FLOSS

At the beginning of the opera the giants Fasolt and Fafner are building a stronghold in the heavens for the gods whose leader is Wotan. The first thing that the audience hears and sees are the Rhine Maidens as they swim in the water we see the gold that they are guarding. They are interuppted by Albrecht a dwarf who is the leader of the Nibelungs .The Rhine Maidens make fun of him pretending that they are attracted by him. Foolishly they tell Albrecht the power that the gold has in it. Anyone who forges the gold into a ring will have power over the entire world.They however regard the gold as safe in their care as only someone prepared to fore swear love will have the power and no one would be prepared to do that. Of course Albrecht leaps into the water seizes the gold and renounces love. Next we move to where the gods are gathered waiting for the giants to complete their work. Wotan is happy but his wife Fricka is not since the price that Wotan has promised the giants is her sister Freya who tends the apple trees which the giants eat to stay young. Wotan has got to find a way out of the contract. Wotan can not simply break his oath because the basis of his power lies in keeping his word.He summons the trickster god of fire and asks his help.Loge tells him that as he has traveled the world he has only discovered one thing that is liked more than gold. He then tells Wotan that Albrecht has forged a ring from the Rhinegold that he stole and that he now has gives power over the Nibelungs The giants arrive for their pay .Wotan asks them if they will take a substitute payment. Fasolt agrees to a payment of sufficient gold to cover Freya. The giants leave taking Freya with them. Wotan and Loge set off for Nibelheim. The first we see of Nibelheim is Albrecht and the dwarfs who are scurrying around mining and forging gold. We also meet his brother who has made him a magic helmet which enables the wearer to change his shape and to become invisible. Albrecht's brother is the first dwarf that Wotan and Loge meet and he tells them about the power of the helmet that he has made. Albrecht appears and is tricked into showing the power of the helmet. First he is tricked into transforming himself into a dragon and then it is suggested that he can't manage to turn himself into something as small as a toad. Albrecht turns himself into a toad and is caught by Wotan and Loge and carried off to the world of the gods. There Albrecht is forced to surrender all his gold but it is not quite enough to cover Freya and only when Albrecht's ring is added to the pile is she completely hidden. Albrecht curses all who wear his ring to die. As the giants leave with the gold they fall out and Fasolt who at this point wearing Albrecht's ring is killed by Fafner. The gods enter Valhala over a rainbow bridge to the song of the Rhine Maidens lamenting the loss of their gold. Children are usually used for the Nibelungs as they scurry about mining and collecting gold. There is quite a bit of screaming at this point. They are sometimes used to form the dragon. I hope that this helps a bit.

It is too easy to see the past as if everything was done then as it is now and as if reputations are fixed for all time. When Manon was first seen in New York in 1974 it was not quite the piece we see today. The Royal Ballet was a regular feature in the dance life of the city and its seasons were considerably longer than they are today. Ashton and Balanchine were both active, their different styles of choreography were recognised and appreciated and Balanchine had yet to be deified. Manon's. choreographer was seen as someone entering into maturity of whom much was to be expected .Arlene Croce clearly did not think that MacMillan had delivered the goods;she criticised Manon because she thought that MacMillan under pressure to produce a star vehicle and to maintain a progressive standard in choreography had failed to satisfy his principal obligation which was to tell a great dramatic story. She found significant parts of it to be reworkings of his earlier works and expressed the view that Anastasia was the best of the full length works that he had produced up to that time. Manon was full of dance but as far as Manon and Des Grieux were concerned it did not tell you about their characters and did little to advance the story.It was full of meaningless dance. She characterised this as" "Madame, I am Anthony Dowell. Notice my turns and my perfect develpe into attitude front" And her answer was "If you're Anthony Dowell, I must be Antoinette Sibley. Let's have a Sibley-Dowell pas de deux" and they did," She seemed to think that MacMillan had lost his nerve. As to the relative standing of MacMillan and Ashton the fact that there are still quite a lot of people around who have direct experience of working with him must be a factor in keeping the MacMillan repertory alive. The fact that there is one beneficiary who protects and promotes MacMillan's works places him at considerable advantage over Ashton whose works are now largely owned by people who have no direct experience of working in dance let alone working with him in the studio. The bulk of Ashton's ballets are owned by his nephew who in the past has shown no great enthusiasm for staging the works that he owns and has expressed opinions about some of them which suggest we are unlikely to see them again on the opera house stage, Two Pigeons apparently " does not work on that stage" which is a very odd view of a ballet that used to be served up regularly at the RBS matinee without complaint; while Jazz Calendar which we might have hoped to see revived is too old fashioned. The fact that it makes an amusing end to a triple bill seems not to have been noticed. Thursday's child in which Alexander Grant used every type of transport until he disappeared into the stage was effective as was the Saturday's child ballet class conducted by Michael Somes playing himself where a late comer is punished by being forced to dance until he drops Kevin O'Hare seems to see Les Patineurs only in the context of The Tales of Beatrix Potter which is more than a trifle unfortunate. None of MacMillan's works have,so far, been subjected to the inept and unsympathetic redesigns imposed on two of Ashton's works which in both cases destroyed the mood of the ballet. Daphnis and Chloe which began life as a modern retelling of the ancient story without a chiton in sight was re-clothed in ancient Greek costumes which radically altered the quality of the movement while Les Rendez Vous currently has a set which makes nonsense of the floor plan and costumes which are a mixture of tweties blazers and boaters for the men and fifties polka dots and marigold like gloves for the girls. Dancers want to appear in MacMillan's works. I have often wondered how much of their popularity among performers is attributable to their inherent qualities and how much to the dancer's familiarity with them. Ashton's works by contrast form a relatively small part of the repertory, are difficult to dance well and unlike MacMillan's dramatic works leave the dancer exposed. Ballets only live in performance.If they are not performed it is easy to assume that they are lacking in some way. If when they are danced the performers fail to dance in the appropriate style it is very easy to write a ballet off as camp, old fashioned and irrelevant. Audiences and dancers alike can end up between them consigning important works to the dustbin of history. The Paris Opera Ballet has a long history of doing so.It remains to be seen whether the Royal Ballet follows the same route as far as Ashton's works are concerned. Perhaps Ashton's reputation in the US will result in the preservation through performance of a greater range of his works there than seems likely here at the present time.

