What Got You Into Watching Ballet?

[Dawnstar]

I mentioned this on the R&J thread last week:

On 17/01/2022 at 20:46, Dawnstar said:

This has made me think: do we have a thread about how forum members got into watching ballet? If not then would there be any interest in starting one?

 

As no-one has replied to say there's already a thread, I thought I'd try starting one & see if anyone else is interested in discussing the topic. (I've waited for a few days as everyone's been busy discussing Raymonda but now we have a few days off before R&J starts up again!)

 

I suppose I'd better start, though mine is rather bitty. As a child I was taken to a couple of LFB Nutcrackers & a triple bill of Spectre de la Rose/Scherezade/Dying Swan by my mother and a BRB Nutcracker by my school. At university, when I started regularly theatregoing, I saw a couple of ENB tour performances, Romeo & Juliet and Alice In Wonderland. At that time I was mostly interested in seeing opera & musicals so when I started going to the ROH from 2004 onwards it was always opera. When the ROH started doing cinema screenings I went to a few ballet ones from 2014 onwards, so I started to have some knowledge of RB dancers but the ballets I saw, while enjoyable enough, didn't blow me away.

 

In December 2015 we went on a cruise and one of the ports of call was Madeira, where we visited a church and found there was the grave of the last Emperor of Austria. I was intrigued as to why the last Emperor of Austria was buried there so looked him up & through that ended up reading about the Mayerling Affair, including that it had been made into a ballet. So come the first booking period for the 2018/19 ROH season, when I happened to only be interested in booking one opera so had ticket money going spare, when I saw the RB were doing Mayerling I thought I'd give it a go. I'd finally found a ballet that did blow me away! After that I started booking for the rest of the ballets that season (I just missed Bayadere, something I fear I will regret as I doubt the RB will dare do it again) & started the process of working out which dancers I preferred. One of the great attractions is being able to see multiple casts in the same piece within a few weeks. It's something I've always liked to do but with opera you usually get one cast then have to wait a couple of years for the next revival to see a different cast & with musicals you have to catch understudies piecemeal as they go on.

 

I didn't exactly pick the best time to get into watching ballet, as I only got 18 months of it before then having 18 months of online-only due to covid. Because of that, my ballet-watching is very uneven in terms of repertoire I've seen, for instance I've seen Romeo & Juliet live 9 times but still have yet to see Swan Lake live. Based on what I have seen, I'd rank my choreography preferences in descending as MacMillan, Cranko, Ashton, 19th century classics, Wheeldon-Scarlett-&-other-recent-choreographs-in-classic-style, anything-in-modern-style. The last on the list I mostly avoid. I like ballets that have pointe shoes and, in the case of 3-acters, decent plots!

[Jan McNulty]

I can remember going on a school trip to the Liverpool Empire to see London Festival Ballet (now ENB) performing Peer Gynt when I was 9 or 10 but was obviously totally underwhelmed.

 

Having a Saturday job in a record department meant that I became something of a rock chick as a teenager and really went to see bands more than anything.  When I made a friend at Uni she was a methodist by upbringing and didn't even go into pubs let alone drink but we went to see lots of bands and by accident started going to see plays at the Liverpool Playhouse and then also the Everyman.

 

One time when something we wanted to see was sold out we went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre in Southport instead and really enjoyed them so we started to watch contemporary dance - mainly LCDT and Rambert but also some smaller companies that used to flog around.  We must have been to the odd ballet too, mostly mixed programmes, because when I did become a ballet watcher I was aware of having seen some of the ballets before (The Rake's Progress and Concerto Barocco stick in my mind) but I obviously wasn't too interested.

 

We also went to the cinema and saw the biopic of Valentino (with Nureyev - oh wow!) and later the biopic of Nijinsky.  Around the same time (and possibly because I had a horsey phase and my favourite horses were Nijinsky and Sir Ivor) I read a biography of Nijinsky and we saw (on an organised weekend to London) one of Nureyev's famous programmes at the Coliseum, which coincidentally featured works associated with Diaghilev and Nijinsky.  I think this was probably 1982.

 

In February 1984 London Festival Ballet were touring Onegin and a mixed programme that featured works associated with Diaghilev and Nijinsky.  We went to see the mixed programme.

 

We had a night in London on our way on holiday a couple of months later and there was nothing on in the West End that we hadn't already seen or wanted to see but LFB were performing Onegin at the Coliseum.  It was 26th May 1984 and the rest, as the saying goes, is history!

 

Some years later I re-looked at the programme and realised why I had been so blown away - we had seen Marcia Haydee (who created the role of Tatiana) and Richard Cragun!!!

 

Coincidentally Dawnstar, the first time I went to the Royal Opera House it was to see Mayerling.  Derek Deane danced Rudolf.  A couple of years later we visited Vienna on holiday and went on a coach trip to Mayerling because of having seen the ballet.

 

So you could almost say my love of ballet had its roots in a racehorse called Nijinsky!!

