Ari

Le Jardin Animé will be revived from the Stepanov notations for the first time by dance historian Doug Fullington and Pacific Northwest Ballet School faculty member and former Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Manard Stewart. This world premiere revival will be the first ballet reconstruction using the Stepanov notations in the United States. Choreographed for 68 dancers, from two lead ballerinas to twelve couples of young students, Le Jardin Animé is a beautiful kaleidoscope of dance and music sure to delight the audience as it did over 100 years ago in Imperial Russia.

ABT produced a version of Le Jardin Anime in 1980 or 81. It didn't use 68 dancers, though, and I don't remember how it was reconstructed.

I wish I could have seen Danilova in this one.  She's the one my friends (who also loved her "Raymonda") remember.  All swear she picked the Poet up, carried him 'round the stage (which is true, I think; this has been dropped) AND up the steps in the tower AND all across the little bridge, or whatever it is.

Memory can be tricky when it comes to performances. In her memoirs, Danilova wrote that many people remember her carrying the poet offstage while on pointe (imagine doing that! :sweating: ). Of course, she never did, but she was pleased that she had created that illusion.

I don't think it's important whether the Sleepwalker is wife or daughter.  Her protected, virginal state is what matters.

I agree. While I can understand that it may be important for dancers to work out some kind of logic in the story in order to help them perform, I don't think that that benefits the audience. In fact, I think the contrary is true -- some ambiguity makes it a richer experience for the viewers. It can mean so many things, instead of just one.

With regard to the ballet performed in Denmark, I imagine there must be differences from the version done at NYCB. The Danish version is probably closer to the original, called Night Shadow. (Alexandra, is it really called La Sonnambula today, and if so has the title changed over the years?) Since Balanchine constantly fiddled with his ballets, the version he eventually staged for NYCB in 1960 probably differs in some respects. (The Host/Baron nomenclature may be one of these.)

coffee,

The King and I is certainly a classic of the musical genre. The music is wonderful (you must know some of the songs . . . Getting to Know You, I Whistle a Happy Tune, Hello Young Lovers). Whether it's worth your money will depend on the production. Do you have any information about it?

I've never seen a production by the Aquila Theater company but I've read good things about it. They specialize in Shakespeare in a contemporary setting -- they did a Much Ado that somehow worked James Bond into the story (not literally, by implication). Twelfth Night seems to be a new production. Take a look at their website:

Aquila Theater Company

For myself, I'd be interested in seeing what they do. But you'll have to decide for yourself!

I saw Streetcar last night and pretty much agree with Alexandra's and Ben Brantley's assessements. Patricia Clarkson, a good actress elsewhere (she plays Frances Conroy's sister on Six Feet Under and was Julianne Moore's bitchy best friend in Far From Heaven) was miscast. Yes, she was too old, but age is an elastic thing in the theater (as opposed to film); years ago I saw Rosemary Harris, then in her forties, play Blanche and I didn't think about age. Clarkson simply had too firm a grip on reality to be convincing. This was especially true in the first act. After that she seemed more scattered, but never vulnerable. She had to work hard for all her effects, and Blanche is supposed to be an open wound, exposed.

Adam Rothenburg was also miscast as Stanley. Too young, too cute, too boyish, not feral enough. He never seemed dangerous. The lack of sexual tension was mostly his fault, I think. Clarkson vamped it up like mad but Rothenburg seemed completely uninterested in her. Even in the rape scene he just went through the motions. His line "You and I have had this date from the beginning" was delivered without any affect at all.

I wonder if today's acting styles are partly to blame for the inadequate performances. Many of Williams's plays were created in the heyday of Method acting, which prized emotional transparency, but it is no longer in vogue. Do today's actors have what it takes to do justice to Tennessee Williams?

One performance I did like was Amy Ryan's. Hers was not the usual Stella-as-doormat interpretation; instead, she played her as an emotionally mature woman who accepts people for who they are and is adept at handling them. When she tells Blanche, "I like serving you," she is saying, "I love you and know that treating you like a queen bee is the only way for us to be happy together."

Who are Jimenez, Cooper, and Aldridge?

Another pattern is the promotion that kind of sneaks up on you. You don't especially notice a dancer being pushed forward, but little by little they accumulate roles, and before you know it they are de facto soloists. Balanchine usually just let them stay that way, but Peter Martins's policy has been to award them official promotion. Stacey Calvert is one example of this. I think Adam Hendrickson may be another.

