with a name that would invite ridicule.However that didn't stop parents naming their daughter Rosemary Bottom and another family saddling their daughter with the name China Lee. At one time the French were said to be very strict about the names that the state would allow to be registered, limiting acceptable names to those of saints and those derived from the classics. But their system wasn't intended to save children from ridicule but to prevent the use of non French names. I wonder how it is operated now, if at all? Perhaps the simplest thing would be to adopt a system where you are given a "milk name" and then when you are old enough to be involved in the naming process you acquire your adult name or names.I suspect that such a system would bring its own difficulties apart from the cost of amending all the official records. After all what would happen if you actually liked your "milk name" and wanted to keep it? Would you be thought to be refusing to grow up and take responsibility of you tried to retain it?

I'm not so sure that the uninitiated would understand the analogy.You have to be a theatre goer and while there may be more theatre goers than ballet goers there aren't that many of either in the general population. Most people that I know who are not avid theatre goers seem to think that once you've seen Hamlet you've seen it.That was certainly the response that I got when I was at work which has always struck me as odd since the same people would have seen nothing out of the ordinary in someone who was so addicted to a particular film, say the Sound of Music, that they had seen it a hundred times and went to sing along performances of it.No the problem I, think for them, was that I was prepared to pay my own money to go and see a Shakespeare play and not only that, to see a performance of a play that I had already seen without the excuse of a television actor to explain the strange behaviour. I think that getting someone to try another performer only works if they have a bit of interest in ballet.If there is a ballet or a dancer that they want to see suggest that they really need to see two performances and for the second performance select the cast that you think will give the best performance of the run. If by some fluke they have hit upon the best cast suggest that they see the dancer that they really like in something that will show another side of them and make sure that the rest of the cast is interesting or if it is a mixed bill that the other work or works are likely to be well danced. but then what do I know? I am currently working on relatives expanding their balletic experience bit by bit but I have no idea how it will work out. They haven't objected so far and it has solved the problem of presents. But as to the future ...?

My experience over the years talking to people who only ever go to full length ballets is that they are rarely able to say why they are wedded to such a limited part of the repertory.They tend to express surprise that there are other ballets and find it difficult to believe that they might be worth seeing.Their choice of ballets seems to be based on name recognition,a well known title is preferred to one that they aren't familiar with, dancers occasionally influence the choice of performance but choreographers have next to no influence on their ticket purchasing decisions.Except for a few big well publicised names, dancers have little influence on the choices made by the occasional ballet goer because they have no way of knowing how very different the same ballet looks when danced by different casts. If the cast does influence the choice of performance the assumption will be that the bigger the name the better the performance will be. I knew a woman who only went to see Darcey Bussell perform. She evaluated ballets according to whether she enjoyed Bussell's performance,if she did the ballet was good if she didn't then it was the ballet that was the problem not the performer.I believe that she gave up going to ballet when Bussell retired. I couldn't try this on her because I didn't know her well enough but I came up with a solution to the "only book for the big names that I know" routine. A friend wanted to see Mayerling and because she had heard of Acosta she wanted to see him in it. I said that I was more than happy to get tickets and go with her but that as the same ballet has a very different impact depending on who is dancing that we should go and see my choice of a second cast during the run. Needless to say she enjoyed the Acosta performance very much. A week or so later I took her to see Watson in it. She could not get over the vast difference in the two performances.After that she didn't want to see Acosta in everything and was prepared to try other casts. I think that because it is clear even to the uninitiated that ballet involves repeating movements that everyone dancing that role will perform it is difficult to understand, until you see it,how much the individual brings to a role.At that point it became clear to her that a big name based on superlative technique and the ability to perform a wide range of roles does not meant that the dancer concerned is going to give the best performance in every role because not all of the roles will suit them equally well. Encouraging people to try something other than the full length ballets that they know is more difficult.Most people seem blissfully unaware that many of the greatest twentieth century ballets are one act works and that if they never go to see a mixed bill they are denying themselves the opportunity to see masterpieces by Ashton,Balanchine,Fokine,Macmillan, Nijinska and Robbins.Marketing department do not seem to feel the need to tell the potential audience about the major twentieth century works that are to be performed. I think that they expect the "Covent Garden experience" to sell the tickets.The best solution on an individual basis, it seems to me,is to take the person concerned to a couple of sure fire mixed bills and trust that the magic will work.It is a question of time and the company actually programming the right sort of works. A couple of weeks ago I came across an excerpt from the Magic of the Dance in which Fonteyn ascribed the influx of young ballet goers in the 1960's to Nureyev.While I have no doubt that she was right about Nureyev's influence in creating a generation of ballet goers I think that the subsidy played a part as it guaranteed that a trip to the ballet wasn't going to be a costly experiment .It would be interesting to know how many of those converted to ballet by Nureyev stayed the course.Finally I think that the level of media coverage was a significant factor. It was not just newspaper stories about Nureyev.Ballet was taken seriously, it was shown on television it was written about and discussed,there were documentaries about it,it was treated as a serious art form rather than something which only gets a mention in the media when there is the hint of a row or it is relegated to show biz or celebrity stories.Then of course that new audience of the nineteen sixties did not appear from nowhere. Many of their parents had come into contact with it in the pioneering days of the 1930's or during the war. It sometimes seems to me that part of the problem here is that having become part of the establishment the main company lost its way and forgot that you need to tell people at regular intervals what you are doing,why it is important and that it is interesting.But then of course you need the choreographers to make sure that it it is exciting and that is a totally different story.

