AnneMarriott

7 hours ago, Peanut68 said:

Oh Lord…. Just tried searching on YouTube using ideas such as ‘BBC dance film world war 1’

Cannot comprehend how this listed such awful options as pole dancing, utterly abusive  stretching for dancers, a woman talking about sex addiction & I can’t even say what else…reaffirms why I do very little online stuff…and the phone I use is s child hand me down so thought it had controls to prevent dubious stuff???? I despair 😩 Why do YouTube clips just start playing too?

Traumatised…. Might need to go down a safe ballet rabbit hole now to watch nice things! 

Off topic I know, but this reminds me of the time I tried to identify the theme music from a post-war Children's Hour serial called "Naughty Sophia".  I won't go into details but my eyebrows took a long time to descend to normal position.

43 minutes ago, Naughty Peregrine said:

But a nice tartare from a Boucherie Chevaline was always good to fend off a winter cold. 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Saturday afternoon matinee at "The play that goes wrong", Duchess Theatre.  Never been there before so I checked the details.  Useful information about running times, including that the interval would be short, just 15 minutes and as no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium we'd all have to be quick with our interval refreshments.  Imagine my surprise to see that we were in a tiny minority of patrons without food and drink in the auditorium.  There was a positive hurricane of wrapper-crackling, chomping and slurping during the performance, not least from the young lad next to me with his family-size bag of Wotsits and his plastic bottle of water.  Luckily the gales of laughter at the on-stage antics overwhelmed the "feeding-time-at-the-zoo" cacophony.  (Really enjoyable farce, incidentally, but I wouldn't recommend the theatre for a quiet, contemplative play.)

10 hours ago, Jan McNulty said:

Shops where you only option to not use self-checkout tills is to abandon your shopping.

 

Boots - hang your head in shame!

 

Needless to say I abandoned the items I wanted and got them elsewhere.

I sympathise wholeheartedly.  Twice recently I have had the ultimate humiliation of waiting for an assistant to come and "verify my bags" after placing them - as instructed by the disembodied voice - in the bagging area.

Sorry - senior moment.  

3 minutes ago, AnneMarriott said:

I have - and I loved it!

Crikey - was that James Blake, then?  

9 minutes ago, alison said:

Anne, you really need to see ENB in Playlist, then!

I have - and I loved it!

I attended the Thursday matinee and wonder if I was actually at the same show as many others here.  Without wishing to indulge in special pleading, my hearing is poor and I have to use hearing aids;  I also like music to have either some recognisable rhythm or melody (or even both) so the afternoon was musically challenging.  Anyhow, here's my contribution:

I had never seen anything by Tiler Peck so Rotunda came as a novelty.  I enjoyed the choreography, although I thought it had a strangely academic flavour in parts.  Hated the score (no surprise there).  Costumes (what costumes?) were unattractive, especially the leggings cut off just above the ankles with socks and jazz shoes - particularly unflattering to short-limbed dancers.  I thought it looked a bit untidy at times - perhaps unfamiliarity with the choreographer or (as has been discussed above) the downside of throwing dancers on at the last minute?

I had forgotten how much music and how little dancing there is in Duo Concertant.  Stravinsky is one of the more challenging composers for me and sadly my enjoyment of the piano is a thing of the past (Satie formerly one of my all-time favourites) so it was a relief when the dancing started.  I was knocked back in my seat by Anthony Huxley.  Such precision and clarity, and all delivered with a charming nonchalance.  Spellbinding!

I had seen one Pam Tanowitz piece before.  Suffice it to say I don't remember anything about except that I didn't enjoy it so, unsurprisingly, Gustave Le Gray No. 1 had me stumped.  Won't bother to mention the score. Choreography very limited and repetitive.  Costumes nice to look at but surely hell to dance in - I thought the male dancer caught his left heel in the bottom of the batwing sleeve early on and was fixated on whether or not he would take a tumble.  Was it all supposed to be joke?  If so, at whose expense.  If not it came across as po-faced if not downright pretentious.  

More special pleading: my enjoyment of popular music tailed off dramatically after trad jazz (1950s-1960s) and trickled on through the 70s and 80s so I have no previous awareness of James Blake.  I loved Love Letter (on shuffle).  When the music started I thought "Oh God, I'm going to be deafened and  my teeth are going to vibrate",  but neither happened - instead the happy realisation that at last here was a score with both a defined rhythm and series of melodies; it was possible actually to imagine dancing to it!  Unlike most others posting here I appreciated the mix of street, ballet and Tudor styling in the costumes. The lighting didn't bother me, nor did the stop/start approach to the various tracks.  I loved the choreography and the story-telling, something of a surprise because my only experience of Kyle Abraham was something he made for the Royal Ballet which left me underwhelmed.  I didn't want it to end, despite having left two dogs alone for the afternoon and realising that the early train was not going to be an option.

