Usually dancers,and ballet fans do not usually find boring a ballet.But when It happens It means It is really really boring.In your own opinion,which ballet did You find boring when You saw it?
I really can't stand Romeo&Juliet as a whole.If It's an extract ok.The whole becomes very boring,especially MacMillan's version.And then everything that's contemporary.I love to dance it,but to be watched,I admit It is boring when It's not a highly genial choreography.
Now It's up to You.

You don't like contemporary? Hmm. If I may, I would like to recommend a dvd to you. Perhaps you've already seen it? It is one of my favorites, and is some of the best compelling contemporary choreography I've seen, (and not even in person!).
Netherlands Dans Theater in Jiri Kylian's Black and White Ballet's. I can almost guarantee you won't be disappointed.
If you end up looking at the Dvd, all of the segments are fabulous, and humorous. My favorites are Sarabande and Petit Mort. (It's a blast to dance as well!).
I am assuming by contemporary, you are meaning this type of performance? What other contemporary ballet's irk you?

Oh I love Kilian(but Petit Mort that I find genial but boring...),Mats Ek(especially his Sleeping Beauty) but that's an enjoyable type of contemporary dance.Because It's very neo-classical,so You have an Aestethic of the movement,of the dancer and sometimes there's a story or something to follow.
I don't like the contemporary that has the tendence to make dancers and movements get ugly,oppressive and exasperatedly dramatical.I mean,like "Sagre du Printemps" or........i don't know but I think You understand.The one with dancers wearing rags,skin headed with thick dark make up and exhasperating movements and sorrow.Can be nice once,but It really gets upsetting after 10 minutes of performance.And unfortunately this type of contemporary seems to be taking root in the dancing scene.
The choice of music must also be well done or people will start sleeping on the seats.Instead It is really "In" nowadays to make performances on Bach or Mozart pieces,which I personally find repetitive and not for sure of impact on the audience.

But tell me about what You find boring;-)

I find 'Mayerling' boring and also hate it.

I don't feel it fair to mention flops, every choreographer has some of those, but among the very popular successes of choreographic stars:
Petite Mort of Kylian and La Dame aux Camelias of Neumeier.
Also " ..... " by Peter Martins, except that when I try to fill in the quotes, then I've got to fill in the cast, and those glorious NYCB dancers (and some of their best are always cast in the Chief's ballets) are never boring!

Me too, and I'm usually a huge fan of MacMillan's ballets - his Romeo and Juliet, and Manon usually have me in tears by the end.

I think that Mayerling is trying to tell too convoluted a story, with too many people having too many affairs, and what is it with the opera singer in the middle?

Some people find Balanchine's "Don Quixote" dull, at least in parts, but I find it moving. The Don Q that bores me is the traditional version based on Petipa. I'm not a folk-dancing fan.

Les Noces.

I also find 'Glass Pieces' and 'Songs of the Auvergne' boring, and all but a split-second or so of 'Friandises' is boring.

The most boring ballets I've seen were so boring I wouldn't waste the time to look up their titles in my performance diary.

Of the ones I remember -- a double-edged sword -- I used to think it was MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, whose Balcony Pas de Deux reminds me of movie previews that are better than the movie. Then I saw Manon at the Met in the '80's. Any ballet that feels eight hours long but stars Alessandra Ferri is not one I'm willing to see again.

Three ballets I'd ordinarily avoid: Spectre de la Rose, Pas de Quatre , and The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

The choreographer who bores the most on second viewing of a work: Jiri Kylian. (Apologies to dancerboy87, but Kylian's work I've seen is sometimes mesmerising the first time around, but mind-numbing on sequent viewings.)

James Kudelka's "The Contract".

Had I been asked this question in 1972, after I'd first seen the ballet. I would not have hesitated to answer.

"The most boring ballet I've ever seen is "Watermill," by Jerome Robbins."

Plenty of people would have agreed. The audience booed the night I was there and at many subsequent performances. Who could blame us? We'd come to see one of the great dancers of the time, Edward Villella. But instead of his usual jumping and turning, he hadn't danced a step. He'd come onstage in a long black cloak, slowly removed it and whatever else he'd been wearing, until he was finally down to white jockey shorts. Ah. we thought, watch him go now! But instead, he'd gone to lie down and think about his past.