 

(I've never had any sort of dance lesson in my life)

[zxDaveM]

I think there are several threads on this in the past - but never hurts to resurrect the idea for those that have joined more recently, I reckon. 🙂

 

For me - Miyako Yoshida as SPF on telly - inspired me to see her live (in Giselle). Duly hooked

What keeps me coming now - Yasmine Naghdi

[MaddieRose]

I started dance lessons as a young kid, and my teacher used to show me ballet VHS tapes. I'm quite young, so the first one I remember seeing was the Acosta-Nuñez La fille mal gardée. But we watched older ones as well, I vividly remember a Bolshoi Don Quixote with Nadezha Pavlova, and some of those Best of the Kirov/Bolshoi tapes. Those have stuck with me over the years, even after I've stopped dancing. There were lots of books involved too. My Mum passed down some of Lorna Hill's ballet books to me, and I had Ballet Shoes as an audio tape to listen to when I went to sleep, alongside other Noel Streatfeild books. 
 

Similarly to you Dawnstar I was into musicals first. In 2014 my Great-Aunt (a long time patron of the Birmingham Hippodrome), found out I wanted to see a musical, and took me to see Wicked at the Hippodrome. It was only really in 2019 that I realised that I could just be out watching ballet, and that it wasn't something that was very expensive and only for rich people (that was why my dance teacher never took us to see anything). 
 

Then lockdown hit, and I couldn't go and see anything, but I found more up to date recordings. I also got interested in ballet history (I'm a history student), and started collecting theatre memorabilia and old dance books. When the time finally came for theatres to open up again last October, I went to see Romeo and Juliet at the Hippodrome, the place where I saw my first musical. 
 

Now I've booked for Northern Ballet's Casanova in March, and am hoping to book to see the Royal's Ashton Bill in April. I'll be going to Uni in a bigger city in September, so I'm hoping better train links can take me around the country to see lots more ballet. 

[zxDaveM]

16 minutes ago, Jan McNulty said:

So you could almost say my love of ballet had its roots in a racehorse called Nijinsky!!

 

 

ah - Nijinsky, the last winner of the English triple crown in 1970 (as well as the Irish Derby and Ascot's King George & Queen Elizabeth Stakes). And he should have won the Prix de L'Arc in Paris too

[Beryl H]

The very first step was hearing The Nutcracker on LP at home, finding out Tchaikovsky wrote 3 ballets and buying Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, wanting to see how they danced to the beautiful music, then going to see Swan Lake in 1965 at the ROH, the fact that Margot Fonteyn danced Odette/Odile at my first ballet amazes me now.

 

 

 

 

[DanJL]

My first experience was seeing the Kirov ballet (as it was called then) perform Romeo and Juliet at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff. This was in 2005, relatively soon after the Millennium Centre opened and during a phase when I was making the most of the wide range of shows programmed there. I absolutely loved it and resolved to see more ballet. Although no obvious opportunities appeared (I didn't actively seek any out in fairness) and my future partner didn't have a particular interest, so it was a decade before I took the next step! 

 

One of my long running passions is the work of Virginia Woolf. As a consequence, I was intrigued by the idea of a ballet based on her work. I went to see Woolf Works in 2015 and was completely blown away by everything I experienced - the music, the dancing and (particularly in the first and third acts) the incredible way the choreography got to the heart of Woolf's writing. I was also enormously impressed by the way Alessandra Ferri expressed emotion in her dancing - I didn't realise that was possible before. 

 

In the following few years I tried to find time to experience a little more ballet - BRB's Nutcracker (handy for me as my family are from Birmingham) and the Bolshoi's Swan (I think in 2016). Then followed by another viewing of Woolf Works when it was revived in 2017.

 

Unfortunately from a personal point of view, I separated from my partner in December 2017. However, in looking for things to fill my extra spare time I found out about the Royal Ballet and Bolshoi cinema relays. I attended a few and loved them all. But was very disappointed that I had a work meeting scheduled in London on the day of the Winters Tale relay, which I'd been particularly looking forward to. Eventually I realised that I could take the opportunity to see it in person! Another wonderful experience and this time I was really hooked.

 

I gradually increased the frequency of visits until I got to the point of enjoying Sleeping Beauty so much that I went back four times for different casts. 

 

If anything, the pandemic increased my desire to see more and more ballet - through both streamings and watching many dancers experiences on Instagram. Now I just need to try not to bankrupt myself with all the trips to London! 

 

 

[Dawnstar]

1 hour ago, Jan McNulty said:

We had a night in London on our way on holiday a couple of months later and there was nothing on in the West End that we hadn't already seen or wanted to see but LFB were performing Onegin at the Coliseum.  It was 26th May 1984 and the rest, as the saying goes, is history!

 

Some years later I re-looked at the programme and realised why I had been so blown away - we had seen Marcia Haydee (who created the role of Tatiana) and Richard Cragun!!!

 

Coincidentally Dawnstar, the first time I went to the Royal Opera House it was to see Mayerling.  Derek Deane danced Rudolf.  A couple of years later we visited Vienna on holiday and went on a coach trip to Mayerling because of having seen the ballet.

 

So you could almost say my love of ballet had its roots in a racehorse called Nijinsky!!

 

(I've never had any sort of dance lesson in my life)

 

That sounds a bit like me then, that you'd already seen other ballets but it took a particular one to really blow you away.

 

So you did Mayerling sort of the opposite way around to how I did it, ballet then tourism. We were suposed to go to Vienna on holiday in May 2020, which would have been my first visit there, but obviously covid intervened.

