KyleCheng

Hi all, I hope you are well despite the unbearably cold weather! I am hoping to purchase 2 tickets for the O'Sullivan/Sambe cast of The Nutcracker on 12th December. Preferably Stall, Balcony, or first few rows on Amphi, but happy for any possibility. Thank you in advance!

Unable to attend myself, I would love to hear some thoughts on this piece from folks who have seen the performance: do you agree? Just from reading the piece, I cannot quite see how the titular conclusion was drawn. I would think that one triple-bill is not enough to represent a company's competency in classicism.

An unexpected traffic disruption has meant that I will not be able to make this performance. If anyone is looking for a ticket for this show later today pleace message me or reply to this thread. Thank you!

My matinee ticket has been sorted. The evening upper amphi ticket is now up for sale!

Due to cancellation of a friend, I now have one spare ticket for the evening performance on that day (7pm Saturday 18th March, Ferri cast) with which I can use to exchange. Seat info: Upper Amphitheatre, U-52 (£17)

I was able to book a weekend trip to London (from Stockholm) specifically to see Woolf Works. While I am lucky to have gotten a ticket for the evening performance, the same cannot be said about the 1pm show (Nuñez cast). If anyone has a spare ticket for that performance they are willing to sell, preferably that for an SCS, I would be very grateful for the opportunity! Thanks in advance and hope all of you get to see it despite the snow and everything.

I am happy to say that I now have a ticket. Thanks and happy holiday!

I've been able to make a very last minute plan to visit London next week and would love an opportunity to go to the missed Opera House. Stupidly I was on a call for too long and all the Friday rush tickets were gone when I finally logged on to the page. Any chance anyone has a ticket for that performance to spare? A SCS would be great but I am also open to anything <£50 Thanks in advance and happy holiday to everybody!

Bit late to the game, but hopefully not too late to express some love for Ms Sarah Lamb. With the premiere of the Dante Project, her long awaited and glorious reunion on stage with Steven McRae in R&J, and her convincing performance in Giselle (the most heartbreaking and nuanced Giselle this season in my humble opinion), I thought this has been a magnificent year for her. I really hope we will still be able to see her dance for another couple of years!

Winning in 5 out of the 12 possible categories (excluding the two companies awards RB are not eligible for) doesn't really invoke in me the question "has the RB been overlooked this year?". To be clear, I do not disagree with the observation that RB deserves to win as a company; when you have the best male dancer, the best female dancer, and the best choreographed classical work, it makes sense that you are also the best company. But I do wonder if a more concerning issue is the regional disparity that may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, in ways such as the one @Jan McNulty pointed out. As a Londoner, I am really not devastated to see RB and ENB wining most of the awards, but at the same time I am not sure if it tells a healthy tale about the dance sector in this country as a whole.

This feels like a big year for the Royal Ballet. While it's no doubt a testament to RB's outstanding performances (I'm fortunate to have seen all the RB works nominated and was blown away in several instances), I do wonder if it makes sense to speculate that the landslide (if this is an appropriate term) partly reflects the fact that the less resourceful companies have been more harshly impacted by the pandemic?

I was thinking the same when I first read it! 😅 But then I recalled the vicinity between j and k on the keyboard and guessed that it’s probably just the poster’s phone being overzealous at spelling correction. Always fun to spot those missteps by AIs; good anecdotes for the Resistance Force Newsletter when computers take over.

Besides regular revival on stage, I think another, perhaps more economic and realistic, way to preserve the classics would be to make available (to the public) recordings of more works that have yet been done so. Being a huge fan of Manon and MacMillan's other full length works, I don't think I will ever say no to more staging of them. The same sentiment, I suspect, is shared by a large portion of the balletgoing community, the result of which is that it will be very hard for companies to also stage those less popular works of a choreographer. At present only a small number of Ashton's and MacMillan's works are committed to DVD/blue-ray. In the word of music records there are "complete collection of (insert composer name)" and I think we can do with something similar for choreographers. It would also allow a more systematic understanding of a choreographer's techniques, change of style over time, etc.

I was also at the Coliseum last evening and really enjoyed the dancing, particularly that of Erina Takahashi, whose sophisticated and nuanced dancing depicted the inner conflict of Raymonda very convincingly. Joseph Caley and Daniel McCormick also showed admirable robustness in the face of some challenging choreographies. As for the production, I must echo the praise to it being a wonderful showcase of stunning choreographies. In terms of the story, I quite like the use of a double antitheses: John vs Abdur, and sister Clemence vs Henrietta, (the latter having a clear reference to the shoulder angel concept), with Raymonda in the middle tugged, explicitly, between these four characters and, implicitly, between four different ideals or values. However, I too share the reservation about having the Crimean war as the backdrop, which seems to be thrown out of the window after Act I. I find myself a bit uneasy indulging in all the revelry when a war is supposedly ongoing. The titular role also did a pretty limited amount of nursing. At the very end, when all hints to the war have all but felt distant, it is equally plausible that Raymonda did what she did (trying not to spoil) so as to pursue her dream in stand-up comedy or hedge fund management instead of nursing. Granted, a ballet can only spend so much of its runtime on narrative progression; but I don't think this cognitive dissonance would have loomed so large had the production not stressed so much on it being "inspired by Florence Nightingale" and "a celebration of the courage of nurses" etc. The result feels like it tries to be socially conscious but only half-heartedly so. I've much respect for Ms Nightingale, who I know did rather a lot more on the frontline than having a dream about falling in love with two men.

An interesting discussion on whether the German audience behaves differently. I have been to the Berlin Philharmonie twice and, considering myself very lucky, on both occasions saw towering figures holding the baton: the first time the late great Mariss Jansons and the second time Maestro Zubin Mehta. They both received an extended (and entirely well-deserved) standing ovation, to the extent that both had to come back on stage after the whole orchestra had cleared the stage. Having been to many concerts in London, I don't recall seeing the same thing here. I wonder if my experiences in Berlin have been extraordinary, or are concertgoers there generally more enthusiastic with their applause?