FLOSS

I think that the answer is that the marketing department does not know how to sell anything of an artistic nature and would be much happier if they were selling something that was standardised and could be packaged and sold without any real effort on their part. Something along the lines of " The Opera House Experience" with a buy line of "Dine in style. Experience the opulence and grandeur of the Royal Opera House's magnificent mid-nineteenth century auditorium. See a show. All you have to do is indicate whether you wish to see a) Opera; b) Ballet; or c)Either . Tell us your price range; the size of your party and the date or dates you require and we do the rest". They could probably just about manage that but when it comes to telling people why they should attend a particular opera or ballet programme if the brand won't sell tickets then they are all at sea. But then I believe that few, if any theatrical marketing departments, are held in particularly high esteem by those who work in other departments in the same organisation. Those employed in marketing are generally perceived to have little interest in the art form let alone the product they are supposed to be selling and completely lacking the ability to inform, persuade or to provide links which might entice someone to buy a ticket.

Here are the names of a couple of petite female dancers who appear to be having successful careers with the Royal Ballet at present. Francesca Hayward who at 5ft 2 ins seems to be doing reasonably well with the company and Yasmine Naghdi who I am not sure is that much taller than her. In addition here are three names from the past of Principal dancers none of whom were that tall, Ann Jenner, Leslie Collier and Brenda Last. I will only write a little bit about Brenda Last as I assume the names of Jenner and Collier may strike a note of recognition. At five foot Brenda Last was the shortest female Principal dancer the Royal Ballet companies have ever had.She won the Genee gold medal and worked for Ballet West for some time .While performing with them she was seen by de Valois who invited her to join the company which was something of an irony as it is said that the RB's founder had originally rejected Last because of her lack of height. She was a dancer with a very warm stage personality who seemed to tell the audience that they were in for a great time the moment she stepped onto the stage. Her technique was extraordinary then and would still be seen as outstanding today as her footwork was very fast , crisp and clean . She was as outstanding as Coppela as she was in the Peasant pas de deux in Giselle; a superb can-can dancer in Boutique ;a extraordinarily funny Poll and as far as the Ashton repertory is concerned she danced Lise even more times than the role's creator did clocking up a total of 101 performances and although she might not have been obvious casting for the Gipsy Girl she was wonderful in the role as she was in the pas de trois in Les Rendezvous where she gave the finest danced and timed account of it that I have ever seen. She had her career at a time when the RB companies danced very few body revealing leotard-clad abstract works and far more demi-character works such as Massine's La Boutique Fantasque and more of Ashton's early ballets than they do today and that must have helped. But the fact that Francesca Hayward and Yasmine Naghdi have made it to the rank of Principal makes it clear that being five foot two or thereabouts is not a bar to recruitment or promotion. I suspect that the advice given to Wayne Sleep who was only five foot two that in order to get into the company he had to be twice as good as the men of average height holds true for the shorter woman as well.The older dancers whom I have named were outstanding technically and more than equal to the artistic and technical challenges of the roles which lay within the range of roles for which they were thought to be suited through physique and temperament.

to For those unfamiliar with the Firebird there are only four named characters in the ballet. 1) The Firebird herself. This is a ballerina role created by Karsavina and first danced by Fonteyn in 1954. She was coached by Karsavina and in turn coached Mason. 2) Ivan Tsarevitch who captures the Firebird and finally destroys Kostchei and releases all who have been enchanted by him. This dancer needs to look convincing even when apparently doing very little. He needs to be able to act and partner well but is not called upon to display other aspects of his technique. This role is suited to a male dancer whose technical skills are on the wain but retains the capacity to command the stage by his mere presence. Somes performed the role for years after he had stopped dancing the leading male roles in other ballets. 3)The Beautiful Tsarevna essentially a character role which may be taken either by a character dancer or one who performs classical choreography.The company's first Tsarevna was Beriosova who was then beginning to be a significant member of the company. I suspect that she was chosen for the role because she looked the part as also happened when Nijinska selected her as the Bride in Les Noces. 4)The Immortal Kostchei a character role originally taken by Ashton himself when the company first performed the ballet in 1954. Ernst Ansermet who had conducted at the ballet's premiere conducted when the company first danced the ballet and is reported to have said that he was so taken by Ashton's performance as Kostchei as he struggled to resist the Firebird's spell which forces the Immortal's entire entourage and then the Immortal himself to sleep that he was unable to concentrate on the music. The first four names may look jumbled as they are not set out in any consistent order but having said that they look suspiciously like the type of dancers you might cast in the Firebird either because they look right for the part or because a specific role would provide the opportunity to give a specific dancer a bit of a send off at the end of their time as a member of the company. I have no prior knowledge but I would not be at all surprised to learn that both Watson and Crawford., are to retire at the end of the season. As for the other odd names they look as if they could well be first thoughts on casting for A Month in the Country. Osipova has already danced Natalia Petrovna so perhaps Cuthbertson and Nunez are in line for the role although I have to admit I can't really imagine Nunez making much of a success of the role but I should be happy to be proved wrong. There again the names could be a series of notes for Symphony in C as to availability as both Osipova and Nunez have international careers as well as commitments to the Royal Ballet. If I am right about those first four names that would give a first night cast who I assume will be appearing in the Fonteynfest gala of Firebird Naghdi Ivan Tsarevitch Watson, The Beautiful Tsarevna Arestis, The Immortal Kostchei the wicked sorcerer Avis A second cast of Firebird Mendizabal Ivan Tsarevitch Kish The Beautiful Tsarevna Calvert The Immortal Kostchei Saunders A third cast of Firebird Heap Ivan Tsarevitch Hirano The Beautiful Tsarevna Crawford The Immortal Kostchei Marriott As far as the prices are concerned it looks suspiciously to me as if the marketing department has been told to sweat the assets of the ballet company to keep the opera side of the operation afloat financially. The drop in the value of the pound plus the cut in ACE funding would have made a big hole in the opera's finances anyway but those effects have been exacerbated by the number of productions which it has managed to stage, particularly during Holten's time as Artistic Director, which did not deserve to make it to the stage in the first place and certainly should not be inflicted on an audience a second time. This reduces the opera to a big hole into which large sums of money are thrown at regular intervals with nothing much to show for the expenditure. Ticket sales for the revival of Cosi are pretty poor as are sales for the new production of the Queen of Spades. As a friend said to me a couple of days ago what is said to be an international opera house seems to be in a similar state artistically to the ballet company about twenty years ago.

I did not interpret the press release as an exercise in obsfucation as it seems to me that the text as translated by the programme embedded on the company's website is simply producing a literal translation of the original text rather than a prepared text in English which takes account of the difference in idioms between German and English. The gist of the message is that they are taking the whole thing very seriously as in the days of social media an individual's personal views and comments posted on social media are no longer private views expressed to a handful of people but have a much wider currency which could affect the company itself. They want to speak to Polunin before any full decision is made. The company expect him to dance in Raymonda on the advertised dates. I don't think that this is anything other than a holding position. They want to speak to Polunin to hear both sides before a final decision is made. The fact that Zelensky's name appears on the press release, does not, it seems to me place him in a situation in which he will be faced with any conflict of interests. It would be a very sad day when saying that an individual's comments published on social media may have an impact on a company and that there is a need to investigate and hear from both sides debars an individual from undertaking the investigation and making a final decision.

