Paul Parish

It played for me.... with some catches, till I closed all other windows, and then it was fine. I don't think this video does much for Kronstam -- his choreography is 'ungrateful -- or as a dance-friend used to say, "hard and ugly." I admire most his graciousness throughout. but Simone really does look wonderful -- her timing, focus, and generosity serve the dance and the audience in a wonderful way. WOnderful phrasing, and wonderful stillness. The finale's fouettes are very exciting. Thank you for posting this.

I love Antic Meet. I bought a video of the whole thing about 10 years ago when he Cunningham company was selling off its stock of old tapes. It is one of my favorite dances of all time. there are many sections, many of them famous i their own right. This Hilarious duet is NOT one ofhte standouts. It's a little like dubliners, wherehte famous sections are Ivy Day in he Committee Room and The Dead but ALL the stories are great and any one by itself is powerful. THe great thing about htis piece is how thankless it is to any one except for Merce [who famously ran hurdles in his side yard, superbly, but never went out for track].. E.g., and especially, for steve Paxton. For me, it's impossible to see this and not think -- o, that's why Paxton invented invented Contact Improv. he has said, "I wanted to have more fun onstage." And yet it is SO droll. I also can't help wondering if that isn't one of Edward Gorey's mink coats Merce wears to drag Paxton off stage. RG, can you advise on that matter?

Thanks, everyone. Please keep them coming. Helene, thanks for that sentimental journey. Next time I'm in the state theater, I'll rub the beads in memory of your friendship. such a dancerly practice. And thanks Bobbi for reporting back to us.

Out of many, this was one of my favorite posts of Carbro's, on the thread "Corps dancers we love" (from some 10 years ago): "For me," she wrote, "the huge gaping hole remains in every role danced by Renee Estopinal. Tall, dark and pretty, she exuded sophistication, elegance and glamur and a certain girl-next-door accessibility and warmth. She was also modest, discussed as an indispensable characteristic on another thread. She never fussed over anything at a time when City's dancers tended to be very mannered. "Among her most notable roles were the Agon first pas de trois, demi in Third Movement Bizet (stage left), the Theme in Goldberg, and -- here's the vacuum -- Who Cares?, the Somebody Loves Me Section (the female quintet), where her status as a first among equals (the lady in the middle) really has not been matched by any of her successors. I know I am asking for a lot, but hey . . . can't help it. "As friends have heard me whine many a time, I miss Renee!!! " I miss Carbro! I propose that anybody who wants to find a post of hers you particularly liked or thought characteristic, and post it here. We'll have a little memorial service of our own, for those who can't come to New York next week.

I met Carley through this site, we became such friends. As with so many others she met through here, she suggested to me that we get together when we were in the same town as an outgrowth of the friendship made through here-- since her posts were so smart, reasonable, learned, kind, generous to the dancers, so full of wit and information and knowledge --she'd seen a lot of shows I never saw, come to love dancers i'd only heard of -- Rene Estopinal! the dancers she loved, and hte things she loved about them, are really a touchstone for me in extending and confirming my own taste. She had insight. It's WONDERFUL to have someone you feel loves the art as much as you do and can understand the intensity of the excitement you feel when something really beautiful has happened -- I was missing her already as her posts dwindled down to a precious few. Like QUiggin, I was always on the lookout for her posts; I always wanted to know what she thought, about nearly anything. She set a standard for how to be a balletomane. her generosity to everyone on this site was wonderful to see. ALexandra must know best -- but even from my perspective, it was clear how much WORK she did to keep this site companionable. What a wonderful person. What a Mensch! I wish I could go to New York for the memorial. I'll dedicate my class to her on Sunday.

Good Lord! Just t o see Maelstrom again --i have SUCH vivid memories of that , I LONG to see that again. And Ratmansky's Piano Concerto? It's all stuff they dance well; one could carp and wish they'd do Concerto barocco [which I could see every day and never get tired of saying I don't get to see it enough], but then I could wish I were a rich man and hop over to Paris to see it. If I could I sure would. It's a wonderfully varied program.

Sandi, I've just kinda pieced this together myself, don't know where to send you for references -- but after the fall of Napoleon, it became dangerous to espouse "Liberty, Equality, and fraternity!" All the monarchies of Europe were restored, each with a very conservative government and a secret police ready to send outspoken liberals to prison. Some of the spookiness in ETA Hofmann comes from the atmosphere of terror which suddenly clamped down. "Prince Metternich's anti-liberal crusades began to put Hoffmann in situations that tested his conscience. Thousands of people were accused of treason for having certain political opinions, and university professors were monitored during their lectures." [that's from Wikipedia] ALthough he was a civil servant working for the courts [as well as a composer, novelist, and journalist], he could not resist caricaturing the bigwigs, and they went after him. Napoleon fell in 1815; Nutcracker and hte Mouseking was written in 1816; Sandmann [Coppellia] was written in 1817. He died just a few years later, in 1822.

