Ari

Sonora, the subject of the ballet that Eifman is doing for NYCB has not been announced. The theory that he would do a ballet about Balanchine was suggested on this board as a joke (black humor ).

It's nice to have the casting, but who are these people? Those of you who have seen the company before, which cast would you recommend?

Glebb, you are right on the money. Roundabout has just extended the show, which was supposed to close on June 29, through Aug. 10.

Like Grace, I never thought that Porter resembled Fonteyn. She had the same dark hair and big eyes, but her body was completely different. She was tall and reedy, which was unusual at the Royal in those days (70s and 80s). Despite her romantically appealing looks, she was never technically strong, and had trouble with big classical roles. I saw her do an Aurora that was downright perilous. She became the target of negative criticism in London (especially by one critic) and I think that her rather abrupt decision to retire stemmed in part from that.

"Stretton Guide to the Ballerina" (now reduced) :D (Good one this year, Bruce!)

Martins's "Magic Flute" shared only its title with the Mozart opera. The story was from an old Russian ballet (Balanchine remembered it, and gave it to Martins as an assignment to develop his choreographic abilities). I don't remember who wrote the music, but it was far from Mozart. Still, it was a charming little one-act piece. I'm sorry it's disappeared from the rep. Xena, were you proposing that a choreographer use Mozart's score? In that case a composer would be needed to adapt the vocal music to balletic purposes, someone who could work with the choreographer to determine when to have narrative music and when to have dancing music, and what kinds of each. The composer would run the risk of being reviled by his or her peers for bastardizing Mozart. There have been a number of ballets lifted from operas — [Eugene] Onegin and Madame Butterfly, among others. Onegin didn't use any music from Tchaikovsky's opera, but I believe Butterfly did.

Just a quick word about last night's performance — Bayadère was fabulous. Adjusting myself to the performing conditions, I focused on the dancers, and they came through. (It was the same cast as on Wednesday, except that Ekaterina Osmolkina danced the second Shades variation.) They made one change in the staging that helped a great deal: still no ramp, but instead of the curtain rising on an empty stage and the first Shade entering through parted curtains like Johnny Carson coming out for his monologue, the curtain rose to reveal the first Shade posed at the rear of the stage, arms en couronne, the tulle extending up her arms like a halo. It was breathtaking — I could hear people sighing with pleasure. And Daria Pavlenko and Leonid Sarafanov were both terrific, she with her beautiful line and adagio and he with strongly centered turns and beautifully controlled leaps. A gorgeous performance. In 4 Ts, Deanna Seay's stronger technique and stylistic maturity made for a more satisfying Sanguinic than Jennifer Kronenberg on opening night. Not that Kronenberg was bad, but Seay's performance was more reminiscent of great NYCB Sanguinics of the past.

That was my experience with Balanchine's Orpheus. It wasn't in NYCB's repertory at the time I first started watching ballet, and I yearned to see it for years. When it was finally revived, I was disappointed. I didn't like the ballet. I think I called it "dated" because the Noguchi costumes really did look like old-fashioned modernism, and I was baffled by the ballet's high reputation. I could only account for the disconnect between its original reviews and my own reaction by assuming that something in the ballet spoke to an earlier era. (It couldn't have been the staging, because that was supervised by Balanchine himself.) After watching more performances, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the ballet had never been any better. Perhaps the critics were so awed by the reputations of Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Noguchi that it didn't occur to them that their collaboration could result in anything less than great art.

