FLOSS

, pf late,I know that at one time I used to find it odd that Sir David Webster who had a professional background in retail and some experience of running concerts during the war had been put in charge of the ROH in 1946 as its General Administrator. Today I can't help thinking that we could do with someone with a similar background running the place rather than the sort of arts apparatchiks who move effortlessly from one arts organisation to the next with generic transferrable skills such as the ability to read a balance sheet and a proven ability to persuade sponsors to part with their money rather than any particular enthusiasm for the artform in question.The arts bureaucrats who have been running the ROH since the resident companies returned to the opera house in 1999 may, for all I know, have been enthusiastic opera and ballet goers but somehow, of late, they have seemed to lack insight and understanding about how the regular opera and ballet goer thinks and what they need by way of customer service. Perhaps this is because they themselves long ago ceased to have to buy their own tickets and have lost touch with what the customer experience of doing so is like. A friend has told me that in his communications with the "Dear Leader" and the minions employed in the Marketing Department he has gleaned the information that a significant part of the ROH's customers today are people who only buy tickets for specific dates which mark significant family events such as anniversaries, granny's birthday or the Christmas trip to see Nutcracker rather than people with a compulsive habit which has to be fed. I am also told by someone who attended the " Dear Leader's" visit to the Ballet Association that the ROH count patrons who buy as many as six tickets a year as "regulars" which might explain why the website has not been designed to make life easy for anyone who wants to make multiple purchases on one occasion. Of course the website's design could be a cunning plan to make life difficult for people who might want to make multiple purchases for opera performances with stellar casts. The trouble is I don't think that anyone in a senior management position at the ROH, anyone ;involved in the design of the website or employed to communicate with the potential audience is that clever and of course there are far easier ways of preventing a repeat of the Forza debacle. So I am forced to the conclusion that the problems with the new website are yet another example of the utter cluelessness of many employed in senior management positions at Covent Garden.

A cliché which is trotted out at regular intervals is that you learn from your mistakes.I can't help wondering what lessons, if any, those in charge at Covent Garden will draw from their failure to sell many tickets for Frankenstein at the price they originally set for them. Will they recognise that they misjudged the likely demand for seats and that they got the pricing completely wrong or will they decide that the fault lies with the ballet company? As they seem incapable of admitting their mistakes I suspect that much of the blame will be attributed either to the director's decision to programme too many performances of Frankenstein or to the fact that he programmed it at all. I hope that the financial hit that the company has suffered as a result of this Frankenstein revival does not lead to the AD losing the degree of autonomy he currently enjoys about which ballets to programme and the number of performances each ballet and mixed programme is to have. The simplest way of making money for the company would be to adopt the balletic equivalent of the programming policy pursued by the resident opera company which every season stages umpteen performances of crowd pleasing starter operas such as La Traviata, La Boheme and Tosca, although I think that by now it must have exhausted its potential audience for them as everyone within a hundred miles of London who wishes to hear them has done so. I hope that the Marketing Department will take some responsibility for the part it played in all of this as I, for one, do not look forward to a season with a range of repertory almost entirely restricted to the nice little earners in the company's repertory. The thought of wall to wall performances of Swan Lake and other equally popular money spinners does not fill me with any enthusiasm.

At one time the ROH used to sell unsold tickets for both ballet and opera at reduced prices to Friends in the last hour or so before curtain up on production of a valid membership card. I bet if you asked why they don't re-establish the practice or set up a modern day equivalent such as allowing Friends to buy unsold tickets a day before Students are allowed to buy them the ROH would deny that they had ever done such a thing in the past. Corporate memory is a fragile thing as it depends on the long term retention of staff who know" how things are done" and a willingness on the part of senior management to maintain established systems which have the effect of making people who provide a regular source of income feel valued however small their overall contribution to the organisation's funds may be. I can't help thinking that the ROH suffers from the presence of too many "new brooms" most of whom would be much happier if they were dealing with a much more standardised clientele than the one they currently have and that the corporate aim is force the audience to conform to their expectations of how their audience should behave which seems to involve systems which require the ROH to do as little as possible to meet the audience's expectations about the services which the organisation should provide for it. At one time I used to think that it was very odd that a man whose previous professional experience had been in running a department store had come to be the first General Director of the Royal Opera House, I don't today. Today it makes perfect sense that a man who had wartime experience of running concerts and other cultural events but whose career was largely spent in selling goods to the shoppers of Liverpool and meeting their expectations should have been given the job of running a theatre which was for the first time to be the home to permanent ballet and opera companies. I think that his professional experience gave him a much better grasp of what "accessibility" and "affordability" really mean than an Arts Council apparatchik can ever hope to have. I don't think that he would have countenanced changes which have the effect of reducing services to his audience apparently without looking for effective alternatives or that he would have allowed the theatre's pricing policy and the allocation of tickets to become so horribly wrong. But then his professional experience was in commerce selling goods to ordinary people. A world in which someone who wishes to be a success starts from the position that the customer is always right rather than one in which the customer is wrong and an inconvenience.

Lengthy operas have an early starting time to avoid the overtime issue. I seem to recall that years ago, at some point during the early years of Dowell's directorship, when the company was still dancing the de Valois production of the Sleeping Beauty, we were told that we were to be charged more for its performances than other full length ballets. The reason given was that the text that was then danced meant that the ballet's finishing time was a lot closer to 10:45 pm than 10:30 pm and this resulted in additional costs in the form of overtime payments. In later seasons the ballet was cut to ensure that its performances finished before 10:30 pm and did not attract overtime. The main victim was the Hunting scene, where among other things we lost the Farandole danced first by the peasants and then by the peasants and the courtiers and I think that some of the panorama music was cut as well. The unimproved opera house had the machinery needed to stage the Prince's journey to find Aurora using nineteenth century technology in the form of a panorama. This is something which the improved opera house cannot manage, which is a great pity as although it was very low tech it was a lot better than the current solution of having the Lilac Fairy's boat weave about among the hanging cloths which are supposed to represent foliage. But then perhaps its just that I find low tech Victorian stage effects such as the ship leaving the harbour and the storm in Ondine far more effective than the shipwreck which ends the Bolshoi's Le Corsaire which I am sure the machinists of the nineteenth century Bolshoi and Mariinsky theatres would have found toe curlingly embarrassing. I don't think that computer generated effects could solve the problem of how to stage the boat ride in the Sleeping Beauty. They produce a very unsatisfactory effect when it comes to the destruction of the temple in La Bayadere.