Sorry you are right it was Derman not McGorian in the recording. Much as I admired Yanowsky I thought that it was not really her role and the two men who danced with her in Monotones 2 looked distinctly terrestrial probably as a result of all their bulging muscles. The dancers in both ballets should appear totally unaware of the audience almost as if they are performing a sort of ritual and in White Monotones in particular they should appear serene, remote celestial beings. Unfortunately Nunez does not do "remote" and always seems, to me at least, totally aware of the audience and the effect that she is creating. Perhaps Dowell needs to look at the early recordings in order to remind himself of the detail which has been eroded over the years. The company certainly needs to look at the early commercial recording of La Valse before that ballet is revived again. It would reveal the detail that has been lost and might turn what now looks like a vague gesture in which the three leading female dancers stroke their arms into the three women adjusting their long gloves. .As far as Guillem's non- involvement in Monotones is concerned all I can say is that we should all be truly grateful for it. Her limited involvement in the Ashton repertory did not enhance her reputation or that of the choreographer as she seemed tone deaf to his choreographic nuances. Her Marguerite in Marguerite and Armand was dire as she danced roughshod over its choreography and distorted everything to suit her own "artistic vision" and very modern aesthetic.

theI was lucky enough to see the original cast dance White Monotones and I would say that ideally they should all be on the tall side, look almost androgenous and appear to be the same height when the woman in the trio is on pointe. Monotones 2 is the celestial ballet and Green Monotones made later as its companion piece is the earthbound one whose first cast was, I think , Brian Shaw, Georgina Parkinson and Antoinette Sibley Bruce Sansom once said that when dancing Monotones 2 the cast had to stop the flow of the movement imperceptibly from time to time to enable the audience to catch up with what the dancers were doing. This is completely unnecessary in modern style performances which move from pose to pose rather than creating the impression of a continuous flow of movement.I am not aware of any recording of the original cast which is readily available but there is one dating from the 1980's which seems to be floating about on the internet. It is danced by Mark Silver, Elizabeth McGorian and Dereck Deane who is the weak link in the trio. On the plus side the dancers match as far as their height is concerned; it was recorded when Ashton was still alive and both he and Michael Somes were still involved in casting,staging and coaching Ashton's ballets and it shows you how the work used to look in performance. The point is that there seems to be no point at which everyone is completely static and the movement appears to be one continuous flow. This will be considered heresy but when the ballet was last revived I thought that Arestis gave a much better performance of the female role because she looked far more Astonian in style and did not indulge in photo opportunities throughout her performance . As far as Naghdi is concerned, much as I admire her, I would not consider her an ideal choice for White Monotones as she is the wrong physical type for the ballet and in this ballet physique matters.

I have not watched the programme and do not intend to do so. I think it a great shame that something which sounds so tawdry will be added to the tally of the BBC's dance output for the year. The problem is not simply that the BBC has become wedded to the knock out competition format, although that is a major factor, but that ballet performances no longer have any sort of foothold in its annual arts schedule. Ballet, if it is covered at all, now seems to be more likely to be served up in the form of a short interview, a documentary with input from Britain's " greatest and most loved ballerina" or Ms Rojo or a programme in which a senior, usually former, dancer is given celebrity treatment and invited to talk about music and their careers on Private Passions or, for the really well known, is given the opportunity to be cast away alone on Roy Plomley's desert island. The Beeb seems to have real problems with fulfilling its charter duty to educate when it comes to the arts and even more of a problem when it comes to "elite" art forms. I suppose that it manages its classical music output quite well as it does broadcast a lot of it but the fact that it is largely confined to its arts silo Radio 3 suggests that it is afraid that the unsuspecting listener or viewer might become contaminated by contact with elite arts. It is alarming how marginal ballet has become when compared to that other elite art form opera which with live radio relays from the Met and the occasional transmission from the ROH maintains a significant profile with music lovers. I was too young to have known about it but I think it unlikely that the BBC will ever find itself putting on a special programme about a ballet revival as they did when the RB first revived Nijinska's Les Noces and Ashton and Nabokov were invited into the studio to discuss the work's significance. This year's transmission of an entire ballet was most unexpected as it seemed that this, one time staple of Christmas television, had gone the same way as the annual television pantomime and the annual airing of Holiday Inn. I hope that this year's transmission of Swan Lake was not a one off but means that the Royal Ballet, if not the entire ROH organisation, has come to realise that cinema streaming of performances may maintain the company's following and that of ballet in general but that these screenings are more likely to be seen by those who already know about ballet rather than creating converts to the art form. It would be good to think that this transmission might mean a resumption of the annual full ballet performance and closer ties between the company and the BBC although I hold out no great hopes given the Beeb's commitment to more popular formats and "art" forms. Please note I am not asking for the coverage of opera to be reduced but why does opera get so much better coverage than ballet ? Is it any more of a marginal artform than opera ? I go to both because I enjoy them but I suspect that the national obsession with class and status is a factor in the level of institutional support in airtime which each receives from the BBC. The fact that a number of country house opera companies have sprung up in the last couple of decade or so suggests that going to the opera is seen by some to confer a certain sort of social cache ; attending a Ring Cycle seems to confer a level intellectual superiority which going to a canary fancier's opera such as Lucia or going to Puccini's Tosca or Madame Butterfly does not but even attending such popular operas seems to count for more than going to the ballet. I wonder whether if you measured interest in ballet and opera by the volume of ticket sales would there be much difference between the two and if you were to add in all those children who go to ballet classes and their immediate families who support that interest might not the following for ballet prove to be the larger by some margin? I think that Kate_N has already answered her own question and explained why the audience responded so negatively to the classical style dancing and so positively to a completely different style of movement when she applied the word "acrobatic" to the style which found favour with the audience. People who know nothing about classical dancing tend to be unimpressed by movements which they assume to be easy because they are executed with elegance and ease. Even those who know something about it often seem to be more impressed with a movement which looks difficult than one which is difficult but has been made to look almost normal and natural through art and great technical skill . I found an amusing example of this on a French dance website a couple of years ago when someone in all seriousness was describing the suitability of the roles of Lise and Colas for inexperienced young dancers who were not yet ready for more demanding classical roles because the choreography of Ashton's Fille was so undemanding. The fact that the uninitiated will be impressed by physical movements which are difficult or appear to be so should come as no surprise. There is evidence that even those who know something about ballet are generally more impressed by extremes and asymmetry thus the ear clipping arabesque and the extreme overstretched body gain more approval than the perfectly poised classical body in arabesque will do. Hence the theory that Fonteyn was not much of a dancer because she " does not do anything". Obviously she was foolish to continue dancing in a style derived from the pre -revolutionary Russian school which concerned itself with the aristocratic aesthetic style of elegance and effortlessness in which you don't spend almost as long signalling your preparation to perform a step as you do in dancing it. It is the difference between the St Petersburg aristocratic audience's expectations and those of a less sophisticated Moscow one. In the event Moscow with its love of obvious bravura and circus won the aesthetic battle. This explains the shift in the aesthetics of classical ballet in Russia after the Revolution from one based on the ideal of aristocratic elegant ease to a style which incorporated and emphasised the acrobatic which appealed to its new uninitiated audience drawn from the proletariat. A shift in aesthetic style which led Danilova to describe the Soviet style of dancing in her memoirs as a " display of dance" rather than "dance".

