29 replies to this topic

[kfw]

San Francisco in 2005 tried to do the "Square Dance" with the caller, but Helgi Tomasson said it didn't work – the musicians couldn't hear each other was his reason. At the same time Joffrey did the original version which John Rockwell, then the NY Times critic, thought was much livelier.

The Joffrey danced the original version during the Balanchine Celebration in 2000, and there is a Ballet Talk thread here. I liked it, but the caller would probably get tiresome in repeat viewings if MCB had used one.

[bart]

Using the caller is carrying "reconstruction" a bit to far, I think.

I have never enjoyed faux-Americana, but .. whether one likes it or not ... it changes the piece enormously. By eliminating these details, Balanchine distilled the choreography to its essence and clarified its relation to the music. Many of the references to American folk dancing remain, but without the burden of humor and personal anecdote. The wit remains, but it's lighter and subtler.

The caller -- with his inevitable unspoken invitation to the dancers to "act up" -- clutters up the piece, as far as I am concerned. (Now, I admit that I haven't seen it that way for more than 50 years. Perhaps things have changed in recent reconstructions.)

[Jack Reed]

I saw some performances of the "original" version by the Joffrey in City Center (on a program with Petrushka and As Time Goes By, I think) and found the caller annoying - I wanted to hear the music better, to see the dancing in relation to it, and as this light sleeper had traveled to The City That Never Sleeps with his earplugs, he tried bringing them to the theater the next evening, just to see what would happen. It worked! For no reason known to me, they cut down the amplified voice more than the un-amplified musicians' sound. (My experiment got some comment from a man behind me, as I took them out.)

I also like best the clarified, expanded version Balanchine made in 1976 and least the weirdly mixed-up version the Joffrey company presented after moving here to Chicago, with the original movements in original costume and new in new.

[Mel Johnson]

Having seen the NYCB original treatment and its Joffrey revival, I enjoyed very much the "showbusinessness" of the countrified features of the production. When I saw the Standard Revised Balanchine revival, I missed those elements, and believe their deletion to have been a net loss.

[sandik]

I also like best the clarified, expanded version Balanchine made in 1976 and least the weirdly mixed-up version the Joffrey company presented after moving here to Chicago, with the original movements in original costume and new in new.

I haven't seen this version, and want to make sure I understand what happens -- the original choreography is danced with the original costumes, and the recent additions and amendments are danced in more contemporary costumes?

If that's the case, it's very much like the current trend in art restoration, to "paint in" the parts that cannot be saved through conservation with a medium that is clearly not the same as the original work, the idea being that we're not pretending this is all vintage material. I hadn't heard of this happening in dance before -- fascinating.

[Jack Reed]

My only hesitation about the Miami preview is that it looks as though the busy sets are upstaging the choreography and dancers' honest work. Balanchine's later efforts were to take all that out, reduce it to its essences, and now an art director has cozily reupholstered it.

"Honest" is the right word, or one of them, for this company, all right, but I have some different issues - for me, it's the busy camerawork that distracts. For instance, at around 00:44, after being able to see the soloists and ensemble clearly from straight on, we get a "partial" - as in "partial view", the kind of seat that's tough to sell? - and then a rapid series of different distances, in-and-out, returning finally to a shot of the full stage. I think all this fussing makes it hard for the audience to do what I think it has learned to do by watching so much television and movies as we do, to relate to the place where the action they see is taking place, settle in, follow it, and be affected by it. The close-in shots tend to make the soloists look gigantic by contrast with the full-stage view of the ensemble we've just had, and then, when a view of the full stage follows some close-in ones, the ensemble looks more like ants than it would by that contrast.

It helps to play it again and begin to get used to the distractions, to get past them, but why put them in? It's supposed to be fun, not work! At least it is good enough you can dig some value out this way. I've seen much worse! (Incidentally, PBS has a nice player here - you can hover your mouse cursor along the time line under the window where the video plays and click and control the point in time where it plays.)

