FLOSS

I understand that targets are set for ticket sales. If insufficient tickets are sold for a particular work it puts a big question mark over the possibility of revival in later seasons. Management may have felt that only allowing students to buy tickets in the Amphitheatre for first night was going to ensure that there was an enthusiastic audience response to this work.The popular ticket prices were clearly intended to get the audience in and so far the strategy has not worked that well. 100+ tickets unsold for every other performance of a new work except the premiere is not something that I have seen before. I wonder how long they can afford to use price hikes for popular works to cross subsidize McGregor's works like this? It is another one of his works that is being supported in the same way next year. It suggests that there is not a ready audience of any size for such pieces and that they are experiencing some difficulty in building one. There is a danger that at some point people will stop paying up for anything except Nutcracker and other really popular works. A theatre like Covent Garden can not survive on passing trade.It is one of the reasons why the first booking period is so long and expensive for regular ballet and opera goers. It gives them money upfront for the best part of five months as the season opens. . What happens if the new work gets panned by the critics and then the regulars who will be there on the second and subsequent nights start warning everyone off and put any other tickets that they may have for back for resale? Worse still for Kevin what happens if the casting for next season does not persuade us to spend? The consensus seems to be that next season is not very exciting on paper. Then there is the American Tour. I wonder how well tickets are selling? There is some suggestion that not everyone is that happy about the programmes being offered at the Kennedy Centre which I understand has been changed to Don Q and at the Koch Theatre where one of the ballets is being replaced by a somewhat eclectic offering of gala odds and ends. Potentially a very interesting summer for the Royal Ballet management team.

Alison and Melody Balanchine quotations. "See the music hear the dance";"Dancing is music made visible" I know that Balanchine's way with music is perhaps best described as cavalier. Finding that a single piece of Ravel was not long enough for his purposes he just spliced another piece by the same composer onto it. I can't imagine him getting that past the Opera House Board. I find it amusing that the man who did so much in the twentieth century to expand the range of movement available to classical ballet remained at heart, at least when it came to music, an old unreformed nineteenth century ballet master.In the Emeralds section of Jewels he splices together pieces from two orchestral suites by Faure and then in 1976 decided to add another piece hence the "false ending".But that does not stop me admiring this ballet which evokes the purity and nobility of the nineteenth century French school and the France of medieval romance and the land of Lyoness. In fact it is this ballet, which often barely registers and is so difficult to perform well that I like most of the three. As far as the music for Serenade is concerned strangely I do not feel that the musical text for the ballet is "wrong" when it is performed with Balanchine's choreography.I would almost certainly do so if I heard it in the rearranged order in the concert hall. I am not an uncritical admirer of Balanchine. I do not think that everything that he made is a masterpiece worthy of preservation. I sometimes think that,unlike Ashton some of whose works are in danger of being lost through laziness and neglect, Balanchine suffers from an over reverential attitude to his works which seeks to preserve the choreographic equivalent of nail parings. I could quite happily live without Tzigane and Bugaku for example. I tend to prefer works that feel like immediate responses to music such as Symphony in C and Concert Barocco rather than pieces which feel as of the life has been analysed out of them. I know that I prefer Ashton following the melody over the bar lines to Balanchine's persistent acknowledgement of them A choreographer does not have to treat the score for Romeo and Juliet in the way that MacMillan did. Ashton made his Romeo and Juliet before the Lavrovsky version was known in the West. It is very different from the post Lavrovsky versions of Cranko and MacMillan .I think that it is the Lavrovsky ballet rather than the score itself which is prescriptive.Where Cranko, MacMillan et al clothe the structure that Lavrovsky has shown them Ashton uses the music in a way that looks and feels very different and it is not just Ashton pas de deux compared with MacMillan style pas de deux which make the difference.. It all feels more specific Tybalt is not simply a heavy who suffers a melodramatic death. He is the" prince of cats".The market place is not merely somewhere for massed dances for the corps to take place.The nurse is accompanied by Peter a character who is normally cut from the acted text. It is Romeo and Juliet as a personal tragedy rather than epic dance drama. Eagling wanted ENB to revive it . A real missed opportunity. Les Sylphides was staged for LFB by Markova in 1976 and performed most recently in 2009. I know that I saw Nureyev and Evdokimova in it several times early on and it was so very different from the way in which the Royal Ballet companies both at Covent Garden and the touring company performed it. They dance it dutifully whereas LFB had a real feel for the Romantic style and the mood the that ballet should evoke.In fact I would say that LFB/ENB's productions of both Giselle(Mary Skeaping) and Les Sylphides (Markova) were much better than either Royal Ballet company in text,overall standard of performance and understanding of the style.I think that Les Sylphides was last performed by ENB in 2009. Fonty. Glad you enjoyed it.Did it include the introduction by Karsavina?

