Paul Parish

Tina leBlanc, SO clear, and so fast, and able to modulate and phrase and place accents deftly in the midst of it all.... Patricia McBride Kyra Nichols, for a big girl, is very fast..... Antoinette Sibley was very fast, and like Sizova, she was little but moved large and with incredible freedom in the upper body......

Taking this topic up by its smallest handle, I'd like to add that the newspapers and magazines of the burgeoning middle classes of the nineteenth century took many skills for granted among those who COULD read and were hungry for something to passhte time -- in particular, MUSIC was published in magazines, like chess and bridge and crossword puzzles.... if you could read, you could probably read music -- the radio was an instrument like a piano, but it could read the music for you, and time was freed up from practising to keep your fingers dextrous, so of course interest broadened and maybe got shallower (but the kinds of music in the magazines were just thenew tangos and such, nothing very difficult -- though in THAT respect there's great music that's not difficult technically -- some Chopin preludes and mazurkas are not hard to get your fingers round, and much of Mozart -- though the hard thing about playing Mozart's piano sonatas is that there are not enough notes, so every one that IS there must be played exquisitely)...... sorry, I'm rambling all over the place..... the cool and really valuable thing about print is that you can take it with you and when you get there you STILL HAVE IT -- video tape fails, cds and dvds can lose all their info in a flash -- but books are there until they burn or you throw them away.... if of course you can FIND them in the mountain of paper. (I've been shoveling off my desk for the last several days, down to bare wood in places.)

dunno yet, Carbro -- it opens here tomorrow.. but the Zellerbach stage is SO much smaller than the Met's -- which is built with spear-carriers in mind, whereas Zbach's is meant for Merce Cunningham (so to speak). The WEALTH of courtiers in the old Kirov movie of SB is just incredible, all looking like a painting by van Dyck or Tiepolo; as I remember this production from when Ayupova was Aurora back in 89 or so was it was underpopulated and then there were all these lilac-colored folk bourreeing around....

Gererally speaking, I'm with Hans. The pace and scope of a long work has more interesting contours when mime and dance (and other forms of spectacle, such as the Panorama) alternate in meaningful ways. There's EXCELLENT mime in the Royal ballet's old version of the Sleeping Beauty -- watching the entire court fall asleep, in particular, as a wave of drowsiness sweeps around the stage -- Macmillan's work, I believe -- was VERY satisfying to watch, to take in, to understand, AND it make an effective curtain for the act, wonderful theater (and way superior to Sergeyev's version for the Kirov). But there's another aspect that has not been mentioned -- changes must often be made to scale a colossal production like Sleeping Beauty down to the resources of the company and the theater. If there are plenty of first-class dancers, there may NOT be a sizeable contingent of well-trained performers who can play ladies in waiting, lackeys, minor court functionaries, in a plausible style, nor room on the stage to deploy all those forces. The Royal Ballet DOES have them, but San Francisco Ballet (for one) does not. And SFB certainly did not have the forces at hand needed for Petipa's Garland Dance, which was huge, and had how many? nearly a hundred? performers in it. Frankly, I think Tomasson cut the garland dance down TOO much, with only 12 corps girls, and 6 children (if I remember right) -- but otherwise his was a judiciously balanced prduction, with a brilliant new Sapphire pas de deux, EXCELLENT dancing and mostly good mime from the principals, and outstanding Carabosses and Lilacs in Jim Sohm and Muriel Maffre. Well, that's a lot of detail on one issue.. but there are others, such as how far to go in modernizing the line, when to drop and add variations (like Tom Thumb's and Bluebeard's).... Who else do you all think has come up with good solutions?

I'm sure the reason that Sleeping Beauty is coming to Berkeley in Sergeyev's version is that the 1895 version could not fit onto our Zellerbach Hall stage, which is not really very big. The Cuban Ballet's Giselle could barely fit, the Bolshoi's Swan Lake was cramped -- none of our stages are really very big out here. Zellerbach;'s stage is smaller than the Opera House's, but when the Paris Opera Ballet brought their Bayadee to the San Francisco Opera House, they had to leave off the temple staircase in the opening scene (so Nikiya had to made her entrance just stepping out onto the flat stage), and for the Shades scene they had to leave off one of the flats, which looked quite seriously "wrong" -- but it's just not a deep enough stage. I'm sure that only the Met Stage, and I guess the kennedy Center's, and probably the big theater in Costa Mesa, could hold the reconstructed 1895 original -- badly as I want to see it, I don't think it's realistic to expect it to be stageable in the Bay area.

