Paul Parish

Well, kfw, it's a little more complicated than that. She's a ballet dancer working in a modern aesthetic, and her allegiances are IN BALLET more to the Cecchetti's geometry than to Balanchine's -- so flexing the wrists is almost a mortal sin. And Cunningham's sense of space COULD be said to derive from taking Cecchetti's "box" and treating it as a Rubik's cube, by comparision to which Balanchine's kaleidoscopic use of the stage IS still tied to the idea of the audience as "the tired businessman." I guess all I'm asking for is to treat her "complaints" as being worth considering. (NB she worships Margot Fonteyn.) She's VERY VERY smart.

Canbelto, you are SO right about Fonteyn's bad day -- hse is just OFF --and Sibley is so bird-like. The Effie on the Hubbe RDB Sylphide was extremely fine -- extremely neat dancing, in her pretty little black pumps, exquisite little jumps that don't leave the ground and just make her look complacent and earthbound and un-impetuous and darling but doomed to be left. Everything about that production is deeply thought-out (Henning Kronstam directed it), the casting is perfect, and each one does his/her part to create the whole. The flashy people -- James, Sylphide, and MADGE( the amazing SOrella Englund) are flashy, and everybody else -- Gurn, Effie, the mother (fabulously underplayed by Kirsten Simone) is earthbound in the nicest possible way. Incredible ensemble playing.

Great topic! THank you. And Welcome. I see this is your FIRST POST. What a good one!

It's great that she did this article about him -- he's become a mesmerizing performer, almost seems to be swimming in the air, like he's got some special purchase on it other people don't have. I haven[t seen him in the Brubeck yet, but I believe everything she says, sicne I've seen those qualities in the Forsythe, and in a new little ballet by Julia Adam -- and it would be FABULOUS to see the music rippling through the principal dancer in this piece....

I'm dazzled by the commentary you guys are making, and it makes me regret that I've disabled my television and can't watch the show. Especially since I DID watch a friend's tapes of the last competitions last year and was fascinated by the abilities -- political, temperamental, and kinesthetic -- of Emmet and (was it Joey?), who both had very big gifts to start with. Emmett had the enormous advantage of "having" an African-American vocabulary of shimmies, shoulder-pops, and hip moves already, which Cheryl took brilliant advantage of, that ultimately registered with the fans at home in a way that Joey's grand ecartes and other dance tricks did not. That was QUITE a competition. I've done a LITTLE ballroom dancing myself -- well, rather a lot of Lindy hop, which is more an educated street dance and certainly is not one of the approved ballroom genres, but still it IS a dance that uses frame and closed position and has a lot of rules for how and when you may break away and come back together, for which frame is essential. Which I mention because it's where I first encountered "frame" and the idea of closed position. SO I'm going to try to give Helene a layman's understanding idea of frame, based on how I learned it. In San Francisco, all the Lindy leads learned to follow, and all the follows learned to lead, so we don't call leads "He" and follows "she." And we learned to do it with one of us having their eyes closed, so you'd really feel the connection -- which is an exercise that makes the connection so inexpressibly sweet you never again wonder why judges value frame and connection, for it is the crown and apogee of dancing with someone else. What makes the connection possible is the sacrifice of a degree of individual freedom to "Rules," so that you can gain in freedom as a couple. And most of us agreed that the sacrifice is worth it for the inexplicable, at times almost miraculous fluidity of communication back and forth from one to the other, almost instantaneous, where an impulse would be detected almost as soon as it arose. Which makes it possible to be witty and make your partner laugh. So the basis of it is to clarify yourself: without being rigid about it, you keep your shoulders over your hips. It's a Gestalt, an ideal, of where your bones ought to be -- in fact they have to go off-center when you move, but as in ballet, basically, you want economy, and that means staying centered, shoulders over hips. In the basic closed position, your shoulders and hips should be square onto your partner's. (A simple variant, "promenade" position in foxtrot has you angled in a parallelogram rather than a square, so you can move easily on a diagonal.) So if you're following, and the leader steps into you, you should respond by stepping backwards as far as "his" impulse moves you, and in exactly the direction "he" has indicated (i.e., not a little to the left or right). Your whole body should respond in this way. If his left foot and shoulder come forward but his right arm holds your hip in place, you should twist. Otherwise, you should NOT twist. Otherwise, you'll never be able to turn. And turning as a couple, sharing a center, is deep deep bliss. Of course, twisting is fun, and most flourishes involve twisting of some sort -- but rationing, subordinating them to geometry, is what makes classic ballroom dancing classical. I'm probably saying a LOT of things wrong, and you experts please correct me. But I remember how the light came on for me when I had all this explained for me. Needless to say, I still twist too much.

