Paul Parish

When I saw the Bolshoi Raymonda, I was struck by the company's style -- their legs look more turned-out at the hip than they used to, and the feet seem to go to and from point with les abruptness -- but the arms seem much the same as (say) Bessmertnova's, especially the hands. I realized as I continued to watch that I LOVE the Bolshoi port de bras. THe arm opens differently than the Petersburg arm -- does it not? and the fingers are not rounded but are allongee, very very long, and hte whole hand has the shape of a chalice, like a lily that's just begun to open. THose of you who know, have I got this right? is this very vulgar of me? and more important, what is the ancestry of the Bolshoi port de bras?

Thanks for all these reports, Leigh! I was going to say that thepoem is Wyatt's "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek" -- but Drew's right, it is "Whoso list to hunt...." But "They flee from me" feels like a companion-piece to it. Sir Thomas Wyatt was the first great poet since Charucer,; he was a courtier of henry VIII. And yes, "Noli me tangere, for I Caesar's am" is such a striking line it's tempted people to think the lady who used to seek him and doesn't any more was Ann Boleyn, though I don't think there's enough evidence to substantiate it. "Noli me tangere" is not really a Christian reference many Christians would be familiar with -- it's not like the lamb of God or the Old Rugged Cross, something millions of people would recognize, but it IS familiar to students of Renaissance poetry and even more of the paintings. There were a lot of paintings of the "Noli me tangere" moment, when the resurrected Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, looking remarkably refreshed and gorgeously approachable. It was a great counter-Reformation subject (they loved pictures with the subtext 'Can you believe how these Puritans are bad-mouthing our darling Mary Magdalene?') -- but it was also painted earlier by Giotto, Breughel, and there's a GREAT version by Titian http://www.magdalene.org/nolimetangere3.htm So Leigh, it's perfectly reasonable that a nice Jewish boy with a humanist college education should have heard the phrase.

Hey all -- Thanks for all your WONDERFUL reports -- Raymonda was thrilling for me, I could have seen it every day for a week -- well, I might have gotten bored during Grigoriev's corps work in Act 2, but he left so much fabulous Petipa in his version, there were tasty intricacies in there that made me quite wild with delight, over and over. The dancers looked in many cases very young, and eager and delighted with their tasks and enormously talented and SO ready to get out there. The 2 Misses K made me bravo them in the dream sequence -- the arabesque hops of the former and the cabrioles of the latter were so musical, so delightful, I could not believe I'd seen something for real that so closely corresponded to the way I'd WANT to see them I wrote a review of it for DanceViewtimes, which I hope you'll check out -- it's at http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2004/autumn/09/bolshoi2.htm So I won't say all that all over again -- But I will say that Allash had a very good day Sat afternoon and danced with more joy and spirit than Antonicheva did the night before. She got happy in her toe-hops and really DANCED, like the kids were doing. Volchkov is a thrilling dancer -- his Act 3 variation included a diagonal with a fouette-saute, where with the back leg in arabesque he brought the standing foot up to passe in mid air and then LANDED the jump on the knee -- calm as Fadeyechev, and he did it perfectly 3 times. But he is not very big next to Allash; he's slender, especially in the thigh, and I was a little worried about the big lifts -- and at the end of Act 2, the big Soviet overhead press-lift at the end of her pas de deux with Jean (after Abderakhman has been despatched) began to come undone as he carried her, one-handed, the whole diagonal of the stage; she was sliding forward, but neither betrayed any anxiety, and Volchkov managed to get her near the front corner and subside onto his knees as he gently but noticeably dropped her; whereupon she pushed herself up with her hands, smiled at him as if to say "You ARE my savior" -- and suddenly we in love with them both. A huge emotion swept through the house. Such spontaneous graciousness, such modesty, such exemplary behavior in front of all the children in the house that afternoon (the Russian families had come out in force) -- you felt like you'd just seen a revelation of the old traditions. Now that's chivalry. I wish I'd seen Gracheva. And now I know I want to see the Kirov's version. PS Probably Allash wasn't helping Volchkov enough in that lift -- it came at the very end of the second act, and both were surely tired. It takes incredible abs to hold the legs out horizontal with support only under the lower back.... The thing that impressed me though, was the way neither of them let blame enter into the question, and the way he went to the floor for her -- as in ballroom dancing; it's always the gentleman's fault.

