FLOSS

How easy casting is when you have no responsibility for it or its impact on the company's artistic reputation , the dancers' development,company morale, audience attendance or balancing the books. In real life casting is far from easy.Do you cast and dancer X because the role will clearly suit them , dancer Y because they need the challenge or dancer Z who will only give a so, so performance but who, because of their seniority, should be given a chance and is valuable in other roles? Casting dancers who are well known to the general public clearly has a significant impact on ticket sales but there are few such dancers today .As far as the general public is concerned Carlos Acosta seems to be the only person currently.dancing regularly with the Royal Ballet who is able to guarantee significant advance ticket sales.Like Darcey Bussell his fame is sufficient to persuade the occasional ballet goer that buying tickets for a performance in which he is cast guarantees that they will see the very best that the company can offer. Enthusiastic reviews of a particular programme or individual dancers involved in it may persuade a few to attend a performance during a run but does not seem to carry over to subsequent revivals. Ballet goers, who you might expect to show some interest in what trusted reviewers say are outstanding performers in particular roles, continue to follow their favourite dancers and show little interest in widening their experience of the interpretation of roles. I know that cost is a significant factor, it is for all of us, but only ever to go to performances by your favourite dancers significantly limits your experience of any ballet and may put you off a work if the dancers are miscast in it..I know some ballet goers who,in order to ensure that they see the widest range of interpretations, keep notes of the casts that they have seen so that they book for different dancers when the ballet is next revived. Generally speaking it is the choreographer and the ballet that loom largest in my ballet going decisions. I loathe soviet style Swan Lakes with their jesters, relentless dancing through the mime sections,slow motion,self indulgent,virtually static Act 2 pas de deux, and happy endings .I think that Danilova's description of the contemporary Russian take on ballet as "exhibitions of dancing" is sadly accurate..Most of all I loathe Grigorovitch's cliche ridden choreography and productions but I will brave all this in order to see an interesting dancer such as Smirnova. As a result I generally need to know the casts before I part with my money for performances by either the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky. I do not go to Don Quixote very often because it has a poor score and a dubious choreographic text but I will go to see the Bolshoi perform it because they do so with such wholehearted vulgarity. I do not think that it is a ballet that suits the Royal because vulgarity does not seem to come naturally to the company although, regrettably, not all of its current dancers are above empty displays of technique. As far as the Royal's Don Q is concerned it will be a particular dancer or cast that will persuade me to go. But if the Michailovsky bring their reconstruction of The Flames of Paris to London I shall not need to see the cast before I buy a ticket.. In the 1980's and 90's casting had a significant impact on my ballet going and that of many others that I know.The Royal Ballet would announce an Ashton programme but when you saw the casts you would find that there were very few performances that you actually wanted to attend.Strangely enough that limited number of performances were those which all the "regulars" seemed to attend. I will admit that while the announcement of the Ashton mixed bill that is currently being filled me with enthusiasm that rapidly waned when the casting for Symphonic was announced.The presence of Matthew Golding's name among the cast made me hesitate because of what I have seen him do so far I know that if I do go to see other performances which he is scheduled to dance it will be because I want to see the ballet and the rest of the cast. When it comes to the dancer of mature years you hope and trust that they will know when the time has come to retire, and that they will do so at a time when the audience feels pangs of regret rather than a sense of relief. The sad thing about dancing is that at the age when an actor or an opera singer has the experience to begin to bring the most profound understanding and artistry to their roles a dancer of the same age, giving such performances, must be contemplating retirement. It is the combination of experience and artistry that made Sibley's,Seymour's and Benjamin's mature interpretations so compelling. I for one hope that we never have another director like Ross Stretton who regarded the more mature dancer as "dead wood". But the young dancer needs to be given a chance too. I will happily go to young dancer's debut in roles.I hope that Ican trust management not to over part a young dancer. But developing the young dancer requires time and coaching resources and programming pieces that give the opportunity to gain experience and develop stage skills. Past experience has taught me to be wary of debuts by more mature dancers who have failed to register as stage performers in smaller roles. A dancer has to bring considerably more to a performance of Swan Lake than an efficient technique and the ability to do Big swans and yet I can remember some debuts during the late seventies and the eighties when that is all the dancer actually brought to the performance. The company should have a system in place to develop its dancers but it does not seem to have one and taking up a contract with BRB has proved a smart career move for more than one dancer. As it no longer has the touring company to perform a training function the Covent Garden company should be programming ballets that provide this function such as Two Pigeons rather than treating roles like Myrthe and Lilac Fairy as suitable for learners.It is one thing cast an outstanding young dancer in these roles but quite another to cast dancers in them as if they were minor roles suitable for the young and inexperienced. That sort of casting decision can quickly lead to the idea that these are not Principal's roles with the result that their impact is significantly reduced and the structure of the ballet damaged.The fact that the Covent Garden company has, so far, shown no sign of adapting its programming to provide development opportunities, and its recent recruitment decisions suggests that it is still more inclined to buy in dancers than develop them itself. .

