Royal Ballet Announces 2022/23 Season

[Guest oncnp]

2 minutes ago, bridiem said:

 

Makes you wonder if the three world premières are all going to be very short - ?! Sounds odd.

 

or more than one program?

[Mary]

So, more like a gala then, perhaps?

[JNC]

14 minutes ago, Mary said:

So, more like a gala then, perhaps?

A gala would be more enticing but then why not advertise it as such? 
 

I did wonder why they didn’t do something like the Spring Gala due to take place in 2020 which would have been a night of opera/ballet short works. 
 

even as a non-opera goer I would find that an enticing prospect! 

[bangorballetboy]

I seem to remember seeing Herman Schmerman as part of the RB's Dance Bites tour in Cambridge in the mid 1990s, with Darcey Bussell dancing the Guillem role.  That was the Dance Bites tour with Sarah Wildor shouldering her leg on the poster (which then hung on the wall in my college room for the rest of my time there!).

[Mary]

I saw that. RB -or a small detachment anyway- even appeared at Cambridge Guildhall once, maybe even twice - not the best venue for dance- after the Big Top days. I remember a piece where they wore some kind of weird space suits, which i think had long springs dangling from them ( is this true or am I dreaming) but can't recall what it was....

[bangorballetboy]

14 minutes ago, Mary said:

I saw that. RB -or a small detachment anyway- even appeared at Cambridge Guildhall once, maybe even twice - not the best venue for dance- after the Big Top days. I remember a piece where they wore some kind of weird space suits, which i think had long springs dangling from them ( is this true or am I dreaming) but can't recall what it was....

 

It was the Corn Exchange when I saw Dance Bites (January 1995, I think).

[capybara]

11 minutes ago, bangorballetboy said:

 

It was the Corn Exchange when I saw Dance Bites (January 1995, I think).

 

Yes!

[Jan McNulty]

1 hour ago, bangorballetboy said:

I seem to remember seeing Herman Schmerman as part of the RB's Dance Bites tour in Cambridge in the mid 1990s, with Darcey Bussell dancing the Guillem role.  That was the Dance Bites tour with Sarah Wildor shouldering her leg on the poster (which then hung on the wall in my college room for the rest of my time there!).

 

I saw this in Blackpool (at the Grand) and it was Deborah Bull!

[Mary]

Do you moderators have supersonic memories or do you write it all down?!

 

OK yes it was the Corn Exchange, thanks -   and I thought it was Bussell and Wildor but, I saw them there 2 or 3 times....what golden days when we had Dance Bites.

[FLOSS]

I don't think that I have felt this before but it seems to me that the ballet programme announced for the 2022-23 season is aimed at two very distinct audiences, something which has not seemed quite so obvious in the past. One is an audience  which it sometimes seems Kevin might prefer to lose but it is the one the company needs to keep it afloat financially the other is an audience more interested in the shiny new present and the future than the past. The problem is that the latter audience which Kevin seems so keen to attract has a natural home in Islington  and is unlikely to be attracted  by the lean contemporary pickings available in Bow Street. The danger is that if Kevin increases the number of performances he allocates to contemporary works many of which seem lacklustre and intended for smaller spaces he is likely to lose some of his regular ballet audience particularly as so little quality control seems to be exercised over the new works the company stages .Perhaps Kevin needs to come to terms with the fact that few of the new works which have been commissioned during the past fifteen years or so have proved to be of lasting interest. The list of duds is longer than it should have been. I think that at the root of the problem is that the company seems to give every choreographer it commissions the sort of respect only due to experienced  choreographers with a proven track record who clearly know what they are doing. I can't help thinking that a little more intervention on the part of management might have spared us some of the choreographic duds we have been asked to endure over recent years. I wish I could forget Strapless,The Wind, Medusa, As One, Rushes, Corybantic Games, Hansel and Gretel and all those aimless, seemingly structureless, choreographic doodles  by the likes of Alistair Marriott being passed off as abstract ballets. The recognition that not everyone who can put steps together in a pleasing manner has a real grasp of structure or a developed sense of theatrical impact particularly in the early years of their career would be a good place to start.

