188 replies to this topic

[Cygnet]

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You can get very comfortable behind your technique, but some of the most subtle and most profound stagecraft I've learned has come from non-dancers, or a dancer who's not technically so good but does something fresh because they don't have a technique to masquerade behind. There are many different ways of intuiting life-altering dynamics, and they have nothing to do with how high your leg extends.

Suzanne Farrell

Source: http://www.independe...-santa-barbara/

[Marcmomus]

"The dance is of all the arts the one that most influences the soul. Dancing is divine in its nature, and is the gift of God.
                                      - Plato

"Dancing is silent poetry."
                                      - Simonides

"O Earth, weigh lightly upon me, I trod so lightly upon thee."

                                       - Greek Epitaph

All from Arnold Haskell, 1934.

[bart]

A development on the Simonides quotation above:

"Dancing is the poetry of the foot."

- John Dryden

[cubanmiamiboy]

"It was like planting a tree and starting to grow it... where I, just as if having roots, grabbed to the BEST soil ever."


Mme. Alicia Alonso on the question on how did she placed Ballet Theatre in her career and her heart.  

[bart]

"There are things that you just cannot teach.  Being organic in dance is one of these.  Many people "pronounce" words properly but don't connect them.  They don't make phrases.  But that's the most important thing, organically connecting classical elements into a single, joined choreographic tapestry."

[ ... ]

"The form is limitless and can be endlessly created.  But it always has to be a imaginative art.  If there is no character behind it, if the dance isn't born out of the heart, thoughts, soul, eyes, then it is no longer art.  For me the imaginative and art are synonymous because characterization must always be there."'


-- Vladimir Vasiliev, interviewed by Nina Alovert, Ballet Review, Summer 2010

[bart]

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Mr B liked to tell us that a snake, no matter how long, no matter how many curves in its body, always knows where its head and tail are.  The head might be far away, but it knows that the tail is doing.  He wanted his dancers to be like that, to be aware of every part of the body from the tips of the fingers to the tips of the toes.

Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique (1999)

[bart]

From the film The Ballerinas.  Carla Fracci is the notorious Fannie Essler (among others).  Peter Ustinov is Theophile Gautier:

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Essler:  We are ballerinas now ... and we wish to grow old, rich, and respectable !!!

Gauthier:  Old and rich are still possible.

[bart]

Serge Diaghilev (1928):[  





quoted by Arlene Croce in her review of Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: a Life.  New York Review of Books, Jan. 13, 2011).

[bart]

Serge Diaghilev (1928 - the year of the Stravinsky-Balanchine ballet Apollo:

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The creators of the marvelous American skyscrapers could easily have turned their hands to the Venus of Milo, since they had received a complete classical education.  But if anything does offend our eye in New York, it's the Greek porticos of the Carnegie Library and the Doric columns of the railway stations.  

The skyscrapers have their own kind of classicism:  i.e., our kind.    Their lines, scale, proportions are the formula of our classical achievements, they are the true palaces of the modern age.

It's the same with choreography.  Our plastic and dynamic structure must have the same foundation as the classical work which enables us to see new forms.  It to has to be well proportioned and harmonious, but that doesn't mean propounding a compulsory "cult" of classicism in the creative work of the modern choreographer.

Classicism is a means, not an end.

Quoted by Arlene Croce in her review of Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: a Life.  New York Review of Books, Jan. 13, 2011).

http://www.nybooks.c...rgei-diaghilev/

[bart]

George Balanchine QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

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I want a dancer to be perfect, but if she is wrong, I don't mind.  It is all right to be consciously wrong, but not right to be unconsciously wrong.  That's what you must teach -- to know what is right.

From the George Balanchine Foundation.

[bart]

George Balanchine QUOTE OF THE WEEK, from the Balanchine Foundation's Facebook page:

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Theater is to me, first of all, fun.  You do a lousy ballet, so what?  I know it's lousy.  It's not a tragedy.

John Clifford (Artistic Director of Los Angeles Ballet) responded on Facebook:

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That's the big difference between Balanchine and Robbins.

[cubanmiamiboy]

I laughed when I read this quote by Mr. Roca.  I could make it my own, 'cause I truly LOVE both Giselle and black beans..!


"I know that Giselle is not exactly a Cuban ballet. It’s a German poem, of the French Romantic era, codified in Russia, but – I hear the beginning of the score of Giselle and for me it’s like black beans in the kitchen. Giselle is very close to Cubans"

Octavio Roca.

[Hamorah]

"Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing.

It's the rhythm of your life.

It's the expression in time and movement,

in happiness, joy, sadness and envy."


- Jaques D'Amboise

[bart]

"Beautiful ... Ugly ... One Step."

-- Svetlana Osiyeva, Harid Conservatory, while demonstrating to a class of young dancers the small but crucial difference between one version of a port de bras and another.  The ability to see and care about such distinctions strikes me as lying at the heart of classical style.   I love the Russian ability to compress important ideas into  just a few words.

[puppytreats]

katharine kanter, on 11 July 2002 - 01:30 AM, said:

William Forsythe, to the Telegraph (London), a couple of years ago.

Telegraph:  

Forsythe says one major inheritance from Balanchine is his use of the ballet position known as epaulement, which involves complex counter rotations of the body, including the shoulders, hips, hands, feet, head.

As he says, "the mechanics of epaulement are what gives ballet its inner transitions. It's essential to a lot of my thinking." He takes this position one step further by what he calls disfocus. The dancers don't gaze out, but "stare up, roll their eyes back." Like a hypnotist might suggest, he asks them to "put your eyes in the back of your head." Their movement becomes "very water-like, shaky, unusual and serpentine". He warns: "Don't try this with too much furniture about."

"Their movement becomes 'very water-like, shaky, unusual and serpentine'."  This is exactly what I was thinking when I watched Sylvie onstage last night.  Every detail was articulated.  Her movement was fluid like water, even in the tiny passages between different positions.  With her strength, concentration, and mastery, this lasted throughout the piece.  I have never seen that in a Forsythe piece.   The contrast with her facility in this form and her partner's served to emphasize her remarkable abilities (although I have seen his work on tape in "Giselle" and other story ballets and admired it.)