If the current management were really serious about the Ashton repertory they would have ensured that there were no" other issues" when it came to casting Symphonic Variations such as staging Scenes de Ballet at the same time. If they were serious about developing the younger dancers they would be programming Les Patineurs, Les Rendezvous (preferrably in the Chappell designs) and Facade on a regular basis as it was those ballets that helped develop the company's dancers in the past. They would have revived Jazz Calendar and the current programme would ,almost certainly, have ended with one of them. Scenes would either have appeared on an entirely different bill or it might have been programmed as an alternative to Symphonic for part of the run. I think that the reasons that no one can remember both Symphonic and Scenes appearing on the same programme in the past is a purely practical one. If you programme them together you immediately lose two dancers to Scenes who would almost certainly have been cast in Symphonic. In the past those staging Symphonic seem to have approached casting it much as you would if you were repairing an intricate and sensitive piece of machinery. If it works don't fix it .If you have to change things make sure that you do only what is absolutely necessary so that you don't upset the equilibrium. Now each revival seems to involve few, if any, dancers who have danced in it before. Few of the changes from revival to revival can be explained simply by dancers leaving the company or by injury. Having seen both these ballets danced by superb casts in the past I, for one, do not want to see either of them performed by dancers "being given a chance" to show what they can do .All Ashton works leave the dancers exposed but in these two works rough edges draw attention to themselves and stand out even more than they do in Concerto which was choreographed for that purpose. It is not fair on the audience or the performers to cast either of the works in this way. I do not care whether the dancers cast are young or well established, or whether or not they are Principals.What I care about is seeing these works danced with superb musicality and precision. The casting for these two ballets should not be dependent on casting decisions already made in respect of other parts of the programme and should not be altered for any reason except illness or injury within the group selected to perform these particular works.

It seems to be accepted opinion, in some circles, that because she was a noted interpreter and custodian of MacMillan's ballets Monica Mason failed to take sufficient care of the Ashton repertory while she was director of the Royal Ballet .I really wonder if that is true. It seems to me that in her ten years in charge she did far more to ensure that Ashton's works were part of the active repertory than her three predecessors had done. After all it was she and not Dowell who restored Sylvia to the active repertory and put Daphnis and Chloe back on stage in the original Craxton designs. During Mason's directorship while Scenes de Ballet and Symphonic Variations may have been treated a little more like repertory pieces than they had been while Michael Somes was in charge of their staging the casts, including the corps in Scenes, were carefully chosen and appeared better rehearsed than they do in the current revival. While the first night cast in Symphonic were good the way in which the casts for the rest of the run have been put together suggests that the management believes that any combination of dancers will do in these old ballets,At the moment I am afraid that I do not see Kevin O'Hare as someone who can be relied upon to ensure that the full range of Ashton's works are performed with regularity and cast with sufficient care to entitle the Royal Ballet to retain its reputation as the custodian of Ashton's works .It seems to me that it is Ian Webb and Margaret Barbieri at Sarasota who are currently the true custodians of Ashton's ballets and style. While it is understandable that the Royal Ballet would like to be the creative force that it was during its first fifty years that should not mean abandoning the repertory that established the company reputation.However the management's enthusiasm for new works, particularly those by Wayne McGregor, regardless of their quality,suggests that some of the so called heritage works are not as safe and secure as they should be.I sometimes wonder if describing the Ashton works as classics would alter the view that management and audience have of them and ensure that they are allocated more than 5% of the time allocated to ballet performances on the main stage? .

I have looked at the Royal Ballet casts who danced in Symphonic during the period 1972-1979. What is noticeable is that only fifteen dancers were involved in the twenty performances of Symphonic listed during that time.There was a far greater degree of consistency in casting this ballet than is the case now .Sibley took the lead in one performance,Park in twelve,.Collier in three, Penney who took the lead role in four performances danced one of the other roles on nine occasions usually partnered by Michael Coleman. Indeed it was Michael Coleman whose name appeared most regularly in the cast of this ballet during this period; appearing in the subsiduary male roles no less than eighteen times. On thirteen occasions dancing the role that James Hay took last Saturday It is of interest to note that during this time if you went to Scenes de Ballet you were more likely to see Coleman in the main male rolein that ballet than anyone else. The other main female dancers were Ann Jenner and Marguerite Porter with nine performances each, Ellis with eight Eagling took the lead role at eight performances,Dowell at six, Wall and McLeary both danced the lead on three occasions.The subsiduary male roles were taken by Sherwood on five occasions Eagling and Silver on seven occasions each and Jeffries on three . During this period there were often only a couple of performances in a season and on only one occasion was more than one person who was new to the ballet cast in it. No wonder it looked so good when it was the preserve of Principal dancers who were familiar with their roles. Only three performances are recorded for the period 1980 to 1990 but then that was a period when the company was going through a bad patch,After that, particularly after Michael Somes was retired it was performed more frequently but was not necessarily seen to best advantage as nearly every cast was something of a curate's egg.

Aylmer I should be interested to know whether the performances that you refer to as occasions when the Royal fielded two casts for Symphonic involved two completely different casts of six dancers or whether they merely involved changing the two main dancers? The fact that the company may occasionally have been able to provide more than a single cast of six dancers during Ashton's lifetime does not mean that it is able do so now.Performances that took place in the seventies would have required Ashton's approval on casting and would have been rehearsed by Michael Somes. No one would have been allowed on the stage who was not fully capable of meeting the demands that this ballet makes on those who perform it. At that time all the company were immersed in his works in a way that is far from true today where, apart from the works owned by Anthony Dowell, they struggle to maintain a secure place in the repertory. Casting Symphonic is not easy because apart from the physical demands it makes on the dancers it requires six experienced dancers with natural stage presence willing and able to dance with the precision and cohesion of the the very best dancers in the corps de ballet . Even at a time when Ashton's choreographic style was familiar to the entire company and everyone had lots of experience of dancing in his works it was not performed regularly.I do not think that the ballet,its creator's reputation or the audience are done any favours by having two casts for Symphonic if in order to obtain the second one you mix suitable and not so suitable dancers across the two casts or you put one cast on the stage that really is not up to it. Like the opera Norma,Symphonic should only be revived when the right cast is available to do it justice.Seeing Symphonic danced by an exemplary cast is a very different experience from seeing it danced by a cast which is struggling to dance at the tempo required or with the necessary stylistic cohesion and precision.In the absence of suitable casts regular revivals are more likely to bring the reputation of Ashton and this work into disrepute than they are to improve its performance. There are plenty of other Ashton works languishing in the shadows that deserve to be seen regularly.It would be lovely to see Les Patineurs as a repertory piece rather than as part of he Beatrix Potter Christmas package and Les Rendezvous in the Chappell designs. Daphnis and Chloe is due for revival and having gone to the trouble of reviving both Monotones it would have been nice to see it again this year. Then there is Capriole Suite , Facade and it would be wonderful if someone would reocnstruct Persephone while there are still people around who danced in it .