I'm looking forward to that Kirov DVD, too. Not having seen it yet,. I may be "a bt previous" in thinking that what you say, Solor, about Dudinskaya's arms may reflect the style of the times.... BUT if you look at old movies of western ballerinas like Zorina (whom Balanchine adored), they used the arms differently than we do now, the elbows are square not rounded, they stick out peculiarly and it looks VERY strange to my eye.....Check out "Goldwyn Follies" I* do* wish I'd seen Dudinskaya live. She must have been thrilling. It's clear she could do amazing things, and that she was tempestuous capabilities.... the one role I HAVE seen, and everybody should, is her Carabosse, on pointe and dancing like a whirlwind IN a whirlwind in the wonderful Sleeping Beauty that stars Sizova (whose dancing was an absolute revelation to me and remains the greatest Aurora I've ever seen her FIRST variation is perfection, sauts de chats that will make you gasp, and yet so restrained, so noble).

i think there IS a practical understanding that some are turners and some jumpers... Variations are built that way. There must be something to Cuban training -- the most beautiful, quietest turns I think I've ever seen are Jose Manuel Carrenyo's, and nearly all Cubans I've seen seem to turn fearlessly. Zakharova is so extremely flexible it's no surprise she has to work to find her placement.

If you want to get a look for yourself, check out the old movie of Balanchine's Midsummer Night's Dream. Ms Schorer was wonderful as the head fairy in the Scherzo.

Frankly, I think I'd rather see Nioradze as Carabosse than Aurora..... I've only seen her twice, as the Firebird (horrifying) and as Zobeide (stunning), when the Kirov did their Fokine program -- oh, yes, I also saw her as the ballerina in Rubies, in which she was overwrought but plausible.... Her Firebird was certainly a powerful individual, but the interpretation was so amped-up, hysterical, and her lines so turned-in and spiky it put me in mind of the Trockaderos.... Perhaps she can also do well-bred; it's possible.... Marc, what do you think?

Antoinette Sibley is the greatest I've seen live..... the freest, most imaginative, most classical, and most beautiful. It must be said that she had an uncanny sensitivity to Anthny DOwell, who was her partner. Their rapport was so strong you could feel them communicating when their backs were turned to each other. Each had a cool demeanor, but they were attuned like twins, they managed to suggest impossible love in almost every dimension. So the two of them made a single thing, and I can't mention her without including him.

I think one of the secrets of Morris's ability to reach so deep into us -- I agree with all of you, his dances can really move me, like nobody else's but Balanchine's and Ashton's -- is his very deep grounding in folk dance -- as a teenager he belonged to a balkan folk dance collective in Seattle, and his first great love was flamenco. It's a foundation for his stage work -- and it gives him access to rhythms and floor patterns, the old dance forms that underlie so much great music (all of Handel and Bach is based on dance rhythms, jig, courante minuet sarabande pavane ecossaise etc.), and the figures of folk-dance -- circles, lines, stars, squares, thread the needle (where two dancers make an arch and another tgoes under it, or leads a line of dancers under it, a favorite of Balanchine's, e.g., COncerto Barocco).... and it gives the fundamental look of his dancers, who don't look to me like office workers but people who move well dancing together, like folk-dancers.... And lots of the sections we all like so much ARE folk-dances -- the "stupid men's dance" actually is a real bavarian folk dance, and the double line dance Helene mentioned, which always makes me cry, it's so beautiful to see all these reasonable designs taking shape, with all its fantastic stage patterning, is a Balkan line dance..... And then there's that thing Alexandra alluded to -- he can make a toy truck dance. What an imagination! A curious thing you wouldn't know if you hadn't read an interview or something is how intellectual he can be -- l'Allegro, he's said, was designed to CONFINE the dancers -- all those beautiful scrims that fly in and out are part of a project of restricting hte space in which the dancers can move, in various dimensions..... my favorite of the effects he created was the slow walking dance, where it looked like we were looking at shades in Elysium pacing slowly, looking down sadly, line upon line receding into the mists, where they were separated by colorless scrims and had to walk like on a cat-walk, to a penseroso section early in the ballet..... The bio of him by Joan Acocella is VERY VERY good -- readable, penetrating, illuminating. I don't always agree with her interpraetations, but I sure find them stimulating, and she's almost never WRONG, she's really seen the dances. She notices things I don't, but they ARE there.

Well, I just rented the Semenyaka, and she is to my mind fabulous in the Hungarian variation -- I haven't seen many versions, but she far outshines Guillem. I love the performance overall, and Mukhamedov's, and Taranda is off the charts -- But I agree with Solor's complaints, the dvd itself is dull -- they simply filmed a stage performance, and did not think out how to make it live on the small flat screen... the vision scene is almost impossible to stay awake through, though when I saw exactly this production 6 months ago in Berkeley I was beside myself with delight.

