Paul Parish

Eliane Munier was a beautiful dancer out here -- many of us miss her and wish her well. I'm sure she will be a delicate, exquisite Sugar Plum Fairy....

Piccolo, Leslie Browne came from a ballet family -- her parents (one or both) had been in ABT, and her brother Ethan has been a very handsome member of hte company for quite a while (he may have retired, I haven't seen ABT for a while; the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago when Abt played Berkeley, he was one of the sailors in Fancy Free, and totally charming). I believe her parents have a school somewhere in the middle of the US, so their situation is maybe a LITTLE like that in The TUrning Point. I saw Ms Browne quite a lot when ABT came through SanFrancisco on tour -- she was an exciting dancer, for she had a LOT of dance imagination but it looked like a not-completely-reliable technique. So with her -- like with the opera singer Gwyneth Jones -- you never knew what you were going to get -- Dame Gwyneth Jones was a GREAT singing actress, but sometimes her voice would just open up and wobble all over the place, and with Leslie Browne you just never knew what was going to happen if she lost her center. She never actually fell, but her attack would become like razor-edge as her tension mounted. I remember her in Balanchine's Stravinsky Violin Concerto giving one of the great performances I'd ever seen of anything.

Yes, Cargill -- I kow what you mean -- she dances it with less tension than most Americans do, and more like an assoluta. More musical, and more like a personnage -- like someone at court. She brings out that side of the music that's based in the old French court dances

I think y'all got something going in Chicago... and I don't THINK a champion basketball team is going to play on parquet over concrete; those guys know from jumping.... By the way, in Oakland there's a lot of interplay between the ballet and the Athletics -- La Russa's girls went to the the ballet school indeed one of them is now in the company -- and for at least a decade thereves been Oakland A's players performing on scheduled nights in hte fight scene in hte ballet -- they're playing on Clara's team, and they are really a lot of fun. Foir one thing htey have TONS of stage presence - and for another, they're willing to do echappes, with half-turns....

I don't know what category this goes in, but I'm curious, how many of you will see your local community's Nutcracker this year? I've just come in from mine at Berkeley Ballet Theater, and I have to say, I had a WONDERFUL time -- the milk and cookie soldiers were marvelous, Clara moved me, the Chinese dance was fantastic (two girls on pointe from level 6, I guess, with those ribbons on sticks that Chinese folk dancers use, and they do pirouettes and releve ballonees in efface while whipping those ribbons around, and then run around bending over at the waist, doing the real Chinese posture, and it all is SO musical, and they're having such fun; the Marzipan shepherdess, who's really funny, was totally entertaining and cracked me up -- there's a kind of pleasure in it that I don't get from the REAL Nutcracker in the Opera House (which I also love). I LIKE seeing people I know dressed up in costumes; there's a kind of pleasure in it that makes you feel the community, lets you feel the passage of time without being too scared by it. It's a kind of entertainment that's like having company over, you hold something in common, you're invested in them, and it makes you feel less all alone. Quite a few of these girls are graduating this year and will be in college next fall, this is Rebecca's and Kate's and Sonja's chance to be Sugar Plum, next year they'll be gone. Rebecca's Sugar Plum is about epaulement, head positions, eyes -- she has a way of raising her eyes at hte bottom of her 4th arabesque penchee that is a VERY big deal -- whereas Kate's is not so inflected, hers is more about the way being on-stage makes her feel happy and generous and like stepping out big and entertaining us -- she has huge extensions and majesty in pirouettes -- well, she's a VERY tall girl and a natural turner, so majesty is her mode. They both looked amazingly confident, considering how hard Ivanov's choreography is.... (I've seen tapes of Markova -- whose attack and lines were marvellous, but she wasn't all that much more secure technically, and she certainly couldn't turn as well as Kate.) It's a pleasure seeing children develop mastery -- so seeing it as it grows is sometimes more ofa revelation than seeing the totally developed thing -- there were moments in hte waltz of hte flowers -- well, I felt I saw Sarah bloom as she did a porte de bras, it was VERY flower-like. the technique was perfect, but that was so completely not the point, it was just natural, musical phrasing that was completely supported by the music; her beauty made me glad. Anybody else had experiences like these? Please share.....

