Paul Parish

when did she say this, Christian? I'd say she's wrong -- whether it's Danilova or Balanchine, the first act retains more of Swanilda's mime and character than any other AMerican production and rather emphasizes the mime than downplays it. ANd the earthiness of the mazurka and czardas make them tremendously exciting. THe women are turning on their heels, the rhythms are fantastic.

Phenomenal strength!. Lovely delicacy, too, AND it's wonderful after seeing her hold her ground so long, to see how fast she can MOVE!!!! Lovely. What atalent! She was a lovely Olga in the Stuttgart Onegin -- at least from the clips I've seen.

Mention of the great Bessmertnova reminds me, the Myrtha to her Giselle was Maria Bylova, and HER bourrees were out of this world -- she hovered with the uncanny lightness of Disney's Fairy Godmother at the beginning of Act 2, I'll never forget it.

bart, maybe you're right about MCB -- but from my limited experience, it's dancers themselves who want to do Giselle -- like actors want to do Hamlet. Those combinations are SO satisfying to dance -- especially the jumps.

" the "Finale" (the "Tema Russo") is so clearly a FINALE (with recapitulated themes and everything) that to my ears at least it sounds ludicrous to hear it in the middle of the ballet." I totally agree......

I absolutely agree with you, Christian -- I have always loved that pair of variations, and have some performances vividly etched in my memory.These are wonderful performances, and those renversees are truly thrilling -- though they do not erase the renversees of Patty Owen, who danced the role with hte Oakland Ballet twenty years ago with a wonderful amplitude of phrasing, in Freddie Franklin's staging. there's a little bit of a difference in Zulma's variation, in that the assembles were straight-legged, I HTINK.... it was a long time ago, but the suspension in the releve had a more sudden effect after the assemble, if I remember right.... I can't imagine why Miami would want to simplify those variations -- certainly they have dancers who can DO them???

Legs Tanaquil Leclercq, Allegra Kent, Makarova, Farrell Arms Antoinette Sibley, Feet, witty Monica Mason Feet, chaste Ulanova, Lopatkina Face leclercq, Fonteyn Eyes Ayupova, LeClercq, Fonteyn, Pavlenko, Julie Diana, Lopatkina Nose Danilova, Farrell,. Ananiashvili Breastbone Sarah van Patten Hands Plisetskaya

Fonteyn excelled at making the moments memorable that other dances just threw away as if insignificant-- In ROmeo and Juliet, she runs down the stairs for the balcony scene with incredible lightness and grace, and at the end of it she reascends those stairs like a feather on an updraft.... it's musicality, mostly -- the music declares that this is a magical entrance and she makes it so -- that and theatre-savoir; she really knew what her dances were ABOUT.

Harvey is SO lovely. Babilee is truly wonderful, BUT there's a problem with his shoulders. He looks very much like adancer of his era, remarkably able to change the speed at which he moves -- but still, I kept seeing Villella and d'Amboise in this performance

Bart Birdsall, I'm pretty sure you're right about Wagner. For one thing, he wrote a more-through-composed kind of opera than the 'number-opera' that preceded it. Mozart's operas proceed by rezitativ-aria-rezitativ-trio-rezitativ-aria, and each piece liteally has a number -- which I guess is why the word "opera" is plural (plural of opus). Stopping a show to repeat a "number" doesn't really present any great difficulty in the proceedings, since everybody knows where we are. It's like reading an epistolary novel and re-reading one of the letters again. it used to be common. Maybe there's some influence from movies -- since hte ongoing stream of images in a movie is a mechanical proposition; it's a "cool medium', it comes on us like fate and you sign on for that when you buy your ticket and walk in. Interestingly, even in the USA they used to stop movies and show numbers again -- it happened famously with a movie that had a number by the Nicholas Brothers. I can't remember which one, I THINK it was "Down Argentine Way," they had to roll the film back and show it again it's in their bio "Brotherhood in Rhythm" I'll look it up later.

Thanks, Christian, for making the case so clearly -- esp about Struchkova --and also about hte neeed to keep Kitri different, essentially different, from Raymonda and all the rest of those girls who do lots of passes..... its in the asdverbs, thespeed,elan, attack, and posture. Kitri and Paquita, for example, are both Spanish girls, but they're VERY different and should not take the same pose the same way.....