My mother was from New orleans, and I've still got lots of family down there -- some of whom we haven't heard from yet. I can still see, like it was yesterday, joseph Giacobbe's ballet company (Delta Festival Ballet) performing outdoors at Simonne Stern's garden party at the edge of Metairie, by a canal. This was thirty years ago, they had a very good boy, Jerel Hilding (sp?) who went on to be a star in the Joffrey, years later I saw him dance Billy the kid in San Francisco really well. The names most on my mind are the Giacobbes and Harvey Hysell, who also had a good school.... I think Grace Madduell was a student of Hysell's, Gina. ...... Thanks, Gina -- I loved the way Grace danced. She must have overlapped with you at SFB, huh? She seemed a truly nice person, as well, though I never knew her except to say hello.....

Well, Dirac, you've certainly got me in a full nelson re Frank Churchill's and Emma -- though you're still SO wrong about Emma's beauty. She's just nowhere NEAR ugly. She's not the young Vanessa Redgrave, but..... hmmm, analogues are SO hard to find. The features prized in her day included that Greek nose, bee-stung lips, rounded shoulders, and so on --well, except for the bee-stung lips, which are still very much in favor, the rest of those things are quite out, except that maybe Almodovar could use the nose. An equivalent in REASONABLY contemporary terms might be young Princess Margaret -- or Alicia Silverstone.... and for Harriett, gosh, she's even harder. I LOVED the girl they cast in Clueless, but then, I loved everything about Clueless. I wish I'd written Clueless. The key to Lizzy Bennett is her FINE EYES, and the play of intelligence, merriness, and scorn they're capable of. You'd want her to smile with you and you would NOT want her to frown at you....

Dirac, with respect, I have to disagree with you about Emma -- the first thing we hear about her is that she's "handsome, clever, and rich." For a woman, she's almost as independent as a man, and she doesn't behave like a pretty girl because she doesn't have to -- while Harriett most emphatically must. But she's not ACTUALLY any prettier than Emma -- thought Jane Fairfax is perhaps better looking than either. And if you find "handsome" is less attractive than "pretty," well, some folks do. On the other hand, though, you may be RIGHT, there's no way of determining it. One has to scope these things out from Austen's wonderfully subtle free indirect style of presenting things -- but Mr Knightley wouldn't have hung around waiting for Emma to grow up if he hadn't thought she was fabulous from the beginning. Actually, I think of Virginia Woolf as being a great beauty, much better looking than Nicole Kidman, who's merely pretty, most of the time (though she did look bizarre with that nose-extension) -- and she was regarded so in her day.

Slightly off-topic, but re: Bessmertnova, when I saw her live here in Les Sylphides I was not moved at all -- but her performances in the films of Romeo and Juliet and Giselle are. Well, I don't know how to praise them. As Juliet -- in the Lavrovsky version -- she is such a glorious creature. At first, her turned-in line bothered me, and her stylized way of holding her hands -- and then she just swept me away. And her Giselle is just astounding -- not the first act, but the second. The solo adage! She's out there all alone, and it registers as the most magnificent act of defiance with me. A great dramatic dancer.

Gina, the snow scene in SFB['s nutcracker was the greatest thing in it, the music is so incredibly stirring, but Christensen's choreography for it was my favorite version I've ever seen -- which includes Balanchine's and Mark Morris's.... so musical, so exciting, those whirling, swirling, eddying dancers flyng in, like they wre caught in the wind... it must have been something to dance that -- so much swooping in the upper body, but with arrowy feet and everthing SO FAST, and with paper snow in your hair and in your eyes and underfoot and up your nose.... If you could do it, it would surely be exhilarating.... Of course you'd love that music.

Well, Solor, I THINK I know what you mean -- since I thought Fanny Gaida (sp?) was about as dull as she could be -- as Nikiya when the POB came here a couple of years ago -- indeed, the dancer playing Gamzatti was so much more interesting, I found it hard not to pull for her.... Manuel Legris, on the other hand, was noble, unaffected, magnificent. Which dancers did you see on this DVD? Generally, I find their men elegant, strong, beautiful, but the women are so weak in the center that they can't control their effects. As for Lacotte's choreography, I am not impressed by it in the Sylphide movie, though his staging is fine. Ghislaine Thesmar's performance, on the other hand, is really amazing.

yes to all of those, and YES to sitting upstairs and getting to see the designs... Theme and Variations is GREATLY improved from this angle, and Emeralds, my GOd! the difference Especially yes to Serenade and Barocco and the entrance of the swans.... Special thrills in the finale of Agon. CHARACTER DANCES: Petipa's wonderful czardas in Swan Lake, czardas and mazurka in Raymonda, and all-time favorite, number 1 GRAND PRIZE, Balanchine's Mazurka in Coppellia The snow scene in Lew Christensen's Nutcracker was glorious. Mark Morris is way up there, near Balanchine and Petipa -- A Garden; Snow, Flowers, and finale of The Hard Nut, l"Allegro, il Penseroso, etc; Sandpaper Ballet; I love the Chinese Checkers patterns in "World Power"; "My Party" and the Texas Playboys ballet....