I am not sure that the duration of the market scenes in MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet are entirely attributable to the choreographer's inability to cut the score.I think that the duration of those scenes has a lot to do with giving Romeo a "breather".He is on in most scenes and he has rather a lot of "heavy lifting "in the final one.I read somewhere that at one time when the ballet was relatively new the cast used to applaud a new Romeo for getting through it. I think that a lot of the "padding" in Manon and in Mayerling is there for similar reasons. Manon has had some pruning. T,he governor used to have a mistress but she disappeared very early on.The brothel scene in Manon can sometimes seem interminable as can the quayside scene, all that repetitive dancing for the townswomen and the soldiers and worst of all,the deported whores collapsing all over the place, can be a bit much to take. But you realise how necessary the "padding" is when you look at an exhausted de Grieux at the beginning of the last scene I do not think that all of that exhaustion is acting. Mayerling has been cut. The hunting scene is shorter than it was originally and the scene with the recital has been removed and then restored but I do not think that the Mitzi Caspar scene has been altered that much if at all. Again it provides a"breather" for Rudolph. David Wall said that the role had reduced his career as a dancer by seven years and even today with careful preparation Ed Watson has said that at the end of the first act it feels as if he has danced a three act ballet. I think that Ashton the ballets that have survived are perfect none of the one act pieces is too long and none of the longer works has excess flesh when you get to grips with what he is doing with the score and get away from the coarsening of detail that has been allowed to creep into revivals.He seems to have stuck to the idea that there was no ideal length for a ballet and that it should be as long as it needed to be. I could make a strong case for any number of Ashton ballets Scenes de Ballet, Daphnis and Chloe,Enigma Variations or Walk to the Paradise Garden but finally I have come down to three ballets all abstract and all created before 1950. I would like to offer the three ballets that Clive Barnes once described as the most significant of the twentieth century Les Sylphides, Serenade and Symphonic Variations. As most people on this forum are likely to have seen Serenade and Symphonic Variations I do not intend to say much about them except that the choreographic text of both ballets seems so integral to the music that all the dancers' movements seem inevitable and that it is virtually impossible to imagine any other choreographer daring to set a ballet to these scores. But I will say a little about Les Sylphides which is rarely performed here today except by visiting Russian companies.It is a ballet of style and mood. It is a revolutionary work evoking the pure French school of the nineteenth century which in its apparent simplicity challenges the dominant style of Petipa's late nineteenth century ballets which incorporate and display the technical developments of the Italian school.It is incredibly difficult to get it right in performance.The last Royal Ballet revival did the work and the audience no favours.The best performances of it that I have ever seen were given many years ago by the ENB in a revival staged by Alicia Marlova who had been taught the ballet by Fokine. Although it was incredibly slow it was exceptionally beautiful.The ballet was the first free standing abstract work.You could argue that without it Serenade and Symphonic Variations might not have been made in the form that we know them. As the ballet is something of a rarity I will mention two recordings of it that are well worth watching. The first is the ICA DVD of a BBC recording with Markova, Beriosova, Elvin and John Field who make it look so simple that you wonder how anyone can get it wrong.The second is a recording of The Royal Ballet with Fonteyn and Nureyev. Then there is Markova La Legende which has a whole section given over to her coaching members of the POB which is fascinating.

Sorry. The last sentence refers to Moseley.

I said that Osipova's Lise was work in progress I stand by that.statement. I don't suppose that anyone is pitch perfect at their first performance of Lise except ,perhaps, Nerina for whom and on whom the role was created. All Ashton's works are technically challenging and all the more so because they must look effortless.From what I have seen of Osipova so far she learns and she learns very quickly and her last performance in the run will look very different from her first one. I do not necessarily find Osipova's performances too big.if a dancer is able dance musically and does not expect the music to be slowed down to accommodate him or her that is fine. For me a ballet performance is about more than merely reproducing steps accurately. it is a about dancing the ballet which involves apparent ease and facility in partnering the gift of apparent spontaneity and appropriate characterization. Based on a recent viewing of Seymour in the role. Osipova's first night Natalia Petrovna was far closer to Lynn Seymour's performance of the role than many that we have seen at Covent Garden recently. Somehow the idea has developed that Ashton was a small scale choreographer who made miniatures and expected safe small scale performances which is far from being true. He liked dangerous dancing. I sat down today and asked myself the questions about my response to last night's performance. Now as this is purely subjective I can not be right or wrong in my assessment and nor can anyone else.I do not go to the ballet to find something to dislike or criticize. I do not expect people to agree or disagree with me.My comment about Marriott as Simone was prompted by the fact that until this latest run of performances I have regarded his presence in a cast as the price that I have had to pay in order to see dancers who I wanted to see as Lise and Colas. Last night he was not as good as he has been in the past.

Osipova's Lise is definitely work in progress.It may well look much more integrated by the last performance in the run, MacRae's Colas dancing with Marquez somehow felt warmer than it does with Osipova. But he probably has less time to radiate warmth and fun and general joie de vivre because partnering Osipova clearly presents far more technical problems than partnering Marquez does.I think that the problem last night,apart from Mosely's Widow Simone which was seriously below par, was that I was too aware of the mechanics of the all the Lise, Colas pas de deux. I felt that I could see them thinking "Now we've got to do.the first "Bolshoi lift" what did we agree?". I know that it is difficult but the audience should not be aware of the difficulties. It may seem like a short ballet to the audience but the main roles are really taxing and by the end it felt as if dancing with a partner as tall as Osipova was taking its toll on MacRae.In the final pas MacRae and Osipova got far too close to the dancers grouped around Simone almost certainly through a slight loss of concentration by MacRae. For me the performance lacked the feeling of spontaneity, effortlessness and charm that Morera and Muntagirov brought to it. Karsavina said said that " Colas should charm with innocence and should not be interrupted by any other mood " Muntagirov who seems to be a danseur rather than a demi character dancer radiated charm and innocence while MacRae who by physique and temperament is a demi character dancer did not. Perhaps all the effort that he has put into recreating himself as a serious contender in princely roles now gets in the way when he plays Colas. Kay's Alain was a cheerful innocent sent out into the world before he was old or mature enough for it.If anyone is ever foolish enough to redesign this ballet I hope that they recognise that the clue to Alain is in large part in his costume. Act I Alain wears a jacket that he has clearly grown out of;a single button straining to keep the jacket fastened and in Act II a set of tails that have clearly been made on the basis that he will grow into them. Alexander Grant the first and, in my books,still the greatest Alain that I have seen gave an interview in which he was at great pains to explain that Alain was not a simpleton but merely immature. He also said that the characters in Ashton's ballets were portrayed as much by the details of the stage business that they were given as the steps that they dance and that the characterisation was always in danger of being lost because dancers thought those details were unimportant. As for Simone I think that everyone who is cast as Simone should be required to watch Stanley Holden on the DVD recording of the original cast not to reproduce Holden but to see how effective the stage business is in creating and maintaining the character. They all need to be reminded that Simone is essentially a peasant widow and must be credible as such. The one thing that Simone is not,however many times journalists refer to Simone as one, is a pantomime dame.I know that my mother was extremely impressed by Ronald Emblem's Simone who she thought looked and behaved exactly like a French peasant woman of a certain age. Emblem's Simone showed real affection for her daughter there was always warmth between mother and daughter even when they were getting on each other's nerves.Simone loves money but she loves her daughter more. That it seems to me is shown particularly in Act II where they dance together and the choreography quotes from the grey girls in Les Biches and when Simone protects Lise and Colas from Thomas' wrath with her Swan Queen pose at the foot of the stairs. I thought that Mosely was far too sour, grumpy and cold as Simone and his clog dance was the worst that I have seen in this run. Marriott was much improved on the last time that I saw him in the role but his clog dance was not in time with the music.Tuckett is by far the best Simone when it comes to performing the clog dance but then he spoils everything by introducing extra pratfalls in the harvest scene.As I watched him I thought how easily a ballet can be coarsened by bright ideas introduced to make up for the supposed inadequacies of the choreographer.Fille is a comedy of recognition not pantomime nor slapstick . It is not meant to be a side splitting comedy. The comic touches that exist in the text are so underplayed that they do not register adequately for example Simone's response to finding Lise sweeping the floor should register far more than it does.Not quick hand to the forehead move on but "You must be ill, you're working! What are you up to?" As far as the clog dance is concerned does anyone find it strange that this section is generally so badly performed at Covent Garden? It can hardly be the case that the dancers involved have too little time to prepare for the role of Simone. Perhaps it would be better to find the latter day equivalent of Ronald Emblem and for both companies to use him in the role.