Given the number of girls who are recorded as receiving choreographic awards while at the Royal Ballet School it is strange that few of them seem to continue with choreography.Perhaps one of the problems for them is that as far as the nineteenth century ballets are concerned the female members of the corps have far more to do than their male counterparts, and great deal to learn during their first two seasons.Tiredness and lack of time could well be factors in their lack of development as choreographers.Then there is the question of what support and opportunities young,would be,choreographers are given today? At one time Leslie Edwards and David Drew were involved in encouraging choreographic enterprise with Sunday evening performances.I have no idea whether such activities are possible today. Then of course there is talent and talent.Some have facility and the ability to reproduce the currently fashionable style of movement or a sort of sub Balanchine style and then there is the choreographer who even from a really early stage has their own voice and ideas which remain clear even when he or she is experimenting with other people's choreographic clothes. I agree that the choice of choreographers commissioned to make works for the main stage, can sometimes,be something of a mystery.The problem is that we would probably all pick a different choreographer and work as the one that should not be there.If a company is committed to raising the profile of female choreographers it needs, it seems to me, to take a two pronged approach.It needs to programme a mixed bill of successful pieces and then commission a new work from one or two of the best female choreographers currently working .As far as new choreographers are concerned it needs to provide support and advice for those making new works. I do sometimes wonder whether,as with much else, there is a sink or swim attitude towards young choreographers whether they are male or female.As both Ashton and MacMillan benefited from the advice of others at the outset of their careers not to make advice and support available to those who want it at a similar stage is a mistake. Of course Ashton was lucky in his early adviser as Marie Rambert a very cultured and knowledgeable woman who had a Midas touch when it came to identifying and developing young choreographers. MacMillan was lucky to have Cranko in his early career.The point is that neither was above seeking support and assistance and they both did so later on in their careers. Ashton listened to Fedorovich's advice on Symphonic Variations and in at least one later ballet checked that the mime sequences were comprehensible, while MacMillan used a dramaturg in at least two of his ballets. It will be interesting to see what comes of this initiative and whether the Royal Ballet takes some action in response.They could mount an all female choreographer programme next season of a Nijinska ballet,La Fete Etrange and either something by de Valois or an established work by Marston or Pita followed in the next season by a new commission. Somehow I don't see it happening. I just can't see a new Marriott work or a new MacGregor work being sacrificed to the cause of female choreographers.Can you?

There was a great change in names after the Conquest when Anglo Saxon names went out of favour.Even now the bulk of standard first names which are not biblical tend to be the ones that the Normans brought with them such as Henry and William.Edward seems to have crept back into favour because Henry III had a great devotion to Edward the Confessor and having lost Normandy the ruling elite were working hard to create a new less Norman identity for themselves. You can get a very good idea about what many of our medieval ancestors were named from surnames based on parental christian names which came in with the original poll tax.From the number of people whose surnames are based on the names Thomas and William it is clear that both were very popular given names.Then there is the great outbreak of old testament given names that follow the Reformation and the puritan ones that Johnson made fun of when he named one of his characters Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. The bulk of Germanic/Anglo Saxon names, apart from Edward,Edmund and Cuthbert,seem to have disappeared from general use until the nineteenth century so few Alfreds,Bedes,Cedds,Dunstans,Edgars or Edwins until then.Why they reemerged is not so obvious. But at one point, at about the same time that the Germans abandoned their taste for all things French ,families in this family who had always been at pains to emphasize that their family came over with the Conquest suddenly became interested in their Anglo Saxon roots.Clearly antiquarianism and literature played their part in the choice of nineteenth century names.As there don't seem to have been that many boys called Hereward while many of us have a great,great uncle or a very distant cousin of our grandparents called Percy lurking in the family tree it would seem that Tennyson was very influential when it came to naming boys. Is being named after a character from the Arthurian legends any better than being named after a television celebrity?

