Paul Parish

Cakewalk is really good theater -- Oakland Ballet used to do it, really well, under Ms Boris's supervision, with a wonderful good spirit. It's light vaudeville, but wonderfully constructed, and that kind of hilarity is a wonderful thing, and has such high spirits it's good medicine. Abra Rudisill as the Queen of the Swamp Lilies threw herself off a mighty tall cliff and was caught by Ron Thiele, I'll never forget it, one of the most exciting things I've ever seen onstage. And Richard Chen See, now with Paul Taylor, was one of the interlocutors, and his batterie was dazzling, and sly, and full of personality -- she made a wonderful use of the Italian technique there, and he realized it to a fantastic degree.

It's very readable -- I'm 100 pages into it, finding out some things. Jowitt's was I thought a great overview -- she stayed very well-balanced, and it seemed that later books would fill in where she wisely sought not to tread. This one is engaging, but there are passages where she goes pretty superficial. It doesn't stay that way, but it can be pretty Noel Coward-ish; lots of name dropping when that doesn't seem appropriate -- lists of books he was reading -- Faulkner's "Light in August," "Brothers Karamazov" get thrown about as if they were visits to Sardi's. I found myself wondering if she'd read Faulkner or Dostoyevsky herself, if she knew what that felt like; can't tell for sure, maybe she's just packing a lot of material into a short space, but it's pretty breezy -- what happened at his draft physical? She gives some details, but I don't think she has a feel for it.

It's a fun interview -- she has a distinct personality, actually SOUNDS kinda NYCB, a little like Tanaquil Leclerc -- well, just a little, but it's frank and as you'd expect rather athletic, the energy is right up front. She even talks happily about liking having competition. I was glad to read it.

I found both Ballet Review interviews really helpful in getting a sense of who Charles France was and how he could be so useful in running ballet companies (he was at NYCB also). He was uniquely situated to know what to do. The biographical info is fascinating -- what an upbringing! Check it out.

Shields was my first editor at Ballet Review. I remember a voice on my answering machine: "Paul! [thick southern accent] Are we ever going to GET any thang from yew?" He didn't like my breezier locutions, since he thought they made the magazine look a little disreputable, but he was really encouraging when I was onto something. He knew a lot, and he'd learned it because he loved finding out. I'm really sad to hear this.

Wow, I am SO grateful to you for that report.

Makarova's Odile was shocking, and yet it was shocking like Yelena Karagina in War and Peace (played in the Ferrer movie by Anita Ekberg), whom Tolstoy describes as somehow always suggestively obscene and yet maintaining an atmosphere of complacent propriety at all times in public. I remember seeing Makarova when she first came to San Francisco -- when she was presented to the queen, she sank into a fantastically deep reverence, with the back leg in arabesque a terre, and when she came back up she looked the queen in the eye and gave her a tiny pelvic thrust -- BUMP! -- very slight, unmisunderstandable, brazen-faced. The queen looked totally stunned for a split second and then became bland and complacent again as if it had not happened.

Miliosr certainly deserves a medal, or should be made a knight. SUCH valuable contribution. I've been looking at Netflix for DVDs of past seasons --- they don't seem to be out, or even in the offing. Am I missing something? (I've disabled my TV because of .......well, you can imagine.... and only use mine for dvd-watching.) Would love to see this show.

Anybody watching "Pity the Fool"? My friends tell me Mr T had to go to a ballet school and stop those bunheads from putting ground glass in each others' shoes. I haven't seen the episode yet, BUT if anyone knows when it's going to be re-run, please let me know. If it's available elsewhere -- well, PM me.

How do you get to the home page? I can't find a link for THAT.... silly me

VNP is working for me, but it's 10Pm Pacific time...... How do you get to the Today's Active Topics button? It's not visible on the screen now -- maybe it was an option on the very first page that came up?

