Paul Parish

A) Can anyone give details of Ananiashvili's royal ancestry? B) Georgian folk dance happens way on top of the foot, both men and women. Some think it's got to do with pointing the foot as part of the use of stirrups in horsemanship. The women bourree. The male dancing is truly spectacular -- the Lezghinka is done on the knuckles of the toes, in soft-kid boots -- we're talking pointe but with no box, so the guys are knuckled over - -and then they throw themselves down onto their knees and bounce back up. There's a very fine Georgian folk company here in San Francisco, and the boys are stellar. But it's ALSO worth noting that Marius Petipa was very proud of the way he danced the Lezghinka, and he was still doing it at 60. C) Tolstoy's wonderful early book "The Cossaks" is really fun reading, and it's mostly about his participation as a soldier in Russia's attempts to extend influence over the Caucasus -- the situation in Chechnya (and Georgia) hasn't really changed at the deepest level since he wrote it -- and tolstoy having the amazing sympathies that he had, you can get a very good idea of how incredibly entrenched and fierce and independent-minded these mountain folk are, fabulous sneaks -- and even get some idea about mountain-folk everywhere -- roughly speaking, they're ALL of them (Basques, Welsh, Scots Chechnyans, Georgians, etc.) the descendants of proud peoples who've been over-run and forced to take refuge in the mountains, where they can maintain their independence and where they can cultivate their pride in the old ways and take pot-shots whenever they can at the conquerors....

That night in 1949 may have been a mass hallucination -- but nearly all agree on how they felt, and there were lots of them. Thre are two other important factors-- 1) Constant Lambert was conducting, and even those who weren't crazy about Fonteyn (Balanchine and Kirstein in especial) thought Lambert was out of this world, and that he and the music made the dancers look better than they were. I went on a pilgrimage to see what Lambert was like and found a recording of him conducting Giselle (in the UC Berkeley music library), and that explained a LOT. He's like Barbirolli or Beecham, it's unbelievable, the way that music breathed -- the overture sounds like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony all over again. He's a GREAT romantic conductor. and 2) de Valois insisted on getting the background right. Like Disney, she felt that the surest way to erode the fascination of a fantasy was to have small mistakes in the background. There is a lot of truth to this. Look at the video of RB's Aurora's Wedding -- yes Fonteyn is almost awful, but look at the polonaise at the where the COURTIERS enter -- it's fabulous! the QUEEN! They are so HAPPY!!! It';s not a bunch of stiff nameless aristocrats - -these are real people, and they're ecstatic to see each other again, and today! Only Disney, and Lavrovsky, can get this stuff right like this. Given the way the Ballets Russes was performing, looking tired and tattered by many accounts, and the completely different aesthetic of Ballet Society, Americans may have never seen a production as polished and "static-free" as Saddler's Wells's Sleeping Beauty.

Nureyev danced so far past his day, and horrifyingly continued to try to dance in the old way, that many star dancers must have felt an inward pressure to retire before they looked deluded. Martins was taking on many extra responsibilities, but he retired while his polish remained uncrazed, and I remember thinking he didn't want to go out like Nureyev. He didn't say that, I don't think, at least not publicly; nobody SAID it; but it seemed that a lot of dancers retired a little early in that era. Since it's possible now to feel that that era has passed, and that younger dance-fans don't remember what it felt like to see Nureyev dance SO badly, and hear large numbers of people cheering for heroic things that they must have hallucinated.

You all are very lucky to have Lorna Feijoo. I saw her with the Cuban Ballet some years back when they came through Berkeley. She is SO musical - and her jumps are lighter than air, and they're SO HUGE. She is one of the finest Giselles I've ever seen live.

Me Too, Perky -- the adage in Barocco. The end of Prodigal Son. The first time I saw Symphony in C, San Francisco Ballet was performing in Berkeley, and Betsy Erickson made me cry in the adagio. Same place Allegra makes me cry, when she swoops idown into that penchee arabesque and goes round the corner. The end of Dido and Aeneas -- last time I saw it, here in Berkeley, with Morris as Dido, retreating one step forward, 2 steps back, 1 step forward, 2 steps back, until she exited through the slit in the curtian center stage. Audible. The end of Swan Lake totally destroyed me, Dowell and Sibley. I found myself kvelling in Aurora's last variation, to hte violin solo, when Joanna Berman danced it in SanFrancisco, when she started corkscrewing her wrists started doing that Russian dnace on pointe