Some parents saddle their children with ridiculous names or names which practically tell you when they were born.I wonder whether girls given names like Jade,Crystal,Daisy and Pixie feel happy with them when they get older or how children given diminutives feel about their names when they get older? As far as diminutives are concerned my experience has been that the children concerned, when they are young, are often unaware that their name is a shortened form and look at you blankly when you try to ascertain for the records whether they are Alex or Alexander;Tommy or Thomas;Billy or William? I knew someone who used to work in social services who was convinced that you could almost identify children who were at risk because of the names that they were given. She used to say that her files were full of children whose names were so peculiar that they revealed their parents' lack of concern for the impact they would have on their offspring. I seem to recall that a study was undertaken some years ago which was said to show that teachers' attitudes towards their pupils was influenced by their given names.So that the Noahs and Jeremiahs in their class were at a disadvantage when compared with children whose parents had conformed to the norms. But it is odd to think that a child called Barry would have an advantage over one called Finnbar. Do you think that the name Darcey is likely to have staying power or is it one of those names that in future years will pinpoint with awful accuracy its bearer's age?. Here are a couple of examples of the sort of transitory name that I have in mind.My father had a friend whose name was Verdun when he was old enough he began calling himself Vernon and no one except those who had been in his class knew the awful truth.Then there are all those men of a certain age who were called Elvis.I wonder what they call themselves? So what is in a name? It used to be noticeable that there were certain names that were not used by Irish Catholics, Elizabeth for example, and others that were used almost exclusively by people whose families were non conformist or whose history was nonconformist.Celebrity names make that sort of identification a little more difficult now but not impossible.

Should we be as worried as some of the media seem to be about the lack of female choreographers invited to make ballets for the bigger companies? The BBC seemed to be concerned on the PM programme today.However in reality the item could have been interpreted as little more than an attempt to give ENB'S efforts in that area a bit of context so that it appeared to be a story rather than a puff. Now I know that of the many choreographers who have worked in the art over the centuries there are few whose works are still in the repertory.There have been female choreographers who have created masterpieces Nijinska is the most obvious example but she is not alone.Other female choreographers who have made great works include Martha Graham whose works were incredibly effective on some dancers and Twyla Tharpe whose best works are outstanding but whose works are extremely variable in their effectiveness.Then there is Andre Howard who was not exactly been well served by the Royal Ballet's revival of La Fete Etrange and who,because the bulk of her works have been lost,it is impossible to evaluate. Do forum members believe that female choreographers have grounds for complaint because they do not receive encouragement when starting out and don't receive commissions once they are established or is it a more general problem which applies to a wide range of people who don't fit the stereotype of what a choreographer looks like ?

Is the reference to Glyndebourne ludicrous if on consecutive days I had two such wildly contrasting theatrical experiences as far as audience behaviour was concerned? I could just as easily have made a list of every central London venue at which opera is heard on a regular basis and those at which it is only heard occasionally and said quite simply that the audience for opera performances is consistently better behaved than the ballet audience is and that the Swan Lake audience last week was merely an extreme example of the ballet audience's behaviour and,perhaps, its indifference to music. While it is true that the behaviour of the Swan Lake audience was very different from that of the audience at the performance of La Bayadere by the same company and at La Sylphide a couple of weeks ago I have come to believe that there is an element of every ballet audience that does not care that much for music.In the past I would have denied this even when the argument was put to me that the evidence was clear because of the ballet audience's readiness to sit through performances of ballets for which Minkus had composed the score. I used to think that the argument was easily refuted by the fact that the audience went willingly to performances of ballets whose scores were written by Stravinsky,Prokofiev,Schoenberg and Hindemith but it is now clear to me that there are a considerable number of ballet goers who have difficulty with much twentieth century music. My comment is not concerned with musical taste however but with the audience's perception of what constitutes a ballet performance. There is, it seems to me, an element in every ballet audience that equates a ballet performance with what happens on stage when the curtain is up and there are dancers moving about on it. So it is acceptable in the eyes of that element to talk during the overture and during music that links scenes.This is a comparatively recent development in my experience.Unfortunately it is not confined to performances of Swan Lake but it is probably seen at its worst at performances of that ballet. It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching a time when the ballet audience is not only told to refrain from applauding during certain ballets but is told to be quiet. For anyone interested in going to Glyndebourne the journey from London is very easy as there is a coach laid on from Lewes station.As to the comment about Glyndebourne not having "walk in audiences" that applies to performances of opera and most ballets at Covent Garden. I wonder if the decline in audience behavior is attributable to the fact that communal entertainment is not the norm for most people now and that what we are experiencing is people treating the theatre much as they do their home when they are watching television and that the overture and linking music are being equated with the adverts? At present the audiences for classical music and opera still behave themselves but how long will it continue?Perhaps it will not succumb because 99.9% of the audience are agreed about why they are present and are better able to police the 0.1% who are inclined to be disruptive?

