Paul Parish

"field of shrapnel" starts 0:55

I DO feel a lot of conflict in the action -- esp in the first movement -- though it's not literally war-like For me the most frightening moment is when the ballerina in palest pink [sunday, Vanessa Zahorian, but I first felt it when Lucia Lacarra did it 10 years ago here; both danced it excellently] makes a perfect circle of the stage doing perfect pique turns while the corps girls rush around her chaotically -- I thought she was giongto collide with somebody, like a planet passing through a chaos of asteroids -- or like a soldier moving through a hail of bullets. [i was sitting in the orchestra, seen horizontally, the screen of corps dancers really looks like ONE of them is gong to hit her, you don't know which; I'm told that from upstairs, it's exciting but does not look dangerous because you can see the trajectories do not intersect.

Watching SFB dance Symphony in 3 Movements yesterday -- it was thrilling-- I was forcibly reminded of Glass Pieces: the way the principals jump into the midst of an ongoing "chaos' -- seems like it's a LOT like the way their counterparts do into the 'urban pedestrians' of Glass Pieces. Has anybody else noticed this? Is it written about?

Thanks for the Robbins, you all. Balanchine's fabulous "Stories of the great ballets" -- written with Francis Mason [who did indeed write most of it] has a LONG LONG and wonderful section on Dances at a Gathering, and there's considerable mention of the studio setting and of "marking" the dance as a beautiful thing, dancing for each other. Also a wonderful interview with Robbins by Edwin Denby, and some discussion of how the boys all had beards when JR was making the dance, and how it had a hippie feeling to it in its making. I recommend it to anybody, though I'd never recommend Gomes's solos to anybody, sadly. But some great performing artists are also creative artists, though weak at it. Arthur Schnabel, one of the great pianists of the early 20th century, was a composer, but his recordings of Beethoven and Schubert are still towering examples of how to play music that is more beautiful than it CAN be played. It may also be good for a performer to dance Gomes's work -- even if the audience does not get anything out of it, it may nevertheless cause the performer to find new resources within himself that keep him/her in a place where a great response to great choreography can be more easily accessed.

Well, there's more Tallchief turning up -- this is more of the original Mozartiana than i have ever seen before, Tallchief in the "Gigue" -- I'd love to see more, but I'm THRILLED to see even this much. Thank God for Nick Wallace Smith. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcClLMd11as

Wonderful, arresting topic. Thank you, Daniel Benton. I'm struck by the boldness of Croce's assertion. I'm THINKING [with Tallchief in mind, and Tanny] that Croce means that the roles he made for his ballerinas are based on who the dancers are and what music they respond to and what matters to them imaginatively. But maybe she means something else.... I do NOT think she's saying something about womankind in general. In particular, I don't think Balanchine was interested in the beaten-down kind of woman that Tudor likes to dramatize. He certainly never married that sort of woman --

Tallchief in Pas de dix [with Eglevsky]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=ST3C9SixavU&NR=1

Here's from the first chapter of her autobiography: http://www.nytimes.c...-tallchief.html What a strong, clear mind -- and what wit! Balanchine never loved a woman who wasn't smart and a wit. "My father, Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, was a full-blooded Osage Indian. Six foot two, he walked with a sturdy gait and loved to hunt. The story goes that he could stroll through the woods, rifle in hand, spot a quail or pheasant out of the corner of his eye, point the gun, and shoot the bird without breaking his stride. With his strong aquiline profile, Daddy resembled the Indian on the buffalo-head nickel. Women found him handsome, and when I was young I idolized him. My earliest memory of my father is from when I was three. I slept in a second-floor bedroom with my sister Marjorie, who was an infant. One evening when I fell asleep in the living room, Daddy picked me up. Snuggled in his arms, I remember waking as we climbed the stairs. I can still see his dark eyes, his tender smile, his shiny black hair. When Daddy was a boy, oil was discovered on Osage land, and overnight the tribe became rich. As a young girl growing up on the Osage reservation in Fairfax, Oklahoma, I felt my father owned the town. He had property everywhere. The local movie theater on Main Street, and the pool hall opposite, belonged to him. Our ten-room, terra-cotta-brick house stood high on a hill overlooking the reservation. When my father was a young man, he married a young German immigrant and they had three children--two boys, Alexander (whom everyone called Hunky) and Tommy, and a girl, Frances. They were little children when their mother died. Later, when Ruth Porter, my mother, came to Fairfax to visit her sister, who worked as a cook and housekeeper for my Grandma Tall Chief, Daddy was Fairfax's most eligible bachelor. Mother must have arrived tired and dusty from her long journey, but from what I'm told there was an instant attraction between them.

Tallchief in Allegro Brillante http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YG2JwU32-4

Well she's with the angels and Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn and Stravinsky and Balanchine now. I wish I'd seen her -- Francis Mason was not the only one to think of her days as the most exciting ones of all. She's on the cover of i remember Balanchine. i've recently been watching her in Allegro Brillante and Scotch on youtube and finding her musicality attack, precision thrilling. I showed her in Scotch to a friend who thought it was Kitsch and I just had to bite my tongue, cuz I thought it was romantic, the separations of hte lovers were harsh and unbearable and made my heart pound but I wasn't about to try to explain that to him, he'd just have been embarrassed for him and i'd have been forced to cut him off.

http://www.amazon.com/Choreography-Balanchine-Chaconne-Steadfast-Tchaikovsky/dp/B000228SX2 Here's a link to the dvd with said THRILLING picture on the cover.