And if that complaint weren't enough, we can't hear the dancers' feet: At about 01:17, where the violins go up high and saw along for a few moments, there are no low instruments heard, but the dancers have a series of small jumps around the stage - the sound of their shoes hitting the stage adds a syncopated accompaniment - ta, ta, TAH, ta, ta, TAH - I much enjoy. Except here, it's missing. Spooky! Maybe I'm the only one who gets something from this, but I'd like others to have a chance at least.

(Did the director, Matthew Diamond, a former dancer, think it an advantage finally to make the dancers' shoes inaudible? I seems to me the choreographer adds this "orchestration" knowingly, if not deliberately - it happens in Rubies too, I think - as he develops his dance organically from his music, and should be left in.)

I think that, while the scenery moves the ballet a little oddly outdoors, onto an infinite plane, it does provide some references for the audience, a defined background, to help us perceive the space where the dancers are dancing. Would a plain cyclorama in medium blue, let's say, have been better? Combined with calmer camerawork, not jerking us around so much, maybe so.

I also like best the clarified, expanded version Balanchine made in 1976 and least the weirdly mixed-up version the Joffrey company presented after moving here to Chicago, with the original movements in original costume and new in new.

I haven't seen this version, and want to make sure I understand what happens -- the original choreography is danced with the original costumes, and the recent additions and amendments are danced in more contemporary costumes?

If that's the case, it's very much like the current trend in art restoration, to "paint in" the parts that cannot be saved through conservation with a medium that is clearly not the same as the original work, the idea being that we're not pretending this is all vintage material. I hadn't heard of this happening in dance before -- fascinating.

Yes, when the Joffrey presented it that season, the recent additions were danced in costumes much like the ones we see on the MCB dancers in the PBS clip linked above. You make an interesting analogy, but in the case of Balanchine's Square Dance, the issue of failed conservation is absent - we've pretty much got the (revised) original, as Balanchine left it, including the costumes, and these shades of gray and black and white were used throughout, and the formerly-onstage string orchestra was out of sight in the pit. So the later Joffrey one seemed to me perverse, a pedantic mish-mash at best, rather than an integrated dance suite, with coherent, legible architecture, for instance the fine male solo made in 1976 for Bart Cook, which with its expansive, slow music, we come to like an intimate and private space. (Or maybe that's just me again!)

[carbro]

Mark your calendar! Set your DVR! Plan your viewing party! PBS will air GREAT PERFORMANCES "Miami City Ballet Dances Balanchine & Tharp" on Friday, Oct. 28 at 9 p.m.!

When I first saw this in the 50s, they were still doing it with a square dance caller, rather in the style of Annie Get Your Gun. Very faux-folksy, even to my adolescent ears. Thank goodness, this was changed to the current version ...

I had a terrible time trying to explain to my very intelligent sister, who saw the revised version, why the title "Square Dance" fit the ballet. I think she thinks the title should have changed with the staging. In exasperation, I finally had to resort to something like, "All dance forms ultimately go back to folk and social dances." I saw the Joffrey do the original version when they were still a New York-based company, and it was wonderful. I do remember the caller mentioning "Franny," Francesca Corkle. I think it's important to keep both versions and denounce the Trust for insisting that Paris Opera retire Palais de Cristal in favor of Symphony in C.

[bart]

My only hesitation about the Miami preview is that it looks as though the busy sets are upstaging the choreography and dancers' honest work. Balanchine's later efforts were to take all that out, reduce it to its essences, and now an art director has cozily reupholstered it.

Agreed. At least on the basis of this snippet. The famous and invaluable telecasts of NYCB from the early days of Dance in America had a similar tendency to questionable and fussy set design. I wonder why.

I have some different issues - for me, it's the busy camerawork that distracts. For instance, at around 00:44, after being able to see the soloists and ensemble clearly from straight on, we get a "partial" - as in "partial view", the kind of seat that's tough to sell? - and then a rapid series of different distances, in-and-out, returning finally to a shot of the full stage. I think all this fussing makes it hard for the audience to do what I think it has learned to do by watching so much television and movies as we do, to relate to the place where the action they see is taking place, settle in, follow it, and be affected by it. The close-in shots tend to make the soloists look gigantic by contrast with the full-stage view of the ensemble we've just had, and then, when a view of the full stage follows some close-in ones, the ensemble looks more like ants than it would by that contrast.