I haven't seen "Abdallah" in a long time, though, and I will say that even by the 1992 Festival, the dancers were beginning to add character to it

Abdallah wasn't part of the 1992 Bournonville Festival. The reason, if I remember correctly, was that it was so much a reconstruction that it couldn't really be said to be a Bournonville ballet, at least when put side by side with, say, A Folk Tale and Far From Denmark.

The four PBS programs from the late 1970s that filmed Balanchine ballets or excerpts in the studio, and which have long been available on four videocassettes, are being released on two DVDs. One contains Tzigane, the andante from Divertimento No. 15, The Four Temperaments, selections from Jewels, and the Stravinsky Violin Concerto; the second contains Chaconne, Prodigal Son, Ballo Della Regina, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Elegie, and the Tschaikovsky Pas De Deux. They have a list price of $29.99 but can be found for less (try Deep Discount DVD). I've seen two different release dates for these, May 25 and June 8, so I'm not sure which is correct. At any rate, they'll be available soon.

Even MacMillan's Juliet is thrown around like a sack of laundry, then used as a mop before before the end.

Most of MacMillan's choreography features women being dragged/thrown/abused in some way. The fact that it occasionally coincides with the story (as in the scene in Mayerling between Rudolph and Stephanie on their wedding night) doesn't hide the fact that MacMillan revelled in violence towards women.

Thanks for the review, Alexandra. I'm seeing it next week. I hope by then the production and performances will have improved.

The festival actually opened a few weeks ago with Five by Tenn, an evening of five one-act plays, four of which were having their world premiere. It was produced by the Shakespeare Theater, although presented at the KC's Terrace Theater. The ST's AD, Michael Kahn, gave the plays the deluxe treatment; I can't imagine them being done better. While none came close to being a major work, all were interesting and it was a very enjoyable evening for fans of the playwright. The five plays were linked by an actor playing Williams who talked to the audience, using text taken from his autobiography. The most substantial and interesting of the plays was one called And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, about a lonely New Orleans drag queen who desperately tries to hold onto a worthless young tough he picks up. Wonderful performances by Joan van Ark, Kathleen Chalfant, and Cameron Folmar as the drag queen.

I like the idea of festivals like this, too, but I do wish the KC had been more adventurous in its choice of plays. Streetcar, Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are Williams's three best-known and most frequently performed works, and he wrote so many others. His later plays are considered difficult, probably because we haven't yet figured out how to stage and watch them. It would have been rewarding to see the KC take a crack at some of them. The Arena Stage is doing one of them -- Orpheus Descending -- and it should be interesting to see how they make out with that.

This is the second of Michael Kaiser's theater festivals, the first having been Stephen Sondheim two years ago. I wonder who they're considering for the future.

My friends and I call that moment  -- no matter who's  dancing -- as "throwing Sally into the pit."  :rolleyes:

In Yes, Virginia, don't they throw her into the piano?

Thanks for finding this, Dale. I doubt that Martins was motivated by hopes that the Eifman ballet would be a money maker. The crowd that sells out the City Center for Eifman is largely composed of Russians, who by and large do not patronize NYCB. And NYCB audiences are not predisposed to like Eifman's brand of overwrought theatrics, so if anything I think it's a risky move on Martins's part (and not a wise one, but that's another issue).

Going back even further, how about the spread in Town & Country shortly after Vienna Waltzes had its premiere? The principal women were featured, as well as young corps members Kyra Nichols and Maria Calegari.

Hey, there's no option for "couldn't get there and madly jealous of those who could." :green:

Last night Turner Classic Movies showed an early Cold War film called Never Let Me Go. In it, American journalist Clark Gable, who is stationed in Moscow, falls in love with a Russian ballerina played by Gene Tierney ("Number Four Swan"), and they marry. Gene has it all worked out: San Francisco, Clark's home town, has an opera house, and she will dance there. And teach their children ballet -- "Ballet makes pretty bodies, and you want our childrens to have pretty bodies, yes?" Trouble is, the Soviet authorities won't grant her an exit visa, and throw Clark out of the country. Their displeasure has no effect on her career, though, and she gets more leading roles -- "Only now I dance better, because I am dancing my love for you" she writes him. An escape attempt fails because Gene is kept in Moscow to dance Swan Lake for a military hero. Clark steals a Russian army uniform and attends the performance, then carries Gene off (literally -- she had fainted when she saw him in the audience). Before they can escape, one of the swan corps recognizes Clark as Gene's American husband, and blurts it out. "Shut up, honey, you're the next Swan Queen," Clark tells her, but she figures that squealing to the authorities is a more reliable way of ensuring promotion. A car chase ensues, but Clark and Gene manage to elude their pursuers, plunge into an unspecified body of water, and swim to freedom.

