POB_fan

Did you (or anyone else on this forum) make it to the performance last weekend at the BMA? I'd be interested to hear any thoughts anyone had on it. I was planning to go, since I was particularly interested to see them in some contemporary rep, but in the end I didn't feel well and didn't feel up to making the trek up there.

I also enjoy http://rhymeswithdarling.blogspot.com/ Carling Talcott is a young American corps member with Royal Danish Ballet and I don't think I saw this blog on the list. Sometimes it treats dance, sometimes other stuff, but her writing is always great.

Thank you for posting this Mr. Catbas! I would like to rescind my comments in regards to it. I will now agree that the resemblance, while it struck me for its musicality, is small. Although there is absolutely no excuse for having made a comment so strong about a live performance that I could not watch step by step for comparison, I can only say that I acted while overwhelmed by a gut feeling that came with the musicality of the beginning of the pas and that it clearly blinded me to the remainder of it. I would like to extend my sincerest and most profound apologies to the other audience member arguing in its defense as well as to its choreographer.

Helene I agree. This is very true, although I would say that the Joffrey, with over forty company dancers, qualifies as a large ballet company. I suppose I am an optimistic person and all I meant is that in order to grow, the company needs to behave as if they are playing to true dance critics and audiences. If Baltimore Ballet is going to grow (who knows if it will or won't, but I know most small companies are usually striving to do so), it needs to present repertoire that a discerning ballet audience won't recognize as someone else's. To pull in the board members that it would take to make this sort of transition even on a small scale, for instance, or to develop the respect and connections within the greater dance community to be given free or reduced cost rights to certain ballets are two things that I find very much tied up in this - to be respected in your community (in this case both the dance community and the Baltimore/Washington community of dancegoers) is the first step in getting noticed and doing something bigger.

I hope I can make it to the shows, although it would be quite the trek for me. For those of you who get to see it, and who want some kind of comparison to what they kept and didn't from the original, I would give Cyril Beaumont's book The Ballet Called Giselle a quick read. I understand that they used it in the staging, since it was one of the first studies of the ballet, and it reads very quickly (took me an afternoon). Really worth it! The changes in Gautier's libretto regarding the wilis from exotic lands are pretty interesting and give some good general insight into the romantic ballet in the nineteenth century as opposed to how we see it today. For those of you in Seattle, enjoy the show!

Do you know by chance who is staging/staged the new Balanchine pieces?

Soloviev: Perhaps I should have been clearer - there were many very successful moments in the performance - and my comment here is not in regards to the dancing nor a comment on the general use of attitude renversée. It is just that I found the first eight eights of Romeo's solo (beginning with the attitude) to greatly resemble the Macmillan, both in choreography and musicality. Perhaps it would have been more easily covered up had it not been one of the most striking portions of Macmillan's version of the pas de deux, but it is one that has stuck with me despite an only moderately in depth knowledge of that particular pas - I left the performance thinking that if I had only known the pas better that I would have surely seen more resemblances since the first was so glaringly blatant. I just think that if this company is going to progress to the next level and become a ballet company based on resident dancers rather than guests and a school, and support a full Baltimore season (which it can and should - Baltimore has a world class orchestra, why shouldn't a ballet company be next?), it needs to be prepared for an educated audience base that will know and recognize these ballets. This is not the first time I have seen Mr. Catbas' choreography strikingly resemble someone else's - I think that he either should embrace his ability for original choreography and create his own work, restage the classics in the public domain and give credit where it is due (congrats to the company on pas de quatre - it was nice to see that ballet on the program since I haven't seen it done much lately), or bring someone in to stage the Macmillan pas in its entirety, if that is what he is aiming for.

bart said: As far as From Petipa to Balanchine is concerned, it is published by Routledge, and unfortunately a lot of their books run for prices comparable with this. I actually haven't seen it at $58 until I looked just now - that is a recent development and it was at $100 used for a long time. But the book is great. I also really enjoyed his book on Sleeping Beauty, which generally sells online for less than $25 since it is published domestically by Yale if I remember correctly. They are both worth a read, although the first I just have chronically checked out of the library. They are both (clearly) narrower than the Homans, but I find that Scholl's general historical knowledge is better (or at least he ties it in better to his writing) than many dance historians, especially those working on the 20th century. Although I agree with many of the previous posters that the historical context and mastery especially in the early portions of Apollo's Angels is excellent.

I was at the Thursday performance, and although I thought that Tereshkina was a lovely Giselle and an ethereal Wili (which would have been enough on its own) it was truly the corps de ballet that blew me away, and that provided a sharp contrast to the renditions I have seen in the last few years from American and Canadian companies. This proved true both in the first act, with Giselle's friends, as well as of course Act II. Perhaps it seems self-evident that a Russian or European company with a state school (and in this case, where most of the corps dancers could probably come up with soloist contracts elsewhere if they wished to do so) would have a better corps de ballet than our American mix of dancers with varied training, but I was beyond stunned and blown away on Thursday - and perhaps the applause that came after the "swimming" makes up somewhat for the lack of repeated curtain calls, since I don't know that I've ever seen an audience applaud like that during corps dancing, although if you're going to, I suppose that is the classic moment. The corps was not at all robotic, and yet the incredible synchronicity with which they moved into B+ after a running entrance was something I had never seen before, not even at the Paris Opera, which I find to have a world class corps.

I have to agree with the previous poster that they are much improved - I thought that the Firebird was one of the strongest pieces on the program, and it was that piece that used the true Baltimore Ballet dancers. Marianna Zschoerper was lovely and she seemed to be truly living in the performance, more so than the young girls from ABT. Although they were also very pretty to watch, they lacked the depth that Ms. Zschoerper brought to Pas de quatre, and seemed a bit underrehearsed. This is excusable. The resemblance of moments in the Romeo and Juliet to its Macmillan counterpart, however, is absolutely not. I've seen this before in Mr. Catbas' Nutcracker - it looks like a Kirov DVD (not just Petipa/Ivanov but that very staging of Petipa/Ivanov, down to pieces like Mirlitons, which are not often retained in American stagings) with some Balanchine thrown into Waltz of the Flowers. Nowhere are the names of these choreographers mentioned. With Macmillan too, particularly the attitude/renversé beginning for Romeo, I felt that this went beyond honest quoting and into the territory of stealing. I think it is fantastic that Baltimore has a growing ballet company that seems to do bigger and better things every year. But I wish that this fledgling company would present honest choreography and then of course give credit to whom it is due.