Paul Parish

THnaks for your posts -- it's VERY interesting, and such good news to hear that it's giong well artistifcally - -sounds like you've gotten some food for hte soul this season...... and of course, folks down here in SanFrancisco are eager to hear how Kath\leen Martuzza and Kester Cotton are doing, and how Adam's new piece is made, and how it went over..... I'd love to hear more......

HOw was her debut? were there reviews? DId the critics have insight? How did hte audience respond? Please, I'd love to know how it went...

Firedog, I've just re-read your wonderful post-- And well, like you, I just don't know where people get off talking about Delibes likethat. It's fantastically intelligible music, and SO danceable -- James Brown himself can not put more boogie in my butt than the Prelude to act 2 does -- and there's nobody dancing att all except us in the audience who can't sit still.... But I wanted to address what you said about Act 2. Until I saw the second act of Bournonville's A folk Tale, I'd have had to describe Morris 's second act much as you do -- but there's Bournonville making a WHOLE ACT out of trolls getting drunk, and it's full of grotesque dancing, hilarious, contrasting with the classical dancing of a sweet girl they're holding captive. It really opened my eyes to the value of contrasting styles of movement in a ballet -- email me, I can show yu the tape if you're interested. THat act of a Folk Tale must have been known, I think, to the team that put hte original Sylvia together. (Alexandra would know better than I -- she's an expert on Bournonville) SO Morris need not have modeled his act on Bournonville -- they'd already done it. Morris does not match Bournonville in terms of gusto or brilliance of invention -- but then trolls are more brilliant and quirky creatures that Orion's slaves are. In any case, "grotesque' dancing used to be one of the metiers. If you weren't tall and pretty, you could still dance -- like Wayne Sleep, who's the twentieth century equivalent of a court dwarf, and got a LOT of great roles, has had a great career, and was much prized. Way back when, in Shakespeare's day, at the court of James II, professional dancers used to have to specialize in the big athletic grotesque dances; a ltitle later Louis XIV and his court got to do the elegant dancing in court masques and would assert their sovereignty over the chaotic forces of (you name it -- Night, Pestilence, War) who'd be danced by the professional dancers who were kept as part of hte royal household (the Roi Soleil was literally one of Louis XIV's roles, as you probably know, forggive me for 'lecturing' -- but if you don't know it, check out Lincoln Kirstein's readable book, 50 ballet masterpieces for a really eye-opening glimpse into the fore-runners of ballet today... Sorry as i've written this I've kinda gotten carried away - -I hope this isn' overbearing, or if it is that you'll forgive me.... I've just been so intersted in everythig you had to say, I got all fired up....

I'm just catching up with htese reports... a little out of breath. Thanks for the compliment, Helene, but my hat's off to YOU... that's a FANTASTIC report, just fantastic --my only regret is that you didn't see Castillo as Eros and have a chance to see what HE did --but then, with your sensitivities, you might have gone out of your mind, and we'd have lost you. Everything about his reading was extraordinary -- his timing, his plastique, his way of NAILING a pose (as the ARab, he'd spring up into a sissone to pointe in a Blasis attitude and HOLD it, like the statue of Eros in Picadilly circus, there for all eternity), the way he'd initiate a movement with a hip-roll that would roll like a shimmy up a snake through his spine and out his crown-shakra with a visible radiance, he just shimmered. He;'s not as stocky as Anderson or Sofranko -- who're both wonderful dancers, love them, but effects like this just don't show up in their bodies. Castillo has almost gumby-flexibility. But he's also got control, and an imaginatoin. (He was the goon with hte really high kicks when he wasn't Eros.)his timing was so idiosyncratic, totally within hte counts but so UNSQUARE -- well ,I just wish you'd seen it, because then I'd have someone to compare notes with..... Firedog, did you see him? I've really been enjoying your comments, not sure I've seen them all yet. yes, those carnations were mighty loud.... Did you love Sherri LeBlanc in that waltz? I pretty much loved all the costumes, I could have done with a little less swathing of Nicholas Blanc, the wrong parts of his toga kept flying up and getting in the way of some VERY beautiful dancing. And i REALY agree with you about Guennadi Nedviguine's Aminta -- I'm told, on GOOD authority, that he danced Friday night on a cortisone shot and that the MIner/Molat cast was on notice they MIGHT have to dance that performance -- his whole performance was impeccable, he was the only one who made a really generous renverse out of the finish to that attitude turn in hte first act, and it established his generosity, that overflowing quality to his love which makes it feel so generous and lovable -- and which sets up his last-act variation, that SPECTACULAR renverse he does after each pirouette -- for y;'all who weren't there, his last act variation comes after he's danced the adage with Sylvia, after (I think) a group dance for hte harem-pants girls, and expresshis exhilaration at having found her, and begins with a colossal 7-or-8 turn pirouette plunging forward into an attitude penchee -- a motif that gets developed even further in the dazzling supported pirouettes of the coda, where it is hte germ of the ballerina's dive that turns into the grand jete around the corner (which is a real contribution to "the hard book" -- the new virtuoso steps they'll codify into the things you have to do at Varna or Jackson)....

