Mme. Hermine

personally i think she has to be a virgin; she's even too shy to let him sit properly next to her! :rolleyes:

i've heard both of those, but i don't know where they come from...

in 'a portrait of giselle' markova is interviewed and says she was always told that giselle didn't care for hilarion because he had a red beard!

so maybe there's a wili hierarchy? could it be a like a hereditary monarchy? or did she maybe get the job because she was dumped in a worse situation than any of the others and has to protect her turf...wonder what she gets out of it? hazard pay for her toes after all the bourrees....film at eleven!

well they're all wilis, right? and supposedly the same thing(s) happened to all of them, so why is she the queen? maybe something worse than what happened to the others happened to her?

must be! i remember that she came to chicago, i think as a guest, during ben stevenson's brief tenure there before houston. knoblauch does mean garlic in german, i wonder if she's related to the yankee left fielder?

i remember this dancer, i think i recall that at one point she changed her name, also. anyone with updates on her whereabouts? (just thought i'd keep with the first-name "trend") :confused:

i can't speak authoritatively to your question amy, but i remember looking at an original score and noting that don q originally had five acts according to the plot summary in the beginning! if i ever get back to the library i'll try to summarize them as i can't imagine what they would have covered! (unless on second thought it meant five scenes). however there were characters on stage we don't normally see now. [This message has been edited by Mme. Hermine (edited April 03, 2001).]

and if i remember correctly, alexandra, kirsten simone donned a black wig when she danced ruth page's 'carmen'.

anna-marie holmes' production of don quixote in boston also uses the little girls dressed as cupids. it's a very cute dance, as andrei says..

i don't know if any are commercially available but i know of two. one was a theatrical release made in 1966 with the farrell/villella/mitchell cast and the second was a television broadcast in 1986 with calegari/anderson/frohlich.

i would hope that the posting wasn't meant to give that information (whether true or not) as justification for considering letting the girl go, but rather as a ridiculous reason for something that they may have considered doing even though they didn't eventually do it. i know who you are talking about, however, and i met the mom a few times and she is a friendly woman, and the girl is a perfectly capable dancer. scary thing though is that in my opinion, the same could be said about the whole lot of them, so it makes less and less sense for anyone to have suffered from whatever tortuous decision-making process (or not, perhaps it was arbitrary as it seems)!

i wonder if a ruling in that way would automatically remove copyright protection for works for which it had already been sought, retroactively, so to speak, or if it would only affect those either created after the ruling or which had not yet been copyrighted as of the ruling?

mesentseva was very good.

dont know, marc, i have a film of her in it with zaklinsky in which she looks really really young, so it's hard to say....maybe someone will know when it was made? [This message has been edited by Mme. Hermine (edited March 23, 2001).]

yes, i see your point. however in most cases, for instance, such as in a large computer business, or any great manufacturer of a widely used product, the person who is at the head of the company is one who at one time used to be intimately involved with the making of the product, and that's not what i mean here. these are people, mostly men, with master's degrees in business, who are interfering badly with the production of something they don't know from the ground up. do i think a business person should advise an artistic director about what they know? sure! if the company's not selling tickets, then of course the company will have less money, depending on how much of their revenue comes from ticket sales. a company which sells fewer and fewer tickets will attract fewer and fewer donors. but i feel that the job, in that case, of the money manager is to bring this to the attention of the artistic director and confer with him/her about what might put those bodies back into the seats, and ask that person to see how that sort of thing fits into what they want to do. but not to dictate, not to emasculate, not to turn a ballet company into a model of a baseball team, where the general manager is george steinbrenner, the dancers are the yankees, and the artistic director is joe torre, who has to manage the players that someone else has chosen for him, without any real decision making power as to who they are. that's what i mean. with people like that making decisions, cargill is right, you'll get schlock. and even with someone making decisions who's "kind of" in a related business, who's been around and thinks that they know enough to make those decisions, you're running a great big risk. and this applies everywhere!! IMHO. of course.

i might also add that i don't believe a ballet company can be run successfully by committee, even if that committee were to consist of ten great artists.

okay, so i'll try to make sense here. keeping a general picture in mind, (though you may draw what parallels you like, i won't be specific.) certain cfos or ceos may genuinely think they are bringing a brand new world to arts administration by managing to have themselves given authority in a circle that in many cases was previously an artistic director's domain entirely. they may have it in their heads that since many companies run deficits, the only way to avoid those deficits is to adopt an entirely corporate or business-based model for an organization that may, in their minds, have previously been run entirely on the basis of whim (although in my opinion most directors are much more responsible than such people realize, cost-wise). i suspect an idea like that might be easy to sell to a board that's a little scared about where their money is going, and that of their friends. but in my opinion, and i would love to hear from others, what it generally results in is the same problem pointed in another direction. away from art, your organization may seem more organized, but art sells the tickets, brings in the audience, brings in the patrons, and you could end up being a very well organized group that doesn't sell and thereby organizes itself out of existence. in an atmosphere organized around this trend, for instance, a dancer like nureyev could not survive anymore, genius or not, because a pool of corporate decisionmakers would decide that artistic temperament was not profitable to deal with, and would make an example out of such a one, at the same time avoiding having responsibility for that being laid on the shoulders of one person by making it a decision by committee that most probably includes non-artists. and i think that a good artistic director has to have a foot in both places, both business and art, even if someone else is balancing the books; a responsible artistic director knows what the budget is and works hard to keep within it, and a lot of them do well. however, you cannot legislate all uncertainties and you cannot entirely eliminate risk, and risk is not the sole provenance of artists. corporate re-organization cannot sell tickets the public doesn't want to buy. the public's perception is just as important as any other factor in a company's success, even though it might be difficult for an organization with such a mind-set to deal with, because it cannot be controlled. and in the end, a company succeeds or doesn't succeed on the strength of that public, and not on whether or not its administration is run on a typical corporate business model. i don't think most such administrations think of art and business as partners, but of art as a stepchild of sorts, that if it works, serves to justify their existence, instead of as a symbiotic type of relationship. i don't think it's going to work finally; in the end, i think these groups will either cease to exist or have to radically reorganize yet again. (aren't you glad you didn't ask what i thought?) [This message has been edited by Mme. Hermine (edited March 22, 2001).]

looked about, david nixon is going to northern ballet theatre. i think in ohio, where he was before, she was running the school, so maybe she'll do the same there. i think she had been a principal in canada at the national ballet for a while after she left the states. [This message has been edited by Mme. Hermine (edited March 22, 2001).]

is she not married to david nixon and didn't he just take a company in the u.k?

i supered with the national ballet of canada in the '70s with 'sleeping beauty' and one of my memories of nureyev is that even though he was dancing in every performance, he would spend every moment he wasn't on stage going from wing to wing to watch every solo, and give corrections to people when they left the stage. he never rested!

she did do it, yvonne, and i thought she was very good....strong, imperious, regal.

she did do it, yvonne, and i thought she was very good....strong, imperious, regal.

oh ed, that phrase wouldn't have been hers, but the ballet's, in describing the fact that she came to the boston ballet as a ballet mistress, then had various posts as assistant and then associate to bruce marks and then became artistic director. she has never been known as a pretentious person!

i saw jeffrey edwards' graduation (is that what they are called?) performance at the SAB workshop, i think it was in 1983. i believe i remember he danced 'sleeping beauty' with margaret tracey. i only saw the workshop once, and if i recall it was the night mr. balanchine passed away, and kirstein, robbins and martins all came on the stage before the performance. i recall that he impressed me a great deal. (sorry to be so vague but it's been a little while). does this sound correct? befuddled (a/k/a Mme. Hermine)