This is an official press release from SanFrancisco Ballet FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRINCIPAL DANCER GONZALO GARCIA TO DEPART SAN FRANCISCO BALLET FOLLOWING THE 2007 REPERTORY SEASON SAN FRANCISCO, Wednesday, April 4, 2007 San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson today announced that Principal Dancer Gonzalo Garcia will leave the Company following the 2007 Repertory Season. Garcia, who has danced with SF Ballet since 1998, intends to remain active in the ballet world and will perform several engagements with Christopher Wheeldon's new company, Morphoses, as a guest dancer this summer and fall. "Over the past twelve years it has been a pleasure to watch Gonzalo develop from a young student in the School into an accomplished principal dancer," said Tomasson. "I wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors." Born in Zaragoza, Spain, Garcia began his training at Estudio de Danza María de Avila. In 1995, he enrolled in San Francisco Ballet School, and that same year he became the youngest dancer to win the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne competition. During his twelve-year tenure with San Francisco Ballet, both in the School and Company, Garcia has performed a diverse array of works from the SF Ballet Repertory. As a student in the School he performed Tomasson's Simple Symphony and the pas de deux from Bournonville's Flower Festival at Genzano. As a Company member he has danced numerous leading roles, including Romeo in Tomasson's Romeo & Juliet, Basilio in Tomasson/Possokhov's Don Quixote, Prince Siegfried in Tomasson's Swan Lake, and Albrecht in Tomasson's Giselle, among others. Garcia has had works created for him by notable choreographers, including Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris, Helgi Tomasson, Stanton Welch, and Christopher Wheeldon. In addition, he has performed works by George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Wayne McGregor, Jerome Robbins, and Hans van Manen. He has toured extensively and made guest appearances in eminent theaters throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Garcia will perform in Lubovitch's Elemental Brubeck, Balanchine's Symphony in C, and Tomasson/Possokhov's Don Quixote during the 2007 Repertory Season. For more information on the 2007 Repertory Season, please visit www.sfballet.org. San Francisco Ballet As America's oldest professional ballet company, San Francisco Ballet has enjoyed a long and rich tradition of artistic firsts since its founding in 1933, including performing the first American productions of Swan Lake and Nutcracker, as well as the first twentieth-century American Coppélia. San Francisco Ballet is one of the three largest ballet companies in the United States. Guided in its early years by American dance pioneers and brothers Lew, Willam and Harold Christensen, San Francisco Ballet currently presents more than one hundred performances annually, both locally and internationally. Under the direction of Helgi Tomasson for more than two decades, the Company has achieved an international reputation as one of the preeminent ballet companies in the world. In 2005, San Francisco won the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award, its first, in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Dance, for its 2004 London tour. In 2006, San Francisco Ballet was the first non-European company elected Company of the Year in Dance Europe magazine's annual readers' poll. * * *

Hmmmm -- sz, you may be right, I haven't seen any Wheeldon for a while -- but his flexed feet seem to me very reminiscent of those in 4 Temperaments.

It's the best dance-writing at the Times since John Martin. Bound to stimulate discussion in every way. Very good for everybody. May even make arts editors of other papers take a second look at their sections and decide that dance is back in fashion.

THe myth of Orpheus is that he played music so sweetly that everything bowed to his power - -even hte gods of hte underworld gave in and gave him back his dead wife -- i.e, he could undo the power of death, and overcome loss with his music -- there was a condition of course (there's always a hitch). Balanchine's work is often marked by the desire to find a way to bring back lost worlds, or reach an ideal world which was never known but only imagined -- Serenade; the slow movement of Symphony in C; Duo COncertante; both his Orfeos (which means Chaconne); Swan Lake; the last movement of Vienna Waltzes; these are some of hte more obvious ones. I'd say Agon fits in there, too, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto as well, but it's harder to make the case. If ANYTHING can bring them back, it's music. Dance is the servant of music.