Standing is always "at the management's discretion" and was only ever available at the Coliseum in the past if a show was completely sold out. In the case of a visiting company I am not sure whether the discretion being exercised when a decision is made to sell standing would be that of the Coli or that of ENB. As the Coliseum has few, if any, opera performances which sell out nowadays I should be surprised if anyone would think of selling standing unless they were prompted by being asked whether standing was available. Good luck with your search for a ticket.

Here is a question which perhaps one of those who thought the use of word "muff" was packed with all sorts of hidden meaning may be able to answer. It is this. What should one call the tubular shaped piece of fur or fabric used as hand warmers which the girls in brown used to wear and use in Les Patineurs but are now firmly attached to one sleeve of their jackets ? These items of clothing seen in seventeenth century Dutch genre paintings, where they may be intended to hint at the morality of the women depicted in them; more innocently in pictures of Victorian skating scenes, which is probably where Chappell got the idea for his designs for the ballet and even found their way onto the lids of tins which contained Quality Street toffees, are properly described by a word of Dutch origin as "muffs". What would you have me call them? I am not aware of a synonym and "tubular hand warmers" is an exceptionally long winded way of describing an item of apparel which has a proper, if giggle inducing, name.

quiet ian , That is a photograph of the most recently used of the Chappell designs. I do not know the complete history of the designs for the ballet. I know that the original designs were much more obviously Victorian in style than the one in your photograph. There is a photograph of Markova and her partner wearing the original costumes in a book called Gala Performance which was published to celebrate the company's first twenty five years. I have always assumed that Les Rendezvous was one of the ballets which the company took on their ill-fated British Council tour to Holland in 1940 and that it was one of the ballets which the company lost when they had their narrow escape from the advancing German army but that it was so popular that it was reinstated and given the designs which most people who saw the ballet from the 1940's onwards would recognise as belonging to it. Jeanette, I realise that Sarasota ballet has staged many of the ballets which I should like to see but that is of little assistance to those of us who live in the UK. I don't think it unreasonable to expect the company whose international reputation Ashton largely created to spend more time in staging the full range of his works and trying to get them right rather than expending so much time on staging second rate works like Winter Dreams. Macmillan at his best is a wonderful choreographer . If the company were to stage Song of the Earth every season I should not complain as it is by far his greatest work but l know that not everything that MacMillan produced is of that quality. The company treat him as if he were the greatest choreographer who ever worked for the company and yet he is a very variable chorographer.Some of his works would not be considered for revival if they were not his creations. I think that MacMillan's weakness in many of his ballets is his pursuit of balletic realism because he created a lot of works which were carried by their original casts whose performances later casts have not been able to emulate. Then there are works such as the Invitation which have dated very badly because of a shift in public understanding of the situations which they depict. The Invitation is a work which like Emlyn Williams' play Accolade depends for its effect on the audience taking a specific view of the characters which it depicts and having some sympathy for the predicament of all involved in the drama. When the audience is no longer prepared to have sympathy for the husband in the Invitation or the eminent writer in Accolade the works cease to work as effective pieces of theatre.. Ashton's strength. it seems to me, is what was once seen as his weakness, that is his unwillingness to tie his ballets down by putting cinematic realism on the stage. He knows the secrets of the human heart in a way that does not seem to come so naturally to MacMillan who will resort to bombast where stillness and the small quiet gesture would be more effective. Ashton's great and enduring strength is that his works are always concerned with dancing whether he is telling stories; picturing characters or creating an abstract ballet out of classroom steps. It seems to me that Anita Young summed it up perfectly when she said at a recent London Ballet Circle words to the effect that when she watched Symphonic Variations she could identify each of its component parts from Cechetti's classroom exercises and yet she could not explain how Ashton had transformed them into movements which in the context of the music seemed to fit it so perfectly and seemed so inevitable. I could say the same about Tudor's greatest works they also reveal the transformative alchemy which a truly great choreographer is able to bring to bear on the classroom steps which are his raw material.

The Steinberg frontcloth is being used.

I must confess that while I like genuine mixed bills which are not merely three ballets with a supposed unifying theme I find this a strange selection of ballets particularly as I assume that it was intended for an audience which included young ballet goers who had decided that they were far too adult and sophisticated to sit through Nutcracker again. Les Patineurs is a fine opener and the Concert is a good closing ballet but "Winter Dreams" is not a particularly good choice for the centre piece. It is not MacMillan at his best; it is too long and reverential as far as its source play is concerned; it is dimly lit and it requires high octane performances to make it seem worth watching. If it had been me I think that I would have staged a major work which would be guaranteed to hold the audience's attention rather than a work which at its best has its longeurs and at its worst feels like one uninterrupted longeur. I think that Firebird, Petrushka, Nureyev's staging of The Kingdom of the Shades or Raymonda act 3 or a revival of MacMillan's Four Seasons would have been better choices. On second thoughts I think that one of the Fokine ballets would have been best if the intention was to make the audience aware of the great one act ballets that lurk in the. Royal's back catalogue. It is a relief to see Les Patineurs back on stage without the ill conceived staging of Ashton's Tales of Beatrix Potter a work which Ashton only ever intended should be seen in the context of the film for which it was created. But some of the fine detail seems to have been lost in this revival. In prehistoric performances of Les Patineurs, by which I mean those staged when Ashton was still alive and for many years thereafter the dancers performing in the pas de deux, the pas de trois and the solos did not return to the stage to acknowledge applause or to beg for it after they had performed their sections of the choreography they danced through. Dancing through is , or it would seem was, an essential element of the ballet's structure as it disguises the fact that Patineurs is essentially a series of divertisements. Dancing through creates the impression that the ballet is a continuous display of dance rather than a series of vignettes in which the dancers are given the opportunity to display their special technical skills. I find it difficult to understand why this has been altered in current performance practice as it undermines the effect which Ashton set out to achieve. There are other changes which require explanation as they detract from the effect that the ballet should create. The girls in brown no longer have usable muffs. Who authorised the costume change which reduces the muffs to an item firmly attached to one arm when this renders tiny sections of their choreography nonsensical and makes Ashton look incompetent? Today on at least two occasions they hold their bare hands to their faces when in the dim and distant past the brown clad girls were shown holding their muffs close to their faces. Finally I come to the Blue Skater who continues to be deprived of the proper ending to his final solo in which he begins turning the curtains are closed quickly and then reopened to show him still turning before they are finally closed. The ending was altered when the company returned to the House after the major refurbishment at the end of the last century and the reason then given for the change was that it was no longer possible to open and close the curtain as the curtain was only capable of being raised and lowered. But now the curtain can be opened and closed should not we return to the original ending? As far as the Concert is concerned can anyone explain why the company has been fobbed off with a vague front cloth which breaks all the rules of good ballet design as described by Danilova? The one which the company used previously prepared the audience most effectively for what it was going to see the current one could be a front cloth for virtually any sort of ballet.