 

I probably should have said the same. At least, I tried a few months of ballet lessons in the village hall when I was about 6 but when I found out how long it would take to get on pointe I gave up.

 

54 minutes ago, zxDaveM said:

I think there are several threads on this in the past - but never hurts to resurrect the idea for those that have joined more recently, I reckon. 🙂

 

For me - Miyako Yoshida as SPF on telly - inspired me to see her live (in Giselle). Duly hooked

What keeps me coming now - Yasmine Naghdi

 

As no-one said "That's been done already" in response to my post on the R&J thread I hoped it would be alright. Was that the BRB telecast from 1994? I remember watching that but, age 9, it was Sandra Madgwick as Clara who I was impressed by. Not that I ever saw her live.

 

54 minutes ago, MaddieRose said:

There were lots of books involved too. My Mum passed down some of Lorna Hill's ballet books to me, and I had Ballet Shoes as an audio tape to listen to when I went to sleep, alongside other Noel Streatfeild books. 
 

Similarly to you Dawnstar I was into musicals first. In 2014 my Great-Aunt (a long time patron of the Birmingham Hippodrome), found out I wanted to see a musical, and took me to see Wicked at the Hippodrome. It was only really in 2019 that I realised that I could just be out watching ballet, and that it wasn't something that was very expensive and only for rich people (that was why my dance teacher never took us to see anything).

 

Oh yes, I didn't really think about ballet books but I read Ballet Shoes and the Drina books as a child then Lorna Hill in my late teens when some of them were reprinted. Its thanks to the mentions in those books that I'd like to see certain ballets from the mid-20th century, such as Checkmate and Job.

 

Wicked was the first West End musical I fell for. I saw it an embarassing number of times in 2007-8! I supose I was fortunate that because I'd already been going to opera at the ROH for years that I didn't have any worries about going there for ballet. Though ironically, given the opera prices are higher than the ballet ones, I'm finding I'm spending more on ballet tickets because its easier to watch opera from restircted view seats than ballet.

 

35 minutes ago, Beryl H said:

The very first step was hearing The Nutcracker on LP at home, finding out Tchaikovsky wrote 3 ballets and buying Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, wanting to see how they danced to the beautiful music, then going to see Swan Lake in 1965 at the ROH, the fact that Margot Fonteyn danced Odette/Odile at my first ballet amazes me now.

 

Starting with Fonteyn must make it difficult for the following ballet watching to live up to that! Your mention of recordings reminds me that about 20 years ago I heard Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet Fantasy Overture and spent a lot of time looking for a recording of the entire score before I realised with disappointment that he only wrote an overture!

[bridiem]

I had ballet lessons for a few years when I was small (or at least young...); my career highlight was playing Jack in Jack and Jill (maybe there were no boys in our class - I can't remember) so presumably I had carte blanche to fall over. Anyway I pretty soon stopped, and I don't know if the ballet classes influenced me, but I always loved Noel Streatfeild books especially the ballet elements, and The Ballet Family by Mabel Esther Allan. Although we lived in London we never went to ballet, so my introduction was on television - I saw Maximova in The Nutcracker in the mid 1970s and was absolutely fascinated by her shoes/feet; and then I saw a documentary about Anthony Dowell (All the Superlatives) and was completely knocked out by his beauty, grace and expressiveness. Then I realised I could actually go to a live performance!! So by the time I did that, I'd already fallen in love with ballet. My first performance (in 1977) was the Royal Ballet in Enigma Variations, Symphonic Variations and Les Noces - talk about lucky. It was the night when Ashton had been awarded the Order of Merit, so he came on and did one of his famous curtain calls. I was just beside myself with excitement about every aspect of the evening - the ballet, the music, the sets and costumes, the beauty and thrill of it all. And somehow, even when all I had was a very small amount of pocket money and then a Saturday job, I managed to go to the ballet all the time from then on (as a Junior Associate there were big reductions at the ROH then, but even so I can't quite understand how I managed it!). Anthony Dowell continued to be my 'first love', quickly joined by Lesley Collier, David Wall and so many others of that generation. And I've never looked back...

 

I really give thanks for the role ballet has played and continues to play in my life; and for all the wonderful people who have given me so much joy.

[Jan McNulty]

40 minutes ago, Dawnstar said:

 

As no-one said "That's been done already" in response to my post on the R&J thread I hoped it would be alright. Was that the BRB telecast from 1994? I remember watching that but, age 9, it was Sandra Madgwick as Clara who I was impressed by. Not that I ever saw her live.

 

 

 

I was very fortunate to see Sandra Madgwick dancing many times and I just loved watching her - she was so neat and English in style (I now realise although I didn't at the time).

[Ian Macmillan]

Simple - getting to know a former RB dancer, by then a long-established teacher and RAD examiner, and now Mrs M.

[Blossom]

I started taking ballet classes at the age of 6/7 at my insistence and a couple of years later my grandma started to take me to the ballet- she was a huge balletomane. 
 

I grew up in Manchester so mostly saw English National Ballet and Northern Ballet and remember seeing most of the classics in addition to Alice in Wonderland and something Christopher Dean had choreographed.  
 

After heading off to university things tailed off a bit as it was too expensive/no youth access programmes and then when I started working in London I was simply time poor and never thought to go on my own, then had small kids I couldn’t leave. 
 

