Paul Parish

He also looked great in tights. I've heard his nickname was "Legs"-- BTW, that La ci darem clip not only shows him in fabulous voice, it shows wonderful byplay with the soprano, who's no slouch herself. My hunch is that that's Graziella Sciutti, who was a great comedienne as well as a wonderful singer. The contrast between his rich, rich voice, and hers, which is dry as claret, makes for a wonderful duet when their voices finally blend -- whoever she is, she's a splendid singing actress.

I love how bright and clean it looks. Thanks, Helene...

Amy, that's very intriguing. It could be so. It certainly happened that a role that later became famous would be started on one dancer who'd get injured and it would be premiered by another. The jumping girl in Symphony in C was designed for Gisella Caccialanza but she blew out her knee in rehearsal and never really regained her former powers, though as Mrs Lew Christensen she moved to San Francisco and made a sort of comeback here -- re that clever video, which intercuts different performers in Tchai pas-- I THINK the footage of Verdy comes from a kinescope of the Bell telephone Hour -- there's a copy at the Robbins collection of the NYPL (at Lincoln Center -- GO SEE IT), and maybe others around. If it wasn't Bell Telephone, it might have been Ed Sullivan.

Great topic -- and on top of that, it's great the way you put the question. For me, the versions of this I've loved best were Kyra Nichols's, Violette Verdy's, and Lorna Feijoo's. Also REALLY liked Jenny Somogyi's, which looked exactly like Kyra Nichols's (in the best possible way), and was amazed how much I liked Alexandra Ferri's, which was on YouTube for a while and sparkled with wonderful Violette-like personal energy. Nichols I first saw in Berkeley, where she danced it with her brother Robbie, who was never famous but danced for Maria Tallchief in Chicago before coming back to Berkeley and was a very good dancer. They made it hilarious -- especially the dives at the end, which as all her fans know she did as if she were diving into a swimming pool, with NO reference to the dolphin shape of a Fonteyn fish-dive -- they were very American and flat-out hilarious, like something Carole Lombard would have done. Violette I saw on tape at the NYPL -- and let me urge everybody to go by there when you're in NYC and SEE it. She did quite different steps from what we see now -- one very beautiful sequence of en dedans pirouettes in attitude, 4 of them at least, maybe 8 of them, and every time she came around the corner her smile lights up the world like the sun. And also -- I THINK it was in Tchai pas -- she did a series of 8 releves with double rond de jambes en l'air, each one turning an eighth, which Kyra Nichols later picked up and did in Nutcracker as the Sugar Plum Fairy -- it's very sparkly, ballerina on a music-box, fancy as can be, a kind of dance-coloratura, has to look like fun or there's NO POINT.... And Verdy made it high-spirits, like Cecilia Bartolli throwing grace notes all over the place. Lorna Feijoo danced it with Damian Woetzel for some occasion, and every now and then the tape of it goes up on YouTube, briefly. BOTH are wonderful. He is SO generous and gracious, both to her and to the audience, and throws away his virtuoso steps as if they were presents, just a few little things he picked up in New York and thought we might like. She dances in a similar sociable spirit -- well, she's Cuban, and they DO that -- and it's just heavenly wonderful. Her variation is the most wonderful thing ever, those little passes are out of this world wonderful, they seem to be happening MILES below her, like she was Ray Bolger, and the diagonal is one long lacy phrase, ending with the most beautifully modulated chaines that I have ever seen, that winds down at the last minute into the kind of stillness Edwin Denby used to sigh over when Markova would end a phrase in perfect quiet.

I loved mydiorella.........

O yes, that is gorgeous! Delibes is unbelievably beautiful. So is the slow waltz from Sylvia, the kind of thing you have to call ravishing (Comes after the intermezzo on that clip, about one minute into it)

So far as I'm concerned, Don Rickles wasn't funny. he made crowds nervous, gave them the Wilis; but he wasn't funny. Joan Rivers is FUNNY. (I didn't see the Liz Taylor interview; I guess I could youtube it, though it just sounds like a flop.) Wit, Dr Johnson said, is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Freud said you laugh when you realize you're NOT going to have to invest emotion. I think both are right, and Rivers's typical joke unites their insights: viz "I saw Dolly Parton last night, such a sweet girl. She had twins, you know -- you didn't know? Yeah she breast-fed them -- they exploded."

Semenova's white swan really moved me -- especially Odette in her solo variation, which she made extremely intimate, tender, delicate, poignant. i have never seen anyone else make that dance so expressive. It's a difficult dance, and it looked like she chose to dance through it (like Suzanne Farrell) without worrying about whether or not she was on her leg, and she often was not but turned that to advantage and made it part of the phrasing, so the vulnerability and the bravery and hte fidelity to hte cantilena came through and made me love her.

o Christian, this is IMPOSSIBLE! How to choose!!! But here goes -- to actually dance to, there's nothing that tops Invitation to the Waltz (Spectre de la Rose) --it makes you want to fly, you just get carried away on it. The spring is in the music, To hear, or to see in the theater, the waltz from Serenade sweeps me up. it's so beautiful.

