188 replies to this topic

[carbro]

That's funny but not quite true.  If you check the company roster on the masthead page, you'll notice a conspicuous exception: Ryu Ji Yeon.

[bart]

Thinking about the appealingly elegant, cheereful, high-speed, ultra-considerate world depicted onstage by Balanchine's Square Dance, currently being performed by Miami City Ballet, led me to this:

Balanchine and Goldner on "reality" in ballet.

Balanchine (speaking of the Nutcracker):  "Actually, it's not a deam.  It's the reality that Mother didn't believe. The story was written by Hoffmann against society.  He said that society, the grown-ups, really have no imagination that they try to suppress the imagination of children ... They didn't understand that nonreality is the real thing."

Nancy Goldner's comment:  "Many of his other ballets move into a dreamlike or imaginary world that becomes a Balanchinian reality. Serenade is the most spectacular example, but it's not an overstatement to say that all of his ballets begin where Nutcracker ends -- in an eternal dream.  The difference is that in the other ballets the dancers don't need to dream to be in a dream.  The curtain rises, usually with a blue cyclorama as decor, and presto!, you're there, in a timeless placeless place.  The dancers don't need a plot device to get them there; they don't need to lie down on a bed and fall asleep or take opium (like the hero in La Bayadere) or search for swans (like the Prince in Swan Lake).  

From:  Nancy Goldner, Balanchine Variations, p. 55.  (The Balanchine quote comes orignaly from Nancy Reynolds, Reportory in Review, p. 157.

[cubanmiamiboy]

From a recent interview with 88 y.o Mme. Alicia Alonso:


-How would you like to be remembered?

- I’m telling you there is a future ahead. Ask me in two hundred years...!

[cubanmiamiboy]

From an interview with the late Michael Bjerknes by Alexandra Tomalonis:

A.T-"But there’s so much pressure to do this. 'No tutus and toe shoes for this troupe! They’re going beyond the rigid confines of ballet' — you read this over and over and over.

M.B-I think that’s a lot of crap. I know with a lot of people that do that, it’s because they can’t."

[cubanmiamiboy]

"Dance to me is life itself.I have lived well. I have achieved a lot. I am aware that I have made history. I planted a seed which grew into a tree and the fruits have been exported all over the world."

Mme. Alonso

[Helene]

"Bring half the amount of clothes and twice the amount of money."

Sage travel advice for Ballet Talk on Tour!

[bart]

"In Alicia, a 1976 documentary made in Cuba ... Alicia Alonso is asked 'What is the hardest part of dancing?' and she answers 'Dancing well.'"

-- Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance, p. 42.

[cubanmiamiboy]

From Caitlin Sims' interview to Carlos Acosta.  Pointe Magazine, June/July 2008 Issue.

CS: "What is your greatest fear?
CA:  Losing my sense of reality and forgetting where i came from."

[innopac]

'Classicism,' he [Diaghilev] often said, 'is the university of the modern choreographer.  The dancer and ballet-master of today must matriculate in it, just as Picasso must know his anatomy and Stravinsky his scales.'

My Life in Ballet by Léonide Massine. page 85

[bart]

"I liked this number [Reminiscence] best because I did not have to understand anything."

-- Samuel Chotzinoff, NY Post, reviewing the first first Manhattan performance of Balanchine's fledgling American Ballet in 1935.

Reminisence was a trifle, choeographed to what Balanchine called the"cute, nice, melodic" music of Benjamin Godard.  

Chotzinoff did not like Serenade, on the same program, presumably because that ballet DID require that you understand something.

Source, Richard Buckle, George Balanchine:  Ballet Master, p. 94.

[cubanmiamiboy]

George Balanchine to Gelsey Kirkland:

"Dear, you're young.  Young people don't have injuries.  Go home and read fairy tales.  Try little red wine.  You need nothing but this place.  You don't need anybody else; you don't go anywhere else.  You have a beautiful theatre here.  You come in the morning.  When you don't work, you go into studio by yourself; you do releves.  You just stay here all day; you go home, drink little red wine.  That's all you need".

From Gelsey Kirkland's "Dancing on my grave"

[cubanmiamiboy]

MCB Principal Rolando Sarabia, when asked to reflect on being in exile:


"There is nothing left for us but to live off our memories.''

[cubanmiamiboy]

Oh, well...and here we go with the old "Think vs. Dance" issue.

"I think too much, far to much, to dance. For years i've been told this by friends, lovers, teachers and messiahs.  Maybe I should have listened and stopped thinking. But must thinking be the death of my career?"

Toni Bentley: "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal"

[papeetepatrick]

cubanmiamiboy, on Jun 23 2008, 05:54 PM, said:

Oh, well...and here we go with the old "Think vs. Dance" issue.

Oh vell, Cristian, while I can hardly thank you in the most sincere way for that one, I may, however, repay you  with one of her productions from 2005, in the New York Review of Books:

In the full-page ad, her beautiful, mournful gaze, twenty years after losing her maestro, peers like a blond widow out of a black web. She, the last muse of the Man Who Knew Time, is posed with her arm across her neck like a noose.


Unlike the Joan Acocella review of Bentley's book, you don't even have to pay for this one.  I can't imagine why...on the other hand, I may be   because, even though quotable, I'm not sure if for the best reasons.  The one you placed is along the same lines, very 'The Days of Our Lives.'

Edited to add:  Sorry I forgot, she was talking about Darci.  It's possible one might not have known.

[innopac]

..."when challenged directly once with the question "What keeps you in ballet?" he [John Cranko] answered.

'Well, if it's just steps, it's obviously not worth devoting one's life to. ...

There's a limit to the amount of jumping around people can do.  You can lift a girl only so high; she can spin around on her foot only so many times.  One has to convert this extremely physical image -- a physical way of expressing oneself -- into a spiritual way of expressing oneself.'"

Theatre in My Blood: A Biography of John Cranko by John Percival. Page 139