FLOSS

I agree that the choreographic text from the old production was excellent.Act I has real coherence the Ashton Waltz is a choreographic gem and the prince gets a solo at the end of the Act which is more suited to his mood and the rest of the story than the one he has currently.Best of all there is no boorishness among the princes entourage.It comes as a bit of a shock to watch a third act in which every dancer is visible. The secret to visibility is very simple, so simple that I am left wondering why Dowell did not demand that Sonnabend provide one for his production.The secret is a pale floor.I hope that whoever gets the commission to design the new production is handed a copy of this DVD and is told that while no one is expecting a slavish copy their designs must make the action as visible as it was in this production. The only draw back as far as the DVD is concerned was that Markarova did not do mime and I, for one, miss it. At the time her act 2 pas were thought to be far too slow but they were not as slow as is currently fashionable.Today the contrast between the speed at which Odette's music and that of the corps is played is so marked that it borders on the ridiculous. The price we pay for having a Russian conductor or a conductor like Emmanuel Young who indulges the dancers to an inordinate degree.The thing that registers with me is that while this was probably the best cast that the company could muster at the time that this Swan Lake was recorded the subsidiary roles were not all thought to be as strongly cast as they would have been even five years before. The dancing of the pas de trois is interesting because of there is a contrast between Conley and Whitten. The dancing of all three artists in the pas seems more idiomatic,flowing and less effortful than we see now. I do not think that the difference is simply attributable to today's younger dancers feeling the need to impress although that clearly plays a part. I think that it is largely the result of a change in style and training. The cast on the DVD, with the exception of Markarova, had all been exposed to the Cecchetti system and it shows.The Neapolitan dance is danced with real verve and vigour and Taylor was, at the time, seen as as a pale imitation of Collier. Much as Collier and Sleep were regarded as not entirely satisfactory replacements for Alexander Grant and Julia Farron on whom the Neapolitan dance was made. The dancers in these pas and in much else in this recording appear to have a closer relationship with the music than we are used to today.I do not think that it is simply a case of listening to the music rather than counting it is schooling too.This DVD records the performances of dancers who, apart from Markarova, were products of the pre Merle Park, pre Vaganova Royal Ballet School. According to Jonathan Cope and others Cecchetti enables the dancer to fit the steps to the music without slowing it down. None of the dancers on the recording seemed to need the music to be slowed down in order to dance the steps as set. Markarova danced slowly presumably because she thought that it made her dancing more expressive. An idea that was not without its critics then and does not convince everyone now. I think that there was more thought given to casting back then; more casting according to suitability for a role and less concern about giving everyone an opportunity to try a role, sometimes it seems, regardless of suitability. Neither system is entirely satisfactory casting according to suitability is fine as long as the system allows for new dancers to be tried out. It gives younger dancers exemplars to emulate and it can guarantee that the audience sees a set of Fairy Variations performed by dancers best suited to each variation rather than the generally unsatisfactory casting to which we have become accustomed where one or two dancers are reasonably well cast and the rest are best described as approximate.The weakness in the old system is that it can become set in stone.At one time if you knew the Principal casting for Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake you knew, without looking at the advertised list on the booking leaflet who, barring injury, would dance in the subsidiary pas, for just as there were first, second and third casts of principal dancers there was a similar hierarchy for dancers taking subsidiary roles.Today the only time that you are fairly certain to see the cast that the management regard as the best available is when you see a performance that is being shown in cinemas. I have seen a couple of clips of Ashton ballets recently danced by casts who were steeped in the required style.Not all of them that highly regarded at the time that they were filmed.I am not saying that the casts were bad merely that it was recognised that some of the casts were not as good as earlier casts had been. I think that in each case performances by the same casts today would lead to superlatives being showered on them.The reason? Not I think because the lapse of time has made me less critical but because the choreography and style came to them naturally from their schooling rather than being learnt and only partly internalised for the purposes of a handful of performances. There is a real continuous. flow of movement in the Monotones II with Derman,Deane and Hoskins? which is completely missing from the performance on the recent DVD. The flow of movement transforms the work from what can seem like a rather dry exercise about line to something that is intriguing and beautiful.It has light and shade rather than moving from pose to pose. Only ten days to the announcement of next years programme for ballet and opera, or so I understand.perhaps even if it is not to be unveiled in the 2015-16 season we may find out who has been chosen to stage it and who will design it.Not I hope Anthony Ward who I believe was responsible for destroying Les Rendezvous ,or Mr Bainbridge who did such damage to Daphnis and Chloe or indeed the team responsible for Don Quixote. Perhaps it should be made clear that it is to be set in Medieval Balletland c 1480 and that the sets must indicate time and place and disguise, without distracting the eye from the dance, the fact that each act is performed in an empty box.Not a tall order. Nothing to it at all.