Artistic Directors wield enormous power as their taste and their personal likes and dislikes, but especially their dislikes, can transform a company's view of itself; rewrite its history and by ignoring the full range of a choreographer's output and choosing to concentrate on works of a specific type he or she can transform his dancers' and his audience's understanding and expectations of a choreographer. This is how we arrive at Ashton as the creator of charming "twee" ballets and comfortable narrative adaptations of stage plays and MacMillan the creator of the British dram- ballet and challenging shabby little shockers rather than a serious classical choreographer.This is why I hope that whoever is appointed to takeover as AD at BRB cares as much about the company's back catalogue as he or she does about commissioning new works. I, for one, should like the opportunity to see some of the works which were revived by the company and won plaudits such as de Valois' The Prospect Before Us and Massine's Choreatium plus La Boutique Fantasque and works such as Cranko's Card Game and Les Brouillards. If Iain Webb manages to make a good job of his revival of Apparitions I would hope that BRB acquires it and sets about restoring Ashton's Capriol Suite; Valses Nobles et Sentimentales ; Façade and Les Rendezvous to its repertory. While I should like the RB to acquire Concerto Barocco and try Liebeslieder Waltzer again I think that Kevin needs to accept and understand that in his role as curator of the company's repertory he controls our understanding of the company's past as well as determining its future. He really needs to come clean about whether he intends ensure that major works in the back catalogue which are expensive to stage such as Les Noces, which is the jewel in the company's crown as far as its historical acquisitions are concerned, Song of the Earth and Daphnis and Chloe are going to be restored to the company's living repertory which is where they need to be if they are to retain the appropriate precision and stylistic vitality in performance or whether he intends to let them die through neglect. When he attended the Ballet Association meeting Kevin mentioned Les Noces in passing using words which suggested that he thought that occasional airings were sufficient to maintain it. The problem, as I see it is that works like Les Noces and Song of the Earth suffer when they are danced so infrequently that the majority of the dancers appearing in a revival have no previous experience of the work in performance. This results in performances which are little better than a print produced from a damaged plate which obliterates the finer details and the variety of tones of the original. The 2012 revival of Les Noces must have seemed to the bulk of the audience who attended those performances as little more than an act of misplaced reverent piety for a work which may once have had theatrical impact but is now little more than the resurrection of a balletic period piece of interest only to ballet historians. Song of the Earth may not be in quite such a parlous state but when last staged at Covent Garden it did not sit as easily on the company as it once did. The corps seemed uncertain and lacked precision and they certainly did not look as at home in its choreography as they do when dancing works such as Manon and Romeo and Juliet. The reason for the difference is that these two full length works are danced so frequently that it is impossible for members of the company not to know how they go and not to have the works deeply embedded in their collective DNA but with ballets like Song of the Earth and Les Noces the bulk of the dancers are new to the work and on a steep learning curve and because they are no longer revived with any degree of regularity each revival is largely a voyage into the unknown for the bulk of the cast. The sad truth is that ballets only live in performance. Works die if they are not performed sufficiently frequently and by pursuing his policy of occasional revival Kevin is well on the way to killing off a number of major works through neglect. So my wish for the 2019-20 season is not a simple list of works to be revived but a plea to the Artistic Director to review the entire back catalogue and undertake a systematic revival of works by Ashton and MacMillan which have not been seen in years. If cost is preventing the revival of masterpieces such as Daphnis and Chloe, Song of the Earth and Les Noces then I would happily forgo any McGregor for as many seasons as are necessary to ensure that these works are once more part of the company's living repertory. I think that we should be careful about calling for early Ashton ballets to be performed in the Linbury as I think that the marketing department could well establish that there is no demand for them by setting ticket prices at astronomic levels. While I think that Capriol Suite would be seen to best advantage in a small auditorium as might Apparitions most of Ashton's later works were seen on the main stage and worked well there. Here is a list of rarely performed Ashton works beginning with the pre-war works;- Capriol Suite last danced by SWRB at an Ashton celebration in the 1979?; Façade last performed at Covent Garden in 1994; Les Rendezvous last performed by the RB at Covent Garden in 2005 in ghastly new designs . Any revival must use one or other of the Chappell designs; A Wedding Bouquet last performed by RB at Covent Garden in 2004; Two more works may be added to this list if Sarasota Ballet revive them successfully namely Apparitions announced for revival this season and Foyer de Danse. Iain Webb has told a local newspaper that he has a film of Foyer which suggests that more footage of the ballet exists than we have seen so far in documentaries. The post war works include Valses Nobles et Sentimentales last performed by SWRB in 1979? Possibly better for a small theatre; Cinderella last performed by the RB in 2011; Les Illuminations last performed by the RB in 1996; Daphnis and Chloe last performed by the RB in 2004; Ondine last performed by the RB in 2009; Sinfionetta danced by the Touring Company in the late 1960's and successfully revived by Sarasota Ballet; Jazz Calendar last performed by the RB in 1979; Enigma Variations last performed by the RB in 2011; Among the neglected works are Ashton's Persephone which was made for Beriosova and was filmed and so is, in theory, revivable and his Romeo and Juliet which given its current ownership is, I fear, doomed . What was staged at the Coliseum in 2011 was a pale distorted shadow of the original. I assume that it was notated when it was revived for ENB in 1985. I understand that Ashton did a great deal of work with the young ice skater turned dancer who was the first cast Juliet and danced on opening night. According to her account she was supposed to help coach the other casts when it was revived but as they were senior and far more experienced they chose to ignore her. I should certainly want to involve her in any revival. Among the divertissements there are at least two miniature masterpieces. The Walk to the Paradise Garden which was the subject of one of the Ashton Rediscovered sessions and was danced for a few seasons during the early and mid 1970's and the Thais Pas de Deux. I should like to see both of them again but only if cast with care rather than with multiple casts the bulk of whom are unsuited to their roles. The Thais cast of Soares and Galleazzi which was recorded for posterity and can be found one of the Ashton DVDs is far from ideal. I should also be interested in seeing the Raymonda pas de deux which was also the subject of an Ashton Rediscovered Session given a new lease of life. As far as the MacMillan repertory is concerned his Four Seasons, Danses Concertantes and Solitaire would be at the top of my revival list with Concerto not that far behind. I think that the company should revive La Fete Etrange and Tudor's Lilac Garden in both cases going out of its way to cast them with care. Reviving the latter would at least give Scarlett another source ballet and save us from quite so much recycled MacMillan. Then there is Tudor's Dark Elegies which would have to be cast from among the mature Principals and Character Principals. It should consider acquiring works like Gala Performance and The Judgement of Paris and I would welcome a revival of Tetley's Pierrot Lunaire.