hmmmmmmph! I don't think Willie MAys had more admirers than hte Beatles, or even ELvis... The thing about ballet, OUR favorite art, is that it doesn't record well, and is therefore not avaliable full-strength on television. Fred Astaire once set the tone for the whole world in how to be a gentleman and a modern man at he same time -- but tap comes across on film (you can hear the weight in the tapping even if you can't see it in the movement). Baryshnikov was only a minor star, by contrast (his weight-transfers, miraculous in three dimensions and real presence, were meaningless on screen, and the pirouettes were not very arresting, and you didn't remember them once they were over). SUnday morning in class, after the petite allegro, we all had a sudden fit of doing those goofy arm-pokes the Olympic-gymnast women would be doing when they weren't doing gut-wrenching flips and twists -- It was REALLY wsilly and we REALLY enjoyed ourselves for about 30 seconds. I'm surprised anybody stayed up to watch the gymnasts, though. I mean, really -- you can't SEE the most difficult things they're doing nowadays, those tight twists are not like hte wide-open moves Nadia Comaneci did at hte top of her fame, where the amplitude was such a visible and stunning thing, that she seemed to go beyond perfection in her achievement, which made 10s the only plausible judgment and created a new proverbial number -- Bo derek made a movie called "Ten," and the guy in Spinal Tap had an amp that would go to eleven.....

land of Goshen! that's some exotic dancer! I like the snaky attitudes the best.... fantastic plastique

thanks, Leigh -- I get it now -- though I DO buy Accella's metaphor -- in fact, I don't even think of it as a metaphor; human beings mark their territory with spilled staining liquids -- the noble Greeks poured libations of wine to do pretty much the same thing that dogs do, to mark the boundaries of their territory, and danced things out also to mark their boundaries. Robert Frost's great poem mending wall echoes some really old traditions of walking along a border to repair it "Good fences make good neighbors".... in any case, Leigh, I want to rezd everything you have to say abut Cinerella, a\so please point me to that thread....

It's a wonderful article....She really has some deep insight -- I especially appreciate the analysis of Cinderella's circles of the stage, and the circles around the prince -- she "dances rings around him," which demonstrates her seovereignty in proverbial erms and shows she's fit to be queen. Small quetoin -- where did Leigh say the manege was infelicitous, and why? Leigh, darling, have you seen Sibley do it? I ask because I'm not only dazzled by it, I'm struck by the way she looks BACK at the prince on certain piques, which makes it such a private and delicate thing, like in the world of Apu when his bride to be steals glances at him while mostly keeping her glance on the floor, as is prescribed by law for good girls.... What more natural that she would WANT to look, and have to staeal glances -- but to do that on a manege of turns!!!! That's really Ashtonian.....

I think it's in the music that they have to be caricatures -- Prokofieff's scenario calls for them to be grotesques, and calls them "furious" and "Petulant," or something like that -- At least, that’s what I gathered from the program notes for the Moscow Festival Ballet, which did a revision of the first Bolshoi version on their tour through here last year -- with very funny pointe work for the stepsisters, and a hilarious drag role for the MOTHER (whom Ashton left out of the story).... THe ballet was conceived for Ulanova, and she was a very real dballerina, and Cinderella was conceived as a real person surrounded by horrible vulgarity.... I reviewed it for Danceviewtimes -- here’s the link if anybody wants to check it out http://www.danceviewtimes.com/dvw/reviews/...er/suburban.htm it was kind of wonderful, but not as lovely as Ashton's -- though there was a beautiful quiet pas e deux where he offered her the crown, and they danced with it using it for support (like hte tambourine in Esmeralda)....

