RuthE

The Royal Opera has announced that Oliver Mears will be joining the company as Director of Opera following Kasper Holten's departure in the spring: http://www.roh.org.uk/news/oliver-mears-to-join-royal-opera-house-as-director-of-opera

If it's going to be under strong stage lighting then even skin tone or not, a beige base is generally necessary on stage, especially if she is pale.

Hmmm... interesting. You generally have to be Somebody to get into the stalls at a dress rehearsal, but that can range from being involved with the production to having got a ticket through a cast member. The only 2 occasions I have ever sat in the ROH Stalls for a dress rehearsal were (a) having been slipped a spare ticket on the way in by a friendly member of front-of-house staff, as a considerable upgrade on my Upper Slips seat - though it did mean it was in the centre block and restricted by the presence of the authorised photographers, and ( b ) a great seat in the side block procured for me by a major cast member as a thank you for a favour. I could be wrong but I think the front corners are raffled to ROH staff members, too. I wonder how your neighbour came by hers? At Semiramide last weekend at the Proms I had a neighbour directly in front of me who from time to time woke up her smartphone and started taking photos. When she turned around in the interval I recognised her as an opera singer (and former ROH young artist). I would have hoped that artists would be more considerate.

I'm assuming that means you enjoyed it! I'm going on Monday.

I think I would like to be a casting director for a major opera company. The trouble is that entry-level jobs in that sort of field are not only ridiculously competitive, but tend to pay less than half what I currently make, and I do need to keep a roof over my head. I do frequently get told by opera singers that I should be working in casting... but I also frequently get told by opera singers that I should be an agent, and I'm pretty sure I DON'T want to do that. It's not a thwarted dream - I don't sit at my desk in my current job thinking "if only my day job was in the arts". I'm pretty happy with my current career, and the associated relative job security. I also think my work-life balance is quite decent, and I have a sideline in freelance choral singing, which is definitely a vocation but I don't know anyone who makes their whole living out of it.

Must say - and indeed I'm sure I already have said, on another thread, in passing - I was really hoping that Shiori Kase would be cast. Though I'll settle for her being cast in the Skeaping production after Christmas (pretty please!)

And rather as I feared, my gamble on picking two performances has resulted in two by the same cast... still, at least it's Tamara... (Though, actually, with the way my diary has filled up in the meantime, there also aren't any of the London performances I'm now free for which AREN'T Tamara. I could literally go to all of hers and none of anyone else's. So it's a moot point I suppose... I suspect I may end up only going once, though!)

Call me morbid but I love "cemetery tourism"... I haven't been to Paris for a while but last time I was there I visited Montmartre cemetery, where - as well as so many others - Nijinsky is buried in a wonderful grave with a statue of him as Petrushka (depicted on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmartre_Cemetery). Somebody had left a pointe shoe on the grave. The real Dame aux Camellias is buried there too under her birth name of Alphonsine Plessis. (Edited to add - as I was racking my brains to think of other ballet connections - Adolphe Adam, who wrote the score for Giselle.) I've got a long weekend in Paris for some opera at the beginning of November and I'm going to have to go back there, I think...

South West Trains via Woking and Basingstoke provides a much faster and more frequent service between London and Southampton than Southern does. I can't see if it's actually Cardiff you're coming from or somewhere en route, but you may find there is a way to do a homeward journey to Cardiff via Basingstoke and then over to Reading. The Vestry is a nice place to eat nearly opposite the theatre.

I hope we get a full RB class this time. Last year they dropped in half an hour after it started...

There isn't a ban on kids, but if I was travelling with a child who was likely to make lots of noise, I wouldn't dream of taking them to sit in the quiet carriage. That doesn't include normal civilized conversation which most children over 5 or so are capable of understanding should be made using their "indoor voice". I'm talking really particularly about toddlers who are especially prone to shout or squeal at the tops of their voices. If on the other hand I was travelling with a sleeping baby, I'd try to sit in the quiet carriage near the door...

Victoria Street.

