sandik

I'm so sorry I wasn't able to see this -- too much stuff on the calendar. I am from the same Star Trek demographic -- I am a sucker for flashing lights and the implied power of the silicon chip. Another group that affects me this way is Dumb Type, from Japan. It's often like a three-ring circus that I only understand in flashes, but it leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

If I may add to the pocket reviews -- the newest in the Harry Potter franchise. It hangs together as a film quite well, though with every jump cut I thought "wait, what happened to all the stuff about...?" The book is long, and if Mike Newell had tried to film every subplot I would still be in the theater (24 hours later) but I'm wondering what will happen when they get to the exceptionally long books in the series. I'm afraid that, even after paring them down to their main plot points, they are still ages long. However, that is the future's problem. There is, in the current film, a charming set of dance scenes, especially when Maggie Smith is teaching the students how to dance in preparation for the Yule Ball. Her rhapsodic speech about the swan inside every girl and the lion inside every boy was absolutely stunning. And the opening of the ball, where they all do a kind of set waltz with a little hop in it, was charming -- you don't notice that they're doing something specific until the first lift, and then everything that looked like awkward shuffling around and mistaken handholds turns out to be real choreography. It was made by Wayne MacGregor -- I'd seen his work for Random Dance, but not anything else, and now would like to see more.

Casting for the first week of PNB's Nutcracker is up on their website. Nothing too unusual so far, though Carla Korbes will do Peacock (as showy a role as the name implies) on Saturday evening, 11/26.

Very interesting distinction, and yes, I think you're dead on. There's a big difference between pure tap and musical theater dance. The earlier comment (that Glover is a percussionist) come close to what I understand many tappers often think of themselves -- they are musicians.

Well, in that case we would have no Christopher Wheeldon at all! Seeing the chickens in "La Fille" on TV when he was about 7 was what got him interested in ballet!!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> OK, so they have served their purpose , now they can be retired Richard <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No! I love the chickens!!

Oh, me too -- I would love to see him in that program. Though, honestly, I'd watch him dance to the Oscar Meyer Weiner song. I love his work. And yes, Giannina, it just makes me cranky when people applaud in the middle of a riff -- if they don't want to listen they don't have to, but I really want to hear what he's doing.

I've taught and reconstructed from notation, and if you have some specific questions I'm happy to try and answer them, but I think the gist of the distinction is this: a film or a videotape is a recording of a particular performance. A notated score is a record of the choreography, as the choreographer intended it. Film and video are wonderful tools, but they don't do the same thing that a written score does, just as a recording of a Beethoven symphony is not the same as a copy of the sheet music.

Meany Hall (Crenshaw and Long) December 10-11 at 2 pm (no evening listed) Everett Performing Arts Center (Crenshaw and Ashe) December 18 at 2 and 6 pm. There is a pair of "preview" performances on December 3-4 at 2 pm, at Mountlake Terrace High School/Performing Arts Center, with no guest artists listed.

Just got the press release today -- she will be dancing Nutcracker (I assume the SPF) in the Olympic Ballet Theatre production in Everett, WA December 18. They are a semi-professional company just north of Seattle, with a very nice, traditional production that's quite family-oriented. She's paired with Darius Crenshaw. He's also performing the previous week in Seattle, that time with Andrea Long. www.olympicballet.com

The Magus was one of the first books I recognized as being for adults -- it's been years, but I can still see the cover of the copy my mother was reading.

Adding my thanks for the review -- I haven't seen the company in several years, but did see a restaging of Suite from Choreographic Offering here in Seattle last year on a student company at Cornish College. They did an excellent job with the work, but I agree about the size -- this piece needs a large stage! We're lucky here to see a good share of reconstructions due to our local college programs. Cornish is doing Graham's Diversion of Angels in a couple of weeks (the rehearsals have been just lovely) and it's more Norman dello Joio in February when the University of Washington grad students are doing Limon's There is a Time. They performed Graham's Primitive Mysteries last year and did a stellar job.

I pretty much started watching dance seriously at the same time that I started dancing, so I can't speak to that aspect of your question. But for several years I taught Labanotation in college dance programs, and many of my students would remark that they looked at their studio class work differently after they'd started learning notation. As you might imagine, as they analysed movement phrases in my class, looking for patterns and sequences, they began to see them everywhere.

Really?!? I had no idea -- how fascinating!