Once they were all of school age I started to focus on myself a bit more! The first ballet I saw was Le Corsaire by ENB at the Coliseum back in 2015/16 and I slowly started to discover what was on at the ROH, starting small by only choosing a few productions a year. I was generally going on my own, but the last Jan which ENB performed Giselle, I invited a new friend to join me and we were a very bad influence on each other and started to see everything together!

 

She unfortunately emigrated in July 2020 and combined with Covid only allowing households to sit together, my eldest daughter has become my most frequent companion. Because there hasn’t been so much ballet since March 2020 I’ve been taking her to lots more in terms of musicals too. She has been bitten by the theatre bug and as she is almost 15 she now wants to encourage her friends to go and see more with her (definitely my mini me!). 
 

My husband is not a ballet fan and was seemingly done after Nutcracker and Dante Project but having played the playlist for Forsythe’s Playlist and shown him some clips online I now have a 3rd attempt to show that ballet can be diverse and interesting and trying to see if I can entice a few more friends along.

[alison]

It was my godmother who started it, taking me to a London Festival Ballet Nutcracker at the Royal Festival Hall, and also The Tales of Beatrix Potter in the cinema.  Fast-forward another decade or so, and I went to see a few ballets at the local theatre while at uni, and London City Ballet when they came to my local theatre.  But the real kick was joining a discount scheme - no longer in existence, as far as I know - aimed at encouraging young people to take an interest in the performing arts (certainly worked for me!).  One of the perks was standbys at the Royal Opera House, so, dressed in my very best dress and hoping I wouldn't be denied entrance for not being smart enough, I went up there in trepidation and got a standby for Ondine.  (And immediately realised that it wasn't nearly as posh as I'd thought!)  And then La Bayadère ... Sleeping Beauty ... La Fille Mal Gardée (which left me wanting to go and watch it all through again immediately!)  The downside of the scheme was that you couldn't take anyone with you unless you could persuade them to sign up, which I never could, so I decided I'd just have to go on my own, or not at all.  It certainly helped that for 20-odd years wherever I worked was always within about 10 minutes' walk of the ROH - and that there was a very enthusiastic Information Officer in the box office who could convince you that just about anything was worth investigating   I also started going to Sadler's Wells, The Place and watching contemporary dance as well as ballet.  But I think it was the forerunner to the original Ballet.co site which really did the damage, by convincing me that not only did I need to do more than just ticking off a ballet (or a production of a ballet) from the list, but I needed to see different dancers in the same ballets (strange idea, huh?) - and maybe even multiple performances by the same dancer in the same ballet(!)

[MJW]

In 2014, a colleague/friend's husband (who then worked for one of the larger telecoms companies) phoned her at work to say that his company was offering some form of staff discount to go to Covent Garden to see the ballet, and did she want to go? The husband said he didn't want to, but despite never previously having had even an inkling of a desire to go to the ballet, I said I wouldn't mind if she wanted to.

 

I looked into it. and booked us both to see the Nutcracker just  after Christmas 2014. It was at that production (with Nunez and Soares) that I caught the Ballet Bug, and haven't looked back since!

 

 

[ninamargaret]

Started ballet classes when I was about 4. I wasn't well and the GP thought it would be a good way to meet other children. I kept on with lessons and.loved pictures of dancers. Not much on tv in the late 40s, but I was lucky to have a godmother who was theatre/ballet minded and saw my first 'real'  ballet in the early 50s. Festival Ballet, as it was then, followed by Sadlers Wells touring. 

[Dawnstar]

25 minutes ago, alison said:

But I think it was the forerunner to the original Ballet.co site which really did the damage, by convincing me that not only did I need to do more than just ticking off a ballet (or a production of a ballet) from the list, but I needed to see different dancers in the same ballets (strange idea, huh?) - and maybe even multiple performances by the same dancer in the same ballet(!)

 

I haven't got to that stage yet - assuming you mean seeing the same dancer multiple times during one run rather than in different runs over the years - as there are already more casts than I can manage to see in most runs. Presumably when/if one does get to that stage it's considered the highest level of ballet watching obsession!

[Rob S]

Although I liked the imagery of ballet, photos, Degas paintings etc I'd never seen much actual dancing other than the odd clip you'd see on mainstream telly but in 2016 I spotted a trailer for Tamara Rojo's Good Swan, Bad Swan (filmed in 2014) on BBC4 and decided to record it. Unlike most of my recordings I watched it pretty soon after the time of the broadcast and when they showed a clip of Swan Lake in the round at the Albert Hall I paused it and googled it and saw that it was being performed there again so decided to book a ticket and then watched the rest of the documentary.

I enjoyed the performance and booked a ticket for another one a few days later but wasn't well enough to go. About six months later I noticed a small Russian touring company was visiting the decent local theatre that I regularly see plays at so booked to see Swan Lake....it was quite sweet and then got a ticket for their Nutcracker a few days later. I think I still have hearing damage from the landing the Prince made after one of his jumps.

I decided it was time to see a great Swan Lake on blu ray so got the Osipova/Golding RB one and REALLY enjoyed it. At this point I should've just bought the 22 ballet boxset but bought all the ones with Tamara in and then over the next year bought and watched loads more. I heard a new production of Swan Lake was coming so bought ticket a for that with a couple of Manon performances as a warm up. I saw one La Bayadere and three Mayerlings but after finding out about Stalls Circle Standing places in time to see Unknown Soldier/Infra/SIC seeing multiple performances became a regular thing.