No dancer is ever going to be ideal casting in every role in the repertory of a company. A dancer's physique, personality, intelligence, acting and technical ability are all factors in whether or not he or she will be successful in a particular role. Up until the end of Ashton's directorship and for so time after that principal dancers were cast in roles to which they were thought suited.You never found out that your favourite dancer had feet of clay. Considerable care was taken in putting casts together. As a result you did not have half a booking period taken up by interminable performances of Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet enabling every principal and a few aspirants to give you their Odette/Odile or their Juliet. More selectivity seems to apply to the casting of Ashton's ballets. It would be interesting to know what part management,right holders and the dancers themselves play in casting decisions in relation to those works. Osipova is here to dance the company's repertory and to learn from doing so. She has chosen to join the company rather than doing a few guest appearances. I have not noticed anything that suggests that she is not a team player. I did not like everything that Rojo did.I found her far too self conscious and mannered in the classics as if she was watching and evaluating everything that she was doing. I did not like her much in the little bit of Ashton that she did but I found her compelling in the MacMillan repertory.In the same way I may not like everything that Osipova does and I will say if I don't.But I shall go and watch her performances because she is clearly a gifted,intelligent and interesting dancer.Not all gifted dancers are as interesting as she is. Indeed some are positively bland when they are denied the opportunity to perform their technical tricks. Osipova clearly wants to do more than perform soubrette roles like Kitri until she retires and it will no doubt take some time for her to identify the roles that suit her . I for one am happy to watch the process. I am also interested to know whether or not other people enjoy the experience and the reason for their response to what they have seen.

What a mixed bag last night's performances produced.In Scenes Choe brought out the playfulness in the choreography which seemed to escape Lamb completely.Scenes is so much more enjoyable if the ballerina looks as though she is enjoying the choreography.For me Zucchetti did the stegps but failed to dance the ballet.Perhaps he feels that the steps and epaulement are not sufficiently challenging for him.The role should be performed with a grandeur and elegance that is not, at present, within his grasp . Zuccetti is both physically and by temperament a demi-character dancer but so was Michael Coleman and this was one of his greatest roles. The corps were still very ragged is it because they are ruggedly individualistic or because they think that what the audience sees does not matter because it is only Ashton? . Romany Pajdak brought rather more to the Five Brahms Waltzes than Helen Crawford did on Saturday, while Crawford brought her usual efficiency to the role Pajdak brought personality and a certain illusion of spontaneity and it made all the difference. Symphonic Variations brought a stark reminder that this ballet is a daunting piece which requires all six dancers to be up to its demands and that to be nearly there is not enough. It may be under twenty minutes but it is the most demanding piece in the Royal's repertory and last night there were too many people on stage who for one reason should not have been there.Was it sensible to cast Zucchetti in both Scenes and Symphonic on the same evening?Was that the reason for him being slightly out of sync with the other two men? Hamilton seemed to run out of steam before the ballet was over.I can not make up my mind whether her problem with the fast section near the end was due to being too tall or sheer exhaustion. For me Luca Acri made no impact in the part that James Hay had danced so well on Saturday. Month brought several debuts. Hayward squeezed everything possible out of the role of Vera. As far as Osipova's performance is concerned she seemed to me to dance it with all the choreographic detail that Seymour brought to the role the thing that was missing Seymour herself. All the histrionics in the choreography were part and parcel of Natalia's personality when Seymour danced it but last night what I saw was Osipova dancing the steps. The dancer and the character were two separate entities.

Has anyone written to Kevin O'Hare to tell him about the things that they think would improve the Royal Ballet's screenings in cinemas or posted their comments about them on the Opera House website? I ask because Mr O'Hare has said that he welcomes comments and suggestions. Of course he may not have been serious when he said this at a meeting of the London Ballet Association but he sounded as if he was. He may even regret what he said; for all I know he may be knee deep in letters from people who think that they could do a better job than him when it comes to programming and casting. But the chances are that heis blissfully unaware of those aspects of the screenings that are regularly subject to adverse criticism on this site. I have seen complaints about breaks in transmission on the ROH site which have at leas been acknowledged by someone at the Opera House. I do not recall any adverse comments about their content and in particular about close ups spoiling theenjoyment of the ballets being screened. Most of the comments that I have seen have come from people who feel that they enhance their enjoyment of the performance.But for all I know all the enthusiastic comments come from audience members who are not regular ballet goers. If you are not a regular ballet goer you may well assume that those filming the performance and selecting the shots to be transmitted will have chosen the best ones. They will not feel the need to see a dancer's feet or whole body at a particular point in a ballet because they will not know the choreography. I have not attended screenings of the ROYAL BALLET's performances but I have several DVDs of performances that were screened and I find some of the choices to move from full body to close up bizarre.As I have been to a few screenings of Bolshoi and Mariinsky performances I feel able to comment on their camera work and choice of shots but can not compare the quality of the interviews. I find that the camera work for the russian companies' screenings use shots which allow you to see what you would want to look at if you were at the performance and tend to use close ups when, as an audience member, you might well be looking at the dancers'faces. All in all they are far less fussy and busy than the Royal's are. Personally I do not think much of the russian interviewer who seems to be able to say very little at great length in several languages and her interviews have been short on content. Darcey must be truely dire if you think, as many of you seem to, that the russian lady does it better. '

