sandik

I've seen him played both ways -- as relatively benign or as a predator. Part of it seems to rest on the relationship that the performer has with the adult dancing Clara. If the age difference is really pronounced, then it can look very disturbing.

Well, the DTH Apollo, and Baryshnikov's solo tour (I was late arranging for tickets and missed out) Both times I felt like the nitwit I was.

1. PNB under Peter Boal's directorship. I'd like Boal to introduce more Balanchine into PNB repertory. And I expect to see him dance a few roles with PNB. I consider this my most anticipated developement for 2005. What direction he's going to take with PNB? If Boal does a great job with PNB, he'll be a front runner for NYCB directorship when Martin retires. Leftcoasters, treasure him while you can. These are some fascinating choices. PNB already has a significant amount of Balanchine in its rep -- I don't know that he will need to add more, but perhaps keep working on what they've already got. Honestly, I'll be very surpised if he performs here, and I'm not sure how that would be percieved by the community. I know that he's a stunning dancer, but that's not really why he's being hired.

From the upper left hand corner: Donald Byrd's Sleeping Beauty Notebook for Spectrum Dance Theater is technically not a ballet, but the beginnings of a very interesting commentary on a classic work. The christening party is turns into a brawl a la Brueghel and Aurora's 16th birthday seems to be held in a brothel, but within all this hubbub there are slices from the original choreography that glow all the brighter for their unusual context. The Joffrey's return to Seattle (or at least a small contingent) after years away, as part of "Dance This...," a great youth dance program last summer. I grew up watching them, and have missed the company all this time. Viktoria Titova, who is an alum of one of Grigorovitch's companies, and who now teaches in the area, guested in a local Nutcracker (Olympic Ballet Theater) and was a lovely fulcrum for the second act. Sometimes the best thing a dancer can do is stand still, and she had great poise and grace in stillness. Nicholas Ade at Pacific Northwest Ballet in a pair of sidekick roles -- "Romeo's friend" in the Stowell R&J, and one of the servants in Prodigal Son. He's obviously put a great deal of thought into being a real person on stage, with a specific relationship to the "main" character. PNB's Balanchine program this fall (Four Ts, Prodigal, Symphony in C). The whole thing. And their school performance last spring of Doug Fullington's reconstruction of the original notation for Petipa's Jardin Anime -- it was exquisitely detailed.

The worst thing in my world last year wasn't a performance, but my nitwittery in missing Dance Theatre of Harlem when they were here doing Apollo (with Rasta Thomas, whom I have never seen live). No excuse, just exhaustion. Like everyone, I'm very sad about the financial troubles at DTH, Suzanne Farrell Co. and Oakland Ballet -- it's never good when a company has to suspend operations.

While I would love to think that they've advanced the publication date from 10/05, I'm not going to hold my breath -- blue isn't a good color for me.

This is such a great image! As our president has said -- "bring it on."

Ah, the secrets of magic revealed!

You're right -- my bad.

This is a subset of the "do you have to be a good person to be a good artist" question. I think the answer to that is no, and I do think that you could be a great ballerina and still be "willful and manipulative." Unfortunate but true.

I save them. I justify it to myself because I do go back every so often to find out who I saw doing something, or when I first saw a piece. I also save my notes, stuffed in the back of the program. I am coming up on the edge of critical mass in terms of storage (I live with a family of packrats -- one of my son's favorite questions as a small child was "can I keep this forever?") and am, very slowly, purging some stuff, but not programs.

It occurs to me that part of this change, at least in some contemporary productions by smaller ensembles, can be assigned to the fact that the growing tree is an expensive special effect. Most companies can field large groups of small children much more easily than complex stage effects.

Back to the general topic of film and ballet. Off the top of my head: Rene Claire's film Entre'act was made originally for the Ballet Russe production of Relache. Robert Joffrey used film and other projected images in Astarte in the 1960's. At Pacific Northwest Ballet, Kent Stowell had Iole Alessandrini design the projections (mostly of text) for his version of Carmen, and a couple of years ago they performed Lynne Taylor-Corbett's "The Ballad of You and Me" (Pete Seeger songs) that included slide projections (WPA era photos onwards) on a social justice theme. If you extend your gaze to dance in general, rather than focussing on ballet alone, the numbers jump astronomically: Oskar Schlemmar and the Bauhaus artists, Alwin Nikolais, of course Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown (who wears a functioning film projector in her work Homemade) and the current experiments with computer generated images all over the map.

It is -- she seems to be the one who got them started on Fuller, since she's a vis art collector of the period, especially of Fuller.

Loie Fuller: Goddess of Light Richard and Marcia Current Northeastern University Press 1997 It just happened to be sitting (out of order!) on my bookshelf next to something about Nagrin!

"I didn't realize La Chatte had a special floor. I wonder what it was made of?" This is off the top of my head, but I think some of the settings were made of mica. I don't know about the floor.

We just saw it here, so it's on my mind, but what about the role of the Siren in Prodigal Son, where she stands on the shoulders of one of the goons and he walks downstage with her up there. Looks spooky to me!

BBC World News ran a very nice piece last night (or rather, I saw it last night) that included a clip from her Giselle, some footage of her coaching the Sugar Plum and what looked to be hand held footage from the old Mercury Theater (with that staircase in the background) I didn't recognize the work in this last one -- can anyone here identify it?

I love that video -- I wish it was still commerically available. She is everything you say, but also, I thought, a very interesting actress. Her "counting petals" sequence had a fascinating abstract quality to it. I know that the current taste is for realistic Giselles, especially in the first act, but this was a kind of abstraction of emotion that flowed seamelessly into the dancing itself. What awful news. She was a link to a part of English ballet that seems to be slipping away.

Just Googled Choo San Goh -- there's a foundation (Choo San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation) that funds choreographers, but I can't tell if it also administers Goh's artistic estate. The foundation doesn't seem to have a website, but I didn't look far. Dance Galaxy did his "Beginnings" a couple years ago, but I don't know if it's in their current rep.

No. They don't.

Ari makes several good points -- while there are companies outside of NY that can offer some things to their dancers that they might not be able to experience in NY, as a dance watcher I still think NY audiences are in an enviable position. My home town company (Pacific Northwest Ballet) often does a wonderful job, but they do 2 repertory programs in the autumn and 4 in the spring (besides the ubiquitous Nutcracker) -- just in terms of variety, NY audiences get a better crack at the repertory. And yes, touring companies are a dicey proposition outside NY. We've seen the Bolshoi, ABT and DTH in the past few years, thanks to a local presenter who's willing to risk them -- but that could easily change.

Pacific Northwest Ballet's production walks a middle path, with a child Clara in the first act, and an adult in the second (who gets the Sugar Plum Fairy music). The child comes back at the very end, when she wakes up from her dream.

This is an increasingly common frustration -- there's either a glib index or none at all. Indexing is one of those jobs that is still done best by a person, and it's an additional expense for publishers.

I'm interested in seeing if any they make any comment about the role of Clear Channel in their investigations.