sandik

Amongst all the hubbub here about the incoming artistic director, current director and choreographer Kent Stowell will be performing Drosselmeyer a few times during the run, including the opening performance this weekend. I know that Nutcracker often has a plethora of guest performers -- in Seattle we've had local celebrities (including sports figures) as parents during the party scene. What kind of special guests does your local Nut include?

Oh, I know it's on the lists -- I've always managed to miss it somehow, though.

True for dancers and airplane pilots.

Thanks so much for posting this, I just wish I could have seen it. Do you know if it was video or audio taped? I was interested in the list of frequently-performed works. I've never seen Valse Fantasie -- does anyone know who performs it? This made me giggle: "Someone else in the audience wondered if in Boston or New York there was an opportunity to see Balanchine's work performed." Some times you just wonder how someone got there.

What about issues of extension and distortion? This is just off the top of my head, but one of the things that I think about when I try and consider the difference between a contemporary ballet dancer and a more classically oriented one is their sense of where plumb starts and ends. With some of the examples mentioned here (Fonteyn especially) I think of a great connection to verticality -- she certainly could move away from vertical, but the feeling of equipoise in balance is different than the sensation of constantly shifting counterbalance that we find much more often today.

Many of us will be seeing Nutcrackers soon and I thought it might be interesting to have a spot where we could talk about them together, rather than separately in threads for different companies. This might not be the right place to put if -- if not, could a moderator please move this thread -- but let's compare notes. Whose are you seeing, what did you like about it, what did you think was distinctive about it, what do you think it could be doing differently?

What a gorgeous photo. I wish I could think of someone who would stage that kind of tableau today. Maybe Mark Morris -- any other thoughts?

This film is from a research project by Irmgard Bartenieff, Forrestine Paulay and Alan Lomax, using a kind of hybridized observation process called Choreometrics. They looked at work and leisure activities in cultures aroud the world, analyzing their biomechanics and energy patterns (Bartenieff was one of the major developers of Laban Movement Analysis, and much of that material is reflected in the coding sheets that the investigators used). They published their results in an academic context, but the three films they made are much more widely known. The first two (Step Style and Palm Play) look specifically at locomtion and gestures -- Dance and Human History is more of a synthesis. Unfortunately, some of the conclusions that people drew using the materials from the study (that cultures employing mostly 3-D movement were more complex and therefore more developed, i.e. better, than cultures using mostly 2-D movement) were biased and rather Euro-centric -- they have for the most part been discarded, but the observations themselves are not really value-laden, and the methodology for observation is excellent. I worked with the coding sheets when I was studying LMA and thought they were very useful. NYPL has all the films in their collection, as do many college libraries -- if you're interested you could probably get hold of it through interlibrary loan.

Without seeing his actual review of "Hunchback" I don't really feel that we can speak about Strini's objections, but he does bring up a valid question -- what do you do when a work is bad? Is it "good for dance" to praise bad work, just because it's being produced (and therefore dancers are working)? Strini says he feels his primary responsibility is to the paper and its readers -- this is a common point of view for journalists, and has a great deal of logic on its side. But what are some of the counterarguments, or alternative perspectives? What do most people think critics are for? Tangentially, has anyone here seen the version of Giselle ("Giselle 1943") that he refers to in his article, and if so, what was it like?

I agree with this -- I was at PNB again last night, and spent a chunk of time watching the corps members who were stepping into soloist and principal roles, and was pleased to have been able to watch a little bit of their development.

Back to dance -- I know at one time the general policy at Canadian arts organizations (and possibly across the boards, but I don't know) was that they could hire someone from outside Canada only if they could prove that there wasn't a Canadian available who could fill the position. At some point in the 1980's, Bill Evans went to Winnipeg to run a contemporary company there, but he could not get a permanent contract since he wasn't a Canadian. I believe the idea was that he would work there for a time, until they could find someone else for the job. I have no idea if this is still the case, it wouldn't surprise me -- for several years Canadian media companies were required to include a minimum percentage of work generated by Canadians.

If I remember correctly, CBS Cable also produced Tharp's "Baker's Dozen. It looks like I need to be very careful with my copy of Portrait of Giselle...

A bit tangential to this thread, but interesting... Richard Tanner has been in Seattle, setting Prodigal on PNB, and he's been kind enough to participate in the post-show Q&A that the company does. In an answer to one question about staging and copyright, he remarked that at some point the Balanchine work will all be in public domain and that you could "get a tape and do it" (my paraphrase). I cannot, off the top of my head, remember how long standard copyright lasts, and for how long it can be renewed (and indeed these seem to change whenever it looks like Mickey Mouse is in danger of entering public domain) but I thought it was an interesting comment for him to make. Indeed, at some point, Balanchine's work might be more like Petipa's -- the backbone of a ballet but not always the details.