I imagine it's not practicable because there are vast differences between station platforms along routes run by the same operator. Some have platforms where the train comes in nice and snug to the platform, with hardly a gap and no height difference; at others there's a massive step up (platform 4 at Elephant and Castle mainline, anyone? - you have to be able to pull one foot up to knee height and haul yourself on - I've had to give a hand up to a short-legged and arthritic friend who literally couldn't reach) or a hugely wide gap because the station is on a bend (like the Central Line platforms at Bank on the Underground). I'm struggling to imagine a one-size-fits-all design solution that would work on, say, Central Line trains at all their stops, or Southern trains at every station on their entire network.

I suspect this is a mistake on the website - I went to see this at Clapham Picturehouse not long before the DVD came out (several months after it had been filmed) and I remember the cast sheets supplied at the cinema gave the wrong casting for Meditation and Voices of Spring, so it looks like the same error.

I didn't get that far. Started watching it last night on iPlayer, and my musical sensibilities overrode my visual curiosity when it got to the routine (very early on) set to part of an awful souped-up version of La traviata, and I gave up and switched off!

I'm seeing two performances, and I do have a lot of time for the piece, but to me the last run feels very recent - not 18 months before this one. Also, I wish they had published the casting of Widow Simone when they announced the principal pairings. They still haven't, I definitely don't need to see more performances of it than I have already booked, but I'll kick myself if one of my existing bookings doesn't feature Will Tuckett.

I can't say I've noticed a recent change, but it's smelt of fish for years!

Indeed (though it's clearer on her "artist page" on the ROH website).

I am neither a poor student nor a working mum, but both of these tips form the absolute foundations of how I run my (busy single professional, at work all day, out most evenings) household. Cooking for one gets time-consuming and expensive otherwise! :-) The two principles are particularly satisfying when combined - that is, finding a kilo of mince or a big box of diced chicken thigh (or whatever) reduced to a couple of pounds just before closing time on a Sunday, and getting six or eight portions of chilli, curry, risotto out of it for the freezer!

I note that there have been a few surreptitious edits to the RB Promotions and Joiners article on the ROH website. Joseph Aumeer has been taken off the list of Aud Jebsen Young Dancers because as we know he is now taking up a position in Paris, and I'm pretty sure the original article had no mention of Leticia Dias joining the company - I believe the only RBS graduate originally mentioned as joining as an Artist was Joseph Sissens. I have a feeling that even the sentence about Mica Bradbury may have been missing from the original release? http://www.roh.org.uk/news/promotions-and-joiners-at-the-royal-ballet-for-201617 Still no statement on Leavers...

I'm with Nick on this one... longest night of my life, or so it felt, despite some very fine dancing (especially, IMO, from Tikhomirova). I considered leaving in the first interval, but then remembered that ENB's version has loads of massively impressive stuff for the male characters in Act 2. So I stayed, and nothing happened, and I realized that that Grand Pas d'Action or their equivalent of it had, I think, already happened in Act 1, and made much less of an impression...

ENB's Corsaire premiered in Milton Keynes of all places, didn't it?

I assume physical lightness must also be to a female dancer's own benefit, particularly to minimize the amount of force directed through the leg, foot and toe when en pointe.

But it descends with controlled speed and force. It isn't as if somebody disconnects it at the top and then just drops it. I've seen curtains come down on people's heads/shoulders (thanks to optimistically-timed full company bows) on many occasions and never yet heard of any harm being done.

It is a statement of fact that lots of little girls want to be ballerinas. It is also a statement of fact that lots of little boys want to be footballers. I'm guessing both of the above apply to the named sex to a much greater extent then the opposite sex. Yes, that's a product of gender-biased media and (in some cases unintentional) social attitudes that most children are exposed to from a very early age, it's great that there seems to be real momentum behind efforts to change the gender bias in these areas (the Let Toys be Toys campaign, for example), and there's a lot of work to be done to ensure equality of opportunity in these and other fields. But mumof6 statement was an unarguable fact about the current demographics of wannabe ballet dancers and footballers.