If the ticket prices and advertising are anything to go by the Marketing Department underestimated the demand for Don Q while it overestimated the likely demand for performances of Frankenstein. I assume that its estimate of likely demand was based on tickets sales in their initial seasons . The problem is that while the bulk of the ballet audience may have resigned themselves to a not entirely successful staging of Don Q when the management offered the prospect of some very interesting casts the same magic can not be worked on a ballet which had some very serious problems of structure. focus and pace when it was new and has been revived with none of its weaknesses addressed. In its first season it was a new ballet which excited interest because it was the first full length work of a young choreographer. However the ballet has not generated interest because it is no longer a novelty and it is now clear that its weaknesses have not been addressed in an effective manner. If Scarlett could have brought himself to make the cuts that were really needed then perhaps word of mouth and a few really positive reviews would have generated better ticket sales for the performances scheduled after the first night. Unfortunately the changes which were made did not really involve the work's structure or its focus and the result is unsold seats. Perhaps something positive may come of this if it dissuades the Marketing Department from setting such "dynamic" ticket prices for ballets which are unknown quantities as far as ticket sales are concerned. Perhaps, but this is too much to hope, they might revert to a simpler approach to ticket pricing like the one the ROH used to use. if the hike in prices is a result of the cut in the ACE subsidy it would be fairer to everyone if the ROH said as much rather than allowing the antics of the Marketing Department to alienate a large number of the resident ballet company's loyal followers.

It would be interesting to know exactly who decides the number of performances each ballet programme is to receive and the factors which are considered in arriving at that decision. Presumably previous demand is a significant factor and unfortunately whoever it is who decides has got their calculations wrong with both Don Q and Frankenstein. I just hope that the failure does not have the effect of reducing the AD's autonomy in making decisions about what ballets to programme at a time when it seems the Marketing Department is out to generate income at all costs. Frankenstein is a flawed work but I don't think that it would have helped if Scarlett had created a one act Frankenstein and had subsequently added a further two acts to it. The three act Anastasia was created in that way because MacMillan wanted an instant three act ballet for the company and his solution was to add to a one act work he had created for Berlin. It is not that good a ballet and it depends on the performance of the dancer cast as Anastasia for its success. His successful full length works are far less dependent on a single performance. Anastasia is not revived that often because without an outstanding dance actress to carry it there is little of interest in it. The choreography for the supporting characters contains little to distract you from the performance of the title role while the Kschenssinska pas de deux provides more challenges than most dancers can cope with. Watching the pas de deux performed is rarely a pleasurable experience. Frankenstein may not be a perfect ballet but how many full length works are? It is not as if the work is a complete disaster in the way that MacMillan's Isadora certainly was. Three act narrative works can take several revivals and revisions to settle into their final familiar form. MacMillan and others provide evidence that even experienced choreographers are capable of making one act and full length turkeys.However I am far from believing that this work is an out and out turkey. I see it as an interesting apprentice work. One of the ballet's principal weaknesses, it seems to me, is that Scarlett loved the original novel too much to be an effective and ruthless butcher when it came to transforming the literary work into a serviceable libretto for his ballet. But he is not the first choreographer to fail to cut characters or scenes which are inessential to an effective retelling of a story in balletic terms. The fact that the ballet needs some serious pruning has not put me off going to see this revival.The problem with the initial scenes is that they go on for far too long. The prologue is unnecessary while the choreography for Victor and Elizabeth does little to develop their characters pr to develop our understanding of their relationship. Although the steps alter from act to act the overall impression is that the same pas de deux is being performed in each act.For me the ballet only starts to work as a piece of theatre from the point at which Victor brings the creature to life and then rejects him. Once you get beyond the numerous introductory scenes and get to the heart of the story, the choreography for the named characters works after a fashion but it is not enough to make to turn Frankenstein into an effective piece that deserves a place in the repertory. Scarlett still has not made enough changes to shift the focus onto Victor's rejection of his creation and give us an understanding of why the Creature behaves as he does. The designs are strong. While the music is more like a film score than anything else it is serviceable and it does its job of supporting the action of the ballet. By the time we arrive at the nightmarish ball in the final act the score has morphed into Prokofiev. A flawed work? Yes. An interesting work? Perhaps, but only as an apprentice work.Yes. Just bear in mind if this revival fails to sell enough tickets the blame is unlikely to be attributed to the Marketing Department's decisions on pricing. As far as casting ballets with the company's best known dancers is concerned it might well sell tickets but it would be no guarantee that the audience would see an outstanding account of the ballet in question. I am far from convinced that the presence of Nunez and Muntagirov in its initial season would have improved the ballet as she is not much of a dance actress. The ballet's problems seem to me to be ones of structure and focus and those are things which no dancer however stellar their reputation or however large their fanbase is, can remedy..

I recall very little of the ENB revival except that it did not work and that all the critics scrambled around for an explanation for the failure of a work of which they had once clearly thought so highly. As it was a ballet which had Helpmann portraying its central character and a young Fonteyn in the leading female role I assumed that it was the lack of dancers with theatrical gifts similar to those of the original cast which was the reason for the revival's lack of success. It needed dancers with stage presence and glamour who compel the audience's attention and have the willingness and ability to play the roles as Ashton had created them. Without the right type of dancer there were major gaps at the centre of Apparitions which had nothing to do with the designs or the material used for the costumes. I think that Les Patineurs has a similar problem when it comes to the White Couple whose romantic pas de deux should be the ballet's centrepiece but today it is rarely anything other than the ballet's low point . The lack of a glamorous couple leaves a hole in the work but because there is so much else of choreographic interest in the work it is merely a disappointment rather than a disaster, with Apparitions the lack of a suitable cast was little short of a disaster. It is good to know that the Sarasota revival worked well. With any luck it will persuade Iain Webb to start work on Foyer de Danse as he has said in interview that he wants to stage it. As far as the Royal Ballet companies are concerned it should make it difficult for the powers that be at the Royal Ballet and the Birmingham Royal Ballet to ignore the revival completely. It might even make the Ashton Foundation stir itself and do a session on Apparitions at one of its events. I don't know why they have chosen to shift the emphasis of their events from the obscure and rarely performed to repertory pieces. It is not as if there aren't plenty of Ashton ballets that could do with a bit of "rediscovery" because no one has bothered to revive them in years. If the Foundation want to make people think about who Ashton the choreographer was and the range of his output it would run sessions on works like Illuminations, Capriole Suite, Façade, Jazz Calendar and Daphnis and Chloe.

