Back in rehearsal, as the weather slithers greyly and inevitably towards winter, for a revival of Mainz's Eugen Onegin, with me gladly resuming my role as the increasingly demented nanny, and one question looms large in my mind;  why the bloody hell did we put so much blasted KNEELING into this part??  Argh.  

 

I am very nearly there* with regard to my knee, but the act of sinking to my knees and staying there currently makes my body very uneasy, and I don't believe a chorus has EVER lasted as long as the eternal peasanty jubilations in Act I ...

* I hope!  Mind you, I was most chuffed today, having run into (almost literally; I was on my bike and it was raining...) a lovely choreographer I know, who seemed to assume I was built of the same essential stuff as dancers ("Broken knee?  Oh no, no, that won't have stopped you for long...").  I was immensely flattered.  It's not, of course, true - dancers will regularly practise and perform through unbelievable pain levels, and generally only give up on limbs when they actually crunch and fold underneath them...  I am in awe of such bloody-minded and strange creatures.