Paul Parish

"It was a grey day in Stern Grove...."

http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php/sec=dancearticle=227

OK, so the third guy from the left has his right leg turned in, the rest are all turned-out. Who's right?

Anyone who saw Betsy Erickson dance the adagio of "Symphony in C" would tell you she was a ballerina. Same with Sophiane Sylve.

Grandeur....... it's not off-limits in Forsythe. Muriel Maffre had grandeur in "in hte middle, somewhat elevated.' She was like Garbo in it.

And there's a kind of comic grandeur -- Leclercq had it in western Symphony. Elizabeth Loscavio had it in Ballo [which SHE mad e hilarious] and in "Who Cares?"

From the look of the videos, they're all giving it their all. I think Smirnova is tremendous -- not because she's stylized, but because Tatiana is an idealist and a romantic, and Smirnova's lyrical way of doing everything seems in keeping with the great-hearted Tatiana who was in love with the noble Grandison, whom she only knew from a book, before she ever met Onegin. Smirnova's long long phrases are really extraordinary. i love the duet with her husband.

I remember Julie Diana from her days in San Francisco, and I'll never forget how magnificent she was in Diamonds. Mesmerizing.

One of the best Diamonds I've ever seen -- rather like Daria Pavlenko. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

She was also lovely in the Siciliene in Emeralds, but it wasn't magnificent. Diamonds was.

Helene, I've read [if memory serves] that Kaye was magnificent as Odette. Denby, I think, but can't say for sure.

Sandik, I thank you, too. that was marvelous.

I saw that production, and I'll NEVER forget when the dragon emerged form the mists. Real theater magic.

Sorry Helene, there's a problem with that Guardian link

He was a wonderfully appealing performer -- even when he was playing characters who were not themselves appealing. I always felt like I got it, with the character he was playing.

Thank you, David Wall.

Awful news. Greece, the home of the muses!

me, too -- thanks for all that wonderful information, Marcmonus.

Thank you ALL!!!!!!!!!!

sandik, I'm going to steal that line:

And people say there's not enough drama in a mixed rep program...

Just wondering what Diaghilev programmed to share the bill with Rite of Spring that fateful night 100 years ago.

Anybody else curious?

agreed, Pherank. She does not not get enough press, but what she does get is always [to m knowledge] superlative. She also does not seem to dance as much as the younger ballerinas. She's sovereign in any role, though.

She loves to teach. She let me watch a class. It was beautifully balanced in terms of technique, musicality, pointe work and jumping. She was unfailingly kind and supportive -- but if a step was being done incorrectly,she stayed with it til the student had the proper action.

Trieste, i can not agree with this general proposition: "Odette is fairly inconsequential to me, and I'd argue for varying degrees of this sentiment in anyone who loves ballet."

I do not think many would agree that Odette is inconsequential. Odile is just a diabolical parody of Odette. Odile does not even exist in Balanchine's version of the ballet.

I do certainly grant that Skorik is not a good Kitri; she must have outrageous energy, she must embody the idea of the irrepressible. Osipova rules in that respect -- Look at the elevation in her jumps, the extension and amplitude of her leaps, the way they come from the toes.

THe audience in SF really treasures Sylve. She received the Isadora Duncan Award in 2012, for outstanding individual performance, for her dancing in "Symphony in C" outdoors at the Stern Grove Festival

I'm with Quiggin.

Mazzeo was unique here. I agree with everyone else, we're really giong to miss him. He was expecially fine also in Mark Morris's Beaux, where his wit turned out to be visible from the back. The's a delicacy abouthe way he projects -- but htere's no pallor to it -- it's a ravishing star quality. He's not our only wit -- at various times, Joan Boada, Taras Domitro, Damian Smith, James Sofranko, Pascal Molat have been wonderfully funny -- but Mazzeo's sallies are more like mood shifts that affect everything by creating lightness of heart all over hte stage -- more like delight than hilarity.

I hate to see him go.

Thank you Ray, for posting that poem.

Wonderful insight.