Thank you Alison for getting the point that I was making. Walking down to the Strand on Thursday evening it was clear just how many businesses have been affected by the Kingsway fire. It will mean a drop in takings at the Royal Opera House for the catering section but not all the other businesses affected are going to be able to shrug off their losses so easily. Not every food outlet in the area is part of a big corporate food chain. I wonder how long the disruption and rerouting will continue? If they have dig up most of Kingsway it is likely to take some time. By the way does anyone know if Mr Holten apologised for the lack of food on Wednesday evening?

How standards have fallen.The Royal Opera House thought it necessary to place a notice on its website to warn those ballet goers who regard having a meal as essential to their enjoyment of a performance that they would be out of luck because of the fire in Kingsway. There was no danger of starvation as there would be sandwiches available in the bars.Fair enough in all the circumstances given the number of restaurants cafes and pubs that were unable to open for business last night. What I found odd was that the director himself appeared on stage to apologise for the lack of food.Somehow I can't imagine de Valois or either of her immediate successors thinking it necessary to come on stage to make such an announcement. Was it his idea or did the powers that be suggest that it would be an appropriate gesture?Is the theatre so dependent on food sales that it has been reduced to an adjunct to the catering? It sounds as if the Royal Opera House is no longer important in its own right as a building housing at least one world class company but merely a nice restaurant with a theatre attached.

Out of curiosity can anyone think of who the English equivalents of Celine and Proust are? It seems to me that the only authors that a British politician can safely say he/she enjoys reading are Jane Austen,Anthony Trollope and P.G. Wodehouse none of whom carry quite the same intellectual weight. Any other author would guarantee almost certain political annihilation on the basis that the politician concerned was too intellectual, lacked the common touch and was totally untrustworthy. What stands in the way of people in this country being open and more welcoming of new developments in the arts? Surely a better question is what stands in the way of people in this country having any interest in the arts? One or more of the following ;lack of physical access and access to information about performances and companies.Cost, real or imagined;entrenched philistinism at home,in the wider family;in the education system and in the media;newspapers particularly the Murdoch press apparently endorsing the tastes of the man in the street,discouraging interest in anything except popular culture and denigrating everything to do with the arts and everyone involved in the arts as "Luvvies";both commercial and public television withdrawing from producing weekly arts programmes, whatever happened to the BBC's duty to educate? The only place where you can access new developments in the arts easily is Radio 3. Philistinism exists at every level of society. If you are interested in the arts you are perceived as being odd whatever the social group to which you belong. King George V's favourite opera is said to have been Boheme.The reason? Because it was short. His grandson George Lascelles caused great consternation within his family because of his love of opera.His uncle the Prince of Wales actually asked what was wrong with his nephew. The immediate answer to why some of those on the forum think the Shechter is wonderful and others are considerably less than underwhelmed by it, is simply a question of preferences and what you have been exposed to. When the Royal Ballet staged Pierrot Lunaire there quite a few ,on this forum who complained about the music in much the same way as some have been commenting adversely about Mahler's Song of the Earth.I have come to accept that everyone has their cut off point when it comes to music and that for some it is still strangely early in the twentieth century.But it all has a context. I recall that years ago Sir Robert Mayer,of Children's Concerts fame, appeared on Desert Island Discs. At one point he spoke about his mother's love of music and then said that she did not like modern music.The composer whose works she could not appreciate was Brahms. Yes even good old safe and dependable Brahms was once, to some at least, a modern composer.

I know that it is fashionable to portray MacMillan as a misunderstood,undervalued "outsider" and that is how Lady M prefers us to see him.Although I find it hard to think of any other "outsider" who has had a palace coup staged on his behalf.Perhaps the portrayal of the Boards's refusal to agree to MacMillan creating Song of the Earth for the Royal Ballet has more to do with maintaining the "MacMillan myth" than anything else.Could the Board's refusal have, in reality, been occassioned by fear of the reaction of an audience who were fond of the Mahler if the MacMillan had failed to come up to the mark.