Thanks for posting, Helene! All of them are adorable -- but the thing that struck me is how great Sendak's designs are -- I'd forgotten, he makes Drosselmeyer look like Voltaire -- that's him the most gleeful of all at the popped crazy-string can moment. With his white wig, he's a gentleman of the 18th century who's lived into the Biedermeyer period and has had to scale down all his hopes for Enlightenment [but Voltaire had already done that in Candide -- what more like cultivating your garden than doing brilliantly subversive things for your godchild, to stimulate her imagination to hope for more than the Familienkreis -- though, indeed, in that period of the restoration of all the monarchies, and their secret police, the family circle was the only safe place in which to espouse the values of universal human rights. Sendak's designs are VERY soundly based -- and yet, there's no need to go beneath the surface to find them satisfying. But they are subversive, in the nicest possible way.

Oh, that sounds like such fun! said Sandik I'll second that!! How I wish I could see it. The timing, the pauses....

Thanks for those highlights, Peggy R. I did not expect YuanYuan Tan to be a contralto.

I thought she [Adams] was wonderful -- very light and fairy-like. the tempi are quick, she can never let her weight go back into the heel, since she's got to flit off right away into the next thing -- but that's what it's like to be a fairy. And i thought she was gracious throughout. BTW, they were probably dancing on concrete floors.

Thank you Christian, for bringing up the suhbject in he first place, and for posting the links. All of them are wonderful, just wonderful I love the fresh tempos. Watching those flowers do those steps that big and that fast and that close together is truly thrilling..... and Sandy that's choice, truly FABULOUS!! That girl gets it. Lily Verlaine is pretty good by itself!

O god, Glebb, I miss you. I can't get over how much I l;ove this ballet, and how grateful i am to Dolin for staging his version, which is of course a pastiche and a re-imagining, but I haven't seen anything by Lacotte that can equal it. If we had Perrot's of course, we'd have something to measure it against -- but but but BUT, i say, I watch this ballet over and over again, and I can not tell which version of it satisfies me most. Probably hte earliest Alonso version, since her footwork was perfect, even in cabrioles htat barely left hte ground, that just "tore away form the floor' -- and everything was chillingly perfect, which is devastatingly diva-like, to my lights -- but of course the Trocks are great, better even than they know, and I also love these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWGxQsZCbaQ [Ananiashvili, Gad, Terekhova Kistler], in which i alternatively hate and love Kistler. The question IS [as the adorable Sylvy suggested] who do you like the least? I used to think Kistler was too butch, but tonight, I LOVE her. I must be out of my mind, but in all the group dances, she seems to me the one who most loves the steps, those GOLDEN steps. Good god, why doesn't anyone give Dolin credit? These steps are WONDERFUL! It's excellent choreography! It's things dancers want to do and they know how to do and it's not about rivalry, it's about being like Ariel in the Tempest,. "I flamed amazement!!!!" And then there's the Kirov version RG mentions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YKoW4sPqZA with Mezentseva as Taglioni grave and majestic, which is glorious -- with Kolpakova no less and the divine Komleva, and [to my mind] Evteyeva bringing up the rear. WOnderful performance. Evdokimova lingers in my mind as he best Taglioni ever -- but I can't fidnd hte link. Evdokimova had THE most immaculate placement I've ever seen in a dancer who could move fast; her Sylphide is far and away my favorite, partly for timing and geometry both.... Glebb, I wish you were here to continue this conversation. God bless you.

Well, helene, Christian, et al -- perhaps you haven't seen the pink-elephants ballet in the DISNEY movie. Americans knew hookahs very well, and weren't always so averse. But my hunch is that it's marijuana he's supposed to be smoking -- so ARABIAN-- assassins=hashish and all no question, Arabian is dance about smoke, the arms should be like smoke; Americans knew about all this from Ruth St Denis and DW Griffith and Hollywood Sheiks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8mVKL4RHxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHeFx-jf8OY Most Americans knew this kind of dance from vaudeville and carnival hootchie-kootchie, which was sometimes I'm sure very well-danced. Mark Morris himself dances the Arabian dance -- or did until recently -- in his "Hard Nut" version of Nutcracker as a FABULOUS imitation of Isadora Duncan in veils, with veiled reference to the assassins. Balanchine of course knew better than most of us do the Arabian dance that Fokine choreographed for Glinka's opera "Ruslan and Ludmila," which is a whole scene, a magic-induced vision that Ludmila's Arabian suitor endures -- Fokine echoes Bayaderka in this, the scene is almost on the scale of "Shades." When SF Opera and Gergiev's Maryinsky revived the opera, we in SF were dazzled by the production and amazed to see the pictures we knew from Diaghilev's Festin de Pierre come to life -- it was one of the productions Diaghilev brought to Paris in the very first Ballets Russes tours, renamed Festin -- it was really the last act of "Ruslan and Ludmila," and a VERY GREAT THING IT WAS.

