volcanohunter

Natascha Mair has abruptly left English National Ballet. She joined the company in 2020, when Martin Schläpfer became director of the Vienna State Ballet. Now she has left ENB two months into Aaron Watkin's tenure. This also leaves the company with an empty principal (vs. lead principal) rank.

The company has posted a photo of the alumni bow. Unfortunately Heather Watts' face is invisible behind her extra-large phone case.

It premiered in the Netherlands before that. I guess this was kind of implied by the sequence of auditorium photos by Oleksii Kniazkov, but I think the narration used the phrase "most consequential" to describe the performances in Washington, simply because it's Washington, and Ratmansky himself described the Kennedy Center as one of the world's great stages.

Thank you for teasing out the casting. I hate fighting my way through the impenetrable thicket that are ABT press releases so much, that I usually don't bother trying.

It has in the past, but I don't remember exactly when sales began.

Stuttgart's Cranko series has continued post-pandemic with a DVD of The Taming of the Shrew. With Elisa Badenes, Jason Reilly, Veronika Verterich and Marti Fernandez Paixa, filmed in May 2022. I hope that Katherine Barber will no longer mind when I say that I hope this performance is better than the videos of Onegin and Romeo & Juliet were. https://www.amazon.com/Crankos-Taming-Shrew-Domenico-Scarlatti/dp/B0BHN5C34D/

Prisca Zeisel has resigned from the Bavarian State Ballet. In late July she participated in a gala Sergei Polunin organized in occupied Sevastopol. Instagram posts show that with Dmitri Sobolevsky she performed the Don Q pas de deux against a projection of the interior of the Odesa Opera House (slide 7), less than a week after the city had come under heavy bombardment, resulting in the destruction of its Orthodox cathedral. It turns out this may not have been her only performance in Crimea this year. Yesterday, after Süddeutsche Zeitung broke the news of her resignation, she posted a video on Instagram of her performing Odile's fouettés in what is clearly the Perm Ballet production of Swan Lake. Not coincidentally, the Perm Ballet presented a brief run of Swan Lake in Sevastopol a few days after the concert. Zeisel, along with Polunin and her Munich colleagues Laurretta Summerscales and Osiel Gouneo, had performed in Sevastopol before. In 2019 they appeared as guest artists with the Novosibirsk Ballet in a condensed version of Spartacus in the presence of Vladimir Putin. From the Kremlin web site: http://static.kremlin.ru/media/events/photos/big2x/BK7YaeiZ49saxuXrgiqGLXUjpvIlsO41.jpg I did some digging about various ballet performances in occupied Sevastopol, looking at web sites, posters, press reports and social media posts, which would be a lot easier to do if Instagram had a proper search function. Vladimir Shklyarov's "attendance" record is perfect. He has performed there every summer since 2018, which is more consistent even than Polunin. Ekaterina Krysanova's attendance had also been perfect until this year's concert coincided with the Bolshoi's tour to Beijing. Basically there were three types of performances. "Galas" (though when such an event takes place at the Fishermen's Palace of Culture, as it did one year, it's strange to call it a gala), at which I would say participation is entirely voluntary. If a concert takes place in midsummer, during official holidays, it would be straightforward to cite other plans: a planned and paid-for vacation in Egypt, a visit to parents in distant Siberia, therapy to look after a persistent injury before the season begins... I counted 16 current and recent Bolshoi and Mariinsky principals who have never performed in Crimea, as far as I can tell. The next type of performances are official tours by Russian companies. Since 2019 there has been a policy of bringing big-city Russian theaters to Sevastopol in the summer. In 2019 it was the Novosibirsk Ballet with the aforementioned Spartacus. In 2020 the Bolshoi brought Carmen Suite and a selection of opera arias. In 2021 the Mariinsky brought an operatic selection and Concerto DSCH. (I don't know whether Ratmansky was aware of this.) In 2022 the Mikhailovsky ballet brought Nacho Duato's Romeo and Juliet. This year it was the Perm Ballet's Swan Lake. In these cases it's quite possible that dancers had no say in the matter. The third type of performances were guest appearances during these official tours. This, again, I would consider voluntary. The same summertime excuses not to participate could be used. If Shklyarov (all of whose performances fell under the gala category) could briefly display an anti-war post online, perhaps it's because his loyalty to the regime is well-established.

In the most recent City Ballet podcast Ratmansky mentioned that his Coppélia will be original choreography, not a reconstruction. https://podcast.nycballet.com/episode-95-new-combinations-alexei-ratmansky

On Saturday, September 16, at 19:00 CEST/1:00 pm Eastern, the Vienna State Ballet will livestream the Nureyev production of Don Quixote, with Liudmila Konovalova and Davide Dato. The stream is free-of-charge, but logging in is required. Registration requires only a name and email. Traditionally streams from the Vienna State Opera have been available on demand for 72 hours. https://play.wiener-staatsoper.at/event/ee11d96d-aa75-4350-b445-0402d8cb7f44

Woolf Works has just been added to ROH Stream. https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/woolf-works-2017-digital

A presenter that specializes in galas needs a corps to do a Nutcracker. I wonder how it's going to be sourced.

