Paul Parish

I agree with you all, especially Mel....

I sort of agree with everybody else -- though I HATE going with high hopes......I like to go as casually as possible, with no expectations.. but still -- something that really will snag me is if what the reporter says is interesting -- whether or not I think I'll agree withthem, if it gets the writer actually interested -- you can tell from the tone-- in something that seems to come from the dancing itself, that will intrigue me and make me want to go..... I wish I'd seen Double Feature, for example, from hte things people said about tom Gold and Kyra Nichols and so on, the kind of opportunities it gave for dancers to get their teeth into something they don't normally get to do just made me want to see it for myself -- I hated Contact (thought it was nasty) but loved Oklahoma and just wanted to go and see if I'd have felt the same way....

Amen, Brother Mel! It's the truth. ANd since the Cuban Ballet's version was bound to be remarkable, both in execution and style -- not to mention commitment -- there would have been SOME DISCUSSION!!... I was looking forward to the espnses, even though I live on the west coast and wouldn't have had a chance to see the ballet itself.

Oakland Ballet did it quite beautifully a few seasons back -- Lara Deans Lowe, was really beautiful as the girl who does hte penchee upstage left while hte pas de deux couple cross down front. The boy wawn t great -- but few do have the depth of fonduthat Baryshnikov (and he young Nureyev) had, that makes that part so distinctively soft -- the jumps don't go high, but hte landing should go very low. THe Kirov in their recent visit made hte boy's part way too heroic, it was not beautiful. and indeed, the corps hardly seemed to be breathing, except for Pavlenko nobody else did either (she was wonderful). THere was a little dancer, whose name I CAN'T remember, and it kills me, for she was SO beautiful in hte prelude, I can't tell you, how airy she seemed, it was ALL breath, so soft, so melting.... (PS Nobody has mentioned the Royal Ballet video, with FOnteyn and Nureyev and I think Merle Park in hte mazurka, but it's really wonderful, VEY musical dancing.)

INCREDIBLE web-site -- don't miss it....' Good God almighty!

I'll just say, I wish I coulda seen it. i think I'd have liked it. I was thinking about it a lot while I was watching Michael Smuin's St Louis WOman for DTH, which I really enjoyed, partly because the dancers were having SUCH a great time, getting hteir teeth into something that really appealed to them. ( I wrote about it this week on DanveView, so please check it out, any of you who think here might be some comparison worth making. ) And I've got to way, it's fun imagining Kyra Nichols being bad.......

Sandik, I hear you. By the way, there's a brief clip of young Pina Bausch as the grieving Mother in the Green Table that is NOT TO BE BELIEVED, she will take your breath away, somewhere in htat Dance of hte Century series -- it's worth combing through to find it, one of hte greatest performances of anything I've ever seen -- just a few seconds really, but visionary........ and it makes you understand a GREAT deal about Pina Bausch......

Drw, I have to say, I'm really impressed with your reasons. THey REALLY have lot of force. I agree with you completely, but i couldn't have put it that way -- especially about hte reverse engineering -- it's the variety included within hte whole that suggests so many possible avenues.......

Sandik, and all, I watched Mrs Markard rehearse the Oakland ballet the last time they presented he ballet, and it was a fantastic experience. Not many of htem had been in it before -- the earlier cast, with Richard Chen See (now at Paul Taylor) as hte speculator and Ron THiele as Death and Erin Leedom (or ws it Joy Gim?) as the mother was EXTREMELY powerful, they were naturals for those roles (Chen See was brilliant, preening, nasty, fantastic in hte role, and Thiele had weight and silhouette enough to frighten you. The new cast were lighter, harder to draw the right energy out of. Joral schmalle had the muscles for Death and could do coldness, but he wasn't tall enough to be overwhelming, and temperamentally he couldn't do ugly, he was fastidious that way. She worked them very hard, asking for very particular qualities in the movement, some of which (though they always made sense artistically) went against the dancer's natural grain and were hard for them to achieve -- and I must say, they worked very hard to give her the qualities she wanted. I doubt that even a THOUROUGHLY annotated score could have gotten the phrasing as carved as she wanted it.... SO I'm not suggesting it's an UNNECESSARY expense --

