Helene

There are a lot of people leaving, and they each would have reasons/reasoning. I wish them all the best in what they do next

We just received the final donation that brings us to our 2024 Fundraiser goal, and I'm happy and grateful to announce that the fundraiser is closed. I want to thank everyone who contributed for your kindness and generosity, including your kind words for Ballet Alert! . Not to be forgotten are the people who use our amazon affiliates link in the banner at the top of our page -- we appreciate every bit of it. I've "hidden" the fundraising thread, so that no one is tempted to contribute before the next fundraiser launches in 2025. (We don't want to owe Federal taxes, so we budget as close as we can to the last dollar and ask for that.)

Corella wasn't the face of then-Pennyslvania Ballet, though, when he took it over. Ballet is a small world, but ABT has been the center of Jaffe's world for much of her adult life.

As far as I know, no one tried to tie this to The Hours, which just played at the Met as a joint promo. It wouldn’t be for tourists, because too far apart, but it might have been a good crossover deal for people in NY Metro.

The Met did two mixed triple bills in the ‘80’s. The Stravinsky program had Rite of Spring as a ballet, Ashton’s Le Rossignol danced by Makarova and Dowell, and sung, and Oedipus Rex. The French Program had a ballet, Parade, and two operas, Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges.

In the opera world, having a playwright, novelist, or poet as librettist is not uncommon for new opera, however much librettists get a bad rep. (Most of the time, they were given the latest popular story or play to turn into a libretto, and it wasn’t their original idea. Plus they had a composer asking for an aria for this and a duet for that.) Someone like Jonathan Dean, who does supertitles for Seattle Opera, and turns 600 words into a sentence or two, might be enlisted. And for theaters where they have titles, they might be able to have an early run through with the written titles with the scene synopsis or point to see if civilians would get that from what’s being danced.

There are two ways to quote more than one message: 1. To quote full posts, click the little "+" to the left of the quote, and that will display a tally all of your selected posts in the bottom right of your screen: you click it and all of the quotes will appear in the reply box at once. 2. To quote partial posts, highlight the part of the post you want to post, and a little "quote selection" box should come up. If you click it, your partial post will appear in the reply box right away. You can then highlight part of another post, which will add that selection to the reply box, or a full post or two, and so on. You can combine full and partial posts, add more after you've started to type in your own comments, etc. Although every once in a while, the Quote selection button doesn't always appear, for reasons I'll have to attribute to Wilis' retribution. I don't see a configuration that has a maximum number of quotes, but I suspect there might be one.

I was on my way out after the last Coppelia at Pacific Northwest Ballet yesterday, and behind me, one young woman said to the other, "I like the first two acts better than the third. I could understand the story." She started to explain, but then they took a left as I took a right, and I didn't get to hear the end of the story. But clarity is critical, because when people don't understand the narrative or get the story through crystal clear relationships, like [fill in the Tudor ballet], they feel stupid, and who wants to pay money to feel inadequate? This isn't Jaffe's first rodeo at ABT where the home-grown dancers were compared unfavorably to the big international names, the first being when she was a dancer and many big names were still there, but also through Baryshnikov's tenure while he tried to take a different path. I wouldn't be surprised if she has a very thick skin. Is there no theater that is available during the summer, where ABT could decamp after the shortened Met season and, possibly, do another rep? After Titanic, which ends June 23, there is nothing on the NYCC calendar for July and August, and their Upcoming Events pages shows ATTACK on TITAN: The Musical, based on a manga. There are occasional preternatural young stars, but in 99% of the cases, they need to dance a lot and work out roles. I'm looking at PNB's All Balanchine program, and without looking at the roster, off the top of my head I can think of eight couples just for Square Dance, and there are only seven performances.

What sad news.

Also 1994 and 1995, after I moved to Seattle and returned during the last week of the Spring season a few years in a row. I was thrilled to see it in 2009 when I visited, too. A Midsummer Night's Dream is such a great way to see such a wide range of the Company in just a few performances. To go back to Other Dances, while the movement might not be authentic folk dancing, what Makarova and Baryshnikov had in common was years of character dancing classes as part of their curriculum. Since the dancing is stylized anyway for the stage, they wouldn't be able to say what region a dance was from, but they could probably tell you what costume and what ballet those gestures invoked. I remember there were some YouTube videos of long dance classes at the school, and the part that I watched over and over again was the character class.

I think this akin to our company policy, which is 1. Don't allow people to tailgate into the building on your badge 2. If you have any fear about stopping a tailgater, then don't. There's a 2b, ie call security with a description once you get to your desk, which I'm guessing, is only under emergency conditions in a theater. I wouldn't try to physically stop someone physically, either, if I were an usher. I wish there was a way to ban them from the premises going forward, though.

"Cool" would be perfect for Thomson.

I think that much of the time when people express audible disappointment at an announcement, it’s because of who they aren’t going to see, rather than who they are going to see.

I haven't seen this posted anywhere, but Megan Fairchild's post about graduating with an MBA from Stern School of Business (NYU) showed up as a recommendation on my Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/p/C6uCNrtOWMp/ It was from two weeks ago, and in it she talks about looking forward to commencement, and from the timing, it sounds like yesterday was the day. Congratulations to her .

Pacific Northwest Ballet has performed Dove's Vespers, Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, and Serious Pleasures, which was choreographed for ABT.