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Royal Ballet Period 4 Casting


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Rather to my surprise, casting for some of the final triple bill of the year has appeared on the ROH web site. 

 

Obsidian Tear (McGregor)

The Invitation (MacMillan) 

Within the Golden hour (Wheeldon) 

 

Obsidian Tear (all male ?)

 

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/obsidian-tear-by-wayne-mcgregor

 

 

Invitation - no details given at present

 

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-invitation-by-kenneth-macmillan

 

 

Within the Golden Hour

 

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/within-the-golden-hour-by-christopher-wheeldon

 

Casing here looks similar, but not the same as for Feb. 

 

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Nothing on my Friends page about this. It always lists the booking times etc in the past. Is this the only production for those ticket sales dates

 

 

******PLEASE IGNORE THIS - SAME BOOKING PERIOD AS THE BOLSHOI *****

Edited by SPD444
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Very disappointed that a male choreographer appears to be doing an all male piece.  

 

Did you say this when Wayne Eagling choreographed that piece, the name of which escapes me, for the men of ENB to go with Giselle as well, BBB?  (I guess that it would probably be being worked on largely when the company are performing Giselle, in which the men are, after all, distinctly underused?)  Who knows, perhaps we might get an all-male pas de deux, the absence of which some commentators also complain about? 

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Nothing on my Friends page about this. It always lists the booking times etc in the past. Is this the only production for those ticket sales dates

 

This is the only Royal Ballet main stage production in Booking Period 4.  Not sure whether the Bolshoi tour booking date will be the same day.

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Did you say this when Wayne Eagling choreographed that piece, the name of which escapes me, for the men of ENB to go with Giselle as well, BBB?  (I guess that it would probably be being worked on largely when the company are performing Giselle, in which the men are, after all, distinctly underused?)  Who knows, perhaps we might get an all-male pas de deux, the absence of which some commentators also complain about? 

 

It was Men Y Men, and yes, it was meant to even up that programme given how little there is for men in Giselle.

 

6 years have past since...

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Very disappointed that a male choreographer appears to be doing an all male piece.  At a time when we're looking for more female involvement at all levels of the artistic spectrum, this looks like a couple of steps backwards.

 

 

I recall Darcey Bussell saying that not enough female stars in ballet are being produced in the UK.

 

Great encouragement, support and attention have been directed towards boys and male dancers, ever since Billy Elliot.

Darcey Bussell stressed the fact that it is high time UK companies focus on producing outstanding female ballet stars. Is this going to happen?

 

A McGregor ballet with all male dancers? Fine, at least, as someone mentioned in another post, the poor females will not be subjected to those male dancers manipulating them in a way Classical ballet doesn't do.

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Very disappointed that a male choreographer appears to be doing an all male piece.  At a time when we're looking for more female involvement at all levels of the artistic spectrum, this looks like a couple of steps backwards.

I am not sure I'm convinced that women get a particularly raw deal compared to men when it comes to the number and quality of roles for them in ballet.  I can't think of another work in the RB rep that is devoted to male dancers (even if there is one, the balance still seems to be more than fair between the sexes) and this could be really interesting.  I think there is definitely an issue with a lack of use of women choreographers and it would be good to see that corrected over time.  Based on a New York Times article back in November, it sounds like we have Crystal Pite creating something for the company in the near future (something I am very excited about as I love her work), but that's not much given the resources the company devotes to a small clique of exclusively male choreographers.

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The ROH website says:

Obsidian Tear is McGregor’s latest work for the Company. In it, he collaborates with the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, and takes inspiration in part from Salonen’s 2011 symphonic poem Nyx. McGregor takes what he describes as the ‘raw viscerality’ of Salonen’s music and generates a contemporary myth on the intense pressures within the human being.

 

"None the wiser" just about describes my response to that.

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Has McGregor used Nyx before, or am I getting ahead of myself and thinking of some previous statement he's made about the piece - like saying he was going to be choreographing something using the music?

 

I don't think he has used Nyx before.  He has been talking about this for a while, though.  He used another Salonen work (Foreign Bodies) for Yantra, the piece he created on Stuttgart Ballet in 2010.

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I'm pleased we get casting for new works in advance now. It was not generally the case in the past. I recall that when Wheeldon's Alice was premiered there were no cast details at all, and you had to try to guess which nights might be the second cast, if you wanted to see them. Names of new works were often not revealed until opening night either. However there does seem to have been a change in policy on these points which is welcome. 

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Yes, I think with Alice the three tickets I *did* manage to book ended up all being for the same cast.  There was a heck of a lot of attempted ticket swapping going on once the casts were finally announced.  We don't necessarily need to know *who* is dancing, just when different casts will be performing.

 

But we still don't have The Invitation yet, of course ...

