John Mallinson

Vic-Wells Ballet 1930 - 29 short ballets (including 12 opera ballets) 1932 - first full length ballet (Coppélia) Sadler's Wells Ballet 1940 - 5 full length, 24 short inc diverts 1950 - 6 full length, 19 short inc diverts Royal Ballet 1960 - 7 full length, 22 short inc diverts 1970 - 5 full length, 27 short inc diverts 1980 - 9 full length, 24 short + 36 diverts!! 1990 - 6 full length, 21 short inc diverts 2000 - 7 full length, 20 short + 24 diverts 2010 - 8 full length, 17 short + 11 diverts These figures are from Robert Kimber's useful Ballet Chronicles. I suppose they support the idea of a switch from shorter to longer works.

My thought was that it was to give the Polyphonia cast a bit of a breather before the McGregor, but that's very speculative since we don't know the Carbon Life casting apart from Lamb, McRae, Cowley and Watson.

Tim, have you tried the Royal Ballet School archive? They were very pleased to receive photos and programmes that I was tasked with finding a home for.

True, Susan. We Londoners are a privileged lot - if you don't mind the pollution, the noise, the crowds, the muggings! (Actually I couldn't imagine living anywhere else.)

The other thing for us pensioners (and maybe students and others?) to remember about the Coliseum is that for almost all performances you will be able to get a concessionary standby at a substantially reduced price.

Ian, I don't seem to have exceeded my allowance so here are the three NYT links: Review - Danspace Project, Platform 2012 - Parallels, NY: Brian Seibert, New York Times Review - Nimbaya! (dance troupe from Guinea), NY: Brian Seibert, New York Times Review - David Neumann, Restless Eye, NY: Claudia La Rocco, New York Times

Sitting in my plush £10 seat last night I had quite mixed feelings, not about the programme which is excellent but about the widespread and rather desperate-seeming ticket offers. I felt a bit guilty with regard to people who had booked early and payed full price and wondered if this late discounting might actually in future dissuade people from booking early in the hope that they might catch a bargain nearer the time. I am sure that the ENB marketing department and the Coliseum must have thought about this Catch-22 and weighed it up carefully and we'll never know what the break-even point is in regard to expenses versus ticket revenue. On the positive side, selling tickets at £10 is better than not selling them at all and maybe it will induce people who wouldn't normally attend ballet to give it a look, especially in these straightened times. The Dress Circle was almost full last night, maybe in part due to the ticket offer, but checking now on the Coliseum website other performances are still only about half sold. I don't understand the London ballet audience. Do they really only want to see yet more of the staple classics? Of course the difficulty of filling the house for mixed bills isn't peculiar to ENB or to this programme - the Royal Ballet suffers from it too. I don't understand why theatre audiences expect to see new or unfamiliar work alongside the classic rep but ballet audiences are so much less adventurous. As Irmgard has indicated, you shouldn't miss this: Apollo (arguably the greatest ballet of the 20th Century); a new, ingenious and enjoyable working of Jeux by Wayne Eagling; Anton Dolin being channelled in the gymnastic solo from Train Bleu (last night most excellently by Vadim Muntagirov); Lifar's Suite en blanc, not likely to be seen here danced by any other company and a classic in it's own way.

Connecting Conversations with the Ballet Boyz This is one of a series of interview/discussions with artists from various fields including dance exploring links between their art and psychoanalysis. Wednesday 6th June 2012 7-8.30pm at London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre Tickets £10 / £8 (concessions) William Trevitt and Michael Nunn, founders of pioneering dance company Ballet Boyz, will explore with psychoanalyst Luis Rodríguez de la Sierra their role in changing the perception of ballet within the dance world and beyond. More details here.

Paul, Thanks for that. I've always struggled with the much bruited concept of company style (it almost seems to deserve capital letters). As far as the Royal Ballet goes I have assumed (maybe wrongly) that it is based on the ability to dance Ashton as he would have wanted. In other words a certain sort of flexibility of the trunk, épaulement, soft arms and fast feet. I've always found it difficult to accept that such things can not be taught to dancers trained elsewhere, though years of dancing, say, Balanchine might make that more difficult. Is there much more to this than I appreciate? or is the mystique surrounding company style rather exaggerated?

It's not for me to dictate to Irmgard what she should do, I was just pointing out what the policy is, mainly with a view to making people think about it. And perhaps I should say that I did expect that Irmgard would have added her real name.

No, of course not. It depends what they were posting about. If a hypothetical leotard seller was posting a review of a performance then certainly not. If he or she was saying that Brand X of which he or she has the UK distribution rights is the most hardwearing then absolutely. I think one has to extrapolate from there and let common sense prevail. Or, to take a nearer but very improbable scenario, if an ENB board member was to post highly critical things about a member of ENB staff without declaring their position that would be totally unacceptable.

I agree that the detail of the Rite costumes were lost, certainly from where I was sitting and without binoculars. I only saw them in the photos. I liked the effect of the huddled ant-like masses, quite different from the light-coloured RB version. Alison, I'd not seen the ENB Rite before. Did they not use the Sidney Nolan costumes?

Oh, and Aileen, you've kicked me into posting a few thoughts about ENB's Ballets Russes on the other forum!

