Melissa Hamilton in "Manon"; wow...

Isn't a "Manon" a kind of chocolate?  Something with praline and whipped cream enrobed in fine belgian choc?  Delicious.

"Manon" the story is not exactly delicious; it's bittersweet even at its happiest moments, and deeply tragic by the end.  At the moment the Royal Ballet are doing MacMillan's magnificent version and I've been twice, sad balletomane that I am.

I went with the DipGeek, a planned outing; we saw Laura Morera and Nehemiah Kish, innocent and unhappy as the lovers, and Riccardo Cervera as an insouciant Lescaut.  But then on Monday I managed to get a returned ticket, to see one of my current dance idols, Melissa Hamilton, making her debut in the lead.

So if I am a sad balletomane? - so what.  This was something not to be missed.  And boy, do we have a Manon here!  I know I'm one of her fangirls, but Ms Hamilton simply seized the part with both hands and made it her own.  I was completely blown away.

She was going absolutely flat-out, technically - not a foot wrong, not a risk fudged - while dramatically, emotionally, this was as subtle and truthful an interpretation as I've ever seen.  Her performance was alive with flickering feelings, right to her fingertips.  She brought out little nuances, like the way the innocent girl, arriving in Paris in a pell-mell hurtle of excitement, cannot resist trying to show off her pretty new frock to her brother - only to realise within minutes that next to the glittery finery of the local whores she looks provincial and frumpy.  And bang! she goes, like the kid she is, straight from unthinking happiness to frustrated dissatisfaction.

This was a very young Manon, in love but also very much swept up with being in love, and visibly steeling herself to the touch of Monsieur GM with his creepy fetishes and bullying dominance.  Right through Act One there was a vividly real sense of someone trying to keep abreast of things, trying to make decisions on the spur of the moment, trying to stay ahead without really knowing what she's doing.  Circumstances keep changing, complications keep arriving, and she is too un-worldy-wise to realise she cannot have it all, despite the deepening mess, until it is horribly, painfully too late.  By the end we were going full-on for raw danger; the famous flips and plunging lifts of the last pas de deux were taken right to the line, as they need to be, to give the last scene the utter desperation it needs.  Seriously; it needs to be scary, that scene, and it was.  I haven't seen a Manon come that close to dashing her brains out on the stage for a while...

She had an excellent Lescaut in Bennet Gartside, who I didn't know would be dancing this role until I opened my cast sheet; that was a nice surprise to arrive to.  He's matured into a terrific actor and still has the dancing chops to pull off a superbly naturalistic, tumbling drunk scene, making all those horrendous off-balance leaps look easy - and phenomenally real.  If anyone in the company is going to step into Gary Avis' shoes in time, Mr Gartside might be the one to do it.

Mr Avis was excelling himself as usual (if that isn't a contradiction in terms) as an utterly repellent Monsieur GM.  I wouldn't ever have expected to say this as a compliment, but he was rape culture personified.  Through great chunks of the brothel scene my eyes kept straying from the merrymaking of the whores and their clients, to watch the interactions between him and Manon.  This was a real relationship, subtle and full of tension, a constantly-shifting unadmitted power struggle going on.  One got a very clear sense of what has happened to Manon in the last few weeks, and a real premonition of what might have happened in the succeeding months, if she hadn't taken another spur-of-the-moment gamble and tried to have it all.

I would have liked to see Miss Hamilton paired with a more emotionally responsive Des Grieux.  Matthew Golding certainly seems to be a strong, safe partner (& my god, you need one with some of the lifts in "Manon") but his acting was a bit one-dimensional for my tastes.  Mr Kish, a couple of weeks before, brought a low-key sincerity and an air of innocent, well-intentioned sweetness to this foolish young man; one watched his characterisation and thought "By gum, Des Grieux is an idiot" but one also felt for him desperately.  I didn't really feel for Mr Golding, and that's a pity. 

But by and large it was a tremendous performance.  As usual all the bit parts were beautifully done.  As usual Gary Avis acted his socks off.  And as usual Miss Hamilton left me stunned, by her wonderful dancing and her heartfelt dramatic instincts. 

The rest of my week has been busy at work and I am tending to flop at home.  I'm still very tired.  I've just been for a drink after work with the Press Office team, followed by pizza and salad 'cos it's Friday.  My internet connection at home seems to be okay tonight, after being distinctly off-colour lately.  And I have kitten-sitting duties this weekend.  So things aren't too bad at all, all things considered.  And now I am going to bed.

Nutcracker, Firebird, Hobbit, laptop...

Here's something really cool to start with

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20918398

Excellent idea.  Now all I need is for someone to do the same thing for SF writers!!

