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Drew

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  1. I thought Fang was excellent as Mama Elena in Like Water for Chocolate just this past summer. I'd be happy to see her name on the program in future. In any case, retirements can't be expected to solve deeper structural problems: ABT needs to be dancing much more. Until that lack of performing time is solved--more weeks in New York and/or more touring time--everything else seems something of a stop gap. The programming for the summer is disappointing...
  2. Welcome to Ballet Alert @alynedamas. According to the Petipa Society website created by Amy Growcott the ballet was not preserved except, via notation, for one variation: "The Pearl was performed often throughout the early 1900s and was given its final performance in 1910, after which, it fell into obscurity. Only one variation from The Pearl was notated in the Stepanov notation method and this variation is part of the Sergeyev Collection....The only number from Drigo’s score that is used today is a pizzicato variation, which is used by Yuri Burlaka in his Rose Pas de quatre as the variation for the goddess, Aurora." Here is a link to the website's entry on the ballet--It does not include the scholarly sources for the entry. You can also find a bit of information on the website itself about its creator. (I apologize if this website was already known to you, but from your question I thought perhaps it was not.) https://petipasociety.com/the-pearl/
  3. Congratulations to her-- A wonderful ballerina!
  4. A news feature in ArtsAtl that I had missed mentions that the Balanchine/Danilova Coppelia next season in Atlanta will use Pacific Northwest Ballet's production--ie not the Ter Arutunian designs used by NYCB. The PNB sets and costumes are by Roberta Guido di Bagno. I looked at a bit of video of the PNB production on youtube and if the Act I and Act III costumes for Swanilda are anything to go by, then it should be a gorgeous production. I will look up what PNB threads on the production have had to say about it on this site, but in the meanwhile, here is a link to the ArtsAtlanta piece about the new season: https://www.artsatl.org/news-atlanta-ballets-2024-25-season-to-include-coppelia-three-world-premieres/?fbclid=IwAR0Jd8uuAAL9Xi6LWJ6cb0kF6y8D_bmTSr1geOgh9Ov0DoOX18s6gPuRI44
  5. Atlanta Ballet has announced plans for the 2024-25 season. For me the two most compelling programs are also, happily, two programs that will be accompanied by the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra. The best of the news is that the company will be dancing the Balanchine/Danilova Coppelia in March. (On the announcement it says the choreography is by Balanchine, but I assume that this is the Balanchine/Danilova version NYCB dances which they also call "after Petipa" on their website.) Coppelia is one of my favorite ballets and it has one of my favorite ballet scores. I LOVE this production and, being as 'objective' as I can, I will say, too, that Coppelia is an ideal choice for the company and its school. (I should say that Atlanta Ballet has danced a version of Coppelia before--according to the season announcement that was over 20 years ago. I never saw it.) Their February program is the other program that will have a live orchestra: it will offer the world premier of a new version of the Rite of Spring choreographed by the company's choreographer in residence, Claudia Schreier, alongside Helgi Tomasson's 7 for Eight, which the company has danced previously. I was a little bemused by the timing because their February program is often advertised as something appropriate for Valentine's day--sometimes with special Valentine's-themed offers included--and Rite of Spring is not exactly a champagne and roses kind of work. However....Saint Valentine was violently martyred, so maybe it fits after all.😉. The season will also see world premiers by Kyon Ross and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Both choreographers the company has danced before. Notably, the Lopez Ochoa premier comes in the wake of the company dancing her full-length Chanel Ballet, a "world premier" co-produced with other companies and actually first danced by Hong Kong Ballet. I'm pleased to see this kind of continuing collaboration with such a prominent choreographer. The season will also see a return of Liam Scarlett's Catch. The latter was created for Atlanta Ballet in 2019--according to the publicity at the time, it was created in something of a rush and when I saw the ballet the weekend it premiered that is exactly what it looked like. I'm hoping that the revival allows for enough rehearsal that one can better determine what the ballet actually has to offer--and how (or whether) it fills out Scarlett's oeuvre. For me, though,next season's headline is Coppelia...and the two main sub-headlines are the premiers by Schreier and Lopez Ochoa.