Thanks, Marga. Any other recipes in that book that you liked?

Thank you all! Any further thoughts about her playing Polyhymnia, anybody?

Please....

A friend says she can see her as Polyhymnia -- with the finger across her lips. Well, indeed, duh!!!! so can I! Very easy to picture it. Did she do it? Was she ever Terpsichore? I can picture that, too -- though not quite so clearly.... but I can CERTAINLY see her doing those pas de chevals on pointe, and hte swivels from 4th to second and back....and hte dives into penchee and he liettle skitters around on the heels, and he pelvic bumps, yes I can see it, and would LOVE to. But did she?

Thanks, Natalia -- is that Lacotte's choreography? THey're lovely in it, but I find the arrangement of steps kinda dull, and the scarf doesn't seem to be doing her any harm, which is odd.

Generally speaking, hte "beautiful' foot -- with the high instep and arch -- used to be thoguht of as weak. The "strong" foot that pointed enough -- but only enough -- to allow the bones to get into a pointe that would support the body without strain was recognized as the type likeliest to allow a dancer to work without frequent injuries. Pavlova had a "beautiful' foot.

Suite in Blanc, a sort of kingdom of the shades for mildly happy couples, nicely completed the program, and how wonderful was Sofiane Sylve who really inhabited her part. She was the white silk ribbon that pulled the whole thing together... Beautiful, Quiggin; thank you: I wish I'd said that. I'm also eager to see the ballet again.

Thanks for posting. What a talent! Loveable dancer.

The great thing about Wikipedia is that it's online and you can look things up there at 3 in the morning. The n ext great thing about it is that it's communal, and on the whole the spirit behind it is generous/. Re ballet, it is weak -- though there are some WONDERFUL articles there [e.g., the very thorough piece on la Fille mal Gardee]. I have found myself inserting a paragraph here and there -- since it is weak in its way on everything. I'll give an example -- the section on Bizet MIGHT have a paragraph on his youthful Symphony in C that discusses his education, the occasion of the composition, its debt to Gounod, the fact that the score was lost for a long time -- but NO MENTION of Balanchine's ballet set to that score. Such was once the case -- I doubt at this point that that lapse has not been rectified -- but similar lapses lurk everywhere, since the articles are generally the work of enthusiasts who may know a great deal but are not necessarily aware of all the important ramifications of the subject they're writing about.

Thank you Rosa for posting that. Tee choreography is in many passages SO BEAUTIFUL -- and so difficult -- it really reveals Obrastzova's modesty and greatness of heart, to see how scrupulously and generously she moves through these paces. Ashton contrived a more wonderful entrance -- never was there ever a more wonderful entrance than Cinderella's floating descent of that precipitous staircase -- but Sergeyev's dances are more moving and more expressive and no less exacting than Ashton's. I'd never seen this version before - -and I can't imagine a better case being made for it.

It's BEAUTIFUL, rg -- Looks from the plastique like some airy sprite -- the west wind? maybe something by Jakobson. The costume is less interestin to me than hte pose, which is VERY contrapposto'd and very specific, and very very beautiful/ Thanks for posting. WHo was that guy who danced with Osipenko? Semenov or Markovsky? Actually, maybe Nisnevich in a wig?

Re Other Dances -- Makarova and Baryshnikov were fabulous in that ballet, and the Slavic touches were very important to it. Just for depth of background, i'm posting a wonderful video of Serge Vikharev in the man's mazurka from Chopiniana [aka Les Sylphides-- since it's danced to piano accompaniment -- asi the ballet was originally before Diaghilev had Chopin's piano music orchestrated - the connection to Robbins's Chopin dances is pretty clear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX9LSqaJxiQ Even more so, though there aren't any allusions to Slavic arms, Fokine has used the rhythm of the Polish mazurka step as the organizing principle in this solo, and there is a deep, true musicality in Vikharev's dancing that brings out the nostalgia that Chopin built into the music and that Fokine built into the dance, and which Robbins is using as the atmosphere his dancers are breathing. That poetic rhythm, the ebb and flow of it, is the MOST important thing of all.

Dear Birdsall -- I hope it won't creep you out to hear that it was a well-known ritual in the 19th century for fans to drink champagne out of the ballerina's slippers. I think it makes most sense in the Catholic countries, where there's a 2000-year tradition of venerating local saints, and of visiting their shrines and cherishing the physical remains of their lives on earth. My slightly loony great-aunt from new Orleans had a 1/4-inch-square piece of cloth from a garment once worn by Blessed Claude de la Colombiere, which she kept foisting on members of our family who had to go to the hospital -- she was interested more in the possibillity that a certifiable miracle would occur that she could document and send in to the Vatican, in hopes of moving Blessed Claude up the ranks out of the beatificate into the status of sainthood. A garment, or a fragment of one, something that touched the saint's body, the church considers [or did when I was a child -- they've kinda moved away from such superstitions] a 3rd-class relic. First-class would be a part of the saint's actual body. The Holy Grail and the crown of thorns of course have got TONS of cachet. I do have a pair of Kyra Nichols' toe-shoes and I don't care who knows it.

SOunds like a great party -- and I DID like the triple Pas