MacMillan had originally intended to make Song of the Earth for the company it was only because the Board objected to the use of this major orchestral work as a ballet score that MacMillan made the ballet for the Stuttgart company. I suspect that the Board's objections were based on concerns that a ballet could not possibly come anywhere near matching one of Mahler's masterpieces and would end up trivialising it.Remember in 1964 when MacMillan made his proposal to the Board he was still comparatively young and while he had made some interesting works nothing that he had made up to that point necessarily suggested that he would be up to the task of creating choreography that would match Mahler's score. While it is true that the first audiences to see the ballet in Stuttgart would have understood the text being sung many people in the audience at the first performances here would have been familiar with the work, if they were at all interested in classical music.The Song of the Earth is one of Mahler's best known works and it had become known to many people through the recording made in the early 1950's by Bruno Walter with Kathleen Ferrier. The nineteen sixties were the age of Mahler and Bruckner in that both composers who had been hovering at the edge of the standard classical repertory as a result of performances by advocate conductors became fully accepted as part of it.I am not suggesting that you could not move for performances of Das Lied von der Erde during the 1960's but it was, and remains, one of the most popular of Mahler's works. MacMillan had certainly not chosen to make a ballet using an obscure work known only to German audiences when he made his proposal to the Board. He had selected an early twentieth century work that had well and truly become embedded in the consciousness of the average concert goer.

It is, I fear, a fashion thing. Shechter is fashionable. So we have to acquire a Shechter.It does not matter whether it is good or not. The Royal Ballet has acquired a Schecter and Kevin O'Hare can claim to be an innovative director. I did not find the music particularly loud. My objection to the music is that it is dull and repetitive and, in this, the choreography is, as far as I can see, a perfect match. Mr Shechter seems to belong to the "look at me aren't I being daring getting all these classically trained dancers to stomp about the stage?" school of dance maker. At least we were saved the sort of programme notes that McGregor seems to find essential to establish the quality of his work and his genius status. I did not experience anything but tedium as the work kept stopping and starting.Its profondity escaped me completely. I should be most interested to know where those who say that they were moved or found it interesting were sitting. Perhaps I was sitting in the wrong part of the house.But then isn't there something wrong with a dance work that only looks good from a few seats in an auditorium? It seemed as if the bulk of the rehearsal time had been given to the Balanchine and the new work. The Balanchine was well danced. It was nice to see it again. Perhaps everyone thought that they could get away with a short period of preparation for Song of the Earth . Perhaps the fact that there is another run of the ballet before the company goes off on tour indicates that they know how much work is required and that we should treat this run of performances as an extended open rehearsal. I have to say I always find it unnerving when the Royal Ballet dances Balanchine better than it does the work of one of its in house choreographers.It suggests that the MacMillan and Ashton styles are not nearly as deeply ingrained as they once were.It is not that noticeable in a full length MacMillan dramatic ballet. All that emoting is capable of covering a multitude of technical and stylistic sins but works like Song of the Earth and Concerto expose even the smallest defect and lapse just as Ashton's works do. Soares is not a natural fit for the role of the man in this ballet and on the first night he was not dancing on the same level as Acosta or Nunez.I never cease to be amazed by MacMillan's Song of the Earth which captures the essence of one of Mahler's greatest works.The orchestral piece is a meditation on the beauty of life and its transitory nature The ballet manages to capture this but it has to be danced with beautiful precision and that was what was lacking.It is MacMillan's masterpiece but it did not look it last night. Let us hope that it improves.

Once it is official will the Royal Ballet invite comments on their website? I know one thing the Royal will not get away with a virtually invisible Act III this time round.It is probably visible in the stalls and that is all that is probably all that mattered at the time. Everyone who has suffered in silence over the last twenty seven years will not have to do so with the new production. I wonder whether the powers that be have really taken on board the impact that the internet is likely to have if their new offering is not liked let alone loathed as heartily as this one is by some. There are people who claim to not to have seen the current production since the first night they dislike it so much.So it starts to look a bit like a poisoned chalice.There is no pressure on whoever gets asked to mount the new production. None at all.Having nerves of steel and a broad back start to look like the most essential qualifications for the job rather than a compendious knowledge of the choreographic treasures that could be pressed into service. If it is Scarlett who gets the task it will be fascinating to see to what extent someone of his age chooses to embrace the company's traditions and to what extent he feels the need to reject them.