I have only seen Le Train Bleu on DVD and it really seemed a very slight occasional piece, far too dependent on people and types who were fashionable and newsworthy in the nineteen twenties to bear revival. Le Tricorne on the same disc was pretty dull too. Both were very carefully danced rather than performed.But when I saw Muntagirov perform his Beau Gosse gala "party piece" he almost convinced me that the ballet might be worth seeing.He danced it with great verve and I suddenly understood how it made Dolin's reputation. With the right personalities in the other three key roles Le Train Bleu could be great fun.I don't suppose that Kevin would be interested in a Nijinska triple bill of Les Biches, Les Noces and Le Train Bleu.

Jabasemesrhblack you could check the ROH's performance database but I do not believe that it is a complete account of all the performances at Covent Garden from the postwar reopening of the House to date. I do not recall Penney ever being cast as Lise. I think it unlikely that she ever danced it. Sibley did, but Ashton told her that she was unsuited for the role because she was too sophisticated.I expect that he would have felt the same about Penney.During the directorships of de Valois, Ashton and MacMillan all the dancers, including Principals, were cast according to their suitability for roles rather than seniority.Suitability was based on type, but the number of types was not as great as the categories used by the Russians in their system of emploi, nor as rigorously applied.The main categorization of female dancer in the Royal Ballet companies was between those who were classical ballerina types such as Fonteyn, Beriosova, Sibley and Penney and those who were demi character soubrettes who tended to be shorter and more compact with brilliant fast footwork and often with good jumps.These categories were more a rule of thumb than a rigorously applied system of typecasting.The decision to cast Sibley as Lise seems more than a little bizarre unless you know that Sibley and Graham Usher danced the leads in Coppelia at the Royal Ballet School's first Covent Garden matinee in I think 1958. Today the only area of the repertory in which suitability seems to continue to weigh more heavily than seniority in casting is the Ashton repertory. I think that this may have been,in part, the result of a lack of interest from some senior dancers.But the strongest factor has almost certainly been that both the rights holders who stage the Ashton ballets they own and the director seem to have had similar ideas about casting these works. If some recent casting decisions are anything to go by.that casting consensus may be in process of breaking down. The role of Lise was created for Nerina who was a soubrette as were Park, Collier and Jenner all of whom danced the role to considerable acclaim. The list is not exclusive but the four dancers that I have named were among the best exponents of the role that the Covent Garden company was able to muster in the first twenty years of the ballet's history. The Touring Company and its later incarnations have also had a rosta of great exponents starting with Brenda Last who danced the role over a hundred times and probably knows more about the it than anyone living or dead. As for the ballet itself.It is a shame that the Covent Garden company dances it so infrequently that the audience has to be told at every revival what a great work it is. Other companies express concern about the lack of child friendly starter ballets and yet both Royal Ballet companies have it in their repertory but do perform it as frequently as they should. I find it hard to believe that anyone would complain if it became a regular Easter holiday feature at Covent Garden except those who believe that in order to be taken seriously ballet must always be ill lit and earnest.

Yes those 1977 performances were ones to savour.I remember at the beginning of the curtain calls there were so many flowers lying on the front of the stage that when Jenner came out for her first one she had to grab the curtain to keep upright. I have to say that Morera and Muntagirov were outstanding on first night and neither seemed to be overly exerting themselves as if Ashton is a breeze to dance. How wonderful to see a ballet made by a master choreographer working at the top of his game rather than a dull,atmospherically lit tediously earnest work wasting highly trained dancers.

I wonder whether it is kinder to say that a dancer's career has stalled or stagnated or to suggest that they have almost certainly reached their natural level in the company and that in your opinion they are unlikely to progress further. The ardent supporters of the dancer concerned would be sure to come down on the poster concerned like a ton of bricks. I believe that nearly everyone has at least one dancer whom they admire about whom friends and acquaintances maintain a polite if slightly amused silence for fear of causing unnecessary offence although they are thinking ".MISS X OR MR Y AS PRINCIPAL YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!!". I wonder how many people who have contributed to this debate have put forward names of favourite dancers whose performances they admire who they know are not in the running for promotion and how many believe that the dancers that they have named are really likely to move up the ranks? Of course none of it matters because it is all harmless speculation.I wonder if anyone has ever sent an irate letter to a director about a favourite dancer's lack of recognition. When people put pen to paper the letter would have been written in green ink. Does anyone have an idea about what the e-mail equivalent might be?