I agree with most of Alexandra's comments. 4Ts received the kind of clean, unforced performance that we've come to expect from Miami City Ballet. That may not sound very exciting, but it's exactly the style that Balanchine — and this ballet in particular — needs, and that not many companies performing Balanchine give us. It went over very well with the audience, which was genuinely enthusiastic. The cast was: Themes — Katia Carranza & Didier Bramaz; Tricia Albertson & Jon Hall; Andrea Spiridonakos & Bruce Thornton. Variations — Jeremy Cox; Jennifer Kronenberg & Renato Penteado; Yann Trividic; Michelle Merrell. I, too, liked Trividic's Phlegmatic very much. He uses his body very expressively without straying from classical decorum. The corps in this variation, however, wasn't crisp enough, too taffylike. I thought that Cox, while he obviously understood what was needed in Melancholic and tried hard to provide it, didn't have the necessary elasticity. Akira Endo, a former music director of ABT, conducted (the Kirov brought their own conductor, and the MacMillan was danced to taped music). Apparently the orchestra was divided in two, with one portion backstage, watching Endo on a monitor. The MacMillan wasn't as bad as I'd feared — I'm no fan of his. It was a completely modern work, danced barefoot and without any ballet steps. Could it be that this contributed to its success? MacMillan's work seemed more comfortable and fluent in this vernacular than it does (to me) in his "ballets." The movement was interesting, but the drama was not. Lacking words, MacMillan couldn't figure out a way of making Hamlet's passivity interesting, so all Adam Cooper did was to wander around the stage watching the other characters interact. All these entanglements (both figurative and literal) never reached a conclusion, since MacMillan did not want to tell a story. Incidentally, the costumes that Alexandra objected to were designed by the choreographer's widow Deborah, who was also instrumental in persuading the Kennedy Center to stage this production. To close out the program, we had a chamber version of the Shades scene given by the Kirov. Eighteen Shades made their way onto the Eisenhower's stage — about as many as they could fit in there, but not enough to make it Bayadere. Without a ramp (last week the KC couldn't find a wing chair for Spectre de la Rose, and this week they couldn't find a short black ramp?), the Shades entered center stage through a gap in two black curtains. Owing to the small size of the stage, the small orchestra pit, and the intimate size of the house, they seemed to be right on top of us (and I was sitting in the balcony). This doesn't work for a vision scene, where the dancers should seem remote and misty. The reduced size of the corps didn't provide the same hallucinatory effect that 32, or even 24 dancers do. And there were a couple of wobblers. So it wasn't a true Kirov Bayadere experience, which is a shame since the real thing is one of greatest spectacles in the ballet world. Pavlenko has a beautiful technique but remains a cold performer. The soloists were Irina Golub, Irina Zhelonkina, and Ksenia Ostreikovskaya, all pretty good. Golub and Ostreikovskaya will dance their variations at all performances this week, with Zhelonkina alternating with Ekaterina Osmolkina. The principals at subsequent performances will be Sofya Gumerova & Anton Korsakov and Ekaterina Kondaurova & Danila Korsuntsev. This week's program is an odd contrast to last week's; it's as substantial as last week's was light. I'm sure that scheduling played a large part in determining what was going to be danced when, but the results could have been better.

I don't think you should take Crisp quite so seriously, Watermill. As Alexandra says, it's part of his curmudgeon act, and frankly I enjoy these little asides even when I disagree with them. (I love to see children from a company's school dance onstage with the professionals; it emphasizes continuity, maintenance of tradition, and integrity of style — of course, none of this is true of today's Royal Ballet. ) He challenges the pious verities of life, like "all kiddies are adorable angelic creatures." In December he said that sitting through Nutcrackers was "one more thing to add to the horrors of the season." I enjoyed that.

Dale, the festival is being held in the Eisenhower Theater (is that what you meant by the smaller theater?), not the Concert Hall. ABT's engagement there was, thankfully, the only ballet to be seen there this year. I think it was necessitated by the fact that the Eisenhower was booked that week.

The hand-to-ear gesture also occurs in some versions of the Rose Adagio, the ones with the lute girls. Most companies unfortunately now use the Royal Ballet version done for Fonteyn, to show off her unsupported balances. And a "whispering" moment is also, delicately, present between Nikiya and Solor in the Shades scene in Bayadere.

Inga, I didn't care for Shipulina. I don't remember exactly what my objections were, but she was the weakest of the soloists in Don Quixote.