Oh yes, any historical novel. I read all of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series, all of Michener, Uris. But preferred Regencies -- Desiree I went through several times, and re Gwtw, I was on a first-name basis with Suellen and Careen O'Hara, talked about them as if they were real.

Maybe because it's directly ABOUT the power of music to move us, and appeals to the imagination of choreographers to add the most they can to the realization of that power.

How about Mark Morris? Even those who don't much like MM have to admit that they love "L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato." Fabulous music, fabulous choreography. Artist, let me recommend that you check out Handel's vocal music -- especially his arias. you'll find melancholy there of a kind you wouldn't expect -- SO beautiful, so romantic, really moving. His operas are so rich with emotion. Try "Giulio cesare" -- you may be able to Google "V'adoro pupille," Cleopatra's aria. Heart-breakingly beautiful. [bart, we must have been writing at the same time. You are so right.]

Thank you, Sandik!! That's a wonderful reference. Ms Brown's book is going to generate a LOT of this kind of discussion. I can't wait.

Well, not all musicians scorn dance. THough in fact Rachmaninoff once responded in that spirit, to balanchine, who'd just said he'd like to choreograph something to his music. R was offended, "my music? -- ballet!" Balanchine was also offended. I think it's to your credit that you saw a program with "Symphony in C" on it and some other stuff and you only remember "Symphony in C" -- I've had exactly the same thing happen to me. First time I'd seen it, never heard of it, it made me cry -- only thing I remember from that evening (well, I remember exactly where it was that I started to cry: you can see it for yourself in hte clip of Allegra Kent doing the adagio, when she swoops down into arabesque and starts theading around the corner.....) on "Balanchine's ballerinas." And I looked up the ballerina's name: Betsy Erickson (SFB). She was fabulous in that role. Glad to know more about you.

miliosr, I for one am SO glad you're doing this

Horse- books. I read Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka and loved them, but my favorites were the whole series of books about the wild horses of the Chesapeake-Bay island of Chincoteague. I have no idea how I'd feel about htem now, but they really sank into me deep -- in fact, when I see Serenade, and all those girls galloping around, it always reminds me of how I felt about Misty and Sea Star.... SImilar in its poetic appeal was Green Mansions, Rima swinging through the trees -- there must have been a plot of some kind, but all I remember is an eternal lyrical tireless ongoing sweeping rush, flying through the top of the Amazon jungle, better than Tarzan.... In a very different way, I loved Little Women. And I must say, if you haven't seen Katherin Hepburn play Jo March, you MUST. hepburn herself said someplace it ws the best hting she ever did, and, well ,she really WAS Jo. ALso Little Men, Under the Lilacs. Dr Doolittle was read to us by my 4th grade teacher, Miss Polly, along with the Wonder Books -- what an inspiring woman. SHe felt that all education begins in wonder, and I'm really lucky to have been exposed to her so young. And I was addicted to Tom Swift, boy scientist. Science fiction was great - -loved Jules Verne -- but I really liked stuff that seemed to be more like real science, trying ot find things out. The biography of Marie Curie was really important to me, and I was REALLY taken by "Microbe Hunters," it was one of the great reading experiences of my life, people discovering hte deep truths of the invisibilia.

Ah yes, MY BOOK HO)USE -- we had 6 volumes of it, and I thought that was all there were.Kate Greenaway drawings (or at least in her style -- I didn't know her name at the time, but I'd recognize that style anywhere.... East of hte Sun, West of hte Moon, Snow White, Rose Red.... yeah, it was a whole world. Thoughi think I liked the rhymes volume the best. Hickory Dickory Dock, what a great poem! "Deedle deedle dumpling, My son John" -- they don't make them like that any more.

THanks, drb, for pulling that up. It's a wonderful article -- really really touching. I've seen her do Mozartiana with the kind of feeling this article gives you. She's a different kind of ballerina altogether from Suzanne, but she embodies the state of grace in another way. She makes the Preghiera about mother-love -- nothing fussy, nothing cloying, BUT she was totally aware of those children, all the way through, and didn't make her exit without FIRST THING gesturing to them, OK, let's go home now. Suzanne did it like a saint in an old icon, where she's the tall one because she's the SAINT and the other folks are short because they're NOT the saint, and the dance was about her and Jesus. Which is of course the REAL truth of the piece, and why nobody else's will touch it - -but Kyra's way is really full of love, full of it, really floating on love -- which is totally appropriate, and a completely acceptable alternative. The Preghiera is a setting of the Ave verum corpus, which is a hymn about Jesus's unparallelled care for us, so it's essentially a meditation on the same thing, and REALLY beautiful -- and she sustained this state and carried it all the way through to the finale. What a wonderful imagination.