Work is getting busier, which is no bad thing.  On the good side, Great-British-winter-wise, once or twice lately we have had some watery wintry sunshine.  On the bad side, we’ve also had snow – and not nice crisp snow that settles and makes kids happy, but the sloppy wet kind that doesn’t settle but gets everywhere, and still makes going out miserable.  

 January is probably my least-favourite month – there simply isn’t enough daylight.  At least here, with all of Kew Gardens to mooch in during my lunch break, I can smell the sweet scents of winter-flowering plants, and watch for snowdrops and the rose-pink buds of limes and maples, to remind me of spring.

What have I been up to?  Writing, quelle blague; what a surprise.  I’m relieving the work of typing up and revising “Gold Hawk” by also indulging myself with a little fanfiction on the side.  It does feel a bit like having something on the side, too; a really sinful indulgence, like a box of good posh chocs (think Booja Booja quality) or a bottle of 20-year-old Laphroaig.  Or a fling, obviously (only I get all screwed up over those, whereas with chocolate or liquor, or fanfic, I can relax and enjoy myself).  Not sure what I’ll do with it, beyond using it for relaxation purposes (ooh, now that does sound dirty!), but it’s giving me some much-needed light relief in this dark month.   

I gather that some people consider writing fanfic to be a dreadful and unforgiveable sin.  Obviously I’d be a stinking hypocrite if I pretended to agree with them!  I guess in their book I’m hell-bound and that’s all there is to it. 

From what I’ve read (not very much, I should add) some of it is drivel and some of it is porn, or at least porny.  But plenty of mainstream legitimate fiction is drivel and/or porny.  Surely anything that gets us consumers to wake up and doing something creative, instead of just sitting on our backsides all day consuming, can’t be all bad?  Whether it’s taking a camera out to photograph the texture of leaves, or taking a sketchbook when you go on holiday, or keeping a journal, or singing in a choir, or going outdoors to reconnect with nature and discover some natural history, or writing a short story about your favourite fictional characters, just for fun; it’s creative, it’s self-expression, and it’s engaging with the world and responding to it instead of simply being spoon-fed the mental equivalent of junk food.  It’s co-creating, in a small way; and that, if you’ll forgive my going all religious on you for a sec, is blessed; it’s lending a hand in the Goddess’ work.

However, to come back from these heights to my present reality; the big problem at the moment with my writing, of all kinds (serious, frivolous and even perhaps drivel) is that my laptop is sick, and getting steadily sicker.  It now gets conniptions every time I try to save what I’m writing onto disk.  Since it’s far too old for me to be able to save onto a USB stick (they may not even have existed when it was manufactured – at any rate it lacks the necessary scart/port/whatever), floppies are my only option if I want something saved in a portable format.  And I can only get my work onto ICW, or into a friend’s mailbox, if I can get it off the machine in the first place.  Lately, I can have been peacefully typing all evening, and then the laptop will suddenly turn up its toes and refuse to do anything more.  Instead, I get a frozen screen, and it refuses to switch off, either, and sits buzzing for hours until it runs its battery right down.  By this point it has generally kept me awake for several hours, which is not good.  I feel about ninety this morning, after having this happen again last night.

Around the edges of a lot of typing, I’m having a busy old time of it culturally-speaking; a good dose of high culture, and a healthy fillip of somewhat-lower-culture.   A Nutcracker, a triple bill and a Hobbit, to be precise.

I love the Royal ballet’s “Nutcracker”; it is very, very traditional, with snowflakes and glittery costumes and wicked mice and a gorgeous transformation scene.  I’ve seen it about six times, so this trip was a complete indulgence.  Mainly I went to see Akane Takada in action as the Sugar Plum Fairy.  She’s one of their up-and-comings, just starting to get some bigger roles.  It’s one of the joys of going to see a particular ballet company regularly; getting to spot young talent and see them progress rapidly (or, frustratingly, not so rapidly) up the ranks and into the larger parts.   She wasn’t a flawless Sugar Plum, but rather a lovely one nonetheless; she doesn’t over-extend, which loks right to me in this kind of pure classical stuff; she has a delicious finish, right down to her fingertips, and that trick of coming down off pointe very smoothly (which probably has a technical name) so that every balance seems to flow into the next move without the tiniest transition.  She also looks like a Japanese Googie Withers, which can’t hurt. 

The triple bill was “The Firebird”, “In the Night”, and “Raymonda Act 3”.  Two utter marvels, and a dollop of glittery idiocy and Mittel-european flouncing in character shoes.   

Mara Galeazzi’s Firebird was extraordinary.  She is a dancer who is immensely good at conveying powerful human emotions, but here she genuinely seemed to be touching the non-human – instinctive, reactive, self-preserving, utterly wild – so that the creature’s reappearance to honour her pledge with Ivan Tsarevich became not just the working-out of the plot, but a moment of real awe and power.  This is what fairy tales do, when you’re a child and the stories are new; hit you in the eyes with their archetypal potency.  It’s good to see it can still happen, and raise the hairs on the back of my neck.  It’s also a joy to see Ms Galeazzi back in action again, let alone in such blazing (almost literally!) good form.  