The story may be naive in many respects -- the real Soviet government would have punished a citizen who married an American far more harshly -- but the ballet scenes are treated with respect and are marked by an absence of howlers that Hollywood movies sometimes commit when dealing with ballet. There are several short dance sequences, all from Swan Lake Act II, performed by the London Festival Ballet, with Anton Dolin as Gene's partner. And, appropriately, Gene doesn't do Odette's mime scene. Prescient, since Soviet ballet hadn't yet made its appearance in the West in 1953.

Ari, if you are simply dying to see Les Noces you are very welcome here. I can offer lodging (youngest daughter's room) and food - I am a good cook and you will damn well need it!

Okay, Pamela, I'm on my way!

One of the happy accidents of such travel is that one sees, and connects, elements of the visited cities with elements of the work.

I think this is the biggest benefit of ballet travel. When you see a company at home, in its natural element, you begin to understand things about it that don't come across when they're on tour. When I went to London for the first time and experienced the city -- large in area but low in height, at least from a New Yorker's perspective -- I began to understand the Royal Ballet's preference for small dancers and contained movement. Similarly, Bournonville's ballets don't come across well in a cavernous modern arena like the Met, with its overheated world championship atmosphere, but communicate beautifully in Copenhagen's cozy, human-scaled Royal Theater.

The ultimate in situ ballet experience for me would be seeing the Kirov's "historical" Sleeping Beauty at the Maryinsky. I hope some day I'll get a chance.

This is a press release from the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum:

A multimedia presentation on George Balanchine’s choreography for commercial stage and screen

Monday, May 10, 2004 – 7:00 pm

San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum

(SAN FRANCISCO) – The San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, in tandem with its current exhibition George Balanchine: Ballet Master, presents By George: Balanchine, Broadway, and Hollywood. On Monday, May 10, 2004 at 7:00 pm, Stanford University lecturer Janice Ross will present a multimedia survey of Balanchine’s notable choreography for musical theatre, movies, and operetta, documented with rare archival slide images and video clips.

Admission is free, but space is limited and reservations are recommended – call 415-255-4800. The Performing Arts Library is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue (@ McAllister), Veterans Building, 4th Floor.

George Balanchine was a lifelong fan of American popular culture, and nowhere is it more evident than in the 15 musical comedies, four operettas, and five Hollywood films that he choreographed between 1927 and 1951. These ranged from the classic “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” number for Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes to the surreal extravaganza of The Goldwyn Follies. Of the hundreds of ballets that Balanchine created , these works for the commercial stage and screen received little scholarly attention until the Balanchine Foundation sponsored the ambitions Popular Balanchine Project from 2000-2002 to recover as many of these works as possible from the surviving dancers. Janice Ross, an original participant in the Project, will rely on some of this landmark scholarship in her presentation.

Janice Ross, B.A., MA, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Drama at Stanford University, where she has taught Dance History and directed the graduate program in Dance Education since 1990. For 10 years she was staff dance and performance art critic for The Oakland Tribune, and her articles on the arts have appeared in Dancemagazine, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and past president of the Dance Critics Association. She was the recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a principal researcher for the Popular Balanchine Project.

George Balanchine: Ballet Master, curated by Sheryl Flatow, offers a comprehensive survey of Balanchine’s life and work through original photographs, posters, programs, correspondence, costume and set designs, video excerpts, and other rare memorabilia. The exhibition is currently on view through June 19, 2004 at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, located in the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue (@ McAllister), 4th Floor. Admission is free. Gallery hours are Tues-Fri 11:00 am-5:00 pm, Sat 1:00-5:00 pm. For more information, visit the Library’s website at www.sfpalm.org or call (415) 255-4800.

This Performing Arts Library exhibition and related programs are made possible through the generous support of Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, The Sharper Image, the L.J. and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, the Mervyn L. Brenner Foundation, the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the George Frederick Jewett Foundation, the Upjohn Fund, the Wallis Foundation, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Russell Hartley Society, and the members of the Performing Arts Library.