I think that the company is going to struggle to get the mixed bill in, in much under three hours even with two intervals of twenty five minutes each. I hope that they have factored in the amount of time that it will take to change the stage for each work.The timings for the ballets in the mixed bill according to the ROH Performance Database are as follows:- 1) "The Firebird" 48 minutes when performed in 2012. 2) "A Month in the Country" now takes 45 minutes to perform as opposed to the 41 it took at its premiere. 3) "Symphony in C" may take 34 or 35 minutes. I hope this information is of assistance.

penelopesimpson, I don't know where you live and so I don't know whether it would be a practical proposition for you to attend the meetings of London Ballet Association or London Ballet Circle both of which hold their meetings at venues in central London. The meetings of both organisations are open to non-members. As to the difference between the two groups the Ballet Association's interest is focussed on the Royal Ballet Companies and the Royal Ballet School, with the result that it is sometimes disparagingly described as " the Royal Ballet's supporters' club". The Ballet Circle's interests are more wide ranging and not focussed on a particular company or group of dancers. Of course when it comes to the choice of guest speakers there is a considerable overlap between the two organisations. Both groups publish reports of their meetings.

eSometimes biographers disagree about why events occurred and their significance. This is perhaps inevitable because not only will each writer's focus be on the individual whose biography they are writing but they are unlikely to be looking at exactly the same source material, either because they deem it irrelevant to their researches or they have not been granted access to it. Having said that I think that in general if I have to choose between two or more accounts of Ashton's choreography; his reasons for creating a ballet in a specific style on a particular subject or theme ; his choice of dancers and who was in the studio with him as he devised his choreography I am likely to prefer Julie Kavanagh's account of those matters over that of anyone else. If only because I think that Kavanagh is more likely to be right about such matters as her primary focus is on Ashton and his ballets rather than on one of the interpretative artists involved in their creation. I should have thought that Kavanagh had far more to lose in reputational terms than Daneman from being found to be inaccurate or partial in her account of the creation of a particular ballet.as it was Ashton's reputation as a choreographer which led to her major in depth biography being written in the first place. When we consider the conflicting accounts of the creation of Cinderella it helps if we remember that Kavanagh was writing an account of Ashton's life and Daneman was not.According to Kavanagh Ashton intended the role of Cinderella to be shared by Fonteyn and Shearer because it was not practical to expect a dancer in a new three act ballet to perform the lead role on consecutive nights. As we know Fonteyn became injured and it was Shearer rather than Fonteyn who danced at the premiere. Kavanagh says that Fonteyn only found out that she was to share the lead role with Shearer from the press. She reports Fonteyn saying that the news " …. hit me like a slap in the face". I had always understood that a good part of Cinderella's choreography was created on Shearer rather than Fonteyn and that it explains the dance vocabulary he used and why the choreography draws attention to Cinderella's feet as much as it does. My understanding is that it was not until Birthday Offering that Ashton decided to create choreography which drew attention to Fonteyn's feet. I am sure that I read somewhere that Ashton had described the creative process as one in which Shearer had "dragged" the choreography out of him. Shearer danced the role in the first season while Fonteyn did so in the following year.Those who saw both dancers in the role say that it was Fonteyn who made Cinderella a character by the pathos and innocence she brought to her interpretation of the role. "Artistry" is an elusive concept which is sometimes employed to excuse technical weaknesses but on other occasions it is simply used to explain why one performer is judged to have achieved greater effect in a role than a talented colleague has done. The early history of Ashton's version of the ballet seems to provide two examples of artistry and expressiveness being found to be more effective than undoubted technical prowess. The first was in his choice of the dancer to play the Jester where the young and inexperienced Alexander Grant, later described by at least one eminent Russian critic as a "great actor- dancer" was chosen in preference to Brian Shaw who was for many years the company's outstanding Bluebird and much stronger technically. The second occasion is when Fonteyn finally came to dance the role and was judged to have brought something extra to her portrayal of Cinderella. There are a couple of film documentaries floating about on the internet which are of interest to those who want to know more about Fonteyn and her influence on the company and its development. The Patricia Foy documentary has some interesting footage including the finale of Façade with a young Fonteyn as the Debutante and Ashton as the "Dago",which I think must come from the Rambert archives. It gives you some idea of what Ashton was like as a dancer and why dancers said that if he demonstrated something it was all but impossible to replicate the movement he had demonstrated. It also includes de Valois, Ashton, Helpmann and Nureyev talking about her as an artist. I think that the unidentified American voice on the film must be that of Robert Gottlieb as his name appears on the credits but he does not appear as a "talking head". The Tony Palmer documentary is also of interest because although it uses much of the footage used in Foy's film it includes both Parkinson and Sibley describing the effect that they felt Fonteyn's continued presence in the company had on the careers of the younger dancers within its ranks.

" As has been said a report will be prepared and posted in due course. As you may imagine the person or persons who were the invited guest speakers will be anxious to ensure that the report that has been prepared is an accurate account of what was said and that anything that might, on second thoughts , have been indiscreet, is removed before it is published on the site. The process is rarely completed in a few days as the dancers and other guests are busy people. However I suspect that this report may be turned round quicker than most are as it is Alex Beard's opportunity to demonstrate that he listens to the audience's concerns. If you google "Ballet Association-Official Website" you will find a section headed "Reports". If you click on that link you will find that you have access to reports from as far back as meetings held in 2001. The report of the 2019 meeting at which Matthew Ball spoke is already on the site. I am sure that the report of Mr Beard's meeting with the Ballet Association will be posted on the site as soon as possible. As the meeting only took place this week I don't think that it is appropriate to say that we have to be patient.