Unfortunately I don't speak Russian. But I recognised several borrowed words that did not find their way into the translation. I have extensive experience of working with interpreters across a wide range of languages in a job where it is essential that you have a verbatim translation.You know after a minute or so of testimony whether you are being given a witness's own account in their own words or whether you are getting edited highlights.In real life it is as obvious as it is in the cinema with a subtitled foreign language film when a long section of animated dialogue is translated by one word. I did not intend to go into so much detail but I now think that I should. I do not want anyone to think that I was expecting simultaneous translation. I was not.No one suggested that the lady who translated was a professional interpreter.This is not a criticism of her efforts. It is a comment on my experience of interviews conducted with guests whose first language is not English where an interpreter is used.The two that spring to mind are an interview with Madame Legat where the interpreter and the interviewee had what appeared to be a very interesting and animated conversation of which the audience was granted a few crumbs and the Osipova interview which, while it was not quite as bad, was far from perfect. In my experience failures in translation at this sort of meeting arise, just as they do in the courtroom, because no one has told the individual who is to interpret what the function of an interpreter is. This is true whether you are working with someone who is trying to help or a Ministry of Justice approved interpreter. Unless the interpreter understands that they are merely a mouthpiece for the person who requires their assistance and that they should translate word for word you will at best get a third party account and at worst get edited highlights consisting of what the interpreter considers to be important and what they can remember of what was said. What I found less than satisfactory was that while Osipova was clearly giving a lengthy animated account of herself we were given a severely edited account of what she said. In the end it is the responsibility of the person who organises the meeting to ensure that those who attend such a meeting as an interpreter understand what their function is going to be.It is the responsibility of the interviewer to ensure, ideally by a pre-talk chat, that the interviewee and interpreter understand how the interview will be conducted and that both know that if necessary the interviewee will be stopped in mid flow so that the interpreter can catch up.It really is not rocket science.If and when such an interview goes wrong it is the interviewer who has failed not the interpreter. My comments about getting a fuller account is more of a hope than anything. Quite simply interviewees are sent a copy of the report of the meeting so that they can approve its contents.I have no doubt that this usually means editing out rather than adding things.But with any luck Osipova will have time to read the report and decide to put some of the detail back.

It was one of those occasions when the services of someone who came along to act as an interpreter provided those that attended with edited highlights of the guest's responses rather than a word for word translation.As reports of the meetings are sent to the interviewee for approval before they are published it is quite possible that the published report will tell us more than the interview did.

Wonderful to attend a gala that was not stuffed full of the empty technical display pieces that are usually trotted out on such occasions. Without a tutu in sight this was a gala with more quality choreography than is usual. The pieces and excerpts ranged from Vianonen's 1930's Flames of Paris to works by Watkins and Scarlett. If McRae provided the wow factor with an extremely musically adept tap dance there were short sections from Asphodel Meadows, Rhapsody and Two Pigeons and all of Monotones II to remind the audience of the sheer beauty of classical dance.The entire programme had clearly been chosen with great care to display an exceptionally wide range of choreographic styles. It would be nice if every gala programme was chosen with such care and danced with such commitment, skill and artistry.