And casting is up for second week as well, same link. They announced last night (at the post-show chat) that Le Yin was out of the program -- he needs knee surgery) and that Lucien Postlewaite would cover his performances, which is what the website shows now.

I know that these are the elements that are the hardest to maintain over time, since they were themselves so maliable in the original productions, but I am a sucker for detail, and wish we saw these ballets more often, if only for these little moments.

This was mentioned in today's links section (10/31/04) and I'll be very curious to know more about it. A local modern dance company (Seattle, WA) acquired Bebe Miller's work to Hendricks' music, and negotiated with his estate for permission to use the recordings -- when they came back to the estate to request permission for additional performances they were turned down. I imagine that the rights situation is slightly different with an orchestrated version, and if this is a one-off performance it hardly matters, but I wonder what might happen if they wanted to keep the work around.

I'd just like to say that you wear the beanie very well.

Also not wanting to get into a ruckus about Ron Protas here, one of the things that the situation with the Graham repertory taught everyone is to be more careful about the circumstances of your work, and to pay attention to the contract.

I saw this tonight as well, but had to stop at the store on the way home, so Helene got here first and did all the heavy lifting describing the show. I'd read all the terrible press, and was prepared to think it was pretty grim, but came away impressed with big chunks of it. I agree that the score is very tough, it's bombastic and inexorable -- you have to do what it tells you to do most of the time, and it's difficult to create any kind of tender or intimate moment in that environment. I think one of the reasons that this production works as well as it does is that it doesn't have much tenderness, so that it isn't fighting the score so much. You can really tell that there was a theatrical director involved as well as a choreographer -- there are places where the effects are created through movement and places where the physicality is more along the lines of stage blocking than dancing. As Helene points out, this works really well with the chorus -- I would have liked to see more rhythmic inventiveness for them, but as massed groups they were very effective. The fight scene was also very cleanly staged, keeping our focus throughout. Putting Mercutio in drag gives that whole tension between him and Tybalt a single, continuous thread, and since the Mercutio tonight was quite tall, and Tybalt smaller (I'd add "rat-like" to the other descriptions) the dynamic was easy to read. I didn't really think of the production as feeling "British" per se, though there were some real music hall spots, but to me it felt more akin to German expressionism, in part because of the "movement choir" aspects of the chorus, but also in the archtypeal qualities of the main characters.

Copyright and dance is such a twisty place. I can't look it up right now, but I remember reading at one point that Agnes de Mille was the first (one of the first) to copyright her choreography, and that the documentation she submitted was a scenario, a storyline (I think for dances from Oklahoma) I know some choreographers have submitted Labanotation or Benesh Notation scores, and so that material is legally registered as theirs, but ownership is a sticky concept, especially when you are discussing a specific production of a classic work. Kent Stowell owns his production of Swan Lake, and Christopher Wheeldon probably owns his, but who knows who owns Swan Lake itself?

Is this the Amanda Miller who used to work with/for William Forsythe?

I find this really cheerful, in part because this woman knows who Balanchine is and thinks that he's the best example of the analogy she's making, and because the paper thinks enough of their readership will recognize the reference.

The company has announced casting for the first week of its upcoming all-Balanchine program (4T's, Prodigal Son, and Symphony in C) http://www.pnb.org/season/all-balanchine-casting.html

People who pull this stuff make me want to blurt out, "Well, excuse me for being born too late!" I think we've all come across this point of view at some time, the only thing that alters is the date of the golden era that's being held up as an unmatched model. I agree -- I wish that I'd been able to see people and productions that were long past before I got to the theater, but I like to think that other, wonderful things might be in store if I'm patient and stick with it. Most long-term dance watchers seem to have the equivalent of the bird watchers "life list" -- an index of dances that they're curious about, with check marks on the ones they've managed to see. If I had lots of disposable cash and time, I would have sent myself to Ohio earlier this month to see the reconstruction of the Massine Symphony -- it's on my 'curious' list, and isn't likely to tour much. I don't know that I feel particularly snobbish about this -- I'm excited when I see a good performance of hip hop dancing too, but following an art form that has such a spotty record of conserving its past is motivation to see as much as I can.

Silliness, mostly. It was mostly young men, and I think they were feeling a bit embarrased by the whole situation -- this was a way to dispell tension.