Helene

This is a link to Godunov’s NYT obituary written by critic Jennifer Dunning: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/19/obituaries/alexander-godunov-dancer-and-film-actor-dies-at-45.html?unlocked_article_code=1.100.z6ip.s-8q4Dqo5NKC&smid=url-share There are two things in it that I think are pertinent to why Western critics seeing him at ABT would have been seeing a different dancer than Soviet critics and Cynthia Gregory, who saw him on tour 1973 — where Clive Barnes called him “flamboyant and promising,” and Anna Kisselgoff raved about him in Don Q — and wished he’d defect to be her partner: and (emphasis mine) “Flamboyant” was the quality Barnes emphasized about him in the 1974 tour with Plitsetskaya, and Barnes thought she’d found a great partner. If he was holding back the qualities that made him appealing — he wasn’t going to win the better technique discussion, at least not in American compared to Baryshnikov — and he wasn’t on stage in the Soviet Union for five-six years, then he would have been a different dancer. Bujones in his book wrote that Godunov was one of the Soviets who was hired by Baryshnikov, but I don’t understand that timing: Godunov defected in 1979 during the Bolshoi tour, which was in the summer 1979, when critic Anna Kisselgoff listed him among the dancers yet to be seen. The article announcing his defection was published on August 24, 1979.According to the obit, he was hired three months later by ABT. Lucia Chase wasn’t pushed out until 1980, and Baryshnikov was still dancing with NYCB at the time. I hadn’t remembered that the Kozlovs defected later on the same tour, for them in LA. They later danced with NYCB. According to this article by John Gruen with extensive quotes for Godunov, he was sidelined in Russia, but he was also dancing with ABT before Baryshnikov became director, which meant he was hired by Chase under different circumstances than he would find himself under Baryshnikov. I suspect that if he had defected first and had spent time under Chase establishing a partnership with Gregory adjusting to ABT and settling into life in the US, to be followed by Baryshnikov, then it would have been a different discussion, a comparison of Bolshoi vs. Kirov style and who preferred what, rather than how he was Not Baryshnikov.

Thank you for the link, @Meliss. That looks like a transitional time after many of the Principals from the ‘70’s, like Eleanor D’Antuono, Erik Bruhn, Carla Fracci, Ted Kivitt, Sallie Wilson, and John Prinz (who joined NYCB), left the company, along with Gelsey Kirkland. Her partner in drugs, Patrick Bissell, was still at least listed. He was considered one of the most talented male dancers of his time. He was important enough to the Company to keep hiring back despite his drug use and arrest and being in and out of drug rehab. He was the dance equivalent of skating’s Christopher Bowman: all of the talent vs. all of the drugs. It was from the list of soloists that Baryshnikov saw as the future, except for Susan Jaffe, still in the corps, and whom he pushed, many of them women, but among the men, La Fosse, who danced a lot of Baryshnikov’s roles and later left for NYCB, Ross Stratton, and Johann Renvall, who danced Prodigal Son with the Swedish Royal Ballet before joining ABT, and danced with Godunov in Godunov’s side projects. They were treated as de facto Principals, although, like in many companies, their titles lagged behind. (Plus, Soloists were compensated under the union contract, unlike Principals, who negotiated contracts.) To go off topic for a moment, looking at the roster, I recognize two corps dancers, Patrick Hinson and David Moore, who later joined NYCB, and Amy Rose, who later became a soloist with ABT and left to dance with Pacific Northwest Ballet. I saw her dance with both companies, and she was a lovely dancer.

It hadn’t been complete radio silence: Teuscher posted to social media about her disappointment, and some past and present dancers weighed in on the thread: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8U7_CAuIlb/?igsh=MW1kNXRtNnkzNDEyeQ== That is about as close of a manifesto as dancers can generally make without sinking their careers. “Orders” don’t have to be explicit for people to self-censor, like at any workplace, including self-employment.

It would not be any more strange if those critics had seen those same performances as NYC audiences did at ABT. In Godunov’s case, the writers saw a dancer in a different cultural context in a different company in a different country. It is not strange at all that different people, critics and audience, censored or not, have different opinions about the same dancer. The only time any opinions matter is if the writer has influence with decision-makers.

And the dancer who plays the father is usually one of the tallest and strongest in the company or on staff, since it's a character role.

