tylerls

I bought the Bonynge recording from HMV Japan, and it arrived a week or two ago. I had trouble finding a reasonably priced copy anywhere less exotic, though it looks like arkivmusic.com have it in stock, too. (I hadn't heard of arkivmusic at the time.) "Pas des fleurs" is track 6 on disc 2. It's 3 minutes and 11 seconds long. On a hunch, I googled for "cddb", the old database where people entered track names for their CDs and shared them with everyone. You can search for CDs that have a "song" with the exact title of "Pas des Fleurs": Pas des Fleurs but, unfortunately, that database only seems to know about the Bonynge recording, and a few false matches. (I tried a few other searches.) Still, I thought the database was worth mentioning, in case it helps someone else, for some other problem.

News on the Australian Ballet's website: Steven Heathcote's big leap There's also an article in "The Age": Heathcote ready to hang up the ballet shoes (The Age)

"HMV Japan" says the Japanese edition of Bonynge's Le Corsaire recording is "coming soon" (16th of May, 2007). They have a few other Bonynge ballet recordings which seem to be pretty hard to come by. Le Corsaire (Bonynge) at HMV Japan The other ballet recordings they've listed as "coming soon": Giselle Les Sylphides / La Boutique Fantasque La Bayadere La Source Coppelia Sylvia Sleeping Beauty I've ordered "Le Corsaire", so hopefully it'll really turn up at my door in a month or so. Worth a try, at least. (You never know, it could be just a mis-translation of "we think we might be able to get this for you in 2-3 weeks, but we're wrong, and it's long out of print".)

POB have finally announced the details of the gala. I just received an email about it. The details are here: Paris Opera Ballet - Grand Gala Wednesday 13th of June 2007, 19:30 at the Sydney Opera House. PROGRAM: Paquita (after Marius Petipa): Grand Pas Swan Lake (Rudolf Nureyev after Marius Petipa): Pas de trios, Swan Lake Act III La Dame aux camélias (John Neumeier): Pas de deux INTERVAL The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude (William Forsythe) Sonatine (George Balanchine) Three-Cornered Hat (Le Tricorne) (Leonide Massine): Miller’s Dance, solo L’Arlésienne (Roland Petit): Pas de deux Tickets are on sale on the 2nd of April at 9am from the Sydney Opera House website Be warned, the tickets are pretty expensive. An A-reserve seat will set you back as much as a full subscription to The Australian Ballet company's 2007 season.

I just found the official website for the tour via the Capitol Theatre's website. There's still no word about the gala, though it's listed on Manuel Legris' own website.

Swan Lake and Jewels went on sale on the Internet about four hours ago, but you seem to need some sort of presale code. The general sale starts 9am on the 5th of December. Ticketmaster Edit: Search for "capitol" and then choose "Capitol Theatre, Haymarket". It's a few pages into the search results. No idea about the gala, yet.

According to Manuel Legris' website, the Gala will be held on Wednesday the 13th of June, 2007. He'll be partnering Aurélie Dupont for some of the above Swan Lake performances. (Dates to be determined).

Dates for "Swan Lake" and "Jewels" (Taken from an offer to Sydney subscribers on the Australian Ballet Company's website.) Swan Lake Sat 16 June 7.30pm Sun 17 June 2.00pm Tue 19 June 7.30pm Wed 20 June 7.30pm Thu 21 June 7.30pm Fri 22 June 7.30pm Sat 23 Jun 1.30pm Sat 23 Jun 7.30pm Sun 24 Jun 2.00pm Jewels Wed 27 Jun 7.30pm Thu 28 Jun 7.30pm Fri 29 Jun 7.30pm Sat 30 Jun 1.30pm Sat 30 Jun 7.30pm I don't have any further information about the gala at the Opera House.

The Australian DVD (R4) will be released on the 21st of September.

Looking at the aStores review I quoted earlier, when I originally suggested you could make one of them for BalletTalk: review of Amazon aStores you can see they managed to add a search box to their example store: Reviewer's example aStore I think it's something to do with "adding categories". (See the review.) The reviewer's store seems to be narrowing down the categories of search you can do to fairly specific things ("Dead Trees", "Movies for Geeks", etc.) but it seems you can also make broad search categories ("DVDs", "VHS", "Books", "CDs", etc.) judging by this randomly selected aStore: Another example aStore For example, I think you can configure fairly restrictive categories to search such as "Balanchine", and/or you can have broad, flexible categories such as "DVDs". Whatever seems suitable. I'd start off with some broad categories, and perhaps add some more focussed categories ("American Ballet Theatre DVDs"? "Paris Opera Ballet DVDs"? "Ballet Biographies"?) to give people ideas, beyond the nine featured items.

