Geoff

What an appallingly stupid, incomplete and disingenuous reply. I wonder if they will now send something similar in response to my own list of complaints? However I don’t think too much blame should attach to the hapless author of the miserable missive you received. It clearly comes from a junior member of staff, no doubt ill trained, underpaid and thoughtlessly replying without getting sign off from senior management. Not untypical of the arts, where in my professional experience low-grade but complacent people fill far too many positions of authority. Might I make a suggestion? It seems worth your sending the note you got (along with your comment) to someone in authority, to ask if they agree with this alleged “policy” being so baldly expressed, one benefit claimed that nonetheless is at the cost of others’ enjoyment. But who to send their reply on to? We are currently being encouraged to “save” the ENO (who own and run the Coliseum), despite it having been astonishingly poorly led for at least the last ten years. So I’m torn as to where to send it. The ENO Chairman who has presided over their recent disastrous era is a Harley Street doctor and medical entrepreneur called Harry Brunjes. Dr Brunjes can be reached via the ENO but my hunch would be to write to someone slightly less implicated in the current state of the house, and more distanced from the day to day running and so better able to take an objective point of view, the ENO President Sir Vernon Ellis. Sir Vernon is a former ENO Chair himself, a philanthropist who has helped restore the Coliseum. He can be reached here (this information is public, by the way, from the Charity Commission documents they have posted online): vernon@vernonellis.net

Just a quick report after tonight’s (excellent) Noises Off in the West End. House pretty much sold out, diverse audience, a wide variation in ages etc. Drinks and snacks allowed in the auditorium. No obvious messages about phones. The show as usual worked the crowd into a frenzy of loud joy (notably more than usual in Act 3, which has been tweaked). Yet despite my best efforts, I could find no bad behaviour of any kind. No phones on, no slurping or talking etc. Concentration, waves of laughter and cheers at the end. How well an audience can behave if…(fill in the space).

This one is marginally better constructed than the first but still contains some basic howlers (eg mutually exclusive options that ignore people’s actual behaviour). Nonetheless the exercise may be helpful in some ways, let’s hope so. However, and above all, it is very sad that none of their latest questions (unless I missed something) are aimed at anything other than getting more money from Friends. What about our many years of experience, knowledge, enthusiasm? Our demonstrable commitment to the arts of opera and ballet? Surely what is these days known as “human capital” could also benefit the ROH, not just our cash? It is short-sighted to see Friends only as a resource to be squeezed for more money, rather than also to help support the institution in other ways (eg spreading the word, attracting new and future audiences and so on). One suspects only “marketing” types were involved, rather than those with real experience of strategic business development.

Another view: https://boulezian.blogspot.com/2023/03/rusalka-royal-opera-27-february-2023.html

In response to some uncritical comments in another thread about this new show, it seems only fair to point out that, as ever, other opinions are available. For example here is a tweet from a long-serving opera critic: My view, fwiw? Go if you already love this work. The orchestra play exceptionally well under a remarkable conductor and the singing is first rate. But if you do not know or do not like this opera, then this is not the production to convince you. The staging is clumsy, bordering on the amateurish, while hoping to hide its incompetence behind a contemporary “message”. Caring about the planet - which as it happens I already did before seeing this show - does not excuse awful sets, costumes, choreography and staging (never mind perhaps the worst “dancing” I have ever seen on a professional stage). Caveat emptor.

Thanks Emeralds, that is exactly my point. As I wrote on Friday: >>I am not really talking primarily about dancers. I am talking about who trains them, who teaches the roles and who stages the works (after all one can’t make a mime gesture or action musical if one has not been taught it as part of the work in the first place). The Giselle research quoted above shows how detailed 19th century productions must have been, every single bar, so it seems sad that attempts are not made to honour this tradition. My hunch is that productions would be more energetic, more complex and therefore more interesting as a result. By way of illustration - and to provide a little more detail to my earlier comment about the Sleeping Beauty Prologue - I watched the performance at Covent Garden this Saturday evening. The curtain (or rather curtains, as there is also a scrim) went up at points bearing little resemblance to what the music suggests. More importantly, the opening section (I kept careful note of everything up to the arrival of the king and queen) has only a few beats of "mime" as understood by the Royal Ballet these days. But there is still a lot going on in the music, though there is now not so much happening on the stage and it is not really connected to the score. Much of what was going on seemed to be happening at the same time as the music rather than in time with the music. It's only a guess (we don't have the missing violin score from the 1890s that Wiley examined forty years ago and which may have given detail of what's expected) but on the face of it there seems to be a lot of "text" missing now.