The director of a company will have his/her own idea of what the company should be performing and what it should look like,One director may see ballet essentially in terms of the display of technique and favour technicians, another may see ballet as a theatrical art form in which a wide range of dancers are needed in order to cast ballets appropriately such a director is unlikely to cast dancers merely on the basis of technique and may cast dancers with just enough technique if they look right for a role. One director may favour short dancers with fast footwork another may favour tall dancers, one may prefer dancers who are dance actors another may simply want dancers with strong technique.The director's tastes have a tremendous impact on decisions about recruitment, promotion and casting;they can make or mar a dancer's career.and they have a long term impact on a company like the Royal Ballet.Their decisions affect the repertory and overall look of the company and just as importantly what individual ballets and entire sections of the repertory look like in performance. Director's ideas about the repertory that the company should dance are heavily influenced by their own experience as a dancer and the choreographers and works to which they were exposed at earlier stages in their career.O'Hare is particularly interesting because he is simultaneously an insider having been trained at the Royal Ballet School and a quasi-outsider as his dance career was at Birmingham Royal Ballet whose repertory overlaps that of the Royal Ballet but increasingly has its own ballets which are unique to it.Perhaps his experience will enable him to look at the company's developmental needs in a more dispassionate way than someone who spent their entire career in the company. But his quasi-outsider status means that he lacks the insider's knowledge of the company's repertory, performing practices and history which are acquired by performing ballets rather than watching them,. Few directors have a completely free hand in their choice of repertory because of the need to cover costs but they can and must make decisions about the value of their historical repertory. Mason did a great deal of work to bring quite a few of Ashton's works that were in danger of slipping into oblivion back into the collective memory of the company but it seems to me that some are, once again, in danger of drifting back into the shadows through lack of performance.Works like Ondine, A Wedding Bouquet and Daphnis and Chloe need to be performed rather more frequently than once every ten years or so and with real care and thought given to their casting if they are to survive.. Then there are ballets like Les Illuminations,Les Apparitions, Jazz Calender, Raymonda Pas de Deux and A Walk to the Paradise Garden which have not been seen on the Covent Garden stage for many years, Perhaps it is not that surprising that the majority of under performed works seem to belong to Ashton's residuary legatee rather than those who received specific bequests. Ashton made bequests to some legatees that he knew were likely to generate income for the legatee concerned. Ashton's nephew Anthony Russell Roberts spoke to the London Ballet Circle some years ago about his work with the company and the ballets that his uncle had left him. He seemed to have little interest in their revival and seemed happy to take his uncle's words that the works would not survive at face value. .As far as performance of works is concerned ownership is not the issue it is the attitude of the director to these works that is paramount as he decides what to stage each season. Directors such as Webb who have worked for the Royal Ballet companies have extensive knowledge of the Ashton repertory and know what will suit their company and help develop it.O'Hare's attitude is a little more difficult to fathom but one to two programmes a season with some odd casting and iffy coaching is not that reassuring.Golding cast as Oberon in The Dream in 2014 and his proposed casting for performances of Symphonic Variations this year are two examples of what I am talking about and the sloppy corps in Scenes de Ballet another.One badly cast ballet is one thing but when the decidedly iffy casting and the sloppy corps only seem to occur in the works of one choreographer I begin to wonder about the company's commitment to the choreographer and his works.. Of the Ashton legatees Alexander Grant (Fille Mal Gardee and Facade) Wendy Ellis Somes (Cinderella and Symphonic Variations ) and Anthony Dowell (The Dream and A Month in the Country) have been pretty active in mounting the works that they own but the rest of the legatees seem to have comparatively few of their ballets staged with any degree of frequency.Lady MacMillan has on occasion been very active in her advocacy for her husband's works, or at least, a certain part of them. The fact that they have, until recently, clearly been central to the Royal Ballet's repertory has ensured that they are performed regularly and given their owner some power over it. It was after all suggested that Stretton's position became untenable when she threatened to withdraw the ballets from the company. But the frequency of their performances is not necessarily a result of their innate qualities nor the decline in creativity experienced by the company after MacMillan's death.In his memoir about his time at Covent Garden Jeremy Isaacs describes a visit from Lady MacMillan and her husband soon after Ashton's death in which she seems to have told him in pretty forthright terms that her husband's works should be given priority over those of Ashton because her husband was capable of producing new work for the company.She also mentioned that the director agreed with this view. It is very easy to assume that works that are performed infrequently are weak and not worth reviving.This view is inevitably reinforced by poorly cast and inadequately coached revivals of a choreographer's works.If the audience has no experience of the work in performance they will assume that what they see on stage is the work being performed as well as it can be.If the Ashton repertory is in danger along with Nijinska's Les Biches then the Massine repertory and much of the Fokine repertory is virtually a lost cause. But neither de Valois nor Ashton acquired these older ballets in order to turn the company into a museum company.They were acquired when the company was busily producing new works because both directors saw the need to preserve the Diaghilev classics because of their significance in the history of twentieth century ballet.More importantly they wanted to ensure that those ballets were available to future generations of choreographers,dancers and audiences in much the same way that the works of the great composers of the past are available to us.Great choreography is great choreography when ever created. I think that the idea of Ashton's ballets being old fashioned is one fostered by those who think that the only way to maintain ballet's reputation as a serious art form is to fill the repertory with badly lit,earnest pieces with unimaginative tediously dull choreography and pretentious titles. If Ashton is old fashioned then so is his contemporary Balanchine. Ivanov and,Petipa must also be old fashioned Fokine,Tudor, Robins, MacMillan and Cranko too. As the Royal Ballet owes its technical development to the conservatism of the Russians who, unlike the French, preserved their ballets rather than jettisoning them in pursuit of the modish and new it would be more than a little ironic if O'Hare's pursuit of new repertory results in the company losing the masterpieces of the past both those created for the company and those acquired for it the first three directors.

Dante Sonata was performed during the war and at least four times postwar at Covent Garden.According to the Royal Opera House performance database it was last performed in its entirety in 1950.I assume it disappeared from the repertory because it was no longer in tune with the times. The choreographic text of Dante Sonata was not recorded and its revival by BRB in 2000, after a gap of fifty years, was completely dependent on the memory of Jean Bedells supplemented by the recollections of others who had danced in it.I think that as there was no living tradition of performance of Dante Sonata the ballet which we saw in 2000 is more accurately described as a reconstruction than a revival. It is the reconstructed ballet that BRB revived last year. The significant point for me in all of this is that the maintenance of the repertory and the Ashton repertory in particular is, it seems to me,overly dependent on the opinion and taste of a remarkably small number of people and that MacMillan is far better served than Ashton as far as advocacy for his work is concerned.It is clear that the artistic team at Sarasota have a high regard for Ashton's works and are enthusiastic about staging them well. O'Hare has given us comparatively few performances of Ashton's works and he has, for the main part,stuck to the obvious MacMillan works.This season's revivals of major works by Ashton and MacMillan have generally been disappointing. The first night cast in Symphonic Variations were very good but the standard of performances fluctuated throughout the run as the casting changed.The corps in Scenes de Ballet were messy and the dancers taking the ballerina role failed to deliver while the corps in the recent revival of Song of the Earth were well below par.It sometimes seems that O'Hare is indifferent to the effect that casting has on performance. Perhaps he really is only concerned with the modish and new.But an organisation that ignores its past really does not deserve much of a future. Ballets only live in performance and although video and notation must be of assistance when setting the steps they are no substitute for a coach with extensive performance experience of the ballet being revived.The choice of repertory performed depends on the taste of the director as does casting and recruitment.It seems to me that Webb and Barbieri have a far clearer artistic vision than O'Hare has shown so far.The Sarasota programme for next year is very impressive for an organisation whose budget is a fraction of the Royal Ballet's.Relocating to Sarasota is not an option but it is tempting.