More from the Herald-Sun:

Today's Herald Sun (6 September 2006, page 59) adds the following information: "Destiny" will consist of Leonide Massine's "Les Presages", plus "the revamp of Massine's 1936 work 'Symphonie Fantastique', by Polish choreographer Krzysztof Pastor" (which will be a world premiere). "Don Quixote" will be based on Nureyev's staging (as seen in the 1973 recording) The Nutcracker will be British choreographer Sir Peter Wright's version. The production will be rebuilt, based on the Birmingham Royal Ballet version. Stephen Baynes is the chap who is creating "Raymonda" for the 2006 season. 2007 will be Stephen Heathcote's 25th year with the company. (Sorry, I haven't found an online copy of the Herald Sun article.) The Australian Ballet's email newsletter promised that our nice glossy subscription brochures would be waiting for us in our mailboxes today. So naturally, the rain has been bucketing down. Typical!

"The Age" mentions a few more tidbits: - New works by Christopher Wheeldon and Krzysztof Pastor. (I guess Christopher Wheeldon = "After the Rain".) - Leonide Massine's "Les Presages" See: The Age: Australian Ballet's year of dancing too safely

I'm afraid I haven't personally seen any of his work yet. I almost went to see "Southern Lights" in 2004, but my friends pulled out on me. As of this year, I've started going to ballets by myself when necessary (sad, I know) so hopefully that won't be happening again. I'm sure there'll be others on this board with first-hand experience, but here are a couple of references. It sounds like he's good at what he does: Australia Dancing profile of Stephen Baynes New York Times review of "At the Edge of Night" (October 15, 1999) (probably requires registration)

The 2007 season has just been launched: Austrlian Ballet 2007 Season - Don Quixote - New Romantics ("Apollo. After the Rain. New Stephen Baynes work.") - Bodytorque. Generations - Paquita - Destiny ("One Classic, and one world premiere.") - The Nutcracker Sounds good to me. Don Q., Paquita and the Nutcracker will be enough to keep me happy. I had reservations about the 2006 season, but it hasn't been bad so far. (I'm yet to see Raymonda.)

2. In the above code section, change the height to "90px", to match the height of the amazon logo. This was easy to do, once I poked around and found where it was located. Huh, what do you know -- I can see you've just changed "68px" to "90px", and that's been sufficient to make it work with Firefox. Can anybody else confirm this? I was trying to keep the number of changes required to the bare minimum, I must have missed this combination. As for tile_back.gif, you can see what it is if you paste this URL into your browser: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/style_i...1/tile_back.gif but I wouldn't advise you to change it, if you don't have to! If you're happy with the way BalletTalk now looks on IE, Firefox and Safari, maybe someone should make the same update to BalletTalk for Dancers?

Apart from the minor annoyance with the Amazon search box, I find Firefox to be much better than Internet Explorer for browsing these forums, because of its "tabbed browsing" feature. I usually search for new posts, and for each topic which sounds interesting, I right-click on the title, and open it in a new tab. It's an especially useful approach for "BalletTalk for Dancers", where there's a high volume of posts. Therefore, you can consider me "motivated" to help get this working with Firefox. :foot: I downloaded the HTML "source" for the front page of the website, along with a couple of the images, and did some experiments. Obviously, I couldn't experiment with the actual website, but I was able to try things out on a copy on my computer, and see how they might look. I don't know how much control you have over the code in the website, but the page appeared perfectly, in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, when I made the following (minor?) changes: 1. Find where it says: 2. In the above code section, change the height to "90px", to match the height of the amazon logo. 3. Resize the image file "tile_back.gif", from 68 pixels high to 90 pixels high. I used a very crude method to do this, and it ended up looking badly aliased. You just need to replace the image file with any other one which would make a suitable background, and is 90 pixels high. 4. Optional - resize the BT4logo.jpg to 90 pixels high, too, so that it matches the Amazon logo in height. I guess you have this forum hosted by Invisionzone, and you might not be able to update "tile_back.gif", or the height of "logostrip" yourselves. But hopefully this will give you enough information to ask the invisionzone folk for help, without wasting too much of anybody's time. (If you're interested.) Tyler.