a Richard LH As far as Fonteyn's reputation as a dancer is concerned we have to remember that her reputation was based on the experience of seeing her live. An inordinate number of people in this country saw her in live performance before, during and after the war on tour and in London long before she went international and became the incarnation of ballet for so many . We all know that live performance is a very different experience from one that has been recorded and it can be very difficult to assess the effect that being in the theatre with a performer, exposed to their stage personality has on our understanding of them and their art. Most people who saw her say that she lit up the stage and that you were compelled to watch her even when she was simply standing still on stage. That personal, physical impact of being in the same theatrical space as her is something which no recording can hope to replicate you just have to accept what the people who saw her tell you about the experience. As far as recordings are concerned we have to accept that at best they only tell you half the story. I have the same problem with the limited amount of footage that is available of Pavlova dancing.However I am prepared to accept that her teachers recognised that she was different and that there was something special about her and that her performances made her contemporaries, including her fellow dancers,believe that she was a truly great dancer in a way that other more obviously technically accomplished dancers were not. I also believe that she entranced the teenage Ashton and that he never recovered from the experience of seeing her. Many of the dancers who worked with him were aware of her influence on his choreography; there is always the Fred step and then there are the stories he told about her whenever he had the opportunity. Perhaps it is easier to accept the assessment of Pavlova by her contemporaries because there is so little evidence than it is to accept the assessment of Fonteyn by her contemporaries because there seems to be so much footage of her. As has been said the performance style, particularly in the earlier recordings, is so very different from what we are used to seeing today it can appear more than a little disconcerting to anyone who began going to the ballet in the last twenty years or so. In the early recordings the technique is lighter; steps are faster;with more time spent apparently off the ground than on it; more off balance; far less straight up and down; far more concerned with movement than held poses; little, if any, obvious preparation ;passing through steps without lingering over them and rarely if ever reproducing steps in performance as they would be performed in class. In other words full recognition that ballet is a theatrical artform in which the classroom prepares the body for performance but does not dominate and obliterate the choreographer's individual style. Fonteyn's career began when the aesthetic of ballet was largely agreed to the be the one which Fokine advocated in reaction to what he saw as an overemphasis on technique as an end in itself in the ballets which Petipa had created to display the prowess of a series of Italian bravura technicians who had came to St. Petersburg as guest ballerinas. For Fokine classical ballet needed to return to its French roots and concern itself with ease, elegance and harmony rather than technical tricks treating technique as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This is why Fokine's Chopiniana, renamed Les Sylphides by Diaghilev for marketing purposes in the West, is such a revolutionary work. It was concerned with the evocation of mood and the pure style of the French Romantic ballet. He wanted the audience to see easy elegance in performance. The audience was not to register the technical difficulties it presents to the dancers in performance. Working in that aesthetic the dancers of Fonteyn's generation did not see performance merely as an opportunity simply to display their technique or as a "display of dance". Richard I don't know which recordings you have seen of Fonteyn I suspect that they are largely the Margaret Dale recordings for the BBC. Here are a few performances that I would recommend you watch in full. They are on the DVD "An Evening with the Royal Ballet"(1963) which contains a recording of Fonteyn, Nureyev and the Royal Ballet dancing Les Sylphides and a recording of "Aurora's Wedding" basically Sleeping Beauty Act 3 with Fonteyn and Blair as Aurora and Prince Florimund and Sibley and Shaw as Princess Florine and the Bluebird.Then there are the performances on a DVD called "The Royal Ballet" from 1960 which contains Fonteyn in an abridged Firebird, Act 2 Swan Lake and an abridged Ondine. Then there is the recording of Act 2 Giselle with Nureyev and Fonteyn in glorious black and white. Finally there is the Rose Adagio filmed for Rank as part of a full length Sleeping Beauty which was abandoned because of cost. Once you have got your eye in with these recordings watching them for what they contain rathr than what they lack you are likely to see more will see more in the snippets on the internet. Performance style has changed so much since Fonteyn was dancing in her prime not simply because dancers now flaunt their extensions at every opportunity and dance more slowly to accommodate their display but because the dancers of Fonteyn's generation and the one which followed it seemed to dance with greater interpretive freedom and were not afraid to look "untidy" if the interpretation of a role required it. Somehow in the desire to be seen to be dancing correctly something has been lost in performance. Somebody described the snippet of Seymour as the Young Girl in Two Pigeons as looking "untidy" in performing the role she created. If she did not know how Ashton wanted the character to be played I am not sure who does. The performance style of Ashton's choreography has shifted as fashions have changed. Today in performance it is much more "correct" in classroom terms and far too prim, proper and well behaved as a result. There is no room in modern performance style for what Dowell describes as the point at which in his ballets Ashton goes "completely mad". Dancers appearing in his ballets are far more straight up and down than they should be; they are far more on balance than they used to be and there is far less internal contrast in speed in performance than there used to be. The result is that Ashton's choreography has lost a great deal in contrasting light and shade in performance and has become safe, sedate and a little dull. If you compare the early recording of La Valse with the modern one you can see exactly what has been lost. All the recordings floating around on the internet have done two things. They have blunted the contrasting styles of choreographers in performance and the knowledge that their own performances may be recorded has encouraged most dancers to perform cautiously and more obviously in accordance with the rules of the classroom than is appropriate if stylistic differences are to be observed. The result is that performances of Ashton's ballets have been slowed down to accommodate every step being seen to be performed in perfect textbook fashion and hardly anyone one dances them idiomatically, "dangerously" and "off balance. Fonteyn the ballerina was the creation of Ashton, De Valois and Lambert. She was the Ashton ballerina personified and between them they created a house style which was recognisable in performance into the 1990's. It was more lyrical than it would have been had Markova continued working with the VIc-Wells Company. Ashton had to accommodate Fonteyn's limitations, she did not have much of a jump and emphasise her gifts which included speed and extraordinary musicality. We have to remember that Fonteyn was never a bravura technician nor was she the company's greatest classical dancer. Pamela May Sibley's teacher was the company's classicist and Shearer seems to have been more suited to Balanchine than Fonteyn was. If you watch Fonteyn's recordings expecting to see a display of technique or a display of dancing a la Russe you are going to be disappointed. She does not appear to be doing anything and that is the point. She does not appear to make any preparation, steps just seem to happen. She makes everything look normal and natural. Indeed she is reported to have said that she wanted to make the Rose adagio look as normal and natural as getting on and off a bus. For her as for Karsavina technique was a means to an end never an end in itself. Film clips of dancers speaking about her broadcast at the time of her death emphasise her physical beauty and the harmonious beauty of her movement (Sibley); her consistency in performance (Shearer)and her ability to move not only audiences but her fellow dancers who were on stage with her(May) while Dowel seems to think that it was the harmony of her body which set her apart and made her inimitable. Another dancer whose gifts seem to have got lost in the rush for easily discernible technical accomplishment " in displays of dance" is Ulanova who reportedly had a picture of Fonteyn executing a chastely beautiful classical arabesque. I recall reading somewhere that they had a connection through their teachers in that one of Fonteyn's teachers had been taught by the teacher who had trained Ulanova's mother.

O In my book being able to dance a choreographer's work or a section of it "properly" means dancing it idiomatically showing that the dancer has complete mastery of the steps and the style rather than giving the impression that the performer has not fully mastered the way in which the choreographer has chosen to modify the classroom steps it contains or that he or she has chosen to ignore the inflections which the choreographer has chosen to give them. When dancing Ashton's choreography it means dancing it as a flow of movement until you reach the end of the choreographic phrase, which almost invariably coincides with the end of the melodic phrase; not hesitating every time you get to a challenging bit which is difficult because it calls for a quick and a tricky change of direction; clean footwork; no dancing at half speed and no interpolated freeze framing. Basically it is the antithesis of "doing the steps but forgetting to dance the ballet". I don't imagine there is any chance that if Apparitions is well received at Sarasota we shall see it here any time soon. It failed to please when it was revived by ENB in the 1980's but reading between the lines that may well have been attributable to artistic differences with the cast rather than problems with the designs or the materials used as was suggested when the critics came to explain the revival's failure . The Ashton biography suggests that both Ashton and Jean Bedells who assisted him were anxious to have their names removed from the credits for the revival. I think that the Webbs have better judgement when it comes to casting Ashton's ballets than Kevin sometimes shows. Will he go for suitability or seniority when it comes to casting for the Fonteyn Gala?