Gesundheit! Reinhard. Hope you feel better soon, and I too would be VERY interested in hearing abut Lulu, bitte.

hmmmmph! are we talking about art or product? You should have Robert Rauschenberg designing your decor -- My friend Ellen Cornfield told me about dancing in a piece of Merce Cunningham's where she had to do a double pirouette and land on this little rug so she could be pulled off-stage -- but the added complication was that Rauschenberg was doing the lights , too , and turning them on and off ad lib, and just before she finished the pirouette it went DARK -- "It was WILD!" she said, but I think it actually did work out ..... Now THAT's modern art....

I didn't think she was harsh -- she didn't DWELL on it, which WOULD have been cruel, and she didn't make it sound like he wsn't brave to try... It's a famously difficult role -- If you read Bobby Maiorano's book about the making of Mozartiana, Ib Andersen himself had difficulty in places learning it -- there are lots of sections that are very tight -- a set of ronde de jambes a terre, if I remember right, like 3 outside and then 3 inside, can that be right? into preparation for pirouettes, looks SO ungrateful -- not ugly or anything, but so hard compared to the effect it makes.... I liked Redick a lot as a dancer when I saw him here -- I wish I HAD seen him in this. But Mozartiana calls for exceptional, angelic qualities. Peter Boal himself might not be above criticism in it any more.

It is a FANTASTIC photo -- by Cecil Beaton, It has incredible lighting, He's in a noble pose, in 3/8 profile so the downstage cheekbone gets reflected light. It's impossible to say what he's thinking, but hte picture somehow makes you very aware of the powers of his mind. He's opening a glass box, and his left hand is in hte picture -- WHAT a beautiful hand, it looks like Nijinsky's in Les Sylphides.

I agree with Hans about SO many things -- first off, that ballet tells some stories better than any other medium, and they only become silly when they get paraphrased into an idiom that won't support hte deep values. And I should add that Hansel and Gretel are important figures in my life, and Gretel in particular is a really brave person. not that I've seen a great ballet version of Hansel and Gretel, but there could be one. The GREAT challenge in a three act ballet is finding the pallette -- what movements belong, what imagery needs to be developed, what qualities of weight, rhythm, "color" go together to make this entire Gestalt come into being and have a life as real as Reality's? Swan Lake has that great image of the arabesque that shows a bird being buffeted by hte storm -- arabesque always shows, by its nature, the direction you want to go in -- it's the result of taking a step forward, ennobled and enlarged; but the swan arabesque is thwarted, the arm goes up, not forward, the back leg is bent slightly, there is no way out except transcendence. It's all there in that arabesque -- but there are so many ways to develop the idea, and the story offers so many opportunities for lyrical episodic intensification, that you don't have to LEAVE the idea before you get to dwell on it and all its implications. All the great story ballets have their own plastiques. I'd like to mention a ballet nobody seems to admire, for the plastique is so remarkably consistent, metaphorically powerful, and profound -- the ugliness of Spartacus has made many people hate it, but I find that to be a fantastic achievement -- to take the forms of classical humanism and distort them until they figuire forth the rhetoric of brutal temporal power. Virtues like those of Spartacus and Phrygia ARE rare; they are truly heroic, and the world they live in would have to be as ugly as it is in the ballet to call UP those virtues to oppose it. Crassus and his horrible wife are great roles, and if the ballet is nearly unendurable, well, it IS a tragedy, and the nobility of the protagonist is given a setting that makes it shine across the centuries. If the brutality of the Romans looks a LOT likethe brutality of Stalin, well, all the more credit to Grigorovich for sneaking this past the censors. (The same holds for Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet, which I admire enormously, I love it.)