Yes I think that Horoscope is definitely lost.It was made in the days before Benesh notation,it was not filmed and everyone who danced in it is long dead. I believe that it is one of the ballets that the Vic Wells Company was forced to abandon when it fled the German invasion of Holland.I think that the company's choice of ballets selected for immediate revival,after their loss in Holland was governed by practical considerations such as the call up of male dancers. Perhaps the intention was to revive it after the war. The postwar move to Covent Garden led, over time, to the company's increased reliance on the nineteenth classics and the loss of works made for the stage at Sadler's Wells which were thought too small scale for the Opera House stage. Concerns about the size of the company's new home even led Ashton at one point to create a new version of Les Patineurs which I understand had a double corps. During the fifties and sixties no one was that interested in reviving the company's prewar lost ballets as there were plenty of new works being made. Dowell's directorship,following a choreographic fallow period, saw the revival of Ashton's Ondine and the staging of a number of reconstructions of historically significant works from the Diaghilev repertory. Talks about reviving Sylvia came to nothing, as I understand it, when Ashton and Dowell's professional relationship soured following Dowell's decision to remove most of Ashton's choreography from his new production of Swan Lake.Relations were so bad that Ashton would not allow Dowell to use the choreography for the Neapolitan Dance which Dowell did want to keep.The Neapolitan Dance was not restored to the ballet until after Ashton's death. Bintley has a good track record with his revivals of de Valois' Job and the Prospect Before Us and Ashton's Dante Sonata.Horoscope was a not insignificant ballet. I can not help feeling that if it had been capable of revival we should have seen staged at Birmingham by now.

I now realise that my comments about ticket sales were ambiguous.I should have made it clear that I was talking about ticket sales for performances of new ballets by Ashton and MacMillan not about ticket sales for recent revivals of their works. It must be at least thirty five years since we had a premier of a new Ashton ballet and nearly as long since we had a premier of a new work by MacMillan. My recollection is that there was a real sense of anticipation when there was an announcement of a new work by either man and that tickets for their new works sold pretty rapidly.Both men had a real following based in large part on their high rate of success in ballets of varied genres.There was a general interest in their works even by people who were not their fans.But then a new work by an acknowledged master choreographer is a very different thing from a new work by a choreographer whose works appeal to a niche audience and about whose capacity the general run of ballet goers have doubts.It is a big step to move from abstract ballet to a ballet with narrative elements and from one act to three acts and the public knows it. The period from 1945 to the late 1980's was a time of great excitement in the world of dance because of the number of major choreographers who were making ballets. The fact that there was so much work being produced and that so much of it was good maintained the public's interest in the art form.Remember it was a time when art was thought to be good for you rather than elitist(it was pre-Murdoch)and ballet performances and documentaries were shown on both BBC and ITV. Ballet was taken seriously, serious people spoke about it and discussed it and serious programmes were made about it. Ballet was available outside London on a far wider scale than is true now.Far more people had access to ballet performances than now and a much wider range of repertory was toured.All this helped generate and maintain interest in dance while generous subsidy made it accessible.Ballet did not have to be a once a year Christmas treat for the family.But none of this guaranteed full houses every night for mixed bills that were not interesting,A premier or an initial run of performances made them interesting. The ROH booking periods covered about two months and tickets went on sale at a date considerably closer to the date of the performance than is the case now. This meant that you knew who was dancing in the new work when buying the tickets which encouraged sales.I think the short booking periods also helped ticket sales because the ballet goer was more conscious of spending comparatively small sums regularly than of the overall cost of their theatre going.Someone interested in ballet felt they could afford to be adventurous because ballet tickets were relatively cheap. Booking cheap tickets for a new work by someone whose works you have seen and enjoyed does not seem that much of a gamble and if the work is a failure you are less likely to write the choreographer off than if the tickets are expensive.Spending a lot to see an unsuccessful new work is likely to make the ballet goer increasingly risk averse and less inclined to try the new.

Anthony Russell Roberts Ashton's nephew and residuary legatee has declared a number of ballets to be lost. I believe that he told the audience at an Ashton Symposium of some sort that Dante Sonata was irretrievably lost only to be flatly contradicted by another member of the panel who was already involved in its reconstruction.I have heard him say of Jazz Calender that its revival had been discussed, presumably at Covent Garden. but that it was agreed that it was too old fashioned whatever that means, When he was part of the Royal Ballet staff he expressed a reluctance to promote his legacy because of the position that he held, I think that his apparent lack of enthusiasm for his late uncle's works when compared with Lady MacMillan's active promotion of her late husband's works goes a long way to explainAshton's comparative neglect. Of course at a time when current taste is for serious ballets accompanied by lengthy essays it does not help that Ashton did not really go in for angst ridden earnest pieces. In the case of Foyer de Dance and Persephone there are silent films of the ballets. Both are capable of revival. The barriers are a general lack of interest in reviving old works and Ashton's in particular in organisations which arguably have the money and expertise to undertake the work.I have not seen it but I believe that de Valois' Bar aux Folies Bergere has been reconstructed from film which I would dearly love to see.

There is a film of Jazz Calender with the original cast.It was shown at the BFI as filler in a Dereck Jarman tribute,

I think that we shall find out whether O'Hare is serious about building the company up from the bottom by the casting announced for the first booking period.It will be interesting to see just how many young dancers are cast in Romeo and Juliet, Nutcracker and Two Pigeons.When it comes to Pigeons I shall be disappointed if the artist and young girl are roles allocated to mature dancers. It is to be hoped that casting and promotion will be based on suitability rather than seniority and on performances given on stage rather than those given in class.

I think that it depends on the choreographer. Ashton and MacMillan tickets sold quickly. Perhaps people are holding back until they have some idea about what it is like from reliable sources. After all opinion was divided over Raven Girl between those who thought it was a masterpiece and those who thought it was evidence that McGregor had no talent as a story teller and that his choreographic style did not lend itself to ballets with any element of narrative. The tickets for Woolf works are being sold at "popular prices" which makes the lack of enthusiasm even more unusual. It will be interesting to see how well the Connectome Raven Girl programme sells next year.

barton 22 The company gets a quarter of its revenue from ticket sales and a quarter from Arts Council England. The ACE tends to want evidence that arts organisations are attracting new audiences and attracting them across the entire demographic. I think that the Nutcracker assists ticking some of the requisite boxes without too much effort.A block of performances at Christmas probably makes it easier to let people whose families live abroad go off to see their families. I seem to recall that the delay in announcing some of the replacement casting for Don Q was caused by the potential Kitri being in South America. I imagine that blocks of performances like the one at Christmas allows time to prepare other ballets. Of course I could be completely wrong and it could be a deep laid plan to top up Sir Peter's pension pot.