As the Fonteyn Centenary Gala gives every indication of being an afterthought rather than something that was planned when the 2018-19 season was announced I think that what I posted constitutes "fair comment". If you are aware of your company's history and its significant anniversaries you don't find yourself forced to rearrange your company's performance schedule in order to accommodate an overlooked centenary. It's not as if Fonteyn's date of birth Is a state secret; that she was a minor player in the development of the company's repertory and its international standing or that she played no part in the creation of Ashton's lyrical choreographic style. He is on record saying that it was her presence in the company which lead him to develop a more lyrical choreographic style than he might otherwise have done. Somehow this season Kevin has managed to allocate several evenings to a mixed bill celebrating the centenary of Leonard Bernstein who, as far as I am aware, had no direct connection with the company and yet he, and those around him, have managed to overlook the centenary of the birth of the company's Prima Ballerina Assoluta. Announcing the inclusion of a Bernstein centennial triple bill when the season's programme was published indicated that it was planned and prepared for whereas the mid-season announcement of a single performance to celebrate Fonteyn's centenary suggests that Kevin and those around him had somehow either managed to forget it or had hoped to avoid marking it. If an AD can apparently overlook such a significant company centenary it seems quite possible to me that he could overlook other equally important aspects of the company's history. As to what I would choose to stage to celebrate Fonteyn my first choice would be a proper mixed bill beginning with Birthday Offering followed by Symphonic Variations and ending with Daphnis and Chloe, a masterpiece we have not seen since 2004. Many people who saw Fonteyn in the ballets say that Chloe was her greatest role Each of the ballets in the mixed bill to be carefully cast according to ability and willingness to dance with appropriate Ashton musicality and style rather than seniority. I am anxious to avoid the travesty of Birthday Offering which we saw in 2012 when the company fielded two casts and the majority of the dancers involved gave every indication of being mastered by the choreography rather than mastering it and danced with such extreme care and caution that the majority of the performances lacked any sense of being idiomatic accounts of the choreography. This time there should be only one cast for Birthday Offering with those best able to perform the choreography selected to appear in it. If this means casting junior dancers and only a limited number of Principal dancers then so be it. An exemplary cast for Symphonic Variations and equally careful casting for Daphnis and Chloe. In addition I would revive Cinderella, Ondine, Sleeping Beauty and Giselle during the season. I should like to include Sylvla but that has only recently been revived. Other mixed bills suggest themselves such as Scenes de Ballet, Nureyev's Kingdom of the Shades and Birthday Offering ; Les Patineurs, Scenes de Ballet or Symphonic Variations and A Wedding Bouquet and possibly a Diaghilev mixed bill of Les Sylphides, Firebird and Le Tricorne although I accept that Les Sylphides and Le Tricorne would both represent real artistic challenges. .

,My guess is that apart from Firebird we shall be treated to some of what the Royal Ballet is dancing in its mixed bill on its Japanese tour which includes a series of excerpts including Romeo and Juliet balcony pas de deux and a section described as a "Tribute to Margot Fonteyn". This is said to include the Rose Adagio. So at the end of the day the Gala could well be little more than something the company is already dancing plus what amounts to a dress rehearsal for the tour. I hope I am wrong about this but it seems that it could end up being about as exciting as Stretton's ill-fated gala. Even today the balcony pas de deux could, to say the least, be a somewhat incendiary choice for some older fans. As Kevin spent his dancing career at SWRB/BRB I wonder how aware he is that such a choice could still be a problem?

Of course I may be being cynical but this sounds horribly like an excuse to commission a few more productions from Katie Mitchell to give a feminist perspective on a few more operas from the Italian repertory. The roots of the ROH's problem, it seems to me, are the very narrow view of the standard repertory taken by the last artistic director and musician currently in charge of the opera side of the organisation and the dominance of the director's vision when it comes to staging productions. No opera house can stage more than a finite number of operas each season but the standard opera repertory is considerably wider than the programming at the ROH would suggest it to be. The dominance of the late nineteenth century Italian verismo repertory is the music director's choice. Under Haitink and his predecessors the house's active repertory embraced a far wider range of major works than is currently the case. The standards of its opera productions were set by the likes of Visconti and Zefferelli and that tradition was continued by the likes of Sir Peter Hall, John Copley and Elijah Moshinsky who all enabled singers to exercise their skills as interpretative artists rather than constraining them with their artistic vision as director, They did not impose their view of the characters on the audience or tell its members how they should understand the opera. I suspect, that the "opera company" will only be free to stage a wider repertory than it does at present if it manages to regain its reputation for staging productions which bear repeat viewings. Only then will it become less reliant on regular revivals of works such as La Traviata, Butterfly and Tosca to mitigate its seasonal losses, if not balance the books. Perhaps the answer to the question about how to reduce the dominant influence of the director in the world of opera is to be found in staging family friendly productions. i know that the new Hansel and Gretel did not please all of the critics because they thought it too tame and not frightening enough. But that rather missed the point. The production was intended for a family audience and no doubt management would have been concerned if they had received complaints that the children who had gone to see it had woken in the middle of the night with nightmares caused by attending a performance. it seems to me that if you can stage a concept free production for a family audience you can do the same for an adult audience as well. It would be truly refreshing to attend a production which the composer and librettist might recognise as having a close connection with the work they created where we are given new insights into the work in question because the director has found something in the work which he wishes to share with the audience as was the case with Hytner's productions of The Magic Flute and King Priam. What I object to is having the director's ideas imposed on me as a member of the audience whether it fits or not. My objection to being told what to think even extends to director's ideas which represent a valid interpretation of the music and libretto because even that limits the interpretative possibilities available in performance. The ROH's most recent Peter Grimes gives the audience its first sight of Grimes not in the hall where an inquest is being held into the death of his apprentice but shows him standing centre stage with a coffin tucked under his arm. Labelling him a child killer from the outset. It gives the singer tackling the role of Grimes far less room to give his interpretation of the role than the production which it replaced did and it gets in the way of the audience fully engaging with the work which Britten and Crozier created. Some of the children who went to see Hansel and Gretel may want to go to another opera at Covent Garden but i am not sure what I would recommend apart from Butterfly and Tosca neither of which I care for that much as operas or productions. Both of which, unfortunately, reinforce the idea that opera is essentially a misogynistic art form. Perhaps the Magic Flute but the production does not give Pamina the active role which Hytner gave her in his production for ENO. I think that the young man in charge of opera productions at Covent Garden could do with a checklist to avoid some of the problems which Holten encountered and some encountered by earlier regimes. 1) Check that the director actually likes the opera he/she is to direct before you sign him/her up. That way you will avoid another debacle like the production of Idomeneo staged a couple of years ago when the director wrote in his essay for the programme how much he disliked the opera and proceeded to do the work as much damage as he could in his staging of it. 2) Remind the director that the house is horseshoe shaped and that you expect everyone not sitting in a seat specifically designated "restricted view" to be able to see all the main characters throughout the action of the opera as you do not want to have to refund money to anyone who turns out to be sitting on the "wrong" side of the auditorium. 3) In the case of works being staged for the first time and those being staged for as" family friendly" productions insist that the production is one which the composer and librettist and composer would recognise as their work and consider whether they might not be best sung in English. The Hansel and Gretel would have had a more immediate theatrical effect if the Poultney translation had been used. 4) Check that those designing the set have the correct dimensions of the Covent Garden stage. This is particularly important in the case of a co-production where the initial performances are taking place at another theatre. 5) Ensure that singers are engaged for their voices rather than body type. 6) Avoid trips to the bargain basement for singers and conductors. 7) Avoid engaging directors who use the staging process as a form of state funded therapy. 😎 Ensure that you have a binding agreement about who is to choreograph any dance elements of the production. 9) Avoid engaging directors who insist on using a large number of non singing extras as their presence tends to incense those members of the audience who pay for their own tickets and are already angry about price hikes. 10) Remind directors that as far as the audience is concerned they are there for the music and the drama and that anything which interferes with this such as clanking metal sets; unscripted yelling, shouting and screaming and any other noises not provided for by the composer are a no-no. 11) Intervene when directors want to include tiresome repeated action during the overture or scenes of unscripted nudity and humiliation not required by the libretto. 12) Make and keep a list of other elements in stagings which tend to upset audiences and keep it updated. Make sure that the director is aware of its contents I am sure that there are plenty of other tips which others could suggest.

