Paul Parish

"Damsel in Distress" is not worth much, BUT there's a trio for Fred, George Burns, and GRACIE ALLEN that has to be seen -- since Gracie was at least as dead-pan funny as a dancer as she was talking. I'd never seen it in any of the documentaries. The 2 movies with Hayward -- well, You Were Never Lovelier is the stupidest thing there EVER was, unbearable even compared to Down Argentine Way (which is also a must-see for the NICHOLAS BROTHERS 5 minutes of glory), but the dance by that name is as great as Cheek to Cheek, and Hayward adds another dimension altogether -- she's like an orchid, just unbelievably beautiful, with a musicality of her own that's hard to describe but just astonishes you, like Suzanne Farrell's in a way -- her signature step is failli (which is suitable for a Latin dancer, it's such a Spanish step, Kitri is inconceivable without all her faillis) -- , she's in the air, and suddenly she's alighted in a lunge, croise, and there she stays for a glorious long moment, just settling down like a butterfly, such a luscious astonishing radiant moment of gathering clarity, and then she's off again... The story of the other movie, the one where Fred joins the army, is not such an insult, quite, and the dancing is again really delicious -- but not like You Were Never Lovelier, which is just an epiphany, dancing in the moonlight.......so romantic, and so light

Decades ago at San Francisco Ballet, Lew Christensen choreographed beauty and the Beast (i think it was even televised). Havne't seen it, but many thought it very good There's FANTASTIC material for ballets in the traditional dance-dramas of India and Indonesia. I saw last year a version of "the Abduction of Sita" -- a crucial episode in from the Ramayana epic -- done by classical artists from that region, in which Rama was danced in the Kathak style, the demon Ravenna in the Kathakali style, and Sita by a fabulous Balinese dancer who danced her role in the Balinese style. The story is common to all these cultures, all of which have great clasical dance forms, and hte story of the abduction of Sita is a very important ballet in each culture -- and it is a fantastic, intriguing, haunting, heart-breaking story, with a great role for a ballerina, a principal dancer, his brother, a love-lorn demonness, her brother, the monkey king Hanuman (FABULOUS role), a deer, an eagle (who dies heroically in mid-air trying to rescue Sita from Ravenna, who's borne her away in his chariot) ...... and lots of wonderful mime. To make a ballet out of it, the only great obstacle would be getting a suitably wonderful score written to support it. Then Christopher Wheeldon could have a field day.

Kanawha, you're onto something --I think Baryshnikov said at some point soon after he defected that he wanted to dance like James Cagney.... if you haven't seen the movie "Yankee Doodle Dandy," you might not realize that James Cagney was in fact a GREAT dancer as a great character actor. Fabulous allegro technique. Check it out. he dances up the walls. At the end of the movie (he plays the composer George M Cohan), he comes down the stairs (after a private audience with President Roosevelt, who's thanked him for all that Cohan's music has done to raise the morale of the Allied soldiers) of the White House, and starts dancing down the stairs, doing cabrioles -- at first they're tiny, almost nothing, but they get bigger and bigger till they're huge and then fade back again till they're like a whisper, before he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

Yes, Carbro, thank you -- JEAN SHRIMPTON. One of the most influential beauties of her day -- suddenly, EVERYBODY broke out in overbites. The covers oif Glamour, Vogue, 17, all the way down to Redbook, every model on those covers for years had two teeth visible. That's why Gelsey had to have her lips done. And yes to Jennifer Ringer and Elizabeth Taylor. In fact, when Daria Pavlenko came out in Diamonds, with her hair up and that crown of diamonds on, I thought she looked exactly like the young Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe -- it wasn't the diamonds association, it was her face -- the huge wide eyes, the shape of cheekbones and jaw, it was an awesome resemblance -- and the rather short wide-hipped body. They had shaded her tutu indigo at the sides to make her waist look narrower (or else her partner's hands had gotten into a vat of ink and he'd left hand-prints from turning her -- what are the odds of that?) But she was awesomely beautiful.

Canbelto, you raise the interesting issue of the upper back as extendable-- Americans have tended to thing of extensions as meaning LEGS, and the back has had to lose pliancy as the legs were raised higher and higher -- or viewed another way, the back has been trained less and less as the attention went to the legs. It's partly a choreographic difference -- Ashton really was interested in making the torso dance. Sometimes I think of it as being an interest in the middle chakras -- the waist and the heart and throat chakras are very active in his ballets, which produces a more emotional (naysayers would say sentimental) effect than the cooler American manner, which mostly concentrates on keeping the center Pilates-stable and quiet. The best example i could cite is the way Antoinette Sibley dances Princess Florine in the Royal Ballet's old 1-act Sleeping Beauty -- she's flying along in the finale and doing double ronde-de jambe-pas de bourree with the upper body sweeping along at DRASTIC tilts as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Violette Verdy danced like that in Emeralds, too -- so it's not just an English thing, and not something Balanchine did not use on occasion or value. but he used it more for volupte than for sentiment.