Come on it's only ballet. Why do they need to get names right? The Marketing Department "knows " that we only go to see performances by the corporate entity which is the Royal Ballet and that the ballet audience has no interest in individual dancers apart from those taking the most important named roles. It certainly does not extend the same respect to dancers as it gives to opera singers as was evident on Saturday afternoon when there was no information about who Mr Camargo is, his repertory or his home company. If it had been a singer taking over even a minor named role there would have been plenty of slips of paper available to give the audience biographical and career details of the replacement performer. This attitude to the ballet company is completely bizarre as, at present there is only one company of international standing resident in Bow Street , and it is not the opera company. In fact I find it difficult to think of an organisation which only possesses a chorus, an orchestra, a handful of apprentice singers and limited number of essential support staff but has no comprimario or other established singers on its books as a real "opera company". The ROH is merely a receiving house which retains the services of only those elements of a genuine company which it is not practical to hire on a need basis for each production it stages. Of course, if you want to, you can explain away the fact that the name of an eminent British composer appeared in the cast list for a ballet performance by saying that Walton's name is almost certainly on the Opera House database. I agree it probably is because he composed the opera Troilus and Cressida and the music for Façade and both works are on the performance database. But I am afraid I don't consider that an adequate explanation for such a howler. As Bridiem says you need to check your own work when you make changes to anything that is to be placed before the public to ensure that the information is accurate and that names are spelt correctly. This is a theatre that likes to boast it provides worldclass opera and ballet performance. But an organisation that makes such claims has to ensure that everything it does is of the highest quality including giving timely and accurate information about casting. The Marketing Department is the place at which the ROH organisation interacts with the public and its potential audience. Being slapdash about matters which relate to the ROH's core function which remains the provision of theatrical performances rather than acting as a purveyor of comestibles speaks volumes about its attitude towards the ballet going public and the resident ballet company. There would be all hell to pay if it made that sort of mistake about opera casting. Heads would roll as they would if comparable mistakes were made on the restaurant's menus. But as I said before it's only ballet and who cares about ballet ? Richard LH. In an earlier post you pointed out that Kevin had made special provision for McRae and Sambe as if that established that Campbell should have had a partner selected for him so that he too could dance Romeo during this revival. In a section of an earlier post which I deleted for fear of being accused of going on too long I said that I thought that one of the reasons why Campbell had not been cast as Romeo is that Kevin had already had to accommodate two short dancers in this revival of R and J. and might well not have wanted to make provision for a third when there were younger, taller men who were likely to be more useful to the company in the long run. Last year Campbell got the opportunity to dance several roles because other dancers were injured. It does not matter that it was not part of the initial plan for the season. Campbell got the performances. That is how ballet companies have always worked. But the fact that he was able to take over from other dancers meant that the dancers who were injured did not get the chance to add roles to their repertory. Perhaps Sambe is being given Romeo in preference to Campbell because he was unable to dance Albrecht last season. It does even things up a bit. No company will want to put all its eggs in one basket when it comes to dancers learning new roles. So, sad though it may be, the fact is that a dancer who needs special provision made for him by being given a petite dancer he can partner is always going to be less useful to a company than one who can partner each and every female company member. I think that is why Hay is unlikely to enjoy the sort of career that the quality of his dancing would suggest should be open to him. As far as Ball being Kevin's favourite is concerned a friend of mine was of that opinion until he saw him take over from Hallberg mid-performance in Giselle at which point he conceded that that Ball was not simply a very good looking young man but a dancer of some promise, and if he had not already decided to do so, that was probably the point at which Kevin decided that Ball was ready for promotion at the end of the season. Ball does not have an ideal body for a dancer but he seems to have other perhaps more valuable assets including artistry and the burning need to dance. Perhaps we should remember that he is still in his early twenties.

I don't know where she is at present. Her name appears in the cast list of dancers in the 2018 Disney film Nutcracker and the Four Realms in which Misty Copeland and a certain Sergei Polunin seem to have leading roles. As for where she is now. Possibly back in Australia ?

It is not just Insight events where inattention rears its ugly head. I used to attend a great number of training events in a professional capacity and we trainers used to wait for the daft questions keeping our fingers crossed that whoever it was who asked the daft question or questions was not someone whom we had been directly involved in training that day in one of the subgroups doing the case studies and that it was not someone who came from the centre at which we worked on a daily basis.

Although it is true that the Ballet Association enables its guest speakers to check the official account of the meeting at which they spoke in order to edit out indiscretions before the text of the meeting is made available to members I don't think that is the reason why the question and answer section of the Insight events are edited out. I suspect that the real reason why the question and answer sessions at the end of Insight events are cut is not to encourage free debate or eliminate indiscretions but to save audience members embarrassment as these sessions tend to reveal that a lot of the nice middle class people who attend them can not readily distinguish between questions and statements and do not know how to transform a statement into a question. I don't go to many Insight events because I don't find them that insightful but on the rare occasion that I do attend one the questions that are asked would tend to suggest that very few people listen that attentively to what the speakers have had to say. Of course just occasionally an audience member comes up with a question that the speaker can't answer immediately and unlike professional trainers and lecturers that can completely throw the non-professional speaker. Someone asked about the original score of Swan Lake at the Petipa Insight evening because he had noticed marked differences between the entire ballet score as played in the concert hall and the revised score used by Petipa in his 1895 production of the ballet which is the form in which most of us hear the score in ballet performances today. The speaker was not expecting the question and I thought she floundered a bit in answering it.

oaodan and Sophoife, The fact that the RB has a group of Principal Character dancers suggested to me that reasons other than mere expediency had led to David Yudes being selected to replace Philip Mosely as Sancho Panza and the performance that he gave more than confirmed that opinion.Yudes is an exceptionally talented dancer and it would seem a very versatile one. He clearly is not going to be side-lined playing older character roles in perpetuity with little opportunity to dance as his debut as Sancho Panza on Friday evening was followed at the Saturday matinee by his second appearance as the Gypsy Boy in Two Pigeons. I imagine that he will turn up in the virtuoso role of Kolia in A Month in the Country at the end of the season. I did not find myself being distracted by a mismatch between his youth and the role he was playing, From where I was sitting his makeup was very effective in disguising his youth and his portrayal of the character was spot on. This Sancho was a bit of a rogue,full of peasant guile and unlike Moseley far from boring. Yudes did far more than simply going through the motions. He was not merely reproducing the stage business while failing to create a character which is a fault which has crept into too many of Moseley's character performances.It made a pleasant change to see all of the role's choreography performed so crisply and so completely in character and revealed what a hole there is in the action of the ballet if the role is not performed to the hilt. The decision to cast Yudes as Sancho Panza is unlikely to be the result of a lack available mature dancers. Kevin O'Hare has said on several occasions that he recognises that he can't give everyone the promotions they deserve but that he intends to make their careers as interesting and artistically rewarding as possible. Giving younger dancers opportunities to perform roles which are generally given to more experienced performers is a policy which benefits both the company and the individual dancer as it develops the dancers' artistry and expands their range. At the last revival of Winters' Tale the role of Polixenes , which had up until that point been performed by mature Principal dancers, was given to three young men Reece Clarke, William Bracewell and Lukas, Bjorneboe Braensrod all of whom acquitted themselves well. The decision to cast Yudes as Sancho even if prompted by Moseley not being available should, I think , be seen in the context of that policy and it paid off. I hope that management think very seriously about casting him in the many roles created for Alexander Grant and those he inherited, As far as Don Q is concerned it is far from being my favourite ballet. I find so much of what passes for its comedy laboured and barely amusing so I was pleasantly surprised by the first night of the run in which the details of the staging which had seemed awkward when the production was new looked far better organised. I wonder how much of a role Christopher Saunders has had in tightening it up as he is credited with the staging. Great performances all round almost converted me to the ballet. Kaneko was a fine Queen of the Dryads making the challenges of her choreography look simple and straight forward by dancing it so elegantly.; O'Sullivan a charming Amour; young Sissens and Dixon outstanding among the Matadors with Morera, Nunez and Muntagirov full of character and making all of the choreography look ridiculously easy. If the company maintain this standard throughout the run I might even become a convert. For the first time in decades they had to bring the houselights up to persuade the audience to leave the auditorium.