One advantage of having a "Ballet Talk" store-front would be that board members could post a direct link to a relevant product in their post, in such a way that "Ballet Talk" is still getting a cut. The Amazon banner seems to work by remembering that your session started off with a search query which included the "tag", "campaign" and "adid" information referring to "Ballet Talk", but by the time it takes you to the product, there's no mention of "Ballet Talk" in the URL. It's just remembering that information for the current session. So if you try to paste that link, it'll take people to the product alright, but Amazon probably won't attribute the traffic to anyone but themselves. On the other hand, if you copy a URL from one of these "aStores" store-fronts, it takes you back to the same store-front.

Amazon are introducing a new facility, whereby you can design your own store-front for a selection of Amazon products, and then get a cut of the revenue, when people buy something through it. I read a review of it this morning: Amazon aStores beta review Perhaps it's a bit of a gimmick at the moment, but I have a feeling that it could mature into something useful. It's probably worth keeping an eye on, in case it can add any value to "Ballet Talk" and "Ballet Talk for Dancers" beyond what the Amazon banner link already provides. E.g.: Create a store with recommended books/DVDs/videos, and occasionally update it so that any new items, or items under discussion, are "featured products".

I didn't have any luck finding any Easter egg, even by manually inspecting the DVD's titles and chapters on a computer. It seems to me that the R1 DVD is a better bet. It's possible that the R1 Easter Egg just appears as a normal special feature on the R2 DVD, but a chrisk217 noted, the trailer and English subtitles are definitely missing, at the very least.

By definition, you probably won't find the "easter egg" unless you make a concerted effort to go looking for it. It's usually a short & entertaining bit of footage which is hidden in the menus somewhere, so you have to experiment/go exploring to find it. It's not usually so significant that the people who haven't found out about it are really missing out, but it is usually worthwhile in some way. (Otherwise people would get annoyed!) Wikipedia definition: Easter Egg It might still be there, and you just haven't found it yet. Chances are that it'll be there the same as the R1 one. I'll go hunting for it later tonight, and post back if I find it. In the meantime, here's an example of how to find an easter egg in the "Return of the King" special edition DVD, to give you an idea of how it might be hidden:

My R2 DVD (from Amazon UK) didn't have a booklet, either. D'oh!

"The Sydney Morning Herald" reports that the Paris Opera Ballet will be performing in Sydney for two weeks in June 2007: Paris ballet poised and pointed for Opera House debut This was also mentioned in the current, August/September 2006 issue of "Dance Australia", on page 16. They'll be doing a gala at the Sydney Opera House, and then a season of "Jewels" and Nureyev's "Swan Lake" in Sydney's Capitol Theatre. Unfortunately, they won't be performing in any of the other capital cities. Dance Australia says that "Melbourne's State Theatre is not available at (the) time". If anyone can confirm actual performance dates, and when and where tickets go on sale, please let us know. I need to book some annual leave to fly up there.

(I know I'm getting a little off-topic here, but hopefully the following information is of value to someone.) This looks like a useful example webpage for those of you in North America who just want a DVD player which you can hook up to your TV, and use to play any DVD (PAL DVDs included): DVDoverseas.com They are a U.S.A.-based company who sell DVD players with built-in PAL to NTSC conversion. You could look at the model numbers and shop locally for the same models, but be sure to check with the salespeople that it will do what you want. (These people might be in the business of performing their own modifications to the DVD players, to give them their multi-region/multi-system capability.) Tyler.

In this respect, life definitely seems to be easier in a PAL territory -- all you really need to worry about is getting a multi-region DVD player, and you're probably OK. Most recently manufactured PAL TVs will usually cope with an NTSC signal OK, as long as the DVD player is OK with the region. Most PAL DVD players have an option to force a PAL signal output, even for an NTSC disc. There is software available which can usually make one's computer effectively region-free, and would probably help you with your difficulties with R2 discs on your Mac. But the same software can potentially be used for other purposes, which are likely to be considered less compatible with the forum rules. With regard to the computers locking you into a region: It's not just the software, many of the DVD drives themselves will lock you in after four switches. Some people used to buy two DVD drives for their Apple Powerbooks, and swap them! Usually, if the hardware does this, you can send it in for repair, and they can give you another few switches to get out of the mess you're in, but even the service people can't do this for you any more than a couple of times. So, unless you know that your equipment can play a foreign DVD, be careful. If you try to use it in a computer, you can eventually lock yourself out of the rest of your DVD collection, as far as that particular computer is concerned. Usually the computer will prompt you before it tries to switch region, and tell you how many switches you have left. If in doubt, take the disc out and "just say no". Tyler.