Paul Parish

Balletmom, that sounds like a great plan -- Something you might consider is aranging with the school to show some videos for a whole class of students, and letting the young dancers talk about what they liked and didnt like about the performance.... it might take some tricky scheduling, might have to wait for the summer Intensive, but do a short series, Swan Lake one week, Agon the next, Who cares? the next, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers the next (Mr B told Gelsey to dance like Fred Astaire, and I've alwys thought that Suzanne Farrell had some of Ginger Rogers's qualities -- note how she uses her face to keep her privacy) Well, that's what I would do -- but you could come up with your own..... oh yes, don't forget SInging in the Rain

Lobenthal also reports that some thought he had been killed. His brother thought so. Lobenthal is careful not to speculate. He does say that it would have been a propaganda disaster for the Soviets for a heroic dancer to kill himself -- it would be seen as a public loss of faith in communism -- and coming so soon after (I can't remember, was it Baryshnikov's defection?) it caused the director of the Kirov to lose his post. Soloviev was never a member of hte Communist Party. But several of his partners were. His first rise was as the partner of a dancer with powerful protection. If he had political enemies -- he DID get summoned more than once for long interrogations, especially after Nureyev's defection, which was aggravated by Soloviev's rejecting a homosexual advance from Nureyev when they were room-mates on tour -- Lobenthal does not go into detail at all. He doubtless knows more than he is telling, but he probably does not know enough to make any kind of case. And he does not mention any personal enemies.

famously, when he was at hte Kirov....

Sandik asked

Sandik, you are a person after my heart -- I do so TOTALLY agree, it's comparable to Giselle and not Red Shoes or Turning Point, Do I love it more than you? I challenge you.... prove that you love the movie more than I do, not in words, but.. well, let's see? do you get up and do the Madison with them every time? Which variation has the Jackie Gleason? Who's your favorite dancer? (Mine is hte slender boy in the tan vertically-striped shirt -- in hte Madison production number -- that's always on the edge of hte screen and they never feature, except that they do show him doing the world's greatest Mashed potato in hte opening credits). Would you do a Clearasil commercial if Corny asked you to? Who is Tracy Turnblatt's manager? Scoop, you should be proud. Eskimopieo, you're so ritght -- Strictly Ballroom is a major contender, it's a great dance movie. In a humbler vein, but honest and sweet, and close to your home, have you seen "Shag the Movie," about Carolina shag? Truly sweet. But the other GREAT dance movie to me is the recent Japanese "Swing Time" -- if you haven't seen it, waste NO time.

Joanna, Nie mowie dobje populsku, but your English is not bad at all. I'd like to add a welcome to BAllet ALert, Joanna, and to say I hope you WILL post news from Poland, even if you don't feel you've expressed yourself at your best, we would still be so grateful for news from Poland. I have been to the Silesian Dance Festival a few times in June, and found it a fascinating experience. The situation in Poland is very exciting, as free expression becomes again a possibility -- what wonderful challenges you face. And there is a LOT of talent that we would like to hear about. I myself would love to hear about Jacek Luminski's company in Bytom, and also about dance in Lublin, Wroclaw, and Warsaw -- and perhaps othe places that you will know about.

THanks rg, -- they don't duplicate the BR pics, and would be welcome even if they did, I right-clicked on them to save them to my hard-drive. Marc, do you know off-hand the NAME of that Russian documentary? It is definitely top of my list.

Who do you wnt for hte roaches? I do agree with Carbro, Kyra should have a go at Carabosse.... though I also agee with Nanatchka, she IS the Lilac Fairy..... And Jenny Somogyi should have a crack at Aurora. And I'd like to see Lindy mandradjieff as a fairy -- maybe Breadcrumb.

Does anybody else like Hairspray as much as I do? It is probably my favorite dance movie -- the fat girl can REALLY dance and becomes everybody's favorite dancer because she IS such a good dancer, and she dances because she has just gotta dance..... I watch it every few months and just LOVE it. As far as dance movies go, it is probably my favorite. it LOOKS silly, and it's certainly got some moments that are forced, but the DANCING itself is just wonderful, and it's really faithful IMO to the way people who love dancing feel about dancing.

