l'histoire

Of course it's the right word. Does a source of inspiration have to be something positive & good? Inspiration just means (at least in Latin) to give one's breath to something. Have just been teaching this week with some of the famous WWI poets. They were "inspired" by the trenches to great art, doesn't mean they were inspired by anything good.

What is it with ballerinas who can't just curb their social media use to "appropriate" posts only? I'm a professor who had a rough tenure case, and believe me, I have had plenty of times I'd love to throw shade at multiple organizations/administrations, but I don't, because I recognize my ability to be employed also requires being discreet occasionally, even when I'd love to be ranting. Lane may not be "ranting," but this doesn't seem like a very well-considered post. At least Bouder is still (as far as we know) an on-the-payroll principal at a major company. Who's going to hire Lane now?

She definitely tells this story here (which I realize many people have already confirmed!!), but it's really one of the most charming parts of the documentary. The way she conveys it is absolutely wonderful & one of the parts of the documentary (which is pretty interesting in general) that always sticks out to me. In the documentary, she relates how she asked Balanchine how it should be done. She relates it in very witty & wonderful style. I'm not sure if that documentary is available streaming anywhere, I have it on DVD which was cheap & easy to acquire when I got it not THAT long ago. Hayden: "And at one point, I said to him 'Well, how am I supposed to dance this?' You know, you're doing all these steps & the music sounds so different, it sounds like you want to get up and use a baton or something like that ... or be a cheerleader. And he said no, 'You must dance it like grand pas de deux [voice dramatically heavy], maybe like Black Swan, you know [voice much more casual, with a shrug of Hayden's shoulders!]. And I said, 'alright, I'll do it that way'"

I'm no great Bouder supporter (at least in terms of how she presents herself on social media), but this is a mischaracterization of what she posted. Like it or not, the woman has been subjected to absolutely horrific comments on her social media (and was apparently booed on the first night she debuted this season?). It was obvious to me she was "speaking" to the people who have been vicious to her on social media, not to people who'd just rather not see her.

@sandik I'd love to hear about her experiences! I think it's the Balanchine Lives documentary where she was pretty extensively, but I loved listening to her insights (and watching her in rehearsals for Midsummer). I'd love to hear more from repetiteurs in general about their experiences, esp. who have been places outside of the US or Europe.

I remember this being mentioned several years ago on this board & I was fascinated - I think, IIRC you (or someone else on this board) relating, she was on her way home from staging Scotch Symphony & maybe some other Balanchine things with Suzanne Farrell in Russia in the late '80s (which, of course, was a Big Deal) & Russell got diverted to China for this task. I can only imagine what a Chinese company would've made of Farrell & vice-versa. I'd love to know what Russell made of the Chinese company & vice-versa! I'd love to talk to her about it. Alas, I do not have as one of my skills the ability to pursue living subjects or do interviews - I really DO hope someone has talked to Francia Russell about that experience (and WHAT an experience it must have been) & if not, I may have to screw up my courage to inquire further, though I wouldn't know where to start! Edit: to be clear, I'm not at all surprised by "learning from Soviet Big Brother" (how the USSR was often referred to in Chinese propaganda in the '50s), even after the Sino-Soviet Split. My other big, leading-to-a-book research interest is mountaineering, which is very much a "learning from the Soviets" kind of thing, even after the split - but mountaineering isn't ballet. It's interesting to me that a Chinese company was maybe/probably learning Balanchine from tapes. What led to that? They weren't directly learning from "Soviet Big Brother" in the 80s, and even the Soviets weren't *really* sold on Balanchine at that time.

Thank you both for your replies! I'm familiar with the very general outlines of "ballet comes to China(tm)," including Russian influence before & after 1949 - but I haven't done much historical digging, since my work that's adjacent is on traditional Chinese opera - so I generally just take idle note of ballet photographs/articles in the course of my own research, without thinking too much, since I like ballet. Interestingly, no one's really done a lot of work on ballet in 20th c. China. I have friends & colleagues who study other forms of dance in China (with some mentions of ballet), and apparently someone was (is?) writing a book, but when I was idly musing about maybe writing on performing Balanchine in China, they rather liked the idea! (Maybe someday)

I'm hoping some BalletAlert readers who are better versed in historical dancewear/costuming (especially Russian) will be able to chime in & help me figure out ... what's going on with this guy's shoes?! I've read plenty of books & seen plenty of pictures regarding mid-20th-century-ballet, and I've never seen a danseur, c. 1958, in what appear to be 18th century heeled pumps. I was doing some scanning for a friend (I am lucky enough to own many physical copies of the Chinese journal 'Theater Gazette' (Xiju bao), so when people need high-quality scans, it's easier to ask me to do some scans than request them from a university library) & the issue I was doing had this as its back cover - a Chinese student performance of Swan Lake. I always take note of ballet performances/articles in these things, but this is the first time I can remember seeing a danseur in pumps! The image has obviously been (heavily) retouched (the prince seems to have a pointe shoe on his left foot!), but I'm scratching my head trying to figure out why this footwear might *actually* be on the danseur. I've read a lot about retouching of pointe shoes etc. throughout the 19th & 20th centuries, but can't remember seeing anything about men's slippers. Chinese ballet was mostly imported/influenced by Russian dancers & Russia - is this ever seen in early/mid-20th c. photographs of Russian ballet? I know NYCB men were for sure not dancing in heeled pumps in 1958! Anyone have any insight, or even just ideas? I'd love to hear them! (BA won't let me insert an image, so an imgur link is below) https://imgur.com/a/nd9v8i0

