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kathaP

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  • Connection to/interest in ballet** (Please describe. Examples: fan, teacher, dancer, writer, avid balletgoer)
    fan
  • City**
    Nürnberg
  • State (US only)**, Country (Outside US only)**
    Germany
  1. I agree that the cuts are unfortunate, but I find the parts that are there extremely impressive nevertheless. Ulanova's mad scene is just something else. I wish the Myrtha solo was there, the severity of the dancer who portrays her really works for me, I would have liked more of her.
  2. I think what the "Today Show" clip showed is that Macauley's comment came at a time when there was already a media narrative underway that portrayed ballet as potentially dysfunctional, obsessive and unhealthy. The "Black Swan" clips inbetween Ringer's interview highlighted that. Mainstream media usually sensationalizes, simplifies and misrepresents. Ringer did very well, she was calm and not accusatory. Because of course Macauley is entitled to write his reviews as he sees fit. That's what he gets paid for by the New York Times. At the same time, I thought the "too many sugar plums" remark was just a cheap shot. He didn't elaborate why the dancers' weight bothered him and how he thought it distracted from the choreography etc. Honestly, it seemed that he just thought that his pun was clever ("Ha ha! Nutcracker! Sweets! Suger Plum Fairy! Too many sugar plums! Get it?") and couldn't resist putting that in. Or he wanted to create controversy, I'm sure the NYT got a lot of pageviews out of all that outrage. They even linked to Ringer's interview in one of their blogs.
  3. Review of Ratmansky's Anna Karenina in the St. Petersburg Times: "Femme fatale"
  4. I just found this little snippet of Simone and Kronstam on youtube. I hope this is the right place to post this? I've never seen either of them dance, so I'm really excited to have discovered this. Simone and Kronstam
  5. Swan Lake and La Bayadere Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Midsummer Night's Dream Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee, A Month in the Country and The Dream Nijinska's Les Noces Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fokine's Les Sylphides I have too many favourites and can't bring myself to only choose one or two.
  6. Wasn't there talk some time ago that Burlaka wants to restage Grigorovich's version? I thought I read something along those lines somewhere.
  7. No, the "blaming" was me paraphrasing the article as I understood it. And I do think that her argument is that the Balanchine influence is so overwhelming (in the USA?) that other kinds of styles get pushed to the side. Perhaps they get pushed aside because their great representatives are being neglegected (Ashton, Tudor etc.) and not because Balanchine is ubiquitous and supposedly easy to imitate (which, as you said, isn't really true, or only true on a very superficial level...)?
  8. Thanks for the Dance Magazine link. Very thought-provoking topic. That said, I really stumbled over the AD of Ballet Idaho saying that Tudor has little value as well. Surely the answer can't be to dismiss everything that isn't abstract? If there really are too many people in positions of power who dismiss every ballet that isn't Petipa, High Modernism or "done last week" then I can see how that might be a serious problem. The other responses seemed very thoughtful and measured to me, though. Back to the original Kaufman article...I agree with her analysis of the problems ballet is currently facing and that endlessly copying Balanchine can't be the solution. I'm not sure that this is really what most choreographers are still doing, though. I have a European perspective, so that does probably make a huge difference, but I don't see this obsession or cult around his work. Things might be different in the USA, what with so many of his former dancers at the head of ballet companies. And even if there is, that isn't Balanchine's fault. He was a genius who made some of the greatest ballet choreographies of the 20th century, of course these works should be performed and kept in the repertory. The problem might not be so much that there's too much Balanchine being performed and that his influence stifles everything else, but that the other great masters are being neglected. NYCB performs his work extensively, while most of the other great choreographers of the 20th century have no reliable institution to preserve their work. ABT does perhaps one or two Tudor ballets per season. The Ashton works go through repeated cycles of being pushed out of the RB repertory and then crawling their way back in. And I would argue that even MacMillan gets questionable treatment, since they insist on doing his (in my opinion) inferior evening length ballets while neglecting his shorter works. Lavrovsky has been mostly forgotten, Yakobsen is practically unknown in the West. You could say that Grigorovich gets his due at the Bolshoi, but then, he's still alive and can influence things there. That this erosion is happening is a tragedy, but getting miffed that the Balanchine repertory is getting better treatment strikes me as slightly counter-productive. As for Balanchine's spell on recent work...I'm not sure if that's true if you look at the more prominent ones. Haven't seen enough of Wheeldon to make a judgement, but Ratmansky seems to be working in a different aesthetic (I think...) and I'm pretty sure that Eifman's inspiration lies elsewhere as well.
  9. Oh, that's great news! I was wondering why all her performances were suddenly cancelled. From the little I have seen of her, she's one of my favourites. Her Bride in Nijinska's Les Noces was haunting.
  10. Sorry to drag up an old topic, but I just got the DVD with Maximova and Vasiliev dancing Lavrovsky's version for Christmas. Speaking only as a ballet fan and no sort of expert on anything, I love it. Of course the two leads are divine. But as far as I can see the choreography is beautiful as well, certainly more coherent than MacMillan's (which is the only other version I know). What I noticed is that the choreography for the corps is more detailed and contributes to the "setting" of the narrative while for me the "happy harlots" sequences in the MacMillan piece always seem totally disconnected from the rest. And I like the formality and "heaviness" of the patterns he creates to the music, it really lets the Prokoviev score shine. So I would say it's a classic, a stunning one at that. But it is a very theatrical choreography, with much acting and mime required. Perhaps the latest Kirov production had problems with that? And I think that all the crowd scenes and choreography for the corps must be done with precision and conviction, otherwise it might seem dated. The reviewers in London are also used to MacMillan's R+J and may have been disappointed that it's not as "naturalistic" as the one they know?
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