Leigh Witchel

The ideas are flying about (whee!) so apologies to both Leonid and Patrick for not fielding what they've thrown - food for thought but my post will be pages if I try and respond. The choreographer that keeps coming to my mind in this train of thought is . . . William Forsythe. Not his current work but of that heady period in the mid-80s when it looked like he was The One. And as ambivalent as I am about his oeuvre he did important work - recently seeing the full length Artifact I was impressed and saddened that after 25 years we learned all the wrong lessons from it. "It's just classroom steps" - the painful thing is I *have* said it, and it's a legitimate problem. The thing that brings any work of art beyond technique is the concentrated expression of the artist - say what is on your mind. It doesn't have to be a story, it doesn't have to be a theme. I think The Four Temperaments succeeds because of the concentrated nature of its expression. Balanchine took a few choice ideas and stuck with them like a terrier with a rat until he was done. You can sense that the ballet had to come out of him. Sure it's subjective, but I think it's what good works of art share. To get back to Forsythe, I sensed that need in both Artifact and Impressing the Czar. He needed to talk about ballet, and he created enchainements and his versions of ballets blancs (in green or yellow) to wrestle with the issue. And all we seemed to see were the enchainements and the extensions - not the need to express. And if we've been stuck anywhere, I think it's there. We've got overbred, overspecialized dancers and as Alexandra might put it (this is her point, and an excellent one) a "mannerist" art form obsessed with technique at the expense of content. It's still a great art form, but I think we need desperately to back off from form and re-explore content. Boy, I'm off topic

One similarity both of those men also share is working in a relatively unplowed field. Not ballet itself, but in both countries' nascent movements into the form. I think that may matter more than money. Adding to the prior question - how much does it matter if the field's already been plowed and cultivated? What geniuses in ballet came out of and flourished within an institution? Balanchine started there but then moved to an "unplowed field."

Coming into this late - I'm less interested in individual geniuses than in the movement of genius and how it chooses to express itself. A little story my dad loved to tell - when someone asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, his response was, "because that's where the money was." There will be another genius in ballet if it makes sense for him or her to express him or herself in the medium. As I recall, Ashton chose ballet as a young man; Balanchine was sent to ballet as a child and recommitted to it when he came to adolescence. What made ballet a fertile ground for their expression? What would make it so for a young artist today?

Cristian, those performances are also Ansanelli's last, so if there are reports, please relay them.

To take a serious topic frivolously, I'd like to know if any of our experts on Russian ballet can explain the importance of the Mullet to 19th century Russian ballet, particularly Le Corsaire. In this version, the Mullet appears in all its resplendence on each of the pirates. It's important to note how the particulars of the Mullet reveal individual character - Conrad's relatively straight and severe Mullet hints at his potential to be reformed. Birbantio's lush, curly Mullet speaks to his libertine nature. The Mullet is essential to the story of the ballet, as evidenced by its ending. Following the shipwreck, Medora appears with her hair unbound and reveals that she, too, has a Mullet, her way of showing her perpetual devotion to Conrad. Truly, where would Russian ballet be without this hairstyle? I hope we can discuss the importance of the Mullet in other Russian ballet, as well as in other styles of ballet, notably the French and Danish schools.

I saw Nureyev towards the end of his career - when POB came to New York, he squired Sylvie Guillem in Swan Lake - her debut performances in the US, I believe. I don't recall associating his debilitation with AIDS; I thought he was arthritic and in pain. It hurt to watch - and the contrast between his condition and the young Guillem's made it worse. As previously mentioned though, a hunger for the stage may have been there, but equally was the realization that he sold tickets and got bodies in the seats.

Kistler may not have had the sort of general celebrity that Nureyev had, but she was Balanchine's final ballerina and one of the major ones of her generation. She's not some random principal dancer who won't get off the stage. She inspires this sort of debate because of her level. If you never saw her, it's hard to understand it (I felt that confused twenty years ago seeing Patricia McBride or Suzanne Farrell at the very ends of their careers) and for those who did see her, we're torn between wanting to hold on to her and wanting to hold on to the dancer we remember.

Thanks for the perspective, Beatrice. Though I agree with you about Morgan (she along with her cast made a surprising case for Romeo + Juliet), to me the pernicious thing is if all you have to go on is the performance you see, what happens when someone decides that Romeo + Juliet is a better ballet than A Midsummer Night's Dream?

OK folks, I think we can disagree without impugning the perceptions of other posters or eviscerating the dancers. Cool it, OK?

I happen to really like that article, but then again, Barry is a friend - in fact we met over a discussion of her old home.

Hans, Ami, Helene and I in a raucous conversation after Corsaire (I credit Hans for the brilliant idea of mini golf during Jardin Anime. I merely wanted lawn ornaments) figured out a new game - Ballet Clue. By the end, we had figured out that - It was Giselle in the Kingdom of the Shades with the Spindle. Create your own and play along!