I confess that this did not bother me all that much. (Compare it with the truly bizarre look of the 3D Giselle simulcasts to theaters a month or so ago.) As you say, Matthew Diamond is a dancer as well as a director. Comments on the MCB blog suggest that the dancers enjoyed working with him and appreciated his efforts to make them and the choreography look good. I imagine that anyone in his position must try to balance a number of different aesthetics and points of view: ballet experts guardians of the Balanchine and Tharp repertoire, ordinary tv fans, programmers, fund-raisers, marketers, etc.

On the whole, and given that the alternative is usually long periods of ballet invisibility on American television, I have to agree with carbro ....

[Mel Johnson]

[I saw the Joffrey do the original version when they were still a New York-based company, and it was wonderful. I do remember the caller mentioning "Franny," Francesca Corkle. I think it's important to keep both versions

I quite agree, and the call revision was made nearly seamless by the continued presence of the original caller, the redoutable Elisha C. Keeler. Keeler could change his text, and what you were getting was still original Keeler. And so the creative process continued. Keeler survived long enough to provide coaching to a successor caller for the Kansas City Ballet revival of "Square Dance" - was it 2004?

[Jack Reed]

My only hesitation about the Miami preview is that it looks as though the busy sets are upstaging the choreography and dancers' honest work. Balanchine's later efforts were to take all that out, reduce it to its essences, and now an art director has cozily reupholstered it.

Agreed. At least on the basis of this snippet. The famous and invaluable telecasts of NYCB from the early days of Dance in America had a similar tendency to questionable and fussy set design. I wonder why.

On the whole, and given that the alternative is usually long periods of ballet invisibility on American television, I have to agree with carbro ....

Returning for a moment to my role in this thread as odd man out, the fussy Dance in America sets, in contrast to the simplicity we often got on stage in Balanchine's theater, help to keep the viewer oriented - we know where in the space the dancers we're looking at are because we see them against a distinctive background. Otherwise, don't we lose some sense of the plan or pattern of the dance? (Sometimes, like in the Dance in America Chaconne, it got a little overdone; in Tzigane, with just some stylized trees in the back, or in Ballo della Regina, with an evocation of the original "mother-of-pearl" idea, I thought it was close to ideal. (In The Four Temperaments, the changing background colors Mr. B. intended to underline the different themes distract me, and I turn the color off!)

But I'd like to add another Heads Up! (maybe I should post there?) regarding broadcast times: The Chicago PBS station WTTW has published its October schedule, showing 9 PM on Friday the 28th for this, like other parts of the country (under the heading "PBS Arts from Miami"), but also, now, a rebroadcast at 1 AM on Monday the 31st. Check local listings, as always; not that you may want to stay up that late for it, but you may like to have a fall-back time in case your recorder messes up the first broadcast...

[Natalia]

Jack, re. the changing colors in Four Ts, Ballet West performs it LIVE with changing background colors, as witnessed here in DC last month when Ballet West performed it at Wolf Trap. It wasn't quite as bothersome as in the 1970s TV version.

I loved the Joffrey version of Square Dance with caller, until I saw the 'pure neoclassical' version by NYCB and it appeared to be a totally different ballet. Actually, I still like the Joffrey...but it's a totally different mood and 'experience' for me. One if great fun, the other sublime. I hope that Miami's setting for the 'pure non-caller version' remains pure. (With Balanchine neoclassicals, my usual preference for elaborate sets goes out the window.)

[Jack Reed]

Changing background colors in 4 T's onstage? That's weird. Well, and staying within our context, if I can make a helpful adjustment for myself seeing the old version of Square Dance by putting earplugs in - I found when I watched the Joffrey in the New York City Center in the '70s that earplugs cut down the caller, over the PA system, more than they did the string orchestra, live on stage, so I could follow the music better - I suppose if I ever see Ballet West's 4 T's, I can take along some monochromatic glasses. Thanks for the warning!