I think the fact that Muntagirov has been cast in roles that were in Dowell's repertory is wonderful as he has a very similar quality of movement to Dowell's. The fact is I had almost as much difficulty in imagining Golding in Scenes as I had in watching Guillem in dancing Ashton. I am in favour of dancers being cast in roles that suit them I am not in favour of dancers being cast in roles which they are not able or prepared to dance as choreographed simply to sell tickets.

During Ashton's lifetime Symphonic Variations was not a regular repertory piece.I know that I had to wait several seasons before I saw it for the first time.In those days you had to wait until Ashton had a suitable cast and there was no thought of a second cast on his part. I should like to see it performed more frequently but only if care continues to be taken over casting.Fortunately the demands that the choreography makes of the dancers means that you can not throw it on with a scratch cast but I should hate to see it reduced to a repertory piece where casting has more to do with seniority, star status and the box office than suitability.But I should like to see the company dance far more Ashton than they do at present and do so on a regular basis. ] I am looking forward to seeing Reece Clarke in Symphonic. He gave a very polished and assured performance as Jean de Brienne at the 2014 school's performance, and people who saw him at the open rehearsal of this programme were very impressed by him. Perhaps the Muntagirov, Clarke cast swap was intended to take the pressure of a first night off the younger dancer and to give Hamilton an experienced partner.I suspect that it has more to do with wanting to ensure that the first night, with the press present, went off well than a desire to raise Muntagirov's profile with the occasional ballet goer by getting his name in the press. Several people have said that they don't get the Five Brahm's Waltzes which is strange since the dances are exactly what the title says the audience will see. Perhaps the problem begins with a title which sounds a bit like a museum exhibit label but I find it hard to think of a better one. Would calling it an Evocation of Isadora Duncan help the audience? At first I thought it might be its place in the programme but showing it immediately after Scenes was a deliberate choice and I do not think it was made simply as a matter of convenience. A good mixed programme is more than a jumble of disparate works, care is given not only to the choice of ballets but their running order. This programme is intended to show the full range of Ashton's art from the rigorous abstract of Scenes to the consummate story telling of Month.The latter a ballet in which the main action and the human emotions at the heart of Turgenev's play are portrayed in purely balletic terms using the vocabulary of classical ballet. A ballet in which steps and lifts that other choreographers would use for their wow factor are used to portray emotion and mood. Symphonic is there, I believe, not only because it is an acknowledged masterpiece but because it is a ballet of mood and beauty in which everything appears simple and unaffected. However difficult it is to dance It must seem effortless and artless. This is definitely not a ballet about technical display or one in which the formal structure of the nineteenth century has any apparent part to play.It is among other things a choreographic riposte to the sort of ballets that Helpmann had been making for the company such as Miracle in the Gorbals and Adam Zero so it is interesting to be able to see it while Gillian Lynn's version of Miracle is being played by BRB. But why include Five Brahm's Waltzes? In order to answer that question you need to know a little bit more about Isadora Duncan than that she was an American dancer who gave dance recitals in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Her ideals were totally at variance with the world of ballet as experienced at the end of the nineteenth century. Think about the works of Petipa with which we are familiar particularly Sleeping Beauty with its formality and etiquette in which Petipa evoked the world of the Sun King's court for the Romanovs in their imperial theatre . It was a time when,in Russia, ballerinas wore their own jewels on stage and male dancers might come off stage bleeding because they had been cut by them. It was an age in which the Italian school reigned supreme as far as technical innovation was concerned . Italian dancers such as Legnani with her fouettes and Brianzi with her extraordinary balances traveled to St Petersburg where Petipa revived ballets and made new ones which incorporated these new technical feats .Isadora's world of dance was the antithesis of this with its natural movement, light costumes, bare feet and good music.While it is true that Petipa used Tchaikovsky's scores in three of his ballets there were plenty of dancers prepared declare his ballet music "undanceable" and you were far more likely hear Minkus or Pugni when attended the ballet. Plenty of people involved in the Russian dance world went to Isadora's recitals and she had a profound, if unacknowledged, impact on the aesthetics of ballet for much of the following century, I sometimes feel that those who disparaged her later had been more influenced by her than they cared to admit. Ashton saw her late in her career I believe that Waltzes started as a piece for Lynn Seymour to perform at a gala and that he added to it later. He made it clear that he had not attempted to reproduce what Isadora had danced to a specific piece of music;it is an evocation of her manner of dancing. In it he shows, as he thought she had, the beauty of simple movement. You should not be conscious of the fact that it is being performed by a classically trained dancer and while it should not appear effort full it should not appear completely effortless . The dancer should not attempt to appear weightless when jumping; arms do not float as the do in ballet . Ashton gives the dancer some of the props that Isadora used such as rose petals and a scarf and he gives her certain poses or actions that she was known to have used but I think that he did so because these were things that a dance audience in the 1970's would have known about .I recall reading the comment of an academic who saw Seymour perform this piece which was that while she had read a great deal about Isadora it was only when she saw Seymour in it that she understood the effect that Isadora's performances had had on her audiences. Scenes follows Waltzes because at one level at least you could argue that with its apparent simplicity of style and movement in which neither dancers nor ballet steps call attention to themselves individually and the ballet has to be viewed as a whole or not at all Ashton made a piece which gives the appearance of a spontaneous response to the music much as Isadora's dances were intended to do.