The Arts Council, it seems to me, has become more obtrusive and interfering as it has had less to distribute.It requires its client organisations to provide it with a marketing and development plan.A company is supposed to consider existing and potential audiences when drawing up its plan but it is easy to see how an organisation can end up directing most, if not all, of its efforts towards groups who are not attending performances rather than those that do.Companies have to provide evidence of their prosletizing activities which no doubt explains the content of some of their published material.Setting targets has had the effect of distorting activity in all sorts of sectors of activity.There is no reason to expect the arts and ballet companies in particular to be exempt from this skewing effect.It will be interesting to see whether Bintley,now he no longer has the distraction of his Japanese company, is able to come up with a solution which squares the circle of attracting a broad audience including both core and target groups and satisfying Arts Council England that he has met the goals that it has set. The Covent Garden companies have tried to deal with the ACE problem by reducing their dependency on public funding. It is not a solution that is open to every company and it does not necessarily produce satisfactory results for anyone except the occasional opera or ballet goer. In the case of the opera company it means interminable runs of Boheme, Tosca and Traviata while the picture for the ballet is not much better as we get weeks of Manon or Swan Lake with the odd mixed bill which tend to be extremely variable in choreographic quality and content. I am interested in new work but not if it is choreographically inept, derivative or just plain bad. I have sat through my fair share of stinkers by new choreographerS and established ones. I have wondered how works some ever made it to the stage.For the avoidance of doubt the comments about poor ballets being shown to a paying audience were just as applicable in the 1970's to the New Group as they are now. Describing a work as "challenging" and/or "innovative" seems to be effective ways of getting a work staged. I am afraid that I have had enough of pieces without real structure where the men are given a limited dance vocabulary and the women waft about the stage and those full of muscle wrenching movement and gynecological lifts. I know that it is too much to expect another Ashton, Balanchine,Nijinska,Robbins or Tudor to suddenly emerge but you do not conjure up new works of quality by jettisoning the past.No one in the world of classical music suggests that the way to find new composers is to throw out the works of Mozart and Beethoven. Their works need to be kept alive in performance as do the works of the major choreographers of the twentieth century. I think that both Royal Ballet companies would be a lot healthier if they were able to sell tickets at lower prices as that would encourage people to try ballet. But I know that is not going to happen. I recognise that it is the full length works that keep the London company afloat financially.It would be healthier if both companies did more to ensure that a wider range of the older ballets were performed on a regular basis.I wonder how much the range of works that we see is influenced by active advocacy by rights holders and how much other factors come into play. It would be fascinating to know whether the limited range of MacMillan's works that are performed can be ascribed to his widow's desire to promote her image of him as an unappreciated modernising outsider.I think that programming ballet is one of the dark arts. The two directors who were most successful in programme construction were Ashton and Wright who managed to get the right balance between old and new and between choreographic styles and content.Not only did they get the right works in a programme they saw that they were performed in the right order so that the audience left the theatre on a high note.Both directors of the Royal Ballet companies could learn a lot from looking at their programming. Who knows they might find the key to appealing to a broader audience at each performance.

Perhaps the problem is too much Bintley not enough of any other choreographer on a regular basis? Somewhere in the Dancing Times interview, which I have only skim read Bintley says that Peter Wright was too conservative in his choice of repertory for SWRB. Given that MacMillan's New Group must have put off a lot of people who had enjoyed the repertory of the Touring Company Wright's repertory choices were sensible. They restored the company, its reputation and audience. They were a very adept mixture of old and new. Never too much of any part of the repertory old or new with fascinating revivals of Massine's works and early Ashton including Capriol Suite. Bintley is very proud of the amount of new work that his company produces but how good is it does it stand up to regular revival? Is it the new work that puts older audiences off because its not that interesting or the failure to perform Ashton, early MacMillan or the nineteenth century classics on a more regular basis? Sarasota Ballet seems to be doing rather well with the sort of repertory that is not that different from the works that Peter Wright used to programme. Webb and Barbieri seem to be attractinga broad demographic to their performances perhaps they have the right idea. Bintley has been in post for twenty year perhaps he has got a bit stale and out of touch with his core audience during that time. After all older people are in many ways the future of the company as they are often responsible for the Christmas trip to the ballet. If they fall out of love with the ballet the grandchildren will not get their introduction to ballet.

Sorry I had to answer the door and got cut off in mid flow.What I meant to say was as follows. Unlike the Royal Ballet. which because of its size has the luxury of being able to employ some specialist dancers such as Paul Kay and Ed Watson. BRB has to cover an exceptionally wide range of repertory from a smaller pool of dancers.This means Bintley needs dancers who are technically strong but who are sensitive to the choreographic and stylistic demands made of them. He needs artists rather than technicians.Perhaps that is what he was talking about. The whole issue of what dance training should provide is aired regularly here and elsewhere.I think that it is interesting that even the Director of the RBS has expressed concern that the current emphasis on physical and technical perfection from the outset might not be doing anyone any favours.It seems that the powers that be may gradually be coming to realise that the current criteria would have denied Seymour access to the school and a career in dance. Perhaps the interview in the Dancing Times will throw some light on the subject.

I think it may be connected to something that David Powney has mentioned in connection with the changes needed in training when he mentioned the need to develop artistry.Given the size of BRB

I strongly suspect that one of the greatest hurdles that Park had to overcome with the "regulars" was that she was so closely associated with the Neapolitan dance.I recall one lady whose response to the news that Park was to dance Swan Lake with Nureyev was "But she's a soubrette !"