The Jerome Robbins was utterly wonderful, too.   Why don’t they do a Robbins triple bill?  “In the Night”, “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Dances at a Gathering” are all in the RB rep now; and wouldn’t that be a simply dreamy evening?  I suppose they fear that it wouldn’t put bums on seats.  It would get my bum there; but that’s only one bum on one seat (or technically two if I went twice, which is always a temptation with mixed bills as there’s usually more than one cast).   “In the Night”, anyway, has grace and charm and delicacy and romance and humour, and an indefinable overarching quality of mystery; it is far more than the sum of its parts, as all the best short works are.  I saw Emma Maguire and Alexander Campbell as Couple One, luxurious Zenaida Yanowsky and big Mr Kish as Couple Two, and Roberta Marquez and the great Carlos Acosta as Couple Three.   Gorgeous casting in a gorgeous, haunting ballet.

“Raymonda” does nothing profound for me, but it was great fun, and looked gorgeous, and everyone was dancing their socks off.  ‘Nuff said.

“The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey” is a muddle.  I wish it weren’t.  I loved Peter Jackson’s three “Lord of the Rings” movies, although they aren’t perfect (the bits that grate with me, the unnecessary tweaking of the plot in particular, grate more each time I see them).  This looks just as good and for a change some of the tweaks actually work better.  If one is going to present the story of “The Hobbit” as part of the same canon, and not as a lighter, more child-orientated work (which the book certainly is), then one has got to stress the seriousness of what is going on, and set it firmly in the same continuum.  I can accept that; much of it has been lifted and shoe-horned in from the appendices of the “Lord of the Rings”, and I think from the “Silmarillion” too; and I think in the main it’s fairly well done.

 But there are also some completely extraneous additions; notably a prolonged battle in the Orc halls that looks as if it was lifted wholesale from a computer game.  And all the way through, one is aware that here, things could be taken with leisure, spreading the story over three films when it fills one pretty short book.  Compared to the taut, compact story-telling in the three LOTR films, this looks relaxed to a startling degree.  The dwarves get to do both their musical numbers, for goodness’ sakes.  I didn’t really need either.

But what works, really works.  The “Riddles in the Dark” section is like something from a different movie altogether, tight and powerful and genuinely scary.  The designs are glorious (though I’ve always felt the Peter Jackson Shire looked too untamed – it has the appearance of a landscape that was first settled and farmed perhaps two or three generations ago at most, not countless centuries.  It should look like rural Kent or Devon).   Little things like the moon-runes and the sword Sting glowing are spot-on.  Above all, the cast is excellent, and I honestly don’t think that if they had instigated a world-wide hunt for Bilbo Baggins, à la “the search for Scarlett O’Hara”, they could have found a more perfect lead than Martin Freeman.  He is simply wonderful.

Well, anyway; I’ve been writing this in my lunch breaks since the end of last week, so now I am finally going to post it, and then try to keep a bit more up-to-date.  But here’s to more cultural fun, both high and low, for the rest of this year.  And here’s to the blinking laptop behaving itself tonight.  Please?

Not by bread alone...

It’s a long time since I wrote.  I had a lovely fortnight off; chilled out at my mum’s, then swam and sketched for a week in Kefalonia.  I came back to work tanned and refreshed, straight into a cloudburst at Gatwick.  That was just two weeks ago.  Work has been steadily busy ever since, which is good (I hate being bored).   

My cultural life since then has consisted of three mixed evenings out.  The first was to a concert that was a bit of a curate’s egg – a beautiful, lump-in-the-throat producing performance of The Enigma Variations, followed by Brahms’ Violin Concerto played by a Very Famous Soloist who I rapidly began to want to slap.  I’m sorry, but being a “character” does not entitle you to add extra percussion (sometimes off the beat, to add insult to injury) by jumping heavily up and down in fake exuberance as you play.  I love the Brahms concerto dearly, and the last person I heard playing it was Christian Tetzlaff, who is a musical demi-god in my book; I don’t want to see it turned into a self-indulgent party turn.