 

While I welcome the return of Ashton's Cinderella  after a gap of twelve years  I find Kevin's choice of repertory depressingly limited in its range and the number of performances allocated to all four established repertory pieces somewhat excessive. I am sure that the company needs them but does the audience really need 15 Mayerlings. 31 Nutcrackers,28 Sleepjng Beauties or 28 Cinderellas? Apart from Nutcracker,  will there be an audience for quite so many performances of each of the works which are clearly intended to do the heavy lifting as far as generating the company's income for 2022-23 is concerned? I think that the revivals of Mayerling and Cinderella will prove to be of interest because of the number of opportunities for debuts they offer, but that does not mean that they will necessarily sell that well. While we may be able to guess who the new Rudolphs will be when it comes to Cinderella, it has been out of the repertory for so long that nearly everyone involved will be dancing their roles for the first time.

 

Although the contemporary pieces only account for 25 of the 120 ballet  performances allocated to the main stage during the season  the contemporary section of the programme seems to loom large perhaps because it includes nothing I really want to see. I feel no need to reacquaint myself with Woolf Works. I think that Crystal Pite's idea to expand Flight Patterns runs a real risk of destroying a very powerful one act work by over extending it. As far as the triple bills are concerned I never want to see Corybantic Games  again and Anastasia Act III lives or dies according  to who is cast as Anastasia. I don't feel any great need to see that programme.while the programme marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Friend's organisation just strikes me as weird. Perhaps it is just me but I would have thought  that a selection of pieces with which the company is closely connected would have made more sense. I love Diamonds but the Royal Ballet is not a Balanchine company and it is a comparatively recent acquisition. I should have thought that anyone who had a real grasp of the company's history and its development since 1962 could have come up with a better selection of works to stage and would have found ir possible to identify works whose initial production or significant revivals had  been supported by the Friends, or had first been seen at a Friends' Christmas party.

 

I find it strange that the company has not found it possible to revive a single major twentieth century one act work created for it nor anything from its Diaghilev repertory. I find it worrying that the company seems to feel the need to tie revivals of full length works into significant anniversaries as it seems to show a lack of faith in their quality as works of art and a lack of interest in making a wide range of works available to its dancers and its audiences each season. Perhaps it would find less reason to apologise for its revival policy if it dropped the label "heritage work" for its twentieth century repertory and took to describing works like  Daphnis and Chloe,Fille, The Dream, Enigma Variations,Les Rendezvous,Les Patineurs, Symphonic Variations, Scenes de Ballet,The Song of the Earth, Gloria, Requiem, Les Noces and Les Biches as "twentieth century classics". I don't imagine that de Valois believed that the company would only ever  have nineteenth century classics in its repertory. Her acquisition policy and that if her two immediate successors suggests otherwise. Her hope was that the company would create its own classics and acquire some of the greatest works created by the other major choreographers of the time. In 2022 the company's management should be comfortable with  acknowledging and celebrating the creativity and innovation of the twentieth century without apologising for staging such works.

 

While I am relieved that the Royal Ballet's management and the rights holder have finally resolved their differences I shall reserve judgement on the new production of Cinderella until I have seen it. I am more than a little  concerned that the design team does not seem to have experience of designing for ballet. Ballet design is a specialism in itself which always involves creating costumes in which dancers can move with ease and an understanding that the designs will need to be read throughout the theatre and not just in the first  eight rows of the stalls. In the case of a narrative work  designs need to do a lot more. The truth is that while good design can do much of the  the dancers' work for them by establishing  the time and place in which the work is set and its mood poor design can do untold damage to a work and its reputation. The 2003 -4 production  of Cinderella was, I believe, the first one for which Wendy Ellis Somes was entirely responsible for  staging and presumably chose the designs used.in it. Those designs were a disaster. Cinderella's rags were far too pretty and fussy, those of the stepsisters failed to establish their wearer's contrasting characters and would have bee rejected by anyone staging a pantomime. At the moment I would happily settle for the Walker costume designs from the 1965 staging because they were approved by the choreographer and were for the main part restrained and clear. The designs for the sister's costumes clearly reflected their contrasting personalities but they stayed  within the historic bounds set by the designs for the corps de ballet in neither case did Walker exhibit the vulgarity on display in the 2003 production