In no particular order, but hte order in which they come to mind -- The Danish version of La Sylphide, directed by Henning Kronstam, staring Nikolai Huebbe and Lis Jeppesen and SORELLA ENGLUND The ABT Giselle starring Makarova, Baryshnikov, and van Hamel (out of this world) The old Royal Ballet 1-act version of Swan Lake starring Fonteyn and Somes, which has also a couple of other ballets on the video The Kirov's Sizova/Soloviev Sleeping Beauty The old Bolshoi Swan Lake staring Plisetskaya THe PBS Balanchine biography The Royal BAllet Makarova/Dowell Swan Lake The Royal Ballet in Ashton's Cinderella, starring Ashton, Helpmann, Sibley and Dowell The BBC biography of Margot Fonteyn "We sing, we dance" (biography of hte Nicholas Brothers) Singing in the Rain Hairspray Swing Time Shall We Dance? (both of them, the Fred/Ginger and the Japanese titles) Elusive Muse Strictly Ballroom

Thanks, everybody -- esp RG, for hte research and for the pictures, which remind me a bit -- you too? -- of Fadeyechev, except that fabulous picture in b plus form, where he shows more of his rotation "Little Humpbacked horse." Lobenthal has by the way another one of the "genius of hte water," in arabesque with a rather Spectre de la Rose porte de bras, VERY beautiful....... it's fascinating how beautiful he is in second position, or as in your third picture, in B-plus...... i've been recommending that Sleeping Beauty video for years, for Sizova's performance -- but SOloviev's is just tantalizing, I want so much more han that.. Has any7one see n the fascinating Beauty filmed in Japan in hte 70's with Soloviev and Kolpakova that Lobenthal mentions? I will seek out the glory of hte Kirov video... Did any of you see his performances in New York and london in the 60's?

FASCINATING!!! Thank you so much for posting this. I believe the foundation is making hte tapes available to places like our Performing Arts Library and Museum in SF-- djb, do you know anything about htis? Have you seen any? I've got to look into this, see what they've published. WIll report back what I find out....

djb, I defer to your knowledge -- I'm really kinda envious that you had some actual experience of Christensen -- I agree that Christensen's snow dance in Nutcracker is wonderful, I just love it. I've seen several of Christensen's ballets revived over hte last decade -- and IMO probably con Amore fared the best of them. I know that Virginia johnson has not been involved in the stagings at SFB, not for a while -- and hte problem maybe starts there -- because they just look like they've been set by people who know the performance style. Filling Station they're not dancing at all idiomatically -- well, I didn't see it when it was new, but it MUSt have been more fun than this. And you can look at it and see that the dancers now are square on hte beat when it does not make sense to be -- exspecially in the mime passages. the drunken debutante ballerina is sure-fire comedy, but hers is the only rolethat's getting done with any moxie. And Oakland Ballet, hte year Joral Schmalle was interim director, did Jinx superlatively well, better I think than SFB did it last year -- I think VIrginia Johnson DID have somehing to do with that. But they danced it like a Ballets Russes company (Oakland, I mean -- the dancers looked a little stiff, old-fashioned -- they looked convincingly like a down-on-their-luck ratty little circus (like those in hte early Fellini movies); At SFB Katherine Winfield was extraordinarily good at catching that old-fashioned look, with a high fifth that looked like Markova's, "peek-a-boo" -- and Yuri Possokhov was marvellous as hte jester. But in Oakland's staging, EVERYBODY was right -- the guy with the whip really LOST it, the taattoed lady was really grotesque AND grief-stricken. At SFB, Katita Waldo looked way too much like someone who could dance "The Vertiginous THrill of Exactitude" without breaking her neck for me to believe she was the tattoed lady; she needed to change her whole way of moving to be convincing in that role, as Nijinsky did when he played Petroushka. SFB also do the Vivaldi Concerto Grosso well, but again, too square; and a novelty with black lighting and fluorescent body parts came off well a few years ago, esp with Paul Gibson as hte guy who gets left holding hte leg; you need a dead-pan comedian like Gibson to make it work, but he was a scream. But "con amore" had LOTs going for it, every time I saw it -- in retrospect the BEST thing was elizabeth Miner as Cupid. SHE WAS PERFECT. I hear she's going to be one of the Sylvias next year. Very promising.

wow, it's news to me too -- VERY curious.....