The second was last Friday, to a Hollywood blockbuster of the “lets trash New York with CGI” variety, and the last was last night, to “The Prince of the Pagodas” at Covent Garden.  “Prince of the Pagodas” was interesting stuff.  I gather the plot has been tweaked a bit, the intention being to make it a scrap more comprehensible; not very successful, I’m sorry to say.  Britten’s score veers between very beautiful and very weird, and so does the choreography.  But the orchestra and the excellent cast were putting their all into things, and I cannot fault the performance.  I’m just not sure it was worth reviving in the first place.  Marianela Nuñez was a radiant Princess Belle-Rose, Nehemiah Kish a handsome, gentle, gentlemanly Prince and Tamara Rojo a splendidly contemptuous Princess Belle-Épine, flashing her magnificent eyes and slashing high kicks at everyone.  The four evil kings who team up with Belle-Épine were terrific, the daft but saintly Fool bounced like the requisite rubber ball, and all the numerous bit parts were well done too.

But I’m afraid the blockbuster movie was a lot more fun. 

There are times when you want perfectly-cooked fresh food and top class wine, followed by superbly-played Mozart, and there are times when you want popcorn and a large chocolate milkshake, and lots of hunky men slinging each other about the place, and explosions.  “The Avengers Assemble” has the hunks and the explosions, a plot that is surprisingly easy to follow given its complexity, a script that is well-constructed, intelligent and genuinely witty, and a very good cast.  It was a perfect Friday-night movie, and I shall probably buy the dvd when it comes out, to add to my collection of things like “Aeon Flux”, “V for Vendetta” and the “Star Trek” reboot, for those “popcorn-needed” evenings.  Come to think of it, of course, although those are all popcorn movies they are, like “Avengers Assemble”, blessed with better than average scripts and good actors (okay, and eye candy). 

I’ll grant you that some of the Avengers are, to be polite, more limited as actors than others.  Captain America and Thor are big manly lunks of muscle, and they do “decent” and “honourable” and “heroic” to a tee, but I’m not sure either of them would do “Hamlet”.  Tom Hiddleston, enjoying himself playing the villain, would be a dream Hamlet, on the other hand (& is my dream Gabriel Yeats).  Robert Downey Jnr., Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo and Samuel L Jackson are all eminently watchable, in pretty much everything they appear in, whether they are paying their mortgages doing junk or acting their socks off in something intelligent.  They can all carry a movie on their own, and any of them would be worth seeing this for.   Yes, that’s right, I’m not being silly; this really is a superhero movie worth seeing for the acting. 

That brings me to Hawkeye, Jeremy Renner, who was new to me, and steals every scene he is in.  Even when he isn’t doing anything, one’s eyes stray to him; he’s so hot he burns.  I haven’t been able to muster myself to see “The Hurt Locker” (I have a vivid imagination, and don’t want to see the subject matter made any more real than my imagination already can); so I had no idea what this chap was capable of, or even what he looked like.  Indeed, I admit that I was vaguely expecting a handsome, high-cheekboned scenery-chewer, trying wildly to capitalise on having been flavour-of-the-month a couple of years ago.  Mr Renner however is the exact opposite; a middle-sized guy with nice eyes, who looks as if he might be part hobbit, and does bottled-in intensity so well he could almost be British.  He’s terrific. 

So, not for the first time, I have the great Joss Whedon (who wrote and directed this) to thank for a good evening’s entertainment.  Thank you, Mr Whedon; more, please!

I came home from this so fired up that the Muse popped in and has been hanging out with me ever since.  A new story!  I’m about 25 pages in, and it’s feeling good.

Beauty and busy-ness

I think the autumn this year is the most beautiful I can remember since I have been here at Kew.  The first fall colours began to appear in September, but here we are in early November and everywhere I look I can still see spectacular leaves and berries.  What is more, unless we have a high wind, it looks set to go on a bit longer yet, for some trees are still green and unaffected.  Because of the weather has been mild and still for weeks, trees have held their colour.  Because we haven’t yet had a hard frost, every species has turned slowly, at its own pace, rather than all going over at once.  It has been a long, slow passage over from late summer into fall, and it has been as quiet and measured as the rising of the tide.

As I walk through the Gardens here at work I am surrounded by riches.  Scarlet and crimson, brick red and Indian red, chestnut brown, golden brown, golden yellow, ochre, Naples yellow, gamboge; everywhere  I look are these magnificent colours.  Every leaf of Virginia creeper is marked with brilliant patterns, like Venetian millefiori glass; the berries of a crab apple swing over my head like gobstopper-sized jewels, and the Grass Garden is a tapestry of pale golden seed heads and soft, feathery brushstrokes of colour...

Actually I cannot imagine, brushstroke metaphors or no, how on earth one could paint this.  It is staggeringly beautiful, but so much of the beauty is dependent on the immeasurably fine gradations of shade and the tiny details of structure.  One couldn’t use swathes of colour without losing all that delicacy; every tree looks like a mosaic with each leaf an individual fleck of gold or ruby glass.  Yet if one painted every leaf, compulsively, one would lose the sweep and scale of the view, and the result would look obsessive rather than beautiful.