I have been lucky enough to see Scenes from various parts of the house.. I think that it is one of those ballets that is best seen from the Amphitheatre. Watching a master choreographer move a mass of dancers around the stage forming them into groups, and then making them form ever more complex patterns only to dissolve them in the blink of an eye is one of the things that makes ballet so fascinating.. I think that while most choreographers can make something of a small group of dancers it is those with the ability to move large groups around and to make their exits and entrances interesting that have the greatest talent. Balanchine once said that while he and Mr Ashton might make bad ballets they never made dull ones and he could have added that they both were very inventive when it came getting the corps on and off the stage.

Audiences tend to have set expectations about the works of individual choreographers because of the programming decisions made by the directors of ballet companies and the effort that ballet owners make to get particular ballets performed.The standard view is that while MacMillan made works which challenged audiences Ashton made charming pieces which made few demands on the audience. MacMillan was radical, rigorous, and forward thinking ; Ashton was conservative,without intellectual rigour and always set out to please. The bulk of the programming choices made by the Royal Ballet since the deaths of these two choreographers has done much to create and support the image of the two men for the average ballet goer. It clearly comes as a shock to be shown a different side of their choreographic craft. Indeed if you have developed the idea of Ashton's choreography being sweet, fluffy and charming you may have difficulty watching Monotones 1 and 2 because you have to concentrate in a way that is not required when you watch Les Patineurs or the bulk of the MacMillan works that are programmed regularly. Ashton did not set out to ingratiate himself with the audience when he made Scenes de Ballet. It is a rigorous work without a vestige of narrative. He described the ballet as having a "distant,uncompromising beauty, which says " I am here, beautiful, but I will make no effort to charm you".The floor patterns for the female corps derive from Euclid's geometry and were made to be seen from any angle and they are vintage Ashton .In order to make its full impact everyone on stage has to dance with absolute precision. Unfortunately on Saturday the male corps were ragged and everyone seemed seemed under powered.The ballerina should light up the stage and the male lead although he has little actual dancing should produce the effect of a rocket going off when he takes to the air.All in all it felt more like a dress rehearsal than a performance. As a work Scenes stands on its own but you get a lot more out of it if you are really familiar with Aurora's choreography in Sleeping Beauty and the conventions of Petipa's late ballets. It helps if the ballerina role is danced by a great exponent of the role of Aurora because then the playfulness of the choreography comes across clearly..When she enters the ballerina must dominate the stage your eye must be drawn to her and stay with her. Ashton takes the expectations raised by knowledge of Petipa's nineteenth century classics and subverts them. A great performance of the ballet should leave you smiling because of the way you have been led up the choreographic garden path and then been presented with something unexpected but totally in line with the Stravinsky score. Ashton is doing to Petipa what Stravinsky is doing to Tchaikovsky playing with expectations. While the ballet is not entirely about epaulement luxurious arms are a distinct advantage particularly in the second solo where they should be an oriental quality to the movement. Antoinette Sibley said that Scenes was her favourite ballet and that she did not care if the audience did not understand it .She also said that she thought that it was not a good ballet to open a mixed bill because it was difficult. for an audience to come to cold. It would be interesting to see the programme reversed so that the familiar face of Ashton came first and the audience came to the least familiar and most challenging part of the programme last of all. How you respond to a ballet depends not on your expectations of a particular choreographer but also on when you started to watch ballet. The initial experience of watching ballet trains your eye and effects how you see works by unfamiliar choreographers. If you begin with Balanchine you will see everything else using Balanchine as your reference point. If you began with MacMillan you will see Ashton using MacMillan as your reference point and as Ashton's choreography is denser than MacMillan's you are likely to miss a lot on first viewing even if the ballet is exceptionally well danced. The rule of thumb for a new Ashton work or a work of his with which you were unfamiliar was that at least two viewings were required.

There clearly is a problem about the allocation of tickets between the different levels of Friends for certain events and perhaps for particular casts but the solution is not to impose a blanket ban on anyone buying more than six tickets for any ballet production but to impose limits on the number of tickets that you can buy for particular casts or events. Years ago there was a limit of four tickets per applicant for Nureyev performances which achieved the desired effect. I am sure that everyone would be interested to know what response, if any, the Friends give to anyone who complains.My guess is that they will say that this limit has always applied to both opera and ballet but that the box office has become rather lax over its application to ballet performances.They may even say that they have had letters of complaint from people who could not get the tickets for performances that they wanted to attend which is why they have issued the reminder. The fact that they have issued this notice at a time when ballet ticket sales have been particularly sluggish suggests that the decision to do so was made by someone who is more concerned with principles than money in the bank.As the ballet company has to cover its costs over the season and achieve a set percentage of ticket sales for each production I would have thought that it would be pleased to sell as many tickets at full price as it can early on, rather than run the risk of selling at a discount later. Alienating its loyal fan base does not seem like a particularly clever move when people are feeling hard up but then what do I know? Perhaps it is the first shot in the campaign to find a new ballet audience . For those too young to know the goal of finding a new ballet audience is to the Royal Ballet, what the search for the philosopher's stone was to the alchemists, a costly delusion. But from Mac Millan's directorship onward it has re emerged at intervals as an ideal to be pursued at any cost and usually involves radical changes to the repertory to encourage a new radical audience . Talking about radical pieces does any one find it odd that the schedule of performances in the most recent edition of the Friends magazine makes no reference to Wolf? The performance dates of works that will take place during the months covered by an edition of About the House usually appear in the schedule even when the tickets will not be sold until the next booking period.Is its omission just to keep everything on two pages? I ask because several people I spoke to on Saturday thought it strange that there was no mention of this exciting new work in the October edition.