I know that a lot of people have expressed the view that Clement Crisp should be pensioned off. I am not sure that I agree, after all it is quite easy to find adulatory pieces by people who are in tune with modern dance but who clearly know very little about classical dance and don't much like it. As we know not everyone paid as a dance critic actually knows much about dance as an art form either as a practitioner or as a long term observer of it in its varied forms. Just because a particular critic does not feel as enthusiastic about a particular dancer or choreographer as I do does not mean that their opinion is not worth reading. A foreign critic seeing a company intermittently may be more aware of changes and of decline than someone who sees the same company regularly. What Arlene Croce had to say about the Royal Ballet in the 1980's was spot on. A critic who has seen a wide range of dance works over the years is likely to be able to identify the sources of what appear to be an innovative approach to choreography and to evaluate them against what he or she remembers of the source material. Again a critic who has seen a ballet danced by generations of dancers is inevitably going to compare the current crop of performers against the great exponents of the past. Just because I like a particular dancer it does not make them a great exponent of a particular role.The performances of Manon that we have seen over the last five years have clearly moved a lot of people, but it is interesting to read the views of someone who has seen every cast since Sibley and Dowell. If your favourite dancers do not get a five star write up that does not mean that either you or the critic are wrong in your respective evaluations of the performance. I much prefer to read a critic who makes me think than one who spends two or three paragraphs telling me the story or the background of the ballet's creation and then uses a couple of lines to say what they thought of the performance. It is relatively easy to find a critic who writes what you want to read, very few have enough guts to say what they really think of a particular work or performance. I find it refreshing and I can agree or disagree as I wish. Now I am going to read what CC wrote about Mr Ek's retelling of the story of the star crossed lovers.

However highly regarded Manon is today it did not receive universal acclaim at the start. Mary Clarke wrote words to the effect that all you needed to know was that Manon was a slut and Des Grieux a fool. When Arlene Croce wrote about it she complained that MacMillan had filled the work with dance but that apart from a few scenes he had failed to capture the essence of the book or tell enough of the story.She singled out the five pas de deux for Manon and Des Grieux for particular criticism because she thought that they were all too similar and that MacMillan had failed to portray DesGrieux being corrupted by Manon .In her opinion De Grieux remained a sweet boy until the end of the ballet. In the 1970's MacMillan was regarded as a talented choreographer but he was not seen as the equal of Balanchine, Ashton or Tudor He was intelligent, musically acute and had theatrical flair but he lacked Ashton's genius. In 1974 there were people who thought that Ashton's enforced retirement had been unfair and that his replacement by MacMillan was detrimental to the company. I do not think that many people then would have expected the reputation of the two men to have changed so markedly. In the US in the 1970's the negative response to MacMillan was from fans as much as critics. I do not think that the critics created the response to MacMillan. They did not need to. MacMillan's fault was that he was not Ashton and that was sufficient reason for criticism. The response to Manon had nothing to do with conservative tastes and liking nineteenth century classics because at that time they had not come to dominate programming in the way they do now. The world of ballet was far less conservative and driven by the accountants than it is today in large part because of the number of major names who were still actively engaged in ballet making. As to the Ameican view of dance they seem to like classicism and loathe expressionism. While in Europe, if what we get to see here is anything to go by, expressionism is dominant. We seem to occupy a the middle ground as far as likes and disikes are concerned. Anyone interested in the initial response to MacMillan's Manon should read Arlene Croce's criticism of the ballet which is reprinted in Writing in the Dark.