Near the back door of the office I work in are a cedar that has been gilding the pavement with pale golden pollen; a camellia covered with bright early flowers in shell pink; a golden-orange maple, and one that looks as if it has been dipped in grapefruit marmalade.  Moving through the Gardens I am blessed by colour.  Dodging back indoors again as the rain starts, I can carry, held quiet within me, the beauty and delicacy of the autumn trees, and their grace.  Not just the grace of physical beauty, but the spiritual grace of yielding to autumn and flowing with the cycle of the year.  Trees are a model of grace.

Of course from a phenological point of view the cycle of the year is a little askew; here is a link to an article by Kew’s Mr Arboretum himself, Tony Kirkham (who knows a heck of a lot more about trees than me!) on the subject:

http://www.kew.org/news/kew-blogs/arboretum-team/a-very-strange-autumn.htm

It’s been a hectic weekend; all the usual jobs like grocery shopping, going to the bank, running the washing machine, gardening and so forth, plus a heart-rending performance of “Manon” at the Royal Ballet (Marianela Nuñez surpassing herself as a subtle, tragic, ravishingly beautiful Manon, Nehemiah Kish partnering her beautifully as a devoted Des Grieux [& on a more carnal note I see with satisfaction that he still seems to be resisting the fashion for chest-waxing!] and Thiago Soares a superb, powerful, charming Lescaut [I have never cried at Lescaut’s death before]); plus tea with my stepmum Jane, plus an absolutely spectacular firework display.

Now I’m back at work, and the whole office is being plagued with computer problems.  Strangely the internet isn’t behaving too badly; but our office email system is really not doing well.  Ah well, these things happen, in the modern office; but sometimes I long for the days of handwritten ledgers and paper correspondence.  So much less liable to technical faults!

How not to grow old...

You all know what a balletomane I am, with my raving enthusiasms and cries of delight - "She was wonderful, they were terrific, he's brilliant!" and so on. It must get rather monotonous...

Anyway, last night I was at Covent Garden for my last ballet outing until ENB’s summer season in July (sob). But I had two of the other kind of balletomane in the seats behind me – the “Fings ain’t wot they used to be” kind; real griping grannies.

I quote:
“No-one knows how to dance Ashton properly these days, that girl’s port de bras is awful, they should send that Ukrainian boy back where he came from, it’s a disgrace that chap was allowed on stage without having a chest wax… "

And so forth.

They weren’t just criticising the performances, either; they were being downright mean, making sniping personal remarks about dancers’ abilities, technique, looks, morals, age, you name it... They bitched about two of my favourite female dancers; then, they thought everyone was over-rated, Nehemiah Kish needed a nose job, Leanne Benjamin should have been let go years ago – “she’s well past her sell-by date” – Madam would never have allowed a shocking performance of “Scenes de ballet” like that to go ahead, Madam would never have promoted “that dismal smirking Cuthbertson girl” to principal, or hired “that ugly Japanese boy, and that American with the awful feet”… (“Madam”, in case you don’t know, was Ninette De Valois, who founded the RB).

When the “Rite of Spring” ended, as soon as the applause finished one of them started up again - “Well! Wasn’t that a mess? I suppose with all the foreigners in the company these days…” – and I just leapt up and fled. I don’t think I’ve ever exited the auditorium so fast!

It made me wonder if the Royal Opera House has a department handling complaints, like Kew, and if so, how on earth do they answer such horrible personal comments about individual performers?

For the record: “Scenes de ballet” is not my favourite piece, but was very well-danced; “Voluntaries” was gorgeous, heartfelt and lyrical (& Leanne Benjamin is SO not past her sell by date! - & Ryoichi Hirano is SO not ugly! - and Nehemiah Kish SO doesn’t need a nose job – or a chest wax for that matter!); and the “Rite” was absolutely stunning (Steven McRae’s dance of death was chilling – he is brilliant, this ginger Aussie dynamo, and I love him to bits).

But these carping crones cast a nasty shadow over the whole evening for me. Why they had bothered to come in the first place I don’t know, but heaven preserve me from growing like that. I'm more likely, on current evidence, to be a dirty old woman than a griping one, but it was still a salutary reminder of how not to grow old.

There, just had to get that off my chest.

That picture, incidentally, is Leanne Benjamin, photographed somewhere in the Australian Outback a couple of years back, in a jeté so zingy she's practically in flight... Past her sell-by date, my eye!

Thoughts on a man who has since produced the goods...

I have been trying to tidy up some computer files full of out of date notes, and I found this - my thoughts after the last time I got to see two different casts in the same ballet programme at Covent Garden, back in the autumn. Since it contains a bit of musing on Nehemiah Kish, the chap I saw coming out of his shell to such excellent effect last weekend, I thought I'd pop it down in here, for my own reference as much as anything. Yes, more ballet-ramblings; sorry. But it's amusing and pleasing to see I was more-or-less on the button with him.