-In 1961." o my Lord. It must have been a great night for yu, Christian. I'm so glad you were able to be there.

She is FABULOUS in this clip. her variation is just astounding... I have watched them a number of times and like you I still have absolute admiration for Mme Alonso. In this youtube clip that Cristian posted, she remains extraordinary no matter her age(65). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm1Frz5jlFs I think it is wonderful that she will celebrate her birthday with ABT.

A book on the company -- Paris Modern: the Swedish Ballet, 1920-25 -- This EXCELLENT book -- I have a copy -- was actually the catalogue for an exhibition put on by the late GREAT Nancy van Norman Baer in SF which assembled fantastic materials from the Ballets Suedois. The essays are very helpful -- but the great thing about the book is the imagery -- the sets and costumes, the designs for these ballets were at least as wonderful as anything Diaghilev put on. Leger's designs for the Creation of the World set the ballet in Africa, with huge puppets 10 feet tall (think Julie Taymor's inspiration for Lion King) designed in a jazzy-African idiom, like Picasso's for Parade in being Cubist but more wonderful, I think. Nancy had a huge maquette of the stage, with sets and dancers and puppets represented, which just took your breath away. And the designs for Skating Rink were maybe even more wonderful. By all means, Pamela, get this book to accompany the biography.

o innopac, thank you!! He's pretty demanding, but look how they deliver. Also NB how less likely Dowell is to ask for those things -- the shoulders, in particular, or that extra-crossed croisee. The new ballerina has her head vertical at many places where Sibley had hers bowed -- which is DOUBTLESS the posture Ashton wanted, this is the reconciliation pdd and she's still mortified to discover that she was making love to an ass....

It was a benefit, wasn't it? In somebody's (Geltzer's?) honor? cast with nothing but ballerinas, who each did her signature variation. Petipa added the harp variation for Pavlova very late in his career. I can't find my source for this, but I THINK it was a divertissement plugged into a complete performance, rather like the Viennese new Year's practice of expanding the party scene in Die Fledermaus with 'special guest stars' singing party pieces.

That's Ed Sullivan who comes out to congratulate them at the end. He had the most-widely viewed TV variety show in the USA during hte 60s, shown on Sunday nights. Milions of people would have seen this broadcast. Under these circs -- dancing the last third of the pdd, for a TV audience on a variety show -- i.e., amidst these indignities -- they're suitably expressive, impressive, and beautiful. They certainly give something that audiences in the farthest reaches of the country could recognize as high-minded, stately, glorious, doomed. I wish I had seen it then, but we watched the Steve Allen show, on NBC, the opposite channel. I was in high school growing up in Mississippi at the time -- I had sheet music for Beethoven and Chopin, hard-copies of Hans Christian Andersen and Hawthorne's re-telling of hte Greek myths, records of Rubenstein and Melchior and Flagstadt and The Marriage of Figaro -- not very different from country gentry anywhere. But we didn't see great dancing like this. Sullivan, and the Bell Telephone Hour disseminated these things. Fonteyn can direct your eye across her body in fascinating ways -- the neck bend, the bird-like head, the tiny movements of her feet as her whole leg shimmers in the phrases at the very end -- the BIG back-bend in the middle -- she does not call attention to her leg in arabesque, which is not very high but is beautifully placed and is there like the vanilla in a chocolate cake. If it weren't perfect we'd hate her, but she's not calling attention to it, but to her eyes, her neck, her arms, her heart -- the swan/woman aspects. Lopatkina is close to this in the decisions she makes. her leg IS high in arabesque, but that's what's de rigeur these days. She's similarly about the eyes, the neck, the timing, the phrasing of serrender. THere may be a connection, maybe through Nureyev -- Lopatkina's coach was Kurgapkina, who was amazingly intelligent and deeply thoguhtful about the deep contaent of a role and was of course Nureyev's partner-in-crime and probably one of the people who challenged him most to think about what he wanted to show. it's probably no connection at all but a community of like-mindedness. I think this film was made around 1963 and it shows Fonteyn elegaic but not at her most expressive. I especially remember a full length performance they gave in 1967 in which they both hit heights they never reached before or after. This film is a happy memory of how the ballet was once danced. Thank you.