K Dawnstar, With the benefit of hindsight Monica Mason's failure to sign up Muntagirov seems incredibly ill-judged but you have to remember that he was not the only talented dancer to have come out of the school, if I recall correctly Polunin gradated in the sane year, Of course one can never be certain about management decisions on recruitment except to say that if the director has any concern for the morale and the good will of company members they will generally be as much concerned with the needs of a company in its entirety as they are about individual dancers and their potential. Basically a company the size of the Royal Ballet, which has ninety plus dancers; a broad active repertory and an even bigger back catalogue can not have too many dancers being fast tracked at the same time without upsetting the company's delicately balanced eco-system and running the real risk of putting a lot of noses out of joint. Management has to strike a balance between those who have served their time in the ranks, working their way up through minor supporting roles who are now ready for leading ones and the exceptionally talented inexperienced youngster. An Artistic Director who loses sight of the need to reward the hardworking versatile dancers who are the backbone of any company with juicy roles is storing up trouble for the organisation he or she is leading. Appearing only to use experienced company members who are ready for leading roles themselves as the supporting cast for big name guest stars and a few favoured company members can have an awful effect on company morale in a very short space of time. The best way to send company morale through the floor is to make casting decisions involving company members which seem to be at the expense of equally talented mature dancers with greater experience and stylistic suitability for the roles being cast. Side-lining experienced dancers and favouring young inexperienced ones who were not ready for the roles with which they were entrusted plus accusations of casting decisions being made for sexual favours led to Ross Stretton's early departure as director. Now to the question about why the company did not recruit Muntagirov when he graduated. At that time, perhaps because of the problems which ignoring seniority had caused, the company was run on a far more hierarchical basis than it is at present. Seniority really counted when it came to casting. The company had a large number of big name dancers in its ranks all of whom expected three or four performances in leading roles in a run of a ballet like Romeo and Juliet. At the point at which Muntagirov and Polunin graduated the Royal Ballet was already in the process of launching the careers of Steven McRae and Zachary Farouk. As McRae and Farouk are only a couple of years older than Muntagirov and Polunin the company would have struggled to accommodate two more dancers who were going to demand fast tracking. As it is Mason signed up Polunin while Wayne Eagling was able to outbid anyone else who was interested in securing Muntagirov's services by offering him Albrecht in his first year with ENB, ironically almost certainly because the company's repertory in any one year is so limited with the result that giving a young talented dancer a couple of performances of Giselle was going to be far less disruptive of the company's delicate eco system than allocating the same dancer performances in a company which mounts twelve different programmes in a season where the fans of each Principal dancer will expect to see their favourite appear across as wide a range of the repertory as possible. My earlier comment about the opera and ballet audiences interest in a wide range of repertory was comparing the relative interest of opera and ballet audiences in really unfamiliar repertory. I was not talking about the umpteenth new productions of an established opera which while it may not have been seen in London for twenty or more years gets regular outings at one or more of the truly major opera houses of the world. I am not talking about staging operas such as Le Conte Ory which enjoy a sort of half-life on the outer fringes of the standard repertory receiving the occasional airing at a summer opera festivals. I am talking about staging works like Janacek's Osud or Rossini's Ermione both of which were famously failures at their premieres ; staging works by composers who are no longer fashionable such as Mayerbeer and his L'Africaine or going right back to the origins of opera and putting together performing editions of works by composers like Cavalli. I really don't think that there is a balletic equivalent of that sort of repertory or rather the balletic equivalent of that sort of repertory would consist of half of the major choreographic works of the twentieth century rather than works which belong to an earlier period. The average ballet goer seems to be far more satisfied with a remarkably limited repertory than the average opera would be. Even a work like Two Pigeons still counts as a rarity which is to be approached with caution if ticket sales are anything to go by. I am far from convinced that people would rush to buy tickets if Kevin were to stage a Fonteyn themed programme at the beginning of the 2019 -20 season consisting of Birthday Offering last staged in 2012, and Daphnis and Chloe and A Wedding Bouquet both of which were last seen in 2004. Is the problem that Kevin's obvious lack of interest in the historical repertory is contagious or is it something else? It is easy to naively assume that the artistic director of a company with a repertory as extensive as the Royal Ballet's is, will ensure that the company's audience sees a full range of the repertory and that ballets which are neglected deserve that fate. Is it simply that his enthusiasm for new works has blinded him to the strengths of the entire Ashton output and works of great choreographers like Tudor and Nijinska or is it simply that he has dubious taste ? Perhaps it is simply that he is far too trusting of the abilities of those he commissions. I admit I still find it difficult to understand how he ever let Acosta's Carmen reach the stage .

