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Ballet at the cinema / on the big screen


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I'm trying to retrieve the various details of ballets being shown in the cinema for this season, not totally successfully. If anyone can contribute links, please do.

 

The Royal Ballet's performances, being few in number, are fairly easy to remember: 22nd March for Romeo & Juliet, and 16th May for La Fille Mal Gardée. Details here http://cinema.roh.org.uk/ (and perhaps one day the site will get its postcode search accurate: apparently, Piccadilly Circus is under 4 miles from where I live, Leicester Square nearly 8, and Covent Garden over 17 miles :). For those not overly familiar with London geography, all 3 are well within a mile of each other). Also, according to the Period 3 brochure, the 16th July "Titian" performance will be shown on big screens across the UK.

 

The cinema chains listed for the ROH broadcasts are Apollo, Empire, Cineworld, Vue, Odeon, Showcase and Picturehouse. The Odeon's cultural offerings are here: http://www.odeon.co....plus_09_07_2010

 

As for the Bolshoi, their performances are rather more numerous (Le Corsaire, The Bright Stream and Raymonda). The dates can be found here, among others: http://www.pictureho...Moscow_2011_12/

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Thanks Alison! I'd forgotten about the Bolshoi ones. I'm now looking forward to them, especially as I've never seen any of those 3 ballets all the way through, just clips here and there of Le Corsaire and Raymonda and nothing at all of The Bright Stream.

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Thanks for this reminder Alison. I would encourage anyone who has not tried a balletic cinema experience to go for it! I enjoyed the two Bolshoi live broadcasts I have seen at FACT in Liverpool very much and plan to go to as many as possible this year.

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I'm not on an ipad either, I meant there's a link on the word local and when I hover the mouse over it a pop up 'win an ipad' type advert comes up. Weird.

 

Edit: I googled it and it turns out I'm just an idiot and had somehow enabled something called text enhance, which I have now got rid of. Strange that I only noticed it on this site though. But anyway, nevermind, gone now :)

Edited by JaneL
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  • 1 month later...

Bumping this for the Bolshoi Le Corsaire next week: note the earlier-than-usual starting time.

 

For a lot of London-based audience members, at least, it looks as though it may be a case of threading your way through various sets of engineering works to get at the relevant cinemas for this! Time Out seems to suggest that it's virtually only the Picturehouse chain showing this one, and as far as I can see The Gate in Notting Hill and the Phoenix in Finchley are sold out. Wish Odeon were covering it: it'd make things a lot easier.

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Watford Palace theatre shows most of the ballet/opera offerings and is normally not full. Best to phone for tickets 01923 225671 as the online booking starts seating you from the front. It is fairly expensive - £15 no concessions - but nice to sit in a theatre setting. (I think Freedom passes extend to Watford.)

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I don't think you'll get in for less than £15 (at least, not full-price) anywhere, Gail :) - although I thought Picturehouse did concessions. Thanks for posting: I'm hoping I won't have to go anything like that far, though. I'm currently playing "thread your way through the engineering works" with the TfL Journey Planner, and may actually be in a position to buy a ticket before I travel. Or maybe not: I might want to leave my options open, depending on where I can get to.

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Thanks for this post. I popped along to Clapham Picturehouse today (I only live a couple of miles away) having booked at 1pm. The cinema was not full. I enjoyed the performance particularly as it's not a ballet that seems to be performed in the UK much. I did see an ABT performance a couple of years ago but was not impressed. I thought the Bolshoi performance good but not stunning. The Bolshoi's audience was rather restrained in its applause. I don't know if that is typical. I noticed that The Bright Stream and Raymonda will also be shown. I would like to see them as, again, they don' t seem to be performed in the UK much.

 

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I wasn't overwhelmed by the performance either, and was surprised to find that the choreography (a lot of it, at any rate) had been done by Ratmansky - it didn't seem to me to be very special and was rather repetitive. Its worst failing - for me at any rate - was that it simply couldn't hold a candle to the beautiful recording I have on video of a Kirov performance from the late 80s with Altnai Assylmuratove as Medora; I can't wait to root it out and see if I can get it converted to a DVD so that I can watch it again and marvel at its lyricism and subtlety. This isn't to say that the dancing in the Bolshoi film today was anything but brilliant, as one would expect from Bolshoi dancers like Svetlana Lunkina and Nina Kaptsova, but the choreography and the tone of the production robbed them of any chance to seem anything but rather brittle. I'm hoping that 'The Bright Stream' (Sunday 29th April) will show Ratmansky's choreography rather better.