I agree absolutely, djb -- especially the last quality you mention, her intelligence. I remember when I first saw Maffre, I was like you, Lukayev, just stunned by her look -- every bone that CAN be long on her is long. It was hard to belive that a person constructed like that could move at all, much less dance. But over hte years, i've come to be impressed by the way she thinks about her roles, the ways she uses her looks and way of moving to make something poetic for the public. I can't speak for you djb, but I suspect you were impressed by the way she created the role of Myrtha in Giselle. Maffre does NOT have a great jump, but she was a heroic Myrtha nevertheless -- she HAS stillness, command, and greatness of heart -- her Myrtha was not cruel, but she WAS remorseless, like fate. and it was there in the way she danced -- the opening arabesques, the way she phrased the promenades and the penchees was strictly on time, like moonrise, there was NO concession to difficulty or idiosyncracy. But hte carriage of her head in the travellng arabesques began implacably and CHANGED to a nobler but still unshakeable posture. And then there was the time she did hte adagio of SYmphony in C during an earthquake.

Happy thanksgiving, EVERYBODY.... As HTE BRINGER OF GREEN VEGETABLES, i WANT TO MAKE A DISTINCTOIN BETWEEN ZUCCHINI AND MODERN -- For "modern" -- once upon a time-- had very definite, and definitely challenging ring to it. "ll faut etre absolument modern" was kind of a war cry iwhen TS Eliot quoted it -- was it La FOrgue who said it ? -- and it meant in the ENglish-speaking cultures opposition to sentimentality, warm-fuzzy thinking of all kinds, over-cushioning, and "skirting" in almost every sense -- they took the skirts off the tables and exposed their legs, shortened the skirts on ladies and exposed THEIR legs, took the skirts off the genteel.... In America, the genteel tradition was not very old, but the fantastic economic success of the country had created a considerable cushion of material well-being for a huge proportion of the population -- which had a numbing effect on the minds and spirit. Isadora Duncan wanted something much freer; the next generation of moderns, like Eliot, who'd seen World War I, were appalled by the complacency of hose who thought that "progress" would be just a steady advance of good and goods... There hadn't been a really big war in Europe since Napoleon was defeated, and modern scientific warfare was cataclysmic for their whole world-view. "The Waste Land," "The Rite of Spring" -- art like that concentrated on revealing the hidden forces at work behind pleasant surfaces, which could collapse to reveal violence in the abstract. The challenge was to be intellectually honest, acknowledge the real forces at work. So modernism was a heroic movement; even when it was being ironic, it was using irony as a force of disillusionment. Graham wanted to show what was going on under the skirts -- without taking the skirts off, she wanted her performers to "dance from your vaginas." One of the most frequent metaphors modernists used was "leanness" -- "a poem should be / clean as bone"; Balanchine wanted the bones to show. You should feel the art working, there needed to be a heroic penetration, beneath surface ornamentation, to the absolute essence and THAT is what the artist must reveal -- the inner workings, the idea itself. (Conceptualism is a last gasp of that, from an era when the divorce between vision and technique had become no longer something to feel sorry for but laughably complete.) Post-modernism is not a heroic movement. If it's a movement at all, rather than just an attempt to find some kind of spirit to carry on, it's an acknowledgment that the times don't suit heroics. But I'm sure the situation is very different in different countries -- Joanna's situation in Poland is very different from ours in the United States -- where it seems to me the situation is (as they used to say in Vienna) "desperate but not serious." Well this just came off the top of my head. I wonder if I'll agree with myself an hour from now. Gotta go get my green vegetables ready for the Thanksgiving feast.

I've seen (I think, it's been years) a video clip of Danilova talking about that variation, "is Arab song..." she sighed, and lifted her rbreast bone and showed her profile with more je ne sais quois than I'd ever seen before..... Or was it Makarova coaching the same variation, to prety much the same effect, trying to get a certain oozy quality in a soutenu -- "gooshshsh" she'd say, and then show it again, as if she were donig fondu on both feet while swiveling around.... I';m inclined to think there was a lot of character flavor in certain variations -- like Aurora's last act solo, with its Russia-dance phrase. Kchessinska was famous for her Russian dance. Petipa was himself famous for his Lezghinka, which he was still doing in his 60's (and hte Lezghinka, remember is that Caucasian men's dance done in black-kid shoes, on the knuckles of hte feet, with all the sudden drops down onto hte knees).