Thank you for the recommendation, @sandik. I just ordered a copy - I'm going to have a summer full of ballet reading (and mountaineering, but such is the life of a cultural historian with rather varied interests!

Thank you for this wonderful list, pherank! I already have too much on my "to read" list, but I've added several of the ones I haven't read to it. I sometimes dreamily consider teaching a class on ballet history (it would never fill, so it never enters more than my random musings), but this just reminds me that there is SO much good writing on ballet from SO many perspectives (when I asked my grad seminar on "writing history" to share their favorite pieces of non-academic writing, my selection was Acocella's profile of Farrell from 2003, because the prose is simply so spectacular). I've finished the book & while I still feel like it's way too long, Homans does "catch the spirit" of what she's writing about in many parts, which can be quite gripping. I'll try and write a more considered review soon. The long & short is that it does a lot of stuff great, does bring some new material in, but so much of the rehashing of previously-published pieces could be cut - I wish she'd let her own narrative/research shine.

I'm halfway through & I have to say, this book is too long by half (and I'm an academic, so used to plowing through overly-lengthy monographs), though I am finding it very nicely written and a good-ish read. Where was her editor? I'm not finding it "notably tactile" (per the NYT) - I admittedly have probably spent a lot more time reading & musing on dance criticism than many, though probably not in comparison to the balletomanes on this forum. It's reminding me of another good book in need of very good (and judicious) editing, Into Great Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (on two other things I love reading about, WWI & high-altitude mountaineering, and also another book that should've have hundreds of pages chopped). I'm hoping the 2nd half will lift my impressions, but judging by the footnotes, I'm not terribly hopeful. A decent addition to the rather limited library on Balanchine, but I think most people would be better served just by reading through the collected articles & interviews in something like Reading Dance or I Remember Balanchine.

My god, the tutu portion of that costume is truly awful - Farrell would look inelegant with it flopping about around her.

Look, as a cultural historian who happens to be a China specialist, I'm less concerned about "does this all make sense?" (My bread-and-butter of my first decade of an academic career was studying plays where dead women are miraculously brought back to life and can go on to do FANTASTIC things - most of which don't make much sense (gee, sounds like several Romantic-era ballets I could name) - but at least, from my POV, they weren't parroting weird racist gestures that apparently said "Chinese" to a 19th century Russian audience) - it's fantasy, after all. I just prefer my fantasy not be overtly racist/Orientalist/colonial. As someone that studies & loves some forms of Chinese opera, the "fingers pointing upwards & being wiggled about frantically" is a really, really strange thing to hit on from Chinese performance traditions - the subtle gestures of hands & fingers are very important, yes, but as I have said multiple times on this board, I think Balanchine (had he been exposed to those particular dramatic traditions) probably would've found a lot of inspiration in the lovely, subtle, and fluid gestures of Chinese opera actresses, especially in the slower ones like kunqu. The opening of Serenade - which still gives me goose bumps, years after I first saw it live - reminds me of nothing so much as it does watching young kunqu artists practicing the movements of their arms. As a China scholar (especially in the current climate), I "liked" what I saw of the PNB "Cricket" variation. They can call it whatever they'd like. At least it wasn't yet another variation parroting some version of stereotypical " ancient China." It was quite clever. [apologies for the post, board software is not behaving as nicely as it should with my laptop)

I didn't say "Fu Manchu" (which to me conjures images of men with sad drooping mustaches), I said MANCHU headdresses, which the PNB production had on the women in "Tea." The last dynasty of China was an ethnically Manchu dynasty, and the women in the PNB retained historically-appropriate headdresses from the Qing dynasty - which is one of the things that set Manchu women apart from ethnically Han women in the 17th-early 20th centuries. At least, unlike the absurd "finger-pointing" choreography (among other things), that's something ACTUALLY taken from the lived past & not just imagined up in an Orientalist fever dream.

Well, apparently PNB managed to come up with something more creative and "Asian" without being offensive, so I guess blame MCB management for being blinkered and dull. I was actually quite impressed with the PNB "remake," which I got to watch on stream - the women in Tea even had appropriately Manchu headdresses on, and weren't of Asian descent!!!! Honestly, this whole conversation just reminds me of the Russian directors who are like "Oh we're doing black face because it's cute!"