 

Cinderella is the ballet in which Ashton channelled his inner Petipa before trying his hand with a  French ballet pompier with Sylvia. It contains some wonderful choreographic set pieces in the choreography for the stars, the divertisements for the Seasons Fairies and the choreography for the pas de deux for Cinderella and her prince. The role of the Jester is a demi-character role devised for Alexander Grant which calls for the  depiction of a character rather than a Soviet style  leg machine. I am not sure that I would ascribe the  characterisation of the stepsisters in Ashton's Cinderella to the English pantomime tradition. That I think is an idea which has considerably more to do with the right's owner's lack of imagination,taste and discretion than Ashton's original conception of the roles or his choice of dance styles which were clearly intended to express the essential contrasting nature of the two characters. I think that the DVD of a performance staged for US television starring Fonteyn in which Ashton and MacMillan play the step sisters makes this abundantly clear. I hope and pray that neither Sleep nor Dowell are allowed anywhere near the roles or coach them as they were singularly unfunny, vulgar and crude in their interpretation of the roles. I am rather hoping that they might try female dancers in the roles as the company did at one point during the 1950's.

 

 

It has been said that great ballet directors are ones who have a strong sense of their own company's history as an organisation as well as its place as part of a living artistic tradition and it is with the announcement  of the bill of fare for the 2022-23 season that we are forced to recognise how little personal connection Kevin actually has with the history of the company he is now running. This may have been of assistance when it came to developing  his dancers' careers since he has not felt constrained by the company's way of doing things but his limited sense of the Royal's  history[; his predecessors' acquisition policy  and his limited interest in the development of ballet during the twentieth century can now be seen for what it is, a dangerous weakness. Kevin has a firm grasp of the mechanics of developing and maintaining his company but his neglect of its twentieth  repertory is a dangerous weakness.I don't think that it is an exaggeration to say that each of the major twentieth century works which de Valois, Ashton and MacMillan added to the company's repertory wither by creating them or through acquisition,is in its own way, as important as de Valois' acquisition of her five nineteenth century classics.  

[FLOSS]

The comment made earlier in this discussion expressing concern that Ashton's treatment of Cinderella might be too "child friendly" brings home the effect that a decade's neglect can have on the collective knowledge and experience of a ballet that was once a regular feature of the Christmas repertory.But of course that was before  Dowell's time working in America which had the effect of turning Nutcracker into a seasonal fixture at Covent Garden.

 

Ashton's Cinderella belongs to the period of his post war classical crusade during which the choreographer set out to provide a clearly classically based repertory for the company in its new home and quietly eliminate the expressionist style ballets which Helpmann had made for it during the war.While Ashton may not strike one as the sort of choreographer who would publish an artistic manifesto but there is a point in the immediate post war when he does just that when he reportedly says words to the effect that only ballets based on classical technique are really of value.

 

Cinderella has been televised on at least four occasions and two of those performances have been preserved on DVD. The earliest recording is a version made for US television which was broadcast there in colour in 1957. It was cut  and adapted  for television by Ashton with linking scenes which don't appear in the ballet itself, that,. and the commentary on the action, suggests that the network had a very low opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It also suffers from the effects of some technological experiments which may have worked well in the original broadcast but don't work in the current format which is a pity as the dancers dancing the Fairies were major members of the company. In its favour it preserves Fonteyn's performance  of the title role, you see Grant at a point in his career when he was still on top of his choreography and  Ashton and MacMillan do not overdo things as the Stepsisters. It is available from VAI music and seems to be on offer at present.