Slightly off-topic, BUT --Hans, you've got to stop teasing us. Where where where, What is the tape with Sizova's Vivandiere on it? I agree, based on her Sleeping Beauty, Sizova is just about better than anyone in anything. unbelievable, the jumps in her first variation.......

Well, I liked Sleeping Beauty.

I've only seen Pankova twice, but both times she won my heart. She danced Aurora here in the late 80s; I preferred her characterization to Ayupova's -- she was SO young, so fresh, so alive to the whole world around her, her eagerness appealed to me enormously. And in a Kirov video whose name I don't recall, she dances the ballerina role in La Vivandiere with such elan I don't know who could resist her. I've heard that some think the style of the Kirov's production is exaggerated, there are great tilts of the upper body going on all the time, it's almost hooty, though since it's so well under control I'm also highly impressed -- but her dancing takes everything to another level, it is so effervescent, her attack has such allegria....

The way we live now, 2 hours in the theater seems like enough to most people -- indeed, the old ballets are losing their intermissions, as ADs compress them to get audiences on the road home early. SO Giselle no longer seems too long -- BTW it is NOT a good idea to pad Giselle by lengthening the first act with MORE hops on pointe and expanded takes on the peasant pas de deux -- Even a version as well done as Helgi Tomasson's, which has VERY nice choreography for his peasant pas de cinq, and some sweet extra dances (WELL constructed) for Giselle and Albrecht, is too much -- it over sweetens the first act, making it a kind of petit trianon diversion rather than a swiftly moving story. You can't hang all that bric-a-brac on a poor country girl. Gina I wish I'd seen your double- bill -- it sounds VERY nice. The cool thing about Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Giselle is the way SVC has all those character steps in its finale -- the dancers enter WAVING "Hello" to each other like they do in Giselle.

Petipa Fan, if you had another name it might be easier to understand your aversion to Petipa's greatest ballet.... It's really shocking to hear that you don't see anything in it..... If you don't like SB, what do you see in Petipa? the ballet IS, I admit, extremely polished -- indeed, just under the surface, there is a considerable anxiety that's constantly breaking through in alarms, but a surface placidity, even complaisancy, keeps reasserting itself until Carabosse brings the whole thing down.... on the other hand, HER theme is the very firrst thing we hear in the overture, which is IMO a MAGNIFICENT composition and maybe the greatest overture ever written by ANYBODY, including Beethoven and mozart and Richard Strauss.... If any overture ever set out the thesis and antithesis and set you up for what's to come, it's this one.... THe thing about this music is, it's literally magical -- and the good magic is even more powerful than hte bad, magic performed by daylight. maybe I'll ask you about particular pieces -- what about the Breadcrumb fairy's music? The pizzicato violins are making the sounds of breadcrumbs falling (which for old fashioned Russians evoked a charm against poverty, the baby will always have food), and the tenderness of that melody is SO touching it sometimes makes me cry. There are other more poignant moments in the score -- none more vulnerable for me than the solo for the vision of Aurora, with its rocking melody. And there's the intensely sweet violin melody in the wedding variation. It's all music about hope (and of course, fear), and Aurora is an embodiment of hope -- of all you could want to be left behind after you're gone. The waltz you mention from Swan Lake is indeed beautiful, I agree -- and indeed, Swan Lake is incredibly beautiful, and its mood is so penetrating -- but the big waltz of Sleeping Beauty is sweeps me up more than any other I know. WOuld it help recommend the score to say that Stravinsky loved it?

Bart, the bad thing about sickling is that if you do it, you've put your foot in a very weak postion which WON"T SUPPORT you -- especially in landing from jumps. SO there are millions of exercises to train you NOT TO DO THAT, and also to strengthen the weaker muscles which prevent sickling, cuz sickling is EASY and dangerous -- if you came down on a sickled foot, you'd fall, and a sprain of the ankle would be the least-worst that could happen.... Wrapping is not only beautiful, it is a basic exercise to prevent the development of that bad habit......