>>I didn't think the PNB's mime looked quite as natural. Might I ask your view of how musical you found the mime? I ask because of this related discussion elsewhere on the Forum: https://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/27071-music-and-action-in-classical-ballet-performance/

To illustrate here is an example from the document at the centre of the research, for those who don't have access to Marian Smith's work ("The Earliest Giselle? A Preliminary Report on a St.Petersburg Manuscript", published in 2000 in Dance Chronicle). This is part of a page from an 1840s repetiteur - violin rehearsal score - showing Giselle Act I scene vii. This example is part of the scene where Hilarion finds the sword. Below is the French text written on the score (with a translation). Notice how much action is described for so few bars, and that this is not really what we think of today as a "mime scene" but more what I called “through composed” ballet.

Exactly Pas de Quatre. The research shows that what you call “any” mime or actions are but a fraction of what people used to see (rather than, as we tend to get now, little sections of “mime” and then back to generalised filling in). For example, and going back to my example of the Sleeping Beauty Prologue, try listening to the beginning of the ballet (assuming the curtain rises when the music and the notation have the curtain going up, this again often not being in the right musical place). Then compare what you have in your minds eye with what is going on in the music. Who is doing what during Tchaikovksy’s “demi-comique” march, say? Sitting with the score one can soon see just how much we may be missing in today’s productions.

Thanks Alison but, just to clarify, I am not really talking primarily about dancers. I am talking about who trains them, who teaches the roles and who stages the works (after all one can’t make a mime gesture or action musical if one has not been taught it as part of the work in the first place). Producers might find themselves responsible for more energetic, musical, exciting and entertaining ballet performances if they took such research discoveries into account. Instead the excitements embedded in the tradition are forgotten, gymnastics takes over, and the multivarious surprises and delights of a “through composed” ballet - music and action as one throughout - end up replaced by something which gets called boring.

This exchange on another part of the Forum has made me think: https://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/27055-pacific-northwest-ballets-historical-giselle-streaming/?do=findComment&comment=394596 Specifically I noticed this comment on how detailed the links between music and action were in the original performances of Giselle: >>copious annotations...describe the mime scenes, showing specifically how the action matched up to the music...every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor is designed to provide the dancers with a vital resource for communicating the drama, moment to moment—a resource that is not always recognized today as such. This rings true. To take a simple example - also from Giselle - what does one feel when Albrecht knocks on Giselle's door in Act 1 but does not bother (or does not know to) match his actions with the clear door knocking in the orchestral score? Or when the Widow Simone - in Ashton's Fille - clog dances around but doesn't hit the beats of the music? Such clumsiness always grates, because there is so obviously a mismatch, like a film being out of sync. But, as this academic study of the 19th century shows, we are missing so much more of the original intentions throughout performances of classical ballet: when conceived and performed back then, the action and the music were allied, bar for bar. This aspect of ballet performance is at risk of being more or less completely forgotten. One thinks of Prologues to the Sleeping Beauty which proceed as if the music is a generalised accompaniment to what is happening on stage, rather than the mime, the movement, the actions, being a detailed expression of the music: "every note, every phrase, every shift from loud to soft or major to minor...communicating the drama, moment to moment". We understand that more musical dancers show how they dance *to* to the music rather than merely at the same time as the music. By extension, it seems clear from the example of this Giselle text that everything, not only the dance steps, has been set to music and could (should?) be performed as such. How much are we missing in current ballet performances? Could they not be so much more detailed, so much richer, deeper, and therefore so much more exciting to watch?

Just for those who notice the absence of Osipova, I should say that she was indeed scheduled (dancing a new work by Kittelberger). This was printed inside the programme. Her departure was the only change shown on the listing on this sheet (produced later and inserted in the programme) so this must have happened pretty last minute.