I’ve only seen this cast -- I THINK I saw Cinderella live with these principals in 1969 or 70, but am not sure I haven't just manufactured the memory from seeing the video, loving it, and having indeed seen Sibley and Dowell in the Dream, Swan Lake, Giselle, and smaller ballets. I loved her, loved him, love d them - -and this video reminds me a great deal of why. For all her control and elegance --and she REALLY had that, check out the releves in passe with the qui8ck, accurate cambres in JUST the upper back, while the rest of her body is marvellously poised, light, elastic, and still, with NO give in the lower ribs -- for all that, she was a marvellous actress. One of the most telling moments in the whole thing is that one on her hands and knees in the recognition scene, when she's rushed center stage to recapture her glass slipper, and he tries to lift her up and she's so shy she resists -- it really moves me, it's so emotional, so powerful, so touching, so poignant, so full of a lifetime of NOT being recognized... She told Barbara Newman, who interviewed her for Striking a Balance, that as a young person she was much more interested in acting than ballet, and though she could obviously do the steps, she only agreed to go to the ballet school to get back to London and be with her parents (she'd been evacuated in wartime to the countryside) -- but that later when she realized she could make her arabesque say "I am sad" or "I'm exhilarated" or "I love you" that she began to really love dancing. She does this with the attitude turns in her "after the ball" dance in the kitchen, she's got a story going on the whole time, and yet she has that tiny, frail, perfectly beautiful classical body, with the long long neck -- and SUCH beautiful head positions, so accurate.... I didn't see Fonteyn in the role so can't compare the two, but I can't imagine that she outdid Sibley in that paradoxical mixture of fantasy and strict accuracy, and SIbley's fluidity in turns I'm SURE Fonteyn could not have matched, nor the strength of her footwork. It's a great shame there's no record of Sibley's Swan Lake -- she was SO eloquent in the mime scene. The way she took shape in lifts was breath-taking (look at the lift in double-passe in the grand pas de deux in Cinderella -- it's the most beautiful one I've ever seen -- partly because of the thrill of the instantaneous appearance of the diamond shape, partly because her upper body is so powerfully stretched out of her hips, and the head position is SO beautiful). Her swan queen was much more moving to me than Makarova's -- the arabesques were not so high, but they meant more, and they meant more of the right thing. Sibley was a warm Odette, and brave -- she created a nobler creature than Makarova's. Makarova's is too close to seductive, a creature of pathos like Criseyde rather than a heroine.... But Sibley's was still inside a free spirit And her Odile was a really dangerous woman, charming and frightening -- when she did her fouettes, she made it a fantasia of lashing and whirling, throwing in doubles ad lib, at random.... each one was stinging, each with its own attack. SO this Cinderella has to represent her to the rest of the world -- this and her WONDERFUL Florine on the RB Aurora's Wedding, in which case she thoroughly outdanced Fonteyn and everyone else onstage.

Here's a link http://www.danceviewtimes.com/dvw/reviews/...r/sfbgala1.html to a picture of "The Unsung" and a short notice I wrote for Dance view West last fall. I totally agree with you, Miliosr, that hte Limon men look as great as any men in the world in this ballet -- and it's at least in part because the choreography is so extraordinary, and they dance it with such care and devotion. I'd recommend it to anybody

Fascinatin news, Jane--Will definitely be on the look-out. What a wonderful name, sounds Cambodian. DO you know? I gather that there will be a significant number of new dancers coming into SFB -- but there are lots of visa problems, and it's not clear when they'll all be resolved....

It's tempting to say that he ran off with Fifi la Vivandiere..... but alas , I can't really help.

Will Lin-Yee's a local boy from Oakland -- it's great to hear that he's a lot of fun on-stage. He's a great kid; he's taken class with us in Berkeley . For quite a while he was out with a foot injury that wouldn't heal, and he'd be in with his mom (who's a good dancer) doing stuff without releves...... His younger brother Max is a promising student at SFB school, also tall.

o Jorgen, THANK you for that.