I don't have any numbers for how big the company was or how many Principals they had when Godunov was dancing. All of my programs, which would have list company members and ranks, from that time are long gone. Looking at today's numbers ABT has 18 Principals, (~20%) and 12 Soloists (~14%) of the 88 dancers on their roster. NYCB has 21 Principals (~23%) and 22 Soloists (~24%) of 91 dancers on their roster.. ABT was doing a lot more triple bills in those days, compared to their reliance on full-lengths recently, so more opportunities for Principal and Soloist roles, but even with a summer season, it doesn't compare to the number of performances put on by Paris Opera Ballet, the Bolshoi, or the Mariinsky, all with two theaters. ABT has always shared the theater with the resident opera companies and other dance companies. Before moving to the Metropolitan Opera House, they performed in the same theater with New York City Ballet and the now defunct New York City Opera. With relatively limited number of performances, being one of 18 is still a limited number of performances, even if roles are distributed equally. I can't name a single company that's been written about here where some Principals and Soloists haven't been described as neglected, underused, passed over for opportunities, and others as over-hyped. From the times I saw Godunov live, I can't say I thought ABT should made him more prominent than he was. Principal contracts are negotiated individually, and there can be a wide range within a company. Some Principal dancers were on salary regardless of their number of performances and ; others were paid by performance, and if they weren't cast, they didn't get paid. Unless this is disclosed by the dancers, or if they are among the five most compensated employees in the organization, which will be disclosed on their tax from 990, no one knows how well Godunov negotiated his contract or the kind of contact he was on. As far as company tapes, I don't know if ABT was among the many companies that made them for their own archives, often as a memory aid for reconstructing ballets or remembering parts. If they did, there's no guarantee that they're in any shape, as media degrades, especially tapes, and they need to be transferred to more robust media. Company tapes/recordings are used for whatever the Company wants, without the expectation that they will ever be made available to anyone but company insiders.

I wish I could have been there...

Pacific Northwest Ballet performed Edwaard Liang's "The Veil Between Worlds" as part of 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography at the Kennedy Center. According to the programs on the website, the dancers were: June 18-19: Cecilia Iliesiu/Ezra Thomson* Angelica Generosa/Kuu Sakuragi Jonathan Batista/Leta Biasucci James Kirby Rogers*/Leah Terada Elle Macy/Dylan Wald June 20: Cecilia Iliesiu/Ezra Thomson* Luther DeMyer/Lily Wills Angelica Generosa/Mark Cuddihee Jonathan Batista/Ashton Edwards Leta Biasucci/Lucien Postlewaite *Last dancing performances with PNB Jonathan Batista/PNB and Cecilia Iliesiu posted about the trip to Instagram. (It looked like Kiyon Ross was giving Company Class.) Batista (video) https://www.instagram.com/p/C8fXWjOyfIF/ Iliesiu (photos): https://www.instagram.com/p/C8epZgmAu6p/?img_index=1 Touristing in DC: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8en77oAngO/?img_index=1

He certainly danced as if he didn't mind sharing the stage with someone else.

Of course there were videos at the time. There was plenty of footage of Maria Tallchief from TV, for example. There was a series of Balanchine ballets with NYCB filmed in Montreal, a series in Berlin, and later, in the late '70's, a series filmed for Dance in America. They are all commercial or institutional , and the producers including for of the variety shows -- Ed Sullivan, The Bell Telephone Hour, Firestone Theatre -- were the ones extending the invitations to appear. The US dance companies were not producing their own work. No one extended the same invitations to Godunov, so unless there is promotional or news footage with some dancing clips in the Paley Center for Media or the archives of a news organization, his performances would have been filmed on company tapes, if ABT had them at the time, for their own internal archives, and the quality of those tapes in general were extremely weak, single camera versions at the time. The only other source would have been pirates, and I haven't seen any published to YouTube for example. I have no idea about whether pirate exist on Russian media. There were a lot of Principal Dancers. and not only Principal Dancers were central to the Company: it all boils down to where the Artistic Director puts his or her attention and how she or he distributes the roles. Godunov was not the equivalent of an Etoile, more than any other Principal, and how much he was paid would have been determined in private negotiations with management. At the time he was there, central to the Company would have been Baryshnikov, who was still dancing, Bujones, and Patrick Bissell, primarily among the men, along with Robert La Fosse, whom Baryshnikov was pushing strongly. Among the women, Cynthia Gregory, Gelsey Kirkland was in and out at the time, and Martine van Hamel are the dancers I can think of off the top of my head. There were also a number of younger ballerinas whom Baryshnikov pushed particularly when he was acting as Director and not just on the masthead after he'd wanted to leave, and he gave them opportunities that would normally have gone to more established dancers. Among these, only Jaffe hit it big. Actually, I did not mean he left immediately after Godunov. But soon enough - only after 3 years of Baryshnikov's management. As he wrote, he was not planning to leave ABT when he did, after six years of Baryshnikov's management, in truth and in name when Baryshnikov wasn't really directing the company at the time -- Bujones called it leaderless by that point -- he left after a contract dispute, expecting to be able to join the company again -- and not only if management changed -- but the ABT press release and subsequent accusations by Dillingham and Baryshnikov, which he quotes, killed any chance of that.