Of the four ballets shown last night the one piece that looked as if it needed more work done on it was Scenes de Ballet.If you were not familiar with the piece you might have have come away thinking that it was a rather weak piece rather than Ashton's neoclassical masterpiece.It was not sharp, crisp or accurate enough and the male corps was most at fault.If the female corps did not register as strongly as casts have in the past, or ooze chic, they were in the right place whereas the men were ragged and appeared to lack the strength and control demanded by the choreography.As previous revivals have tended to use older, more senior dancers for the male corps in this ballet perhaps it was a case of boys being sent to do men's work or perhaps it was the effect of dancing so many performances of Manon where the corps is not as cruelly exposed as they are in Ashton works .In MacMillan's dramatic works you can get away with quite a lot of approximation. Ashton however requires precision and if you aren't precise it shows. At one point the men lift the ballerina and one of them extends his arm to her.For the first time in this ballet I saw the boy's arm tremble. Both Lamb and McRae danced as if they were tired for the main part they did not do anything wrong but they both failed to register as they should.For me Lamb did not bring out the contrast in her two solos, one sharp as a diamond, the other lustrous as a pearl, both deriving from Ashton's private lessons with Petipa. Somewhere in all of the choreography, particularly that for ballerina, you should be aware of the ballet's close connection to the choreography of The Sleeping Beauty. The principal male role may involve more carrying than dancing but each section should register with clarity and precision and in this ballet precision includes landing in the place you started from. All of this may seem like nitpicking but this is one of those ballets that exposes everyone on stage and just like a piece of precision engineering it is either spot on or it is not. I expect that by the end of the run it will look much better. Ashton's five Brahm's waltzes tell us in a few minutes rather than a couple of hours all that we need to know about Isadora Duncan and her influence on twentieth century dance.Ashton saw her dance and it shows. The work is an evocation not a pastiche. It is a pity that Lynn Seymour does not appear to have been involved in this revival as originally promised. I thought that Helen Crawford did well in a ballet that she was not originally scheduled to dance. My main comments are that she moved her hands like a ballet dancer and so her hand movements did not register as strongly as they should have done and that she did not quite manage to show in her dancing Duncan's relationship to the floor.I think that only Seymour has shown the weight of Duncan's style of dancing, where effort is not disguised,and the floor is something to be used rather than escaped from. Symphonic Variations was well cast and danced but I do wish that James Hay had danced off centre turns .It was lovely to see it come up fresh as paint yet again. The company is fortunate to be able to field such a fine cast . I know that a lot of people were surprised by the terse statement in the cast sheet that Matthew Golding was being replaced without further explanation although I do not think that anyone was upset by the news. Month had a splendid cast on paper and in performance. Perhaps Paul Kay, who I think the best Ashton demi character dancer the company has, should bid farewell to Kolia after this run.

Given the letter of complaint to the Telegraph about the subsidy paid to the company when it employs so many foreign dancers I assume that the advertisement is an attempt to provide a degree of transparency about the company's recruitment practices. As always with such "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" letters concerning arts funding it shows how little its author knows or cares about the arts in general and the performing arts in particular. It never ceases to amaze me that those who write about arts funding in terms that give the impression that they are guardians of the public purse never consider the work a company the size of ENB provides to musicians and all the ancilliary staff as well as designers and costume makers. A more direct response from the company would involve getting down into the gutter with the letter writer and his supporters showing that your recruitment practices are open and fair avoids this.

If Ashton had merely been the company's founder choreographer the company's cavalier attitude to his works might be understandable. But he was not just a jobbing choreographer whose works tided the company over until a real choreographer appeared he was one of the two most significant choreographer's of the twentieth century. Watching a 1960 recording of Les Rendezvousz this week really brought out what is missing in so much of the Ashton that makes it to the stage now for the main part it's too careful and small scale and lacks any sense of vivacity and wit. In an interview that David Wall gave he said that in his time with company they had worked hard to maintain the Ashton style. In an interview that Elizabeth Mcgorian gave she spoke of the difference between the performances of La Valse given by the company and one given by a cast from the 1960's saying that the recent cast had been very careful whereas the earlier cast had gone whoosh.It would be interesting to hear what others think about when the rot set in and whether they think that it is simply a question of fashion or whether it has a lot to do with the strength of advocacy for each of the choreographers.

I know that Acosta and Osipova have been cast together in a number of ballets and as a result it did not come as a surprise to me that they appeared together in Manon. .I clearly should have thought more carefully about the question that I asked about casting.What I should have asked is how much the decision to cast a particular pair of dancers together is a management decision and to what extent the dancers had a say in the matter . The fact that Acosta and Osipova have been cast together so much does not necessarily make much sense in terms of box office receipts since Acosta has a solid fan base who will pay to see him in almost anything in which he appears. You might have thought that management, if it was their decision alone, would have cast Osipova with other dancers rather than him if only in order to boost box office receipts. I suspect that Acosta decides who he dances with and that the only reason that he is not dancing with her in Fille is because he has an established partnership with Nunez in that ballet. It will be interesting to see what casting looks like in the post Acosta era.