  6. I am migraine prone and have difficulties at altitude, which has kept my Vail fantasies in check. But maybe see if your doctors would 'pre' prescribe for you some headache meds suitable for migraine and also nausea. (Not opioids or anything addictive of that kind--but there are drugs that work better for Migraine and related Nausea than what's available without a prescription. Since I'm not a Doctor I don't want to list drug options for another person, but you could ask your doctor and likely s/he will have ideas.) I do hope you are able to go and have a great time! I have often thought about it.
  7. No video can convey the excitement and impact of a world-class live ballet performance. It was great to read @balletlover08 's review which helped to convey that excitement and impact--I hope many more live performances are in your future. I don't get to see many such performances these days, but I'm older and over the course of a lifetime have a seen a lot, so I shouldn't complain. And I'm also a fan of the Kennedy Center. And thanks to everyone who has been writing about the performances of all the casts!
  8. if Goecke is a choreographer loved by directors and dancers and "all the other German dance critics" as you describe, then rather obviously one critic's attack on his work had not damaged his career in any fundamental way. His ability to choreograph and develop his art was not suffering. In fact, if Goecke's work is as widely admired as you report, then his physical attack on this one critic seems all the more childish and misogynistic --and would make me a little wary of trusting him not to explode similarly in other situations. Hüster's writings are not the issue. I do read German--and there is Google translate to help when I hit a roadblock. When the attack happened, I made a point of checking out some of her reviews --out of curiosity, not because I thought that anything she wrote could justify Goecke's appalling response. She could be biting. But I've seen as bad and worse on multiple occasions in the New York Times and even the New York Observer. She is not the first biting critic in the history of ballet -- and he is not the first artist to be on the receiving end of such criticism. (Ask William Forsythe, ask Wendy Whelan, ask Ed Watson; heck, in the New Yorker Croce once referred to the Bejart repertory as "diseased." Goecke can get in line.) I also read Goecke's own statement about why he did what he did and it was shocking to me. What he called his "deep apology" was immediately followed by pompous declarations of his philosophical intent ("to start a conversation...") and continued vituperation against his victim. When you are still blaming your victim, then you are not making an apology at all, but giving excuses under the disguise of an apology. And once you attack someone physically you have put an end to any possibility of conversation. Of course he didn't want to converse with her--he wanted to degrade and humiliate her. (My quotes are from a New York Times article from February 16, 2023.) I believe strongly in second chances and comebacks when people make missteps at work or in their private lives--even some very bad ones. Nor do I think such chances should be dictated by someone's gifts as an artist: the same compassion should be shown to all. That said, in a case of this kind, it's not enough to just forgive and forget, no matter the seriousness of the actions involved and without some reckoning. Had Goecke shown genuine remorse, made genuine amends, and faced some serious consequences, then I might better understand the willingness to bring him back into the dance/ballet fold --even if I personally don't agree that such physical violence should be quite so quickly overlooked. But I haven't seen such a reckoning. He lost some work, but still continues to have his ballets staged regularly even though this all happened barely more than a year ago. As for genuine remorse? genuine amends? or a period away from the stage to take stock of why he lost control (that is, take stock without blaming his victim)? I haven't seen or heard anything like that.
  9. There is a whole miniseries on Apple TV + entirely devoted to Chanel vs. Dior called The New Look--I've only seen the trailer, but I'm guessing a series called The New Look must be team Dior. The whole idea of the two designers as, at one time, rivals, with different visions of femininity and different experiences of the war seems to be in the air. To be clear regarding the ballet though: Dior as a character makes no appearance in it at all, though the synopsis mentions him as the designer of the New Look. After the WWII episode and Chanel's fall from grace -- she is shown being forced to leave France -- there eventually emerges a line of women in voluminous skirts that are suggestive of his designs. From the ballet's point of view the New Look harked back to the older feminine ideal that Chanel had always fought against, and in these final scenes I mostly enjoyed its staging of the way Chanel's work frees women's bodies from certain types of silhouettes. But Chanel's personal nemesis in this ballet is Wertheimer--which left me uneasy for the reasons I went into above. Popularity-wise, at least, I had thought Chanel had something of a mini-come back later in life. Until prepping to see this ballet, I had forgotten that Jackie Kennedy wore Chanel --and was wearing Chanel the day Kennedy was assassinated. That's the blood covered suit...