djb, one of hte first things I noticed was hte way the hand floats up as you begin to go down, at the beginning of plies, when I started taking classes at Berkeley Ballet Theater about 20 years ago. (the school was stated by Janet Carole, who'd been at SAB and told wondeful stories about Danilova -- "stay, stay, stay! why you no stay?" was my favorite; Sally Streets, a City BAllet alum, joined as co-director a little later, and remains; Janet has moved on.) Nobody actually SAID "hand like parachute," but we all did it. It was the first bt of style I tried to get. I think we all still do them that way here - -but I'll have to check around and see if there's anybody that doesn't.

Thank you so much for finding and posting this site, Alexanda --t's a WONDERFUL sourceo f information, and of tributes to him and memoirs of him by people who knew him well/ But BA readers, if you don't know Denby already, this may not give yu any idea why people like me care so much about him. Read his BOOKS --Dancers Buildings and People in he Street, for one, and then you'll probably understand. He really cared about dancing, and he really looked at ballets and at daners and saw what they were dong.... he is an astringent writer as a poet, but his dance essays are only made clearer by his fidelity to what was really going on on hte stage, in hte ballet. He wrote for hte New Yourk Herald Tribune during WOrld aWar II, and so he had to write in 'ordinary" language -- his poetry, I'll say it again, can be cryptic, but his criticism is really lucid, I read it all hte time, for pleasure. Hope you like him too.

Perky, I agree, both of those ballerinas would be great.... I wish I'd seen them too. ANd i agree, she embodies a whole people's hope for hte future -- maybe not in a world of darkness and despair, but certainly of strains and well-concealed anxiety. (The music is SO full of sudden alarms -- even Lilac Fairy's music has abrupt moments ofstrange rhythms, sudden sforzandos). That's the point, she's the LONG-awaited heir. I remember Elizabeth Loscavio's balances in hte Rose adagio having a quality of being like a fountain, you had no question thta she would stay up, she was breathing so freely she could even sway a little bit, like a fountain in a breeze, without there being any question of falling -- it was like hope springing eternal, looing at that, she was an irrepressible dancer, a fabulous Aurora for us in SanFrancisco...

djb, I am so sorry you missed it..... She got the Isadora Duncan award for that performance, and I was there when she received hte award and she said she'd had a remarkable feeling throughout the performance, which was that she was just going to let it happen. SHe could hardly believe she was going to get to do the role. That was (I think she said) the only time it ever did happen, though she had prepared it many times. SHe had a rib injury the first time around (years ago), and then there was something else, plantar fascitis? -- that let her dance one-acts but not Aurora. Then in the run up to he performance her partner was injured and was replaced at the last minute -- and they'd barely rehearsed it, and then she was on, and she found she didn't want to impose herself on hte ballet but just let it unfold and be aware. She had fantastic support -- wonderful fairies, all her friends were on the stage.... It was a fabulous evening -- I wrote about it in Ballet Review -- her act 3 solo made me cry... I remember thinking, I've cried at SwanLake, which isn't strange, but it IS strange to be crying in Sleeping Beauty -- it was SO beautiful, and the "Russian dance" section, the way the arms rose from her back, you could feel it coming from the shoulderblades, it was so generous, so loving, so full of feeling, and so MUSICAL, like Isaac Stern playing Russian dances for his encores..... I was quelling, as they say in Yiddish.

She should have some of the qualities of the fairies, but be more human -- the Auroras I have loved most were circumspect enough to have the dignity of a person whom all eyes will be constantly watching, but still have the graciousness to meet that challenge with warmth. In particular, I LOVE it when Aurora looks at everybody else onstage -- Yelena Pankova did this, Cheryl Yaeger did this, Joanna Berman did this -- when I saw them perform live in San Francisco. It fantastically opens up the space for her to make eye contact with people all round the room, as a girl WOULD do who was being presented on such an important day -- as brides do at their weddings, looking through the crowd and greeting people without actually putting down the bouquets or leaving hte arm of their father -- Berman did it because she was ganuinely beloved of the whole company, and everybody onstge was happy for her as Joanna, and they watched her and she met thei eyes and greeted them -- it's amazing how that creates thetical depth and vibrancy on he stage, hte air itself becomes charged, almost sparkling, all around her, so her edges, the places where the light hits her, become even more sharply defined than if she'd lost ten pounds.... it also is almost impossible to make such connections without there being a heart connection, which is probalby most evident in he quailty of the breathing. Above all, Aurora must be breathing like a happy person.

