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On 4/18/2017 at 5:15 PM, cinnamonswirl said:

Yay! Crazy NYCB has to go all the way to Paris for us to get a recording.

 

Sara Mearns and Tiler Peck won't have to dance their entire careers without having once been filmed. Unless you consider the "New York City Ballet Workout" sufficient.  ;)

Edited by pherank
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I just LOVE this performance and was ecstatic to receive my DVD last week!  What a treasure. What a gem!  Finally, we can see Balanchine danced by his current company, dancers dancing now, in HD and glorious color.  I love the old films of his classics and the VAI Balanchine series of DVDs, but it is truly gratifying to see the dancers we see live in a video dedicated to great Balanchine works.

 

Now if only Miami City Ballet would release a DVD of their Dance in America program from, what, four years ago or so? I so adore their Square Dance with Jeannette Delgado and Renan Cerdeiro - sublime. I used to be able to watch the full performance on YouTube, but it was taken down :(.

 

 

 

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I hope everybody realizes that the company Balanchine actually supervised to dance his ballets as he wanted to see them danced was also recorded in color - though not anything like such glorious color and definition as today:  The cameras they used to tape the PBS broadcasts in 1977 and 1978 later released on VHS and on the two "Choreography by Balanchine" DVD's produced pretty garish color, and when I play any of the dances on those, I usually turn the color knob down slightly. 

 

Not only that, "Robert Schumann's Davidsbuendlertaenze" was also taped in color around the same time, though released only on VHS and Laserdisc, as far as I know, neither broadcast nor issued on DVD; but now I remember one of the greatest astonishments of all, the 1966 film of Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," filmed in color in a studio in downtown New York, with Suzanne Farrell as Titania, Edward Villella as Oberon, and Arthur Mitchell as Puck.  (There's also a water fountain upstage in Act II - never in the theater.  Balanchine remembered how that could be done in the Czar's theater where he danced as a boy, and he sometimes expressed regret that he couldn't do it in his own theaters.)

 

"Davisbuendlertaenze" can be found sometimes; but the "Midsummer" film is rare, at least in America, apparently.

 

But KarenAG's description of her enjoyment of seeing on screen at home, whenever you want, dancers you see in the theater, is what sent me down memory lane here:  I well remember that evening when the first "Dance in America" Balanchine show was broadcast in Chicago in December 1977:  Look, I thought, there they are!  Those dancers I knew from my expeditions to New York.  Not their faces so much as their individual movement flavors.  And the next evening, having rewound my cassette, I could repeat the experience, right in my own living room, without the effort of traveling!  And I could use those recordings to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the ballets, as I had used music recordings.

 

Yes, I agree, I would also like MCB, or somebody, to release their PBS program - actually from longer ago, 2011 I think.   

 

 

Edited by Jack Reed
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On ‎7‎/‎19‎/‎2017 at 7:22 PM, Jack Reed said:

I hope everybody realizes that the company Balanchine actually supervised to dance his ballets as he wanted to see them danced was also recorded in color - though not anything like such glorious color and definition as today:  The cameras they used to tape the PBS broadcasts in 1977 and 1978 later released on VHS and on the two "Choreography by Balanchine" DVD's produced pretty garish color, and when I play any of the dances on those, I usually turn the color knob down slightly. 

 

Not only that, "Robert Schumann's Davidsbuendlertaenze" was also taped in color around the same time, though released only on VHS and Laserdisc, as far as I know, neither broadcast nor issued on DVD; but now I remember one of the greatest astonishments of all, the 1966 film of Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," filmed in color in a studio in downtown New York, with Suzanne Farrell as Titania, Edward Villella as Oberon, and Arthur Mitchell as Puck.  (There's also a water fountain upstage in Act II - never in the theater.  Balanchine remembered how that could be done in the Czar's theater where he danced as a boy, and he sometimes expressed regret that he couldn't do it in his own theaters.)

 

"Davisbuendlertaenze" can be found sometimes; but the "Midsummer" film is rare, at least in America, apparently.

 

But KarenAG's description of her enjoyment of seeing on screen at home, whenever you want, dancers you see in the theater, is what sent me down memory lane here:  I well remember that evening when the first "Dance in America" Balanchine show was broadcast in Chicago in December 1977:  Look, I thought, there they are!  Those dancers I knew from my expeditions to New York.  Not their faces so much as their individual movement flavors.  And the next evening, having rewound my cassette, I could repeat the experience, right in my own living room, without the effort of traveling!  And I could use those recordings to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the ballets, as I had used music recordings.

 

Yes, I agree, I would also like MCB, or somebody, to release their PBS program - actually from longer ago, 2011 I think.   

 

 

Thank you, Jack. Yes, I was writing my post in my usually-rushed fashion that I forgot about 'Choreography by Balanchine'. I wish someone would clean up those old films and videos, including MSND, and release them. I have the DVD set and it's not too bad, but, as you mentioned,  it doesn't contain Davidsbuendlertaenze nor does it include Allegro Brillante, which was also in that series, I believe.

 

As for your comment about the luxury of being able to watch a performance repeatedly, yes to that! As with musical recordings, I gain such a deeper understanding of a work by viewing multiple times, honing in on sections, dissecting parts and coming back to the work as a whole to better understand it's fully realized glory and artistic statement. And doing so gives me a much more informed viewing experience when I see the work again in the theatre. There is so much to take in during a performance in the theatre.  Also, it goes without saying that the seat one occupies can affect the experience. 

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2 minutes ago, KarenAG said:

Thank you, Jack. Yes, I was writing my post in my usually-rushed fashion that I forgot about 'Choreography by Balanchine'. I wish someone would clean up those old films and videos, including MSND, and release them. I have the DVD set and it's not too bad, production-wise (it is old, after all), but, as you mentioned,  it doesn't contain Davidsbuendlertaenze nor does it include Allegro Brillante, which was also in that series, I believe.

 

As for your comment about the luxury of being able to watch a performance repeatedly, yes to that! As with musical recordings, I gain such a deeper understanding of a work by viewing multiple times, honing in on sections, dissecting parts and coming back to the work as a whole to better understand it's fully realized glory and artistic statement. And doing so gives me a much more informed viewing experience when I see the work again in the theatre. There is so much to take in during a performance in the theatre.  Also, it goes without saying that the seat one occupies can affect the experience. 

 

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4 hours ago, KarenAG said:

I have the DVD set and it's not too bad, but, as you mentioned,  it doesn't contain Davidsbuendlertaenze nor does it include Allegro Brillante, which was also in that series, I believe.

 

The Allegro Brillante you mention is available on YouTube, along with a couple of others.

 

 

 

Edited by nanushka
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On the other hand, the Rubies pas de deux, danced by Patricia McBride and Robert Weiss, which was included in Part 2 of the four Dance in America "Choroeography by Balanchine" programs, and broadcast in November 1978, has not been seen much since.  Not commercially reissued nor on Youtube.  (Some of the current Youtube posts of these performances have less-good image quality than we have seen over the years, but, my God!  The dancing!  In spite of the taxing conditions at Opryland in Nashville, the long hours, the hard floors.)

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