Hey Hockeyfan -- I 'm really glad you liked liebeslieder, too -- and that you liked Berman, a dancer I admired a great deal, in fact loved would be a batter word, most of the time..... I wish I'd seen that performance. They mixed it up some. I think MOSt people had a favorable response to Liebeslieder, though they were it's true quiet about it...I took my editor from SF magazine, who's a baseball fan and doesn't go to ballet much, and he thought it was wonderful.... Those names you don't recognize were Alice lu-Ann Lewitzke (a tall, stunning dancer, who adanced the ADams role the night I saw her, i.e., alternating with Maffre), and a man whose last name was Coutereel, first name Stephen I think, who didn't stay here long -- a superb technician, who'd won a gold medal at one of hte major competitions if I remember right..... but memory probably does NOT serve.....

COming in very late in the discussion, aND NOT REALLY PICKING UP THE BIG QUESTIONS -- oops caps lock.... BUT I'd like to correct the misapprehension that Liebeslieder didn't go over well in SanFrancisco -- it wasn't, indeed, a smash, but I myself LOVED it, as did most of the critics -- and most of the audience, on the several nights I went, seemed to enjoy it a lot without making a lot of noise about it. THe couple in front of me one night were holding hands. It was beautifully danced -- especially by Sherri LeBlanc (in Patricia Mc Bride's role, I guess that was maybe Hayden's originally), who was electrifying, and by Muriel Maffre, in von Aroldingen's (it was Von Aroldingen who set the ballet). Joanna Berman was not much better than ok in Verdy's, but Damian Smith was magnificent, very like Montgomery Clift, as her partner. Tomasson did not, it's true, put it on hte bill the following season. I don't know why; I was really sorry, I wanted to see it again.

Gloria Govrin says that balanchine came over to her apartment to watch Gunsmoke. But then she herself IS Wonderwoman.

First I'd like to defend Ann Murphy. As a writer myself, I find her a colleague I really admire. She has integrity and guts and really loves dance. I always finding her thoughtful and stimulating and deeply concerned with what the dancers are doing, how they're doing it, and why, and whether it's a worthy goal they're aiming at. She tends to bring the kind of mind associated more with modern dance -- rigorous, edgy -- to the theater than a ballet-mind -- and indeed, it's about modern dancers that she's illuminated me the most, the kind who do unpleasant things for good reasons. But I think in this particular case she's seized on an extremely important point about SFB – the singing body -- and talked about it in a lot of detail. It's a company full of dancers with a phenomenal ability to make transitions through positions -- you see the lines, but you also see the sweep and flow of movement. My temperament is very different from hers. I might not have picked the particular examples she did -- though I myself DO go on about Tina leBlanc. I wouldn't have used the same similes and metaphors to describe their qualities -- and sometimes I don't agree with her. But I find her really stimulating and interesting and likely to be seeing something I missed. If she’d been writing an essay for an English class, she might have been supposed to work her thesis harder, and stick to dancers who’ve come up through the company – and here have BEEN some, such as Elizabeth Loscavio – and Julie Diana, who started out in the corps and got her first chances as the White Cat and such-like, and for whom Tomasson may be thought to have gotten such odd ballets as “The Invitation” (which Lynn Seymour herself coached Diana in, and in which Diana was sensational – and it was indeed a preparation for her Juliet in Tomasson’s Romeo and Juliet, in which she was simply astounding….. But I only say this to agree with Murphy and bring in other examples to back her up.) It IS true that fantastic dancers have not been coming out of SFB School like they did 10 years ago. It’s hard to say why – it didn’t look like there was that much talent at the school shows there for a while, no matter what the teachers could do. I think that's turning around, and there are some very fine dancers in the upper classes right now, but there was certainly a dull patch after Jennifer Blake and Chidozie Nzerem graduated. Tomasson's probably been going afield to get dancers because the likes of Elizabeth Loscavio aren't growing on our trees right now. But I repeat, it DOES look like he's bringing dancers along -- Sarah van Patten got maybe too much of a rush at first, but he cooled it with her, and it looks like that’s paying off BIG-time-- her dancing so far this year has been remarkable. She was astounding, no less, in Le Quattro Stagione. She came in from the Royal Danish Ballet, yes, but she’s young, and wasn’t a star there, and just came in as a soloist here. Among the dancers I see coming along are Elizabeth Miner, who’s getting some large featured roles (and was spectacular as Cupid in Don Quixote, indeed was spectacular as Cupid in Con Amore several years ago; Tomasson used her in his new 7 for Eight, and she was beautiful in it). But the women are not as hot as the men in the company – lovely as Joanna Mednick has been this year, I don’t see her jumping levels to ballerina – whereas I can see a LOT of the men in big starring roles – James Sofranko, Pablo Piantino, Garrett Anderson, Hansuke Yamomto have already done outstanding work in featured roles, just totally taken the stage and made us love them. But whether any of them could have danced Melancholic like Nicholas Blanc (new French soloist) did Saturday night – well, I’d love to see it. But the way he took a pique arabesque, fouetted half- around to face that leg, then fell backwards out of it, and from THERE flipped himself over like a garden rake lying on its side, was a miracle of strength and co-ordination we just won't see very often.