I might not laugh out loud, but I find sobbing in nearly every type of performance, whether it be ballet, opera, or theater, to take me out of the performance and roll my eyes before I can think about it. I've even cut a stream of La Boheme short before hearing Rodolfo sob between his sung "Mimi!"s. I know you're supposed to feel for Onegin, but I never will.

There's nothing that a modern-day Tatiana can do about a contemporary audience's emotional reaction to her or Onegin.

I didn't realize War Memorial in San Francisco was so big, nor that Mariinsky Theatre was so small. I would have guess wsthat it would have been the Mariinsky Second Stage that was smaller, but it has 1830 seats (plus room for 2500 staff members according to Wikipedia). According to this article in The Guardian, the Bolshoi Theatre was increased to 2200 seats during Soviet times, but was restored to back to 1720 during the restoration in the 00's. We were there in March 2005 for one of the last performances before the reno, and it felt a lot smaller than the Former NYST, but, in reality, it would have been less than 400 seats smaller at the time. I can't find an exact number, but from the seating plans here, the New Stage at the Bolshoi is significantly smaller, with half the number of rings.

It would not be surprising that in a theater as big as the Met that 2500 seats is considered a sell-out. I don't know whose performance of any ballet would fill up 3800 seats in NYC.

There is little video of Dowell from ABT: most of it was from his Royal Ballet days, not his ABT days. Bruhn's work on video is mostly from European sources plus appearances on variety shows like The Bell Telephone Hour. I think it is more strange that there isn't more video and footage of Godunov from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and my archives opened, even for defectors. He spent the most important part of his dance career there, and the Soviet TV filmed a lot of dancing. His career at ABT was only a few years, and his dancing wasn't central to the Company. Bujones, who trained at the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for New York City Ballet, was touted as the first American to be as good technically as Baryshnikov, and he was the first American to win the gold medal at Varna. He wrote extensively about why he left ABT in the autobiography that was published posthumously by his coach, Zeida Cecilia Mendez. ("Fernando Bujones: An Autobiography". There are comments from different people as insets in the book; I'm not sure if he solicited them or if they were added by his coach, which they read like to me.) The gist is: He and many dancers were unhappy when Lucia Chase was pushed out and Baryshnikov took over, especially by the handling of the new Executive Director/corporate mouthpiece (my paraphrase) Herman Krawitz, who later was producer of two TV specials built around Baryshnikov. Baryshnikov built a clique around him and promoted dancers without the skills and experience; many dancers left the company at that time, dancers Bujones admired, and even the Soviet and Eastern bloc dancers and coaches who were hired by Baryshnikov were gone within two years; he lists Godumov among them. Bujones was getting a lot of opportunities to guest, and he was living the life outside of ABT, dancing with great partners (Pontois, Haydee) and getting great reviews, with one critic in France calling him "un nouveau Nureev," with Nurejev, not Baryshnikov, his hero. He continued to guest all over the place while remaining at ABT until: Maurice Bejart offered to create a ballet for Bujones at ABT. His agent was negotiating with ABT, which seemed to be going back and forth at their usual pace. When ABT's then executive director, Charles Dillingham, told his agent that ABT was not going to produce the ballet, Bujones decided not to sign the contract that ABT proposed, thinking that he might be able to re-join the company in the future. Critic Anna Kisselgoff contacted him, saying ABT sent a press release to say that he was trying to coerce the company to produce the Bejart Ballet, Dillingham sent a telegram accusing him of coercion and accusing him of having broken an oral agreement. He got a hand-written note from Baryshnikov accusing him of much the same, including rudeness and being ill-mannered. He wrote back. So he never planned to leave ABT, with his opportunities to spend the rest of his season guesting, and, in fact, left three years after Godunov left, not following him. The joke was on the Company, because Bujones was in demand worldwide. His autobiography is official news, by our site rules, because it was written by a ballet professional and is public-facing, and it was so worth $9.99 on Kindle! What is your official source for this?