Special thanks to The George Balanchine Trust, Barbara Horgan, Elizabeth Healy, Bernard Taper, Arthur Mitchell, Maria Tallchief, Helgi Tomasson, Suzanne Farrell, Gloria Govrin, Kyra Nichols, Sally Streets, Jocelyn Vollmar, Sally

Bailey, Nancy Johnson, Jillian P Y Johnson and Dance Theatre of Harlem, David Leopold and The Ben Solowey Studio, The Estate of Al Hirschfeld, Rebecca Paller and the Museum of Television and Radio – New York, Judy Kinberg and Lylian Morcos – Thirteen/WNET New York, Roger Englander, Pennebaker Hegedus Films, John Belle – Seahorse Films and The Estate of Anne Belle, Alyson Belcher, Steven Caras, Martha Swope, Paul Stiga, Trudy Garfunkel, Murrey E. Nelson, the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in San Francisco, New York City Ballet Archives, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

BALANCHINE® is a Trademark of The George Balanchine Trust.

San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum

Overall, the program was very interesting in the way that two of the three works arise out of, and show Balanchine exploiting, the patterns of social dance -- the minuet and probably some other dance patterns in the case of Divertimento # 15; and successive generations of waltzes in the case of Vienna Waltzes; and in the echo of this then so clearly resonant and present in Episodes, especially in the final Ricercata danced by Kowroski and a corps de ballet of fifteen dancers.

Divert, Episodes, and Vienna is the company's "Viennese" program. When Vienna premiered in 1977, Balanchine put this program together and the company performed it several times, in contrast to their usual MO of mixing repertory with each performance. I think the three ballets go together well, in part for the reasons you mentioned, Michael.

The only time I crossed an ocean specifically to see ballet was in 1992 for the RDB's second Bournonville Festival, and it was well worth it. But when I travel to Europe I usually time it so that I can catch ballet, that is if I'm going to places where they have ballet. A few years ago my vague thoughts about going to Paris solidified into reality when I heard that POB would be doing Jewels. Once I timed a multi-city trip to coincide with performances by POB and the Royal, and lucked out in between, managing to catch one performance each by Bejart in Brussels (he had moved to Lausanne by then but was visiting) and the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam. The last was a real piece of luck -- it was the premiere of a new production of Swan Lake and was completely sold out, but I waited in the return line and managed to get in.

I'm toying with the idea of going to London in November to see the first three programs of the Royal's season, which include Les Noces (a ballet I'm dying to see, along with Les Biches) and a lot of Ashton. But the feeble dollar and a lack of confidence in the company's ability to manage the style is holding me back.

Thanks!  How did you find them?  I did a search for "choreographers" and "Balanchine," and also went to their shop and looked at the stamps they had (the arts and the people section).

Google, Alexandra. Always Google.

Here is a picture of the stamps:

American Choreographers

rg, your TV has to be able to be able to receive PAL in order to use these multi-region players, but using a converter on a standard American NTSC TV will accomplish this. Some of the players listed on the Overseas Best Buy site state that they come with built-in converters. The Daewoo player apparently has one, too, because both people I mentioned who have one have ordinary American TVs.

There has been some discussion here in the past about DVD players that can play discs from all over the world, not just Region I (North America). A friend of mine recently drew my attention to a website that lists these kind of players:

Overseas Best Buy

She also told me about an even better deal: Costco, the warehouse chain, sells the Daewoo DVDP480 player for an amazing $47, and on the evidence of two other people, it works fine. If you're interested in buying one of these players, it would be worth purchasing a year's membership in Costco just to get one (checking first to see that your local Costco has them in stock or can order them), since the combined cost would still be less than those listed by Overseas Best Buy.

Then you can spend the money you save on DVDs not available in Region I format.

Chauffeur, thank you for that review. It's by far the most detailed and thoughtful account of this production I've read.

Reading your description of the ballet, though, I was reminded of the thread on "using Swan Lake loosely." Murphy's ballet bears so little resemblence to traditional one by Ivanov and Petipa (or what we've come to think of as the traditional production) that wouldn't it be more honest of him to do as John Neumeier did and call his production something like "Illusions -- Like Swan Lake"? At least it would be truth in advertising. I wonder how many people will see Murphy's production and think that that is what Swan Lake is.