"I also went to a second performance of the Royal Ballet Mixed Bill; sheer self indulgence on my part. I had booked it because I read in an interview with Kim Brandstrup that he was fascinated by how his new ballet was shaping up differently depending on which of the two casts were dancing – he actually said something like “it’s almost like doing two different ballets”. Then a couple of days after I had treated myself to a second ticket for a performance with the other cast, poor Alina Cojocaru injured herself and had to drop out, and Ed Watson and Leanne Benjamin stepped up to do every night. So I got a double dose of them – at which I am not complaining (complaining? – at wonderful Leanne Benjamin and gorgeous Ed Watson?!), though I would have loved to see Cojocaru and Kobborg too. The rest of the casting for the whole bill had to shift around, too; I didn’t see quite who I had expected, either time.

Still, it is sheer luxury to see two performances of the same programme, and to be able to compare casts. I went to the Saturday matinee on the 16th, and the evening show on the 30th; the second performance in the run, and the last.

To be frank, first time around I thought “La Valse” looked a bit messy. The dancing was passionate but rather untidy and the final image was spoiled by the central sextet having trouble getting going – they were still trotting briskly in a circle as the curtain fell, when they should have been whirling madly round with the girls’ feet well off the ground. This Saturday, by contrast, everything was perfect, really elegant and polished, and the dramatic undertones came across strongly.

There is something weird about “La Valse”; Ravel’s music has a tension one doesn’t expect in a waltz, and Ashton's choreography hints at this same sense of danger. The men leap in unison as if bursting with sublimated stress, and there is an increasing feeling of foreboding as the dancing grows ever wilder without quite breaking its conventions; it is as though these people are trapped in some doomed kingdom, dancing forever in their fairytale evening dress. The best image I can come up with is of the citizens of the Land of Lost-Hope, in Susanna Clarke’s marvellous “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell”… These dancers are beautiful, yes, but also haunted and haunting.

“Invitus, invitam” knocked my socks off, and Watson and Benjamin were both dazzling, both nights. It’s one of the most nuanced pieces of contemporary ballet I’ve seen, and passing straight from “La Valse” to this was a good judgement call. It’s as if the general disquiet of “La Valse” has moved into a personal level; the device of the second couple apparently running through the blocking of the piece in rehearsal clothes, their own relationship lightly sketched in around the choreography of the central couple, suggests the timelessness of this story of heartbreak and separation. The lovers in the story must part, however much they long for another outcome, and even those to whom this is just a story to enact will have their own stories also, and their own partings.

I must say, though, following this with “Winter Dreams”, with its equally sad story, does leave one feeling pretty emotionally drained by the second interval. It started to seem as if the whole evening were one long descent into a realm of loss and sorrow.

For the first “Winter Dreams” performance I saw, the leads were Tamara Rojo and Nehemiah Kish; a mismatch, basically. I don’t want to be rude about the new guy – he dances well, but he looked oddly controlled, even cautious, for someone supposedly in the throes of an overwhelming passion. He was elegant (he has lovely arms) but his acting is on the quiet side and he looked downright subdued beside Ms Rojo, who as always was acting her socks off. But I do think it was a mismatch as much as anything. The best comparison I can think of is of what would have happened if you had ever been able to put Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi on the same stage; Callas would have acted Tebaldi into the orchestra pit, given her famously-intense histrionic oomph. And yet, in the long run, Tebaldi was the better singer, and the one who had the confidence to let the drama that is inherent in the music come through, rather than imposing her own drama upon it.

So I hope it will be with Mr Kish, as he gets the feel of the House. For all I know he’s been used to a smaller auditorium with better sight lines (CG is a bit of a barn, after all), and have developed an acting style to match – he may just need to open up and relax a bit more. He’s tall, which can only be useful in a Company with some (ahem) less-than-tall fellas, he’s got a pleasant quirky face (& a splendidly long nose), and he did a lovely job in the second cast of “La Valse”, partnering Lauren Cuthbertson beautifully, so I’m prepared to give him a chance and see how he shapes up as he settles in.

The other parts were well cast and well danced, especially Jonathan Cope as the unhappy Kulygin, and Itziar Mendizabel as Olga. I saw Cope again on the 30th, and he was even more nuanced and subtle second time around. His solos were almost painful to watch, so perfectly did they express pain. It’s a joy to see him in action again – dare one hope for more of him on stage again?