Concern has been expressed from time to time about the limited number of ballets that a company like ENB is able to tour because the occasional ballet goer seems unwilling to buy tickets for anything other than Swan Lake,Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet. I started a thread to see whether anyone had any ideas about why the audience was so unadventurous and what,if anything, might be done to encourage people to try something different. There is the long term thread about audience behaviour.I happened to attend the Thursday night performance of Swan Lake at the Coliseum. It gave me no pleasure to say that the audience where I was sitting was incredibly noisy,drowned out the orchestra when there was no one dancing and gave the impression that the ballet was an unwelcome intrusion into the more important activities of talking and looking at their mobile phones.Attending last night the audience was smaller, far less mobile phone fixated and far more attentive as far as the performance was concerned. I can not say whether Thursday night's behaviour was typical of the entire run of Swan Lake, that night's audience, or whether it was limited to my part of the theatre. If it had been my first time at a ballet it would have put me off going again. I am not sure how these two threads are cause for confusion. On the one hand there is, apparently outside London, little interest in a wide repertory which invites the questions why? What,if anything, has altered? On the other hand there is a potential audience which,for whatever reason, does not know how to behave as part of a theatre audience.Now I know that it is quite likely that someone will remind us that being quiet in the theatre is a relatively recent phenomena but bobbing about, flicking your hair. standing up as people traipse out to the bar or to the loo five minutes after the performance has begun does spoil the performance for that part of the audience whose view of the stage is obscured by these activities.

Oh the difference in between audience and audience. Occasional ballet goers and occasional opera goers seem to belong to two totally different tribes. Last night at Glyndebourne, I had a very cheap ticket, you could have heard a mouse fart as the audience watched and listened intently to the Ravel double bill. On Thursday at Swan Lake you could not hear the music for the noise that was generated by an audience who clearly were of the opinion that a ballet is only being performed when there are dancers on the stage. My visit to the Coli was a very dispiriting experience. It left me wondering why the bulk of the audience was there and what they were getting out of the experience. They certainly were not there to listen to the music and seemed to be more taken by the Jester than virtually anyone else.There were quite a few people round me who felt the needed to maintain their alcohol level but then perhaps they felt the need to block out the boorish behaviour going on around us from an obsessive hair flicker to all those people playing musical chairs.There seemed to be more people with weak bladders than you would expect to encounter at a pantomime matinee. I'm afraid that I came away wondering whether it wasn't rather a good job that most of them were unlikely to darken the doors of a theatre at which ballets other than Swan Lake, Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet were being performed. I know it sounds mean spirited but I don't want to sit through too many more performances like Thursday night's.

Is it a blanket ban? Did not Jacobson use Richard Strauss' suite of music from Der Rosenkavalier in his Viennese Waltz?

zxDaveM Sorry that you think that I am "Royal Ballet bashing".It is just that as I read what ABT was serving up it seemed to me that it made the programming at Covent Garden seem overly predictable. Of course it could be that it is a case of "the grass seeming greener.." but the range of ballets that the Royal Ballet performs is far narrower than it needs to be and too many of the new works created for it seem to me far from inspired. A pretentious title and atmospheric lighting don't make a great ballet.I will come clean. Ratmansky's Le Coq d'Or and the Shostakovitch Trilogy look far more enticing than the Raven Girl programme and I am someone who thought his Cinderella a waste of good dancers.

On the topic of whether it is a good idea to have two inexperienced dancers making a joint debut it is interesting to note what Muntagirov has to say about the benefits of making a debut with an experienced dancer in his recent interview published in this month's Dancing Times. He seems to be in favour of one experienced, cool head as part of the duo.Just a thought, particularly as Romeo is a marathon.It has always seemed to me that the reason why the jollifications in the market place go on as long as they do is to give Romeo a breather and to ensure that he is still standing for the last scene.It is strange how the company has oscillated between the experienced pair of hands approach and the joint debut approach over the years. I wonder how long it will be before the company finds itself able to tell the public about cast changes? As Lamb and Pennefather were due to have their performance broadcast it will be interesting to see who the management chooses as the replacement Romeo, and whether that choice leads to further cast changes.

