sandik

Pacific Northwest Ballet hasn't done their Firebird for several years -- before Peter Boal arrived as AD, and he's starting his sixth year. I love the music, and am always interested in seeing different versions of the work (and would absolutely love to see some more performances of the Fokine choreography), but I do think the score is a difficult one. In a tricky way, it's a Petipa-era three-act ballet condensed into a half-hour work. You have the opening, that sets up the conflict and introduces the major characters, the big denoument that plays out the drama and solves the conflict, and the happy-ever-after celebratory act. Once the Firebird has vanquished the evil sorcerer, the procession of the princesses and the noblemen is awkward -- too long to be a single swoop up to the final tableau, and too short to allow for differentiation between performers (no variations). The music, which scrolls along, is so beautiful that I sometimes just close my eyes and listen, but it doesn't really support any distinctive action aside from the processionals. In fact, the best staging I've ever seen of that music is the retirement gala for Kent Stowell and Francia Russell here in Seattle -- their sons put together a big performance for them, and used the Stravinsky for a grande defile. The music just kept unspooling, and the dancers just kept sweeping through the space.

Although the official release was made this summer, Peter Boal did a very nice curtain announcement yesterday before the opening night show for the dancers promoted to principal or soloist. Sarah Ricard Orza and Laura Gilbreath got flowers, but Seth Orza did not, which hardly seems fair. And Sarah RO was modeling a very sleek orthopedic boot on her right foot -- she's got a minor injury, but it's keeping her off the stage for now.

Thanks so much for the links -- the article from the Vancouver Observer has an astonishing photo of Johnston and Dick Cavett -- two people who were so influential in the evolution of the culture.

Jill Johnston, former dance critic for the Village Voice and author of Lesbian Nation, died earlier this week. While she didn't really write about ballet, she was integral to the development of American dance criticism. NYT obit

And an all too brief clip of the waterbabies themselves!

Thanks for the link -- I didn't realize that Amazon was selling this on their download service -- it's been a topic of discussion that it hasn't been available commercially for awhile. I thought it was a bit disconcerting that, in the voice-over promotion in the trailer, they list the director, the designer, and the composer, but not the choreographer...

Yes, that's part of the question that also includes 'where are the female choreographers and company directors?" Dance Chronicle is bringing out an issue in the next year on the topic -- the call for proposals is still open. Dance Chronicle

It looks like a lot of people are getting some interesting opportunities. And it will be nice to see Chapman and Stanton onstage again.

Well, this explains something -- I heard over the summer that people were learning T pas de deux, but I didn't know where they'd be performing it. It is a very handy piece for guesting and one-off touring, so I can absolutely understand why they'd be adding it to the rep right now. Any ideas when/if the presenter will be announcing casting?

The trick is to recycle the paper there as you finish using it -- leaves more space in your bag to bring the exhibition catalogs home!

I'm fascinated with the way different groups use video, especially online stuff, to market themselves, but I don't always expect the material to really do the work justice. This, however, was an excellent little video essay of/about Glass Pieces -- big congratulations to whoever shot and edited this!

I saw the notice about Maraval and was curious about his choice -- before he left PNB he'd mentioned in an interview that one of the reasons he went to Montreal was a chance for his children to live in a French-speaking environment, which I don't think is part of Naples, Florida!

This reminds me of Fonteyn's description of her first sessions with Ashton, of his insistence that she bend and twist much more than she originally was trained to do, and her complaints to her mother that she just didn't understand what he wanted. That certainly changed!

And they missed Robert Joffrey.

Just goes to show you how much attention I pay to it when there's no dancer honored... Still, two years apart seems more frequent than we've seen dance people honored previously. I went back and looked at the Wikipedia link again (thanks!) and did some counting up (there's nothing like trying to avoid other work to encourage playing around with statistics...) Counting this year, this is the 32nd set of KC honors. Of those, there have been nine years when there was no dance honoree. There have been two times when there was a two year gap between 'dance years,' and both of them were in the 2000s. And there have been two years when there were two dance honorees each. There have been four or five years when there was no one who represented classical music (depending on how you feel about Victor Borge), and none of those were consecutive. And there have been as many as nine years with no one from the theater world (depending on how you characterize Sammy Davis, Jr., Myrna Loy, and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward). And that's if you count Barbra Streisand as representing theater as well as music -- if she 'doesn't count' then there were three consecutive years without a theater honoree. I could keep nitpicking, but I should probably do some other work for awhile.

I was watching a video on the Dance Notation Bureau's website about reconstructing Antony Tudor's Soiree Musicale and one of the dancers (who learned to read notation during this project) had some intersting things to say about the difference between learning from video and learning from notation. It's here if you'd like to take a look, at about the 4 minute mark.

My brother-in-law interviewed her several years ago, and wound up on her holiday card list. Alas, he fell off when they moved -- the cards and gifts were truly odd.