With its Opera House closed all year for renovation, the Kennedy Center had to move most of its ballet programs into the much smaller Eisenhower Theater, which is usually used for plays and modern dance performances. In such a place, the lavish spectacles that make up the bulk of the KC's ballet programming were clearly impractical, so the Center had to come up with ideas for events that would stir excitement. Hence the "International Ballet Festival," which opened last night. Instead of featuring full-fledged companies, the Festival is bringing in small groups of dancers from leading companies to dance excerpts from their native repertory. The first week brings us 13 dancers from the Royal Danish Ballet, doing parts of Napoli Act III, 12 dancers from the Bolshoi, doing several very short pieces, and 7 dancers from American Ballet Theater, doing Fancy Free. Except for ABT, which is presenting three different casts of sailors and girls, the dancers remain the same all week. The Danish dancers will swap solos during the course of the week, though. A last-minute change in the program's order brought us Napoli to start the evening — a bad idea. The excerpts presented here come from the ballet's final act, which celebrates the marriage of the hero and heroine. Performed cold, with nothing to prepare us for this explosion of joy, it felt awkward. This is a closing ballet if I ever saw one. However, I think it might have worked had the dancers been better. This was my first view of the Danes in 11 years, and while Alexandra's posts had warned me of their decline, the performance still came as a shock. These people don't know how to dance Bournonville anymore; their upper bodies are rigid, their arms stiff, and the men lack elevation and ballon. More important, they don't seem to feel the shape of the choreography or understand how the steps fit together to make something coherent, let alone beautiful. Many of the dancers didn't so much as smile. This was true even of the three dancers I'd seen do good Bournonville work in the past: Rose Gad, Silja Schandorff, and Christina Olsson. The performance looked like a school recital, a stiff account of discrete steps. The audience response was tepid. The Bolshoi presented two very short ballets, Spectre de la Rose with Nina Kaptsova and Gennady Yanin (replacing Dimitry Gudanov) and Kasian Goleizovsky's solo Narcissus, with Yanin; the pas de deux from Gorsky's La Fille Mal Gardée, with Anastasia Goryacheva and Andrey Bolotin; and the grand "pax" (as the program called it) and variations from Don Quixote (credited to Gorsky, not Petipa) with Anastasia Volochkova, Evgueni Ivanchenko, Irina Fedotova, Ekaterina Shipulina, and four anonymous girls. The two Gorsky pieces were performed last spring at an Opera House gala, but presumably most of the Festival audience will not have seen that. I did, though, and while I didn't mind seeing La Fille again (especially with the delightful and technically secure Goryacheva, whom I also admired in The Nutcracker a few months ago), I did not enjoy sitting through another Volochkova Don Q. The piece shows this ballerina at her worst, her most vulgar. If she seemed a little less vulgar last night than she had in the spring, maybe this was just because I knew what to expect. It's sad to see this choice of repertory because, as her performance in La Bayadere last June showed, Volochkova is capable of much, much better. The real interest in the Bolshoi's portion of the program came from the piece by Goleizovsky, an avant-garde choreographer of the early 1900s who influenced Balanchine, among others. I didn't see any antecedents of Apollo in the work, but at times it did look like Nijinsky's Faune (I don't know which ballet came first). Closing out the evening was Fancy Free, an appropriately festive choice but one that is very familiar to Washington audiences. (I'd rather have seen Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.) It benefited from the more intimate stage and auditorium, but the boys' horseplay with the first girl looked so tough and menacing (rather like NYCB's version) that I wanted to call 911. I've seen the company do better. Maybe the dancers will all warm up as the week goes on, but last night this festival looked distinctly drab.

Spacey talks about his plans for the Olc Vic in the Daily Telegraph.

Kate, I agree. When Martins danced Franz, he didn't dance the original choreography, but arranged something of his own (needless to say, it wasn't anywhere as good). And the original choreography, or parts of it, date back further than Tomasson. For Franz's Act III variation, Balanchine borrowed the music from Delibes's Sylvia, and also borrowed his own choreography from the Sylvia pas de deux that he made in 1950. The role was danced at the premiere by Nicholas Magallanes, but he was soon replaced by André Eglevsky, and Eglevsky and Tallchief danced it all over the world. Neither Magallanes nor Eglevsky was tall.

It's interesting that the Kirov has so many different levels on their roster. When the company performs in Washington, the dancers are listed at three levels only.

