Paul Parish

As I understand it, the main co-ordinator for the event has been former SFB dancer Miriam Rowan, with big help from Courtney ELizabeth, Luke Willis, and the performers. In The Bay Area Reporter, Roberto Friedman (arts editor) announced Wednesday that 'A group of professional ballet dancers has come together to support orphans and vulnerable children in Uganda, a nation hit hard by HIV/AIDS. The event will include two pas de deux by world-class dancers, a newly created film, a silent auction, and a wine and cheese reception. Dancing for Uganda, an evening of dance, film, and spirits, takes place this Sat., Oct. 15, 7 p.m. at the Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, SF. 'The performance will include renowned dancers Sarah Van Patten and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba in After the Rain, by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon; Frances Chung and Joan Boada in Chaconne for Piano and Two Dancers, by San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson; a song by Nigerian singer and songwriter Nkechi; and a short film newly created by dancers and friends. 'All proceeds go to Children of Uganda's (COU) music and dance program, to support their upcoming Tour of Light in January 2012. COU serves hundreds of children, providing them with clothing, food, shelter, medical care, and education, including a strong program in traditional African music and dance. The Tour of Light, which has visited the US seven times in COU's 16 years, aims to raise awareness of the plight of orphaned children in Uganda today, while sharing African culture with American audiences. For tickets, go to: www.dancingforuganda.eventbrite.com.' Fabulous dancers, wonderful program, worthy cause, I say. I have heard these dancers include Sarah Van Patten, Pierre Vilanoba, Guennadi Nedviguine, Joan Boada, and Frances Chung. SFB is well represented in a good cause. I also heard the dancers are donating some of their personal items - signed shoes, etc - to the silent auction. Sounds like a great opportunity to mingle with some of SFB's finest.

Re the "primitive" Balanchine Apollo, Take a look at this painting by Andre Bauchant http://www.google.com/imgres?q=Andre+Bauchant&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1109&bih=546&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=9sSoREZqa8VyLM:&imgrefurl=http://www.artnet.com/artists/lotdetailpage.aspx%3Flot_id%3D56C5137B7F2D2430&docid=Oah1uYrmIFvnrM&imgurl=http://images.artnet.com/WebServices/picture.aspx%253Fdate%253D19920603%2526catalog%253D2-05-092%2526gallery%253D111405%2526lot%253D00074%2526filetype%253D2&w=416&h=432&ei=YF-WTqfeNojXiALy2bTCDQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=126&vpy=149&dur=3404&hovh=229&hovw=220&tx=89&ty=107&sig=101533351170382477353&page=1&tbnh=173&tbnw=196&start=0&ndsp=8&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0 Totally news to me, and it's stunning.

There was a masculine type of that, too -- Hamlet is the greatest (Hamlet was very famously payed by Sarah Bernhart)people of great soul, who're not grasping and don't want to take charge of things but instead long for otherworldly knowledge. Siddharta is probably hte remote model. The type is common in heroes of SOuth-Asian epic -- in the dance-dramas of India, Java,Cambodia, etc., the dancers who play hte role are very slender, tall, extremely turned-out, "refined" creatures THe Prince in Swan Lake is of this type.

THank yu, Lidewi! That's pretty thrilling. Does Raymonda "usually" do entrechat-quatres to pointe? These are STUNNING, and i don't think I've ever seen them before. I THINK they're usually just changements to pointe. Maybe Cecchetti had all his advanced students doing these. Karsavina says he taught her to do entrechat huit -- he told her to just do another entrechat quatre before she came down, and she did. But probably not to pointe.

Rikki Lake, dancer, jumps into line in the Madison, from "Hairspray" The set-up is, (if you don't know it) that she's an ordinary high-school girl whose mother takes in ironing and who dances in front of the TV to the teen rock-and-roll show, the "American Bandstand" of Baltimore. IN this scene she breaks into the exclusive set of teenagers who're regular performers on the show, who as we enter are being televised dancing the Madison. In the front line is the blonde snob Amber, whose racism actually is a major factor in the movie (which turns on a civil-rights demonstration at Amber's family's amusement park, where our girl and her African American friends successfully integrate the place). I love the movie, watch it every year at Thanksgiving. Perfect accompaniment to a food-coma.

Lovely piece, Leigh.

