Paul Parish

drb, thank you THANK YOU thank you for posting the remarkable thoughts of m Lavrovsky. They are old-fashioned, Romantic, but none hte less true for all that.. Art and HOPE, wow..........

The Shakespeare movie I'd LIKE to see is Quentin Tarantino's version of "Cymbeline"-- everything that's weird about that play would fall into place with his eye-peeling style, and the gazillion recognitions in the last scene would build to preposterous heights -- the old king would be so overjoyed he'd have to be hospitallized.

The old-fashioned phrase for having memorized something was to "have it by heart"-- and though it is paradoxical, the effort that goes into memorizing something is a measure of how much you love it, and once you HAVE memorized it, you can let the emotoin it generates "overtake you' without losing your place or forgetting what comes next. If you'd like to have this experience, defjef, you could memorize a poem, something you'd LIKE to have by heart; then you will have a kind of ownership of it. In my case, I grew up in a backward part of hte United States, where normal schoolwork included memory work, and recited a poem by heart every Friday (some Shakespeare sonnets, "The Tyger," "The SOlitary Reaper," "Daffodills," "Kublai Khan" -- wonderful stuff, which now that I know it I sometimes find myself playing through in my mind with new awe -- The Tyger is SO much more moving htan I used to think it was. I've kept up the practice. It's the same witht hte piano -- you can play with SO much more feeling something you've memorized than something you're sight-reading, as in ballet class, you can dance a combination with so much more subtlety the second time through. Danilova used to tell her students to practice and practice and practice a dance, to develop stamina as well as master the transitions, the breathing, the pacing, but when it came time for performance, to "throw away the technique" and just dance it -- by then you will be ready.

yes, Canbelto --Did you see her in "Ship of Fools"? not a great picture, but an AMAZING performance -- thoguh I gather she was being herself. Manic, off hte hook. Those who htought her hopelessly lightweight - -well, they have the advantage of having SEEN her, and I haven't -- seem to type her as a soubrette, trivial, brittle little pretty thing -- but it's those characteristics that she could bring into such focus and make poignant as Blanche duBois. Maybe it helped her to be playing an American, and a Southern belle, since it would require more warnth than she had by nature, and also since the material is great -- well, Streetcar Named Desire is GREAT material, and Gone with the Wind is under-rated. Scarlett OHara called for heroic grit and determination, ambition, and rock-bottom ability to endure ("as God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"), as well as all the prettiness and grace of a Sylphide. That's quite a spectrum.

hello, jps, and welcome. Thanks for your kind words. Glad you've found BA. This is a great community; some (if I start naming them the list will goon way too long are absolute authorities in their fields; others of us are just hungry eager students who need to compare notes about what we've seen and what we feel and what we want to know more about. Dance is SO local that this international community gives us a chance to find out what happened in St Petersburg, London, Paris, NYC, SanFrancisco, Chicago right on top of things... but there are NEVER eneough reports.SO please tell us about things you've seen. BA is crowded with people who really care about dance performances and are hungry for details about performances that the newspaper critics, for one reason or another -- usually space -- don't include. This is a great place to "think out loud." Don't be scared. Yes, people will pick up an exciting idea, sometimes by the wrong handle, and tear off on a tangent -- we ALL do it (well, not rg, but he's a model of circumspection). I've been fascinated by people's responses to Vishneva. Did you see Joan Acocella's thoughts about her Giselle in the New Yorker? Really inrteresting -- did you feel what she felt? What was it YOU felt? Can you be more particular? There's something about her that gets way under people's skin. I sure wish i could see her myself....

Well, said, Bart: "Anderson, who could be quite grand herself, was rather like a darker version of her Mrs. Danvers character." Scary lady. And Dirac, I agree with you, Vivien Leigh might WELL have been a riveting Lady MacBeth -- there's a beautiful, terrifying photograph of her in the role: she seems to be asking "Who's the fairest one of all?" You COULD play Lady macbeth that way; it could be toweringly vertiginously great.

Thank you, Helene-- Saland was an exquisite dancer, and one of the greatest experiences of my dance-going life was seeing her borne off to Paradise at the end of Serenade. I've seen the waltz-girl before , and I love Serenade every time I see it, but Saland made that finale make me want to shout "Holy!" and fall on my knees.... And she did it simply, but with the grandest imaginable phrasing, by ennobling her lines with a gradually but steadily accelerating intensity that corresponded to the brightening of the light as she got nearer and nearer its source.