Susan Freedman was also wonderful as one of the sisters in Prodigal Son. She actually reacted to what was happening onstage (as opposed to the other sister, Carole Divet, who just stood there like she was waiting for a bus), and in the final scene added to the pathos with her compassion for the Prodigal.

Another unforgettable Estopinal role: the lead in the Ricercata section of Episodes. Her musicality and unfussy dignity were perfect for this part, and for years after she retired, when watching this ballet, I would mentally edit out the dancer onstage and replace her with Renée. Later, Maria Calegari gave a breathtaking performance in that role, but it's Renée's that sticks in my mind.

Silvy, Alessandra Ferri is also prima ballerina of the La Scala ballet in Milan and dances there regularly.

carbro, the International Ballet Festival is being held in the Eisenhower Theater, not the Concert Hall. But I can't imagine all those Shades crowding onto the Eisenhower's stage.

Another word about Delia — in addition to lending her subtle wit to character parts (and Glebb, she will always be the perfect Wife in the The Concert for me, too), she was a lovely classicist. She danced the first (Victoria Simon) variation in Raymonda Variations beautifully.

I saw the second performance last night. While the traffic jams that samba mentioned had been cleared up, the other problems remained: cramped, shallow stage, little scenery, harsh lighting, and the absence of the orchestral moat that separates the viewer from the action, which is necessary to maintain the balletic illusion. But what was worse were the things that couldn't be blamed on performing circumstances. ABT's dancers are given no help with their mime, which is so important to a narrative ballet (which comprise a hefty portion of the company's repertoire). You couldn't tell the difference between the aristocrats and the peasants (except for Gennady Saveliev as Paris, who knew what he was doing), and in the crowd scenes there was nothing going on, no sense of life and activity and humanity. Xiomara Reyes danced well and in the third act showed sensitivity and imagination in her acting. Unfortunately, however, when she is called upon to act happy, there is the problem of her smile. She has a large mouth and when she smiles, it seems to take over her whole face. Perhaps she could try smiling with her mouth closed; this might give her greater range. I was disappointed in Angel Corella. His dancing was OK, but his bulky, overdeveloped lower body is at odds with his normal upper body, making him look like a demi-caractère dancer. He didn't characterize Romeo at all — he was romantic, playful, anguished, etc., at the appropriate times, but it never hung together. I didn't know who this Romeo was and why I should care about him. And for all the performances they've done together, Reyes and Corella showed no chemistry at all. Herman Cornejo, whom I've admired in other roles, was also a big disappointment as Mercutio. He played the character as a punk from the gutter, not as a randy, rip-snorting young aristocrat with wit and imagination. When he finally died, after prolonged death throes, the audience actually applauded, instead of being moved to silence. It's too bad the company and the Kennedy Center chose to mount this ballet, and in the Concert Hall, for ABT's annual engagment. I would have preferred a good mixed bill in the Eisenhower Theater.

Ballet has appeared in Broadway shows for years, at least as far back as the 1930s. The difference with Contact and Movin' Out is that they're shows told entirely through dance, rather than partly. I don't think many people were moved to try real ballet after seeing On Your Toes or Oklahoma or similar musicals, and I doubt that fans of Contact and Movin' Out will be any different. The people you quoted, Calliope, would probably never have been long-term ballet goers anyway. The Broadway musical is in trouble, and in an effort to draw in audiences it's looking for something different — anything that sells. Hence the musical as dance, the musical as opera (La Boheme), etc. It's not a threat to ballet or other forms of "serious" dance.

There are some ballets that never seem to go away. Whenever you look at the repertory a company is performing, at least one of them is being given. A company comes to town that you've never seen before, and you're eagerly looking forward to seeing whatever it is that makes the company unique, but what you see in the brochures is . . . you fill in the blank. If you were World Commissioner of Ballet and had the power to ban all performances of any ballet with the titles listed above, by any choreographer, for a period of, say, five years, which would it be? (Of course, we all acknowledge the importance of a continuous performance tradition. But this is spleen talking in this thread. )