me too, RG -- though my favorite is the croise derriere, such beautiful turnout for an old photograph -- also such beautiful epaulement, and the way she has of making hte scarf seem to be billowing -- a noble image.

There are several marvellous photographs of Osipenko in Lobenthal's recent article about Soloviev in the LATEST Ballet Review -- ven in a group shot, with Makarova an Kolpakova and the other ballerinas of the day, in street clothes, she has a look that sets her apart -- sh'es not being a pretty girl. That seems to me very brave.

Helene, can you describe the conditions under which you saw them? Were you at the Spanish Riding School? My real question is, how close were you to them, how big was their "field" -- etc. We were in a stadium, huge place, where you might watch pro baseball or football, and the scale of it had a lot to do with my disappointment.... How much could you see of the action?

ARen't horses romantic? WHen I was a boy I read a lot of the Chincoteague books -- probably all of them -- which, if you don't know them, are novels about the wild horses that really do live on an island in the Potomac, or maybe it's in Chesapeake Bay...... The books are rather like Green Mansions with horses instead of people, the horses just basically run around like the wind all the time...... Asd I recall it -- there must be events or something, but basically it's just kind of like Serenade..... Which brings me to say, I never see Serenade without thinking of Misty of CHincoteague. The Lipizzaners, on the other hand, when I saw them perform in a HUGE sports arena in San Jose a few years ago (and I was trying to arrive without having too big an expectation) were pretty disappointing. There was lots of paraphernalia, long waits, and not much movement; and even when they did hteir cabrioles -- it DID look difficult, but it looked so small -- and not very poetic. It seemed a LOT of effort expended to small visual effect. Of course, the cabriole was a military maneuver, designed to produce deadly impact on the opposing knight's horse, and when you think that they were supposed to do this while wearing armor AND bearing an armored knight, the strength and control required is enormously impressive -- but it didn't make an enormous impression on me, that night. If I remember right, the horses we saw have their home base somewhere in Florida. I'd go back to see them again, though. I saw a dog playing frisbee the other day that was a gorgeous, fabulous athlete, just the most beautiful sight.

Perky, that's inspired......

Hi Joanna-- THat's very clear-- no problem. I just wrote a long reply but my computer crashed just as I was about to post it, and it's GONE.... SO I'll just ask, was the festival interesting? What did you like about it? I met Conrad Drewiecki in Bytom, but I have never seen any of his dances. Have you? What are they like? I gathered he had to leave Poland and work in Paris but was allowed to work under the Soviets when he came back, though under many restrictions, and that all the young people looked up to him -- a little like the way the young dancers here all look up to Anna Halprin. (Have you heard of Ms Halprin?) She is in her 80's, a great figure in free expression here in the SF Bay Area, indeed in the whole USA, the "mother" of post-modern dance. Were there classes as well as performances? WHat kind? What did you like? Why? My experience of festivals is that there's so much going on, you can't see everything, and you don't even have time to "revcover" from one performance or class before another comes along. Hav you seen any of Ms Strzemiecka's work? (ARe you her student? -- then you mustn't say anything, otherwise, what do you think?) Oh well, I'm sorry, if I'm too pushy.... I just loved being in Poland and want t ore-connect. By the way, did you notice the other thread on hte board about Ballet in Warsaw?

Actually, I must apologize also for jumping to a conclusion -- Lobenthal does not explicitly allege that Belsky lost his position as head of the Kirov due to the scandal of Soloviev's death, coming after Baryshnikov's defection -- he leads you right up to that conclusion, and he points out the sequence of events, but he does not say that this was THE cause, nor even that it was the cause.