I will begin by asking everyone who posts on this site a very simple question and it is this. If you had never heard of Asphodel Meadows or the Two Pigeons and you knew nothing about either of them would anything on the ROH website have induced you to buy a ticket for the programme ? I recall when Pigeons was revived after a thirty years absence from the Covent Garden stage sitting next to a lady who said that she had never heard of the work and yet she claimed to be a great fan of Ashton's works. She said that she came to see his ballets whenever they were staged and yet at the same time she said that she had hesitated about buying tickets for the Two Pigeons because she thought that its lengthy neglect suggested that it probably was not going to be that good. The sad thing is that there are plenty of other Ashton works which are capable of revival which are also being neglected which will need a bit of help to get people to buy tickets for them when they are next revived. Daphnis and Chloe and Illuminations will both need a bit more than an announcement that the Royal Ballet will be dancing these long neglected works if people are to be persuaded to buy tickets to see them. Why is it that the minute that the average balletgoer reads that a neglected work is to be revived their response is so different from that of the average operagoer faced with similar news ? Operagoers seem to be far more adventurous as a group and their initial response is most likely to be where is it being performed? Can I get to it? Who is singing? Perhaps this is because they understand that whether or not a major work becomes part of the core international repertory is often a matter of luck and that an unsuccessful premiere can condemn a work to decades if not centuries of unjustified neglect. Of course it could be that there are more obsessives and completists among operagoers than among balletgoers. Setting aside the fuss about the limited number of tickets made available to the public for the Forza performances which are to be sung by Kaufmann and Nebtrebko perhaps it is that the average opera goer is at least as interested in hearing unfamiliar works as he or she is in hearing specific singers. I don't find a similar adventurous approach among the average balletgoer indeed it is difficult to persuade some people to step outside the perceived safety of a full length work to try a mixed bill. Even the argument that the vast majority of the greatest ballets of the twentieth century are one act works cuts little ice. So the sad fact is that the announcement that Daphnis and Chloe is to be revived is unlikely to prompt a firm resolution to see the rarity unless the casting is peppered with the names of popular dancers who may or may not be suitable for the roles they are to dance or it is included in a bill of more familiar works. What the announcement is likely to do is to prompt a lot of people to ask themselves what is wrong with it and whether it might be wiser to buy a ticket for something safer ? It is after all reasonable for someone who does not realise how much bankability and the AD's personal tastes play in repertory selection to suppose that works which are neglected are weak or defective in some way and that works that are any good will be performed with some degree of regularity by the companies for whom they were made. As far as the Saturday matinee performance is concerned I have always found that matinees tend to sell very well particularly if the ballets to be performed are ones which people have heard of as there are any number of older people who do not like going to evening performances because they don't like walking home in the dark. The one problem that the specific performance presented for me and others I know is that Two Pigeons has to be saved from being perceived as a cutesy ballet which means that the Young Girl should not be played as an adorable character because to do so is bring the work perilously close to the twee and cutesy. It is as bad, as far as the balance of the ballet is concerned as making Widow Simone a sympathetic "Mumsy" character. As far as the cast changes are concerned, I am disappointed that Bracewell is off injured but I do not intend to complain about Naghdi's two new partners. It will be good to see both men who are exceptionally good as the Young Man dancing with a different partner. We don't see enough of James Hay and anything that gives him another shot at the role can not be entirely bad.

The Insight event at the end of January was a talk about Petipa and Ivanov which was not, in my opinion, half as insightful as it should have been. It was on a par with the talk which Alistair Macauley gave years ago on the Sleeping Beauty. I am sorry that I can't be more positive about the January event but in both cases I felt that I had wasted my time and my money on non-events.

The one mystery about Asphodel Meadows is why, after its very successful first outing it took the company so long to revive it ? The score is Poulenc at his quirky best and Scarlett's choreography certainly rises to the challenges which the music presents to the dance-maker. In addition the choreography is actually memorable and I can't say that of much of the new choreography which the company has staged of late. It might be a bit early for a full evening of Scarlett but a programme which included Viscera,Asphodel Meadows plus something of a real contrast in the form of a neglected Ashton work, of which there are far too many, would be welcome. Having said that I should rather like to see what Symphonic Dances looks like a couple of seasons after its premiere. As far as Two Pigeons is concerned it is good to see it back and to discover that all of the casts are making far more of it than they did when it was first revived. It is sad that it has been selling so slowly and that the Marketing Department is doing so little to boost ticket sales. I hope that it sells well enough to guarantee it will be revived in future seasons. I assume that marketing is far too busy re-categorising seats and playing jiggery-pokery with seat prices to actually try to persuade people to buy tickets for this and other slow selling programmes. So what of the Two Pigeons or, as the database insists you must call it if you want to read the incomplete account of who has danced in it on the Covent Garden stage," Les Deux Pigeons" ? It may owe it origins and its music to Merante's balletic account of de la Fontaine's allegorical poem but what is being danced is pure Ashton with its narrative elements pared down to the essentials. It may not be "realistic" in the way that MacMillan claims for his characters and their narrative experiences which seem far closer to the big emotions of verismo opera than anything that people experience in every day life. Ashton's approach is smaller scale and I think more emotionally truthful than is generally served up in a MacMillan dram-ballet. Ashton's relies on the audiences' recognition of characters their emotional states and situations. None of his characters are ever going to end up dying in a Louisiana swamp or in a suicide pact and his Romeo and Juliet is far more concerned with the personal tragedy of the young lovers than presenting the narrative as an epic opera house-scale tragedy. In this revival no one has presented us with a generic portrayal of a young girl which might be pressed into service by someone asked to dance the lead role in Coppelia but I have quibbles about some casting choices. Cuthbertson has managed to make her Young Girl seem less grand and emotionally mature than she appeared when she first tackled the role but to me she is still too sophisticated and a bit too much like Aurora having an off-day to be totally convincing in the role. She is not sufficiently irritating and lacking in self knowledge to be convincing however beautifully she reproduces the steps. She is a wonderful Sylvia and perhaps Kevin should accept that she is more suited to ballerina roles than ingenue ones. We need to see the girl's immaturity; that she lacks insight; is incapable of understanding the emotional situation in which she finds herself; that she is tiresome and that she is totally impotent when it comes to dealing with the threat which the Gipsy poses.It is a comedy about immaturity and recognition of the mistakes everyone makes when they are young. The point at which she removes the chair which the young man is about to sit on is not a simple piece of slapstick, as some would see it, but an action which encapsulates the state of the couple's relationship. Of the casts I have seen so far the one which has given me greatest pleasure, and I think, has come closet to capturing the couple who Ashton created was Stix-Brunnell and Clarke largely because she makes the girl really irritating. Again I can only express regret that the pair have only been given a single show.. Morera is the best thing about the Cuthbertson, Muntigirov cast. Although he is far less princely than he was when he first danced the role being an ordinary young man does not come as easily to Muntigirov as it does to dancers like Clarke and Ball. I thought that Campbell was wonderful as the young man but Choe is still a bit too grand and does not do frustration and impotence convincingly.If I can't have another performance by Stix-Brunell and Clarke then the next best thing is a performance by Hay, Takada and Magri who get the characterisation absolutely right. Magri's Gipsy revels in her allure and her power over men and comes closer to Morera's account of the role than anyone else I have seen in the role in the last twenty years. I look forward to the rest of the run and in particular Naghdi's debut. There was a discussion further up the thread of Hay's suitability for other roles and his appearance with Naghdi in the classical pas de deux in MacMillan's Anastasia. I will simply say that I found their account of the choreography far more convincing than any of the other casts who appeared in it during the run as it was only their performance which came close to Andrew Porter's description of it as looking like a piece of choreography from a long forgotten Petipa orientalist ballet. It certainly looked that way in the ballet's early days when it was performed by Sibley and Dowell for whom it was made but current performance practice and in particular freeze framing breaks up its flow and seems to emphasise its technical challenges. There was one lift that did not come off that well when Hay and Naghdi performed the pas de deux and that is where the man holds his partner pressed to his chest as she makes a curved poisson shape but I would not swear that anyone else made a much better job of it. The great thing about the Naghdi, Hay performance which I only saw by chance was that they performed the pas de deux as a continuous flow of movement and the choreography looked all the better for that approach. Their performance was very impressive given the amount of time they must have had to prepare it. The more senior casts' indulgence in modern performance practices such as freeze framing at regular intervals made the choreography look choppy and awkward in performance.