Ballerina and female dancer are not interchangeable terms as far as I am concerned. I always associate the word ballerina with a female dancer who shows supreme artistry in the nineteenth century classics so while Sibley definitely was a ballerina as were Fonteyn,Markova,Evdokimova,Beriosova,Ulanova and Ananaishvilli for example,Seymour and Haydee were not. They were two of the greatest dramatic dancers that I have ever seen but they were not classical ballerinas. Seymour's classical work was interesting but it was not exemplary by which I mean you would not have held her Aurora or her Odette/Odile out as providing examples of the perfection of classical ballet. I am not talking about technique but that indefinable something extra that a true ballerina brings to a performance. One brings effortless elegance and grace another makes you see a ballet with which you are familiar as if it was a new work, not because they have distorted anything musically or altered the steps in any way but simply through the quality of the movement. At the time I saw it I thought that Park's Aurora was very good. She was musical; she did not distort the score in order to set records for the duration of her balances; she had technique to spare which she used in the service of the choreographer rather than dancing the choreography as if it was merely an excuse to display technique but when it came to Swan Lake I always found her Odette/Odile lacked something. She was not really a Swan Queen more a Swan Princess.If we saw her Aurora today I would no doubt be far more enthusiastic about it than I was then but I suspect that a lot of people would complain that her Rose adagio was not danced brilliantly enough because it was not danced as a simple display piece but as an integral part of the ballet as a whole.As a result it was not subject to the distortions that seem to crept into the Royal's Sleeping Beauty in recent years. I came across a definition of a ballerina which I rather like but I have no idea who came up with it originally.A ballerina is someone who can do everything but has the taste not to.

Fascinating to see Shearer dance in a film which I understand she thought did her justice as a dancer. I think that it helps explain why Balanchine is said to have preferred her as a dancer to Fonteyn.Having seen this film and some of the early Balanchine television films recorded in Montreal it seems to me that his preference was for dancers whose technique could be displayed in dance rather than for dancers whose technique was so understated that it often seems to be a state of being rather than something requiring muscular effort. Perhaps I should make it clear that I am not denying that Fonteyn had technique. I wonder if Massine presented something of a problem to the film makers? He provided name recognition in a way that no one except Thomas Beecham could but his choreography does little for the film. I imagine that it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to insist that Massine should have performed someone else's choreography and Ashton might have felt uncomfortable about choreographing for him but the choreography that Massine set for himself seems to be little more than a recycling of bits of his old roles. While it was impressive to see what he was physically capable of dancing in his early fifties his choreography seemed to consist of snippets from earlier ballets. It is impossible to know whether his choreography took that form because he really had run out of ideas, which is a distinct possibility, or whether it did so because he thought that was what the audience expected of him.

Both the resident companies are required to break even at the box office.I know that the Royal Ballet has to achieve a fixed percentage of attendances for each of its programmes, I assume that similar rules on attendances apply to the opera. I doubt that being panned by the critics would be enough to dislodge McGregor from his very comfortable perch.If enough people have bought tickets for Woolf Works "on spec" it might achieve the requisite rate of attendances. If they have to advertise the piece but it still fails to sell that might be enough to suggest that McGregor has feet of clay.Its comparative failure would probably be explained away on the basis that it was too challenging and innovative for the older ballet goer. It could be that restricting access to the Amphitheatre to students on opening night is intended not only to ensure a favourable response but to boost sales by word of mouth if necessary,later on in the run.The seats are comparatively cheap. You could almost say that they were selling them at popular prices which in itself tells you something about their expectations.

I always understood that while Onegin is a sort of romantic, Byronic, anti-hero, Lensky fresh from his studies in Gottingen with his head full of German learning and sensibilities is, in fact, a callow, inexperienced youth.He is described as a poet but his poetic gifts are limited to feeble imitations of French verse.The contrast is between these two men and their worlds. Onegin's world is full of superficiality which he does not recognise until it is too late. Forced to stay in a provincial backwater while his rich uncle, to whom he is heir, dies, Onegin judges everyone and everything against life in the capital.He regards the people where he is staying including both Lensky and the Larin family as irredeemably provincial. You can not convey that sort of detail in balletic terms so you end up with the characters and the story as you experience them in Cranko's ballet. There are some themes that ballet can handle but there are far more that are beyond its scope. I think that a ballet about Lensky is likely to fall into the latter category.It will probably require its audience to seek the assistance of lengthy programme notes which in my books is tantamount to an admission that a subject not suited to ballet.