Someone must have mentioned James's chair in la Sylphide, and the ring and his tam -- actually, the moment when he holds up the ring, before giving it to Effie, which allows the Sylphide to take it from him and put it on her own hand, is perhaps the single greatest use of a prop I can think of in a ballet, since the gateway the two make as she reaches up for the ring is a fleeting image, but it marks the moment in which his heart enters the imaginary world and leaves this one behind. It's only reinforced when she throws his tam on the floor and he picks it up and follows her out the door into the other world.... The ribbons in Fille-- the BEST is the cummerbund that turns into a true-love knot -- which -- can it be coincidence? -- echoes the Mexican wedding dance "la Bamba" (as danced by the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico) where exactly the same motif occurs -- she takes hold of his cummerbund, he spins out of it, it's revealed to be 10 feet long, and then they lay it on the floor and kick it together with their feet and artfully craft it into a true-love know which tat the end of the dance they lift up and display to the audience in a flurry of zapateado footwork and the audience goes crazy.....

Don't forget the severed hand that the ballerina ends up holding at the end of one section -- which she dumps in the piano.... and the dance with the umbrellas is GENIUS....

FABULOUS thread. Carbro, a sarabande is in 3/4, very slow. Prokofiev's "dance of the Knights" (in Lavrovsky's version, the "pillow dance") is a march in 2/2. Or are you thinking of Juliet's dance with Paris? THAT one is a slow dance in triple metre.

is the first section of a fascinating, unsentimental, and deeply moving quasi-documentary "spectacle" made out of this topic by Jerome Bel featuring the POB dancer Veronique Doisneau; it's too late to make some such thing for Renee Estopinal, but Doisneau's case surely is representative of her class. "I never became a star. I was not talented enough and was too fragile physically. The ballets I loved most to dance are those of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, Rudolph Nureyev, and Jerome Robbins. Those I did not like to interpret were by Maurice Bejart and Roland Petit." A girl after my heart. Wonder what you all will think. Sorry if this has been posted before -- It's news to me, and I wanted to share it.

WOnderful! Thanks for posting htis. I love their phrasing -- though what's up with the music? They're drastically out of synch after a while. It can't have been this way on hte Firestone Hour -- and they both seem very musical dancers. I love his first "Ilove you" lunge -- it actually made tears spring to my eyes.

The Times has manhy irons in many fires. They're trying very hard not to look like a dodo in hte internet age -- so if they can make a splash with anew angle on Twitter, they score pretty big. Not necessarily with the rulers of the internet, but with the people their advertisers want to impress, and also with what remains ofthe general public -- those who pick up the paper 9or read it online0 "to know what's going on."

I've been thinking about this.... It sounds true, but it doesn't fit the way I feel about Legris's performance, so I wondered where my difference comes -- since I respect your knowledge and taste so much, I usually find I agree with you. The thing I realized is that for me, if I'm really listening to the music, sometimes I know what's coming -- even in a piece of music I don't know by heart. The composers who make me love them often set me up for what's coming, and when it arrives it's bot ha pleasure and a surprise and a fulfillment of expectations I didn't know I had. I find Legris's brown boy EXTREMELY musical, , actively musical, like he's listening like Fischer-Dieskau listened to Gerald Moore. this music is intensely nostalgic, and it evokes something long-lost, partly forgotten, but that IS already there -- so you'd maybe attack it since you heard the downbeat coming and might want to twist your shoulders or twizzle the leg cuz that's where the grace note belongs....

Edwin Denby, who was himself never personally unkind to a dancer -- well, he DID say that Lifar had had the great misfortune to gain weight all over his body except frm the knee down -- which truly WAS a great misfortune, since what Lifar had giong for him was mainly his 17 inch waist and his bendiness, Balanchine thoguht him the only man who was plastically as interesting as a woman -- Denby once wrote that dancers shouldn't read criticism. it was bad for them, like smoking. A dancer's body is his instrument. If a pianist played an instrument with a faulty action, or an ugly sound, it would be important to mention that problem -- whether or not the pianist managed to overcome it and make the concert interesting anyway. In ballet, like in any form of theater, what you see is what you get. The way a dancer looks is the most immediate part of the medium. Sometimes a dancer is transfigured by the act of dancing. This was notably true of Baryshnikov, who had a short stubby body and was not particularly prepossessing -- until he moved. And the transfiguration was awe-inspiring. Some dancers, like Suzanne Farrell, are beautiful before they do anything. Runway-model beautiful. Others are transfigured by their musicality and grace (Farrell also had those virtues -- AND, I have to give her credit for this, she was willing -- as in Movements for Piano and Orchestra -- to let herself be 'ugly," if it allowed her to do the freaky movement with the right phrasing. All of this is fair to comment upon. If you DON'T, you're leaving out one of the most important things that the people who were not there would have to know. If they send an ugly girl out to dance Juliet, she's gonna have to be a hell of a dancer -- and if she succeeds, THAT is a triumph.

Perky reminded me of the shot-out-of-a-cannon leaping girl in Ballo della Regina, who comes flying in from the wings (near the end of the dance for the four demis) -- nobody who's seen it will ever forget it, it's SO thrilling. TEXTBOOK example of what John Weaver called the darting movement....

Monica Mason made quite a splash in that entrance, too -- what a great role!