I agree with Marc, you need to look for yourself and make up your own mind, which is a great experience, you owe it to yourself -- Giselle, like Hamlet is one of htose things that you measure yourself against over the years, and you live and learn -- after decades you may come round to thinking Seymour was great DESPITE being out of shape (Arlene Croce had great things to say about that performance, because she liked the way Seymour was a believable peasant girl). I've seen probably a dozen videos of Giselle, and none compare to a great performance seen in hte opera house -- but my own favorites at this stage in my life include Bessmertnova's (the first one is great, too, and hte filming didn't bother me that much, they're just trying to make ity look like the light comes from inside hte characters), Alonzo's, Seymour's -- the fragments of Fracci's floating toe-hops, and of Fonteyn's intensely clear classicism, in rehearsal clothes with Nureyev can be seen on other compilations and are WELL worth seeking out, as is the INCREDIBLE grand pas of Maximova and Vasiliev -- and DOlin's "Portrait of Giselle has wonderful material on it. But for right now, for an American, maybe hte best overall version is Baryshnikov/Makarova, since his Albrecht is so passionate -- he never breaks character, though the applause after his last act solos goes on for oh five minutes.. also has a great peasant pas and a great Myrthe. I'd give anything to see Vishneva and malakhov.

I agree with you totally. Violin COncerto -- I'd just back you up by adding the rest of the paragraph: "Though they are the same age—sixty-five—[Tharp] belongs to the sock-hop generation of the late fifties and early sixties. On the evidence of her dances, her idea of teen rebellion is hot rods and hormones, jitterbug and juvie, the world of “Rock Around the Clock.” Dylan belongs to the real sixties, to sit-ins and drugs and apocalypticism, the world of—what? Of him. Tharp never had any politics to speak of. (Marcia Siegel’s recent book on her, “Howling Near Heaven” says that her political sympathies, if anything, lean right.) When a serious artist produces a dud, a lot of energy can be spent trying to figure out why, but sometimes the reason is just that the artist took on the wrong subject, and later realized this, and couldn’t back out, and ended up having to fake something. I have to say, the phrase "the REAL sixties" seems to me journalistic genius, she's nailed it: I'm sure I'm going to be using that phrase a lot in the future. Acocella is a REALLY smart woman.

I agree about Napoli -- and in GENERAL about Bournonville. Act 2 of A Folk Tale is a crowd scene of trolls getting drunk, and it's SO inventive, incredible virtuosity in moving all those people around like that, and revealing action in hte waves. There may not be that many people on-stage, so it could be that it echoes Andersen's achievement Helene mentions -- and since Andersen came up by way of Bournonville, it wouldn't be surprising that Andersen should have learned something from dancing in Bournonville. The details of action in the big Scottish-dance scene of La Sylphide are amazing, also -- the way the Sylph flits through the crowd, James goes after her, returns to Effie, the bits of action on the stair-case landing, it's almost like the party scene in Don Giovanni where Mozart has got a battle of the bands going and three separate dance-tunes are being played at once. But my favorite crowd-scenes of all time are in Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet -- especially at the banquet during the ball-scene, the people are as thick as in a William Morris tapestry. It was incredibly impressive live -- might not register as much on a video, because it's such a full-stage scrum, but live it's just amazing. And the fights, and the way Lady Capulet comes in and tears her clothes half-off and gets on the stretcher with the dead Tybalt and is carried off on the stretcher beating her breast and wailing.... The only version of that scene I don't hate, it's as big as the music, even bigger, thank god, for the music is hideously ugly at that point.

mnclimber, how lucky that you got to see Sleeping beauty so early in your "career" -- it is such a great ballet, and it sounds like it "got to you" (in hte best sense) even in a small production. t also sounds like you're smart and observant -- one of the fascinating htings about ballet is how obvious it is who's comfortable and who's not, and how important that is -- i.e., the lead couple clearly know how to dance with each other and it makes yhem more comfortable, and htat makes YOU more comfortable. A WHOLE lot of the gallantry in ballet has to do with these attentions, the ability to put someone else at their ease -- and that's what makes it civilized and civilizing and a pleasure to see. Are you talking about Bloomington Indiana? There's a ballet company, you know, at the University -- our own Ed McPherson came from there, and it's a very good school, by all reports. You might want to see some more ballets that they dance. Good luck, and keep us posted. PS In the OLD old days, not only was there applause interrupting hte show, and bows, if the audience REALLY liked something they swould "stop the show" -- literally clap and holler until in extreme cases the performer would do the whole thing all over again. They'd cry "Bis! Bis" or "Encore!" which is French for "do it again!" That would even happen with movies -- the Nicholas Brothers' movies, it would happen that hte audience would make the projector rewind the movie and show their dances again -- even if they were only making a 'guest appearance" and it was supposed to be a Don Ameche/Betty Grable movie, like "Down Argentine Way" (which is an exceptionallly stupid movie with a sublime number by hte Nicholas Bros.)