I do not believe that those who felt that Tuesday's performance was a bit flat did so because they were suffering from Manon overload.I described the impact that the performance had on me and I am sure that they did the same. .It is a very rare dancer who is equally effective across the entire repertory and it could be that this role is less suited to Osipova than other works that we have seen her in or those that we will see her in. Everyone has dancers that they will happily go and see in one role but will avoid in another and some that they will go and see in everything sometimes to the amusement of fellow ballet goers .I have always gone by what I see in performance rather than by reputation. It could be that with another partner i would have responded differently.It could even be that at this point Hayward has an advantage over Osipova in this role in that she has grown up with the ballet and had a far more responsive dancer partnering her,Who knows?

Osipova's dancing could not be faulted but for me she was Osipova dancing Manon rather than Manon whether this was because she was dancing the role with Acosta as her De Grieux we shall, no doubt find out at subsequent revivals with more responsive partners. It would be interesting to know who decided on this particular pairing. Acosta is a man of many talents but acting has never been his strong point.and as his dancing skills wane he can't fall back on his ability to portray a character to help him through the evening. I don't think that the way in which the pas de deux seem increasingly to be broken up into sections with held poses rather than being danced through with a sense of urgency helps. At the time that this ballet was made it used to be said that you only noticed the steps if someone made a mistake.Last night I was more aware of the steps than I should have been in a ballet about love, passion, avarice and death, I am afraid that I think that the role of Lescaut requires more than a lot of empty gesticulation and it would have been nice if Soares could have brought himself to do the little beats at the end of the first solo which he seems to treat as an optional extra. Soares is yet another Lescaut who treats the drunken pas de deux as broad comedy and kills it stone dead.Perhaps all aspiring Lescauts need to be reminded that the originator of the role was perhaps the finest partner that the company had at the time and that Wall and Mason were amusing in this pas because they performed it with total seriousness and split second timing.As currently played it looks like Cranko on an off day. But it seems that we are more likely to get costume changes than any attempt to tidy up the way that this pas is performed.

Muntagirov made an auspicious debut as De Grieux one of the few dancers for whom the first solo presents no problems. Technically assured throughout with all sorts of little detail that I have half thought I had imagined. But no they been there all the time waiting for the right dancer to come along and show them.A bit like Hayward who reminded me of Sibley at several points but especially at the beginning of Act 2 because of the quality of the her movement and in particular the quality of her epaulement. At the present time I think that Lamb and Pennefather have the edge over Muntagirov and Lamb. Pennefather was not born to dance this choreography in the way that Muntagirov was, but he copes with the choreography extraordinarily well .However It is the way that Lamb and he respond to each other that makes them so special in these roles All four dancers seem able to submerge themselves in the characters that they portray.They seem to move as they do not because they have been taught to do so but because they must. I am afraid that while I could admire Nunez's dancing, for me she was always Nunez dancing Manon, rather than Manon. Zucchetti's made a fine, venal Lescaut but while I couldn't fault Choe as far as the steps she danced were concerned as a character she remained a blank.Does no one ever go to the back of the stalls up into the Amphitheatre to gauge how well a performance travels across the footlights into the auditorium? Something has gone seriously wrong in Act 2 where Lescaut and his mistress now perform their pas de deux as broad comedy bordering on slapstick.I don't recall David Wall,Stephen Jeffries, Michael Coleman or Anthony Dowell slipping and slithering about so much in an effort to show that they were drunk.They were far more subtle and as a result this section did not stand out from the rest of the scene in which it appears. Today it seems to come from a totally different ballet, if indeed it belongs in a ballet at all. I don't find the changes that Lady M has authorised to the ballet score or to the costumes are any improvement.Does she get her ideas from beyond the grave or are they all her own ? Why does she feel the need to tinker with things that do not need changing while ignoring things that do? She could ask someone to sort out the drunken pas de deux and the sword fight in Act 2. According to my viewing of it neither De Grieux and nor Lescaut should survive it and the only reason that they do is because the ballet is not over.

Perhaps the reason for the difference in their reputation in the US is attributable to the fact that Ashton,whatever he did, was always very much a choreographer whose work was firmly and clearly based on classical technique. Like Balanchine he took classroom steps and played with them, inverting them and transforming them. His choreography is clear, precise and uncluttered with a very clear relationship with the music to which it is set. His experience of working in the commercial theatre no doubt contributed to the clarity and focus of his works.As Balanchine said " Mr Ashton and I may make bad ballets but we never make dull ones". MacMillan on the other hand while capable of making fine classical works also made works which were much closer to the expressionist style of Kurt Joos. Not everything that he created had the clarity and originality of The Song of the Earth some works such as Rituals are silly while Isadora lacks structure and theatrical impact.I don't think that it is just the subject matter of his works that has led to American audiences seeing him as a lesser creative force than Ashton. It is quite possible that they have a better informed view than is the case here. Lady MacMillan's view of her husband's work and her desire to have it performed is of greater significance to the Royal Ballet and its finances than it is to any American company.And his reputation among those who worked with him also is of little or no account in repertory choices made there.I don't think that anyone there would want to claim that he was in the first division of choreographers of the twentieth century although his widow probably would. With less personal involvement with him and his works and its interpreters ballet goers in the US are in a good position to determine the importance of the man and his works.