Leigh, I think you're really onto something. The "Orient" wasn't far-away; it was next door, or already at home. You mention Persia -- probably even more important were the Turkic peoples who were already within the borders of the empire. In War and Peace, Natasha's mother, the countess Rostova, has an "Asiatic" look -- the sharp black eyebrows, the striking cheekbones. She is aristocracy of course -- but she's NOT European stock. And she's a totally incorporated, centrally important, deeply loved person in the book. She's not as lovable as Natasha's father, but that's because he'd give the ranch away to anybody with a sob story and she's always having to rein him in, and she won't let Nikolai marry Sonya because the family needs a major alliance -- but she HATES herself for having to do it, she's in the middle of it, the mother of them all and in no way alien or foreign.....

I've always thought that margot Fonteyn looked like a romantic version of young Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth, the face on British money. And young Suzanne Farrell looked amazingly like a British swinging-London supermodel whose name i can't remember, but who made the two front teeth fashionable.

Vishnyova in Other Dances! Yeah!!

Thanks, Helene -- it's wonderful to have real news of this company. I wish I could see them. It's also great to have a repot on Julia Adam's new ballet. She's SanFranciscan, of course (well, by way of Toronto, but she started choreographing here. I've found every one of her ballets interesting -- and very different from each other, almost as if she didn't want to repeat herself. The one thing that's been consistent is that she always seems to want to "take you someplace" -- did you get that feeling from "before"? SFB is going to do her ballet "Night" again next year, which she made for Tina leBlanc and is like a succession of dreams. It's one of the few ballets I've ever seen at SFB that when the first performance was over, the whole floor stood and cheered. It caught something that was in the air, it was incredibly timely when it was new -- wonder how it will go next time around.

I have to say, i sure did LIKE the photo of a scene from Messel's 1946 Beauty that ran with Ms Brown's article -- the costumes in particular had a lovely airiness to them that made the figures stand out against the ground without being at all out of harmony with the ground or each other. By contrast, the photos I've seen so far of the new costumes all look hard-edged, with tutus that have no loft to them, and the colors look like aniline dyes.

let me add to what Joseph says -- If you REALLY care about the tape, don't throw it away. Dvds (like CDs) are strangely vulnerable things -- a scratch or a warp can make them go comletely blank and lose everything forever. Something to do with hte magnetic matrix. DVDs, I've been warned, are NOT reliable archiving formats. Or so I've read -- I've never had it happen to me. Indeed this may be an urban folktale -- but I've been warned about it several times already myself.

The thoughtful and knowledgeable critic Robert Johnson, who doesn't have the wide readership he should, found Wheeldon's new work so striking it made him think " "Evenfall" makes plain that Wheeldon has stupendous talent and he should run New York City Ballet." (See the article linked today.) It may be a thought that came to him in the heat of his admiration, but it seems at least as worthy of debate as Rockwell's more widely publicized views. What do you all think?

I love the end of the Firebird, with the Prince and the whole city advancing en masse to that unbelievably thrilling music. Similarly, at the end of the Hard Nut, when the Nutcracker prince advances towards Clara/Marie with the whole world coming in behind him like what he has to offer her..... so romantic, so beautiful, so rich. Generally speaking, Mark Morris ends ballets wonderfully -- "Dido" has a magnificent ending, when the two last women sit at opposite ends of the bench facing away from each other, like statues on a monument, grieving. l'Allegro ends wonderfully with all those people rushing downstage like a cascade of joy. And Sylvia has a wonderful finale tableau, with the 2 gods (Cupid and Diana) upstage holding their bows and facing each other, like a pair of gates center-stage, and the lovers downstage hand-in-hand holding the arrrow of Cupid aloft. Has anybody mentioned "Les Sylphides"? Like Pas de Quatre, it ends with the tableau with which it began, ready to start again.... both beautiful. Speaking of Pas de Quatre, I love the way the Trocks do the final tableau -- unwinding it and doing it again over and over. It's not just funny (which it is), it's quite miraculous....

Joan Acocella has edited Nijinsky's Diary, and published it (subtitle -- Unexpurgated Edition) with a long intro (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999). It's not what we thought. She found that Romola changed a LOT , in fact made him look more homosexual than he really was.

Canbelto is SO right -- Fonteyn is oddly kinda hectic, and Sibley is fabulous in the" Evening with the Royal Ballet" The other truly wonderful performance was by the Queen (was it Gerd Larson?). ACtually, seems like there was a lot of sparkle in the jewel fairies, fast astonishing footwork -- was that Merle Park?