O she was a FUNNY woman. She could could be funny with almost no material -- the lines themselves weren't usually funny, it was the timing and the juxtapositions, and the puncturing of pretensions. She was a Pythoness/Trockadero of the opera. The lines coming back that made me laugh the most aren't funny out of context -- "this beautiful... corsage"; "love sure took the ginger out of her" Who'd have thought we'd live into an era when the stuff she made fun of is NOT enshrined, when the genteel tradition is so thoroughly at bay that the people who're trying to create a new civility have to use completely different materials, when the WIlliam Tell overture is universally known as The Lone Ranger - -well, if it's even known as that. And she was only 94.

Whose choreography is this? It sounds like it must be Lavrovsky's, which has very little "dancing" in it and is mostly pantomime and lifts and stunning crowd scenes. The Kirov did this version on tour back in hte late 80s, and almost everybody complained about the lack of dancing -- Though I'd have to say, I loved it. In fact, I prefer it to all other Romeo and Juliets. Lavrovsky's version is like a silent movie, and I found it internally consistent to the highest degree and extremely expressive -- the lifts are just visionary -- indeed everything that happens in the overhead space shows you what's "really" going on, like when Capulet lifts his hand overhead during the ballroom scene and makes this crushing fist, it just showed THE image of power and tyranny and everything that Romeo and Juliet represent the opposite of.... Sarafanov would be a fantastic Mercutio -- he's got the speed, the aggressive legs, the sexy feet. The Juliet I saw was Ayupova, who had the innocence to pull it off -- the first lift, she's up in the air like a close-up in an Eisenstein movie, and it's all about her radiant face -- "Can such joy be mine?" would be the caption, and you've just got to accept how direct and naive it is, this Romeo and Juliet is made that way -- i found myself thinking about Lillian Gish a lot afterwards (and of course, Ulanova, for whom it was created). Osipova could do it, I'm sure -- not sure about Vishneva, she's too sophisticated.

Sandik, you ask a great question --it's tempting to try to answer it. The obvious virtues of the music are A) it's rhythmically intoxicating, B) it asks to be visualized, C) it's got texts which summon up many emotions, from group exuberance to individual pathos, from extreme tenderness to near-violence (including the feelings of a bird they're cooking and going to eat) -- so many points of view are held in ironic tension and allow for tremendous levels of energy in the presentation. So it gives you an excuse to do an extravaganza -- and best of all, the pleasures are all forbidden, which heightens them to the point of sensationalism. It could be vulgar, even tasteless, but it is not going to be insipid.

I'd better listen to that tape again. Perhaps she was persecuted in some other way that Prokofiev was unable to alter. Yuri certainly said from reading Prokofiev's private papers that Prokofiev was very anxious for his wife's safety and that the ballet was suffused with his feelings about her.

Ed, I don't remember any top -- but the old oakland ballet had some raunchy days. You should have seen their Rite of Spring. if I remember right , there are two ballerinas -- Joy Gim also had a major role. Both of them WONDERFUL dancers, Joy really had the fire, too. Maybe I just saw the ballet several times -- i remember it went fantastically well at the SUnday matinee, and wondering what other company regularly danced best for the SUnday matinee....

Re Prokofiev's music -- I hope that Yuri Possokhov's new version for the Bolshoi, which had a success in Moscow and was shown in London to reviews that were quite favorable, will someday be shown where we can all see it. Possokhov came up in the Bolshoi, but lives now in San Francsico, as you all know, and when I was interviewing him about this project last year he told that he'd been stunned to discover that Cinderella's music enshrines Prokofiev's feelings about his wife, who'd in fact been sent to the prisons by Stalin -- crushing irony, the difference between the private feelings and the public requirements. Prokofiev has to write happy music on this happy subject (which was at the end of WW2 supposed to show the emergence of radiant Russia and make everybody feel liberated) and the heavy, disturbing music for the Cinderella waltz embodies thiswrenching, agonizing love for his wife who has been taken from him and imprisoned by the same powers athat are making him write this advertisement for soviet liberation. I'm paraphrsing him, not very well, but it was very evident that he was trying to fathom the depths of that and bring it out in his new porduction - -I'd give almost anything to see it. In any case, it explains the feeling we all have, that the music is trying to tell us something other than what it's "supposed to."

Hey Kate B -- what an interesting journey you are on. THe cool thing is you can think these things out for yourself, just wonder why it matters to you and how it affects you nad come up with your own understanding. One thing that might intrigue you is to think of Ashton's Gymnopedies as somehow a response to his encounter with Merce Cunningham.