The ballets scheduled for the ABT Met season are mouthwatering Ratmansky's new Sleeping Beauty, Le Coq D'Or and his Shostakovitch triptych plus two Ashton full lengths.It makes the Royal Ballet's 2015-16 season look dull and unimaginative by comparison.With the Royal's programming you know where the full lengths will appear in the schedule and where the mixed bills will pop up a bit like a school timetable which repeats itself year in year out.Yes we get the Two Pigeons and the Winter's Tale and Scarlett's Frankenstein but wouldn't it have been better to quietly dispose of Raven Girl and use the time more fruitfully? Well of course one of the problems is that Kevin seems to be more interested in having new works created on the company by outside choreographers than having their best works mounted for the company.While I understand the importance for dancers of having ballets created on them it does seem rather unfortunate that the company runs the danger of acquiring works that have been made on the choreographer's off days rather than those made when he/she was firing on all cylinders.Perhaps it was because they were choreographers themselves, but the first three choreographers went out of their way to acquire the best examples of an outside choreographer's works as well as the occasional new creation by choreographer's from outside the company.If Kevin wanted a substantial work by Ratmansky he would have to fit in with his availability which means planning several years ahead.Only time will tell whether Kevin is backing the right choreographic horses.

Please note the following is not a suggestion about who might dance the first night performance and nor was my suggestion that Hristov might be cast as Romeo. In both cases these are suggestions about how the Romeo gap might be filled. Here is a possible solution to the sudden Romeo shortage. Ball is given more than one performance as Romeo. I know that there are problems with this in terms of rehearsal time and so on but it might suggest itself to someone.Mason seemed to have grasped the wisdom of getting away from the single sink or swim debut with no planned opportunity for consolidation. So I was a trifle surprised that Naghdi and Ball were only given a single performance in this run. In the past the only opportunity for a second performance used to come from someone else's injury when a dancer who had made their debut was likely to be flung on with little opportunity to prepare for the performance.Given the way debut performances were programmed last year I had thought that the one off performance might have become a thing of the past. The second suggestion relates to the performances of Giselle next year. It is unlikely but not impossible. Xander Parish is invited to guest as Albrecht.I understand that his performances in this role have been well received.

This certainly looks like the season when we discover how committed Kevin O'Hare is to developing the company's leading dancers from within the ranks of the company.He may have been calculating on replacing Acosta this year and Watson in the next year or two but I don't suppose that he was expecting Pennefather to leave.Let us hope that he manages to resist the temptation to take out the cheque book and decides to make do with the dancers in the company. An immediate solution to the loss of a Romeo would be to cast Hristov as Romeo. It is in his repertory and it is easier to replace a Paris than a Romeo. It will be interesting to see what sort of balance management strikes between seniority and the need to develop some of the obvious talent in the lower ranks of the company when it comes to casting in the remaining two booking periods.The explanation that we were given for the late notification of casting was that it would enable management to take account of dancers' performances earlier on in the season suggested that there was a plan of some sort in place to develop dancers.It is to be hoped that the plan is not blown off course by this recent development.

M and A was a vehicle for the dancers on whom it was created. I don't think that it is necessarily a question of it being second rate Ashton if it often looks odd and unashtonian and if performances of the same ballet look so wildly different.It has everything to do with dancers performing what was set in the correct style and speed rather than adapting it to their own style and adding high extensions and so on Having said that I would have been quite happy if it had not been exhumed.All the performances that I have seen of it have fallen short of the original. Ashton was right about this work and Beatrix Potter. M. and A. should not have been revived and Beatrix Potter should never have been allowed to make the transition from screen to stage. But the fact that M and A seems to be spreading across the world like a rash does sugest that there is a demand for suitable vehicles by dancers of a certain age and that they are waiting for choreographers to come up with the goods.Perhaps Mr Scarlett should think about devising such a ballet or a series of them to meet the demand.Then it might prove possible to restore M and A to its resting place. Of course it could just turn out to be the case that whatever its flaws M and A still "goes" in a way that more recent creations do not.

barton 22. All dancers are variable some are more variable than others. It used to be said that there were two Desmond Kellys one who was marvelous and another who was less than marvelous.Someone I know used to describe the latter as "Dismal Desmond", but that didn't stop him buying tickets for Kelly's performances. He took his chance as to which one would turn up on the night. Consistency is a real issue for the performing arts generally and as far as singers were concerned used to revolve around whether you would rather hear Berit Lindholme who was consistently accurate but boring or Gwynneth Jones who was variable but incomparable on a good night.Most people I know, when given the choice, were prepared to take their chances rather than be bored to death.I know that Moira Shearer once said that as far as Fonteyn's reputation was concerned it wasn't just that her performances were outstanding it was that they were so consistent in quality;she did not seem to have off nights like other dancers do. I don't doubt your experience of Pennefather's performances. Perhaps it was a question of who he was dancing with. I have to say that I did not experience the degree of variability in his performances that you allude to.I went out of my way to see him dance with Sarah Lamb because in La Sylphide and Manon they brought out the best in each other. Perhaps as far as the other performances that I saw are concerned I was extremely lucky because I don't recall seeing him going through the motions or on autopilot. Perhaps it depends on what you look for in a performer or performance. I am more than happy to watch a male dancer perform the princely roles as a danseur,with elegance, apparent lack of effort and impeccable partnering skills.In my book those who approach princely roles need to understand that ballet princes don't sweat only those dancing demi character roles do that. Wulff, I don't think that Pennefather was entirely unappreciated by the critics although they often missed his performances because they were not the ones that critics were invited to attend. I expect that is why the first performances that they attended of Lamb and Pennefathet in Manon came as such a surprise. Luke Jennnings wrote very appreciatively of his ability to command the stage with stillness and his stage skills in those yearning,longing scenes that are scattered through Petipa's late ballets, probably to give Pavel Gerdt the opportunity to show the audience his profile.His comments could sound like damning with faint praise but I think that what Jennings was talking about was Pennefather's understanding that ballet is not simply about movement, but about the contrast between stillness and movement and his ability t and willingness to use stillness for effect rather than seeing it as a state in which the dancer is not doing his job which is simply to dance.