As far as the individual stories are concerned, you're right to note that the electronic version of an article is often updated or modified after it's first posted, and this can be a good thing. What I think most online versions of print publications have a difficult time with is conveying the totality of the issue. When I look at my local papers (we have two dailies in Seattle, and my household gets them both) I scan the front pages of the sections and then read the stories I'm interested in. The layout of the page tells me a great deal about which stories are considered important, or connected -- over time we've all learned to decipher the semiotics of a newspaper page. Very often now, though, the individual stories in the electronic version are displayed just like that -- individually. The screen doesn't always tell you which was the lead story, or which was a related piece. In some cases, depending on the way the site is programmed, you can wind up looking at material from several days ago without knowing it, by clicking on a "more" button. Jusst thinking in terms of dance coverage, you don't necessarily get a "picture" of the dance community on any given day, but instead a series of related pieces that may or may not comprise the entireity of the dance writing that day. Of course this is all leading to podcasting, where you pre-select the topics you're interested in and the seach engine takes out all the bits it thinks you don't want. This assumes that there is very little that is expected to engage everyone -- the myth of the general reader seems to be imploding even as I write. And yes, there are whole sections of the paper that I never look at (sports goes into the recycling pretty much just as it entered the house, unless I drop it accidentally and scatter it around), but I do think there's something valuable just in knowing it exists, even if I choose not to explore it. Some papers go out of their way to replicate some aspects of their print version (up to and including pdf files of their pages) on their websites, but I still see more of the floating articles (geographically unanchored). To answer the last part of your question, I think McLuhan is even more accurate now than he was when he was first writing -- with the Internet and its attendant developments, the medium is very much the message.

I'd like to add my voice for Maurice Seymour. His studio photographs are a stunning example of that genre and his era. With the advent of high speed film and the increasing acceptance of photographers in rehearsals and some performances, dance photography has really moved towards the live action shot, and there are wonderful practitioners of that working now, many of whom have been mentioned here. But I find that I miss the deliberate quality of some of the older studio shots, as well as the highly nuanced lighting/shading that often comes with that form. I never saw Danilova dance, but I learned a great deal about her as a performer by looking at Seymour's photos.

You sound like you have inside information and I won't push, but I do hope that at some point the basic details of the saga comes out, especially if the company wants to move beyond this mess and continue to function.

"There was a note in a UK newsletter from 2002 that said that Pankevitch joined the Royal Ballet, which is the last professional listing for him on the SAB site, but he's no longer on the RB site." I saw the Royal Ballet credit when I googled him but couldn't find anything more recent. "Perhaps he was one of Boal's students at SAB?" Oh, I hadn't thought of that -- very likely so.

The casting for the next program is up on the PNB webste. Jonathan Poretta is cast in the new solo (Mopey), as is James Moore. And there's someone named Pandevitch partnering Mara Vinson in the Stowell/Handel ballet, but I don't know who he is.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm still curious about the circumstances of this change -- was this a financial decision, artistic, managerial? And what happens to the company this year -- as a mid-year shift, will they still perform his Nutcracker, or do they need to find a substitute?

It premiered in 1952 (music The Garden of Fand by Arnold Bax, designs by Cecil Beaton) and I don't think it lasted more tha a couple of seasons. And unlike some of the other work he made away from the Royal, I don't think it was ever revived for anyone else.

Five weekends?! Golly -- who else uses that theater? Up here in Seattle, the ballet used to share with the opera and the symphony, and everyone clawed for more time (in a well-bred manner, of course). Now that the symphony has its own hall, the ballet and the opera still have to contend with other users. I can't imagine a situation where they would have five (I'm assuming consecutive) weekends for anything other than Nutcracker. I imagine that the Choreographer Showcase (above) shares time with some other event, considering the math, but still... Golly.

Did anyone here go to the interview with John Rockwell at Barnard (Monday, October 17th, 2005 @ 7:30 pm) If so -- tell all!

I was surprised to read (thought the links section) that the company had scheduled 22 performances of Sleeping Beauty. Is that a typical run for Colorado Ballet? Most companies I know of about that size do considerably fewer performances of any one program, except Nut. (Just occurred to me -- does that include dedicated school shows?)

I was looking through a file of press releases for some local dance presenters, and realized that I'd seen Jiri Kylian in almost every release -- either as a work on a program, or more frequently, as a teacher/artistic director for schools and ensembles that other choreographers were associated with. (and if you can follow that messy sentence) perhaps that's an indicator of "influence" -- the number of times you find someone on the family tree. I'm not sure, but how many ensembles are lead by alumni of Forsythe's companies? I know John Alleyne in Vancouver, British Columbia-- who else?

In a thread about this nice review in the Economist on William Forsythe http://www.economist.com/printedition/Prin...tory_id=4455395 I ran across this statement: “This is William Forsythe, an American choreographer and probably the most influential dance-maker working today” I like Forsythe’s work very much, and think he’s doing interesting things on the edge of contemporary ballet, but the claim being made, that he’s the “most influential,” felt like a writing convention, a way for the author to get to the point she/he is actually trying to make. But I was curious -- what elements would go into choosing the “most influential” choreographer, and which artists might arguably be in considered for that description? I don’t think we’re talking just about the quality of their work on its own, but whether you can see parts of it replicated or echoed in other repetoires. Would this person have had to mentor other choreographers, or is leading by example enough? Is it about having “alumni” working in other venues, or can you influence people you’ve never worked with? What other aspects of this am I missing? And who might we eventually be discussing?