The subject of "Watermill" was the passage of time, and, as Lincoln Kirstein said, the tempo of the ballet was "diabolically slow." It took several viewings and the passage of time in my own life, for me to begin to appreciate the beauty of "Watermill." I don't know what today's audiences would make of it. After all, everything is faster now than it was in 1972. I still don't count it among my favorite ballets. But I'd like to see it again once or twice before it's time to put the cloak back on.

Oh, I loved Watermill on first viewing, and always hoped to recapture the experience. I was floating afterwards, having absorbed the tempo of the ballet, and I felt that the intermission crowd was behaving at manic speed, although probably no more so than usual. It was a lovely, meditative state of being.

I have enjoyed subsequent performances of Watermill, but only with Villella to date.

I generally find MacMillan boring. I agree that Kylian is boring on second viewing -- well put, bart -- except Sinfonietta, thanks mainly to the stage full of leaping dancers at the end.

I think boring choreography is often the product of inept choreographers, while bad/ offensive/off-putting ballets can be the work of great choreographers. There are exceptions to that . I find Balanchine's Ballade boring.

I'd rather be offended than bored -- at least then I have something to latch onto.

I'm not wild about that one, but the Robbins ballet based on folk traditions that really bored me the one time I saw it is "Dybbuk." Perhaps it would grow on me with further viewings.

I loved 'Watermill' and saw it only once. But I think I associate it totally with Villella--I don't think it would interest me to see anyone else in it.

I absolutely agree with You.These two,taken as a whole are terribly boring.Even if I've to say that I'm taking back my bad opinion about Manon.I have it on DVD,the one with Antony Dowell and Jennifer Penney.She is,in my opinion,inconsistent.With or without her on stage,It'd be the same.No sign of interpretation....nothing special technically...but the whole ballet,when You see it many times,and like a medicine:in little doses every day,It comes less boring and more digestible.

Oh, this is so interesting. Personally, I love Les Noces, but can see how it wouldn't suit everyone.

For me, it depends more on the dancers than on the actual ballet. For example, I could never get bored with a Malakhov-Vishneva RJ or Manon, no matter whose choreography I'm watching, but with other dancers, the whole of Manon bores me to tears. Don't even get me started on RJ. I love the pdd with Ferri-Bocca, but even though Makarova was amazing and ethereal in the pdd w. Mckenzie, he wasn't at a level that could make me like the ballet more.

Also, ABT's Swan Lake. Parts of it are lively, but there's just something missing to hold my attention for a long time, and I frequently walk around, bake cookies, or study biochem (I'm a Biochem student ) during some parts of the ballet.

I LOVED Dubbuk. I saw it three times I think. I was confused at first, but not bored. Rutherford is an absolute jem in this ballet.

Absolutley. Exception always can be made for a truly extraordinary -- or historic -- cast.

For example, I was totally absorbed while watching the 1960 video of Pas de Quatre with Alonso, Hayden, Slavenska and Kaye. They say that a great actor can make reading the phone book spell-binding -- so why not certain dancers?

I've also noticed that certain iconic ballets -- often boring on their own in routine performances -- can be completely entrancing and hilarious when they are parodied.

This made me think of 'In Memory Of...' which I loved the one time I saw it because of Farrell, and only because of Farrell. I would never be interested in seeing it again, and would not even really have wanted to see it with her more than once.

But other discussions like 'The Dancer or the Dance' come to mind too, in which people were talking about the work coming first. I think it definitely works both ways, with both good and bad works. I know that I have very often gone to see certain dancers rather than keeping the image of the holy work before me in all-hallowed awe.

I obviously will never achieve the inner circle of balletomanes, because I don't like 'Giselle' much even with Makarova and Baryshnikov in it (well, maybe the once.) I also do like anything with Nureyev and Fonteyn in it, literally anything with the two together (yes, I would have liked them in 'Giselle'). A number of people find Macmillan's 'Romeo and Juliet' boring, I see, but that never occurred to me when I saw the Czinner movie. I also saw a bunch of 'R & J's done by the Stuttgart one summer, and they may have also done the 'Dame aux Camellias' that someone else had found boring. Marcia Haydee was doing it a good bit then, but I still found it boring. Some ballets like 'Raymonda' also depend for me on the company and production, as I am not entranced by this ballet nor with its score. 'Don Quixote' is pretty corny, but if there are some spirited dancers like Ananiashvili in it, I don't mind.