There has been some comment about front of house staff conduct.  If there was an announcement about a pause between Duo Concertant and Gustave Le Gray No. 1, I missed it.  So did lots of others.  Having one of the ushers shouting "It's not a break, it's a pause" above the general hubbub didn't do a lot to resolve the issue.  It's also something of puzzle why, with ushers checking tickets at the entrances to the auditorium, an elderly couple, one of whom was disabled, finished up pushing their way through an entire row of seated audience members to take their places in the aisle seats on the opposite side of the theatre.

I seem to remember from one of Vadim's interviews that he chose not to dance in any contemporary works to avoid injury associated with the physical demands which are so different from classical choreography.  

8 hours ago, alison said:

After this week's famine, next week is a relative feast:

 

Sunday 18th February:

Sky Arts, 7.15 am: Queen & Béjart: Ballet For Life

BBC4, 9 pm: The Royal Ballet in Mayerling (McRae version)

BBC4, 11.15 pm: Men At The Barre: Inside The Royal Ballet (repeated at 2.15 am)

 

Monday 19th February:

Sky Arts, 6 am: Rhapsody/The Two Pigeons

 

Thursday 22nd February:

Sky Arts, 6.30 am: Rumpelstiltskin: BalletLORENT

Neither of the two BBC4 ballets appear in my Radio Times or television programme guide - instead it's The River at 9 pm and When Coal was King at 11.20 pm pm Sunday.  Weird, and disappointing.

After reading RobR's experience with inappropriately targeted advertising on Instagram, I am putting cookies in general in Room 101.  No matter how many times I log on to various favourite websites there seems to be an interminable list of cookies to accept or reject.  Try to ignore it and the website is unavailable.   Take the easy way out and click "accept all" and you'll forever drown in unwanted advertisements. Or scroll miserably through the interminable list to make sure all the unwanted items are off.  Life is too short ...  Thank goodness there is now an occasional "Reject all" option.  

24 minutes ago, alison said:

 

I think mine can - but then you get into all sorts of other problems, like being able to use only one shelf for roasting.  Caused absolute chaos at Christmas, if you can imagine trying to cook Christmas lunch on only one shelf, and nothing on the floor of the oven because of the top-and-bottom heating.

With a bit of googling you can get an additional shelf to fit your oven.  Take an accurate measurement of your existing shelf and google "replacement oven shelf ??cmwide x ?? deep.  I did this recently.  As far as I know this shouldn't cause problems with the oven on conventional mode.

2 hours ago, Roberta said:

 

Ready for Christmas 2024?   Not many shopping days to go so be prepared.  Even fewer days to get that cake baked and soaking in brandy.

I have literally baked scores and scores of fruit cakes, Christmas, celebrations, friends, family, charity bakes and the rest. I like cake baking, I find it gently therapeutic! Radio on, and a nip of brandy to test it's not gone off. A few thoughts, based on trial and error and a certain amount of success. 

 

Yes buy an oven thermometer, Lakeland sells them. Ovens are notorious for being nowhere near the temperature at which they say are.

 

Fan ovens IMO are not the best for fruit cakes though possible. Too aggressive.  I gave up up on my old fan oven, even though turned down to a lower temp, and used the smaller top oven in the end which wasn't a fan oven.  I now have an oven which can be used without the fan and used as a conventional oven with top and bottom heat only. It's really good for cakes. I have had success in a fan oven though. 

 

Better to cook longer and lower temp than burn the cake.

 

Stand the cake on several sheets of brown paper on the oven shelf. Make sure the tin is lined and also tie on the outside with string a double layer of brown paper rising well above the top of the tin. You can buy fancy gadgets for this job too, but brown paper and string has served me well.   

 

Part way through cooking, once danger of sinkage is passed, put a piece of baking parchment or three or a circle of foil on top of the cake.  Keep checking to ensure it isn't browning too much. 

 

Test the cake with a skewer long before the stated time is up, though I now also use one of the bundt cake testers which change colour when the cake is cooked.  Lakeland sells those too.

 

I use an old Good Housekeeping Cookery Book recipe I've used for years and it says bake at 150C / 300F gas mark 1-2,  though a fan oven is hotter than non fan so check check check and adjust accordingly. 