The date of the opening of the ballet season depends on what the opera company is doing. If they are doing the Ring then that will take up September and part of October as there will be three or four complete cycles. and the start of the ballet season and the rest of the opera season will be pushed back into October. As opera singer's contracts are negotiated three and more years ahead the opera company administration knows what they will be performing and who will be singing three and more years ahead. This of course means that the ballet company administration also know their performance slots several years ahead. As Opera magazine has a section headed "We hear That" which gives some information about projected opera productions and performances one or two seasons ahead you may be able to get some information about the date of the start of the 2015 -2016 ballet season. You will probably have a greater chance of success in getting the information that you want if you contact the ballet company rather than the opera house. Good luck with the enquiry and booking your flight. I am sure that we will all be interested to hear about how you get on. Bear in mind that if you come at the beginning of the season you are likely to find only one ballet being performed whereas if you time your visit to come a little later say towards the end of the run of the season's first scheduled full length ballet then you might be able to see a mixed bill and perhaps catch the first performances of the next full length ballet of the season. Mixed bills which get squeezed in between the full length offerings give far more opportunity to see a lot of the company's principals than full length works and many of the major works created for the Royal Ballet were one act works.

This is more a case of a ballet starting to fray at the edges than the effect of the replacement of a dancer. As the ballet was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary it must have gone through at least seven generations of dancers as far as the corps is concerned. Fifty years is plenty of for musical values to change and for technique to be altered by changing tastes. Perhaps someone could tell me but I think that I heard or read somewhere that when a ballet is revived the notes of the last revival are used .If this is the case, and there must be some truth to it as it explains how the " toupe incident" found its way into Cinderella, then each revival of a ballet is the equivalent of a printing plate used over and over again regardless of the amount of ink on it or how worn it has become.

My last contribution to this debate was prompted by a comment made about the last revival of the Dream at Covent Garden by someone whose memories go back to the very earliest days of that ballet. She commented that the corps de ballet's rendition of the fairies' choreography did not seem to shimmer and flicker as it once had and that all in all it was flatter than it had seemed in the past. The thing that I noticed , among other things, was that the Pas de quatre pose for Mustard Seed , Cobweb etc no longer registered, as it once had, as the pose of the four ballerinas in the famous print. Any one going to those performances could have been forgiven for believing that they had the stamp of authenticity on them as Anthony Dowell had been involved in the revival. If anyone involved with the revival had been asked they would have said that it had been performed in accordance with the notation.

Even if those setting the ballet do so following the notation without consciously altering any of the choreography a change in any or all of the following will alter the way in which the audience experiences the work.. 1) Altering the speed at which some or all of the music is played.Usually by slowing it down to enable the soloist to display her technique resulting in a strange mismatch in tempo between those sections danced by the corps and those danced by the soloist In some of the longer nineteenth century works this can also result in cuts in order to finish by 10;30. 2) Dancing on the beat when the choreographer intended that the dancers should dance off the beat or the opposite dancing off it when it should be on. 3) Ignoring the style of epaulement that the choreographer used . 4) Performing steps in the way that you have been taught in class rather than as set by the choreographer for example Ashton's use of the pas de bouree. 5) Redesigning a ballet in such a way that it ignores its mood and floor plan and makes the now defunct choreographer look incompetent. The new designs for Les Rendezvous are a prime example of this. By removing the railing and fence at the back of the stage there is now a gap where there should be none and of course no dancers to fill it. New costumes can destroy the mood of a ballet those for Rendezvous turn it into a paler version of Facade.They can also destroy the quality of the movement as happened with the redesign of Daphnis and Chloe which have fortunately been replaced by the original designs. Any of these will change what you see on stage without anyone feeling the need to tell you that you are not necessarily seeing anything that the choreographer would recognise as his creation.At what point does it become appropriate to remove the choreographer's name from the programme and all publicity material?