Ah. So perhaps there is indeed a page 2 that didn’t end up on Instagram. After all, Antonio Casalinho & Margarita Fernandez were also listed by @FionaE.

That is my understanding, yes, the Prologue and Act 1 are lost. One can keep fingers crossed and hope something turns up somewhere one day. Odder things have happened, as film archive researchers know only too well: as just one example of a miracle, the missing second reel of a hundred-year-old Laurel and Hardy two-reeler turned up less than ten years ago (for those who might be interested, the title is The Battle of the Century and it is now restored and on YouTube).

My memory is that there is a recording in the BBC vaults.

In a technical sense this removes the confusion as to whether the ROH are - or are not - more “relaxed” about their rules regarding children under 5 at Sleeping Beauty. So well done ROH for thinking this through that far. But what silly wording. The sentence now makes hard work out of something simple. Imagine the family who wants to bring a toddler to the show. Now they see this sentence which reads rather obscurely and expects people to know (or look up) “House rules”. The only patrons potentially excluded by “House rules” are young children, so why not just say so? Putting “5+” everywhere is surely simpler and easier to understand than two different official statements, in different places, one about “Rules” and one about “Guidance”, and which have to be consulted in conjunction. Not everyone has a legalistic mind, nor the time to study a lot of small print. When my kids were that small I could barely find time to brush my teeth, never mind solve bureaucratic puzzles. But perhaps (as I posted earlier in this thread) this is an example of the sort of knot ROH gets into when seeking to boast to the world (or rather to the Arts Council) that it is OPEN TO ALL AND PARTICULARLY TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE WE’RE NOT ELITIST OH NO while at the same time trying to maintain some kind of order. One sympathises but I don’t think this solution to the age issue is all that good.

Surely rather more than a moment? Wasn't this a premeditated act? Or is he the sort of transgressive artist who packs some s**t before setting off just in case he will need some later?

This has got me interested Angela! I ignorantly know nothing of his work, might you be able to point me to where I can find a good example of what you are talking about? I don’t mean actual YouTube links (I think we’re not allowed to post those) but names of works or whatever that we can search for that would lead to being able to see some representative work?

Just to revert briefly to a conversation from a year ago, for those who might like to see at least some of the 65%/70% of Raymonda missing from the current ENB production there was a super link posted elsewhere on the Forum last week, which has the whole of Act 3 (and very good it is too):—

Thank you so much for linking to this Amelia. The Petipa and the Bournonville especially are rare treats. For those who want a bit more about the Petipa, La Gioconda, music by Ponchielli, had its first performance on 18 January 1883, at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg. There was a new production on 21 January 1888 (so only two years before The Sleeping Beauty), also at the Mariinsky.

We seem to have this conversation every time these Icons people mount a show at the Coliseum (misleading details and so on). But I would hate to miss it: even if one never knows in advance exactly who is on the bill or what they will be dancing it’s always a pretty good show with a lot of star turns (see previous threads). It also has a certain atmosphere. As the line in Cabaret goes, even the audience is beautiful. Boy George has been a regular. I once saw two women, in full long evening dresses, having it out in the front lobby, handbags flying. All adds to the fun.

No need to worry about the film. I barely notice it.

Me too. RIP.

Almost off the point (but hopefully not totally) it’s interesting to note that important facts behind not one but two MacMillan ballets have emerged since he made the works. Anna Anderson was eventually shown (spoiler alert) not to be who she said she was - and letters from Marie Vetsera turned up in a bank vault which showed what was going to happen at Mayerling and which put to rest over a century of speculation. If MacMillan had relied only on mystery, this would be a problem. Luckily he didn’t.

I agree in principle JNC - however any such training may also have to be guided by Maoist principles enforced by the Arts Council, which the ROH is therefore understandably currently in thrall to (“People who go to theatre/opera/ballet/concerts are OUT, whereas people who have never been before are IN and must be made super welcome so they tell other people that going to Covent Garden is not elitist”). In other words I see a possible tension between “encouraging new audiences” (who almost by definition have not been brought in the past by people who know what’s expected) and the sort of “enforcement” you suggest. It’s a sad situation, often discussed here as having a lot to do with the collapse of music teaching in schools.