The Masha and Vershinin on the 30th were Marianela Nuñez and Carlos Acosta. Wow, is Ms Nuñez shaping up into a deeply wonderful dancer! I first saw her in action ages ago as one of Swanilda’s friends in “Coppelia” - a charming girl with a huge beaming smile; then as Lise in “La Fille Mal Gardée” – another charming smiling girl; then as the Lilac Fairy – a beautiful embodiment of warmth and goodness (and pretty charming and smiley, too). Then in “Serenade” she appeared as the girl who arrives late; somehow without ever actually acting (after all, it is a non-narrative ballet) she conveyed a sense of the loneliness of someone who always “arrives too late”, who is perpetually on the outside with no real idea of why. Her delicate and graceful dancing was deeply moving, infused with a beautiful, subtle melancholy. I think she is learning the immensely difficult art of acting within the movement – as certain great opera singers (to extend the earlier Callas v Tebaldi metaphor a little) act within the music – trusting the material to give her the drama, instead of thrusting her own upon it. The results are proving magical; her Masha was utterly heartrending – I found her far more affecting than Rojo, heresy though that may be to say. Acosta, working beside her, was also full of feeling. I keep reading critics saying he ain’t what he used to be – after all, he must be all of thirty-eight – but he still seems pretty splendid to me.

Thank goodness, though, that the bill finished up with some delightfully crisp, sparkly Balanchine; no painful emotions here, just fun and games, the ballet equivalent of downing a glass of fine champagne. After all that heartfelt feeling one really needed it, and I came out humming the Tchaikovsky music happily."

Hectic, but with ballet and more ballet...

Well, it’s been a hectic couple of weeks since I got back from my holiday. Work is at a busy time of the year and our department as a whole is still very short-staffed, although my team is slightly less stretched now that someone has come back from a long period of sick leave. The new computers are still causing hiccoughs assorted; every time I think I’ve got the hang of things I am brought up against another baffling change to the simple “how you do this” issues, with the result that I still feel like a cat chasing my tail a lot of the time. Fire-fighting the illogicality of Windows 7 is a big draw on one’s time and energy.

I haven’t been completely without fun, though. I’ve had a lovely trip to the Wetland Centre, some ballet outings and concerts to go to, plus a trip to the cinema (“Thor”, totally daft but entertaining; nice to see Tom Hiddleston, one of my ideal Gabriel Yeatses, getting a good high profile job, too) and a highly enjoyable birthday party – the sort where intelligent people talk about intelligent things and laugh a lot over a few pints. I’ve been trying to keep on top of the garden, not an easy task in this drought. And I’ve started the tricky and rather emotionally-draining business of giving “Ramundi’s sisters” a third revision. >sigh< It needs to be done, but it’s a job that gets slightly more sticky with each turn around the block.

My ballet outings were all very enjoyable. The latest Triple Bill at the Royal Ballet was a lovely package, except for being too short – none of the three pieces was particularly long, and the first came in at under twenty minutes. Even with longer than average intervals to pad it out, I was home soon after ten pm; but it was a good enough evening that I didn’t feel short-changed. “Ballo della Regina” was the “please sir, I want some more” opener, with Lauren Cuthbertson in lovely, shiny, smiley form as the lead ballerina, skipping through some fiendish footwork as if it were a playground game. She had a scrumptious quartet backing her up, and Sergei Polunin, all huge leaps and cheekbones, was classy as the sole fella.

Next up came a new piece by Wayne McGregor, which has got the critics all at sixes and sevens; like retsina, it seems, you either love it or loathe it. I was high enough up in the house not to be overly distracted by the video backdrop of exploding trucks, and could concentrate on the dancing. I’m never entirely sure I’m convinced by McGregor’s intellectual ideas, but he certainly choreographs incredible stuff from the dancing point of view; elastic off-centre bends, weird shapes, strenuous lifts and general frenzied athleticism all round. Ferociously tricky, it was danced by the small cast with a bravura that was slightly scary.

For a finale we got a revival, much longed-for by me, of Christopher Wheeldon’s “DGV”, a gorgeous non-narrative piece whose lack of a story does not preclude a heartfelt warmth in its series of fluid duets and final, powerfully uplifting ensemble. It’s a thrilling ballet that I could happily watch over and over; and with a cast like this it simply sings. Duet number one brought us a sensuous Laura Morera and Steven McRae’s customary febrile dynamism, duet number two, Zenaida Yanowsky’s long limbed elegance and the steady, modest strength of Eric Underwood. For duet number three I was lucky enough to see Gary Avis and Melissa Hamilton again; this is a luxury partnership of astonishing chemistry, and their ease with one another in this tender, soaring, probably hideously-difficult material is simply dazzling. To finish off, replacing Sarah Lamb and Federico Bonelli, came a decidedly high-calibre piece of back-up casting in the form of Itziar Mendizabal and Nehemiah Kish, two new recruits both of whom I am warming to rapidly. They hadn’t originally been slated to dance this at all, seem to have been put in fairly late in the day, and both looked as though they were loving every minute.