 

The next recording was made by the BBC in 1969, I believe, as part of its experiments in outside broadcasts in colour. The cast is led by Sibley and Dowell, the Stepsisters are played by Ashton and Helpmann,Leslie Edwards plays the Father, Alexander Grant the Jester, Georgina Parkinson is the Fairy Godmother and the season Fairies are danced by Penney,Lorrayne, Jenner and Bergsma. The colour may be a bit washed out, no one has spent money on restoration, but the dancing which is what really matters is impeccably idiomatic and the recording gives a real idea of what the ballet should look like in performance. This recording was reissued on DVD last year and is well worth getting as everyone in it knows what they are doing and their performances would have been supervised by Somes and Ashton  himself. Helpmann and Ashton may seem a bit over the top but they are performing before a live audience in a theatre which seats over 2000.

 

The ballet was recorded again in 1979 with a cast headed by Collier and Dowell, Sleep appears as the Jester, the Stepsisters are Coleman and Shaw and the Fairy godmother is danced by Monica Mason., the season fairies are danced by Penney , Derman, Park and Wylde, This recording sometimes turns up on Youtube. It has never been issued on DVD.

 

Cinderella in a new production was broadcast on  2nd January 2003 with a cast headed by Cojucaru and Kobborg. The Fairy godmother was danced by McLeekan and the season's fairies were danced by Salerno, Cuthbertson, Morera and Yanowsky. This you might think would have been a strong argument in favour of issuing the recording on DVD. Unfortunately here were problems with some of the performances. The first is that Martin as the Jester is not a character but a mere leg machine. His  make-up does not help.. You could not see his expression because of the  thick make up he was required  to wear. I am not entirely sure that it was the performances given by Dowell and Sleep as the Stepsisters which put an end to any thought of issuing a DVD. It is quite possible that it was their coarse and excessively unfunny performances which decided the issue. However the company did not issue a DVD of the centennial mixed bill which was televised in 2004 either. Bits of that celebratory mixed bill including Scenes de Ballet were eventually issued on an all Ashton DVD but the great loss was the failure to issue Daphnis and Chloe in the Craxton designs on DVD.

 

For anyone who is interested elements from the 2003 performance can be found on You tube. The most important piece of the ballet which can be found on You tube is the section in which the Fairy Godmother and her fairy colleagues dance their variations. My problem with it is that while it is very beautiful  it is all just a bit too slow and just a bit too deliberate and careful to be described as idiomatic.The choreography is in charge rather than the dancers.

 

I hope these comments are of some use to those who who are not familiar with Ashton's Cinderella and persuade them to find out more about a masterpiece.

 

 

 

 

[li tai po]

Crystal Pite's existing Flight Pattern is set to music from Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.  The new full-length ballet will be extended to set the entire Gorecki work, which according to wikipedia lasts about 54 minutes.  Seven performances are programmed between 18 October and 3 November.  The Royal Ballet season has attracted much criticism above for its limited range, encompassing only 8 shows in the main house.

 

This morning the English National Opera has announced its 2022-23 season, with only 9 productions across the whole year.  Announced for 27 April to 6 May, is Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, six performances sung in Polish, in an "unprecedented" staged production of Gorecki's beloved work.  Hardly unprecedented, when the Royal Ballet are performing it on stage barely six months earlier.

 

Given that both seasons are very limited in their breadth of repertoire, this appears to be a disappointing and poorly planned duplication.

[li tai po]

On a related topic, why are evenings of modern choreography so brief?

 

Not long ago, ENB presented La Sylphide and Song of the Earth in a double bill, full of classical dancing.  The recent Forsythe programme presented only two ballets, barely one hour of dancing and we were in and out of the theatre in 90 minutes.  With no live orchestra either, I felt distinctly short changed.