The buzz is, he loves the music and he's doing it "straight" -- It's been finished for a while, and though the press has not been allowed to see any of it, it's been shown to groups of family and friends. Reports are that it's going to be beautiful. It's also said to be selling fast, and some shows are nearly sold out already. If you think you might be in town and want to see it, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking about getting tickets.....

I think there should be a contrast between the 2 lballerinas in piano concerto -- or Ballet Imperial.... Mostly i'm basing htis on conversation I had with Marie Jeanne and Gisella Cacialanza (Mrs Lew Christensen) at the latter's house one day about 10 years ago... They were VERY good friends, those two -- not that I knew htem well enough to say, , but MJ was visiting from Texas and staying at Gisella's, and they had me to Sunday lunch, and they l;ooked as comfortable together and as friendly as , say, the sisters from Pride and Prejudice, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet -- different, but mutually appreciative and delighting in each other. The thing MJ kept saying was that Gisella was"the PERFECT Cecchetti dancer" -- and since she was talking mostly about her own role as being very jazzy, my feeling was that the difference between them was that she -- Marie Jeanne -- was very American-jazzy in feeling, kinda crazy, she just did these THINGS (which have now been codified into these double swqivels, but in her case were just wild squiggly jazz things) while thee were these perfect old-world forms that Gisella did -- From old tapes, I've seen that Gisella was a remarkably creamy dancer, VERY fluid -- she obviously had a remarkable Cecchetti jump, she could do double saut de basque, but she wasn't athletic, she was gloriously well co-ordinated and beautifully "placed" -- However much that's worth, since of course the ballet has changed a great deal over the years..... GC and MJ were both pretty much the same size -- neither a very big person, though MJ had very long feet and on pointe therefore she had tremendously long line....