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I am not sure I'm convinced that women get a particularly raw deal compared to men when it comes to the number and quality of roles for them in ballet.  I can't think of another work in the RB rep that is devoted to male dancers (even if there is one, the balance still seems to be more than fair between the sexes) and this could be really interesting.  I think there is definitely an issue with a lack of use of women choreographers and it would be good to see that corrected over time.  Based on a New York Times article back in November, it sounds like we have Crystal Pite creating something for the company in the near future (something I am very excited about as I love her work), but that's not much given the resources the company devotes to a small clique of exclusively male choreographers.

 

Yes, the Crystal Pite creation will be something to look forward to.

Perhaps in the past, and especially in ballet, there was a favour towards women. But at the moment with current choreographers, it does seem to have switched. Alastair Marriott's last piece had 6 male to one female; this new McGregor is all chaps; several of the last 'Draft Works' were all male, or with a higher male ratio. Then there are the Ballet Boyz, Rambert seem to have a lot of male onlt pieces, etc.

Personally, I like seeing men and women dancing together - but then I'm probably just a fuddy-duddy! :-)

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I've never seen anything by Crystal Pite, but have heard lots of enthusiastic reports.  What sort of style is her choreography?  Classical, or modern?  Vest and pants, or more elaborate costumes?

Modern; generally not particularly elaborate costumes.  There are quite a few videos of her work on YouTube.  A piece she created for a ballet company is Emergence and Pacific Northwest Ballet's channel has an excerpt from that.  There are several examples of her work with NDT and Kidd Pivot, including The You Show, an excerpt of which was performed at Sadler's Wells last year or the year before.  Also Polaris, the large group piece she created for the Thomas Ades programme at Sadler's Wells last season and then took to the Lincoln Center (the Lincoln Center's channel as an excerpt from that).  

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  • 1 month later...

Still no casting details for the Invitation, at least not on this page at time of writing.

 

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-invitation-by-kenneth-macmillan

 

Odd isn't it, given that booking has opened for higher level Friends.

 

 

 

I emailed a week ago to ask when we could expect casting to be published. The reply was that they hoped to have the information soon and it would be published on the website as soon as it was known. If it isn't published by the time ordinary Friends' booking opens on 1st March I'm going to hang fire - don't want to risk seeing the same cast twice because I've booked differrent casts for the rest of the programme.

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Still no casting details for the Invitation, at least not on this page at time of writing.

 

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-invitation-by-kenneth-macmillan

 

Odd isn't it, given that booking has opened for higher level Friends. 

 

It's very unhelpful.  I note that my tweet to RB asking whether casting info would be provided before booking was ignored.

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I've never seen anything by Crystal Pite, but have heard lots of enthusiastic reports.  What sort of style is her choreography?  Classical, or modern?  Vest and pants, or more elaborate costumes?

 

Her latest work, Betroffenheit, is playing in Canada at the moment and will be coming to Sadler's Wells in May. There are links to reviews on Sunday's and today's links pages.

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Casting (now, at least) looks to me to be the same as the current run. With another 6 performances, it's a bit of a shame they couldn't have supplied a third cast.

Perhaps final casting may be dependent on casting for The Invitation? Depending on who they (finally) cast in that, it may mean changes elsewhere in the bill. Just a thought.

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I would like some  'mix and match' casting for Triple Bills rather than duplicate casts in all three ballets as is the case with the current Wheeldon programme. I appreciate that it would be difficult for Lauren  Cuthbertson to take the lead in Strapless and then dance Within the Golden Hour but the line up for After the Rain could have been different on certain nights (and would, as it turned out, have helped Reece Clarke).

 

In the case of the summer programme, maybe the groupings could have been changed after the first night.

 

It will be interesting to see who eventually emerges for The Invitation especially as some of the 'likely suspects' are already listed for the other ballets. But frustrating, as others have said, to be faced with booking without knowing.

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  • 2 months later...

Last night I attended the Royal Ballet In Rehearsal event, in which Mayara Magri, Nicol Edmonds and Fernando Montano were coached on the cock & hens [edited - sorry, I mean "cocks & hen"] dance from The Invitation.  The question about casting of the principal roles was asked.  Apparently they are still in the process of working out the most suitable dancers, in something of a workshop environment (which, Jonathan Howells said, is not normal practice at all, but he stressed the importance of choosing suitable dancers for the piece).  He implied that there were around four dancers currently under consideration for each of the leading roles, and that it would probably end up being narrowed down to two casts, not necessarily based on seniority of rank.

Edited by RuthE
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Oh well, I guess we'll find out *some* time before opening night. It would have been useful, though, assuming 2 casts, if it could simply have been indicated which cast was likely to be performing when, even if it was clear it wasn't set in stone.

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