Size matters

[scherzo]

William Tuckett's ballet Seven Deadly Sins had its world premiere last Thursday at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the review that I read today the reviewer suggested that it might work better 'on a more intimate stage'. What makes a ballet better suited to smaller spaces? Initially I thought it was simply the number of dancers in it, but then Ashton's Symphonic Variations has only six dancers. I don't think I've ever read of a ballet needing a bigger stage - ballets are always 'swamped' etc by space. Any thoughts?

[papeetepatrick]

deleted by author

[Leigh Witchel]

You may not haven't read about ballets happening on too small a stage because they may not have been covered (if the space is too small, a newspaper may not think it newsworthy) but it certainly happens. There are stages a dancer friend of mine called "hostile" and I call "airless" - in New York, two examples are Florence Gould Hall and the theater in the Guggenheim Museum. It's hard to make anything look good there (cruel irony, more people saw my work in the Guggenheim - the worst house I've ever played in in terms of sight lines than anywhere else). I think the Miller Theater at Columbia also provides the wrong frame for the dance. Pace's Schimmel Center has a similar problem of being very wide and narrow but the Miller also has a proportionally low proscenium; there's no "air" in the frame. You can solve some of these problems with very careful, expensive lighting.