SPD444. It is unusual to see a ballet performed in two mixed programmes only a few months apart but the company are taking two mixed bills to New York rather than Don Q.One mixed bill is made up of new works including The Age of Anxiety the other is made up of The Dream and The Song of the Earth.So we will probably get a mixed bill including The Dream fairly early on next season.

While I accept that it may be difficult to find works that would sit happily with some of McGregor's works I think that it is unfortunate that the Royal Ballet's mixed bills are increasingly constructed as if there are a number of distinct, self-contained ballet audiences that should not be required to mix.It no doubt makes sense as far as box office receipts are concerned to divide the audience into traditional/old and experimental/ young but it would be fascinating to see how well some of the new works would stand up if they were part of a programme that included a twentieth century masterpiece like Les Noces. Here are a few suggestions for next season.I shall be amazed if many of them are included in the 2015-2016 season. Full length ballets. Ashton's Cinderella with completely new designs or the original ones with a real effort made to play the sisters as characters not caricatures and either The Two Pigeons with a one act ballet as opener or Sylvia;MacMillan's Anastasia and Wheeldon's A Winter's Tale.As far as the classics are concerned Sleeping Beauty. One act works Ashton's Daphnis and Chloe not seen since 2004;Les Rendezvous with the Chappell designs;Monotones I and II and Facade or Jazz Calendar;Nijinska'a Les Biches;MacMillan's Four Seasons and The Invitation; Nureyev's Kingdom of the Shades with a full corps of thirty two Shades; Robbin's Dances at a Gathering; Massine's La Boutique Fantasque or Mam'zelle Angot and Buornonville's Conservatoire and La Sylphide . I would welcome a revival of Les Sylphides if it were to be sensitively and carefully cast and coached but it has never been a jewel in the company's crown. Its last revival was embarrassingly bad.The cast was an odd selection of dancers who seemed unable to dance in the appropriate style.I am not sure whether it was the casts that were the root of the problem, the coaching or a collective lack of sympathy with the aesthetic which the piece embodies.It cannot simply be the tempo chosen since I recall that ENB had a beautiful Sylphides mounted by Markova which felt light and buoyant although it was exceptionally slow. As for new works it would be nice to see Scarlett make a real break through this year and to see McGregor make a piece which does not rely on murky, sorry atmospheric lighting, and which does not feel like recycling.It is always a source of amazement that choreographers who are not constrained by the rules of classical ballet seem to run out of ideas and begin recycling themselves long before those who apparently lack freedom because of their adherence to the ecole de dance. What would I like to see added to the repertory? I would love the company to try Liebeslieder Waltzes again and to acquire Concerto Barocco. As it seems most unlikely that they will be able to revive their previous production of La Sylphide the company should try to acquire another of the same quality without too much delay.

I do not think that anyone would be complaining, or at least they would not be so vociferous, if the Amphitheatre were exclusively allocated to students on any night other than the first night of a new full length ballet.It suggests that the management lack confidence in Woolf Works and are trying to engineer a suitably enthusiastic response to it. I hope that it is better than that. But we shall see what we shall see. The ballet company's search for a "new audience" has been an ongoing quest since at least MacMillan's directorship. I recall some long term ballet goers back then muttering darkly that " He wants to get rid of us and get a new audience". But strangely the old timers did not disappear as a result of management machinations nor was there an influx of new young ballet enthusiasts. Management has probably been anxious to find a new, young audience since the 1950's when the company acquired establishment status with its royal charter. Perhaps someone just noticed one day that the audience had got that bit older or someone expressed concern that the company's creativity was being stifled by the audiences' preference for the nineteenth century classics and their indifference to new works. And that was a period when many major choreographers were actively engaged in creating new works. It will be fascinating to see what Woolf Works turns out like. If it is a roaring success will O'Hare try to convert the company into one even more suited to that style of performance? If it is a failure like MacMillan's Isadora will McGregor still be as highly regarded as he is now. Will he be able to command the share of the company's resources that he does at present?

London Ballet Circle ? Gerald Dowler is due to interview Katherine wade and Patricia Linton tomorrow.

All I know about it is that I read somewhere that Shearer said that she hated the idea that people would assume that the dance sections in The Red Shoes were representative of her as a dancer as they were shot in such short sequences that they gave no idea of the flow of movement.She was far happier with The Tales of Hoffman because the dance sections were filmed in much longer sections and as a result provided a better record of her as a dancer.