There's a lot to be learned from cemeteries. A lot about the living as well as the dead. In Solzhenitsin's Cancer Ward, maybe he's exaggerating, but it's clear that under Stalin people were "strongly discouraged" from visiting cemeteries, since it was backward-looking and not optimistic, and the state required everyone to put shoulder to wheel and further the revolution. In my one experience of a former soviet-dominated culture, i.e., Poland, I found the main cemetery in Bytom was as busy as Central Park -- children playing, grown-ups visiting. I watched as a lady in stockings and pumps came up to a grave, reached up int o a branch of the tree standing over it, withdrew a cloth, knelt down and polished the entire grave, changed the water in the vase, replaced the tired flowers with new ones, and sat down for 15 minutes and read from a book. The Jewish cemetery was full of graves but I was the only visitor. The pre-WW2 grand rebbe's enormous black-basalt tomb was inscribed in Hebrew and in German with quotations from Job and (if I remember right) from Faust. Every tomb that bore a death-date post 1945 said the deceased was born in Lodz. While I was standing there a soccer ball came over the wall, followed by 10 urchins who got me to come over with them into the parking lot on the other side and be their goalie. I could have been in some danger -- Bytom now has a lot of unemployment, and drunken parents put their kids on the street, and they roam in packs. My home town in Mississippi is near the river and one of the oldest settlements in the state. The Catholic and Jewish cemeteries always draw me when I go back there. I am proud to say I grew up in a town with no anti-semitism, where Jewish families were at the top of society. The synagogue has been turned into a museum, since all the Jewish families have left PG, but the cemetery is crowded and maintained like a golf course. The Catholic cemetery contains more graves for the year 1873 (the year of the Yellow Fever epidemic) than for hte entire 20th century. A quietly stunning fact. Sorry, I've wandered far from ballet.

Hey Estelle, let's call it pilgrimage, huh? I have a rubbing of the Russian cross from Balanchine's grave. It was made for me by a really dear friend, over the bookcase in my study.

Thank you Tikititatata -- wonderful, in fact. You could SET this ballet. I wish I'd seen as many performances as you did. I believe you about Katita, I've heard it from lots of people, even some not-Katita fans, that she REALLY makes that part make sense. And I agree, Jaime Garcia Castillo is amazing, the levels of intelligence, imagination, style, and taste he brings to the stage. He is answerable.

I think Macaulay was brave and did his job, which is to represent the concerns of the audience -- and the audience has not forgotten that Ms Kistler lodged charges against her husband years ago any more than the public has forgotten that Balanchine fired Farrell, then took her back. This is common knowledge, and it's germane. The onstage slap awakened memories of the offstage slap for me when I first read about it -- even though in California, I haven't seen the ballet yet,i t's the one detail I have VIVIDLY pictured. I have to agree with Mel, this is the one gesture that seems to resonate in a ballet that usually has its own wires crossed. THE VERY fine thing about Macaulay's essay is the compare/contrast essay he 's written about appropriate use of this gesture in other works, which heightens the sense that Martins is confused as to the KIND of ballet he is making. ............ PS his article is not British tabloidism, which is of course unbelievably vulgar. The Brits are different from us (I lived in England for 3 years, which is long enough). Just where you would NOT expect it, they are human and not squeamish; if something is on EVERYBODY's mind, they'll talk about it. Their journalism is also in the best sense personal -- they do not pretend to be objective, they just try (the best of them, and Macaulay is one of their best) to find out as much as they can and then say what they think. I admire that.

Tikititatata (love your name, it sounds like a Kathak rhythm), I sympathize. It's reasonable for anybody to find that Don Q is some form of shaggy mess but sometimes you love it anyway. Different folks will object to different bits -- but it's been re-worked over and over and OVER so much, it tends to pull apart anyway, and it depends on how well the bit is done as to whether I like it that night. But I'm curious: You said "I also prefer the traditional choreography for the Act 3 pdd." What do you mean by that? Do you mean the Bolshoi's version, without the pas de chevals? Or what? Iwish I knew WHAT could be considered THE traditional wedding pas de deux.

Thatssomint, that is a WONDERFUL story. yes, I'd be touched, too. i have a single shoe given to me by Kyra Nichols when I was in new York in 1992. She'd danced the Sugar Plum Fairy; I loved her in htat role, she was so sweet to the little angels. She also danced immaculately, but I loved hte way her graciousness never diminished no matter how "busy" she got with her footwork. I know her from her visits home to Berkeley, where I live and study ballet with her mother, the great teacher Sally Streets, and when I went backstage, she asked if I wanted a shoe and signed one for me. i've got it in my study bookcase next to Bernard Taper's biography of Balanchine.

Well, drb et al., it just shows to go you. [FF, I laughed out loud.] BUT-- this is one of those cases where the myth is sure-fire and the dancers can always over-ride the choreography. They did with Misha's Swan Lake, they'll do it with R+J. The arc you find in Katie's performance was already there in Ulanova's and Bessmertnova's (by the book dancing with Tybalt, etc.), and it's there in hte music. THe kids may eventually figure out how to make the puzzle you mention work; it's usually that they have to figure out the breathing. Helgi Tomasson's RnJ for SFB is not answerable choreography either, but two ballerinas -- Julie Diana and Sarah van Patten -- have made it into tremendously moving theater by listening to the music and telling the story.