Gautier, Gautier, Gautier. Denby, Denby, Buckle, Denby. Levinson in Russian. Noverre.

Stand-up, you're right -- they're chock-a-block over there. They had to go SOMEWHERE. And yes, Bart, i'd say Jim Carey fits , as do Robin WIlliams in his more maniacal phases, and Jonathan Winters was one too. in fact, in some ways, rap artists fit in here, too, since they're improvising at top speed and work at the edge of disaster, weaving freak thoughts into a network of rhymes that billow along and barely make sense.

I'd like to echo Major Mel's support of Mark Goldweber's work. Goldweber is a first-rate ballet master, extremely attentive to detail and to the overall arc of meaning. He was of course a few decades back one of hte most brilliant dancers of his day -- the Blue Boy in Ashton's Les Patineurs was his specialty. Perhaps it was on the strength of that that the Ashton people came to trust him -- in any case, he's in charge of ballets like Monotones, which is one of the ultimate tests of technique, musicality, taste, and style to supervise. It IS true that a reader (especially a critic) might want to know the "apostolic succession" of the person who originally set Apollo on them -- Jacques d'Amboise's settings, for example, have some odd details (e.g., Apollo does not watch the muses' solos). It is a pity that her review made it seem to be slighting Goldweber's contribution. As a practicing critic myself, I suspect that she intended no slight to him, and SUSPECT that her annoyance at not knowing which variant she was watching rose to the surface, colored the sentence -- and that she did not have time to smooth it out before the deadline. (I don't know Ms Reiter, but I've certainly had things like that happen to me which I would have changed later if I could.) And as a student of Balanchine's work, myself, I always want to know whose version I'm looking at.

atm 711, let me URGE you, if you can, try to see "Esplanade" --

I always loved Betty Hutton, even when she seemed to be wired to the point of mania., The persona was huge and WAY out front, but the vulnerable very sweet kid was always appealing from behind, and as a queer with a necessary front-persona myself, I recognized the problem and sympathized and enjoyed her solutions. There used to be LOTS of live-wires in American theater, and it was actually a social fact, it was one of the accepted personae in real life; seems like there were lots in Mark Twain, and in Sinclair Lewis novels. Kinda disappeared after the 60's. But Danny Kaye was a male version. She was fantastic in miracle of Morgan's Creek," but Preston Sturges (who wrote and directed) was himself talent with a marked admixture of mania. Actually, he was a genius.... Joan Cusack seems to me to have some of Betty Hutton's appeal -- there's a noticeable admixture of sadness in the humor, especially in the play of the eyes. I love Joan Cusack, anyway, in much the same way. " Check out "My Blue Heaven," you'll see.

dnznqueen, there was a really interesting, informative discussion of PdQ on hte "Glory of the Kirov" thread -- it told me a lot I didn't know about the choreographer and the traditions he had to work with in "recreating' the ballet. You might get something from there. Thanks for bringing the question up - -I love this ballet. Which of the versions do you like best so far, in your "uneducated" state? You can always change your mind later -- that's what I do as I find out more -- but the impressions you have now are really valuable in themselves. I'd LOVE to see the Ananiashvili/Kistler/et al version. Is Kistler still good at that? She was FANTASTIC in her youth in steps of that kind, which is documented on the NYCB Bournonville DIvertissements which she was coached in great detail by Stanley Williams) -- her little rond de jambe sautes are among the most beautiful the world has ever seen, and her quatres and sixes are unbelievable, and pique attitude turns like THISTLEdown. But she was flying -- the cool thing about the Kirov version is how exquisite it all was while being done so close to the ground.

Artist, I think you're right -- just dig in, start reading poetry, real poetry. Like the Odyssey. I'd start there. SO good! I realize from reading Bart that Miss Person was like the Lilac Fairy -- she was local aristocracy, and embodied the very best of the old ways: she stood for them and she stood up for them and when she said "No," bad things didn't happen. She had strength of character on a scale I have never seen since -- partly because the way of life in the old south put character on the line all the time, so you had to show it.