Looking at the ROH Performance Database will give you some idea of the changes made to the text of the The Sleeping Beauty by Ashton and MacMillan over the years if you are prepared to plough your way through it.Not everything is as plain as it might be .While it indicates the dates of new productions there are no notes to indicate dates when changes were made to a production for example by the addition or removal of divertisements in Act III or major changes in design.So you would not know by looking at the data base that the current production had recently undergone a radical redesign so that it is no longer a sea of pastel and finally looks as if the design had been influenced by Oliver Messel. Another problem with it is that some of the longest running productions have so few performances attributed to them that I find it difficult to regard the database as a definitive account of the Royal Ballet's performances of The Sleeping Beauty. . There is no reference to additional choreography in the Opera House's record of the Vic Well's 1939 production and although Fydor Lopukhov's name suddenly crops up as choreographer of the Lilac Fairy's prologue solo in MacMillan's 1973 production this does not indicate that a new solo had been inserted but that Lupokhov had admitted that he was responsible for this part of the" traditional" choreography. The choreography for this variation was I assume recorded in the notes that Nicholai Surgeyev used to stage the ballet for the Vic Wells company in 1939. Frederick Ashton's name first appears as a choreographer involved in The Sleeping Beauty in connection with the famous 1946 production. His contribution to the choreography was, Act I Garland Dance and Florestan and his two sisters.Act III Presumably this pas de trois was devised in order to provide the male dancers in the company with more opportunities to dance. The 1968 production was mounted by Peter Wright. Ashton's contributions were Prologue Fairy of Joy, Act I Garland Dance. Act II Prince's Solo and Awakening pas de deux, Act III Gold and silver pas de trois ( later replaced by the choreography of Florestan and his two sisters but still called the Gold and silver pas de trois).. I think that the choreography for this production's Garland Dance was new. The moody solo for the prince was added to give him something to do. Remember this was a ballet created when Pavel Gerdt was past his prime. In the mid twentieth century under Nureyev's influence a prince did not expect to have to wait until act III to dance.Unlike some of the later interpolations in other nineteenth century classics, such as the prince's solo at the very beginning of the company's current Swan Lake, this solo seems appropriate to the character's mood at this point in the ballet. In Kenneth MacMillan's 1973 production most of the additional choreography including a new Garland dance was provided by him, but it did use Ashton's Act II solo for the Prince and Jewel Fairy variation in Act III.. This production was replaced in 1977 by one by de Valois. There were no quibbles about the choreographic text used in this production the main complaint was that the sets and costumes were not as lavish as the ones in the Messel production . The reception of the 1977 production was in marked contrast to the 1968 production and that of 1973. Both Wright's production and MacMillan's had been strongly criticised. The bell shaped tutus and the medieval style designs of Wright's production caused controversy as did the colour of some of the costumes. I recall several pages in the Listener given over to a discussion of costume design in ballet which centred on the appropriate shape of a tutu for classical ballet.The designs of the 1968 production were judged to be inappropriate for the Sleeping Beauty as they suggested the romantic period. MacMillan's production was, I think, criticised because it was said it looked as if much of the action was taking place at the bottom of a swimming pool. The 1977 production was welcomed as a solid production. The 1977 production used choreography by Ashton for the Garland Dance Act I; Prince's solo, Aurora's variation and Awakening pas de deux Act II and Florestan and his two sisters in Act III. It also included MacMillan's choreography for Hop O' My Thumb which had been made for Wayne Sleep and originally appeared in the 1973 production.This variation seems to have. disappeared in 1980. 1981 saw the restoration of the variation, once described as" the most boring in all ballet" Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. From 1977-78 this production also included the Three Ivans a variation last been seen in 1972 in Peter Wright production, Ashton's Awakening pas de deux seems to have disappeared at some point in 1979. There was a new production in 1994. This time Anthony Dowell was responsible for what we saw on stage; the choreography was attributed to him..This production used MacMillan's Garland Dance for Act I and Ashton's Act II varitions for the prince ( the moody solo) and Aurora; Act III Sapphire variation used his choreography and the entree and coda of the pas de quatre were described as "after Frederick Ashton.". This production was the last one to use a significant section of the court dances in Act II as can be seen in the recording of the production. By the time that Ross Stretton arrived as director there appeared to be a tradition of each director having a new production of Sleeping Beauty so Stretton had his. The 2003 production was mounted by Natalia Markarova using the choreography of Konstantin Sergeyev and Fydor Lopukhov.The fact that it lasted for only two seasons and was rapidly replaced gives some indication of how much it was disliked. Why was it so disliked? In large part because it ignored the company's own tradition of performing the ballet, which despite tinkering at the edges, the company and its audience felt was closer to the text and spirit of the Sleeping Beauty than the Soviet style production which Stretton had decided on. The Markarova's production was replaced by the one performed by the Royal Ballet today. It has a Garland Dance by Christopher Wheeldon and Ashton's choreography is used in Act II for the prince's solo and Aurora's variation and in Act III for Florestan and his two sisters. It is interesting that it is the garland dance that has been changed most often. I suspect that is because changing that dance does little or no damage to the ballet as a whole. I am afraid that I would prefer any of the earlier versions of the dance to the either of those that Wheeldon has so far provided. e

A few dancers are identified as potential ballerinas or premiers from their days in school but there are some who seem to escape notice until they get out onto the stage when that strange transformation takes place which turns steps learned in class, applied and adapted by the choreographer and transmitted in the rehearsal room into an extra ordinary theatrical experience. I recall a RBS performance of Two Pigeons years ago when the dancer cast as the Gipsey Girl had according to the programme failed to obtain a contract which seemed extraordinary as the performance that she gave was exceptional. At the end of the afternoon the rumour went round that she had in fact been given a contract by SWRB. She went on to become a company principal. I mention this because a director determines a dancer's progress not only as a result of casting decisions but through decisions made about repertory. The SWRB employed her not simply because she was good but because she was suited to the company's repertory at the time. Taste changes over time and a dancer is unfortunate if a marked change happens during their career particularly if it involves physical type. While MacMillan clearly had different ideas from Ashton about the type of dancer that he wanted to use he still had room for the lyrical dancer.Although he was more prepared than Ashton to show the difficulty in some of his choreography he did not believe in the display of technique for its own sake especially in the classics. A change in director can herald a complete change in aesthetics and outlook which will affect development at every level in the company leading to the sidelining of dancers and resignations. A dancer clearly needs to work hard to get on. It helps to remain free of injury and of course a bit of luck is helpful too. Being known to be a quick learner and of having a working knowledge of roles at a higher level does no harm either.Antoinette Sibley tells the story that at an early stage in her career she was asked if she could dance a particular role and had replied that she did not know it and that it was above her level. It clearly did her career no harm but was that because she had already been singled out as the school's first ballerina? We shall never know but I think that most young dancers today would think that it was best to know as much as you can as soon as you can.