 

It is standard for ballet companies, not least the Royal Ballet, to perform a double Swan Lake on a Saturday.  The ladies of the corps de ballet seem to have the stamina to get through this challenge. 

 

Apparently 54 minutes is sufficient for a complete evening of Crystal Pite's new ballet.  Why can't the Royal Ballet provide the audience and its own dancers with the opportunity of a full evening of dance?  Maybe they could complement the group dance of Crystal Pite with excellent principal and soloist performances in Dances at a Gathering.  

[bridiem]

15 minutes ago, li tai po said:

Apparently 54 minutes is sufficient for a complete evening of Crystal Pite's new ballet.  Why can't the Royal Ballet provide the audience and its own dancers with the opportunity of a full evening of dance?  Maybe they could complement the group dance of Crystal Pite with excellent principal and soloist performances in Dances at a Gathering.  

 

I agree that 54 minutes of music/dance wouldn't constitute a full-length work (and it would be less than double the length of the existing work). I know Akram Khan (for example) has put on works this sort of length on their own; but in smaller theatres, at lower prices and for a (largely) different audience. If this really is going to be the length of the new Pite, something else should indeed be added to the bill. (And if it isn't, I doubt if I will go - I loved the original Flight Pattern and have no wish to see if it's possible to maintain the quality over a longer piece if that's all the bill is offering.)

Edited April 14, 2022 by bridiem
Sentence added

[alison]

ENB's curtailed programme was due to circumstances, of course, but since it now effectively costs me £11 every time I go up to London I'm going to want to do something else rather than just spend less than an hour up there  

[zxDaveM]

1 hour ago, li tai po said:

Apparently 54 minutes is sufficient for a complete evening of Crystal Pite's new ballet.  Why can't the Royal Ballet provide the audience and its own dancers with the opportunity of a full evening of dance?  Maybe they could complement the group dance of Crystal Pite with excellent principal and soloist performances in Dances at a Gathering.  

 

Even if they have 30mins intervals between movements (for the bar takings) this is still under 2 hours - why not a short Pite work (or something else - a company choreographer perhaps) for 15-20mins, to kick off the evening (though not necessarily 20mins of rolling around in the dark)

[Jan McNulty]

1 hour ago, bridiem said:

 

 I know Akram Khan (for example) has put on works this sort of length on their own; but in smaller theatres, at lower prices and for a (largely) different audience.

 

The Akram Khan works tended to be solos or with a very small cast and tended to be very intense to the extent that if they were any longer the cast probably would have expired!  Smaller companies tend to do shorter programmes but you would not expect it of the Royal Ballet.

[FLOSS]

Returning to the theme of the strange decision to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Friends and then to celebrate it with an expanded version of a work Wheeldon created for Kings of the Dance ,a new McGregor and crown it all with Diamonds suggests that Kevin has fallen into a similar trap to that Ross Stretton fell into with his celebratory Gala which simply served up what the company was dancing at that time. It may not be quite that bad but every gala needs to have something special about it ,a bonne bouche if you like, which sets it apart from other performances during the season and encourages the ballet audience to purchase tickets . This is something which Ashton  understood  and was perfectly capable off providing when called upon to do so.  His ability to whip up a gala piece explains all those short entertaining pieces which get aired from time to time in all Ashton mixed bills, sadly often danced with dogged  determination rather than the flair and idiomatic facility which are prerequisites for such display pieces. Each is as Ashton put it when asked how long a ballet should be " As long as it needs to be". 