For those who may be interested there is a documentary about Petipa available on the french television channel Arte until the 29th December. It is called Marius Petpa le maitre francais du ballet russe. It is available in French and possibly German but as there is a lot of filmed dance the language should not be a problem. It includes Alban Lendorf dancing the original choreography for the Prince from act 3 Sleeping Beauty.

I can understand that the cut in the ACE grant has had an impact on prices for both opera and ballet but in the past the need to raise revenue was dealt with by the simple expedient pf raising ticket prices across the board at the beginning of the season not with the sort of jiggery-pokery, price manipulation and mind games which the Marketing Department is currently employing. As far as the opera is concerned I am afraid that most of its problems are self inflicted. While it is true that operas cost a lot to stage and the drop in the value of the pound will not have helped the company's finances the real problem with the opera company lies largely with the decisions which have been made with respect to pensioning off old still serviceable productions and replacing them with exceptionally poor ones. It is arguable whether the organisation which stages opera at Covent Garden is a company at all as it consists of little more than a chorus, an orchestra and support services reduced to a bare minimum with no comprimario singers or really experienced in-house singers. In balletic terms this is the equivalent of an organisation which is essentially a corps de ballet an orchestra and ballet coaches without any soloists, first soloists and principal dancers claiming to be a ballet company' Depending on how you look at things the opera company has either had an extraordinary run of bad luck as far as its new productions are concerned or it has been run incompetently. However you look at things since the 2011-12 season it has managed to stage more than forty new productions very few of which anyone would willingly pay to see again. Both the Carmen and the Cosi being revived this season fall into that category. The reason why ticket sales for them have been so poor has nothing to do with the local audience disliking Cosi or Carmen as operas. There were plenty of people who naively were looking forward to a new Cosi when it was staged in 2016-17 but after seeing it do not want to repeat the experience. I am one of them. Staging a new opera production. like staging a new ballet or a new play is always a bit of a gamble because you don't know whether it really works until it has been placed in front of a live paying audience. But to stage so many new productions and have so few which are genuinely revivable takes some doing. A well run opera house should, at any one time, have at its disposal any number of good revivable productions of core repertory works which will still draw audiences and a few classic productions which even the most demanding of singers will be happy to appear in. The Zefferelli Tosca was just such a production as were the Visconti Don Carlos, the Mosshinskey Peter Grimes and the Copley La Boheme, and of these, only the latter production was built to last. When it was commissioned the director and designer were told that their Boheme had to last at least as long as the production it was replacing. Such productions enable a company to undertake worthy efforts such as taking a calculated risk by staging works like Henze's Boulevard Solitude which are unlikely to sell out. The ROH staging of Don Carlos and the full evening Les Troyens in the 1950's both started as calculated risks which paid off and helped to establish the prestige of the company .and raised it in less thantwenty five years to being seen as a world class company. Solid revvable bankable productions are an essential element of a company in financial and artistic good health as they guarantee a company a regular income stream season after season. A well run opera house should not need to make repeated trips to the bargain basement for its casts nor does it need to import its comprimario singers from half way round the world. It ought to be able to bank on at least 50% of its new productions being sufficiently good to justify one or more revival and a few being so good that they will make it to a third revival, the point at which a production begins to go into profit.Unfortunately very few of the Royal Opera's new productions have risen much above the level of third rate provincialism. The new productions tend to be ones in which the director ignores the guidance provided by the composer and librettist and replaces the opera they composed in their naivety , with the work they would have created if they had possessed the superior sensibilities and knowledge of the director. This may sound incredible but when it came to staging a new Idomeneo the opera management engaged a director who actually wrote in his programme notes that he disliked the opera and proceeded to demonstrate it with the production he staged. In replacing its older marketable productions it has staged any number of "exciting", "challenging", "accessible" and "relevant" productions but it has staged very few that bear repeated viewing let alone ones which people might look forward to seeing revived. Each failed new production represents money thrown down the drain and a great deal of money has been thrown away in recent years. As a result the opera organisation must be losing considerably more money than it can realistically hope to recoup in the immediate future. Evidence that the opera side of the organisation is in a bad way and that it is not that highly esteemed company it considers itself to be is provided by the fact that its new Lohengrin, with a good cast, failed to sell out and the first revival of its new La Boheme played to a half empty house at a weekend matinee at the end of its initial season. The fact that last summer was an exceptionally good one is no explanation for a poor house as keen opera goers ignore both good and bad weather if a work is being performed which they want to see. As far as La Traviata is concerned it is a pretty dull affair which just feels as if comes back annually. It is just possible that it has all but exhausted its potential audience in London and beyond. High ticket prices do not help to sell performances in old productions which are not classics of their kind. What the management laughingly described as Carmen bore little resemblance to the opera which Tchaikovsky described as a perfect opera. The new Boheme is a poor thing which did not sell out on its second appearance at the end of its initial season. The new Lohengrin was daft but not objectionable. Against the background of years of poor productions and the hike in ticket prices I don't think that it is any wonder that Pique Dame is not selling that well. Tchaikovsky seems to play a significant part in the staging of his opera which does not bode that well. I think that nearly everyone who has posted on this topic has expressed concern about the policies which the marketing department is pursuing. I don't think that I am looking back on the past with rose coloured spectacles but my memory of the old pre-closure opera house, was that its audience was far more socially and economically diverse and local than it is at present as far as the Amphitheatre audience was concerned. But then the management did not behave as if they were running a business.Ticket prices for the upper part of the house were kept affordable with the posh part of the house bearing the brunt of any price increases which were needed. This was a deliberate policy as both David Webster and his immediate successor wanted to keep the building genuinely accessible to those with a real love of opera and ballet. Performances were genuinely accessible to ordinary people on ordinary incomes. Postmen, shop workers, railway workers, secretaries, nurses, teachers and students could afford to attend performances. It did no cost an arm and a leg to try opera or ballet for the first time or to experiment with unfamiliar composers and choreographers because you were not going to bankrupt yourself in the process. Perhaps it is simply the fact that the newly Opened Up Opera House was unveiled at the time that we became aware of the jiggery-pokery being employed by the Marketing Department in its ticket pricing policy but somehow it does not feel as if the people running the newly refurbished opera house are as concerned with the needs of their core audience as they are with generating income at every turn. It is not simply that the new public areas still look and feel like an artist's impression of "Open Up". It is almost as if with its airport terminal look the ROH organisation is more concerned with processing people and parting them from their money than it is with the artistic activity in the building.Now while it may be true that last time I looked the large white stuccoed building on Bow Street was being still being described as an " opera house" rather than "Beard's Eatery" or "Alec's Grub " its anonymous airport style design and its bland, beige, boring décor in the new public areas suggests that its primary function is to feed and water passing tourists and get as much money out of them as it can. If you were cynical you might think that the entire "Open Up" project was only ever intended to give the illusion of accessibility to those not already in the know about ballet and opera while the management was actually trying to restore its pre-war exclusivity based on the ability to pay.