I would recommend anyone interested in Ashton's ballets to read Geraldine Morris' book Frederick Ashton's Ballets Style, Performance, Choreography which not only discusses his style,technique and musicality but also looks at six of his ballets Wedding Bouquet, Illuminations, Birthday Offering, Jazz Calendar,Daphnis and Chloe and A Month in the Country in some detail.

At his Ballet Circle talk Xander Parish indicated that the system of allocation at graduation still applies at the Mariinsky.The coaches then select the potential principals who they will coach. I imagine that the same sort of system applies at the Bolshoi too. It is not really clear what the Royal Ballet does,if anything, to develop its dancers. In large part it seems to be down to the personal taste of the Director ,their choice of repertory and their choice of choreographers to work with the company which determines the progress of individual dancers. The disbanding of the Touring Company in the 1970's did not just mean the loss of the character dancers it also meant the loss of a training ground for choreographers and dancers. One of the reasons why de Valois established the Touring Company in the early 1950's was to enable young dancers to develop and gain experience away from the pressure of the opera house stage. Making a debut in a major role and knowing that you are going to perform it at least once a week during the course of a tour is a far less fraught experience than making a debut at the opera house feeling that it is make or break because you have the one performance in which to prove yourself and that if you do get a second chance it is likely to be at short notice with little time to prepare. A significant number of the dancers who were the big names in the Royal Ballet in the 1970's had performed in the touring company.They had had the opportunity to learn their craft by performing regularly rather than being "the flavour of the month" for a time and then dropped in favour of another "flavour of the month".I am not sure that the company has ever successfully addressed the question of how it develops dancers since the Touring Company was disbanded.I can recall sitting through debuts in Swan Lake by dancers who had once been promising but had been left on the back burner for so long that they were no longer capable of delivering the goods and by others who were very promising at their debuts but who were, for whatever reason,. unable to stay the course. In recent years the company has got into the habit of hiring its principal dancers from outside the company.Some of those recruiting decisions made sense but some still seem bizarre. It has also, it seems to me, got into the habit of hiring dancers who see ballet not as a theatrical art in which mood is created or a story is told but as the opportunity to display technique. It will be interesting to see whether Kevin O'Hare is any more capable of dealing with issue of developing dancers than his predecessors have been. At least one of his recent recruits suggests that there is hope for the future. However I still feel that the advice that I would give to a young dancer who had the choice of joining BRB or RB would be join BRB because you will get the experience there that you need to develop as an artist and you will progress if you have it in you. I know that in any one year there are only a limited number of vacancies at the RB but I wonder how many of those who take up contracts abroad feel that they have lost out or whether they take them up believing that they have a far greater chance of developing and progressing away from the RB than in it.

Notation and filming does not ensure that ballets are performed in the correct style or save them from coarsening. That requires a real understanding of what the choreographer wanted and the desire and ability to convey this to the next generation of dancers. Alexander Grant said in an interview that dancers today were concerned with technique and did not think that the detail that Ashton put into his ballets were important although they were put there in order to show the characterisation. It is of course true that choreographers may change choreography. Ashton changed the Winter Fairy solo that Beryl Grey had danced: altered some of Oberon's choreography to accommodate David Wall and changed parts of Lise's final solo for Leslie Collier simply because he liked the way that she had danced them in another work. What I am interested in is how the style and mood of a ballet are preserved. I am sure that those looking after MacMillan's works are concerned to achieve this and are, at present, able to do so. This is due in large part to the fact that there is one person in charge of the works and those assisting in teaching and coaching them are still for the main part people who had direct experience of working with him and his style. By contrast Ashton's works are spread among an increasingly large group of beneficiaries fewer and fewer of whom have had any direct involvement with ballet let alone the performance of Ashton's works. In Following Sir Fred's Steps one of the contributors described coaching dancers and who were then told by someone who had nothing to do with the coaching to" camp it up". In discussions of the staging of Ashton's works there is usually a great deal of discussion about epaulement and Cecchetti technique but little is said about the impact of dancers trained in Vaganova technique and their willingness to adopt another style of dancing. In a dance world where technique is seen by many as an end in itself and dancers who slow music down to squeeze in an extra turn or hold an extended pose are praised there seems little room for dance that creates mood or character. As far developments in technique are concerned why do we think that they should be incorporated into older works? A singer who sang Rossini or Mozart as if they were Puccini would be laughed of the stage.The world of classical music long ago abandoned re-orchestrating Bach and Beethoven on the basis that they would have composed for the late romantic symphony orchestra if it had been available to them. Is not it about time that ballet abandoned this sort of approach too? l

Anyone watching the Royal Ballet performing an Ashton ballet is likely to believe that they are seeing the work as Ashton created it. Are they right to do so? Might they be more certain of the choreographic authenticity of what they were seeing if it was a work by MacMillan ? The fact that a work is performed by the company that it was created for does not guarantee that the choreographer would recognise what is put on stage as his work. Perhaps this is inevitable as there are fashions in ballet technique and aesthetics as in everything else. I doubt for example that Petipa would recognise much of what today is put on stage in his name. We knowthat major changes were made to Don Quixote during his lifetime because he complained about them in his letters. We also know that the jester in Swan Lake was a Soviet addition and that Sleeping Beauty'sfish dives were added in the 1920s. Does the fact that Petipa's works were "improved" and "modernised" in the twentieth century mean that it is inevitable that the same will happen to the works of the majortwentieth century choreographers such as Ashton? Do MacMillan's works stand a better chance of survival in a recognisable form at least in the foreseeable future because he feels closer in time and dancers still want to dance in them?