Similarly to Lynn Seymour, Balanchine saw something in Stephanie Saland, who could not do cabrioles nor turn reliably but became a star of New York City Ballet; she had a fabulous look and fabulous dance imagination

Continuing..... Judith Anderson was a really chilling Lady Macbeth..... I think her husband was Ralph Richardson, can't recall but she was really something. The way she behaved when the murder came to light was deeply horrifying? "What, in our house?" The facade of family values! I have to disagree with most of y'all about the old Hollywood adaptations -- Leslie Howard is the best Romeo I've ever seen, the only one who makes it plausible that he might have been up all night, an intellectual -- it's ALL THROUGH the text, he writes sonnets, he's a philosopher, and a romantinc one at that, he's not a sleepy kittenish warm cuddly sexy teenager, he's a nervous-wreck bookish kid. And I loved Norma Shearer; true they did have to superannuate the whole rest of the cast to make her look young enough, but good God, they used to do that -- Sarah Bernhardt was the first Salome, and she was no spring chicken. Indeed, the close-ups of Fonteyn in the movie wreck hte illusion that she's a teen-ager -- her neck's all crepe-y, etc etc -- but her performance is fantastic (as was Ulanova's when she was in HER 50s-- realism is not nearly as important as imagination in a role like this.) ALso, I find Orson Welles's the only English-language Othello that i can bear; it's heart-breaking. All the others make Othello look like a fool and let Iago run away with the production. Macliammor is a haunted, FABULOUS Iago -- his delivery of the line "If I were Othello, I would not be Iago" is so mysteriously desperate, hollow, wretched, it makes me understand how he could act out all his bitterness with such glee, as a distraction from his own self-loathing. The Russian Othello is magnificent, as is the Russian King Lear.

re Antony and Cleopatra -- it's ALL about trust and betrayal, the Roman desire for permanence ( and Anthony's smart enough to see that's a prison, but he's a Roman nevertheless and wants it) and something protean and ever-self-refreshing about Cleopatra, who's young all over again like the Nile delta with every spring flood ("Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/her infinite variety....") He says "Thou has beguiled me to the very heart of loss." and she says "Not know me yet?"

Off-topic, but -- anyone know a good way to get egg off your face?

O Lord this is a shock. Yes, one knew that Ms Lieberson was ill -- but gone? Those of us in Berkeley remember her WHEN.... when she was Lorraine Hunt. She went to Berkeley High. THere's been a great early-music scene here for four decades, and she was part of it. Modest in temperament, greatly gifted in talents. Am I hallucinating, or didn't she sing Dido at the first performances of Morris's "Dido and Aeneas" here in Zellerbach Playhouse? I remmeber listening to the singer as often as i watched the dancer, whoever he was, kept looking at his fingernails. And I THINK she was the nightingale In "L'Allegro." (Wonderrfulissima) We heard her all the time, till her international career took off and she wasn't around so much. What a wonderful talent, what an artist, what a loss. PS THE New Yorker article is wonderful -- please go read it.

Spain's loss is our gain -- here in San Francisco, sometimes it seems like new Madrid. The company is chock-a-bloc with dancers from Spain, WONDERFUL dancers, so much so that SFB can dance Don Quixote as if to the manner born. With Spaniards and/or Cubans in salient roles, they really make it feel Spanish, down to the tilt of hte eyebrows, the opposition of jaw and shoulder (which is as characteristic of Spanish line as it is of Egyptian), and the stretch of the arms across the body (that spiralling line where the hand goes to the opposite hip), the fan and cape-work, the knives stuck in the floor, etc -- The corps of course don't make a flawless back-drop.... but if they drop out occasionally and the suburban kid peeps through, they DO keep getting back into it. But with the Martin brothers, Ruben and Moises, Gonzalo Garcia, a corps dancer whose face looks EXACTLY like Goya's Maja, Jaime Garcia Castillo, Katita Waldo (born in Spain), to name only the most salient, and the Cubans Lorena Feijoo and Joan Boada, they COULD WELL TOUR THE PRODUCTION (edited by PP july5) and be fairly confident that they'll have a hit, and I'd be surprised if audiences don't love it, for they dance it with tremendous spirit and flair and fabulous backbends and love of its Spanishness. ....................................... By the way, if you're bookish, there's a LOT about Spanish dancing in Carlo Blasis's GREAT book, "The Code of Terpsichore" -- check it out. As it did later with Petipa, Spanish dancing affected Blasis at a gut level, he's never really coherent about it, but he's crazy about it. .......................... I got my wires crossed when I first saw posted on BA that SFB were taking Don Q to Edinburgh -- it's of course the OTHER SFB (Suzanne Farrell Ballet) taking Mr Balanchine's Don Q to Edinburgh. I KNEW better, when I read the Farrell Ballet thread I corrected myself, but I have to KEEP reminding myself that SAN FRANCISCO's SFB is NOT going to Edinburgh, and in the middle of the enthusiasm of thinking about Madrid West I forgot again and posted the erroneous thought. I'm sorry.