I see that Yuri Possokhov's Classical Symphony was nominated also, for choreography. There's no mention in the article, but Kochetkova was the ballerina at the premiere in San Francisco. The article did not mention what critic nominated it nor what company the nominating critic saw perform it nor where -- it has been danced in Moscow and I think in Berlin. I'm glad to see it was nominated --I think it's a wonderful ballet and that American critics don't rank it high enough.

WONDERFUL link, thanks so much for posting that! What a guy. I saw him last when he received his Isadora DUncan Award for lifetime achievement a couple of years back in San Francisco. He's always so gracious.

FANTASTIC news!! IT's such a thrilling story -- Martin Duberman tells it very well, also, in his great bio of Kirstein [which is one of the best biographies I've ever read about anybody anywhere].

Company style includes many small details the audience is not supposed to notice but that create the company's flavor, accent, attack. Do frappes go straight to the floor or do they lift up slightly at the end; Do pas de chevals wrap and go straight to the floor, or does the foot rise up the standing leg and make a larger arc before extending. Balanchine taught both at different periods -- if you watch Tallchief coaching Judith Fugate in the pdd from Scotch symphony, you'll see her insist on a pas de cheval that stays low -- she corrects it several times, and it's very beautiful when Fugate does it her way. By Ashley's time, pas de cheval had become an airier move. Is the preparation for pirouette from a straight back leg, with the arm in arabesque in front [balanchine]? Straight back leg with the arm rounded [which I'm told Careno is asking for at SanJose Ballet]? Does spot stay behind for the first part of the turn and only then flip round, or does the head go round first [which Williams taught]? Are the fingers rounded [Vaganova and all the West] or extended [bolshoi]? That's the sort of thing [and there are many more of these details] that company class is for: it's necessary to creating a true unison, without any "noise" -- and it's reasonable for an AD to require it, especially for the corps so individuals won't be pulling focus. [bTW, these are just examples off the top of my head-- I'm apologizing in advance for mistakes. I shouldn't trust my memory, and you shouldn't either. The point is that differences LIKE these are important to company style.

o YES, I totally see Peter Pan in there.

I agree [with you and with him]-- it's one of his best pieces, and it's SO true, how much of a dancer's essence one can see from WAY far away. When I saw Plisetskay live, the only tie, I was sitting in hte back of the balcony, and still she slayed me.

Sandik said 'several times she took what I thought looked like a modified second position, sometimes with her arms on her hips' yes, indeed, and her arms in a grand second position like Raymonda, and if both hands go to the hips instead of one going to the back of the head, well, it STILL seems to me kinda like Raymonda.

I'd say that van Patten, though she's been a star since she was young, is an old soul. Her Juliet [in Denmark] actually slipped on the stairs as she made her ballroom entrance and it didn't bother her.

I'm sorry, everybody -- and thanks, RG -- Though that's scary -- it is SO easy to imagine d'Amboise in the role, I'd swear I've seen him do it. Is there no recording out there that shows him dancing the role? I see from Googling that he's doing coaching sessions for archival purposes -- which I would certainly love to see, and maybe that's enflamed my imagination. It's been a long time since I watched that tape, and the memory plays tricks. I've noticed, my imagination is often stronger than my memory. I'd still swear that's Marisa Lopez with Het.

The second song is "Alley Cats" -- she seems to be doing a jazz Raymonda. Works for me. I adore Plisetskaya - -i waited 90 minutes for her to come out of hte theater once, she autographed my souvenir program up the side of her leg in the centerfold Carmen, in which she did a lot of poses like these.

I like them quite a lot -- unlike the YT commenters, I think theylook like they're enjoying htemselves. THe jumping girl looks SO MUCH like Marisa Lopez, who used to dance with SFB, it's a joy to seee her up there, dancing so joyously -- she isn't stretching her ankles a lot, but she's dancing with her WHOLE body in a way I really enjoy. Also, the Patty girl is very appealing; it's only the Marni girl who's unable to throw her pelvis around. But then, I've seen Elizabeth Loscavio dance this role, and nobody can measure up to the wit sensuality, and preposterousness of that -- it's as if ROssini had written it,the way she danced it, we were screaming. The cameraman isn't doing any favors to the boy, who's unfortunately got a nose that's in the way of his smile but a REALLY good partner. I love this ballet. To anyone else who loves Who Cares, please, try to find the CBC recording from when it was new -- KARIN stole hte show. The steps have been changed, but she just horsed around and it was out of this world -- none of those jetes battus, but man could she jump, and it was a house afire. And biding my time, the boys' dance, wasn't a bunch of bankers but Astaire-ish hoofers, sweeter guys, in light-colored trousers so you could see their legs. And Jacques was almost a lil Abner, he was so sweet cute and hunky , not corny exactly but very very appealing and "innocent." A wonderful wonderful thing.