I'm late to this discussion, and late to any real viewings -- since I've disabled my TV, I'm going to have to catch up on youtube. The thing that caught my attention is the news that Ricki Lake is on the show -- whose performance in John Waters's "Hairspray," which I simply adore. She danced GREAT in that movie -- "I can do that dance," she says, and jumps into he middle of the Madison on the teen-dance TV show and becomes the toast of Baltimore. AND she can do ensemble performance (she can hold her own against Divine just fine). From the jive and mambo that I've seen, she can still turn that trick. And if there's any justice, her ability to talk spontaneously after the dance and tell the audience something they can appreciate and learn something from will move her into the top. She may not have a huge fan base, but she can win hearts. It makes me glad to see her doing so well, and giving so much credit to her teachers and to the art. SO much of what dance teaches is how to make good decisions and behave decently under pressure amidst many contingencies in an enterprise that involves many other people. It looks like she's got that -- the banter about "Get Smart" was wonderfully smart, light-hearted. The inter-generational dynamics there were breath-taking -- she's not just twice Hough's age, she remembers "Get Smart" well enough to know the running gags from it. She gets my "Young at Heart' award for the week. Now I've got to go back and watch Hope and Nancy.

i never knew Virginia Johnson, but I saw some of her stagings of Lew Christensen's ballets and was very impressed. Oakland Ballet, in particular, did Christensen's "Jinx" surpassingly well in her staging --

Great idea! I've seen the results of El Systema at UC Berkeley, in the Young musicians program), which has been using a Venezuelan conductor to work with the kids on orchestral playing for the last two years. This summertime urban music-camp was excellent already, under the inspired and inspiring direction of the soprano Daisy Newman, a very fine classical singer who is African-American (she comes from Natchez, MS) and has been able to make bridges between young people of disadvantaged communities in he Bay Area and some of the finest conservatories. (Not all of the participants come from minority communities -- but most do). But since Ms Newman decided to bring El Systema in, the orchestral concerts have been exponentially more ambitious -- and they have been amazingly successful; some of the students have years of excellent training, but some may have been working on their instruments for only one year, but they're given intensive coaching and then asked to play in ensembles and pull their weight in wonderful and very demanding music. There have been some wrong notes, but the phrasing and attack and sense of the organic whole has been real music-making, thrilling to experience, and it's also clear that it's a major experience for the young people to encounter such great music, and rise to the challenges (including surviving their very public mistakes and continuing to make music). The program's goal is that everyone who goes through will go to college. Some will become professional musicians, but all will have been transformed by the music and the program and will have a sense of their own potential greatness they can take with them into the future. For a sense of their direction, I offer this clip of Leonard Bernstein conducting Daisy Newman in his song "A Julia Burgos from a Proms concert in 1988. El Systema looks to me -- I do NOT know this, it just looks that way -- like it owes a lot to the way Bernstein presented music to young audiences, which I remember being very excited by when I was a kid and saw him analyze Beethoven's 5th symphony on TV back in the 50s. If there is no debt to Bernstein, the approaches are certainly compatible. Great music --and ballet, too -- is the heritage of us all, I really believe this; it is not just the preferred entertainment of the wealthy.

So musical, such clear action, such smart timing. He reminds me of Harpo Marx

THe main qualification for a principal dancer is that they should never do anything that makes you want to look away. They need to be able to get and keep your attention.

Please go, Christian. He and Paul Taylor are the greatest choreographers alive today -- and you'll see him with his own group, who understand at a deep level what he wants. He CAN do ballet, and he's choreographed 8-10 ballets for SF Ballet alone. but his roots are in folk dancing - as a child he did flamenco, as a teenager he did Balkan folk-dance. He understands many idioms, and his choreography ranges through a number of different vocabularies. He doesn't always use the dance-figure opened up as big, stretched as long as a ballet company asks for, so the pleasure is more in the rhythmic complexity and the fluency of the movement and the aptness of he big poses when hey come. He really understands entrances and exits and how to use space, the geometry of a dance may be as strict as Petipa while the people look like peasants. I don't know some of the dances on your show -- But I do know "V" and love it -- it looks a lot like a ballet. And it's very musical in its structure.

Me, too -- thanks for the Jacques footage. ALL of it -- Apollo is really great, but the Swan Lake is wonderful too -- i love his attack, the power to focus an image and hold it exactly as long as he wants to, wonderful energy. And his "philosophy of life" as my father would have called it (he had one to, people used to), it's great that he acts on it and shares it. When he taught Apollo to SFB, he said some interesting things about the process. First of all, he said, when he came, he wondered if there'd really be any of he men who could really do the role. Then he said, he got here and he realized ALL the men were capable of it. And with Gonzalo Garcia, who opened in the role, he got someone who looked so much like him, it was almost like seeing d'Amboise young, dancing it right before our eyes. Truly uncannny, fabulous performance.