[zxDaveM]

3 hours ago, Dawnstar said:

 

As no-one said "That's been done already" in response to my post on the R&J thread I hoped it would be alright. Was that the BRB telecast from 1994? I remember watching that but, age 9, it was Sandra Madgwick as Clara who I was impressed by. Not that I ever saw her live.

 

 

No, it was with the Royal Ballet in the very late 90's, maybe first year of this century, dancing with Jonathan Cope. I'd missed most of it, and was channel hopping on the bedroom TV whilst the rest of the family watched Endybenders. I caught the start of the grande pdd and was transfixed 🙂

[alison]

5 hours ago, Dawnstar said:

 

I haven't got to that stage yet - assuming you mean seeing the same dancer multiple times during one run rather than in different runs over the years - as there are already more casts than I can manage to see in most runs. Presumably when/if one does get to that stage it's considered the highest level of ballet watching obsession!

 

Nah - going to see every single performance in a run and travelling abroad to watch ballet, at least, both rank higher

[LinMM]

Thanks for starting this Dawnstar but my ballet story ....telling a tale from 7-74 ...is somewhat long so am going to have to find a way of doing some pretty good editing before posting ...not exactly one of my strong points!! 

[ctas]

I was indoctrinated at an early age; baby ballet lessons, being taken to Covent Garden is one of my earliest memories. @AnneL (my mum) is probably the more interesting story and it was her love of ballet that got passed on to me! 

[Richard LH]

Watching the BBC documentary "Dancing The Nutcracker" featuring Francesca Hayward and Alexander Campbell (coached by the wonderful Leslie Collier). This led to seeing those two in Giselle in early 2018 (also Francesca as Perdita in The Winter's Tale) after which I was truly hooked.

[Diandri]

In autumn 1992 I saw the poster of Irek Mukhamedov as Rudolf in Mayerling at my local tube station & was fascinated by it (at aged 15); I managed to get a cheap stalls ticket to the additional matinee put on following MacMillan's sudden death & I was hooked. 

[Emeralds]

On 25/01/2022 at 19:41, zxDaveM said:

 

No, it was with the Royal Ballet in the very late 90's, maybe first year of this century, dancing with Jonathan Cope. I'd missed most of it, and was channel hopping on the bedroom TV whilst the rest of the family watched Endybenders. I caught the start of the grande pdd and was transfixed 🙂

That is a wonderful performance and recording- with Alina Cojocaru as Clara!  One of the best introductions one can have. Miyako, for me, is the patron saint of all Sugar Plum Fairies ever. There are many who are impressive, memorable, gorgeous, or all three, in the role too, but for me, when Miyako comes on stage or on one’s tv as SPF, it makes everything in the world all right and at peace for as long as she is dancing. Truly remarkable how she did it. Ahh. 

[Fiz]

Seeing the picture of the pink Degas dancers on my father’s collection of Tchaikovsky records and then hearing his music. I think I must have seen ballet on Blue Peter but I didn’t see any live ballet until I was about nine and then not till our dds were learning ballet. 

[FLOSS]

Here is a condensed version of what I wrote a long time ago when I first joined the forum. One of the reasons that I became a ballet goer was that I was not taken to see the Nutcracker when I was a child. I always suspect that if I had been exposed to Nutcracker as a child or to any ballet set to music by Minkus I would have been put off ballet for life. The lack of  a Nutcracker or Minkus  experience meant that I had no preconceived ideas about what were appropriate subjects for ballets; what they should look like or sound like. Having innocent ears and eyes is, it seems to me, a great advantage when encountering ballets set to major twentieth scores by composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I was taken to the ballet for the first time when I was in my mid teens by an honorary aunt who took me to see a mixed bill performed by Ballet Rambert which at that time was in the process of becoming a contemporary dance company but still had significant early works in its active repertory. I know that I saw Tudor's Judgement of Paris on that occasion and  I think Pierrot Lunaire with Christopher Bruce was also on the bill. I came away from that performance thinking that ballet was a very good thing indeed. Not long after that I encountered Tudor's Dark Elegies and was equally impressed with it. Anyone who saw the two Tudor works at the company's celebration of his birth will probably be astounded that either work  was capable of making such a profound impression on anyone. All I can say is that what was shown in London in 2009 were, to be polite about them, pale imitations of the works which Tudor had created.( If you were  disappointed by Rambert's  performances to mark Tudor's centennial and wonder why he is held in such high regard please see post).

 

After my Rambert experience I  tried to see everything I could regardless of the company. The Royal Ballet Touring Company came to Oxford and I went to see them. I found out that if you went to the Wednesday schools' matinee you came into contact with old repertory like The Lady and the Fool, Pineapple Poll,The Rake's Progress and Les Patineurs. I worked out how to get tickets for Covent Garden and I went to see LFB at the Coliseum all the while collecting ballets  in the same way as I was collecting operas and trying to work my way through the Shakespeare canon. 