The latest Ballet Review has a long article on the great mid-century Kirov dancer Yuri Soloviev that makes me want to hear anything anybody has to say about Soloviev. Please read it. The essay is by Joel Lobenthal, and tells a fair amount about Soloviev's childhood, his training, his incredible elevation, and his lyrical, complex gifts as a dancer, his difficulties getting roles that did not fit his shape (short, with large thighs -- he was so short he was almost not allowed to continue at the Vaganova academy), his turbulent emotions, his suicide. When he caused a sensation in London as the Bluebird, it was not just because of his incredible technical powers -- elevation such as "had not been seen in London in three generations, " -- but because he did NOT use the role as a showcase. "But it is not a showcase," he told Ballet Today; "The Blue Bird is a prince who has turned himself into a bird in order to see the Princess, and when he dances with her he is singing to her and she listens to his song." To have such physical powers allied to such technique AND such a temperament, such an imagination! It makes me breathless just to think about him. I have heard elsewhere -- Lobenthal does not mention this -- that some said Soloviev danced as if he were already dead inside. [oops, editing later -- yes he does quote a ballerina, Kolpakova I think, as saying late in his career "she couldn't reach him"] Others say quite the opposite, that there ws a fantastic stir of emotoins inside him. (Lobenthal quotes Kolpakova and Sizova, and Vinogradov says that Soloviev's way of "being Spanish" in Don Q was less a parade of mannerisms and technique than a kind of emotional expressivism -- which sounds to me VERY intriguing). There are two photographs that break my heart -- one of him with his face full of -- I can only call it visionary hope, like the famous close-up in the Battleship Potemkin of the idealized sailor-youth, and an image of him in the Little Hump-backed horse, -- the only other person who has ever looked like this was Nijinsky, the poetry of his line is out of this world. (Ok, I'm exaggertating, but I can't tell you how beautiful he seems to me.) Please take a look at this and comment.

The Act III fish dives themselves are not original -- Sergeyev's version, if I remember rightly -- haven't looked this up recently -- comes fom hte version ("The Sleeping Princess")that Diaghilev did for London, and for that version Lopukhov made some additions (or was it Nijinska?) -- including I believe the fish (which indeed, hte Russians no longer do, but use instead usually a multiple inside turn and a swoon in sous-sus). In the variation itself the Russians nowadays do less of hte Russian dance (the section with the corkscrewing wrists), but break it up with a couple of soutenus or something. I myself would love t o know how much of THAT is petipa, and who konw, and how they know for sure....

THanks, guys -- wow, Carbro, that's quite a seating chart..... incredibly user-friendly...... Please, everybody, feel free to give more tips on seating -- but how about casting? WHo do you like in Cindreella? I saw Sibley, and AShton and Helpman (sp?), myself -- which was ideal... WHo do you like now, and do they dance matinees?