 

One further disappointment; the audience appeared to be made up almost entirely of OAPs (like myself!). I can't help feeling worried about this...

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I debated going ... but then remembered (with joy) that we saw Osipova and Vasiliev here live in the Bolshoi Corsaire a couple of years ago ... and even on another occasion in that same run had Vasiliev dance the soloist role. Moreover, it was a lovely day .... and, for that reason alone, I don't blame the younger folk at all for not joining thier elders in a darkened room ... In fact I joined them ... 'The sun, mother. The sun!'

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It was very poorly attended in Hackney, which was a shame, but there were quite a few young people in the small audience there, so that’s good. I did feel a bit guilty missing the sunshine, but decided it was worth it as I’d never seen Le Corsaire before, except the Act II pas de deux. I really enjoyed it, though Ann, I see what you mean about some of the choreography being a bit repetitive. I thought the principals all gave wonderful performances, but for me the ballet as whole couldn’t hold a candle to the warmth and emotion of MacMillan and Ashton choreography or the sparkle and joy of the ‘big’ Petipa classics.

Edited by JaneL
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I was also at the Clapham Picturehouse which I thought was almost full and not entirely of OAPs ! I would have gone to my local cinema at East Finchley but even a week ago it was sold out. I have to say I LOVED everything about the performance. It was sumptuous and so suits the fabulous looking new Bolshoi theatre with it's enormous stage. OK it's a daft old romp of a ballet (as Clement Crisp might say) but who cares with dancing as superb as the Bolshoi at every level. It was pure pleasure to watch men and women of the corps move in complete harmony and soloists with wonderful clean technique. I particularly noted some lovely men given the "vacancy" at the RB: I think Kevin O'Hare might consider pinching Ruslan Skvortsov to replace the dear departed Polunin.

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Have to agree with Anna that it looked sumptuous. It's a long ballet, but at least I had a seat this time, for the same price I paid to stand at Covent Garden a couple of years back. I still find it difficult to assess dancing properly when the dancers are some 20 feet tall, though!

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  • 1 month later...

Bumping for the Bolshoi's The Bright Stream this Sunday. Picturehouse details are here: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/film/Bolshoi_The_Bright_Stream/. They have also had the sense to set up a mailing list for their arts showings: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/News/item/Sign_Up_To_The_Screen_Arts_Mailing_List/

 

Anyone got any other details? Not on at Odeons, that's for sure.

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... what a lovely romp to brighten up a wet weekend. The acting was brilliantly played by all the cast, Lunkina and Lobukhin as Zina and Pyotr, and Alexandrova and Skvortsov as the ballet couple. As always the male ballerina was laugh out loud hilarious and although the satellite was a little broken up at times it was better than I had anticipated with the stormy weather around.

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There were trailers for Paris Opera Ballet - Romeo and Juliette on Tues 15th May (looked a modern set), NDT - Move to Move on Thurs 31st May (looked very stunning contemporary), Bolshoi - Raymonda on Sunday 24th June. As far as I know of these only Raymonda is scheduled for Watford, but they are showing Sondheim's Company on May 7th and RB Beatrix Potter on 26th August and lots from Glyndebourne in between.

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PatheLive hasn't shown any of the POB ballets this season, and despite the fact that both R&J and NDT are listed as "next live broadcasts" on the cast sheet, I don't see any signs that they'll be on at the Picturehouse I was at.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think the Bourne Swan Lake is being shown elsewhere, too, although possibly not at the same time.

 

The RB Fille seems - from the few cinemas I've looked at - to be selling better than anything else so far.

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Hi, Ibeard

 

I'm not sure about running times for Raymonda, but certainly when I saw Nutcracker live at Cineworld, they didn't stop transmitting during the interval. They showed footage of interviews and backstage happenings which would all be included within the running time.

 

It was quite awkward, actually, as I was there with my 2 daughters, who both needed to visit the loo. The cinema was packed and when they went out (during the interval, as such) they got 'tuts' from the people in our row! It was the INTERVAL!!!

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