 

The 1960's and  70's seem almost unreal today. It was a totally different cultural world.In those days rather than living in a perpetual present companies seemed very conscious of the development over the previous fifty years and the debt they owed to  Diaghilev. Perhaps it was the exhibition to mark the twentieth fifth anniversary of Diaghilev's death which prompted the interest and the introspection or perhaps it was the deaths of some if those involved with his company which had this effect but at a time of tremendous creativity and the creation of major works a company like the Royal Ballet was able to find time in its studios and performance schedules to stage major works by Fokine and Nikinska. The works of the past were not seen as they often seem to be today merely a means of making money. Staging the great works of the recent past was not , at that time, a resented chore. The recent past was as exciting and compelling as the present and the present at that time was very exciting with Ashton and MacMillan both making major works, Cranko in Stuttgart making important works which the company brought to London and Balanchine and Robbins making exciting new works in New York. Choreographers appeared on television and on the third programe to talk about their own work and the great works of the past and then of course there were dancers who were household names plenty of whom appeared in London and many who were to be seen in Bow Street.The Royal Ballet was not the one dancer company it largely became to the general public in the 1990's. It was the company of Fonteyn and Nureyev  but equally it was  the company of Sibley, Dowell, Park, Wall, Seymour,Jenner, Penney, Mason, Coleman and MacLeary.

 

Ballet, opera and theatre were more available to ordinary people then they are today. Touring arrangements meant there was a lot more ballet, opera and theatre available to the general public and whether you were in London or the provinces the arts were  genuinely accessible and affordable. State subsidy for the arts had not become the political football it has become largely because it was difficult to argue that the average worker was being asked to subsidise the pastimes of the social elite because company's toured; ticket prices were low and there was an audience. State subsidy meant that experimenting and finding that you did not like a particular art form, work, composer or choreographer was not the costly experience it is today. I know that this sounds very paternalistic and almost like nanny state but the postwar consensus about society which included the radical idea that the arts were good for you and should be made accessible to those who wanted them regardless of class was still very much in place. The popular press did not think there was any mileage in  pushing the pernicious idea that elite arts were only for the toffs and of course the big names from the pioneering days of ballet in this country were still alive, vigorous and vocal. Ballet was one of the arts and was covered in the arts columns. Journalists were expected to take it seriously and it was covered as art rather than showbiz. Peter Wright's new production of The Sleeping Beauty (1968) got acres of coverage, Oleg Kerensky devoted several paragraphs in the Listener to the unsuitability of the bell shaped tutus which da Nobili had designed for it. The BBC took its duty to inform, entertain and educate very seriously. it showed the occasional ballet performance even ITV chipped in with the odd performance and in the early 1970's it showed a series of half hour programmes about the development of ballet which I think was base on Brinson's Ballet For All educational programmes. It had David Blair as its presenter and used dancers from the Touring Company.

 

 

Tudor Centennial and Reputation a Footnote. 

Neither of the Tudor ballets which I saw all those years ago looked remotely like the disappointingly anaemic accounts of them which Rambert served up at the time of the choreographer's centenary. In those early performances of fifty years ago the dancers conjured up characters and emotional states from the choreography but then those dancers had the benefit of working in the context of an unbroken chain of transmission. They had a real feel for what Tudor had set out to achieve with those works; what seemed like an innate understanding of who each of the characters in the ballets were; what they should look like physically;how they would move and what motivated them. Both works were described by Rambert as "Chamber ballets" but while I think that the new Sadler's Wells might be a bit too big for them I don't think that so much should have got lost in performance. The Judgement of Paris is a darkly comic take on the myth in which the action is set in a  seedy, low bar rather than Mount Ida, Paris is not a Trojan prince but the sole customer in a the bar. The three goddesses of the myth transformed into three bored, predatory worn out hostesses all of whom have seen better days attempt to entertain the man who gets increasingly drunk until he passes out at which point the waiter and the women swoop on him strip him of his money and his valuables before he is kicked out

 

.Dark Elegies on the other hand is a profoundly moving work in which Tudor portrays a group of parents in a small community whose children have died. As they are depicting ordinary people the dancers' movements should look heavy and grounded  rather than light and dance- like,additionally their sense of loss and desolation adds greater weight to their movements as each in their own unique way expresses emotions for which they have  no words and for which, perhaps, there are none . Sadly no one in those centennial performances managed to do justice to the quality of Tudor' s unique artistic and theatrical imagination,his choreography or his ability to evoke mood and raw emotion from plastique and simple movement. Everyone involved, regardless of the character they were supposed to be portraying, remained looking like the lithe athletic dancers they were. I accept that the aesthetic, the tone and the vocabulary of these works are alien to dancers today because they don't emphasise  technical ability and treat technique as a means to an end rather than en end in itself but whoever staged those ballets failed to kindle in the casts that imaginative empathy which makes an old work live as a compelling piece of theatre. That failure could be for any number of reasons from resistance from the dancers to lack of adequate rehearsal time, Tudor's works require extensive periods of rehearsal if they are to work in performance.The fact is that these revivals did the choreographer and his reputation a grave disservice, as for

 many those performances may be the only  occasion on which they encounter the choreographer and his works and pn the basis of what they saw they are unlikely to be tempted to seek out other works by him.

[AnneL]

On 26/01/2022 at 13:13, ctas said:

I was indoctrinated at an early age; baby ballet lessons, being taken to Covent Garden is one of my earliest memories. @AnneL (my mum) is probably the more interesting story and it was her love of ballet that got passed on to me! 

