18 replies to this topic

[Alexandra]

Helene, on Mar 16 2007, 12:41 AM, said:

My impression of Reiter's mention of Goldweber in the review was that she was surprised that there wasn't an official (with registered trademark) Balanchine stager to which the production was credited.  There wasn't anything else in the review that suggested there was anything amiss with the staging.  She liked some performers more than others, but a sense of spontenaiety and confidence is not something a stager can force from a dancer.

Exactly, Helene. I got an email this morning from Reiter, telling me that, in response to her query, she had received a letter from the Balanchine Trust that the stager was Paul Boos and that Mark Goldweber had "maintained" the production since 2004, and asking me to put up a note at the bottom of her review to this effect.

[Mel Johnson]

Good!  That does clarify the pedigree of the staging to a considerable extent.  Thanks, on the behalf of all us old Joffristos.  

[Alexandra]

For the record, the relevant section of the review is this:

Quote

The staging of this production, which included the birth scene and was performed to taped music, was puzzlingly credited to Mark Goldweber, a leading Joffrey dancer who is now a ballet master. It would seem that someone with more of a direct and longstanding Balanchine connection would have set the work initially, before it was turned over to the in-house team.

What Reiter wrote is accurate. It is not the Balanchine Trust's practice to allow productions to be staged by in-house balletmasters unless they are approved stagers of the Trust. That's the whole point of the Trust -- that stagers who have a direct connection to the Balanchine tradition stage the ballets, and stages the official version. What happens is what Leigh described above: the Trust assigns a stager who sets the production. An in-house balletmaster maintains the production, and a Trust stager checks on up on the production to see that is maintained to Trust standards (but does not check up every year, in my undferstanding.)  It is usual for the actual stager, not the in-house balletmaster, to be credited in a program as the stager.

[Mel Johnson]

I know more about this than I'm letting on, and suffice it to say that Goldweber was approved by Richard Tanner to put "Apollo" back up.  I've already been flirting with the edges (and perhaps from the wrong side!) of the "no inside information" policy here, so I'll let it go.