Bradan

I had mixed feelings about Firebird. The whole thing seemed a bit kitsch -- though so did Fokine's when I saw the Mariinsky do it last year. I enjoyed the costumes and the profusion of color onstage. But I agree the choreography for the women made them appear silly, in sharp contrast to the men's powerful and constraining movements. Even the Firebird seemed to spend a lot of time being held rather than flying on her own steam. But Osipova is an exciting dancer and looked like an uncanny creature. Hallberg was also very satisfyingly evil in a cartoonish way.

I enjoyed his Apollo as well. He has the ability to make the air look heavy when he moves through it, and I thought his characterization of Apollo was nuanced. And his line is sublime ...

Thanks for this review! I was lucky enough to see Roaratorio in the Barbican in October. The music completely overwhelmed me for the first few minutes - it was my first introduction to Cage and my poor brain struggled to make sense of it - and then it was entirely enveloping, except when I got snagged on a song or a tune that I knew and the 'mix' in my head got unbalanced. I would love to have heard it live.

The dancing seemed incredibly clean-edged and luminously simple against the music. I don't think I've ever been so completely absorbed by a dance.

Just wondered if anyone else had seen this:

http://www.guardian....be-dance-column

Seems like a nice idea

Thanks for this!

Hopefully there will be some footage of Kirkland dancing with Baryshnikov among the 650 tapes he has just donated to the NYPL ...

Thanks for this!

I'm afraid I don't know about any further North American performances though there are a number of European dates. I will be seeing it in Paris the week after next, so can report back on the dance element – looking forward to it

I thought people might be interested in this if they haven't seen it – I didn't know it existed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46mqNsOeD2w&feature=feedwll&list=WL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbYPe2Sdlv0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k66v-gcDlV4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfQ_L6nHxZE&feature=related

From the BN catalogue, it's from a 1977 performance:

Type : spectacle, notice documentaire

Titre(s) : Giselle [spectacle] : ballet / chorégraphie de Jules Perrot ; chorégraphie de Jean Coralli ; musique d'Adolphe Adam ; costumes de Paul Lormier ; avec Noëlla Pontois et Mikhaïl Baryshnikov

Représentation : Paris (France) : Opéra de Paris-Palais Garnier, 1977-12-24

Producteur(s) : Opéra national de Paris . Producteur

Note(s) : Notice rédigée d'après Le Dictionnaire de laDanse/ Philippe Le Moal et Le dossier d'oeuvre du Ballet. - Ballet créé à l'Opéra de Paris le 28 juin 1841 avec Carlotta Grisi et Lucien Petipa

Auteur(s) : Perrot, Jules (1810-1892 ). Chorégraphe

Coralli, Jean (1779-1854 ). Chorégraphe

Adam, Adolphe (1803-1856 ). Compositeur

Interprète(s) : Pontois, Noëlla (1943-.... ). Danse

Baryschnikov, Mikhaïl Nikolaïevitch (1948-....). Danse

Collaborateur(s) technico-artistique(s) : Lormier, Paul (1813-1895 ). Costumes

Notice n° : FRBNF39684716

http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39684716k/PUBLIC

I saw the Homage to Fokine programme on the 29th July: Chopiniana, the Firebird (with Ekaterina Kondaurova) and Scheherazade (with Diana Vishneva and Igor Zelensky).

I had never seen the Mariinsky before so it was something of a revelation to me. I had never seen ballet before where the corps was as interesting, if not more interesting, to watch than the principals. In Les Sylphides, there was a taut quality to their stillness - like the tension on top of water - and a crispness to their movement, wholly synchronised but without looking facile like a chorus line, that lit the stage. It was pure and intricate at the same time.

It looked white and timeless and in a way set the other two up to be multi-coloured period pieces, but they were great fun as well. What I remember best is the impression of sheer opulence created by more and more dancers pouring onto the stage in each piece - and the skittering, pulsing movements of the creatures in the garden of the Firebird, which reminded me a bit of the corps in the Prodigal Son.

Kondaurova was full of sweep and authority, and even took her bows in birdlike character. Vishneva didn't have that much to do as Zobeide, and I was unfortunately distracted early on by how thin she looked in the slave costume, which made it hard for me to see the illusion of voluptuousness in her movement. And Zelensky was big and impressively precise (even when a member of the corps unfortunately ran into his outstretched leg in a grande pirouette) but got more interesting for me when I remembered the dance was made on Nijinsky and started trying to see him in it.

I was only sorry I couldn't stay in London longer to see more - would be very interested to hear other people's impressions.

I was just reading one of Arlene Croce's articles where she argues that the critic should take into account and comment on the ways in which injuries and age are affecting a dancer's performance:

The silence about Farrell's injury is falsely conceived homage to a great dancer. I think we see more of what she is doing when we know that she is doing it under great stress.