 

Take the cake out of the oven and remove the brown paper to cool on a rack, leave in the tin until cold.

 

Hope this helps for next time.  

 

 

Wow - am I glad my oven can switch between fan assisted and normal!  Glad to see an obviously experienced baker endorsing the oven thermometer.

22 hours ago, alison said:

Oh, and by the way, which is the Mariinsky Bayadere?  They did a reconstructed, longer, version a couple of decades ago, didn't they?  I don't know if that's still the version they perform.

I wouldn't bother about which version it is - from my TV listings it's the usual RB performance with Muntagirov/Nunez/Osipova, and I find I have four recorded it four times, once when it was supposed to be Acosta/Rojo/Nunez ...

In that case perhaps it's worth investing in an oven thermometer to see if the thermostat is working properly? 

1 hour ago, Pas de Quatre said:

Dogs need to go out and be fed. So I catch up with balletcoforum while drinking a cup of tea!

Same here!

Just now, Pas de Quatre said:

Sorry to hear your problems, probably nobody else will notice.  In general you need to set a fan oven about 20° less than a standard oven.

Aha - I see I'm not the only early riser!

I'm not an expert baker (indeed not a baker at all really) but fan assisted electric ovens need a lower temperature than an ordinary electric oven to achieve the same effect.  So simply converting gas mark something to celsius won't be correct.  Online conversion tables will give you the detail but I do know that for recipe temperatures of 200 degrees C you need to set a fan oven to 180 C.  Whether that would be enough to avoid your burnt bottom I can't say!  Good luck for next year.

22 minutes ago, zxDaveM said:

 

Only a personal opinion of course, but:

Wedding Bouqet, Daphnis  & Chloe, parts of Sylvia's last act (though I do love that), some of the ghastly bits of Ondine (ie when Ondine not on stage), Beatrix Potter, are a few examples that instantly and vividly spring to mind

Very much agree about some of these although I loved Wedding Bouquet.  I described Two Pigeons as embarrassingly twee (from start to finish for me) and have survived, which is a testament to the tolerance of different views by BalletcoForum readers.  I stick to my guns and don't book to see it.

5 hours ago, Pas de Quatre said:

I have a vague memory of a TV interview where Wayne Sleep was talking about the mask and costume problems.

I have a worryingly clear memory of Squirrel Nutkin nearly plunging into the orchestra pit a few feet away from where I was sitting, Stalls Circle right. I think Ashley Page was the squirrel.

5 hours ago, LinMM said:

Well Anne Marriott let’s hope it’s put either first on the bill so you can have time for an extra tea/wine in the bar or at the end so you can get home a bit earlier lol! 

Yep - that would be my plan!

1 hour ago, LinMM said:

I never thought I’d be reading that the Ballet Marguerite and Armand should be consigned to the attic as such!!! 

...

Of course I’m not saying this particular ballet cannot survive without Fonteyn and Nureyev but it needs artists who can ….in a short space of time ….portray deep emotional abandon on stage without reducing it to melodrama…not easy. 
 ...

As an aside there was mention recently of needing another shorter ballet to accompany the Cellist programme or where the main Ballet on offer is a bit short …. so Marguerite and Armand would be perfect for this purpose or as part of a triple …..but not necessarily always an Ashton triple ….it can always be mixed with other choreographers Pieces as well. 
 

As a confirmed non-fan of this ballet, I must admit that melodrama is its most accurate description for me, almost regardless of cast.  I only saw the original cast on film and clearly the stage performance must have been more convincing.  Without wishing to offend anyone, I have always caught a whiff of silent cinema and I half expect a speech bubble, "Alas, I am undone", to appear at some point.

And please, if and when it comes back, let it not be as part of a triple bill, especially as the middle piece.

5 hours ago, capybara said:

Haven’t the offending wigs been ditched now?

That's a relief! I have avoided it for some years so wasn't aware of design changes.  However, wigs aside, I have always found it old fashioned and curiously uninvolving (Tamara Rojo an honourable exception).

12 hours ago, Sim said:

Things can be universal and still be outdated stylistically.   

Can I tentatively add Marguerite and Armand to the list of stylistically outdated?  Even if I am alone in my opinion it surely counts as a ballet that has aged badly on the grounds of giving offence to wig-makers.

2 hours ago, Mary said:

Yes - except I don't think any self-respecting medieval mummer would have been seen dead in a ditch in that costume!

Try telling that to the Longparish Mummers!