 

I am really surprised that Kevin does not seem to understand that a gala audience is unlikely to be made up of fans of contemporary dance and will not necessarily want to pay through the nose to see the types of works that they can see on other evenings at other London theatres or that Diamonds, once described as "pure paste", on its own might not be quite enough of a tasty morsel to make up for sitting through the rehashed Wheeldon or the new McGregor. If he had any sense I think that Kevin would be offering the new McGregor, as it is probably too late to cancel the commission, and announce a major Ashton revival of some sort. It isn't as if he would not have a wide choice as so many Ashton works have been languishing neglected over the years. I accept that staging a revival of Birthday Offering and trying to get the casting pitch perfect would be far too obvious for such an event. So here are a few more adventurous suggestions beginning with an antidote to all the dour earnestness currently on offer in Bow Street, beginning with a  revival of Facade which has nor been seen in Bow Street since 1994. If that does not suit Kevin then  a revival of Apparitions in its entirety, a revival of A Wedding Bouquet or a revival of Daphnis and Chloe  would be equally acceptable and far more enticing.

 

[capybara]

6 minutes ago, FLOSS said:

Returning to the theme of the strange decision to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Friends and then to celebrate it with an expanded version of a work Wheeldon created for Kings of the Dance ,a new McGregor and crown it all with Diamonds suggests that Kevin has fallen into a similar trap to that Ross Stretton fell into with his celebratory Gala which simply served up what the company was dancing at that time. It may not be quite that bad but every gala needs to have something special about it ,a bonne bouche if you like, which sets it apart from other performances during the season and encourages the ballet audience to purchase tickets . This is something which Ashton  understood  and was perfectly capable off providing when called upon to do so.  His ability to whip up a gala piece explains all those short entertaining pieces which get aired from time to time in all Ashton mixed bills, sadly often danced with dogged  determination rather than the flair and idiomatic facility which are prerequisites for such display pieces. Each is as Ashton put it when asked how long a ballet should be " As long as it needs to be". 

 

I am really surprised that Kevin does not seem to understand that a gala audience is unlikely to be made up of fans of contemporary dance and will not necessarily want to pay through the nose to see the types of works that they can see on other evenings at other London theatres or that Diamonds, once described as "pure paste", on its own might not be quite enough of a tasty morsel to make up for sitting through the rehashed Wheeldon or the new McGregor. If he had any sense I think that Kevin would be offering the new McGregor, as it is probably too late to cancel the commission, and announce a major Ashton revival of some sort. It isn't as if he would not have a wide choice as so many Ashton works have been languishing neglected over the years. I accept that staging a revival of Birthday Offering and trying to get the casting pitch perfect would be far too obvious for such an event. So here are a few more adventurous suggestions beginning with an antidote to all the dour earnestness currently on offer in Bow Street, beginning with a  revival of Facade which has nor been seen in Bow Street since 1994. If that does not suit Kevin then  a revival of Apparitions in its entirety, a revival of A Wedding Bouquet or a revival of Daphnis and Chloe  would be equally acceptable and far more enticing.

 

 

I, for one, like For Four and will be very happy to see 4 of the RB's male dancers in it. That, for me, plus Diamonds, does make the proposed gala 'special'. 

 

 

 

[jmhopton]

For me, Floss's idea of a Gala sounds much more appealing. The new Valentino ballet is the only item that might even tempt me to purchase it as a stream (presuming the ROH are carrying on either filming or streaming each performance) let alone make the 400 mile+ round trip to the ROH. I've been thinking wistfully of Facade ever since I saw Sarasota do it as part of their pandemic streaming and Birthday Offering sounds a good anniversary choice. Though I'm with Briedem (?) or whoever it was who suggested if Kevin wanted to do a Friends celebration why not ask them what they would like. I bet it would be more classical than modern which is probably why he didn't bother.

[Fonty]

Rather than writing on here, perhaps we should all be writing to Mr O'Hare, making these points to him?

[jmhopton]

I intend to do this. Will let you know if I get a response. 

[The Sitter In]

If you really want to show off four male dancers, why not Dolin’s Variations for Four which Muntagirov knows already?  If you want a pendant, Dolin’s Pas de Quatre - you choose the company’s four ‘top’ ballerinas.