I found Eifman's Musagète to be boring, confusing, and musically incoherent.

Don Quixote, which I only saw once danced by the Boston Ballet (with Erica Cornejo!), seemed overlong and musically thin. There was one long stretch in the second act, if I recall, where one ballerina danced a variation, then Quixote crossed to one side of the stage and made a big dramatic gesture, then another variation, then Quixote crossed back to the other side of the stage and made the same gesture. Why couldn't he just stay put?

I find that if I don't care for the music, my interest in the ballet is often proportionally lessened. Give me Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, all the other great composers Balanchine and Robbins resurrected for ballet from Bizet to Bach to Brahms/Schoenberg - but I dread having to endure the musique dansante of Minkus, Adam, and to a somewhat lesser extent even Delibes. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy parts of them - like the Shades in Bayadère and the Bronze Idol - but I want music with greater nourishing power than cardboard.

I do find Liebeslieder Waltzes tedious, because it seems to me so dull for Brahms, and the dancing doesn't do much for me here either.

If we're going to be heretical about Balanchine, Stars and Stripes pas de deux puts me right to sleep, as does most of Western Symphony.

Coppelia is the no. 1 boring classical ballet for me.

Add for me all that slow marching at the start of Union Jack.

Most Kudelka bores me to tears, unless, as in the case of his Swan Lake, I'm too angry about the travesty of it all to fall asleep.

As long as we're ragging on the rep of Canadian companies, I'll add that I admired the early work of Mark Godden but couldn't make it through either his Magic Flute or Dracula. In both cases I abandoned the theatre not far into the second act.

However, I would like to cast two votes in defense of Les Noces and Liebeslieder Walzer, two of my all-time favourites.

That's another one that proves Bart's part of these points--the dancer transforming the ballet, although I think Coppelia is quite charming. But Pat McBride in Balanchine's 'Coppelia' is one of the most delicious things I've ever seen, and Peter Schaufuss as Franz in the National Ballet of Canada was pretty smashing.

I guess it's what you have to sit through to get to the good bits that bores me.

Firebird can also be extremely boring, which I find strange as the music is so great.

Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which I had the misfortune to sit through twice at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago. I nearly fell asleep!

Yeah, if they excerpted the act two dance/pas de deux I'd be happy.

Noooo! I like that ballet so much!I admit that for the first act It is almost all pantomime,and It can be boring.But the story,the costumes,all those fairies strolling around the stage...make me dream!And then It's Balanchine...If the Aestethic sense had a name,It would be Balanchine's.All those beautiful portraits of ensemble He makes with the dancers on stage....It's superb!In anything He does.

I think Diamonds is boring. There. I said it.

I agree, except the ballerina's choreography. That's enough to redeem it.

I would say Watermill. I just couldn't get it and I thought it would never end

That's another one I see mostly in terms of Suzanne Farrell, but I don't think it's at all boring as a work the way I do 'In Memory Of...' , especially if you're seeing the whole 'Jewels'. I don't think it works nearly as well by itself, whereas 'Emeralds' does, but not if it's badly cast, as on the DVD using Merrill Ashley, who looks so strange and struggling-so-hard-to-reach-it dewy-eyed student in it. Farrell has a hard balancing act (I don't mean when she was dancing), one might say. There's wanting to be devoted to the Balanchine work, which she never abandons her faith in, and there's the fact that she's a star no matter what. There's a singularly non-commercial integrity that she's supposed to represent, but I used to go to see her a good bit in the 80s, so it could be said that 'Farrell sold me more tickets than any other dancer did.' Why not? Somebody had to sell them, and I wanted to see her at that period, and did.