Yesterday I went to In Step with Fred a screening of films of Frederick Ashton's ballets that were made when he was still actively involved in choreographing. We were shown the1960 BBC recording of Les Rendezvous with Doreen Wells and Brian Shaw in the principal roles and Merle Park in the pas de trois, the 1978 recording of A Month in the Country with Lynn Seymour, Anthony Dowell,Derek Rencher,Denise Nunn and Marguerite Porter in the roles that they created , a film of Doreen Wells and Donald MacLeary in the pas de deux from Sylvia and a short interview that Ashton gave during the 1978 broadcast. The films were fascinating and gave ample evidence of the loss of detail and musicality in those pieces as performed today but it was the earliest film that was the most revelatory. It showed a much lighter, bouyant, effortless style of dancing than is seen today with upper body. arms, hands, neck, head and face all used by the dancers as intended by the choreographer. The music was played at speed and all the dancers were completely in the music and of it. Pirouettes were fast, really fast with multiple turns,without any emphasis on showing the preparation that we see today.It was like seeing an old master painting after all the discoloured varnish has been removed. I know that many people who have made a contribution to this discussion have expressed the view that change is inevitable and that advances in technique should be embraced and incorporated in older works to keep them fresh and relevant to the current audience.This is the sort of thing that happened in music until about sixty years ago. Anyone who performed the works of Handel or Mozart as if they had be written by Puccini would be greeted with ridicule today.I wonder whether there will ever be the balletic equivalent of the early music movement which has had an enormous impact on orchestral performance by traditional orchestras? Some years ago I went to a meeting at which Donald Macleary spoke about his work as a coach for the Royal Ballet during which he spoke about his experience with some of the younger dancers who wanted squeeze in extra steps or hold poses far longer than the music allowed.He seemed concerned by the lack of musicality shown by this approach to the choreography. I wonder whether it was this that Rojo had in mind when she told the Telegraph that during her time with the Royal Ballet she had not been able to express herself as an artist and dance roles as she had wished because of the restrictions imposed by the company and its coaches.

Given that the current fashion in opera is to have new productions at regular intervals and that a production takes several revivals to cover its costs you can see why an opera company with a resident ballet company might see the ballet company as a useful source of money. You can't guarantee that every new opera production will be successful which is why there are so many co-productions.If a production is so bad that it has to be given a decent burial after its first outing that makes a major dent in an opera company's budget. It is interesting that in all the turmoil that there was in the period leading up to the closure of the opera house Michael Kaiser appears to have pushed the need for the RB to cut its costs even suggesting that the company might be disbanded for the duration of the closure but he does not appear to addressed the extent to which the ballet company was supporting the opera financially. It would seem that it was Anthony Russell Roberts with his extensive experience of working in opera who rescued the RB company from its financial subservience to the opera.

Earlier in this thread there was discussion about resident ballet companies subsidizing resident opera companies. Some information about the financial relationship between the ballet and opera companies at the ROH was provided by Anthony Russell Roberts in a talk that he gave to London Ballet Circle when he was Administrative Director for the ballet company. He said that when he was appointed he discovered that production costs were apportioned to the opera and ballet companies according to the number of performances each gave during the course of the season.rather than being allocated to them on the basis of the actual cost of their respective seasons.So the ballet company was still subsidizing the opera company until quite recently. Now, he said, the two companies covered their own costs and the only financial requirement placed on them was to break even at the end of the year. But while the ballet company was not required to make a profit there was a requirement to sell a specified proportion of the house for each production.Comments made in the past by older ballet goers who had been involved with Ballet Association since its early days suggest that " the bottoms on seats requirement " is of real significance when it comes to mounting a new full length ballet or a major revival. When Sylvia was revived ticket sales were very slow initially and several of them were worried that it would not be seen again if it did not reach the requisite level of attendance. Presumably the hidden subsidy from the old method of allocating production costs meant that when the ballet company stepped in to fill gaps in the opera schedule when an opera production failed to materialize it carried the cost. I would like to think that when the RB helped the opera company out a couple of seasons back by performing Manon when a projected production of Die Fledermaus was dropped that the opera company covered the costs of those performances but I somehow doubt it. Ballet tours are expected to make a profit which no doubt explains the repertory taken on tour.The tour to Cuba was an exception to this general rule . The RB's early tours to the US were very profitable and it would be very interesting to know how much of the money went to the ballet company and how much, if any, went to the opera company.

I don't think its just Americans who see the Ashton years as the golden age of the Royal Ballet.There are quite a lot of ballet goers here who do as well.There seemed to be a constant supply of great dancers until the mid seventies when the supply seemed to dry up.I have no doubt that this was due in large part to the existence of the training ground provided by the touring company which was axed early in MacMillan's directorship. It had enabled young dancers to learn their craft giving six or seven performances a week in a repertory made up of the nineteenth century classics and works by Ashton and others. No real attempt seems to have been made to provide a scheme for the systematic development of new recruits to the company to replace that provided by the second company..You could argue that this is a problem that persists to this day. David Wall commented on the benefits of his touring company experience when he said that while he had initially been overawed by the dancers at Covent Garden when he first transferred there he soon came to realise that as a result of his time with the touring company he had danced more performances of Siegfried and the nineteenth century male leads than most his new colleagues had. While it is true that not everyone went to the touring company before joining the main company a lot did and significant number of the dancers whose performances are still highly regarded such as Seymour, Jeffries, Thorogood,Conley and Coleman did. MacMillan benefited from the dancers who had been developed during the first two directorships but there was an obvious falling off during his directorship and by the time that the 1977 Sleeping Beauty production was seen in the US it was the subject of comment by the critics that the company no longer had the depth of strength that it had once had.