As a southerner, I love to think by way of analogy .... but no analogy can be pushed too far. but I think there IS something provocative about this one. I showed these graphs to Marni Wood, who's chair of the dance program here at Berkeley, and was a star in Graham's company in hte 50's/60's, and she loved it -- didnt think it was all that new an idea, but it WAS well put. SHe said, in fact, that the great British critic (well, actually I think he's great) Dickie Buckle was onto this long ago. "he'd say, 'Apres toi, Martha.... What THEN?!?' " (BUt then, Ms WOod is a fountain of hilarious and instructive stories about Graham. another thread for that someday.) THe sons of Balanchine -- to MY mind, from seeing a great deal of Helgi Tomasson, rather than (say, a great deal of Peter Martins) -- have caught his way of building momentum through a phrase, and his cleanness of execution, without having his depth of poetic metaphor or penetration into LARGER musical structure. I'd have to say, at the moment I am admiring Helgi TOmason a great deal as a dance maker, esp in the his creations for TIna LeBlanc, who's a fantastic interpreter and advocate of his work -- she is making his Valses Poeticos look like, and like it's in the same league as, Robbins's "Other Dances" -- it's just stunning how musical and sensitive these dance phrases look, with her dancing htem -- similarly, in his new ballet, 7 for 8, she makes the choreography seem as musical as all but hte very greatest Balanchine. Because she is herself so musical???? Well ,she did manage to make Forsythe's Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude look hella musical, so maybe it IS her doing -- indeed, when she danced Valses Poeticos years ago with David Palmer, she didn't make it look like this -- I don't remember the voluptuousness and passion in the releves in effacee that just take my breath away the way she does them now in this piece -- so maybe it's because having had a coiuple of children, she;'s become finally a "released" artist, somebody who's really dancing into hte moment and being as free and intimate with us as she is with her babies.... In any case, her dancing has fantastic new dimensions to it. the honesty that was always there, physically, is now joined to a spontaneity and a wide range of emotion, especially rich in affectoin and playfulness, which makes TOmasson's choreography look immensely appealing. My hunch is that her astounding facility is rather like his, and he can create work for her that has a lot of momentum and co-ordination straight out of his imagination and response to the music, he can identify with her.... but who cares what I think, everybody here feels that something remarkable is happening there....

wonderful topic -- Just off hte top of my head, some examples of radiant softness in dancers of recent times come to mind... I'd say that Violette verdy, -- especially in Emeralds -- had a softness, shading over into voluptuousness, in hte shoulders and arms that was extremely attractive.... And in San Francisco, we've had ballerinas with remarkable softness in hte arms -- Joanna berman wa so soft, there were some people who could not tell that she was strong -- extreme creaminess of action made hard things (such as instantaneous changes of direction) look effortless in her dancing, and people who looked for difficulties overcome could never see the effort..... Our current ballerina Julie Diana has a very soft way with her arms.....

FF and Carbro, I not only agree with you, I've had a version of your problem -- which is, well, people can pronounce it, but nobody can spell it -- The bank doesn't care, i don't care.... well, a little, it would be weird not to notice, but I don't really care. FF, your story is priceless.... rates a double d'oh....

Muriel Maffre at SanFrancisco Ballet is a magnificently commanding figure as hte Lilac Fairy -- good, beautiful, and at key moments she's mesmerizing -- she actually hears and makes you see the music say "No, hte princess shall not die"....

I'm with Carley about hte Hand of Fate from Cotillon-- Oakland Ballet did it here, danced it beautifully -- SUsan Taylor I think was the ballerina at first, and later it was done by Joy Gim, both were sensational. It was staged by the Tulsa people (Moscelyn Larkin? I think), and it was a glorious dance -- very clean action, very few steps, actually, but haunting, truly mysterioous -- -- I remember I htink, hte ballerina doing a huge renverse with a weird timing to it, so that it did not become a releve until the leg had already begun to sweep around to the back, and then somehow she collapsed behind her partner in slow motion.... Could not tell you how it happened, though it was slower than slow and it all took place right in front of you, downstage and en face, and yet it was SO strange..... Hodson and Archer's version for the Joffrey was much brisker -- and not very atmospheric. I found myself tempted to believe in the Larkin/Jasinski version, because it had such poetic force to it.

"Balanchine's awful remakes " deserve a thread of its own.... there's already one gonig, about lost choreography from "Emeralds" -- Another place where Mr B rechoreographed because of hte tempos was the Arabian solo in Nutcracker, which Gloria Govrin was bringing down the house in till the master decided hat Tchaikovsky's markings were for a quicker tempo and rechoreographed it as a faster dance... And hte ballet he abandoned was Baiser de la Fee, for which he couldn't find a suitable finale (the hero has to freeze to death crossing a glacier, and here's almost 10 minutes of beautiful miusic to die to....)

Perhaps it's the danih connection. ANybody who's see nSorella Englund's colossal preformance as Madge (a role "normally" given to men) might say, "well, let's see what a ballerina with a long chin might do in this role." From roports I've heard from peole i trust, Ashleys performances are almost reason enough to \go see NYCB's Beauty. In SanFrancisco, our very tall ballerina Muriel Maffre alternates between Lilac and Carabosse; she also did one Aurora, which I saw and thought marvellous -- very beautiful, though her body is "wrong" for the role..... SO whay hasn't anybody reported on Kyra Nichols' Carabosse? Is she not very good but no-one wants to say so? I heard she was fabulously evil in Double Feature....