A great tenor.He may have belonged to the stand and deliver school of opera singing but the voice was wonderful and because he did not take on roles that were too heavy for him he was still able to deliver the goods into his sixties. The Lucia performances that he gave at Covent Garden in 1985 with Joan Sutherland were extraordinary not because the protagonists'combined ages were at least 120 but because they both had such good vocal technique that they were still able to give performances that singers half their age would have been proud of. I recall at least one critic writing that every student of singing in London should try to get a ticket to hear this object lesson in singing. Bergonzi enjoyed a long career and as a result I was lucky enough to hear him in several roles at Covent Garden.He was the finest interpreter of Verdi and Donizetti tenor roles that I have heard in the flesh and on record.

I stand corrected it was of course Barry Kay who designed Isadora. MacMillan's was working with a tried and tested team when he made the ballet.I do not think that it was a case of a stuffy ROH audience failing to appreciate a work of dance theatre which led to the ballet's lack of success. I am sure that most, if not all, of the audience at the first performance of Isadora went with high expectations hoping to see something as extraordinary as Mayerling. It is the pas de deux in Mayerling that are memorable: each of them is different and whether or not Rudolph dances in them they serve either to to tell us more about him or to move the story on to its tragic conclusion. Isadora like Mayerling also focuses on personal relationships but its pas de deux tell you far less about the characters than those in Mayerling and they do not have the same theatricalimpact or provide the same impetus . In Mayerling the action of the ballet makes the double suicide seem inevitable in Isadora the deaths are not an inevitable consequence of what has gone before. Accidental deaths however tragic or bizarre are not of themselves the stuff of theatrical tragedy and that is something that anyone seeking to revive it in whatever form has to contend with.

On paper Isadora had everything going for it with Gillian Freeman providing the libretto,as she had for Mayerling, and Georgiadis as designer. It had to be good. I am sure that most people who were at the first night of Isadora went with very high hopes but as the night progressed the work fell apart. I do not think that it was the cast that was the problem It was strongly cast throughout and it did notwork with either Park or Conley in the lead role. There were people who thought that it would have worked better if the role of Isadora had been danced by Seymour rather than Park. If the ballet had been made on Seymour it would, of course, have been a very different work. I think that it was the subject matter itself which caused the problem.Mayerling works because at its heart it is a ballet about Rudolph's relationship with a number of women which can be expressed in balletic terms; the scenes with the Hungarian officers, the tavern scene and the hunt work less well. In some cases this is because the scene is there merely to provide a link in the action in others because the material is too complex to be expressed in dance A ballet about an influential dancer must have seemed a much easier proposition by comparison. However Isadora's importance and interest lay in the impact that she had on the development of dance atthe beginning of the twentieth century not in her love life. The fact that it was necessary to have a dancing Isadora and a speaking Isadora gives some indication of the difficulties that were encountered. Ashton who had actually seen her dance made no attempt to revive or reconstruct her dances instead he sought to evoke the effect that her dancing had had on her audience. MacMillan on the other hand provided pastiche when he put Loie Fuller on stage and did little better when it came to creating choreography for Isadora's dance performances. Perhaps MacMillan saw this ballet as an opportunity to do for the female dancer what he had done in Mayerling for the male dancer. He had already gone a long way in extending the sort of material that could be included in a full length ballet for a female lead when he turned his one act ballet Anastasiain to a full length work by adding two more acts.If that was his intention he failed and while he should be given credit for the attempt I sincerely hope that no one attempts a further exhumation of it in either full length or one act form.

Instead of asking people not to take photographs and to turn mobile phones and other electronic devices off perhaps the ROH should say that not only is photography dangerous for the dancers and very annoying to other audience members but that anyone infringing this prohibition will have their phone or other device confiscated and will only have it returned on payment of a fee of £50. While I have seen ROH staff take action over mobile phones and photography it is very hit and miss. It seems to depend on how accessible the offender is;the amount of disruption likely to be caused to other audience members by intervening and which members of staff have been allocated to a particular part of the house for that performance. Some members of staff are more interventionist than others. Although I find these intrusions as annoying as anyone else I find audience members who talk during the performance when music is being played but there is little or no movement on stage equally awful. The worst offenders are people who talk during music such as the dawn chorus section of Daphnis and Chloe when the front cloth is down or the prologue of ENB's Swan Lake.It really has come to something when you have to contemplate the possibility that in the future a company may have to make an announcement similar to that made before MacMillan's Requiem is performed but requesting silence during the performance rather than asking that applause should be confined to the end of the performance

The original designer for Ashton's Cinderella was of course not Macles but Jean Denis Malcles.I am not sure where I got the name Macles from. Anyway his designs, or versions of them, were used until the 1960s. I say versions of them because I know that I have seen a photograph said to be of Moira Shearer in Cinderella wearing a costume that looks very different from the one worn by Fonteyn on the DVD. While Fonteyn's costume was more in the standard ballerina style of costume than Shearer's it still marked her out as downtrodden unlike the pretty rags worn in the current production.