('Hard Facts' (1986), p.541 in Dancing in the Dark).

And this set me off on a series of questions, wondering what people think:

Should critics refer to what they know about a dancer offstage when commenting on their onstage performance? Have things changed since Croce wrote this, now that blogs and twitter give more people 'informal' types of information on dancers?

Are injuries a special case? What about more personal difficulties like, for instance, eating disorders? Part of the anger over Alistair Macaulay's 'too many sugar plums' comment seemed to be driven by the fact that the dancer in question was known to have had problems with anorexia in the past - the critic was criticized for insensitivity in commenting only on what he saw onstage, without taking into account the broader context.

How might dancers feel about this? I remember Suzanne Farrell writes in her autobiography (presumably partly in response to Croce) that she didn't want people to know about her hip injury precisely because she didn't want to be 'graded on a curve'. But then there's Gelsey Kirkland's commentary about her difficulties with anorexia that she asked to be added to the end of her performance of the Don Quixote pas de deux on the Baryshnikov at Wolftrap tape.

And, more generally I suppose, are there cases where knowing more about a dancer and their life has deepened your appreciation of their dancing or, on the other hand, got in the way of your seeing their performance? If YouTube comments are anything to go by (big if!) many people seem to find it difficult to watch Kirkland without reference to her personal story - do we really see more of a dancer's performance if we know it's done under great stress, or do people just end up seeing the stress and not the performance?

I don't know anything much about Sino-American relations in the late 70's but I did a Nexis search for newspaper reports at the time, and apparently Baryshnikov was there with Hope and others (including Big Bird - and I'd just been joking about a Muppets theme!) as part of a Cultural Exchange programme. Presumably there must have been behind the scenes negotiations about Baryshnikov taking part, and so no real threat to him while there - none of the reports I found mentioned any concerns of that sort, though admittedly they were mainly focused on Bob Hope and how his jokes went over in China.

From the AP report, 4th July 1979:

Hope's performance was the highlight of the first American Independence Day celebration since normalization of relations between the United States and China. American festivities began with an international open house at the U.S. Embassy, which served hamburgers and hot dogs.

The audience of 2,000, mostly the foreign community and a scattering of Chinese, roundly applauded the 76-year-old comedian's first live performance in China. The show, in the old Capital Theater, with its red velvet curtains and red star chandelier, was filmed for American audiences as part of an NBC special to be telecast this fall. ...

Other performers included the Philadelphia Boys' Choir, ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, mimes Shields and Yarnell, Big Bird, singer Crystal Gayle, three Chinese comedians, and a Chinese magician.

The Washington Post's Tom Shales wasn't too impressed by the eventual three hour show that the YouTube clip came from, but does say this about Baryshnikov (15th September, 1979):

Ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov brightens the show by appearing to enjoy himself, and when he is applauded by students at the Peking Ballet School, he scolds them, "Come on, stop it!" The man is all charm. But Hope practicing Tai Chi with a group of Chinese to the inexplicable accompaniment of "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" is pure ham, and Hope referring to a Chinese landmark as "this gorgeous hunk of real estate" seems clumsily inappropriate, as do jokes about rice paddies, Chinese laundries, and "column A and column B."

The poster of the clip has written a memoir of the trip, which is excerpted here: http://www.laughmakers.blogspot.com/

Not a very sophisticated response, but his demonstration of fast and slow pirouettes reminded me of Suzanne Farrell demonstrating big and small steps on the Muppet Show

http://youtu.be/7BjnS-ApxOQ

I came across this great discussion here and remembered reading Baryshnikov's account of how he came to play Albrecht as someone who is genuinely in love so I went to look it up (in "Baryshnikov at Work", with Charles France, 1978). He gives this history of 'Albrecht the cad' in Russia:

The traditions, both physical and dramatic, in the way Albrecht is played are very strong in the Soviet Union. Two great interpretations of Albrecht - that of Konstantin Sergeyev at the Kirov and that of Alexei Yermolayev at the Bolshoi - established a standard from as far back as the 1930's. If Sergeyev's Albrecht was the more elegant and poetic and Yermolayev's the more ferocious, they both shared one quality that is basic to all Soviet interpretations: Albrecht is an aristocrat. His primary concern is his social position, and his love for Giselle is at best a somewhat serious bagatelle. Albrecht is by implication or intention a cad, and therefore a limited character. His social position and noble bearing are the most important aspects in the standard interpretation of the role.

