Press Release: English National Ballet announces its 2023-24 season, the first from Artistic Director Designate Aaron S. Watkin

[Dawnstar]

8 minutes ago, Bluebird said:

Since she’s posted pictures on Instagram, I assume it’s OK to report that she gave birth to a baby girl in March. 

 

That had occurred to me as a possible alternative to injury! She certainly won't be back for Cinderella then.

[Emeralds]

43 minutes ago, Bluebird said:

Since she’s posted pictures on Instagram, I assume it’s OK to report that she gave birth to a baby girl in March. 

Thanks for the update, Bluebird! (I don’t follow Insta or Twitter.) Just goes to show ENB seasons in Britain are so infrequent now that the dancers can go on maternity leave and we wouldn’t have realised they were absent. Congratulations to Alison!  So looks like the suggestions of Khaniukova, Suzuki and Velicu are inching that bit closer to fulfilment. 😉

 

10 hours ago, FionaE said:

Maybe I can redeem myself by proposing Daniel Camargo for Guillaume?   According to his bio he has performed Wheeldon’s Cinderella before … presumably at Dutch National.  

Camargo would be a great choice for Guillaume too, if he has space in his schedule. I was disappointed to have missed his Don Q with the Royal Ballet!  Don’t know if he danced it at Dutch National, but he seems to be a quick study at learning new full length productions while guesting around the world, and there’ll be some adjustments to get used to as ENB’s version for RAH is in the round, unlike Dutch National’s. 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Emeralds

[Emeralds]

ENB performance dates and times now available on Sadler’s Wells website!

3 matinees - Saturday 23rd and 30th, and Thursday 28th, all at 2.30pm. They have “agreed” with my suggestion to give the dancers two days off but on Sunday and Monday, rather than my suggestion of a Sunday show and the Tuesday off so as to pitch it to more families with ballet students (and tired adults working on weekdays). Will see if the box office and transport unions agree. 😉 Hope their marketing teams have some good plans afoot- they’ll be needed!

[Peanut68]

Emeralds-top idea… shift traditional weekend off to the ‘working week’! Afterall, more useful day off in many ways & defo widens opportunities for more people to become regular audience members…. Is this model already common in West End/Broadway shows?

[San Perregrino]

41 minutes ago, Peanut68 said:

Emeralds-top idea… shift traditional weekend off to the ‘working week’! Afterall, more useful day off in many ways & defo widens opportunities for more people to become regular audience members…. Is this model already common in West End/Broadway shows?

 

On 10/05/2023 at 12:39, Emeralds said:

ENB performance dates and times now available on Sadler’s Wells website!

3 matinees - Saturday 23rd and 30th, and Thursday 28th, all at 2.30pm. They have “agreed” with my suggestion to give the dancers two days off but on Sunday and Monday, rather than my suggestion of a Sunday show and the Tuesday off so as to pitch it to more families with ballet students (and tired adults working on weekdays). Will see if the box office and transport unions agree. 😉 Hope their marketing teams have some good plans afoot- they’ll be needed!

 

let's not forget that dancers and anyone else involved with a performance are not automatons (well not yet in any case, that time may soon well arrive as dancers are replaced with the equivalent of Abbatars). 

they are real people with lives & real families outside their day jobs.   i say let them have their sundays together.

[LinMM]

Sundays are usually no good for me especially between October and May because they are nearly always doing engineering works on the Brighton line somewhere (causing partial bus journeys and a cancelled trains bonanza) in these months ….often on Saturdays too!! So always try to avoid the railways on Sundays if at all possible. I’d much rather have an additional weekday matinee than an additional Sunday matinee. 

[alison]

Yes, I've noticed that at Sadler's Wells - which is one of the venues which not infrequently offers Sunday performances - those tickets tend to be slower to sell than other dates.

[Emeralds]

2 hours ago, PeterS said:

 

 

let's not forget that dancers and anyone else involved with a performance are not automatons (well not yet in any case, that time may soon well arrive as dancers are replaced with the equivalent of Abbatars). 

they are real people with lives & real families outside their day jobs.   i say let them have their sundays together.

That logic doesn’t apply to their Cinderella performances (and yearly Nutcrackers) which take place on Saturdays and Sundays.

 

I’ve worked all-weekend shifts  (8am Saturday to 6pm Monday, yes, you read correctly, it’s not a typo - 58hours) every month before, in fact, not just twice in June and once in September. They are necessary and we survived! The point is that if Sundays are more accessible for audiences and hence the box office takings are better, audience buzz better,  it makes more sense to dance and Saturday and Sunday, and shift the weekend to Monday and Tuesday. Actually, when your weekend is two weekdays, there can be advantages of being free to do activities, errands and outings in spaces that are less crowded than usual, and families do enjoy the novelty - eg being able to greet/take a child home from school instead of a childminder doing it, and other advantages. 

 

The more salient point is that, as  @LinMM and @alison  have noted, rail if engineering works are now happening frequently on Sundays and customer preferences not to go to theatres on a Sunday mean that the box office takings for many shows are routinely lower on Sundays (I haven’t been keeping track-I trust Alison has!), then they might be better off skipping the Sunday and pitching it to audiences who might go after work/college midweek or tourists and midweek leisure visitors, due to more public transport being available. So I can see why they might pick the Tuesday instead. 