I am saddened to hear of Elaine MacDonald's death there was a time when her name and that of Scottish Ballet were all but synonymous, That was a time when the company made regular visits to Sadler's Wells bringing an interesting Darrell based repertory with them. Not all of Darrell's ballets were masterpieces but many of them were well worth seeing particularly if MacDonald was dancing in them. I can suggest a reason for the neglect of Darrell's ballets and that is simply that his works displayed a level of ingenuity, inventiveness and sheer theatrical effectiveness that seem to be lacking in so much of the new work that is staged here and abroad. Neglect in whole or part is a fate suffered by several other British choreographers of note including Ashton, Tudor and Gore and several choreographers who worked here long enough to be part of the story of ballet in this country such as the two South Africans Staff and Cranko. Of course such neglect is usually explained away by describing the neglected works as old and emphasising their antiquity and finally by making the broad assertion that they would not appeal to modern audiences. As no one is going to stage them we shall, in all probability, never find out whether such statements are true or not. I often suspect that it is the fear that these "antique" works would show up the faults of works by younger choreographers like Wheeldon and Pita and those with choreographic pretentions such as Marriott which keeps them safely away from the stage rather than their age. It would be nice to think that Scottish Ballet might be prompted to stage a ballet like The Tales of Hoffman and some of the other Darrell works in which MacDonald appeared as a tribute to her. If the company were to stage a Darrell work as a tribute there is always the hope that it might prompt interest in some of the other works which he created.There are several of his works which I should like to see just out of interest beginning with his ballet "The House Party".

The timings according to the most recent information on the ROH performance database are as follows:- 1) Les Patineurs 24 minutes (2011 performance) 2) Winter Dreams 54 minutes (2010 performance) 3) The Concert 29 minutes (2001 performance) The mixed bill has one hour forty seven minutes of dancing plus two intervals of either twenty five or thirty minutes. I hope this helps. As far as the website is concerned why would any of us expect somebody employed to provide information about performances to the ROH audience to think that timings matter when they clearly don't believe that ballet casting details are of concern to anyone? You have to remember that the Marketing Department has figures which prove to their satisfaction that all anyone wants to know about performances taking place at the ROH is whether they are opera or ballet. They may just concede that the average operagoer expects to be told who is singing but as far as the balletgoer is concerned all that most people attending performances want to know is that they are going to see a performance by the Royal Ballet. Remember they have the figures to prove it. They want those of us who do not conform to this ideal audience which their consultants have identified for them to change our ways as quickly as possible. The ideal audience members are far less needy as they do not require ROH staff to provide anything but the most basic services. Should anyone object that the ROH audience does not consist of two mutually exclusive groups of operagoers and balletgoers but includes a hybrid group who go to both opera and ballet the powers that be will vehemently deny their existence and redouble their efforts to eliminate that pesky group of nonconformists as quickly as possible through the useful mechanism of the dynamic pricing policy.

I would not usually step into a conversation about ballet training but having heard both Anita Young and Elena Gurliadze speak at a London Ballet Circle meeting they said something which, while it may seem blindingly obvious, may help you. A member of the audience asked if ballet training was so good for the body why were there so many students at the SAB who were obviously injured? Their answers were very much practical and to the point and may be of help to you. They said that there were too many involved in dance training in countries where it is not regulated who had not been trained to teach ballet. They then spoke about training in general terms. I thought that what they had to say might be of help to you. Both agreed that when selecting a teacher you should always check to ensure that those giving classes are qualified as dance teachers and are registered with one or other of the specialist dance education providers. They also agreed that solid foundations were essential and that no element could or should be skipped. Although it could seem very boring to a young student, and even more boring today when children have access to the internet, it was essential that a student began training with the basics and was taught by a qualified registered teacher. They agreed that while the basics are far from exciting they are essential to building a student's strength and preparing the body for the more interesting aspects of the ballet syllabus. No student should run before they can walk. Please move the above post and my answer to the Doing Dance section of the Forum

I agree with the criticism of the new cast sheets which seem designed to be far less legible than the ones they replace. I assume that they are part of the ROH "new brand" initiative. But do we really want triple bills given fatuous titles of the type devised by BRB such as "Fire and Fury", "Summer Celebration" or "Spring Passion " which give no indication of the range and type of ballets being performed ?.Given the way that those involved with marketing and customer experience seem to have taken charge of and tried to standardise so much of what members of the public experience when attending performances and reduce the services provided by the ROH organisation it can only be a matter of time before the powers that be insist that the AD should devise mixed bills that are far more homogeneous and more carefully themed so that they suit the title selected for them. What title would you give the Les Patineurs mixed bill ? "Winter Solstice" suggests itself but would not you have to replace the Concert with something more suited to the bill's title and of course if you chose an equally fatuous title such as "Winter Celebrations" you would, at the very least, have to lose Winter Dreams. In fact you might find that mixed bill became even more difficult to construct than they are at present.