My twopenn'orth: Giving the chance to the very young George Williamson to rechoreograph The Firebird (now apparently just known as Firebird) was brave, maybe foolhardy. I know nothing of his antecedents and hope someone will fill in the details. The couple of clips of short works of his on YouTube don't give one much idea of his style or capabilities. What we're given here is a completely different scenario from the Fokine, the only common character being the Firebird herself. She is surrounded by other allegorical types - Purity, a Celebrity, Muses, an Army Captain and a Peacock. All this rather implies a narrative but that passed me by. The Firebird was more a victim than the powerful figure of the original. Her feathers are plucked by the other characters, though then restored. There was quite a lot of well-performed dancing around. It's a very big ask to take a score as well-known and specific in narrative detail as this and make something completely new out of it. I didn't think it worked. Nijinsky's Faun is a wonderful and strange work - the music is wonderful and the choreography is strange. I'd forgotten just how gorgeous the score is. It is a very small-scale work and maybe it got lost in the vast spaces of the Coliseum and maybe I was seated too high. Whatever, I didn't find the hieratic movement style came across, nor the drama such as it is, and the scandalous ending looked as if it might have been toned down for a matinée audience! Whatever Clement Crisp has to say, I like Dawson's Faune(e). It's set to the two piano transcription of the original score and performed on a bare stage open at the back and to the wings. The pianos are on stage and it all hints at a rehearsal studio, maybe a reference to Jerome Robbins' wonderful and very different version. There are two men, an older and a younger. Their precise relationship is undefined: master and pupil probably, lovers maybe. There are too few effective pas de deux for men - this is one of them. In contrast to the Nijinsky piece which only uses the Debussy score as a backdrop, Dawson expressed the ecstatic nature of the music rather beautifully. What a good idea to redesign MacMillan's Rite of Spring. I don't know whether the impetus came from ENB or from Lady MacMillan but it was fully justified by the result. Kinder Aggugini's costumes are black with dark coloured decorative panels and all the dancers wear black wigs or maybe they're caps. The effect is to make one look at the piece with fresh eyes. Given that the ballet is a regular part of the Royal Ballet's rep it is very sensible of ENB to produce an alternative version, as they have with that other RB staple, Manon.

Aileen, For ages I posted as JohnM but I gave that up when I joined the team here. We don't have a policy about using full names apart from the policy about critical postings as quoted. If you look elsewhere (YouTube comments for instance) you'll find really nasty comments which would never be made by people under their own name. (I'm not suggesting that anything like that happens here.) As for declaring an interest it very much depends what the interest is. I assume that most postings in Doing Dance come from people (mainly parents) with a close connection with one or other institution. That is understood, acknowledged and often declared. It's very evident from Irmgard's post that she has worked quite extensively with ENB and she describes her connection precisely. What we particularly want to avoid is people who are in the business either covertly touting for custom or making comments without declaring their bias. As a rather poor hypothetical example we would not be happy to see a member of the Royal Ballet making highly critical comments of an ENB production without declaring that they were in a rival company.

Aileen, It seems to me that there are two problems here. First as regards the Eagling departure we may all raise our eyebrows, write him a testimonial or whatever but very few have anything more than speculation to offer. Second, as regards "no-one" posting about the Ballets Russes programme, I think the problem is that most of the members here don't post. They may see things but then don't have the time, confidence or inclination to post about them. I would hate to think that this a "Royal Ballet only" site. My own experience of people who see ballet in London is that they will gobble up anything, as I do myself: RB, BRB, ENB, Northern, Scottish, any visiting ballet company. We would also hope that people who see performances abroad will tell us about them. As this is a site of information exchange I would hope that more members will voice their thoughts. The ENB Ballets Russes thread is here.

Irmgard Whatever the rights and wrongs of the circumstances of Wayne Eagling's departure from ENB we will never get the full story from all sides. I am sure that many will agree with you that he has done many good things for the company and are puzzled and upset by what has happened. I am glad that you acknowledge your professional links to ENB. I am however slightly surprised that, whether by oversight or not, you did not append your name to the posting, especially in view of earlier comments here about the anonymous writers of the Dancing Times letter and your stated intent to write to the papers under your own name. Your posting is very critical of the ENB board's decision. Our stated policy is "If a member chooses to make highly critical comments this must be done in their own name and not behind an anonymous user name and email address."

I have this lovely little app on my iPod called Evi. She's like Siri and you talk to her and she answers. She's told me that the weather in Casablanca is very much like the weather in London at the moment but rain forecast mid-week.

How odd. I'm in Casablanca (so it tells me) with DST turned on. Maybe you try logging off and on again and see if that fixes it.

A couple of UK members have reported that their postings today have been timed by GMT rather than Daylight Saving (the UK changed over in the early hours of Sunday morning). I'm not sure why this is - it didn't affect me, so presumably not everyone. You can ensure that you're on the right time by going to My Settings and adjusting the time zone there.

Which booklet is it that I don't have!? The period 4 About the House stilled listed Polunin and the website has tbc.

Ann, I think George Lamb represented the Man on the Clapham Omnibus (that dates me!) I'm sure he knew the answer but had to pose it for the many watchers who might not. As for the re-runs all we can do is and hope.

RBLive: 16 minutes of class .

Any feedback on Beatriz Stix-Brunell's debut as Alice this afternoon? There were some enthusiastic tweets including this from bangorballetboy: "Absolutely gorgeous debut from Beatriz Stix-Brunell. Bravissima! #AliceinTwitterland" More and longer please!