Hi Doug! Our official and inimitable Welcome Lady, Giannina, will have more to say, but I just wanted to encourage you that your big wish is well within reach. It's a very easy trip from Amsterdam to Paris on the Thalys (there are some excellent advance purchase bargains on the national rail websites that are not on the Thalys site proper) so I hope we'll hear about your dream fulfilled very soon.

I was glad to see the young man I noticed at the Pestov gala, Maxime Quiroga, came in third. I hope we see more of him!

Hehehe. I think we're all going to disagree on this one. Loved Gomes, thought Ananiashvili was in fact wafting from lithograph pose to lithograph pose.

I began watching NYCB in the 80s, so I also think of Judith Fugate as an archetypical First Movement ballerina (her progeny in the role includes Jenifer Ringer). Boiling it down to a single adjective, it usually goes to an elegant dancer. Miranda Weese was very fine in the role as well; it suited her witty authority.

A few years ago there was a very thought provoking exhibition at the Met of Jacqueline Kennedy's outfits. There's more than the outfits themselves (most of hers were by Oleg Cassini) but the sense built throughout the show (I recall a 10 page instruction letter to Cassini outlining her hopes and ideas for the outfits for a trip to India) that her glamor was considered an important PR tool on foreign visits. It may seem shallow, but image can be a very powerful thing. I think the First Lady is quite cognizant of that.

Before we throw this one far off topic, my bad for not saying something in my post when I answered - we don't discuss dancers' personal lives unless it comes from a public source - why I cited the advocate. Yeah, it's common news and not sensitive that Gillian Murphy and Ethan Stiefel are a longterm couple or that Marcelo is gay. What we're trying to avoid is "I heard that X is sleeping with Y," "Does anyone know if Z is unfaithful," or "Is Q into [insert vice here.]" Thanks for noting this MJ, but better to report it to us (even if it's me you object to!) For all, it's not sexuality that's verboten, but please respect the dancers' private lives. If it's sensitive and if you couldn't find it with Google in a *published* source, don't ask it here. Back to the gala! Am I the only one who was underwhelmed by Michelle Obama and her dress? That said, it was magnificent that she showed up and even better that she took the time to speak.

Quick note - compère is a much more common term in the U.K. than here. Two nations separated by a common language . . .

I'd strongly doubt there was any romantic liaison between Gomes and Vishneva. (He's been on the cover of the Advocate magazine with the headline "Romeo is Gay")

Because I haven't seen the Maillot I'm loath to answer. The thing I'd like to reiterate is that quality doesn't factor into this. There's great modern and contemporary dance and crap ballet. Nor does exclusivity to "classical" - plenty of other things are ballet. This is a topic Alexandra does better than I but the discussion a long while back about touched a lot upon a choreographer's "home base." Nijinska "spoke" ballet. It's how she trained, it's what she knew and her dancers were classically trained. Her Les Noces is a turned in work of genius and modernism - and it's ballet. In the same way, I'd argue that Mark Morris isn't a ballet choreographer, though he's made works on ballet companies that can be danced as ballets. It's not his home base. (This is a very gray area.) Also, danse d'ecole isn't just a laundry list of steps. It involves placement, carriage, alignment, port de bras, "center of gravity" . . . a modern dancer and a ballet dancer hold themselves differently and approach movement differently. The same with choreographers trained in both disciplines.

Long discussion (obviously) and one that was really discussed at length in the first years of Ballet Talk (there may be some great threads about it if you search the archives) The executive summary - It's ballet if it uses the danse d'ecole (the school vocabulary of ballet) and dancers trained in that. Pointe work doesn't automatically make it ballet. Absence of turnout makes it not ballet. "Good" doesn't make it ballet - nor does "bad" disqualify it. And just wait until you read the discussions on "classical!"

I hate to be like this, but you know what you like, and that makes it good dance, but that doesn't make it ballet.

Bingo As one of my teachers, Gabriella Darvash, said to us repeatedly, "Children, ballet is a visual art." But more than the good looks, he was the one who performed instead of did steps. Alas, Stuttgart did not offer him a full contract. He's going to Flanders.

Aaron - good to see you here. My suggestion is to start a topic in the "Aesthetic Issues" forum ("Welcome" is for exactly that) and you'll definitely get some takers. Have you been to Russia? When I saw La Bayadere at the Maryinsky and walked around St. Petersburg, the Orientalism of the ballet finally made some sense in context.

The only person who matters in these statistics is Balanchine himself. The rest are a different argument - and I'd argue each separately - you may lump Robbins under "Balanchine followers"; I don't, nor particularly Tomasson. Definitely not Ratmansky, and Wheeldon owes as much to Martins and Macmillan as Balanchine.