Well, guys, I can't agree with you more about how much I distrust the current administration in Wahsington And yet, I have to say, I'm hopeful abut the NEA -- partly because I happen to know Dana Gioia, and I like and admire and respect him, as a person and as a poet, and I'm absolutely certain he's on our side, and I have some hope, I really do, that he's going to be able to help. As Leigh has said, he's actually managed to get some budget increases, and he's not squandering it on stupid things. The thing is, he's a poet -- so he's not nearly so hip to the way dancers work, you know, communally. A poet can do his thing on any scrap of paper, in any cafe, on the bus if it's not too dangerous.... Dancers need to get together in the same space, and so on. But he does respect dance. I don't think he knows the field -- indeed, just last week after a talk as SFPALM, Arthur Mitchell asked of no-one in particular, "Who is the head of the NEA now? I've never heard of him..." and when i spoke on Gioia's behalf, Mitchell wasn’t hearing any of it and just said "well, he needs to get to know the field.' And he probably does. But he IS a poet, a real poet, a people's poet in the Italian tradition, and his book "Can Poetry Matter? was necessary and challenging and puts the question really clearly. If it came down to it, he'd probably be as much on the side of a slam poet as of John Ashbury -- not that he's a vulgarian, but that he wants significant form to do the work of containing strong feeling. And at the same time, he admired and befriended some mighty cryptic poets, like Edgar Bowers, a great gay poet I met at Gioia's house. Monumentum pro Gesualdo would not be beyond Gioia’s understanding or appreciation. ........................................................................ Since you may not know anything about him, I’ll enter here my favorite of Gioia's poems, "Planting a Sequoia." It comes from his excellent book, The Gods of Winter, which is a dirge, almost a Kaddish, written in memory of his son, Michael Jasper Gioia, who died in infancy. "Planting a Sequoia" by Dana Gioia All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And the sky above us stayed the same dull gray Of an old year coming to an end. In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth -- An olive or a fig tree -- a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father's orchard, A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, a promise of new fruit in other autumns. But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, Defying the practical custom of our fathers, wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord, All that remains above earth of a first-born son, A few stray atoms brought back to the elements. We will give you what we can -- our labor and our soil, Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail, Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees. We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, A slender shoot against the sunset. And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, His mother's beauty ashes in the air, I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, Silently keeping the secret of your birth. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// It's a wonderful poem, and typing it out has kept me in tears.... the words are SO just ("when the skies fail"). It's a bitter feeling burying a child. This poem is quite filled with bitterness…. It’s a monument, just as the sequoia is a monument, and it has secrets as well as a vigil to keep, which is most of what monuments have to do. In any case, he’s not just an administrator. He’s an artist himself, and he has artists’ interests at heart. At the same time, he’s got a feel for the game – he invented the Jello cube – so he’ll have some skill in handling the people who DON’T care about art. ................................. At this point , ihave to say, I miss some of the people from the old board, like Vagansmom, who would check up on my posts and I think would love this poem. I do miss the rest of the crowd.

It is a GREAT ballet!!! I live in hte BAy Area, where GT is in the rep of Oakland Ballet -- they haven't performed it for at least 5 years -- and both the fee and hte cost of bringing someone from the estate to make sure it's done right are both considerable, I believe, so they may not be doing it again right away-- but I don't think they're abandoning it. But i'm not in on their counsels. Perhaps someone directly concerned with the Joffrey could say about them. I doubt that they'd drop it, since they are adding Nijinska ballets to their "historical" wing....

chauffeur and djb, let me recommend the interview with O'Connor that Alexandra mentioned. It was done by the very young and untried cub reporter Mindy Aloff way back when, and --- well, she asks him some good questions and he answers. It was very moving to read it -- the information he shares is of course interestinig, but hte thing that comes through best is his decency, his lovely personality -- I agree with you djb, "he did that style well" is an excellent way to put it. (And while I'm at it, I wish Hollywood had considered Ray Bolger handsome enough to have given us HIM as Balanchine's hoofer in Slaughte on 10th Avenue" instead of Eddie Albert, for Balanchine himself praised Bolger's dancing to the skies.) I also find O'Connor's style classical -- in the same way the the Nicholas Brothers' were classical, the movement is measured, the economy of it is pleasing, and it's done for its own sake, it's not the function of an expressionist or exhibitionist agenda -- I really enjoyed reading the interview -- check it out.

What a pretty dilemma! Thank you, Alexandra. I wonder if I would want to save my favorite, or something historically more important? Actually, it's clear to me, if all the rest had to die, I'd save Symphony in C, and Barocco too if I could.

I just saw Mitchell last night at hte SF perfroming Library an Museum, and he told the same stories. The limping one he relates to hte opening steps of hte men's quartet, which are kind of pg-legged; Mr B had hurt his knee, was limping,and put those moves int othe ballet right at he beginning, Mitchell said, and he showed it, VERY convincingly.( It was a recurring motif of his talk, how Balanchine would use what was right there and get it to fit into place. It was ALSO a recuring motif that he demonstrated - it was particularly wonderful to see him do hte finale from Agon, the steps from hte triple pas de quatre, the rhythms were so exciting.) Leigh, that's a VERY fine and valuable piece of writing; I enjoyed reading it and recommend it to all y'all. I'd also agree that Mr Mitchell's accuracy is sometimes dubious; as if his imagination may outrun his memory. He told us hat Agon was choreographed before LeClerc got polio, but I am certain he is mistaken there.