As far as I know the DVD is available its the one with the picture of Fonteyn on the front wearing the Macles costume.The Macles designs are interesting because they are not the sort of standard ballet designs that we have seen in subsequent productions. I think that they were abandonded because they were seen as reeking of the nineteen forties which of course they do. Well you could say that it has been down hill all the way since then as I do not think that any of.the intervening redesigns have been regarded as wholly satisfactory. I know a lot of people who saw the ballet with its original designs who have said that reverting to the original designs would help to tone things down a bit.But I am afraid it needs a lot more than that. I wonder what Wendy Ellis Somes is thinking of when she supervises revivals of the ballet? Perhaps she has read too many of those rather lazy accounts of the ballet which refer to the english pantomime tradition and has started to believe that Ashton really was trying to recreate pantomime in ballet terms rather than creating a modern take on the nineteenth century russian tradition. . Unlike the MacMillan ballets where one person controls everything and is prepared to withdraw a licence from a company that chooses to modify a ballet to conform to the local idea of correct ballet technique the Ashton ballets are dispersed among at least eight people only four of whom have direct experience of dancing in his works. I wonder how much say they have over casting or how interested they are in such matters? A major problem is the current way of casting ballets. You never get a cast of exemplars which give younger members of the company a standard to aim for and show them both what the ballet should look like and recreate its style and mood . This I think is true of the Ashton repertory and also of some of the classics. When did you last see a Sleeping Beauty where all the fairy variations and the Lilac Fairy were performed so well that you understood what Ashton meant when he spoke about taking lessons from Petipa? When he spoke in those terms I do not think that he was talking about slow motion exhibitions of technique. In Ashton's time and while Michael Somes was in charge of the Ashton repertory you had to wait until the right cast was available for ballets such as Scenes de Ballet and Symphonic Variations but it was always worth the wait because there were no compromises in order to secure a second cast. The Russians seem to handle the maintenance of their repertory better than we do but they have problems when it comes to ballets where the choreography does not conform to what those brought up in the Vaganova tradition deem correct. Margueritte and Armand was performed with a " foreign accent^ much as the Royal Ballet used to dance Balanchine. How long before it goes native, and if it does will anyone care?

A film of a live theatrical performance whether ballet, opera or drama is inevitably a sort of ghost of that performance. Elements of the actual performance are missing, firstly the artists' abilities to create mood and character and secondly what the audience itself brings to the performance. If the work is essentially abstract then these losses may have very little impact on what the viewer of the film experiences watching the work when compared to the experience of the audience watching the piece being filmed. But when there is any element of mood setting, story telling or humour then the loss can be so great that it makes it impossible to judge what effect particular dancers had on the audience, Also you have the problem that you are seeing a performance close to that was not intended to be seen in that way but that had to project to the back of the Amphi. .Watching a film of a ballet made fifty years ago may tell you a great deal about how a piece was performed and the fashion in ballet technique at the time,in the case of the Sibley Dowell Cinderella it may give some very helpful pointers as to what everyone of a certain age means when they talk about the "English style" but it will not tell you why the audience found the antics of the ugly sisters amusing. What you will see is a certain element of restraint , no toppling down the stairs, no "toupe incident", no playing for belly laughs in the mistaken belief that they are performing in a rather poor pantomime. I think that you might get a better idea of how the ugly sisters fit into the ballet and how essential it is that they are played as Massine style characters rather than a down market variety turn from the version made for American television where they are played by Ashton and MacMillan. I tend to believe older ballet goers who I know when they talk about performances in the past but only when they are people whose responses to performances that I have seen are not dissimilar to mine. People who were in the auditorium on the same day and who did not see a totally different ballet. I agree with the comments about Wayne Sleep and vulgarity but then I think that he transformed the joker into a role that looks like it came from a totally different ballet. And I always preferred Brian Bertcher to Wayne Sleep as Puck in the Dream because he put across the textural references in the role that I found missing when Sleep danced the role. I am not sure whether not doing a proper warm up is how one assesses a dancer's abilities. I recall hearing that Alicia Markova did not do one either. All I know is that I have never seen a better lead Czardas, Petrushka, Madge,Bottom,Alain or anyone better in any of the roles that he created that I saw him perform. I am willing to believe older ballet goers who saw him in the Neapolitan dance as Byraxis, Tirrennio and the barber in Mam'zelle Angot and other roles when they say that there has not been his equal since. I think the point is that I am not talking about a dancer who gives an exhibition of technique but one who had the ability not just to create mood but character to the extent that he seemed to become the character he portrayed and made the audience feel everything that his character was feeling so that for example the Bottom's dream section of the Dream was a lot more than pointing at bushes and shoulder shrugging.