But for me the later version of Square Dance gains not just by the easier audibility of the music, the foundation, or at least an essential component, of a Balanchine ballet, but also by the inclusion of the great male solo to the Sarabande. Putting that into the old version, as the Joffrey has done more recently - what I condemn as a post-modernist approach - drops pretense and makes plain that this was no square dance at all, really, but something less transitory in aspect and more enduring, eternal, if you will. After which, the old game resumes? The audience enjoys the solo, but it's confused by it. Robbins made ballets about these people, here, now (not so much "about" the music); with Mr. B. they're gods, on an eternal plane. (MCB's cloud set expresses this, but it's too bold.)

Taking off the wrappings shows Square Dance for what it is, "just another ballet to Vivaldi and Corelli" as he said (in defense) at the time it would be without the caller and so forth, except that, just like his other ballets, it isn't like any of his other ballets. They're all different.

Still, Mr. B. was no slouch as a man of the theater. He had an idea which worked fairly well, both times. (Some ballets he revisited for their betterment, some not.) For me also, Natalia, the later Square Dance is the more enlarging experience, the greater world to visit, the more worthwhile expedition, not that I never had any fun with the older one (once I got those earplugs in).

[Natalia]

Heads-up: In the Washington, DC area, Maryland Public Broadcasting (MPT) will be showing it at 9:30pm on Friday, October 28, according to their website's TV Schedule. WETA, another local affiliate, is still not showing its late-October schedule. At least we know that it will be on MPT, which is Channel 22 on many cable systems.

[sandik]

I also like best the clarified, expanded version Balanchine made in 1976 and least the weirdly mixed-up version the Joffrey company presented after moving here to Chicago, with the original movements in original costume and new in new.

I haven't seen this version, and want to make sure I understand what happens -- the original choreography is danced with the original costumes, and the recent additions and amendments are danced in more contemporary costumes?

If that's the case, it's very much like the current trend in art restoration, to "paint in" the parts that cannot be saved through conservation with a medium that is clearly not the same as the original work, the idea being that we're not pretending this is all vintage material. I hadn't heard of this happening in dance before -- fascinating.

Yes, when the Joffrey presented it that season, the recent additions were danced in costumes much like the ones we see on the MCB dancers in the PBS clip linked above. You make an interesting analogy, but in the case of Balanchine's Square Dance, the issue of failed conservation is absent - we've pretty much got the (revised) original, as Balanchine left it, including the costumes, and these shades of gray and black and white were used throughout, and the formerly-onstage string orchestra was out of sight in the pit. So the later Joffrey one seemed to me perverse, a pedantic mish-mash at best, rather than an integrated dance suite, with coherent, legible architecture, for instance the fine male solo made in 1976 for Bart Cook, which with its expansive, slow music, we come to like an intimate and private space. (Or maybe that's just me again!)

I understand your frustration with the multiple references in this production (as I'm understanding it here) but I just wanted to say that the impulse to restore the past, in whatever context, is right in line with Robert Joffrey's interests as an artistic director. And as a sometimes dance historian, who has benefited enormously from his curatorial work, I am very grateful. I saw my first Ballet Russe-era works with the Joffrey, was introduced to German expressionist dance and 19th c Romantic chorography by the company -- I know I sound like a cheerleader here, and perhaps I am, but I wouldn't want to lose that urge to preserve that fuels productions like the Square Dance you've described.

I can absolutely understand preferring one production over another, but I'm grateful for every example of past choices that I can find.

[Jack Reed]

The historical wing of the Joffrey's repertory has been valuable to me too - for example, that's 2/3 of why I was in the theater that week: for Square Dance and Petrushka. (I had some fun with the Tharp too, although it took me a while to get on with it: I had never before seen a dance with a different part for each dancer...)

But is Square Dance with a combination of old and new movements in the same performance good history? (It was never done that way before.) Or is it better to alternate pure renditions of the old and new versions, in the course of a week, say. (Some company has actually done this recently; I didn't actually go to see it, but it sounds appealing. My kind of history, you might say.)

I also remember being interested to see their Green Table - I'd rather see a ballet than read about it - and more than interested, very satisfied to see them do Nijinska's Les Noces.

I'm very much in sympathy with conservation of older art. (If I may say so here, lately my own greatest pleasure in this has come from seeing Suzanne Farrell's mounting of rarely-seen Balanchine - dances altogether new to me.)