  10. I saw Coco Chanel: the Making of a Fashion Icon last weekend. Overall, I found the ballet engrossing and I was very happy that our Sunday matinee had the opening night cast and very happy to see a full house! (I've never seen that at an Atlanta Ballet matinee that wasn't Nutcracker.) Mikaela Santos as Chanel was terrific: it’s a demanding role, with multiple dimensions, and the ballerina pretty much has to carry the ballet. Santos seems to me a dancer of great imagination --as well as great fluidity and buoyancy, power when she needs it too. As Helena says of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “though she be but little, she is fierce.” The ballet is organized as a series of episodes from Chanel’s life—centering on her growth as a designer from the time she was working as a poor seamstress and dance hall entertainer through her post WWII comeback. Thus, the ballet is punctuated by scenes in Chanel’s workroom--all quite deftly staged--and ends with a fashion show. But while the ballet centers on Chanel-as-designer, its episodes also insistently thread themselves through a series of her lovers so that we get multiple pas de deux and, at one point, a pas de trois. Additionally, a second, “shadow-Chanel" appears from the ballet’s start as the fully realized “icon” Chanel: throughout the ballet, she seems to be there both to draw together the various episodes and, perhaps, also to stand in for the audience’s presumed knowledge of where this story is going. At key turning points in the narrative, the “shadow” urges or impels the narrative’s Chanel (Santos) to take the actions that will move her career and her life forward so that she can become “Chanel.” At least that was my take-away. As philosophy of history, I don’t care for this approach (to say the least) especially since it puts all the moral issues raised by the ballet in the hands of this “Chanel” shadow rather than Chanel the human being: as if the latter's choices were fated or even pressed on her rather than driven from within. I realize one could say the “shadow” represents the inner drive…but that’s not how the synopsis is written and, more importantly, not how it looks on stage. However, as Ballet/theater, the conceit worked better than I had anticipated –perhaps partly thanks to Fuki Takahashi’s elegance and tact in the role (she dances Chanel in another cast) and partly thanks to the way the shadow Chanel ends up functioning as a fairy godmother figure, so that the role sort of riffs off of ballet genre precedents. Still the overall architecture of the narrative didn’t always work for me—especially in the first half, where the episodes passed one after another with little in the way of resting places or musical climaxes, so that some of them didn’t land as they otherwise might have. And, throughout the ballet, the only figure who emerges as a genuine multi-dimensional character is Chanel herself—which may indeed say something about the designer’s narcissism but does make the ballet feel even more like a string of episodes. (One lover down, x number to go.) That said, several of the individual episodes, on their own account, were compelling -- effective both as complex dance and as complex storytelling, In the first act I especially liked the pas de trois for Chanel and two of her earliest admirers and in Act II the Stravinsky episode mentioned in the Candace Thompson article I quoted earlier in this thread. It certainly didn't hurt the Peter Salem score to have some Stravinsky whisking through it at this point either--which was, apparently, Lopez Ochoa’s idea. One almost wishes she could have done the whole ballet to Stravinsky. During this episode, I was at first a little taken aback by the ballet’s portrait of Stravinsky since Stravinsky as tortured hipster at the piano is not something I had ever imagined, but it kind of worked and the pas de deux between Stravinsky and Chanel had an edge and power that contrasted nicely with the more conventionally lyrical pas de deux with her lover Capel in Act I. Much of the Stravinsky episode took place against the dance background of a shadowy ensemble dance right out of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring—Chanel helped finance the ballet—and at one point Stravinsky looked almost as much like the choreographer as the composer of that ballet. I ended up being very taken with the whole scene as it had an edge – even slightly over-the-top as it was—missing from some other episodes. (Spencer Wetherington danced Stravinsky.) Elsewhere in the ballet, there were clever uses of balletic conventions as in dances for the groupings of “flowers” from which Chanel selects the scent for Chanel no. 5. And even when the story telling remained quite literal it carried some charm: In an early scene she rips a belle epoque gown off of the actress Gabrielle Dorziat to replace it with one of her own dresses and then demonstrates though ballet steps the greater freedom her clothes allow—and Dorziat then tries a few steps of her own. The episode is echoed in the ballet’s second half in what the program describes as a dream vision, in which Chanel rips the wide-skirted post war Dior dresses off women to replace them with her own sleeker look. I found all this mostly effective and even winning in its directness. But in a couple of other scenes both the more literal story telling and the