 

What is definitely a difficult one to predict is whether there will be transport strike- rail, tube or bus -affecting that weekday. Strikes are much less likely to be called on a Sunday.

 

The last two autumn triple bills that both BRB and ENB brought to Sadler’s Wells were both vey badly hit by the rail strikes being called on those weeks- I remember attending the BRB Saturday matinee with a more than half empty auditorium due to the strike (the ushers said there had been lots of ticket exchanges and rescheduling) but outstanding dancing on stage (one of the best any company has ever produced). And I only managed to get there because the rail company had enough staff from (different union) to provide a very limited but impressively punctual daytime service, but it stopped at 5.30. No time for stage dooring or staying for multiple curtain calls-luckily BRB didn’t do those. While many patrons had moved their Saturday tickets to a non-strike weekday, I had to move my Sat evening show ticket to the matinee (no regrets!) as we could get there early but wouldn’t have been able to get home at night. ENB was similarly affected but my show just managed to miss the strike.

 

It’s hard to predict if the strikes will fall during their Sadler’s Wells season again (unfortunately there probably will still be one or two strikes in autumn according to the transport news). Hopefully they’re keeping their fingers crossed and we can only hope ENB will be lucky and escape the strike dates this time. 

[Emeralds]

2 hours ago, LinMM said:

Sundays are usually no good for me especially between October and May because they are nearly always doing engineering works on the Brighton line somewhere (causing partial bus journeys and a cancelled trains bonanza) in these months ….often on Saturdays too!! So always try to avoid the railways on Sundays if at all possible. I’d much rather have an additional weekday matinee than an additional Sunday matinee. 

Thursday 28th Sept  just for you, LinMM😊. 2.30pm.

Edited May 15, 2023 by Emeralds

[Lizbie1]

Interestingly, they're about to start trialling mid-week rail engineering week because of the shift to weekend leisure travel.

[LinMM]

However the vast majority of people still work Monday to Friday though… as well as schools and college courses etc so engineering works mid week would cause a lot of problems…pretty much a disaster I would say! 

[Peanut68]

Lots of good valid points…. Guess was thinking from ‘my viewpoint’ & life situation when a Sunday show to escape to would be great - ha ha! But totally take point about Sundays being valuable family time etc….

[Emeralds]

I hope the mid week engineering works are going to be trialled only on the lines that are quieter on week days and used more at weekends. If they did it on the busy commuter lines they’d lose millions a week closing down those lines. Not to mention the utter chaos for passengers. Of course, sometimes it’s inevitable if there’s an major emergency, eg landslide, fire, etc (touch wood hopefully not too often.)

 

Good question, Peanut68- in Broadway/Manhattan the theatre week has been Tuesday evening to Sunday afternoon for many decades, as long as I can remember, while in the West End and much of Britain, it was Monday night to Saturday night for a very long time, and it’s only been in the last couple of decades that some started doing shows on a Sunday (which seemed very radical initially!) and giving their performers the Monday off instead.

 

Most NYC actors and dancers are used to Monday being their Sunday when they are performing, and Sunday night being their replacement Saturday night. But the ballet seasons there tend to be much shorter than RB’s & BRB’s. I remember being quite stunned when I went there one year and found that NYCB had no autumn season- it was one mixed bill gala performance in late November, then straight into Nutcrackers! And by late June (with some breaks in between) their season was finished. RB used to finish in early July, but with overseas tours now more commonplace, they finish earlier-early or mid June, then start to prepare for the tours. But they do start the season earlier, in October or end of September. 

 

ROH is a bit different from many West End theatres in that Royal Ballet and Royal Opera share the premises, so they do present shows 7 days a week  now, taking turns, but no opera chorus or corps de ballet will be doing performances every single day of the week- they get a break when the other company performs. Within the ROH Orchestra (who play for both RO & RB), they do have replacements and freelance performers, and the same concertmaster/leader/deputy leader of the orchestra won’t be playing demanding solo parts every single night. Within each section they have their own arrangements as to when each person wants to have the night/day off. And occasionally, another orchestra eg Royal Ballet Sinfonia for ballet, Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment for some baroque operas, might play instead of ROH Orchestra. 

 

The concert halls like Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Barbican Hall, Wigmore Hall, Royal Albert Hall etc etc have had Sunday performances for quite some time- but it’s often different performers each night or every few days and I believe the box office and front of house staff work on a rota- they don’t work everyday even if they wanted to. @LinMM might be able to shed more light on  this. 😊

Edited May 15, 2023 by Emeralds

[LinMM]

When I worked at the Festival Hall

it was back in late 70’s early 80’s! 
It wasn’t my main job just something I did a couple of times a week. You were on a rota but I can’t remember how I got the job or even knew about it or how it was generally organised but my guess is it was someone else doing one of the ballet classes I used to do back then who told me about it as a pleasant way to earn extra money!! 
Im sure some people were full time but perhaps we covered more weekends? 
I do seem to remember being there quite a lot on Sundays but some week day evenings as well. 
I do remember it was much easier to park back then as I often drove my mini clubman and parked it near the Hall!! 

[San Perregrino]

This post now moved to Aaron S Watkins thread 

Edited July 25, 2023 by PeterS