Of course you're right, QUiggin -- If a ballet's music is written to embody a libretto [as nearly ALL of Diaghilev's were], then there's a story in the music it would be foolish not to follow... and Balanchine usually did follow the story when there was one -- best of all in 'Nutcracker.'

There are ballets of atmosphere, like "Les Sylphides," which have characteristic events that develope the mood and unfold unexpected qualities of a "world" where the ordinary mode is wonderful from the get-go, but there is no agon, no crisis, no story and I think Symphony in 3 is rather in this mode, though it's not the same mood.....

Early Soviet choreographers like Goleizovsky developed in this abstract way and made symphonic ballets [rather as composers had made symphonies with dance and aria materials but no story, organizing hte motifs using purely tonal logic. Balanchine saw this in Russia before escaping to DIaghilev. Even APollo, which does have a libretto, has a constructivist look to its highly stylized way of telling the story.

It was not anachronistic for people in 1972 to see the Vietnam war reflected in the ballet; 1972 WAS close to the peak of the Vietnam War, if I remember right. I was in my early 20s at the time, and as I recall it, the harshness with which everyone disagreed about what to DO about Vietnam dominated almost everything.

I don't see any Orientalism in the ballet -- though most commentators at the time do seem to have done so.

THanks, Sandik-- That is so true. But as I'm sure you know, Buckle was NOT one of those who did not get Balanchine; he was one of B's champions.

And as it turns out there IS more story there than some led us to believe -- the ballerina in the adage of Symphony in C is the moon crossing the sky.

Question is, as Balanchine asked, "How much story you WANT?"

Obviously, a ballet based on a symphony rather than an opera is not giong to have a story other than the tonal/rhythmic drama of that symphony.

THank you once again, QUiggin, for your insights and your scholarship -- esp for Siegel's coments.

Buckle DOES sound like a Monty Python parody -- "Pretty strong meat there from Longeur!" I've got a soft spot for him -- he was the first critic that really inflamed my imagination [longlong ago]. I protest there IS a value in that style, which plays out a fantasy [in belletristic flourishes] that IS a response to elements in the ballet which other modes of criticism can't mention -- e.g., the "opposite-limb-thrusting" school of "just the facts, Ma'am" style of criticism that prevailed in New York [and which Siegel's work epitomizes].

It's maybe useful to remember that Buckle was writing against the prissy grain of British critics and he delights in being outrageous -- and that's also in a context that values eccentricity.

Siegel and her movement were still bucking the Genteel Tradition in this country that Denby mocked as "another recitation of 'Thanatopsis.'"

I'm currently very high on Lorna Feijoo, shown here. No trace of noble blood, but absolute noble soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDFO5P1I_DE

Thanks, Quiggin, for those insights.

in Balanchhine's Stories of the Great Ballets, a wonderful book published by Doubleday (and mostly ghost-written by Francis Mason, but not entirely), Balanchine writes " after the ballet was in our repertory, I heard that the first movement of the symphony was actually composed as a possible accompaniment for a film about China and that the second was composed (but not used) for a film project -- the apparition-of-the-Virgin scene for the film of Werfel's Song of Bernadette.

"The Sanctuary" is a wonderful expression. Villella has a tremendous imagination and a wonderful way with words.

The outer movements remind me of the expression "the beautiful web of men," which is the Homeric epithet for war. Quiggin used the term "muddle," which is what the British used to call war.-- if you understand it at its highest sense, it mean that everybody's doing what they think best, under the most brain-addled circumstances, to do their duty. Muddle conjures more of the trench warfare, rain, muck, pulling your feet out of hte mud to slog on, when the ballet is pretty fleet-footed -- but the tangles balanchine put onstage though astounding, are CLEAR! And the more you look at htem, and see how the black-leotard people are doing their maneuvers to completely different counts from hte white-leotard folk, AND the pink-leotard folk have a totally different flow-chart they're following -- the more astounding it is, how CLEAR everything is. You can see it all, you just can't take it in -- it's like trying to follow everything going on in Merce Cunningham's "Sounddance" [a ballet that may well have had some influence on what Balanchine was doing].

WAY back when, Ninette de Valois said when she first ecountered Balnchine, she thought he was "a genius, a cross between a dancing-master and a general.":