I'll drink to Willie, machinist and musician and usher at the met. Thanks for posting this, Carbro -- our community has lost a lover of the dance, and it's good to know some of the details about who he was.

Fabulous picture, Carbro-- Danilova had a LOT of heart. You know, she danced virtually for free; I was just reading the Ballets Russes article in Ballet Review and Windreich gives nearly a paragraph to that; Denham or de Basil actually asked her one season to dance for no salary, which I don't think she did, but she wasn't contract-savvy like Markova. That's maybe not by-the-by. Let me fortify the Forsythe strand from the beginning of this thread; when SFB was dancing Artifact Suite here a little while back, the epaulement was THAT most noticeable thing about it -- incredible spirals they were all doing, esp the young corps girls, who looked like it was the first time all year they'd been encouraged to dance up to full scale. it was like they were using it to locate and immediatley RElocate their centers, and as they swung into new positions they looked like they were getting stronger and stronger. It put me in mind of the tempering of a rapier, the more flexible they got the stronger they got. It was very physical, and very visible. Lily Rogers and Rory Hohenstein took it to the point where they seemed to be so powerfully dancing from the center, they didn't have to be standing on the ground but could just as well have been upside-down....

Let me add "Billy the Kid" to the list (It was created for Ballet Caravan, with music by Aaron Copeland, choreography by Eugene Loring, libretto by Lincoln Kirstein). i THINK there's a video of it; the Joffrey ballet does it and does it well (The Oakland Ballet used to do it REALLY well.) I LOVE this ballet, it is the best of them all, since it has in Billy a subject worthy of immortality, how a boy shot the man who killed his mother and in an instant became an outlaw, and then had to grow into his new status -- and Loring found ways to make the legend come to life in movement that's incredibly appropriate.

oh no, Canbelto -- You haven't gone wrong. "Tokyo story" is a GREAT movie, and it won't take you more than 5 minutes to know that. Don't worry, not at all. Every second of it is beautiful.

Don't miss Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff!!!!!!!!!!' It's incredibly beautiful on the big screen -- the moonlight on the pampas grass for me is like "THE SILVER SCREEN" itself -- but it should still be powerful on a TV monitor oh my GOD what a movie. Ozu is great, Tokyo Story is very fine, noble restraint, but it's so modern it's missing a certain romantic dimension -- if you want noble restraint carried to the nth, it's there in INCREDIBLE degree in Sansho......

Has anybody else been noticing the epaulement iamong soccer players in the World Cup? I/e., some of the teams play with a very controlled boxy torso, and others really work the body in spirals-- Last week I saw a player kick the ball in sideways from the corner, and he actually used his head as a counterweight to the leg -- as the foot kicked across his body in one direction, he took his head in the other direction, which allowed for a tremendous follow-through with hte leg. I think that was a Swede -- though generally it's the Europeans who play squarer, and the South Americans who play with more across-the-body spiralling.... or it seems that way to me....

It was not unusual for Lanchberry to cobble some music together -- he did this for Ashton all the time, when he was at the Royal Ballet, before coming to ABT --e.g., most notably for La Fille Mal Gardee -- see David Vaughan's "Frederick Ashton and His Ballets", p304 -- but also he put together/orchestrated/cut/pasted scores for Marguerite and Armande and A Month in the Country, I believe. I've heard he got his start playing piano for silent movies, which similarly, of course, used music as needed to suit the action. Indeed, it's kind of the norm for the score to be whatever the choreographer needs. Petipa's working-score notes on Sleeping Beauty (I heard Roland John Wiley, the foremost authority, read a lecture on this, and this section he intoned gleefully, like a hilarous litany) "Too long -Cut! cut, too long, cut, cut, cut, too long." So there's no point asking WHY Lanchberry did this; the answer is surely because either he or the person who was setting the ballet (Macmillan? wonder who?) or both, thought the production needed that effect. The questioj is why the person STAGING the ballet wanted it.....

I've reserved judgment on Smakov. I don't like what he says about Karsavina, but what do i know? on the other hand, what exactly does HE know. Karsavina could do entrechat-huit. And she wrote two valuable books on technique. I wish I could see her dance to know what I'd think. Danilova didn't use her feet, in Gaite Parisienne (of which film exists) as well as the merest corps member of NYCB, BUT Massine wasn't asking for that, and she DID deliver what Massine's choreography needed.... the back-bends, the timing, the wit! and the fearless brio, and a personality strong enough to hold that mess together and take the climax over the top.