Then came the saga of the “Manon”s. MacMillan’s “Manon” is one of my all-time favourite ballets, and I went to see it back at the beginning of the run in April for a performance featuring the sexy Steven McRae, passionately intense and technically dazzling, and his regular stage partner, the beautiful and elfin Roberta Marquez. Gorgeous!

When I discovered that a performance featuring Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg was being put out on the Big Screen in Trafalgar Square last week, though, I decided I had to go to that – after all, Cojocaru and Kobborg are pretty damned special together, and it was free, and Big Screen screenings are tremendous fun in a slightly surreal way (double decker buses circling, sirens wailing by, aircraft heading into Heathrow as the night sky darkens to deepest phthalo blue…). So I went along, with a fleece and a picnic, and failed to link up with a friend who cried off at the last minute, and was thrilled all over again.

It was a totally different interpretation of the leading roles, with Kobborg playing Des Grieux as an intelligent, mature man of almost heroic decency, and Alina’s Manon the most thoughtful, even moral, I’ve ever seen. I know it sounds odd to call a girl who elects to become a rich man’s kept woman “moral”, but really, you could see her struggling between the choices facing her, knowing that both are, in one way or another, wrong – forswear the man you love and become a whore, or let-down and disobey your beloved brother (and know you are losing your one chance at financial security as well)…

And then my mum called me on Friday to say the friend she was going with to the Saturday matinee (scheduled to be danced by Laura Morera and Federico Bonelli) had called to say she couldn’t come after all, and would I like to join her? Well, Morera and Bonelli were a stunning Tatyana and Onegin last autumn, so I was delighted to say yes. Only to find, on arriving at the Opera House, that Mr Bonelli was injured and was being replaced by Mr Kish – who’s only danced the part once before, and that not with Ms Morera.

Mum was vocal in her disappointment (she feels about Mr Bonelli rather as I do about Messrs Watson and McRae, tall dark Italians being catnip to her in the same way ginger toms are to me); “Who’s this Nehemiah Kish, then? Never heard of him. Where’s he from? How long's he been kicking around?” etc etc – rather embarrassing as one cringes and hopes her well-pitched and rather carrying voice will not reach the ears of a parent, wife, girl~ or boyfriend, or anyone else who’s there to support Mr K... I tried to reassure her but as I hadn’t seen him in action very much, all I could say was fairly bland things about him being tall and a good partner.

So into the theatre we went, and the lights went down, and we were treated to what was for me, completely out of the blue, the best of the three “Manon”s I’ve seen this year, by a good margin.

It’s always hard to explain it, when it happens, but it was one of those performances when everything just comes together. By the time they got to that final terrifying pas de deux, hurtling into despair and death in the Louisiana swamps, I was crying helplessly into my binoculars, totally harrowed.

With two leads who hadn’t been set to dance together, and who therefore can’t have had much rehearsal together, one could have forgiven the odd hesitation or over-careful lift, but in fact they seemed pretty much unfazed by it; there was hardly any sign that they hadn’t been dancing together for years. To my eyes they were well-matched physically, technically and emotionally; their acting styles were complementary (both are subtle and inward actors rather than grand-standing and full-on) and they brought the whole thing alight for me.

The rest of the cast was batting down the order, too, and there were lovely little touches all over the place. José Martín was an excellent Lescaut, perhaps less virtuosic than Ricardo Cervera had been but more complex as a character; Valentino Zucchetti was a terrific Beggar Chief, Gary Avis a really nasty Monsieur GM, Bennett Gartside a really nasty Gaoler – I could burble on for ages listing every bit part who got a credit, as there wasn’t a duff performance to be seen. And from our leads there were lovely clean lines and confident sweeping lifts, kisses that looked as if they were really meant, and all the time that sense of real feeling, of something not thought-thru’ and rehearsed but fresh and immediate.

Laura Morera’s Manon came across as a girl who at the beginning is only just discovering the power her allure gives her, making a journey from innocence to a painful adulthood – a Juliet-like character, trying to make the right decisions, to solve the pull between irreconcilable longings. Mr Kish’s Des Grieux was a classic nice guy, simple and straightforward, kind-hearted, devoted, even perhaps not terribly bright; exactly the sort of decent, honest boy-next-door type she ought to have been able, in a better world, to marry and be happy with.

She knows how to use her stillness to say more than one would think possible; he knows how to use his very beautiful hands and wrists to finish a long, aching line; they both have the technical skill to let the choreography do the talking, rather than trying to over-characterise. The final pas de deux was about as no-holds-barred as I’ve seen it, Manon’s death a shattering moment, Des Grieux not screaming silently as most do but slumping back on his heels, staring at her body in shock; exhausted, bereft, and knowing he’s next.

I’ve been haunted by it ever since.