So I suppose I should tell my story! However I am not sure where it began. I did ballet class as a young child, but didn’t stay with it all that long. I do remember loving being on stage in the annual show and I still have the blue and green tutu I wore aged five (I was a bluebell!) I guess I must have been exposed to ballet on television- in the ‘60s we only had 3 channels and I am pretty sure it was mentioned on shows like Blue Peter. Fonteyn and Nureyev were A list celebrities and household names, we all knew about them. So I pestered my mother to take me to the ballet and she chose the Royal Ballet because she thought it must be the best. We went to the Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden 2 days before my ninth birthday.  Mum saved up for stalls seats because of my poor eyesight. Anyway, that was it - I fell in love with ballet that afternoon, watching Nadia Nerina as Aurora, and Christopher Gable as her prince. I still remember the impact the bluebird pdd had on me that day, and the Act 1 waltz. But really the whole thing - it was love at first sight.
Over the next few years Mum took me to The Festival Ballet Nutcracker and Swan Lake and more shows at the ROH, including Fonteyn and Nureyev in Giselle. My favourites were Sibley and Dowell who we saw in The Dream and in Cinderella. I started reading ballet books - fiction and non- fiction- and by my early teens was reading Dancing Times to see what was coming next season and book ahead. I started to enjoy mixed bills and all the less obvious stuff!
Mum continued to be my companion until her death, and before then we were joined by my daughters. However I do go on my own sometimes, notably a Don Quixote in 2013 which got me back into the ROH  habit after a gap of about 10 years. ( I did see ballet at Sadlers Wells, Coliseum etc in that time). I am glad to have had a lifelong interest in ballet and seen so many amazing dancers and memorable performances! 

[maryrosesatonapin]

On 25/01/2022 at 17:19, Jan McNulty said:

 

 

I was very fortunate to see Sandra Madgwick dancing many times and I just loved watching her - she was so neat and English in style (I now realise although I didn't at the time).

I just loved her!  My partner and I still talk about her from time to time.  So unassuming, not flashy, not spectacular - but adorable and as you say, neat and very English.

[maryrosesatonapin]

I was brought up in a religious cult that didn't allow me to go to the theatre (or even read novels or listen to recorded music) but my schoolfriend went to a local ballet school for little girls and once I was old enough to escape, she took me to see 'Swan Lake' by the London Festival Ballet.  From then on I was hooked.  A couple of years later I did the same to my new (and still) partner, and he became addicted too.  Since then we have seen most of the great dancers of our time, and travelled to Russia and other places (especially in the eighties when not so many people did) and the addiction became stronger!  Sometimes I wish we were old enough to have seen Fonteyn... but then we'd probably be dead by now 😁

[Jan McNulty]

Gosh MR, that lovely.

 

I'd not long been a ballet watcher and had joined the Friends of LFB when the company was invited to perform in Moscow and the Friends organised a trip to tie in with that.

 

Unfortunately, Chernobyl happened and the company didn't go but we had already travelled.  Some people elected to come home and some of us stayed.  For me, it was one of the best holidays I have ever had (and I have been very lucky to enjoy some amazing holidays!).  We didn't see LFB but we did see the Mariinsky in what was still Leningrad and the Mali (whom I think may now be the Mikhailovsky as well as the Boshoi and other performances in Moscow.  When I got back to work my colleagues pretended (for months) that their staplers were Geiger counters!!!  The friend I had travelled with worked for BNFL at the time and took her jacket in to work to be tested.  Her colleagues laughed at her because the radiation had been worse over here than it was where we had been in Russia!

 

Another truly fabulous holiday was to Copenhagen in 2005 to see the Bournonville Festival when the whole city seemed to have gone ballet mad!!

 

In terms of our home companies I have seen NB in Istanbul and Thessaloniki and BRB in Hong Kong and Munich.

[Meetmeatthebarre]

Defining moment #1: I am not sure what sparked my original love, but I recall asking my parents to start ballet classes, which I did for a few years as a child. We were a fairly poor but well-educated first generation Asian immigrant family, living in a provincial town, with no love for the arts and a limited budget - I remember being sent to dance classes with a "Minnie Mouse" puffy dress for a year, because my parents both could not see the difference between those and a leotard, and could consider spending the money on one. I distinctly recall my parents asking me to switch to music at one of my birthday parties, being presented with a keyboard, and being told that there were more people who looked like us in music than dance.

 

Defining moment #2: Around then, in high school, I discovered a book about life at White Lodge in the library. I must have read it a hundred times through. Partly the forbidden art and partly, having grown up so differently from my parents, I fantasised about going to boarding school, and delving into dance. I wasn't to dance again for another decade (though my piano progressed, and at one point, auditioning for the conservatoires including Julliard was on the cards; I also did end up boarding for sixth form after winning a scholarship to a fantastic school). I focused on academics and early career. 

 

Defining moment #3: At the age of 21, with my own job and salary in London, I had still never seen any live performance of classical music or ballet. I threw myself into it, buying up the cheap tickets at the ROH. My first ever ballet was Serenade in 2008, and I believe that Alexandra Ansanelli was the first "live" dancer I saw; I was to become a huge fan of hers at stage door, and I organised her leaving flower throw.  (It was... not good. I have no aim. The carnations stuck to each other. Many clumps. Orchestra pit decimated.) Swan Lake with Tamara and Carlos the next year left me in tears at the beauty of the choreo, and I met fellow balletomanes whom I still consider close friends to this day, sobbing at stage door.