If I remember Oakland Ballet's version right, Ed, you're going to have to dance near-naked in a purple dance belt -- but it's nothing personal, y'all all look kinda like robots at that point, lotsa big angles, legs in attitude, etc., and hte music is totally driving you, should be exciting, like hip-hop. It's been 20 years, but I still remember Summer Lee Rhatigan looking visionary in a long white shift, kinda just standing there like a bride.... she played lots of brides (Les Noces).

I was touched by Tomassini's closing paragraph: "In the late 1960’s she gave up her weighty dramatic repertory, which included her chilling portrayal of Strauss’s Elektra, and began a “second career,” as she called it, singing mezzo-soprano roles and character parts. Mr. Levine recalled that when he asked Ms. Varnay late in her career why she still undertook small roles like Mama Lucia in Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana,” she told him, “ ‘I just love being on stage seeing up close the work of my younger colleagues,’ ” he said.

hello Kate b, I saw it here in berkeley Ca, where I think it had its american premiereyears and years ago now, but it was certainly a fantastic experience -- they did it in Harmon Arena, which is what they now call the UC basketball gym (as seen on TV), which made it in some ways evoke the good old days when modern dancers toured in station wagons and played in college gyms. Seating is in hte round, and at the top were ranged like 50 or 60 cellists -- can that be? -- and round the playing space were massed lots of mikes and amps and computer boards and techies and David Tudor was i think down there making hte music happen. Idon't think they darkened the theater -- maybe dimmed the lights, but all this visual hardware-hubbub remained in plain sight. Maybe they couldn't darken the house, I think there are big windows around hte top of hte gym. i guess there was stage lighting, I recall some effects that would not have been possible without it, but I've seen photos of performances in Belgium where the theater was very different - -they DID have dramatic lighting -- so i don't trust my memory about what happened HERE. There were 4 huge tv monitors with blue screens and the time on them, and they counted backwards for hte 90 minutes the show ran. SInce there were no backs to your seats, it was tempting to look and see how long it would be till you got to stand up. The dancers ran on and off through the same doors that athletes would use, I think there was only one entrance for them, as I remember. And of course merce makes it impossible for you trust your memory -- time passes as in a dream - -VERY PARTICULAR things happen, but you're not at all sure whether or not you really see them when they happen, and it would be real folly to be certain that what you remember is an accurate picture of an objective reality that was in fact just so. But I do remember one dancer sitting like a deer at the edge of things, just like deer do (they come down into Berkeley all the time at night and hover around the edges of the lit areas around campus tennis courts and swimming pools) he was sitting in a perfect Graham swastika and looking over his left shoulder. Across the floor several people were doing something "together" -- maybe just at the same time and in close proximity. I think the deer was Frederic Gafner (Foufois d'Immobilite), but maybe not. I DON'T think it was Tom Caley (sp?), who was in the company then. Dancers of that era -- Jeannie Steele, Banu Ogan, Emma Diamond ( I think).... Everything very clear, difficult, the dancers very alive and I loved the way in which they were aware of each other while each bearing up under the load of such technical difficulties. (Not that it's all always hard. I remember something - -Pond Way? where Banu just walked around like a flamingo, and she can do that till hte cows come home.) I remember talking to Tom Caley at a party after another show in Berkeley -- he'd danced "Runes" that night, where he had the task of taking a perfect arabesque, fonduing deeply, and jumping straight up and landing just as deeply, and the line of his foot as it pointed beneath him was like a knife going into a wound. The entire operation was perfectly done, perfect. It was one of those "layout arabesques, and his body was like a table with one central leg, or a hydraulic lift -- the entire assembly rose straight up all in one piece like a car going up for a grease job, the knee straightened, the foot pointed, and the whole assembly descended, still absolutely horizontal. Unbelievable accuracy he had, and fabulous lines, a foot like oh Sylvie Guillem's, unbelievable arch to it -- and he said it was "the first time he'd ever seen light at the end of the technical tunnel." Gotta run -- will maybe add more later. Oh Kate B, If you don't know David Vaughan's book Merce Cunningham, 50 years, you must take a look at it. Vaughan's two great subjects are Ashton and Cunningham, and he's superb on both. There's a section on Ocean you must read, and the whole book will help you get a handle on why it is that Cunningham is despite the apparant imposture, really the real thing.