I think 'Diamonds' gives the impression of beginning to exist outside time so that extremely intense space begins to become more emphasized than time. This idea is found in many places, and one of these is in 'Parsifal', where Gurnemanz sings about it. I don't believe anybody will ever be fully inhabit 'Diamonds' the way Farrell did. Instead, there needs to be a new choreographer and some new works and new dancers that get up to that level on their own, instead of expecting Balanchine to ever reach the heights he did when both he and Farrell were working together. Farrell and Balanchine and Diamonds are too singular a thing to be able to reproduce truly fully--although I certainly think it should be attempted, and that some of the failures may be wonderful. I probably see their 'Diamonds' as like a piece of unique sculpture, almost, maybe more than other ballets--even more than 'Mozartiana', which I can imagine someone else finally ascending to.

Funny, that's the reply I would make to Klavier when he said that Liebeslieder was boring!

Those who have read my posts know that Mme. Alicia Alonso is my idol. I also usually admit all the critics regarding her political oriented position in Cuba. I know... But there were also political oriented ballet creations...oh, God, they were SO BAD...and those old enough to remember this kind of phenomenom in the Soviet Union before 1989 can give testimony of what i'm tallking about. I remember, particulary, one HIDEOUS creation during the 60's and 70's..."AVANZADA", that had Alonso and some other female dancers dressed in green cuban militar uniforms to describe the "new" woman/comrade in the socialist society.. on pointe...IT WAS AN ABOMINATION, TOTALLY HORRIBLE AND BORING TO DEATH...
Mariano should know what i'm talking about...

Canbelto, thank you. Diamonds puts me right to sleep.

I know a lot of dancers love it, but I find Remanso a total snooze, along with several pieces by Kylian and Duato (can't remember the names).

They're pretty much the same, though, aren't they? Names aren't necessary.

For a long time, I thought Emeralds was unbelievably tedious, but I have seen the light. I read somewhere that even Balanchine said that Diamonds, except for the pas de deux, was a big bore, which I agreed with, until I saw the Kirov corps dance it. There was one moment, when they raised their legs in unison, that I actually felt chills run down my spine, it was just so indescribeably magnificent. But it back to being the real bore now, without the Kirov. As for the most boring thing I have ever seen, I think it would have to be the short-lived ABT full-length, The Snow Maiden, by Stevenson. It had beatiful designs and very good dancing (Ananiashvilli and Corella), and I thought I would die. It was a three-act poisonous pancake.

I had a similar experience viewing the Paris Opera Ballet DVD -- the combination of energy and classical placement of the women in the third movement gave me chills, and I had always snoozed during that movement before. My POB experience made me sit up and take notice when I next saw it live.

Helene, you raise the possibility that when we are bored we are sometimes (though obviously not always) just not paying enough attention. Thanks for that insight. I'm currently looking very closely at the POB Jewels as a kind of visual training for performances by Miami City Ballet in November. There's much more there than met THIS eye in the past. And, as we begin to look closely at the kind of detail that Cargill found in the Kirov's production, it occasionally happens that we also come to appreciate the ballet as a whole. And look forward to seeing it again.

I am not particularly fond of Peter Martin's choreography. It has a tendency to lull me right to sleep.

oh! I had blocked that out totally. I saw it with ananiashvili too and wow. I never thought i would hate something she was in but it was soo tedious and terrible.

SNow Maiden gets my vote as well, and i love your description!

What's freshest on my mind after recent Bolshoi-London tour: Wheeldon's 'Elsinore' a.k.a. 'Misericordes.' Dark - brooding - blah costumes - yet another depressing Arvo Part score and, worst of all, a nonsensical quasi-plot. This is supposed to be a reflection on 'Hamlet'? You could have fooled me! Storytelling is definitely not Mr. Wheeldon's forte. Pack the No-Doze before watching this one!

Calcium Light Night by Peter Martins, one of the first pieces he choreographed

I can't stand this piece either, nor the music.

It makes me want to poke my eyes out with a stick and I agree with you on the music. It is like nails on a chalk board.

I was at one performance when people where boo-ing and walking out. It is not a good ballet but I felt so horrible for Edward Villella. I don't think NYCB has performed it since the 70's.

I don't know whether it's a ballet at all, and I certainly wouldn't put the music on to listen to, but I love it.

Villella returned to dance the role twice, at around age 50. He brought with it all that he had gained in the years between. It was his belated farewell to the company. Quite wistful and melacholy. I won't forget those performances.

I believe Robbie LaFosse was to have danced it, but I don't know if he ever did.