I haven't gone back to look at the list of previous winners, but I think that Rich puts a finger on part of the criteria when he refers to "lifetime achievement awards." The KC prizes are designed for artists whose careers are substantially established, or in some cases almost done. The trick is to balance between someone like Bill T. Jones, who is still actively making work but whose contributions to the field is already formidable, and George Jones, who I think has all but stopped performing. Perhaps it was Winfrey's announcement that she was bringing her long-term television talk show to an end that precipitated her inclusion.

My local PBS station ran a program about this course that included a lot of footage from the class itself -- aside from the subject matter, which I think is fascinating, he's able to do question and answer work with a massive group (I don't know how many people were in the auditorium, but he was linking people on a main floor and a balcony) -- very deft teaching techniques. I've heard interesting things about Martha Nussbaum's new book "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities" -- I'm hoping to get to it this autumn.

As someone who teaches and occasionally stages work from Labanotation (another notation system) I am biased, but I want to point out this distinction -- a videotape is a recording of a specific performance, with all the thrills and errors that live theater is prone to. A notated score is a recording of the work itself, the choreography with the bugs erased (like the really big eraser in the earlier posting!) It's the same as the difference between a CD of a particular orchestra playing Beethoven's 9th and the written score. In dance, we're accustomed to working one on one, learning a work directly from another person. It will be interesting to see what kind of changes happen with this increasing dependence on videotape.

I've been preoccupied with some work lately, and have only now read through this thread, so I have the advantage of seeing everyone in a bunch -- forgive me for the cherry-picking here! A good point, and not just a 19th-20th century phenomenon. Some people have equated this kind of public giving with the old practice of buying indulgences from the Catholic Church, an attempt to ameliorate the backlash for certain behaviors by currying favor, though I wouldn't go anywhere near that far! Philanthropy is motivated by all kinds of elements, some truly self-effacing, but most not. In general, the current emphasis for board membership and/or donation is more on civic engagement and networking/promotion than on wielding some kind of influence over artistic content, though that does still happen. This actually does happen, more often than I think the denizens of this board believe, based on the response to this comment. In Seattle, a socially prominent part of the community banded together as PONCHO (an acronym I can't find the source for) to raise money for the arts in the 1960s through a series of auctions, the proceeds of which were disbursed by a separate committee who fielded applications. The application process has been pretty rigorous, and an unintended side product of it was that if you managed to get a PONCHO grant other funders figured you knew what you were doing and looked at you a bit more favorably. More recently, Arts Fund has done a similar thing, raising money from corporations and disbursing it rather like the United Way does with social/health safety net funding. I don't think bart meant that the tobacco companies have gone away entirely. They still give but it's more on the downlow than it used to be and organizations are more chary of being associated with them too openly. Some of that is window dressing, yes, but nevertheless there has been a sea change in how the tobacco companies and their sponsorships are viewed. So all of those protests and complaints weren't all in vain. I do know of several groups that have not solicited or accepted funds from tobacco companies or their agents, but as many people point out, it is difficult to say 'no' to an opportunity. I agree -- I was gobsmacked when a group of local donors gave a substantial gift to the local art museum to acquire the acreage for an outdoor sculpture park with the caveat that it could not be named after them. Instead, it's named after the mountain range it looks out to. My sister and I really wanted to donate something to the local opera house when it was remodeled, if they would let us name a bathroom stall after our mother, who used to complain about the lack of facilities! (this is my first go-round with the "multi-quote" function -- what a time-saver!)

Works for me! I'm not sure what Brandy has been doing lately, but I remember her in a remake of the R&H Cinderella where she was quite lovely, singing and dancing.

It could be that the Tharp people have a say in this decision (about which of her works to perform) -- since the version of Sinatra that's out now is available for purchase, they might like to have something else on DiA. I'd like to stand up for Golden Section. Musically it's not as subtle as Square Dance, but it's a stunning example of contemporary virtuosity.

The Gohs have offered good training for many years, and their ensemble performs far beyond the typical 'student company' program. I imagine theirs is a very respectable Nut, but I am curious to know how it fares in competition with the Albert company's touring show.

Oh yes -- I really liked the 'kiss the hand' detail! And Valdes does indeed seem to have a very stable center of gravity here, which lets her make decisions about how long to stay somewhere and how to make a transition in and out of a position. There are some things I miss from the versions of the RA that I'm most familiar with, though, and I'd be very interested in seeing what this dancer would do with them. I'm very fond of the series of port de bras that Aurora does downstage center while bourreeing in place, with the music roiling underneath her -- they have a lovely renverse quality that is echoed later in the dance with a true renverse -- in this version that is replaced with a series of lifts crossing the stage. They are quite pretty, and done very well, but I miss the other, simpler, sequence. Changes like that one might connect to the conversation elsewhere on the website about virtuosity. I don't think anyone would argue that Valdes' use of balance here is not an act of virtuosity -- an impressive example of heightened physical ability used within an aesthetic framework. But there are places where that kind of heightened ability is misused, displayed for its own sake rather than to support the overall effect of the dancework.