As the Artistic Director seems to be very keen to show Golding off, with a De Grieux in Moscow and a repeat performance of Oberon in New York, which I hope showed considerably more understanding of the required style and a greater facility with the steps than his Covent Garden debut revealed.I would not be at all surprised to discover that he will replace Pennefather as Romeo. If that happens I just hope that management feels the need to find another partner for Hayward. I don't think that many people would mind who the replacement for Golding was; not being Golding would be high enough recommendation for many.I think that it is unlikely to be Muntagirov because he is making his debut in the role in this run and he does have commitments as guest artist so he might not be available for rehearsals or performances. In a recent interview he cited not being able to guest and the limited repeated repertory as two of the main reasons for leaving ENB and joining the Royal Ballet. I think that for many regular ballet goers Kevin O'Hare's reasons for signing Golding remain a mystery I think that the idea that people buy tickets for performances in which he is dancing with an air of resignation because they want to see other members of the cast is a pretty accurate one.

I wonder whether the powers that be at the Royal Ballet are aware that their streamed performances are not actually being accessed by a wide range of people that they presumably would like to reach. I know that it is blindingly obvious that you can't be in a cinema watching a live streamed performance and at dance class at the same time.But it's the blindingly obvious that so often gets overlooked by people in big organisations particularly if they are providing ancillary services and have had little or nothing to do with the organisation's core functions. It's quite possible that there are people in the organisation wh are congratulating themselves on being able to reach out to dance students when they are not contacting anywhere near the number that they believe they are. It is possible to find out which cinemas are doing repeat screenings by looking on the Opera House website but you have to be aware that the performances are being streamed in the first place. Do details of streamed performances get mentioned in the Dancing Times? I don't know.

Of course you know that one of the big debates about how Ashton should be danced is whether it is on or off the beat. It makes a hell of a lot of difference to how it looks. It would be lovely if the Sarasota company were to be invited over here but I can't see that happening in real life only in dreams. I think that Mr Webb's secret weapon is his wife who was a great dancer. Along with Beriosova she was one of my top three Giselles. It was always something of a mystery to me that MacMillan didn't seem to want her in the main company. I can't help feeling that the reputation of the company would not have dipped so much as it did in the 1980's if he had taken her into the company when Jeffries joined it.