That said, Birthday Offering desperately needs and deserves revival and the RB has enough good dancers to do it - it just needs to be properly rehearsed and no-one to play around with it.  If it was good enough for Fonteyn and all the others who have followed, it is good enough for now.  Wheeldon, I’m afraid simply doesn’t come close to comparing with Sir Fred.

[Guest oncnp]

6 minutes ago, The Sitter In said:

If you really want to show off four male dancers, why not Dolin’s Variations for Four which Muntagirov knows already?  

 

Thank you for reminding me of this. 

 

Not the best quality (and I think it's legal) Variations for Four to the music by M Keogh - YouTube

 

[alison]

1 hour ago, The Sitter In said:

If you really want to show off four male dancers, why not Dolin’s Variations for Four which Muntagirov knows already?  If you want a pendant, Dolin’s Pas de Quatre - you choose the company’s four ‘top’ ballerinas.

 

Aren't they both ENB's?

[jmhopton]

8 hours ago, alison said:

 

Aren't they both ENB's?

If they are, that reinforces what I said earlier about ENB not performing many 20th century heritage works. When was the last time either were performed, along with Sanguine Fan or Graduation Ball? I can't remember the last time I saw any Company perform Les Sylphides yet it used to be a staple of every classical Company. I don't understand this constant commissioning of new ballets when Companies have great works already that are never performed. 

[Sim]

Probably because in order to get Arts Council funding they have to show that they are making “relevant” ballets.  

[DD Driver]

You would think that the ballets that

a) stood the test of time

b) are part of the companies' & countys' heritage and

c) sell tickets

are the most 'relevant' ballets for a Classical Ballet company.  

 

Relevant doesn't mean 'contemporary'.  It means 'of contemporary interest'

(sigh)

[alison]

1 hour ago, jmhopton said:

If they are, that reinforces what I said earlier about ENB not performing many 20th century heritage works. When was the last time either were performed, along with Sanguine Fan or Graduation Ball? I can't remember the last time I saw any Company perform Les Sylphides yet it used to be a staple of every classical Company.

 

I've seen Variations for Four (and Pas de Quatre?) done - I assume by ENB - in Richmond in the not-so-distant past.  And the Royal Ballet did Les Sylphides a few years ago, on a mixed bill with Sensorium and something else, if my memory is correct.  The Sanguine Fan, OTOH, I think was about 1991.  Trouble is, nobody will recognise from the title what it is it's about.

[bridiem]

20 minutes ago, alison said:

And the Royal Ballet did Les Sylphides a few years ago, on a mixed bill with Sensorium and something else, if my memory is correct.  

 

It was in 2009 (with The Firebird).

[alison]

Goodness, is it that long ago?!

[bridiem]

4 minutes ago, alison said:

Goodness, is it that long ago?!

 

Yes, unless they repeated the same bill more recently and I didn't go to it! (Possible but I think unlikely.)

[jmhopton]

1 hour ago, alison said:

 

I've seen Variations for Four (and Pas de Quatre?) done - I assume by ENB - in Richmond in the not-so-distant past.  And the Royal Ballet did Les Sylphides a few years ago, on a mixed bill with Sensorium and something else, if my memory is correct.  The Sanguine Fan, OTOH, I think was about 1991.  Trouble is, nobody will recognise from the title what it is it's about.

If it was done in Richmond which is a fairly small theatre, I  assume it must have been the small-scale Tour de Force which was mainly in the 1990s and did an excellent job of taking classical ballet (albeit small scale) to theatres that would otherwise have had little or no clasical ballet. 

Reading a potted history of ENB this was said about Derek Deane in his time of ENB AD in the 1990s.

Deane preferred to focus on building a strong classical company, whilst still allowing for a rich variety of choreography, ranging from Balanchine to Bigonzetti. During the 1990s, the full evening classics were freshly produced, while shorter signature works like Etudes (first danced in 1955) and Graduation Ball (1957) were kept alive.

 

Sounds like my kind of AD!