Sorry, I've kind of recovered now, and ... indeed, seriously, folks, how about "The Periodic Table" There could be a violent pas de deux for sodium and chlorine, and a skizzy little variatino for the flame at the end of a strip of magnesium... A pas de xept for hte Halides, who all hate each other, some remarkable ambiguous partnering for the ambivalent elements -- chromium, manganese, all those that go both ways, with chromium changing colors as s/he went from being the cavalier to the ballerina, with platinum standing stock still in B-Plus devant as the catalyst that does nothing but in whose presence remarkable changes take place in others... There could be radioactivity, and maybe some mild fission among the very heavy elements 9BUT WHO COULD BE GOT TO PLAY THEM? mAYBE THIS COULD BE DONE WITH SHADOWS OR MIRRORS OR BOTH).. It would be a magnum opus, and with new volumes coming out every other year -- A HUGE installment would be the hydrocarbons, and WHO AGAIN, would get to play the benzene ring? That would probably be the first double-bar, since the circle always comes at hte end, but in htis case it would be the end of hte beginning. We'd be able to use the children to make up the methane series; that would come very early. There could be a corruscating solo for pure carbon in its diamantine form, and something looking like hte end of 4 T's for the transformation of peanut oil into margarine. The development could be a quasi-organic reaction, or rather, one that's defniitely bigger than just molecular formation, some thing like life, like Mitosis (or meiosis, if there aren't enough dancers) -- which would look a lot like a quadrille, with lines forming, then separating, then spinning in a star, then each 8-some going off to a corner of hte stage to do a square dance.... For the finale, well it would have to involve carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and phosphorus -- and could end in an explosion, maybe, with all the dancers on their backs all over the stage and in the flies.

How COULD I come to this topic so late in life -- so little time, so MUCH to say.... Darling Cargill, it was Helen Gahegan Douglas (sp? or wasn't it? you remember, the Democrat moviestar/politician smeared as a Communist by Nixon) who played SHE who must bbe obeyed, and indeed there WERE some interrupted sacrificial dances in it, and I remember thinking when I first saw Forsythe's Artefact 2 (have I got hte number right) in Seattle that it was some dances for She.... it all seemed to be set way deep in a pyramid, or a Rosicruciantemple, and when hte firecurtain crashed down cutting off some scene and went back up on another version of it, seen from the back or side or something, it seemed like some kind of ritual sacrifice was either in the offing or maybe had been accomplished already behind hte asbestos curtain.... Which doesn't mean I didn't like it -- indeed, I really did, it was at least as creepy as the cage, and more fun.....

Pretty close to off- topic, BUT Young Eric Hawkins DID wear a white unitard in Diversion of Angels and looked MIGHTY fine, as indeed did young PT in something else of Graham's(was it Episodes) Well, at least from some points of view it was quite watchable.....

Atm wrote Oh you guys have made me want to come to new york to see ABT(!!?!@?!?!) It must be great, and I can believeAnaniashvili is fabulous. Atm, I didstinctly recall Susan Jaffe rising to this occasion way back when Baryshnikov frst took over the company. That exit just blew my mind -- it was SO majestic, SO grand, staggering, it made me feel she were going to another ball, with twice the assembly, twice hte elegance, and hte space she was about t oenter actually became more real in my imagination than the one she was leaving, it wasn't an exit, it was an entrance..... I guess it must be in the music,I've never had a chance to study the ballet, but that effect is IN the ballet somehow. ANd I can certainly believe Ananiashvili could create it - -I'll never forget her entrance as Giselle, back in 1989 or so, when she ws with the Boshoi -- when she opened that door adn stuck her head out, it was like the sun had come out