I can't help wondering what those who have paid ridiculously inflated prices on the re-sale market for the privilege of hearing Kaufmann and Nebtrenko are likely to react if the "stars" withdraw at an early stage in the run? Both of them have form for cancelling. The fact that the second cast are scheduled to sing so soon after the first night suggests that the ROH has made contingency plans to deal with the possibility that one or both of the "stars" will either go home early or not turn up at all. In answer to an earlier enquiry I suspect that the reason that the ROH doesn't sell the entire season in one go is because most people, or rather the proles aka "the little people who pay taxes" would have to take out a second mortgage to fund their habit or habits which would lead to even more accusations of elitism and exclusion than at present. As long as the arts organisations resident in Bow Street receive public subsidy they have to go through the motions of being accessible even if the marketing department with its sleight of hand; recategorization of seats programme by programme and general jiggery-pokery with prices seems to be doing its best to make them accessible only to a monied elite. If the entire ballet programme were to be sold in one go would not the ballet audience complain that they were being required to buy tickets for performances by the Royal Ballet rather than performances by individual dancers? Is not lack of casting details something about which there are all too regular complaints at present? As far as the lack of performances of Britten operas is concerned remember maestro Pappano clearly believes that a true opera lover burns to hear the third rate verismo repertory which is generally confined to provincial opera houses in Italy rather than Britten. As far as Pappano's conducting is concerned the fact that so little Britten is programmed may be no bad thing as he managed to make Peter Grimes sound more like Berg than any other conductor I have heard. The centenary village hall style staging of Gloriana suggests to me that there is little empathy or understanding of the composer and his works to be found among the current artistic management of the "opera company". Alex Beard gives me the impression that he is merely a front man who has no real power and no understanding of how an opera or ballet company should operate. He never seems to be there in the evening to see the curtain go up and deal with emergencies in the way that Tooley and Isaacs did. His job is simply to deliver the script that he has been given however far removed from reality his scripted statements may be.

Xandra you make it sound as if Polunin was given opportunities which he did not deserve. He was by far the most gifted dancer that I think anyone had seen in decades. He seemed to have it all in terms of physique, technical ability and artistry. The only other male dancer I can think of who was made a Principal so early in his career was David Wall. Wall was also given a swathe of leading roles early in his career but the essential difference between them is that Wall's relationship with the artform was a committed one, once he had decided it was what he wanted to do, whereas Polunin's relationship with it, is to say the least, an ambivalent one. Wall had great talent, did not have to travel abroad to train, and embraced ballet as his career. Polunin was possibly even more naturally gifted but found himself tied to something which he clearly did not enjoy and resented for all sorts of reasons including having to leave his family and the break up of his parents' marriage. When comparing the careers of Polunin and Parish we have the benefit of hindsight which those making decisions ten and more years ago did not have. It is easy to forget that an opera house based company of the size of the Royal Ballet does not have the luxury of being a company of stars and no stars particularly when its senior dancers are well established and they and their loyal followers will expect them to be given the lion's share of performance opportunities. In those circumstances those with obvious talent are likely to be given opportunities while those whose talents are not so obvious are likely to be overlooked. Although I have to admit that I thought that Parish's height was something which would lead to his career taking off at some point. Ballet whether we like it or not is a competitive world, even where the competitiveness is masked by good manners and behaviour . It is above all a world in which career progression is based on personal taste and opinions. I think that it is always difficult for a dancer to get on who does not obviously stand out as having something special about him or her, be it technical ability; partnering skills; stage presence which enables them to make a mark through their artistry in a minor role; being the right height as a partner for a more senior dancer or catching the eye of a choreographer who brings out something in the dancer which no one had noticed previously. It helps if you have some sort of support or sponsorship from decision makers inside a company. I suspect that obvious technical aptitude and strength are essential assets today as artistic directors and audiences now seem more interested in technical skills than may once have been the case. So much so that it is almost certainly the case that a man of average height can no longer expect to have much of a career if his technique is merely average while one who is taller than average has to have something more than height to offer management . The days of casting roles on the basis of a dancer having just enough technique for a role while having the right looks, absolutely the right stage personality and artistic aptitude are over for both sexes. I am not going to indulge in the "Mason made a mistake" line of argument because Parish's career did not develop under her directorship as it seems a pointless exercise. I will simply suggest that the way in which a number of male dancers have come to the fore with the company suggests that it is often a matter of chance and being in the right place at the right time which counts although it is possible to make your own luck. Donald MacLeary who turned out to be an extraordinary partner got his break because of his height. Beriosova who was considered tall needed a partner and chose him. David Wall was recognised as a great talent from the outset whereas Dowell does not appear to have been. Wall was sent off to the Touring Company to learn his trade and given a wide range of leading roles before returning to Covent Garden as a Principal. As far as Dowell is concerned he does not seem to have been marked out in the same way. Possibly because he was not in the established danseur mould. Sibley said their partnership came about by accident. She wanted to practice a supported step, he was nearby and that she realised almost immediately that everything felt so easy with him because they were the right height for each other. Soon afterwards they discovered that they heard the music in the same way. Of course it helped that Ashton cast them together in the Dream and in doing so created a new expressive style of choreography for the male dancer. Some thirty years later Pennefather said in interview that he had worked hard on partnering and eventually plucked up enough courage to ask Guillem if he could dance Paris with her. She had agreed and he had developed the reputation among the other female Principals of being a safe pair of hands. I think that Parish has been very fortunate to be discovered and nurtured as he has been and that given the talent coming up behind him there is no guarantee that O'Hare would have seen things any differently.

I wonder whether these two and three day flying visits are what is required to retain the company's current audiences and are sufficient to attract and build a new one? They do not seem to give much opportunity for the dancers' personal career development. Acosta's repertory selections certainly do not seem to respect the company's history and its artistic traditions as the works chosen from the company's "heritage " repertory are the safe, standard works which any ballet company has to perform at regular intervals if it is to be taken seriously as a classical company. They are all three pretty much guaranteed to sell themselves. As far as the Acosta Don Q is concerned I hope that he recognises the need to revise it. It will be interesting to see whether Acosta's appointment and more particularly the repertory announced for the 2019-20 season leads to changes in the company's personnel. I am prepared to give Acosta the benefit of the doubt for his first season but it looks very much as if BRB's reputation as the custodian of a considerable number of major works of historical and artistic importance is about to come to an abrupt end. It will be interesting to see if Acosta's name is sufficient to sell tickets for his own production and his new repertory. It will be even more interesting to see just how long his honeymoon period with the press and the Board will last.