Spannerandpony I think that there is a very simple explanation for the Song of the Earth appearing in two mixed bills not that far apart.The company is taking Don Q to the US this summer but it is not taking it to New York a very wise decision in my opinion. I expect that the official reason is that the New York audience gets to see a lot of ballet and might appreciate more interesting fare than a ballet that is an ABT staple. I don't suppose that it has anything to do with the weaknesses in casting or the defects in costume design and staging that so many commented on when Don Q was being performed a couple of months ago. New York is getting two mixed bills one of recent works by McGregor, Wheeldon and Scarlett (the Age of Anxiety) the ballets on the second mixed bill are the Dream and the Song of the Earth.Before the run began I joked to a friend that perhaps we should treat this run of performances of Song as an extended period of open rehearsals.On the basis of the performances of Song that I have seen that is what they are and the cast needs all the rehearsal that they can get.The first cast does not seem to catch the mood of the piece and some sections look decidedly rough;the section where the men turn the girl in cartwheels over their shoulders looks so awkward that you would think that Choe was a last minute substitute which she clearly is not.Again there is no surprise when the Messenger carries her off because you can see her preparing to be carried off whereas in the past, as it was less obviously prepared for, it came as the surprise that it is intended to be.I read somewhere that Nunez has been longing to dance in this ballet. On the basis of her performances so far the role does not suit her.It is not a question of technique because the two greatest exponents of the role that I have seen were as different technically as chalk and cheese but both brought something very special to the work.The originator of the role Marcia Haydee had a beautiful bouree and there is a lot of boureeing in it.The bouree is really only a linking step but both Ashton and MacMillan used it to create mood and depict character.The bourees must be beautiful and nuanced Haydee's were and so were Mason's. Both dancers performed the role with a deep understanding of the music and the text.They danced with real feeling projecting anguish,loss,resignation and hope to such an extent that they were one with the music so far Nunez has danced it with little insight. The programme for 2015-2016 is at first glance a strange mixture and the responses to it have been both revealing and entertaining. At first I thought that all those Nutcrackers was a bit excessive even for the holiday period but it helps to pay the bills and may be needed after the Connectomes progranne.It is something that the non fanatic ballet goer might want to attend with grandchildren in tow. If it helps create and develop the next generation of ballet goer then that's fine by me. As some have already said it should give some of the younger dancers a chance to perform and I suspect that is also one of the reasons why the Two Pigeons has been scheduled.The timing suggests that the two programmes of Pigeons may be intended for those who consider themselves too grown up to go and see Nutcracker and who are not old enough to appreciate the glorious score and the bits of Ivanov choreography that Sir Peter Wright includes in ballet.The long run of Nutcrackers followed by sixteen performances of Giselles may be intended to enable a good number of the younger dancers with potential to work with Sir Peter who will be ninety in 2016. I suspect that the choice of ballets to accompany Pigeons has got little to do with with appeasing "Ashton fanatics" and quite a lot to do with getting the Ashton repertory right.It would be lovely to think that the management were that concerned with appeasing the "fanatics" and keeping the repertory of one of the twentieth century's greatest choreographers alive.The number of performances of Pigeons should ensure that the performance that is seen in the cinema looks right.The management does not have the luxury of a large number of dancers in the company who have already performed in Pigeons at the School's matinee so they will be starting from scratch. Two Pigeons was made for young dancers and I hope that it will be used to let a significant number of the young talented dancers in the lower tiers of the company gain experience of dancing the roles of Young Girl, Young Man, Gypsy Girl and Gypsy Man each of which is a test of stamina and artistry.It would be a lost developmental opportunity if it is only the big names that are cast in it.The ballet provides a real test for the dancer but it does not come loaded with the pressures that a nineteenth century classic does, with memories of great performances of the past real and half imagined.Those who are old enough to have seen it danced by the company rather than as part of the ballet school's Covent Garden matinee will be so grateful to see it that they will not want to make comparisons with past casts. For dancers like Nagdhi,Hay,Hayward,O'Sullivan and Ball there will be an audience brimming over with good will and pleasure.I wonder whether the Ashton Foundation has put in a word for its revival as there are still several notable interpreters of the roles who were coached by Ashton whose insights they will wish to record for posterity.I hope that both Seymour and Anderton are called in to coach as they created the roles of the Young Girl and the Gypsy Girl. Some dissatisfaction has been expressed that both Monotones are to be revived. I am pleased that they are being revived because I thought that both parts were work in progress at the end of the run rather than the finished article. I did wonder whether my memory had perhaps exaggerated the smooth flowing movement that I recalled as an integral part of Monotones II but then I came across a recording of a cast that would not have been considered anywhere near the equal of the original but whose performance would now be highly regarded. The dancers were used to Ashton's Cecchetti based choreography and danced it idiomatically; all three seemed to be in continuous movement without any of the little stops and starts that have crept into its performances recently.Monotones is a subtle ballet and neither part that was recorded was danced perfectly. The white section was the least effective because it was not not danced with the flowing shifts of weight and direction which made the original cast seem almost weightless.I know a lot of people who will be happy to see both parts again. I do not normally agree with ballet evenings being programmed for particular sections and demographics of the ballet audience.In the case of the Two Pigeons I find it hard to think of anything else other than Rhapsody and Monotones that the company has scheduled that would be suitable with Pigeons. That programme may have written itself. I am sure that those who failed to find Raven Girl a work of genius will be grateful that it is on the same bill as Connectomes rather than something more compelling. Romeo and Juliet is not my favourite ballet but I have the feeling that once the casting is announced Imay feel compelled to see several performances.It is ballets like this that make it clear that rather than having too few principal dancers the company has too many. The company has seven permanent female principal dancers.Six of them have the ballet in their repertoire if each principal expects to dance three performances of it there will be no opportunity for new casts and the development of younger dancers who are the company's future. I for one hope that O'Hare makes some tough decisions, skips a generation and gives some of the younger dancers a chance to perform in this work rather than casting some of the more established dancers whose careers have appeared to stall. It is good to see that the Winter's Tale is being revived. I hope that the dancers who actually appeared as the second cast in its first season are allowed to repeat their performances as they were at least as good as the first cast and in some cases surpassed them.A full evening of Wheeldon may be interesting but I wonder whether there is sufficient difference between them to make a really interesting mixed bill. I think that Scarlett is a very talented choreographer who shows considerable maturity. I hope that he makes a break through this year with his new work and that it is clearly his work rather than an example of trying on someone else's choreography. I felt that Sweet Violets in particular was a case of dressing up as MacMillan. At least it is likely to have more substance than Eagling's Frankenstein did.I seem to recall that Eagling's work work was over dependent on a spectacular use of stage effects. The mixture of old and new may be more immediately pleasing to the dancers than to us but that does not mean that we won't enjoy the next season when it is fleshed out with casting.It may well be that this season is intended as a sort of declaration of independence from Lady MacMillan who some have felt has wielded too much power over the company since her husband's death.Perhaps O'Hare will achieve his aim of refreshing the repertory with major new works. Time will tell.