Mab, I hope that I am careful to make clear which are my opinions and those that are the opinions of others. I thought that I had made it clear that it was a criticism made about Stretton's casting of Don Q which I thought had contributed to Mason's decision to recruit from the outside rather than developing dancers from within the company. The comments about Stretton's casting decisions came if I recall on the back of the critics' reviews of the performances of the more experienced dancers in his Don Q and were along the lines of at last we get to see Yoshida and Cope who have the experience to know how to dance this ballet.I am sorry it was a good deal more than twelve years ago and I did not retain the actual reviews. I don't see that the comments about the inadvisability of casting young inexperienced dancers in Don Q, which seems to have been taken out of context to make a point, are incompatible with expressing the view that young dancers should be given a chance to show what they can do. Even if that comment was a bald statement it would not be incompatible with my general view that the company is not programming nearly enough work that would promote the development of the younger dancers without in any way diminishing the quality of the ballets that are performed. In order to succeed as Basilio or Kitri in Don Q a dancer, it seems to me, needs stamina, stage presence if not panache and an obviously brilliant technique these are rarely all present in comparatively inexperienced dancers.I recognise that dancers like the rest of us learn by doing rather than being the balletic equivalent of spear carriers which is what happened to Xander Parrish. That is why I want to see O'Hare make provision for the young talented dancers in the lower ranks of the company so that they get a chance before it is too late. Over the years I have seen far too many young dancers being given their turn as flavour of the month, after several years doing nothing but corps work, and then abandoned,not to recognise that management needs to take a consistent approach to developing its dancers and that without a consistent approach to programming and casting we will find that all the dancers in the senior ranks of the company invariably come from outside it. There are ballets that are generally unsuitable for the inexperienced dancer such as Don Q and Sleeping Beauty and those that give the young dancer the opportunity to gain stage experience and show the director what they can do without placing inordinate pressure on them to be a success first time out.They are ballets like Facade, Les Patineurs,Les Rendezvous and MacMillan's Solitaire which have a number of small roles in which the inexperienced dancer can shine and be tried out for bigger better things.The Two Pigeons was made for young dancers and because it has not been danced by the Covent Garden company for about thirty years it does not carry the same weight of expectation and performance history that many other ballets do. Indeed those who are old enough to remember those performances are likely to be so grovellingly grateful that they won't make a peep about older casts. I shall be interested to know what you and other people think about this.Surprisingly a lot of the ballets that I have listed, and the list is not exhaustive,are by Ashton and in the dim and distant past were what the successes of MacMillan well as Ashton were built on.The new works,it seems to me for the main part require experienced dancers and provide far less opportunity for development as a classical dancer than these older ballets do. While I look forward to seeing Matthew Ball in Romeo and Juliet I am conscious that the role of Romeo is a marathon for the dancer performing it. I trust that he and others will get their chance to show what they can do on a consistent basis.

At the Coli there is a television down in the bowels of the earth to which latecomers for opera are usually consigned. I would not have thought that it would have been removed when there are ballet performances although on second thoughts perhaps the powers that be have decided that the behaviour of the average ballet goer is so bad that they are not prepared to chance it.

Two Pigeons I do not know which BRB performance of Les Rendezvous you attended last year and I will not ask who the dancer was whose performance you found so unidiomatic in the Markova role. I went to Birmingham for the midweek matinee and because of the duration of the programme I found that I was able to see the evening performance as well and still get home easily so i bought a ticket for it. The management in their infinite wisdom, it probably looked fine on paper after all both roles were created by Markova, or perhaps both dancers had been assured that they would only be in one show during the day, allocated the two Markova roles to a single dancer at the matinee and did the same thing for the evening performance with a different dancer.What made this casting decision so odd was that no one seemed to have noticed that although they were roles created on Markova they are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. The Markova of Les Rendezvous was a dancer who was preparing for her first Giselle and as a result what she presented to Ashton in the rehearsal studio was a dancer performing in the clean style of the French school. The Markova of Facade was a dancer full of Italian technique which Ashton proceeded to subvert by breaking the rules that usually reveal the harmony of the body in motion. The performance of one dancer was perfectly suited to the Markova of Les Rendezvous and totally unsuited to the Markova role in Facade. The reverse was true at the other performance where the dancer was fine in Facade and unsuited to Les Rendezvous. All in all a really bizarre experience and one that suggests that the company is deaf to nuances of style. Perhaps one of the problems of the Ashton repertory is that there is not a single one size fits all approach to his works.It is true that there is the requirement to bend, the epaulement, the Fred step, the fact that the bouree is very rarely a mere step of transition and so on . The problem is that all his characters move differently and even those individuals who are merely roles rather than characters have their own way of moving.It must make coaching extremely difficult particularly if the dancer is not prepared to adapt their style to the one required. If Ashton himself had so much difficulty in coaching Markarova in Apparitions that he withdrew from the process I hate to think what coaching is like for mere mortals.