There were two well-known exceptions to this standardization: the performance by Nikita Dalgushin, a very talented and gifted dancer from the Kirov (who incidentally made a double debut with Natalia Makarova), and by Rudolph Nureyev, who made his debut with Irina Kolpakova. Both interpretations departed significantly from the usual. Unfortunately, by the time I came along these two dancers were no longer with the company. My own models - Yuri Soloviev, Sergei Vikulov, Vladilen Semyonov, all gifted dancers - were still very much in the Sergeyev mold.

So, so far as he knows, the cad interpretation goes back to at least the 30's, and the 'Albrecht is really in love' interpretation is something that he had to come up with himself as a way of making himself believable in the role, given his youth and the skepticism about him as a danseur noble in the Kirov system at the time. Does anyone know if he was he the first (at least in living memory) to dance the role that way, or were there others outside of the Soviet Union who were playing it like that before the 70's?

Of course, he later changed his mind and played the cad version himself when he was older - which seems to fit with Leigh Witchel's observations about watching Kronstam's attempts to coach a young Lloyd Riggins :

Riggins is following Kronstam's lead as well, but there's a real noticeable change in how the same gestures and direction look on an older, weighted man or a younger man. Riggins had the physical bulk, but not the gravity Kronstam did. I think that's a function of age.

If you check the on-line catalog of the New York Public Library/Performing Arts Collection (www.nypl.org), you can sometimes learn interesting tidbits about these clips. It appears that Kirkland donated to the Library many tapes of rehearsals and performances, often recorded in silence. The YouTube clip had the piano accompaniment added later and you'll see on YouTube that it was posted with permission from Kirkland.

Some tapes in the NYPL collection say they were "preserved with support provided in part by Save America's Treasures through a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service." Although these generally are not of the quality that could be shown on television (and I'm sure there are frightful issues of permissions from all the performers involved), at least we have footage preserved of great performances from the 1970s by Kirkland, Baryshnikov, and many others. Only researchers who can get to the NYPL library can see them, alas, but we can hope that some day some of this material will be used in documentaries or somehow distributed to educational institutions around the country.

Thanks! Just spent some time going through the catalogue - yet another reason to try to get to New York again as soon as possible

PS: Thanks for that link. If you scroll down, you'll find all sorts of goodies -- which will no doubt be removed from viewing very soon -- take a look ASAP.

What I liked about it as well was the sense that this was someone's personal collection of things they liked over the years - nice to have a curated list rather than wading through YouTube for a change

if you can locate these vids, the following were filmed and telecast (the second was commercially released).

Balanchine and Cunningham: an evening at American Ballet Theatre / co-produced by WNET/New York and Danmarks Radio ; produced by Judy Kinberg and Thomas Grimm ; directed by Thomas Grimm. 1988.(60 min.)

Host: Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Danced by members of American Ballet Theatre.

Writer, Holly Brubach ; lighting, Jorgen Johannessen, Tim Hunter.

Duets / choreography, Merce Cunningham ; music, John Cage (Improvisation no. 3) ; design, Mark Lancaster ; danced by Melissa Allen, John Gardner, Jennet Zerbe, Clark Tippet, Amy Rose, Robert Hill, Amanda McKerrow, Gil Boggs, Kathleen Moore, Ricardo Bustamente, Christine Spizzo, and Wes Chapman.

La sonnambula / choreography, George Balanchine, staged by John Taras ; music, Vittorio Rieti after themes of Vincenzo Bellini ; scenery, Zack Brown ; costumes, Theoni V. Aldredge ; danced by Leslie Browne (coquette), Michael Owen (baron), Mikhail Baryshnikov (poet), Alessandra Ferri (sleepwalker), Johan Renvall (harlequin), John Gardner, William Stoler, Robert Wallace (acrobats), and others.

This is currently up in four parts on Yahoo video, if you want to catch it there before it's taken down: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3527055/9774301

It also has a young Julie Kent in the 'danse exotique' with Gil Boggs

These videos been taken off YouTube by now, but there's a clip of Kirkland's variation from Theme and Variations on this site - http://www.mystagepro.com/trinarina (click through to video and scroll down) - which is completely stunning.

There's also a silent clip of her first act Giselle variation, which looks like it's from rehearsal footage - it seems to be one of the two tapes that were edited together to make the Giselle clip that was posted on YouTube a while back. Does anyone know where it comes from?

Just saw that Baryshnikov will be dancing with the Merce Cunningham Company at BAC on the 4th of October - tickets go on sale on 30th August.

There's a post about it on the NYT Artsbeat blog:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/baryshnikov-to-kick-off-special-collaboration-with-cunningham-company/?ref=dance

Hi everyone,

I danced as a child, but am just now rediscovering the fun of going to performances as an adult, and getting very interested in dance history and criticism.

I've been enjoying reading the posts and learning a lot from the discussions, so I thought I'd stop lurking and join up properly