I am not sure that I want to see an "exciting" pas de trois in Swan Lake.What I want to see is one that is danced apparently effortlessly with an impeccable sense of style, neat clean landings by the man and a clear contrast between the two female variations.If anyone is interested in what I mean about the difference between the two female variations the DVD of the previous Royal Ballet production with Dowell and Markarova leading the cast and Conley and Whitten in the pas de trois will show you what I am talking about. In the dim and distant past the company used to cast the pas de trois in Swan Lake and the Fairy Variations in Sleeping Beauty with greater care for suitability and contrast than they do now when the whole casting process seems to be conducted on a more democratic basis. It means that more dancers get a chance to show what they can do and, in some cases, what they can't do.Both approaches have their advantages and their disadvantages.The selective approach operates with a small pool of dancers. It guarantees a certain level of performance;it provides the possibility of exemplar casts and a definite hierarchy of casts.The democratic approach is a bit more of a gamble as far as the audience is concerned as it often means a degree of proximate casting.I am not entirely convinced that it is that beneficial to the company as a whole.It certainly gives greater opportunity to individual dancers but it does not provide any guarantee that any cast that we see is exceptionally good let alone exemplary. I think that the closest we get to the company indicating who they regard as the best in subsidiary roles in such ballets is when these ballets are shown in the cinema. It would be very interesting to know who the company casts in the pas de trois and other subsidiary roles when it goes on tour.I suspect that the casting is far less democratic and more obviously directed towards showcasing those dancers who are best suited to the roles than we are accustomed to see at Covent Garden. As far as ENB is concerned, I suspect that they show us their very best casts in minor roles when in London and that the Mariinsky do the same.The ENB dancers in the pas de trois were, for me, too obviously trying to impress. There was nothing effortless about their dancing, and the men gave me the impression that they thought that they were auditioning for the Bluebird. Despite the fact that the Mariinsky also dance the Petipa text when they perform Swan Lake their text for the pas de trois is not exactly the same as the one danced by the Royal Ballet which makes it difficult to make a direct comparison. Given the number of performances of Swan Lake in the run I do not think that the company did too badly as far as the pas de trois was concerned. They seemed able to field a greater number of casts for the pas de trois than for the Neapolitan Dance. I have to say I found O'Sullivan pretty impressive in her second outing in the pas de trois. She danced well, her performance projected up to the Amphitheatre and she used her eyes to show the audience where to look, an old fashioned trick but one that still works. Choe's performance by contrast was small and self contained.Somehow, for me, she neither draws the audience in nor projects out. I can't fault the way in which she reproduces the steps that she has been taught but for me there should be a significant difference between reproducing steps and dancing them in the theatre. So now we must wait until Wednesday to find out what the coming season holds for us.We might even find out when the new Swan Lake will be unveiled and whether Liam Scarlett will stage it.As it is nearly thirty years since the Dowell production was first performed a whole generation has grown up for whom this is the only Royal Ballet version that they have known.I wonder whether the new production will be the radical reworking that some seem to favour or whether it will remain true to the choreographic text preserved by the company for so long.But there again merely changing the familiar production may see radical to some.

I hope that there are no appointments to Principal this year from inside the company because in my opinion there is no obvious candidate .As far as an outside appointment is concerned there is no obvious need. There are a number of young dancers who are developing very nicely but are not ready for Principal status although some are clearly ready for principal roles. There are others who though more senior appear to have stalled in their careers and in some cases to have regressed.Not being able to field a single good Myrthe or Queen of the Dryads let alone a really good one is a very sad state of affairs. Leaving posts unfilled should act as an incentive to some at least to take the action that is needed in order to fit them for promotion. Hamilton needs to work on her classical technique if she wants to get to the top. While Choe,Takada and Kobayashi all, it seems to me, need to understand that merely reproducing the steps does not constitute a performance.All three need assistance to make their performances project into the auditorium. You might have thought that someone within the company would have noticed and taken remedial action.They can not all simply be classroom performers. The more Principals the company has the less opportunity there is to develop younger dancers if all of them expect to appear in all the nineteenth century classics and MacMillan,s full length works. The remedy to an oversupply of Principals in the 1950's and into the 1970's was that they were all allocated a limited number of full length ballets in which they appeared.The other solution is to increase the number of performances of each of the full length ballets in each run to enable debuts and consolidating performances to take place.But could anyone stand a run of 27 Swan Lakes? The most controversial solution is to cast dancers according to suitability for a role rather than seniority.Restricting all senior dancers to specific roles would, I fear, not be acceptable today although it would save some dancers from themselves. I have to say that I found it strange that given the duration of this run of Swan Lakes and the fact that it must have been known at quite an early stage that it was unlikely that Cuthbertson would dance her allotted performances that no effort was made to prepare someone at soloist level for at least one performance.There was enough time. I would have thought that preparing an in house Odette /Odile was more important and more useful to the company than that dancer appearing in a new ballet. I assume that the company will usually require new Principals to satisfy the unwritten requirement generally applied to members of the company that in order to be a Principal you have to have danced with some success in at least two of the major nineteenth century classics as well as whatever your particular area of specialism is.I think that the unwritten rule used to be applied as a way of ensuring that the dancers concerned had the necessary level of technical ability and to ensure that there was a supply of dancers available to dance the two works which are central to the classical repertory. Although Morera's advancement did not follow that route she had Lise in her repertoire and many other technically demanding works as did Yanowsky. I felt that Watson's appearances as Albrecht and Palemon were not wholly unconnected with his promotion which otherwise would have been almost entirely based on his specialist repertory. It seems to me that the obvious promotions have already been made and that now it is for management to provide the opportunities that dancers from Reece Clark to Harrod, Hay and Hayward need in order to develop .This requires planning as far as repertory and casting are concerned.It may mean tough decisions about those who have stalled. It certainly requires care to be taken to avoid the "flavour of the month"syndrome that beset the company during the 1980's.It requires attendance at performances to see whose performances are effective and whose are not with assistance given to those whose performances are of limited effectiveness.It requires planning. I think that Mason felt that it was more important to ensure that as much of the repertory as possible was part of the company's collective memory than to develop careers. That was probably the most pressing need during her directorship. O'Hare does not have that problem to the same degree but he needs to ensure that those works that were rescued from oblivion are not lost on his watch.His job building on Mason's work is to develop and nurture the careers of his dancers. It will be fascinating to see whether he decides to do that or whether at some point he succumbs to temptation and buys in talent. I am not sure whether hiring Matthew Golding was an aberration or is representative of how he intends to refresh and develop the company and its dancers.