You should start that thread. The first examples that come to mind, of GOOD ballets to popular music, are "Who Cares?" and "Company B." Both of which are IMHO wonderful ballets.

Your question could start an interesting thread. Is "pop" music suitable to ballet? What should come first? The music or the dance? What are some examples of successful ballets done to pop scores? Who has or could in the future write a great pop score? Can great choreography transcend and enrich a pop score? Is Gershwin a "pop" composer? What about Mozart? What happened with the Pet Shop Boys' ballet?

Yes, there is now a website www.dancingforuganda.eventbrite.com where you can order tickets and find out more about the benefit: "Dancing for Uganda" will take place on October 15 at Fort Mason Cowell Theater in San Francisco. Apparantly, the dancers cannot advertise who they are. So there's a benefit by an unnamed group with unnamed dancers - a PR nightmare. I have it on good authority that Sarah van Patten will be one of the stars.

van Patten as Juliet... She raises the ballet to a sublime height.

Dear ATM -- it was not MY Somova comment -- it is the uploader's -- indeed I was startled, too, and felt the same way you do. Then I went and looked at a recent youtube of SOmova dancing Odette's solo and I was impressed by the increase in sensitivity and quiet in her dancing.... I haven't seen the pdd, but that solo is VERY hard to dance in a way that actually moves the audience, and she made it happen for me. So I'm reconsidering her... Meantime, I agree with you completely about Mezentseva; that performance really makes yoou feel differently about every other one you've ever seen.

It IS a huge nuisance that the best stuff on this video is SO FAR at the end. But here's how: to watch hte end of a long Youtube clip is to START it, then click pause and go away for an hour and a half to do what you have to and come back, then click on the minutage bar at the bottom (using the uploader's timings, which are there in great detail) and it'll have loaded in during that time -- then it and will go to that place and play it (I started it last night, and watched it this morning, just now). The contents and minutage are as follows: THE STARTING TIME POINT OF EACH DANCE IS LISTED AT THE END OF EACH DANCE IN MY DESCRIPTION This video consists of two programs from Soviet Union TV in the 1980s, consisting of ballet fragments from the 1970s and 1980s. the first program has a man talking plus a woman speaking with the information on each piece, in this order 1. The Waltz from Chopiniana (aka Les Sylphides ) with Irina Kolpakova and Sergei Berezhnoi Time 0:06:18 2. Le Carnaval with Alexandre Grebnina as Columbine , current Mariinsky Ballet artistic director, Yuri Fateyev as Harlequin and Sergei Svatov as Pierrot Time 0:14:01 3. Dying Swan - Maya Plisetskaya Time 0:20:10 4. Spectre De La Rose - Maris Liepa of Bolshoi Ballet with Natalia Bolshakova of Kirov Mariinsky Ballet . This performance was probably near the end of Liepa's career and may be the only time he danced this role without one of his two regular Bolshoi partners, Natalia Bessmertnova and Marina Kondratieva Time 0:28:00 5. Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor - Kirov Ballet Time 0:34:13 6. Firebird - Marina Leonova , director of the Moscow Choreographic School in Moscow , making her the Moscow equivalent of Altynai Asylmuratova , who is director of the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in Saint Petersburg . She is partnered by Yuri Vasyuchenko Time 0:44:11 7. Petrouchka - Alexander Yevdokimov Time 0:48:52 8. Ruslan and Lyudmila - Irina Kolpakova and Vladimir Lopukhov Time 0:55:12 9. conclusion of chopiniana with Irina Kolpakova and Sergei Berezhnoi along with Nina Soldun and Olga Likhovskaya. Time 1:01:23 Second ballet program is much shorter, but explosive like dynamite 1. entrance of Aurora and Rose Adagio - definitely from 1970s, if not even late 1960s with Irina Kolpakova . The girl watching the Rose Adagio, who suddenly is transported onto the stage as Aurora is Xenia Ter-Stepanova. Time 1:08:06 2. Different Chopiniana with Sergei Berezhnoi , Yelena Yevteyeva ( Elena Evteyeva ) and Xenia Ter - Stepanova Time 1:15:38 3. The Best Odette White Swan Adagio from Swan Lake I had ever seen, by a big margin by Galina Mezentseva, until I finally found one to compare with her this year, Alina Somova This was definitely a very young Galina Mezentseva in the 1970s, probably early 1970s, being born in November 1952, so early 20s in age of Mezentseva at that time.. I think her partner is Vitali Afanaskov Time 1:22:46 4. Don Quixote variations and Coda - Vadim Budarin and Ninel Kurgapkina Time 1:30:45

DId this topic actually POST? I don't see it on the boards....