Choura, I'm totally craving your appellations.... Drekov is tip-top.... By the way, Isn't today Mr Balanchine's 100th birthday? Mr Balanchine's 100th birthday today Happy Birthday, Mr B.....

posh stuff, DJB -- keep it coming.. By the way, it wa geat to meet you at hte Arthur Mitchell talk, about 90 minutes ago now.. Wonder what his life would have been like if he'd taken the scholarship to Bennington? About these locutions, Nanatchka, I[m with you -- pantherine is a major category with me. I once described Frankie manning, the great exhibition-Lindy dancer, as pantherine-- he not only was the first swing dancer to throw his partner over his back, he developed a deep-bent stance, with the body sloping at about a 50 degree angle and hte knees in almost perpetual fondu, that not only suited his heroic figure but gave hte dance a new sleek look, very cat-like Ugly phrases I have used: supremely musical (yuck), that's the one I hated the most when I read it. weird locutions I can not forswear: I reserve the right to use hte adverb "unmisunderstandably" when hte situation calls for it. I first heard it when at a master-class, when Karl-Ulrich Schnabelk assured a pianist at Mills College that if he used this fingering, he would play hte phrase unmisunderstandably. ("The smallest steps on pointe can register from the back of hte house. La Optima phrased the sylphide's hesitations and sudden return of confidence unmisunderstandably.")

Hey, Silvy, That's a great question -- Many of us have noticed htis over the years, I'm sure. I'm no expert on this, but others may be able to correct my errors and fill in some -- Of c ourse, one thing, simple as it sounds, is he's gotten older. He hadn't lost all his baby-fat in hte video you're talking about. But seriously, Soloviev, who was the other great dancer of his day, in a sense his great rival, had even bigger thighs -- with fantastic elevatoin and power in reserve that he rarely used all of. That heroic Russian style required tremendous elevation, and of course that requires a GREAT deal of thigh and glute strength. When Baryshnikov came here he did not have THAT kind of competition -- big thighs were less attractive here -- and the way Americans danced involved a lot more finesse. Well, some Americans -- but if you look at Helgi TOmasson on hte competition in Moscow tape -- he won the silver the year Baryshnikov won he gold -- Tomasson's finesse was really remarkable, and involved a lot of quick changes of speed and of direction, and development and co-ordination of the smaller muscles. WHen Baryshnikov went over to Balanchine, he was asked to dance much tighter, more changes of direction, more turned out, with quicker release.... And somewhere in there he injured a knee pretty badly, which always causes the thighs to lose some tissue. The quads deteriorate faster than any other muscle with lack of exercise, so it's pretty easy to lose thigh muscle-mass -- just sitting around a lot.... His knees have continues to give him trouble -- I remember when he was dancing Graham's El Penitente, he learned the dance from a tape of David and Marni Wood; point is, there are lots of knee-bourrees in it, and Marni (she's chair of hte dance department at Berkeley, and he perrformed it here, we talked about it afterwards) was impressed that he DID THEM ALL, given the state of his knees.

Brynar had many friends, and many students in the Bay Area -- I took his Cecchetti classes along with MANY others, in the Finn Hall in Berkeley 20 years ago. He taught for Sally Streets at Berkeley Ballet Theater and choreographed a lovely ballet for their company, and taught at UC for David and Marni Wood and made a WONDERFUL solo there for Randy Wickstrom, a young gymnast-turned-dancer who died of AIDS way too soon after.... He'd had a heart attack before -- he told me about it. He said, "I'd probably have died if I hadn't gotten interested in it. oh-- I'm on the ground..... ok; breathe out; what's that sound? yeah....... ok;" Kind of like that..... It wasn’t the words so much as the quality of the breathing as he told the story, the rhythm, the length of the phrases, the sweep of his arm gestures and the look in his eyes as he continually adjusted his equilibrium as he re-lived the experience. He was using his imagination again, it seemed to me, much as he'd used it the first time -- to put himself into a state of heightened awareness of everything within him and without him. I'm sure others can tell this story better than I, I think he told it to all his friends, as an example and a kind of testimony, he bore witness to the reality of the ideal world, that was his calling. Funny I was thinking about Brynar rather intensely a couple of days ago in response to some posts on BA -- the radiant way he spoke about the architecture of "the natural balances" -- the interacting spirals that underlie the various attitudes and arabesques -- in trying to think about what it is in Sasha Cohen's sense of form that I find so inspiring. Brynar's sense of line was not pictorial but structural -- the line is beautiful because the physics of it is transcendently beautiful. I realized that to talk about it, I'd have to invoke Brynar.