Burl, I'm sure you're right -- Boada was injured a LONG time.... and Brbropus, he does have a pure, clean basic technique. SO he must have been working at that time carefully, to get his strength back and re-establish all his connections. He is phenomenally gifted. I'd have to say that Boada is a heroic dancer, with a lot more dimensions to him than I used to think. THis is a little awkward, since I'm a critic, and I have written about him. Here's the URL to what I used to think. http://www.danceviewtimes.com/dvw/reviews/...inter/sfb2.html But after seeing him in Ashton's Symphonic Variations, as well as Square Dance, where I totally agree with Burl, I'd have to say he's NOT just a top dog, indeed he can share the stage as graciously with other dancers as anybody I've ever seen...... In the Ashton, his dancing was noble, simple, and joyous, and right in hte middle of the right style -- he had many very difficult steps to do, and did them handsomely, but he gave them no more "attention' than he did his simpler steps, and he also gave FULL value to the pose in B plus (what IS the name for B Plus with the foot crossed in front?) he had to do it in Square Dance, too -- but in SYmphonic he stands like that, at the back of hte stage, with his back to us, for nearly 10 minutes before he ever moves, and he made the pose beautiful and kept it alive and simple and quiet -- it really raised my opinion of him, to see such modesty. Boada was one of the stars in Sylvia, but I did not see his cast perform. Burl, did you?

Dear brbropus, Wow -- that's some head's up! I've seen a LOT of performances this year, and so far as I know I havent seen Phillips yet(his name is spelled with 2 l's in the SFB program booklets, where he IS listed as an apprentice)... WOnder if he's been injured? On the whole it's really hard even for a fabulous new man to stand out at SFB, where ALL the men are so good.... There are lots of people who think of it as a man's company, like the Royal Danish Ballet. And it's been a fantastic year for the men -- in a company where men dance a lot but still the women dance more often (well, there were 2 all-Balanchine programs, and Mr b used a lot more women than men....) We DID see something of 2 other male apprentices -- Martyn Garside was brilliant in 4 Temperaments, just in hte corps, but thrilling -- and both Garside and Garen Scribner were featured in Mark Morris's Sylvia -- Scribner was stingingly smart as one of the heralds in Morris's last act ... Quadruple tours....... my o my.. WOnder when I'll see him.... oops did I say 4 t's ?/ Maybe I meant Stravinsky Violin COncerto......

Iulia, THere's a conference in June/July you might be interested in, though it's modern dance, mostly, not ballet, in Silesian Poland, that' I've attended and found VERY interesting in the past. THe Communists suppressed modern dance, and the direscor of the Silesian Dance Theater (Jacek Luminski) has been concerned to re-profeseionalize the art and has held simultaneously a dance festival and a professional/scholarly conference.... You might want to look into it.... COntact Slaski Teatr Danca, Bytom, Poland

My friends in Lithuania tell me that hte American evening went over really well, and htat Spokaite was sensationally beautiful in Arpino's Secret Places.... "like a tall pliant flower, weightless...."

I just saw the NYCB tape last night -- and Kowroski's Barocco just mesmerized me. I hadn't seen her before: like the poet said, "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken" Awesome, just a glorious creature. I can see why people are reminded of Suzanne - -she is soft and rounded, the action is invisible, the legato is so continuous, and her exaltation is so private -- it's like looking at the moon. They took it at a VERY fast tempo -- more like the speed at which LeClercq danced Barocco than Farrell, but her performance is not sunny like LeClercq's -- I can believe -- and I'd LOVE to see -- that she's funny like Carole Lombard, oh what a fabulous gift, to have wit like THAT back again -- but Barocco didn't have that quality. Did anybody else, by the way, feel that the tempo was perilously fast? Fayette looked almost petrified with anticipation. Maybe that's just his manner -- it certainly contrasted with Peter Boal's quality of attention earlier in the show. Somebody mentioned Darci earlier -- from the way people talk, I was not expecting such beautiful dancing. I was moved and thrilled to see so much of her old self present in Liebeslieder.

That's funny, MY head feels better....

And for 2000 dollars, what did your dog say to Mr Robbins, Carbro?