Forgive me if this has already been posted, but I just happened upon this EXTRAORDINARY 90-minute YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHB1iuljgt4&feature=digest_refresh_mon Amazing footage, esp in the last 30 minutes, truly exceptional Chopiniana and white swan (Mezentzova in perfect form, glorious singing phrasing in the arms), Rose Adagio with Kolpakova in great form First part has curios like "Carnaval" and other Diaghilev-era ballets, done well but not fabulous; it's the last 30 minutes that are staggeringly beautiful... I almost wanted the Chopiniana to go slower, the through-line of the dancing is unbelievable Wonder what you all will think

Very long thread, and much that;s not about Sevillano.... I'm with those who're grateful to have been introduced to Sevillano, who seems a dancer of very great talent, modesty, imagination, delicacy, modesty, and charm. The pirouettes in attitude, which she turns superlatively well, are all the evidence I need of sturdy technique, and the little dance she makes out of the pizzicato section is I find wonderfully Giselle-like, modest and dancerly, and just as pretty as the ballonnes. After all, Giselle loves to DANCE, she's not someone who goes to class to 'do ballet." The diagonal that Christian mentions is something the Russian companies never do -- Bolshoi and Kirov ballerinas do a manege of pique turns, usually VERY fast, and usually with one hand holding the skirt. All the versions staged by Freddie Franklin and I suppose Ballets-Ruses derived, have the diagonal, which is considerably more difficult and not IMHO lovelier. "A little learning is a dangerous thing." The toe hops are not iconic there are many ways of doing them. Look around, you'll see them with rond de jambes, straight ballonnes, ballonnes alternating with 4 little hops in attitude devant.... The music is not wonderful, it's just a nice little interpolation by Burgmuller.

CAl Performances's list is short but it's good -- including the world dance that they've always presented. In flush times, back before the collapse of Lehmann Bros., and with a special round of fund-raising to mark hte end of Robert Cole's tenure as head of Cal Perfs, they presented bot hthe Kirov and the Bolshoi. Actually, I remember writing then that we would not see the likes of this extravagant programming again for a LONG time. Perhaps the crash had begun, but the things that had been set in train were still coming to pass.... Houses have been small forthings I've seen; UC Berkeley is being cut back in ways it never has before, since the state has no money and it's a state university. Cal Performances has been self-supporting for a long time, but so many UC staff have lost their jobs, and he prospect of further cutbacks is looming, and the loss in value of real estate has been so chilling, people who might have bought tickets are holding back....

THis woman does not look beautiful mostly because she's not comfortably balanced. Her neck is very tense indeed as are her shoulders. Her partner also looks strained. it could well be Pearl Argyle caught at a bad moment.

Another provocative topic, Variated, with many wonderful replies. So much depends as was briefly noted on what the Artistic Director needs. Balanchine needed young dancers for the works he wanted to create. He let Danilova go -- which was not a disaster for her. Massine needed her, and she and Franklin had a great career dancing Massine's ballets. It's true, some dancers seem to be like Isadora Duncan good at promoting themselves -- they enter competitions, they blog, they twitter, they cultivate their fans without seeming to be selling out. Daniil Simkin joined this board and talked to us like a member back when he was still a student. Most of us got a good look at him on YouTube, and it was charming to see him doing the same combinations as his father in friendly competition -- and it worked like good PR to make the very boyish boy look like a chip off the old block. And beyond the PR, it was very good dancing and a charming double-portrait of two excellent dancers. Simkin's qualities make him a soloist/principal, not a corps dancer -- his lines are too vivid for him not to pull focus. Out west have several Youtube stars at SF Ballet -- Sofiane Sylve's amazing pirouettes have been hit on over a million times; Maria Kochetkova went on a reality-TV dance show and danced off with the prize, and gained a tremendous amount of cachet into hte bargain. she was already a principal dancer with everything going for her -- superb line, and a wonderful kinetic quality and appetite for movement. And she's getting used a LOT. Yuan Yuan Tan is a superstar in her native China, and she gets a lot of opening nights. It doesn't hurt that she looks like a supermodel and has a rock-solid technique....