I tried to post this last night....... "I was at a preview-screening of the Company tonight, realy REALLY enjoyed it -- for hte quality of presence in it all hte way through, the quality of hte attention, the loving absorbed attention....it made me very happy...... It's extremely generous, and is i think a response to the generosity of hte dancers, the recognition of one artist (Altman) that goes to those others, the dancers, who work in such a total way, where what you do is open and close like a flower, and offer up what you've got come rain or come shine when your time comes.... "I just loved it. "It was great to see Deborah Dawn looking so fine. I really liked Mark Goldweber, the quality of his energy was very appealing -- small part, but really memorable. I quite liked Malcolm MacDowell, even -- I loved it when he told the Italian AMericans that he owed htem nothing, and htat hte biggest award they could give him would be to NOT make it so hard on their boys to be a dancer.... I doubt that Arpino would do that, but I loved it.... I hope all the Billy Elliotts out there get to see him hit em a lick for that. "THe Blue Snake, even is not all that bad -- where else could the dancer in white who opened the piece get to show his strange, bizarre, FABULOUS quality? As allegories go, it's kinda stupid -- but not much worse than parts of the ballet de la Nuit. "But hte really beautiful section was the trapeze ballet -- those unending cartwheels, they had hte fullness of eternity in them.... And so lovingly filmed. .............. I have since learned that Mr Arpino DID make such a speech.... I am glad to know it. It reminds me how Anita Finkel used to say there was never anything mean-spirited in ARpino's ballets. I wish she were here to see the movie.

Try Contacting Frank Shawl, of hte Shawl-Anderson dance studio in Berkeley, CA --2704 Alcatraz Ave, Berkeyley, CA94704; 510 654-4921. Frank iis a very important dance teacher in the Bay Area. He danced in ODonnell's company before he came here, and he's very proud of his connection to her. He teachers her work from time to time, in the USA and Europe. I'm sure he'd be willing to happy to help spread the word about her work.

This all started with a GOSSIP column in hte Post, right? I DO wait for the day someone choreographs "There's a Place for us" as a gay pas de deux -- Gays are not hte only ones who could see West Side Story as being "about them" -- an Arab in love with a Jew, or a Korean in love with a Japanese, a Hutu in love with a TUtsi, just to begin a LONG list of ethnic conflicts we could pick appealing young people from, and hte list is growing longer these days, and fast.... As a queer myself, I certainly DO feel the appeal of hte story as one that "appeals to my condition" -- and I certainly think it gave Jerome Robbins a medium for expressing feelings he'd suffered for. (He was draftable during World War II, and His draft physical found him 4-F -- unfit for service; not much is known about what happened at his physical, except that it was traumatic; I believe knowledgeable persons think he was refused on account of homosexuality. And within a short time he had choreographed and was dancing an exemplary sailor in "Fancy Free.")

I was at a preview-screening of the Company tonight, realy REALLY enjoyed it -- for hte quality of presence in it all hte way through, the quality of hte attention, the loving absorbed attention....it made me very happy...... It's extremely generous, and is i think a response to the generosity of hte dancers, the recognition of one artist (Altman) that goes to those others, the dancers, who work in such a total way, where what you do is open and close like a flower, and offer up what you've got come rain or come shine when your time comes.... I just loved it. It was great to see Deborah Dawn looking so fine. I really liked Mark Goldweber, the qauality of his energy was very appealing -- small part, but really memorable. I quite liked Malcolm MacDowell, even -- I loved it when he told the Italian AMericans that he owed htem nothing, and htat hte biggest award they could give him would be to NOT make it so hard on their boys to be a dancer.... I doubt that Arpino would do that, but I loved it.... I hope all the Billy Elliotts out there get to see him hit em a lick for that. THe Blue Snake, even is not all that bad -- where else could the dancer in white who opened the piece get to show his strange, bizarre, FABULOUS quality? As allegories go, it's kinda stupid -- but not much worse than parts of the ballet de la Nuit. But hte really beautiful section was the trapeze ballet -- those unending cartwheels, they had hte fullness of eternity in them.... And so lovingly filmed.

I was bar-tending for a wedding Saturday night and just happened to walk by a tv where the skating was on and just had my heart broken by what turned out to be ht tail end of Sasha Cohen's st\kate -- AFTER she had fallen. if she lost concentration after her fall, WHAT must iot have been like before that? "So that's Sasha Cohen" I said to myself, and I haven't really had anything else on my mind since.... I may find on further exposure that I don't like her, but so far, I find her ability to figure ideal alignments just inflames my imagination no end... What a sense of form!

i'M WONDERING WHAT THE DISTINCTOIN IS BETWEEN "BEST DANCER" AND "BEST ARTIST" (oops, caps lock) anybody know their rationale?

in the tape called 50 Bournonville enchainements, the lovely Rose Gad sdoes many many turns in sur-le-coup-de-pied (after entrechat, quatre, for example), doubles, without spotting, and will come down in fondu and glissade backwards or some such -- it's quite something to see hte accuracy in hte line achieved with so little vigilance in the demeanor......