Aurora does coupe jetes, too.... it's not just a guy thing. But it's a good question, when did they start. SIzova did them with splits in the old Kirov Sleeping Beauty, that would have been 1970-something.

Just got in from Megan Low's last Sylvia -- I'm writing about this for Ballet Review, so I can't say much, but what a wonderful day in the theater. Ms Low ended her career in the best possible way, dancing and acting at full tilt, supported wonderfully by the company, who relaxed into the occasion and gave it up for her. They put the ballet over with a lot of style and wit. The audience was also totally with her, greeting her first entrance with applause. Her fellow Amazons were alive to each other and danced together with great attention to each other. Damian Smith was fantastically complex and poignant as the oaf who abducts her -- it was a case of "What part of 'No' don't you understand?" And Guennadi Nedviguine danced Aminta with incredible feeling, within a fabulously pure classical way of moving -- he looked at times like Carlo Blasis, the imagery was so distinct, single, double, triple step-up turns in attitude that dive into renverses stand out most clearly in memory as ways of declaring "I am in love with Sylvia." The bows were fantastic: The company were all applauding her, Helgi came out with a huge bouquet and kissed her, Guennadi ran offstage and returned with a bouquet the size of a bathtub, Mark Morris (who was in the audience) then ran onto the stage in humble posture bowing as he ran and gave her what looked like a fan.... And in the lobby afterwards the Low clan were gathered in large numbers, including the important SF modern dancer Sue Li-Jue, her cousin, looking very very happy and proud and taking pictures of each other singly and en masse.

I sometimes have dreams that i wake up from laughing -- I remember one, my favorite, i was in grad school at the time, I dreamt I was swimming in a bowl of warm oatmeal, and it was SO delightful -- very wet, watery oatmmeal, with just the ideal resistance, so swimming was effortless and I could on top of that breathe easily without having to come up for air, and every now and then there'd be this cute oldenburg-y huge oat-flake, and I'd swim around it, and just before I woke up I heard this genial booming voice saying "Searle perfectly understands the cooking of gruel." And i just woke up laughing out loud, shrieking. This sounds like one of them -- the wit is so fantastic.

Well, Mike, in the days when Merce started choreographing "independently" of the music, as Remy Charlip used to tell the story (I'd heard this a long time ago, so I'm going to have to keep it very general), it was the days when Merce was teaching class and John was playing for class, and he'd often not finish playing when the combination came to an end. SO they settled by getting out their stop-watches. Merce and John were also living together -- "John cooks, and I do the dishes," he once told a symposium I attended at Cal -- and they may have had a pretty good idea of what the character of the piece was going to be, even if they didn't confer. SO in theory it's one thing, but.....

The factor I haven't seen mentioned re NYCB is the deleterious effect on Balanchine style of dancing and rehearsing Peter Martins' ballets. I haven't seen NYCB often enough to make my observations worth much, but when City Ballet has toured, or I've been in NYC, I've noticed that Martins's ballets are extremely well-rehearsed and danced with tremendous conviction and style -- and the things I noticed in particular are the kinds of pedal-to-the-metal effort required to bring them off. (I know Martins HAS craft and works in different styles himself, but I haven't seen everything -- I'm referring to the effect of dancing the ambitious symphonic pieces.) In particular, I remember in some big-statement ballet (Adams concerto maybe?) seeing a man doing grand pirouettes a la seconde like a demon -- his releves were not on, he had to hop to keep them going, but it didn't matter, the expressionist force was making them very effective. And I thought -- wow, hmmmmm, no wonder the Balanchine ballets are looking so intermittent in their phrasing. The kind of transitions needed for Balanchine, the clarity of the action and the simultaneous musicality of the phrasing aren't necessary to Martins's style, there's a different kind of drive to this that's almost Massine-like -- and the dancers sure can DO it. The Balanchine ballets on the same program looked sharp but pinched by contrast, without follow-through (though as a regular at SFB, the thing I'm MOST used to enjoying is the sweep and follow-through of dancers here, they may not be sharp enough, but the liquidity of their phrasing is going to be very nice). Still, in Balanchine as opposed to Martins, NYCB's dancers looked under-rehearsed and under coached -- and of course, at NYCB the choreographer has always been the best coach. It was so in Mr B's day; it's the tradition. If the choreographer is also the director, the pressures of getting ahead are going to tune the dancers into making his ballets as presentable as possible, getting the idiom as natural-seeming as possible, and the logic pellucid. But if Mr B is no longer alive, for his ballets there needs to be supplemental coaching.

omshanti, I've been thinking for several days of a photograph of Soloviev in releve in second position that to MY mind makes it clear that he's a good dancer -- BOTH legs are rotating -- not just rotated but actively rotating, you can see it, it's one of the most revealing photos I can think of. It was included in the article abotut Soloviev in Ballet Review several years ago -- all of the photos are interesting, some are really beautiful (some are not), but that one.... There was a similar photo of Henning Kronstam in second position in releve in Alexandra's biography of him, the similarity being in the visible active rotation of both thighs simultaneously, which (again, to me) is a touchstone for classical action.