 

Defining moment #4: Laura Morera's Tatiana in Onegin in 2013 taught me subtlety and carriage, started me seeing multiple casts for the same production, and inspired me to go back to a once-weekly ballet class! Unfortunately I was moved with work abroad just after for five years, where classes were extremely hard to find.

 

Defining moment #5: Back in London in 2019, I hoovered up ballet classes, started back on vocational syllabus within months, before the pandemic. I now dance close to 10 hours per week in class and have surpassed my childhood self by miles, taking Advanced 1 and rep classes; and having the vocabulary (and sometimes, technique) to appreciate/dance the roles I see has enhanced my appreciation further. I recognise the artistry more; I apply it to my own dancing. And whilst it is a double-edged sword - I don't enjoy every interpretation as much as I might have with fresh eyes - the performances where everything is perfect lift me to highs I could never have appreciated before. And I'm glad for it!

[LinMM]

Watching ballet and doing ballet are pretty much intertwined for me but the doing long preceded the watching! 

Although I started ballet (and tap) at age 7 after going to watch a friend in her ballet class ( RAD syllabus was followed then)  I didn’t see any performed until about the age of 10 when for a few years was taken by an Auntie to the annual Richmond Theatre pantomime where there were some little dance scenes in which I loved but first proper ballet visit was the 1960 RAD gala at Drury Lane when I was 12. 
I (with a lot of help from Auntie) got loads of autographs of famous dancers at that performance : Fonteyn ( pre Nureyev) Michael Soames Robert Helpmann The Tallchief sisters Alicia Markova and others! That was the first time I saw Fonteyn when she danced an extract from Firebird. 
Then in terms of Watching a big gap until in my early 20’s when I moved to London aged 24 and started ballet lessons again ( having given up the first time just before 15th birthday😥) 

I did see a very early incarnation of Northern Ballet at Port Sunlight hall on the Wirral when they were Northern Dance Theatre before moving to London though. I had eight school kids with me and primarily remember this experience because they danced all the way back into Liverpool ( well wherever they could lol) 

Between 1973 and 1984 was my main theatre going and amateur ballet performing days and when I found my main ballet mentor in Roger Tully. I also owe huge debt to Thelma Litster ex Rambert dancer who gave us wide ranging opportunities to perform from the Purcell Room and Commonwealth Institute to Old peoples Homes around Chelsea and Westminster. 

Back then the old Covent Garden flower market was still there next to the Opera House and you could stand for 50p!! They sometimes kept the queue waiting (which queued up outside the theatre in those days) until the very last minute not selling tickets till 7pm!! But spent hours in queues to see in everything they did ..Fonteyn and Nureyev, or Sibley and Dowell and remember Merle Park being especially good as Raymonda! But too many dancers to mention here.
This was my time for going to multiple performances to see different casts etc. I’m sure I was at either ROH the Coli or Sadlers Wells every other night at one point and I did attend a lot of First Nights back then of well known ballets today of mostly either Macmillan or Ashton

I also booked to see anything Wayne Eagling was in as had a bit of a crush on him for a while lol!
Other standout dancers from that era were Beriosova , Lynn Seymour and Lesley Collier Jennifer Penney ( loved her in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune) Laura Connor and Marguerite Porter.  
 

I made some good friends in those queues some of which are still friends today! 
One of those friends worked at the Coliseum for a while so I was lucky enough to get a chance to do some ‘dressing” of the corps de ballet and this involved the other main London Company London Festival Ballet when Beryl Grey was the Director. So saw a lot of their performances in this period too and goodness knows how many Nutcrackers ( also when at Festival Hall a terrible stage for dancers at that time) It’s not every day you realise Nureyev or Evdokimova ( wonderful dancer) is standing directly behind you in the wings so definitely very heady days! After some performances to name but a few like Nureyev and Fonteyn in Marguerite and Armand,  a visit by the terrific Bejart Company or the Bolshoi, Makarova in both Giselle and Swan lake, Baryshnikov in Fille mal Gardee and ( towards the end of his career) Nureyev in Songs of a Wayfarer with Italian Dancer Paolo Bortoluzzi I used to walk all the way home ( about three to four miles) in my enthusiasm afterwards! 
 

Then I had another long gap from both  doing ballet ( was exploring other dance styles for a while)  and not nearly so much theatre going after 1985 (devastated when Alessandra Ferri left for America) but missed a lot of Darcey Bussells career and only saw Cojocaru a few times. Moving out of London didn’t help but it was when I took up ballet yet again at 63 the year before retiring ( and reunited with original mentor who was still teaching in his 90’s!) that renewed desire to go more often to see performances re surfaced and so the last ten years brings things into the current era where there are so many good dancers to see. I won’t get back to the almost every night phase of way back in 70’s and 80’s  but enjoy seeing just one or two casts but from much better seats today!
And next one up is Fumi Kaneko and Frederico Bonelli in Swan Lake so very much looking forward to that! 
 

 

[Dawnstar]

That sounds like you had the most amazing time in the 70s & 80s @LinMM!