more stylized balletic story-telling fell flat for me—I'm thinking of the car crash that kills Capel and the pas de deux for the Chanel monogram [sic] --C intertwined with C—the latter of which I thought was an ingenious idea but not as memorable in realization. At least not at the performance I attended. Jerome Kaplan's simple and elegant designs for the ballet were fabulous—a white curtained world for the first act turned black in the second, with moving staircases occasionally punctuating entrances and exits. The costumes captured the shifts in storyline and helped convey the main points about Chanel’s development as a designer, but never overtook or overwhelmed the dancing. One flashier scenic “effect” that the publicity for the ballet actually mentions —when chairs in the workroom where Chanel was a seamstress rise up to become chandeliers at the home of her first wealthy lover—seemed to me completely unreadable from the audience: if I hadn't read the program, then I would have assumed it was some kind of surreal comment on events, not a sign of aristocratic luxury. On the subject of reading programs: Atlanta Ballet has been nothing if not conscientious about addressing Chanel’s antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazis. The publicity for the ballet and information about Chanel that was posted in the theater lobby even foreground the issue. And Lopez Ochoa’s ballet does try to confront some of the issues raised by Chanel’s activities during WWII as well as some of her other less pleasant traits. Primarily, she focuses on Chanel’s relationship with a Nazi officer and her willingness to use Nazi Aryanization laws against Jewish businesses in order to settle a score with the Jewish businessman, Pierre Werthheimer, who had partnered with her on Chanel no. 5. But if, pace Balanchine, there can be ‘mothers-in-law’ in ballet (it’s not that hard to show), then can there also be ‘complex-business-deals-gone-awry-with-your-Jewish-partner-whom- you-despise-in-part-because-he’s-Jewish-even-if-you-are-repeatedly-willing-to-take-his-money’ in ballet? Can you even try to show that story without leaving the audience a little uncertain as to what exactly is going on and, for that very reason, uncertain as to who or what they are rooting for/against? From what she has said in interviews, I infer Lopez Ochoa wants the ballet to show Chanel as a complex, morally problematic character, but the effect may be less in her choreographic control than is intended. My specific issue is how the conflict with Werthheimer comes across on stage—as opposed to how it is explained in the program notes which are somewhat better (sort of). That is, if one had not read the program notes, then there is no reason from the staging not to think that, in fact, Wertheimer was a swindler that Chanel had every right to hate even if the staging makes it clear that working with the Nazis to attack him was an appalling choice. Maybe that is what Lopez Ochoa believes…but I don’t necessarily think so especially as she shows his continued support of Chanel’s work after the war, when Chanel had become persona non grata, and she shows Chanel’s continued hatred of him alongside her continued willingness to take his money. In fact, Chanel’s obvious contempt for him casts a shadow over the triumph of the ballet’s final fashion show --which otherwise reads as a testimony to her creativity and the freedom it gave women's bodies to move. Lopez Ochoa’s ambitious choices are part of what make her work interesting, but I’m a little skeptical this venture entirely comes off or that the more challenging episodes don't remain problematic, not least because Chanel herself is the only character who seems to get a multi-dimensional characterization. However, as I only saw the ballet the one time my thoughts about it are not quite settled. If you have taken the time to read all of this, then thank you--I should say unequivocally that I think this was a high quality collaboration for Atlanta Ballet. I appreciated its seriousness and its popular appeal even if I had some reservations.
  11. This sounds very fun. The first time I saw Trenary in a featured role (one of the solos in the shades scene of Bayadere) she showed the fluid movement quality you mention.
  12. What fantastic news! Congratulations to Tamara Rojo, her team, and San Francisco Ballet-- If all goes well, then in the next 2 years I will be in a position to make occasional trips to San Francisco. I would have loved to see both of the two programs they have done so far this season.
  13. I am hard put to think even John Cage could find art in this...😮
  14. Below - from an article by Candace Thompson in Pointe magazine--this appeared a few days ago but I only just read it this morning: "Of Chanel’s famous relationships, Ochoa includes an episode with Igor Stravinsky, who was married with children, and, more controversially, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was special attaché to the German Embassy in Paris and known to be a Gestapo spy during World War II. The Stravinsky scene acknowledges how Chanel remained Stravinsky’s patron even after the short affair and nests within it a mini ballet, nodding to both the music of Le Sacre du Printemps and Nijinsky’s work." https://pointemagazine.com/coco-chanel-atlanta-ballet/
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