Omshanti, in the linked photo, Nureyev is standing croise, not en face -- and in that position the front hip is going to be visible. I wish he weren't lifting his ribs so much in that photo, but he's clearly the midst of a port de bras that he's giving an expressive curve to-- Generally speaking, women have a better chance at getting everything rotated and stretched and presented for a perfect fifth. Some teachers believe that it's not possible to stretch both knees completely and allow a softening of the front knee -- it's a hotly contested issue. But I'd suggest looking for photos of the young Darci Kistler in fifth -- or if you can find it, take a look at her performance in the NYCB "Bournonville Divertissements" video. Fabulously beautiful fifth positions -- many many small beaten jumps with beautifully rotated legs -- though if you watch it in slow motion you'll see that she actually lands from entrechat-six and takes off into the next one in "seventh position" -- completely turned out, but with her feet so overcrossed that her heels are on the far sides -- in plie her toes are touching as if she were in sous-sus. Extremely irregular, if not illegal, but she was coached for the role by the great teacher Stanley Williams himself, and he must have let it pass.......

Thanks, Leigh; I'm sure you're right. There's the story of Conrad Ludlow going to Balanchine and asking him what he's supposed to DO in Concerto Barocco. Mr B said, "you're like the avocado in the salad," and then Ludlow knew exactly how to be creamy and smooth and subtle and how to phrase everything. The choreographer is usually hte best coach.

A friend who was a star with the Martha Graham company told me once that she'd never seen fifth position -- never REALLY seen it -- until she saw Nureyev. Partly becauese in those days, men were never fastidious about their fifths, and Nureyev WAS, and he "showed fifth" more courageously, he WANTED you to see his fifth, than any ballerina did at that time. And she felt she was just echoing what everybody felt at the time -- In that sense, fifth as a theatrical and choreographic fact, Nureyev's fifth was epoch-making. After Nureyev, other men had to pull their lines and rotate and show fifth position. He was the cause of better fifths in others.

Hey guys, Sorry to be coming in on this discussion so late, but I actually didn't know that drb had started this thread till today-- I guess maybe the "view new posts" function isn't showing ALL the new posts? Because I've kinda been looking for a thread since I suggested it to drb after he queried me directly as to what I meant when I wrote that..... As I suspected would hapen, you all have said a lot of interesting things. It's curious to see what looks like a divide between the Soviet school (Hans-- please forgive me for caricaturing you thus) and the American school. Of course under the Soviets there would be no room for play in an issue like being on your leg -- you can't be heroic without it, though you CAN be "cool" without it. SO much of the American style is based on "take a chance" musicality that comes from jazz, which requires finding your alignment by swinging the bones into place rather than "total placement anxiety." Under Balanchine, a dancer like Stephanie Saland could get all the way to the top without really having a solid standing leg. Like Leigh and Carbro and the other Balanchine-school dance-students, I think of "on your leg" as a relative thing. Some dancers can't be knocked off their legs, and Cynthia Gregory I think took that to the point of bad taste. Farrell is my favorite example of a dancer who knows how to stay cool while daring to be off her leg, and she and Mr B experimented with what she could do -- and Hans is probably right in that she COULD have been on her leg if the choreography had called for that. My SECOND-favorite, though, is Russian, Marina Semyonova, whose White Swan variation ("Magic of the Bolshoi") deserves study by everybody who cares about ballet, for she sails through it with absorbed poetic delicacy while never being on her leg once. The double ronde de jambes, the tiny bourrees, all of it, she's never quite up on it and it doesn't bother her, she keeps on dancing. it's just fabulous dancing. lt seems that like everybody who's posting on this subject has taken at least ten years of ballet, but maybe some people are reading it who don't think they are familiar with the feeling of being on your leg. But in fact it's something we've all known, we were all infants once and all learned to sit up, to stand, and to take our first steps. "On your leg' is what dancers call it when your alignment is perfect and youre fabulously on your balance -- it's a combination of having the bones aligned properly and the right muscles holding. it's a visible thing, since the confidence it gives you can make your turns much more relaxed, your balances calm and long-lasting.... It's basically the same thing that children are looking for when they first learn to stand and walk, stability, so everybody has experienced it looking for it.... But some dancers' personalities (Saland comes to mind, also Ferri) or musicality are so strong that their imagination can over-ride a less-than-solid technique and create an image that holds up for us.... Sorry, I've kinda overstated this -- I don't have time right now to go back through and nuance it....