They're bringing Cinderella, Sergei Radchenko, choreography. Anybody seen them? WHat did you think?

Good Lord, Alexandra, that's thousands of lines, and Alexandrines, at that...Is that why you did it? This is th forest primeval. The murmuring pines and hte hemlocks Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in hte twilight, Stand like Druids of eld..... wait, that's dactyllic hexameter, not alexandrines at all (they would be iambic....) I thought I'd done something, was pretty puffed on having memorized the Raven, all, all of it, with its velvet violet lining she shall press, ah, nevermore, and all those silken sad uncertain rustlings of each purple curtain and pallid busts of Pallas and then some. But ALL of Evangeline is all of a whole lot more.... It does make you wonder. I'm reminded of a dance concert Denby compared to a recitation of Thanatopsis.....

myGOD!!! What an evening! What a program!! That's the spirit...

oy, Billboards-- it had some interesing qualities, it really did, though by hte time the Joffrey had performed it SO MUCH, it was looking really tattered. The real problem was that the music couldn't stand up to that much attention, and hte whole experience seemed woozy at the time and still does.... But the drug-overdose super-star meltdown (to "Purple Rain," wasn't it?) is an image i will never forget, it crystallized something very true of those times.... a kind of dance journalism....

Darling Carbro, it's not necessary to tell the truth to a telemarketer -- Kant established this long ago, in the kritik of Pure reason, I think it was -- you don't have to tell the truth to people whose curiosity is idle or invidious. (If the school bully asks if your mother wears false teeth, you don't have to say yes even if she does........)

I wish I could comment on Michael's remarks, but no having seen Kowrowski, I can't say. But I must agree with Mary Cargill -- indeed, I think SanFrancisco Ballet's corps dances diamonds so much better than City Ballet did when I saw them last, but there's nothing like hte Kirov corps in the first movement -- it's enormously satisfying, like hte corps in the last act of Ashton's Swan Lake -- I could watch them forever, Odette doesn't need to rush in with her tragedy, their sad idyll is so beautiful. But beyond that, their performance of the polonaise brought to mind the finale of Agon, the fugal passages are so thrilling -- no other company had ever danced it clearly enough to make me see its structure (well, maybe it was me -- it could always be that I finally was rady to see that part of hte ballet) -- this was especially so the night Lopatkina danced the ballerina -- she was as fascinating as Pavlenko in the Adagio, but MUCH more exact and exciting in the scherzo, and the whole ballet kept building that night, so the finale really blew your head off -- on nights when he scherzo falls flat -- which I believe may also have been a not infrequent occurrence at NYCB, given the stories I've heard about the scherzo being omitted sometimes when hte ballerina wasn't up to it -- the finale may have had no peaks on the through-line and seemed like paste raher than gem-like....... But i haven't seen it enough to be very confident of that notion......

o tempora, o mores! NOT TO MENTINO THE INVITATIONS T RECEPTOINS WHICH AREN'T INVITATIONS AT ALL, BUT INVITATIONS TO BUY A TICKET OR CONTRIBUTE..... OOPS, CAPS LOCK.... It's awful when you get on hte wrong list, and find that you're being solicited for 1000 dollar donations. It somehow seems so much MORE impersonal than it used to be, when it's not even within reason that you could pony up this much. it's not hte tip of the iceberg -- it's the thin end of the wedge (to use a very British example) -- and it's only going to get worse. So far the ballet does not REQUIRE a donation of its subscibers here, as the opera has been doing for at least 10 years --but it can't be far off. With telemarketers, I always tell them, I'm sorry, I'm on the other line and can't talk now.

It may well play a while in the Bay Area -- I loved it, really loved it, all my dancer-friends around here loved it (especially the aerialists)..... Watermill, I do hope you'll get t osee it. THe writing is NOT a problem. It doesn't sparkle like "Clueless," which I wish I'd written, but hte dialogue is full of surprises, and anyway, the main characters (a sous-chef, a dancer, and a company of dancers aren't folks who need to talk a lot, anyway). The Best thing about it is how generous-minded hte movie is to the whole social organism that's "growing" ballets -- it's like a day in the life of a coral reef -- And it is so BEAUTIFUL.