I think we have to understand that Petipa's career as choreographer at the Mariinsky falls into several distinct phases. First working as a sort of choreographer's mate to Perrot assisting him in staging and reviving works first staged in Paris and London all of which had far more mime and acting in them than we are generally used to seeing today. Marion Smith who wrote "Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle describes the structure of a Romantic ballet as very like that of an opera of the period and says that the proportion of mime to dance in the original Giselle is about 40% mime to 60% dance. This assessment is not mere guesswork on her part as it is supported by the structure of a ballet like Buornonville's Folk Tale which does not seem to have been subject to too much revision and by the discovery in Frankfurt of a notebook which once belonged to Henri Justament. its significance is that Justament was the last man to stage a revival of Giselle at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century. The revival was staged, I think,in 1868 . The notebook contained the full dialogue for all the named characters in Giselle but its true value only became obvious when it was discovered that what Justament had written down fitted the music of the violin reduction of the score which was used when Giselle was first stage in St.Petersburg. The point about all this is that it makes it clear that what audiences expected to see when they went to the ballet was almost as much acting as dancing. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this was the sort of structural template which Petipa used when he began creating his own ballets or that he continued in that vein from La Fille du Pharon , his first choreographic success until 1890 when he found himself showcasing dancers whose main claim to fame was their formidable technical virtuosity and prowess. The ballets from this intermediate period are as much concerned with drama as they are with technical display as Petipa was still working in a choreographic style much closer to the French than we tend to be aware of today because the ballets from this period with which we are familiar have been revised and spiced up innumerable times to suit whatever were the current tastes in ballet . The current view of what the Petipa ballet of the late nineteenth century should look like in performance are the product of watching innumerable versions and improved, more audience friendly revised stagings of these works and the effect of the artistic tastes, or lack thereof, of individual dancers as to speed, dynamics, elaboration and the desire to display their "improved technique". I have read somewhere a comment made by Ekaterina Vazem, the first Nikiya, in which she says words to the effect that Perrot was a storyteller who was prepared to create choreography which was directed at being dramatically effective rather than displaying the ballerina. I can't help thinking that Petipa almost certainly followed a similar style at least initially. I know that his diary should not be taken at face value but in it Petipa laments the fact that he felt that he had betrayed the purity of the French school by incorporating so much of the Italian school in his choreography. This comment was clearly directed at the works he created for the Italian stars during the 1890's. This reinforces the idea that until they arrived and he began to create his Tchaikovsky ballets he was working in a vein not that far removed from Perrot's. However even in these Tchaikovsky ballets the display was not as obvious and pronounced as it is in performance practice today. There are fashions in ballet and taste and the average ballet goer today seems far more interested in circus than the sort of nuance in performance which was admired in St Petersburg at the time the ballets were made. The description of the Black Swan pas de deux as a "pas de action" makes considerably more sense in Ratmansky's reconstruction of Swan Lake than it does most modern stagings where it often seems to be treated more as an opportunity for competitive gala style dancing than story telling. Remember Legnani whose technical tricks were fully on display in Swan Lake thanked Petipa for making her an artist. Perhaps a useful exercise as far as this lack of obvious display in what we have come to expect to see performed as knock 'em dead display pieces might be to take a section of choreography by Ashton in which the dancer is expected to disguise its technical challenges and perform it as if it were normal and natural movement. Then imagine what the choreography might look like if during the thirty years after it ceases to be subject to copyright it is consistently performed in a style which emphasises its difficulties and any aspect of it that can be reduced to circus style display. Finally imagine how we would react if after all that time we were exposed for the first time to seeing it performed with its original musicality and dynamics. it would probably look extremely odd to us. I have not seen this reconstruction and am not going to do so until next year so I can only speak about the impression which Ratmansky's reconstructions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty have had on me. I have been convinced by them because they have been performed at a speed which I recognise from my early experience of ballet going . When performed at the right speed in a period appropriate way they seem very stylish, light and beautiful. They suddenly make Petipa's musicality plain and obvious to all who care to see and that is most rewarding. To me it is a vast improvement on performances where the music sounds like a dirge because a dancer wishes to squeeze in an extra turn while another wishes to stick her foot in her ear. Danilova said that during the twentieth century ballet in Russia and in the West had taken different paths. She thought that in Russia ballet had become little more than a "display of dance". I would add that because of the awe in which we tend to hold the Russians because of their ability to consistently produce exceptional dancers many have been persuaded to accept their "display of dance" aesthetic and have sought to emulate it in their own performance of Petipa's ballets. As Ratmansky said his object in reconstructing these works is to get closer to what Petipa's ballets may have looked like in performance. By definition that is going to be disconcerting because it removes familiar text and characters and challenges so much of what we think we know about nineteenth century ballets and their performance, but then that is the point of the exercise. As far as the costumes are concerned you need to remember that Ratmansky has asked his designer to create an impression of what the original designs were like. The expectation at the time when La Bayadere was first staged was that ballerinas wore ballerina appropriate costume which were not affected by the idea that setting a ballet in ancient Egypt or somewhere in central India ought to result in their costumes reflecting the time or place in which the action was set. No leading ballerina would have expected to be required to lower herself by wearing costumes similar to those worm by specialist character dancers .To require that of the ballerinas would have been seen as the gravest insult They would all have been mortally offended if it had been suggested that their costumes should do more than subtly allude to when and where a ballet was set. The inappropriateness of ballerina's costumes exercised Fokine a great deal. You really should read his manifesto it will give you an insight into what was deemed appropriate in ballet design at the time that these ballets were created. We have to remember that as ballet goers we still live in a world in which Fokine's views on ballet aesthetics continue to have considerable influence on what we see or expect to see on stage in many twentieth century ballets. in !877 harem pants would have seemed perfectly indecent and I doubt that they would have been deemed respectable enough for the Imperial stage even at the point at which the ballet was notated which assume was soon after Petipa was forced to retire. I think that harem pants probably entered the world of ballet design with the Ballet Russes and Scheherazade which is another piece of Russian orientalism. Interestingly it seems to owe a debt to Le Corsaire in places.

The Staatsballet website in its English version describes the production as a "reconstruction" and says it is based on "Petipa notation" which I take to mean the Sergeyev material now housed at Harvard. I trust this helps. I look forward to reading reviews from those who were there at the first night. From what little I know of the ballet's history it was given a radical overhaul some time in the 1930's, a revision of the text in which Chabukiani played a major role, so it will be interesting to learn how much of what we take to be Solor's choreography owes its existence to the revision. If the choreography is presented in its original form there will, of course, be no c. 1940 Soviet style Golden Idol and some of the material we are used to seeing in the second scene of the first act of Markarova's staging will now appear later in the ballet. I have read that Ratmansky is slightly less puritanical in his approach to the stylistic approach to the original choreography. It will be interesting to see if this is true and whether he has made any concessions to the modern ballet goers expectation that the male dancer should take a more active part in the ballet than may have been the case at the time the ballet was notated. Of course Ratmansky's directorial choices will depend on just how fully notated the ballet is and the constraints inherent in devising a text that will run for just under three hours with, I believe, only one interval. How refreshing to discover there are still ballet company's which do not have to accommodate the demands of the caterers working in the theatre in which they perform.

Richard LH, Ashton acquired Serenade for the company in the early years of his directorship . It is part of its active repertory so with any luck it won't be too long before it is revived. The few recordings of Balanchine repertory available on DVD largely owe their existence to the "Dance in America" series shown on public service channels in the US. As far as I am aware there is no recording of Serenade available on DVD from that source and certainly no modern one from an official source. However a considerable number of Balanchine ballets were recorded in Montreal during the 1950's and 60's for transmission on Canadian television. If you think of Margaret Dale's work for the BBC you won't be too far off the mark. VAI has released them on DVD in a series called "Balanchine in Montreal". Serenade was issued on the first DVD in the series. While the series is best seen as an historic record of the company and its legendary dancers it contains some gems as the dancers bring a freedom and vivacity to their performances which have been lost as Balanchine has been transformed from major choreographer into all American genius. Of course they are in black and white and the images are not as sharp as they would have been if ICA had got its hands on them and cleaned them up, the camera does not capture everything but at least it isn't all of a fidget. How much of a problem that is for you will of course depend on what you are looking for in terms of image quality. For me they are a fascinating document of the company for you they may be unwatchable.