On the eve of the company’s 75th anniversary season, I'd say the musicians' bargaining position is very strong.

Particularly since the story is set in Ukraine.

Amber Scott (my favorite dancer at the Australian Ballet) is retiring from the stage on 30 September in Swan Lake, after 22 years with the company. Sadly, I don't remember her appearing in any of the company’s recent livestreams, and it looks like her performance in Swan Lake won't be streamed either, since that is taking place on the 29th. I am very sorry I had so few opportunities to see her dance, and I'm even more sorry there won't be any more. I found her to be magical. https://australianballet.com.au/blog/the-last-act-amber-scott-prepares-for-her-final-bow

Tyler Angle's head has been discussed previously on the board. There are a few ways that dancers deal with thinning hair. One method is to darken the scalp underneath thinning hair to make it appear thicker. Angle used to do this, but the technique is most successful when a dancer's hairline is more or less intact (e.g., Alexandre Riabko of the Hamburg Ballet). The Bolshoi's Vyacheslav Lopatin wears a toupée in some roles, when he is supposed to appear especially young. But most of the time he performs with his conspicuously receding hairline. Johan Kobborg always wore a toupée on stage and didn't start going around bald until after he left the Royal Ballet. Even now in photos he is usually seen wearing a cap or hat. The Royal Danish Ballet's Jonathan Chmelensky wears a wig in narrative and tutu ballets. That includes, for example, Ballo della Regina, which the company streamed during the pandemic. But in contemporary repertoire he goes without the wig. Former Royal Winnipeg Ballet soloist Alexander Gamayunov also had a danseur wig for narrative and tutu ballets, though not all narrative ballets required it, and he pulled off a shaved head especially well. At the moment I'd say that Angle's most conspicuous problem is his fitness, and some costumes are particularly unforgiving.

Patricia Neary, the original Tall Girl, is indeed tall. I have seen the role performed by dancers who are not tall, but the interaction with the quartet of men was less effective. There are many female dancers for whom it is difficult to find partners because they are well over six feet tall on pointe. I'm inclined to leave partnerless roles such as the Tall Girl for them to dance. They are shut out of many other roles.

@SusanB: Apparently Amazon has mp3 versions on sale. Vienna Radio Orchestra: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HJFBLQX/ National Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B073LVZB6G/ New and used CDs are also available from third-party sellers.

The one time I saw Kochetkova with ABT she was dancing opposite Sarafanov, filling in, I think, for Osipova. I remember liking her more than most Russian ballerinas. The six-o'clock extensions were grotesque, but she was less mannered than most of her compatriots and didn't drag behind the music.

Perhaps the assumption was ABT audiences demanded Russian ballerinas, and Kochetkova was closer and presumably didn't require a work visa, so she was less of a hassle. She did have a large following online and was very popular in San Francisco. But that sort of thing doesn't always translate to another city or country. Conversely, José Manuel Carreño proved to be far more popular in New York than he'd ever been in London.

Since a larger number of in-house dancers now get a chance to perform principal roles, I'd call that a victory for them.

Unfortunately, at present ABT cannot find a way to sell 3,800 tickets per show. For the most part neither can the Metropolitan Opera, though of course it presents many more performances. NEA surveys have shown that about 3% of adults in the U.S. attend a ballet performance annually (p. 31), and on average those 3% attend 1.5 performances each (p. 43). That was in 2017. I shudder to think what the numbers are post-pandemic. The obstacles are daunting. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts_ParticipationRevised.pdf

In those days the Met was heavily subscribed. I remember my aunt's annual ritual of choosing the subscription package with the fewest operas/singers she didn't want to see. Locally, the season at the main theater complex was 100% subscribed a few decades ago. Make-your-own packages and ticket exchanges were unthinkable not that long ago. Over the past 20 years, though, the audience has been tanking.

I'm guessing regional companies don't rely on tourists, whereas Broadway and the Met struggle mightily in their absence.

But in Canada it's a perfectly ordinary weekend. When the NBoC last performed Onegin 7 years ago, there was a conflict on the last Sunday with the Grey Cup final, which was played in Toronto that year, and the city was a bit of a zoo, fans from Calgary and Ottawa overrunning the place. (The climate being what it is, the Canadian football season runs from June to November.) This year, though,the Grey Cup will be played the previous weekend in Hamilton, which is about an hour's drive away, but has its own airport. Conveniently, the Toronto Maple Leafs will be on the road that week, so no influx of hockey fans either, though there will be an NBA game on the 24th. Onegin is never a monster hit in Toronto. The last time around there were also only six show, there was no Thursday matinee, and as best as I can recall, the top ring remained closed for all performances.

Yes, in 2014 a large chunk of the Bolshoi visited New York with Swan Lake, Spartacus and Don Quixote. In 2017 it participated in the 50th anniversary of Jewels with NYCB and POB, and did The Taming of the Shrew on its own, complete with weak ticket sales. I can understand some people wanting to get Nutcrackers out of their systems, but I'm not sure a MacMillan death fest in the bleak days of February would be a guaranteed hit.