Bakst's FABULOUS costumes for "The Sleeping Princess" were exhibited in San Francisco -- unfortunately placed on Sears Roebuck mannequins, so the poses were all wrong, but she'd run out of money -- in 1989, in a show put together by the GREAT curator nancy Baer, of the Fine Arts Museums of SF, as only one part of an astonishing, huge exhibition of stagecraft associated with Diaghilev (including Matisses's hand made costumes for -- what was it, "Le Rossignol?"). The catalogue for the Exhibition was called "The Art of Enchantment: DIaghilev's Ballets Russes, 1909-1929," and it's well worth having with contributions from Joan Acocella, Lynn Garafola, Dale Harris, Simon Karlinsky, Richard Tarushkin, and others. Might turn up on Ebay

I THINK one reason so many American dancers are not taught much epaulement is that Joseph Pilates moved to new York after world war one and had a big influence on the dancers who came up in the thirties. Graham and Balanchine both worked with Pilates -- and even though Graham uses a LOT of spirals, still, the emphasis on core strength owes a lot to Pilates. One of the Pilates concepts -- not sure how early it developed, but it's certainly widely used now in both Pilates and in ballet class -- is the idea that the torso is a "BOX"-- the shoulders are over the hips, square. THis is a reference point, or set of reference points, and people are constantly referred to them. It facillitates very clear turns, the kind that flip around fast, and also for going straight up and down in jumps.... Dancers once trained are asked of course to move OFF this center a lot -- but it's a different "orientation technique" than thinking naturally in spiralling contraposition, and many American dancers will square themselves back up if they run into difficulties, whereas Cecchetti-based dancers may try to renew their spirals..... I haven't put that very subtly, but something like that is surely in play at a deep level. For a FABULOUS example of epaulement, one of hte most beautiful I know of on video (wish we had more Violette Verdy on film, for she sure had it) is Adam Luders's partnering (of Merrill Ashley?) in Act 2 of a Midsummer Night's Dream (the televised NYCB performance from about 10-15 years ago). Normally it's the ballerina who gets the attention in this dance, but I could not take my eyes off Luders (who was not upstaging Ashley, he was nobly at her service) -- but what noble attention, and what beautiful lines he created.

Not to get fussy, BUT -- soft landings depend on the softness of FONDU (AKA plie on one leg, like the leg you're landing on; fondu means melted, don't forget). Karsavina in her book on technique had a whole chapter on "fondu, the mechanism of the jump." Thing is, it takes more control to land on one leg (as it does just to stand on one leg), and some folks who have plenty of control landing on two feet can't do it nearly as well landing on just one. Danish technique uses a lot of jumps like ronde de jambe saute which GREATLY challenge the stability of the standing leg (straight up and straight down on hte same leg, with all this distracting fancy stuff going on in the other leg), and jetes that land on one foot and stick, with the other leg in the air -- not to mention all the beats they do, esp the ones that land on one leg, which particularly challenge the stability of the pelvis and thus the verticality of the landing -- incredible variety of all that, so they DO know how to land.

Jlaney, let me recommend the great book about the Astaire/Rogers movies by Arlene Croce -- fantastic book, even has a flip-the-pages "kinescopes" of two dances, 'Waltz in Swing Time" and "Let Yourself Go" -- the pictures are great, and there are LOTS of them, the discussions of the movies are wonderfully written and insightful and fun to read. Croce is a great critic, and she never wrote better than she did in this book. I've given copies to susceptible friends for birthdays and Christmas and get it out to reread it again and again. AND it's a great reference book. "The Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers Book," Arlene Croce, Outerbrdge and Lazard (dist EP Dutton), New York: 1972 I agree about "Pick Yourself Up' -- it's my all-time favorite thing (at the moment), and that's because it is such a turning point -- and a turning-point with several turning-points in it, such a LONG turning-point -- Ginger SMILES at him when she realizes he can dance, and it is like the sun coming out, and it has been built up to for so long, and with all that wonderful side-work with Helen Broderick and her club sandwich, and the owner of the dancing-school firing Ginger, and Fred saving the day -- silly as all the stuff at the very beginning of the movies is, with the cuffs on the pants, getting Fred out of the wedding to the girl we don't like, and all, but by the time we get to the big city the work-place Ginger is a thoroughly plausible dance-instructor modern working girl and the movie has become quite REAL, and the romance happens in the midst of all this quite plausible detail, including a little dance-school studio that's plausible as what it's supposed to be and also a wonderful place for their dance, complete with little fences to jump over. Thanks for getting "I'm Old-fashioned" right for me. I've been wondering all day what made me want to compare Hayworth to Farrell -- and the first thing that came to mind was, "How could I?" They're so different. ANd then I thought well, the biggest difference is Hayworth's smile -- Farrell never smiled, her mask was actually a lot like Ginger's in "Night and Day," remote as the moon. But then it seemed that Hayworth is in fact as private as Farrell, and the smile is her own personal attribute, but not an ingratiation -- she smiles because the music smiles, like Louis Armstrong smiles.