Gosh they're cute!

yes, Wheeldon did Sea Pictures for SFB a decade ago. Now that I think about it, it seems the fore-runner of his 'Ghosts.'

it's insanely intricate, Balanchine-y, fabulous performances. Does anyone know what hte occasion was. The video's grainy, but the dancing is sweeping and at times insanely accurate. I recognize Collier at times and I think Durante, who's steely and sharp as any Balanchine dancer. But who else is who?

Vagansmom used to be quite a buddy of mine on here -- I hope she's not completely inactive now. She posed a very good question -- one with an obvious answer, obvious if you know the diffferent courses that life took afer WW2 in Germany and Russia. If you lived in Germany, you had to be affected by the de-Nazification process. There's been no such similar de-stalinization or de-communistification process among former Soviets -- but everyone in germany went through it. Some gave it lip-service, some underwent it whole-heartedly. I know sme people who look back on their youth in the Soviet Union and marvel that htey believed in hte Communist propaganda, how enthusiastic they were as pioneers -- and it reminds me, how idealistic I was as a kid and how much I wanted to believe in hte things 50s AMerica professed..... It may not have been easy for Wigman to let go her Jewish dancers -- but if she was not going to leave the country, like Jooss, there was no other way of working. Exile was not necessarily a good artistic path -- it didn't ruin Jooss, but most people agree that Pola Nerinska lost a great part of her creative energies when she left Poland for AMerica. Yes she taught Jose Limon, yes she did some other things -- but exile took the ginger out of her. A friend of mine from grad school is the child of emigres from Rumania; er mother was a famous writer in Rumania, whose talent dried up and withered away in Los Angeles.

It's coming to San Francisco this season -- opening in roughly ten days. I've never seen it in hte theater. I know the poem in several translations -- including Nabokov's maniacal version -- but not in the Russian. I Leigh is certainly right that it holds a place in hte hearts of Russians that is like that of Dante's Commedia in Italian and Hamlet (maybe) in English --since the verse is strict but the way the language is used sounds at every point like what any Russian would say in those circumstances -- i.e., that is what RUssian sounds like. Something like that. It's also the case that many Russian aesthetes have said, they feel like Onegin. Bored like that -- like Hamlet, in fact."What a piece of work is man!.How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.... et cetera but not to me, he says. How weary stale, flat and unprofitable to me are all hte uses of this world.' I can't wait to see it -- how can you say a subject is not likely for ballet that has TWO ball scenes in it. Guest Angela, thank you for your treasury of insights -- that is such a gift to us. Have you seen the clip on youtube of Alina Cojocaru in hte dream scene/letter aria? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4nwlWoJf0g She's tiny, and it helps -- The lifts here have an inexpressible lightness and innocence to them, almost like a father playing whoops-a-girl with his child. It's very characteristic, hte look of this, the way she's swung up into he air and then lbrought easily, lightly, with no friction, no jolt, all the way down to hte ground, sitting, almmost LYING on the ground.

Me too, Helene -- but it's wonderful all the way through 'Does this corn look normal?' 'Please don't give me a compliment when there's nobody around to hear it!'

I appreciate your concern, and although I hope you're wrong, and we'll see the work performed more widely than you predict, I'm not putting any money down on this. As a tiny part of the press, I was downhearted to learn the details about Cunningham's plans, but didn't get a chance to discuss it anywhere public before it was a done deal. The more we learn about the changes in contemporary productions of historic rep (as in Doug Fullington's lectures on Petipa and Balanchine, then and now) the more the questions about identity and authenticity pile up, like airplanes over a busy terminal. Re-reading the Cunningham tributes in the Brooklyn Rail http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/dance/ reinforced for me how distinct his work has been, and how removed from the general dance world some of his performers seem to feel. It feels like a letter from another time and another culture -- fascinating to us, but hard to integrate into our own world. I've worked on several reconstructions in the past, when I was more of a dancer and stager and less of a critic, and I treasure every chance we have to bring some part of the past back to the stage today, but I think this work has made me more pragmatic. I don't expect that it will be a perfectly preserved artifact, but it will, if it's done right, still have enough of its fundamental identity to help us understand what things used to be like, and by extension, how things got to be what they are today. I know I will never see Cunningham's rep again in the same way I did during his life, but I still want to see what I can. thanks for posting that link, Sandi -- GREAT stuff there, a treasury.

I may be wrong, but I THINK the Nutcracker Prince's mime scene goes back to the original version of Ivanov.... as does the candy cane dance wit hte hoop, which Balanchine himself danced in his youth before he left Russia and kept for his production.