The introduction of Vaganova to the school goes back to Dame Merle's directorship. When the new director was appointed he said that he was concerned by the emphasis on technique that seemed to be prevalent across the dance world and that he wanted to shift the emphasis onto performance and artistry.Now the interesting thing is that even before his arrival it was noticeable that there were, once again, quite a few names among the staff that would be familiar as former members of the Royal Ballet companies.it was noticeable that this year's Royal Ballet School main stage performance showed far more concern with artistry than seemed to be the case in the last few years and not just in the graduating year. It will be interesting to see whether, and how long, this trend continues and how long the director stays as he has a reputation for having itchy feet.The programme included a very well danced Les Rendezvous in the original Chappell sets and costumes which was performed by students predominantly from the Upper School's second year.So perhaps there is hope for the future. I'm not sure that you can attribute anything that happened on Mason's watch to the fact that she was predominantly known as a MacMillan dancer .She had a formidably strong technique I think there is some evidence that when it came to recruitment she favoured those with strong technique but then given the way that lyricism can easily degenerate into weak technique and the state of the company in the 1980's i don't find that surprising. I think that Mason was presented with a number of problems, apart from the company's low morale, when she became director..Faced with the choice of reviving pieces that were in danger of being lost or developing the company from within she chose to stabilize the repertory. Perhaps if she had known that she would retire from the directorship at seventy rather than sixty five she might have taken a different approach. As far as the Ashton repertory is concerned you could of course argue that given the centenary Mason was bound to stage his works in 2004. But if she had wanted to, she could have got away with reviving and programming far fewer of his works than she actually did. If she had programmed the Dream and Month and not much more she would have been criticised by Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp but I don't think that many others would have said much.Indeed she would probably have been congratulated by the very people.who complained about her lack of vision and obsession with "heritage works". Instead we got among other things the restoration to the stage of the full length Sylvia a ballet that I never expected to see performed as a three act work.. Mason was heavily involved in its restoration to the stage. . I think the one thing that her directorship underlines is the long term impact on the company of Michael Kaiser's proposal that the company should be disbanded during the closure of the opera house .As far as I am aware it was that threat that led to the loss of the male dancers who went to Japan with Kumakawa who founded his own company there.As Assistant Director I doubt that she was in a position to try to do much to remedy the situation that the loss of these dancers created. Stretton's decision to cast a lot of talented inexperienced dancers in his Don Q resulted in a lot of criticism of their lack of stage presence and their inability to establish character. It was only towards the end of the run that things began to pick up when the dancers who Stretton had been sidelining and clearly hoped to dump or persuade to leave got the chance to show what they could do.Perhaps it was the knowledge that her immediate need was for experienced male dancers that led her to recruit Bonnelli and Samudurov. I am not sure that I understand the subsequent apparent failure to identify and develop dancers from within the company the most glaring example of that failure.being Xander Parrish whose height alone might, at one time, have ensured that he was at least given a chance to show what he could do. But as he has expressed his gratitude for the help that he has received at the Mariinsky perhaps it was technical weakness that held him back here. It would seem that recruiting from the outside became something of a habit under her directorship and continues to be one as far as principal dancers are concerned. The strange thing about this method of acquiring principal dancers is that while each may be highly skilled their talents rarely seem to meet the company's obvious needs. Here I wonder whether if Polunin was still with the company we might not be so concerned with what we see as the mistakes made and trends started or strengthened during Mason's directorship. On paper it would not have taken that much to produce a different outcome as far as developing dancers from within the company is concerned.All that would have been required would have been a change of repertory. Including works like Facade,Les Rendezvous, Les Patineurs,liberated from Beatrix Potter, regularly as part of the limited number of mixed bills that are now programmed.They are works that still test the abilities of the young inexperienced dancer as well as those of the established ones.These are after all the works that developed the technical skills of the company's dancers in its early years and molded the dancers who created MacMillan's greatest works.So why did not it happen? I suspect that the need to keep the bean counters happy and certain that the company will break even at the end of the year, plus the need to keep the dancers happy goes a long way to explain what gets programmed.But even if you have to stage a certain number of full length works each season to balance the books does it always have to be MacMillan;s Romeo and Juliet? I wonder how Lady MacMillan would react if she was told that the company wanted to rest his version of the ballet for four years and replace it with Ashton's but they wanted to stage his Four Seasons? I wonder whether Mason would have acted differently if she had known that she would remain in post until she was seventy rather than going when she was sixty five? It struck me that during her first period in office she was very much a woman in a hurry with her time taken up in dealing with the immediate problems so that the company she handed over to her successor was in a better sshape than the one she had inherited from Ross Stretton.. No artistic director has a clean sheet as far as their term in office is concerned. de Valois' gravest error was to fail to secure the services of Vera Volkova as a teacher by insisting that she would have to abandon her private classes. Ashton's directorship was successful his weakness was his lack of interest in the school, MacMillan's directorship was not that successful. He would almost certainly have been happier and far more productive if he had not become director. The gradual decline in the company's standards that had been taking place under MacMillan became all too obvious under his successor. The current director seems content to let Ashton retain a toehold this season's programme gives us Two Pigeons with different openers . The fact is that any choreographer's works begin to die as soon as they slip from the living repertory and the collective memory of a company. Part of Webb's success with Ashton ballets at Sarasota is not that they are well coached but they are cast with care and then revived at regular intervals.As a result the dancers become Ashton dancers.As Geraldine Morris pointed out in her book about Ashton's ballets the dancers with whom he worked did not have a uniform training what gave them their uniformity of style was dancing his works in the way that he expected. .At the very point at which you begin to think that all may be lost you have the possibility that things may change. Ratmansky's new Sleeping Beauty is an attempt to return to a dance text that is scraped clean of all the recent accretions of high extensions and musical distortions that give the dancer the time to add the now obligatory "wow" factor.It turns out that Ashton's works are not that dissimilar from Petipa,