This could rival Sorella Englund's Madge. Very exciting -- and what she says about the fairies is so intelligent. If these things can be realized, it sure is good planning.

Gina, my heart goes out to you. I've just come home from the Isadora Duncan Awards ceremony, where we all mourned Smuin's death, though we were all still in shock. The Smuin Ballet dancer, Amy Seiwert came forward to speak on behalf of Smuin's dancers, many of whom came out with her. There was an altar in the lobby set up with photos and flowers by Krissy Keefer, the founder of Dance brigade, who has always proclaimed her admiration for his "Song for Dead Warriors." The whole house was filled with a sense of loss -- Sarah Linnie Slocum, who was his lighting designer, was one of the names read out during the 'in Memoriam" section, by Frank Shawl and Joanna Berman, the MCs -- and it was impossible for me not to see Joanna 20 years ago in "Hearts," in her yellow dress in the "small" role of the "other" girl, which she danced so brilliantly. Evelyn Cisneros has moved to Los Angeles and wasn't there, alas. It was not a memorial, of course, but merely a ceremony colored by his memory -- though he had never, I don't believe, won an Izzy award. Though he HAD come to a ceremony to speak on behalf of Sarah Linnie Slocum when she won an Izzie award. Many many dancers have owed a lot to Michael Smuin, but no-one is so attached in the public's mind with Smuin as Cisneros is -- his Cinderella, his heroine in Song for Dead warriors, and one of his great Juliets (she also danced the heroine, the "Garance" character, in "Hearts"). Larger than life. Lots to think about here.

Talespinner, I totally agree with you -- and he's really raised the ballet in my estimation. WIth him in hte role bringing the piece to a real focus, I get so happy it looks like the best thing in a jazz style since "Company B." FYI, here's what I wrote about it for SF's gay weekly paper. "From the look of it Saturday afternoon, the kids who dance it best are probably the second cast. Everybody gets it, the idiom is theirs, and they were out there tearing it up. Rory Hohenstein (the Boy in Red, who dashes in and sets the tone for each section with dazzling virtuoso material) has totally got the boogie in his butt; watching the rhythms go snaking up and down his spine and out his arms was fantastically satisfying. He can do the big ballet tricks and make them musical, hold the finish of a pirouette, stay up until it seems a miracle, then bite it off right when the saxophone does. Unlike Gonzalo Garcia, on whom the piece was made, who obviously digs doing all these interesting moves but seems never to have seen or heard of them before, Hohenstein looks like he's talking his mother tongue." http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?s...ance&article=64

THANK you THANK you THANK you for these wondeful reports. When the Bolshoi was here (last year? year before?), their Raymonda gave me the feelings you are describing -- a wonderful upsurge of talent, and of deep love of dancing itself. Krysanova was incandescent then - the only time I've ever seen her, but I can't forget it. Oh yes, "here" is Berkeley California.

Re the glamorous Yuan Yuan Tan; Most of us in SF say "wan wan" -- as in why so pale and wan, fond lover." But my friends who actually speak Chinese say something that sounds more like "uEN uEN," with the u being that umlauted "dude" sound but very brief, like hte vermouth in a vodka, it's just a bit of color at the VERY beginning. it starts off quite constricted between the molars, cheeks sucked in, back of the tongue rising toward the soft palate, and then the back of the tongue drops, the "eh" gets thrown against the hard palate, and the middle of the tongue pushes up and stops it. It all kinda happens 'in hte nose" and it's fun to say

Hey sz -- yes, Ashley and Cook are wonderful in 4 T's. That's a wonderful video. and so are the tilted pelvises, very dramatic. The flexed feet are less dramatic, but they're there --esp in "THEME" section at the beginning, before the variations begin --

Mark Goldweber will be a big loss for the Joffrey.

wonderful pictures -- love the old ones.

Anthony Dowell, or Nureyev. Both played him as Hamlet-like, very complex, imaginative, delicate, not very fit for this world.

Canbelto, thank you for including the name of Igor Kolb. What wonderful style he has. Yeah, that's quite a list

How balletic do they look? Well, I have the album jacket for a recording of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" with a picture of Merce and Carolyn on the cover -- will send a jpeg of it to a moderator to see if one can post it for BA viewers.

you know, Kfw, I'm so hungry to read the book, but I haven't got started on it yet, so I'm kinda jumping the gun anyway. And I apologize. It's great to have you picking up things she says and dealing with them.

Dear kfw, Sorry, i was tactless. All I meant was that brown can't be on the sidelines about some issues: as one of the world's outstanding PRACTITIONERS of Cecchetti technique taken in the Cunningham direction, she's as entitled to be testy about flexed wrists -- it's not just wrists, it's breaking the perfect arc of the arms from the center of the back, with the energy extending out through the fingertips -- as say a Vaganovist might be re the proper placement of the foot in sur le coup de pied.