CLicking on this link took me to a page that said "This site is no longer active" "Open the pod bay doors, Hal"

AMy, I wish I knew whatto think of Russian Seasons. I've only seen SF Ballet do it, and like most San Franciscans, I found it impenetrable. I THINK it was set by someone other than Ratmansky; my SUSPICION is, they learned the steps but not the tone and flavor. The boys fared best.

wonderful question, worth speculating on. And htis is gonna be seculative, since I haven't seen the whole range of either, by any means. But first, a ballerina to Balanchine was "a good dancer who has imagination" (according to Mimi Paul, on whom he created the walking pdd in "Emeralds" -- who said so in a wonderful interview in Ballet Review.) ALl his dancers had a certain look and training and musicality -- though by no means all of the good dancers he used looked as uniformly elongated as we tend to think. There were some short girls with big heads who could really move.) Imagination has to be one of hte great characteristics a choreographer requires. Whelan has it -- The first Ratmansky we saw in San Francisco was "Carnival of the Animals," which absolutely required imagination to make it happen. It was not till I saw the ballet a second time, with the outrageous Lorena Feijoo as the ballerina, that I realized how Gogol-level fantastic the ballet is. Maybe I should say Disney -- it was like the cartoon-ballet in Fantasia -- Feijoo was dancing an elephant who thought she was Raymonda, grand, magnificent ballerina with amazing character style; Feijoo is willing to go there and get into that, and project it. I felt like I was exploding. My hunch is that his work will benefit the most from dancers with a taste for the fantastic, even the preposterous.

This is terrible. It's just terrible. He was so kind, so caring, so deeply learned, a scholar of ballet, and like the Clerk of Oxenforde, 'gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.' I'm burning a candle to St Gleb, Mark's patron saint, who I'm sure has been waiting to welcome his old friend into heaven and is probably making him very comfortable already. And if there's been a glitch, I'm sure Gleb is on the case ready to catch him should he fall.

adorable!

Natalia, I too have been doing the 4 Seasons Dance-- it makes me so happy, on the street, on the sidewalk, it just catches up with me and I hear a jazz march and I break out into it. We saw the film here last week -- The film was screened in Berkeley just before hte company performed "Danzon" here, and afterwards several dancers were interviewed by Rita Felciano (VERY good interview). Domenique Mercy volunteered that dancers generated the material, in response to Bausch's questions, but that she didn't use phrases "that could not survive repetition." And indeed, however spastic the movement, you'll notice it's like Petipa, you see the moves repeated and repeated exactly. And that little "Spring Summer Fall Winter" dance REALLY survives repetition.-- it's a classic, there's always more in it every time your repeat it. The gestures themselves are classic -- for spring, the hands open out in low second position, as if you were stepping out in a polonaise or Czardas; march for 4 counts and on FIVE Summer begins, the arms go straight up in triumph, like a gymnast's salute after s/he finishes the combination; march for 3 counts and on the 4th the left hand falls, the right forms into the letter "C" SO Fall and winter have an upbeat into them .On the down beat of "Fall," the right hand twists like a falling leaf (as in the Asian fan-dances on the falling leaf motif) jerking downward 3 times. Then, on the upbeat of Winter, both arms make fists to prepare for the shivering action of "Winter, where the torso contracts, the forearms "shake against the cold," and the elbows knock together rapidly, like a snare-drum roll.... For four counts, and then Spring is back and the body opens up and out, the hands spread with a little burst, like buds opening, the chest opens, the head rises the eyes open and look round, and it's Spring again. BEAUTIFUL dance! It is an ENORMOUSLY satisfying little dance -- reminds me of ee cummings' poem "Anyone lived in a pretty how town,' with its varying stanzas about Anybody's life, and the recurring/varying refrain, "Sun moon stars rain" anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn't he danced his did Women and men(both little and small) cared for anyone not at all they sowed their isn't they reaped their same sun moon stars rain children guessed(but only a few and down they forgot as up they grew autumn winter spring summer) that noone loved him more by more when by now and tree by leaf she laughed his joy she cried his grief bird by snow and stir by still anyone's any was all to her someones married their everyones laughed their cryings and did their dance (sleep wake hope and then)they said their nevers they slept their dream stars rain sun moon (and only the snow can begin to explain how children are apt to forget to remember with up so floating many bells down) one day anyone died i guess (and noone stooped to kiss his face) busy folk buried them side by side little by little and was by was all by all and deep by deep and more by more they dream their sleep noone and anyone earth by april wish by spirit and if by yes. Women and men(both dong and ding) summer autumn winter spring reaped their sowing and went their came sun moon stars rain