At a time when Michael Corder finds it necessary to say that he is concerned that many people professionally engaged in the world of dance say that they find it difficult to distinguish between classical ballet and contemporary dance it might be thought rather surprising that many of us although we may have difficulty in pinning down the essential differences between these two types of dance and putting thosedifferences into words seem pretty sure that we recognise those differences when we see them. Without realising it our early experience of watching dance affects how we watch it subsequently. Whether for example we value technical skill or expressiveness more is as much the result of our experience of watching dance as it is the aesthetic of the period in which we begin to become interested in the art form.These early forays into the world of dance "get our eye in".I am sure that what I saw in my first visits to the ballet have had that effect on me for good or ill.The ballets that I saw then were the works of Petipa, Fokine, Massine, Nijinska, Ashton, Balanchine, Tudor, MacMillan and Cranko. All of whom worked in the classical style. Their works are definitely ballet as opposed to modern dance as contemporary was,then, called. It seems to me that whether or not dancers wear pointe shoes is not that significant in determining whether a work is a ballet, nor is strict adherence to steps as taught in the class room. Most ballet choreographers enjoy inverting and transforming class room steps and positions into something that is unmistakably theirs. Indeed it is those transformations and the selective emphasis on certain aspects of the classical ballet's vocabulary and rules that create the choreographer's individual style.What all the choreographers named above have in common is that central to their works is an emphasis on movements which elevate, elongate and stretch out the body; their use of line;their knowledge and use of pointe work,pas de deux and the corps.Whether created in the nineteenth,twentieth or twenty first century ballets,particularly abstract ones,often have floor plans that emphasise order and symmetry in a way that contemporary work never does. Putting dancers on stage in bare feet does not make the work that they are dancing a contemporary one. Neither Ashton's evocation of Isadora Duncan nor his Dante Sonata, both of which are danced in bare feet,it seems to me ,are contemporary works. The Walk to the Paradise Garden in which one dancer spends most of the ballet flat on his back as he partners the woman who he is holding above him is also definitely a ballet. Although both Les Noces and MacMillan's Rite of Spring contain sections with movements and groupings similar to those encountered in contemporary dance, it seems to me that they are both definitely ballets. If the floor is the ballet dancer's enemy something from which they try to escape through jumping, spinning and terre a terre work it is the contemporary dancer's friend.Choreographers of ballets generally use the area above the surface of the floor rather than the floor itself. Contemporary dancers use the floor rather than trying to escape from it.They are not required to move effortlessly and elegantly as if weightless.It clearly requires the dancer to use his or her body and muscles in a very different way from how a ballet dancer would use them.Rojo describes contemporary dance as requiring the dancer to be grounded and centralized as opposed to elongated and elevated. As far as classically trained dancers are concerned these differences must pose a real threat of injury to any dancer switching between the two genres without time to adjust. It is noticeable that Guillem who has had a long and relatively relatively injury free career used to dance both types of choreography but always had a gap between genres to enable her body to adjust,something that is not possible for less exalted dancers. It seems to me that I have ended up defining contemporary dance as not ballet.One of the reasons for this is that those creating contemporary works all have their own way of making dance works which makes it difficult to identify elements that are common to each choreographer working in this genre.The freedom that they have to do anything they wish seems, paradoxically, to restrict their inventiveness. They seem to produce one or perhaps two interesting works and then begin to plagiarize themselves.Whereas choreographers supposedly constrained by working within the rules of classical ballet seem to find infinite possibilities for invention because there are rules to break.

Booklover 89 . None of my comments were directed at you and I should be really sorry if anything that I have posted deterred you from commenting on the performances that you have seen and enjoyed.We all see things differently which is why this sort of forum is so interesting. I find people fascinating and on occasion I find them immensely funny.On an evening when it was clear that we were lucky to have a performance at all I found it amusing that some people responded to the notice on the ROH website about the fire and the disruption caused by it by complaining that there was not going to be any hot food at the theatre that evening. I accept that some people who set out for the theatre that evening might not have known about the problems caused by the fire but I do not think that applied to the people who posted on the website. Even somebody who knew nothing about the fire and its consequences before they arrived in the Covent Garden area must have realised that there was something seriously wrong because the pubs and restaurants in the surrounding streets were closed. Going on stage to apologise because there was no hot food when businesses in the surrounding area were unable to function appealed to my sense of the absurd.At the time although I did not know the full extent of the disruption I thought the apology unnecessary. On my way home I got a much fuller idea of the extent of problem all of Kingsway was fenced off ; the area west of the theatre was dark; Bow Street was empty, all the pubs and restaurants were closed;theatres were closed and the Aldwych was dark. There was a generator outside the Waldorf providing the hotel with a level of lighting equivalent to that provided by a forty watt bulb. By the time I arrived home what I had seen in the surrounding streets made the apology seem even more unnecessary and absurd. I know that several posters think differently. I sincerely hope that this does not offend anyone or put them off posting.

Sorry.The "it" referred to in the last paragraph of my latest post is of course the new Swan Lake.