I often feel that choreographers who grew up with the Ashton version of Cinderella spend too much time trying to avoid Ashtonisms in their own choreography and not enough time listening to the music and responding to it,so it was interesting to see Ratmansky's first Cinderella. I have to say that I was disappointed by it. I suppose that his bag lady Fairy Godmother, men dancing the seasons and the references to more modern styles of popular dancing in the choreography must have seemed innovative at the time of its premiere.But what, presumably, seemed amusing and innovative in 2002 came over as a rather heavy handed attempt to be different at the performance I saw. The Fairy Godmother was given very little to do and the choreography for the seasons suffered from the very limited dance vocabulary that Russian choreographers use for male dancers. Indeed little of the choreography seemed to have much to do with the music which is ironic as Prokofiev set out to provide a score that was obviously "dansant". As far as the Ashton version is concerned, I too find the ugly sisters tedious and unamusing but I think that this has more to do with the coarse way in which they are now performed rather than defects in the characters as revealed by the choreography since I feel exactly the same way about the Jester who Alexander Grant insisted was a character not a role; Widow Simone and Alain in Fille. The problem with all of these roles is that the company really has very few dancers who are capable of performing demicharacter roles. The ugly sisters are now played as the most outrageous pantomime dames with costumes to match without much consideration for the jokes in the choreography, The small timid , sister as played by Ashton was facially a bit like Edith Sitwell with dainty eighteenth century choreography while the bossy one had more flamboyant nineteenth century style choreography. Recent casting decisions have done nothing to halt the decline into coarseness. Perhaps the answer would be to give the roles to a couple of woman as was intended originally and happened for a couple of years in the late 1950's. The Jester who, originally I am assured, had an air of melancholy about him is now performed by most of the company's dancers as a role in which to show off technique, akin to the soviet jester in Swan Lake. Not a character but a mere "leg machine". Personally I do not find the current Widow Simones at Covent Garden much better.The role is now played very broadly as if pulling faces and heaving up her bosom is all that there is to the character. No one seems to understand that the small details matter, for example little or nothing is now made of Simone trying to discourage Colas by throwing vegetables at him and then pausing just before she throws the plant plot and plant at Colas and clearly deciding that she is not going to throw the pot because it costs money. Again it is a long time since I have seen a dancer who can actually perform the clog dance properly, The role requires someone who is able to play Lise's mother as a peasant woman of a certain age rather than playing Old Mother Riley. And what is one to say about poor Alain? For the main part that role is not performed much better but then the company has real problems in casting Ashton's demicharacter roles and those created for Alexander Grant pose particular problems as they require a virtuoso technique combined with theatrical flair and the ability to create a character physically and to create a mood. Current fashions in ballet do not suggest that things are likely to improve any time soon.

Ballet competitions are only.one factor in the current ballet aesthetic.The number of people who have come into dance with a background in gymnastics with a gymnast's hyper flexible body is a factor. The taste of individual artistic directors, particularly those that are major choreographers, plays an important part in the physical types that we see on stage. It may be a desire to change the look of the company as a whole or the presence of a particular dancer that causes the change. Balanchine changed the face of NYCB when he began to choreograph for Suzanne Farrell. When Macmillan became director of the Royal Ballet he was required by the Board to reduce the overall size of the company Ashton commented that Macmillan had got rid of all the character dancers and that there was no one left to dance his ballets. The result was that what the audience saw, whether they were watching the nineteenth century classics or MacMillan's own works, was a style of dancing that reflected his taste, just as Ashton's taste had been reflected in the Royal Ballet's style from the 1930's until his retirement in 1970.If there is no major choreographer around to establish and maintain a house style and very little concern for such things such as line or choreographic style then technical advances take over for good or ill and ballet ends up much like music did at the end of the nineteenth century where the works of Bach and Beethoven were performed by large orchestras on the basis that that was what the composer would have wanted if only he had had such an orchestra available to him. But we must all remember that ballet like opera has been in terminal decline since its inception. If we look hard enough we might find a letter complaining that Camargo had destroyed the art of ballet.

Ballet is a demanding profession both physically and mentally and if you wake up one morning and ask yourself why you are doing it then you need to walk away from it. Jonathan Cope did and came back after two years in the outside world fully committed to dance. It can't be any fun,if, for example, you become a professional dancer because someone else has decided on that career for you.Talent is not enough. The world of ballet is not the only place where people have serious second thoughts about career choices.When I was a student there was a very high drop out rate among those who were reading law. It is pretty heavy going even if you want to be a lawyer but unbearable you are only studying it because your parents have made the career choice for you

Well I have not seen any cattle prods but last Friday I was most surprised to discover that the ROH has taken to policing the slips.Apparently on an experimental basis. I tried to find out precisely what had led to this and whether it only applied to opera performances. I was told that it applied to both opera and ballet performances and that it was a result of unacceptable behavior. From what I was told it was more to do with drinks being taken into the slips than anything else. Apparently audience members in rows BB and DD are no longer allowed to stand during performances. I have no idea who thought that one up but to my knowledge people have been standing in those rows for the last forty years of opera going as it is the only way to see the stage. .As it was my enjoyment of the opera was disturbed by the member of staff clumping along the back of the second row to deal with malefactors. If people are taking drinks into the slips then surely the answer is station a member of staff at the entrance to the slips to remove the contraband. If the ROH dealt with the chatterers and those audience members who seem incapable of turning their mobile phones off that would be a great advance.