When I first started seeing ballet, I started writing about it right away, in letters home. I was living overseas at the time--- and suddenly my letters filled up with ballet. But I haven't re-read them; my mother saved them, and I have them in a box somewhere. I'll have to check them out. But I DO remember what I started DOING after I started seeing ballet. (My first was a Saturday matinee of La File mal Gardée at Covent Garden, which a friend who was already a balletomane dragged me to -- it was Leslie Collier's debut in a full-length ballet, and he was a fan of hers and was very excited. I don; remember her in the role, but I DO have VERY vivid recollections of her fast FAST feet in red heeled shoes dancing Ashton’s Tarantella in Swan Lake, which I saw later that year. But what I remember from that era was how wild I was to see the ballet -- I'd leave Oxford by train, be in Paddington Station in about an hour, take the subway to -- where ? Shaftsbury Square? and run the last bit of the way to the theater, which was at least a few blocks -- and the closer I got to the theater, the more my feet would turn out. I'd do little jétés as I jumped onto the curb -- I still do -- and when the crowd was thick I'd turn my shoulders into fourth arabesque and slice through it like butter. So I must have been watching that I think what I was into was not so much the way they looked as a kind of kinesthetic identification with the dancers -- yes you have to look, the evidence comes in through your eyes, but the vision was not the main thing, it was the swing, the rhythm, the weight transfers, the feeling of being able to move in an ideally graceful way that was intoxicating me. I must have been feeling the way they were moving, because I was unconsciously trying it out, and I didn't care who saw me doing it. Of course, I was a stranger in a great city, so there was no-one about to say, "Paul Parish, you forget yourself: what ARE you doing?" I was indeed forgetting myself. That was a huge relief; I was very depressed at the time, and ballet virtually saved my life.

Not sure if this is hte right place to post this, but I'm inquiring for friends who're going to London on Dec. 31 and are hoping to see Cinderella at Covent Garden -- She knows I became a fan of hte RB when I lived in England (the high SIbley/Dowell/Mason era). She writes me, "we are looking at horrendous prices (84 pounds for evenings, 55 for matinee). Do you have any suggestions about casts or seats in the Opera House? Last time I was there was in 1969. I can scarcely remember, but I saw an opera from what I think were the balcony sides. The casts are different, too. I'm thinking about a matinee on Jan. 2 to save money." WHen I was aat Oxford, you could get into Covent Garden for a half a crown , get a cheap seat upstairs, identify vacancies in the orchestra, and run down and grab them without the ushers doing anything but smiling. SO I can't help much. Any of you Londoners/RB buffs enough up on the situation to give her some help? My friends are new to ballet, are seeing everything they can, utterly smitten -- both are musical, one was once a child prodigy, played a piano concerto with the LA Symphony when she was like 14... so you would be helping someone who is really a great maven.... THanks, Paul

If I can get around to typing it in, I'll post a review I did of his company ten years ago when I really enjoyed the performance. But for now, I'll mention that it seems really important to me that Forsythe was (in his own words) "the best rock-and-roll dancer in my high school" -- his concerts have the loose look of a crowded dance floor, where people don't pretend to be doig anything but all dancing at he same time -- they're not exactly dancing together, they're doing they thang -- he's really investigated the German material -- Laban's theories of swinging, and the possible ranges of movement, and hte possibilities of moving in several directions at he same time -- which were already implicit in African-American polyrhythmed, multicentered dancing, which those of us who loved to dance rock and roll were doing without knowing there was anything theoretically interesting about it.... It's a huge over-simplification to say that when hte postmoderns wee getting interested in walking and rolling over and other everyday movement (doubtless under hte influence of marijuana, which can make the taste of peanut butter fascinating), the example was set for Forsythe to get interested in what good club dancers were pulling off.... There is FANTASTIC dancing going on in nightclubs....

I'm sorry, Marianna, but I saw the tape when Ms Mozuraitis showed it in connection with lectures on criticism at the Silesian Dance Festival in Bytom, Poland -- On hte other hand the Lithuanians are eager for peole to know about their dancers, and Ms Mozuraitis is attached to the library in Vilnius, and also to he Dance Information Institute there -- inquiries might get you somewhere, if you really want to know. I found them wonderful people. We are still in touch.

THe dance place to be in Poland at the end of June is at the Silesian Dance Festival in Bytom (down near Krakow) -- I've been there a couple of times, the place is crawling with dancers taking classes of all kinds (ballet, release, "Afrikanski," Cunningham; American show dancing -- I learned a dance from "Hair") performances every night by comapnies from THe USA, Russia, Switzerland, England, and of course Eastern EUrope -- mostly contemporary dance, but some ballet, and some extras in hte middle of the dayperformances Bytom is not a major city, but it has a very dynamic modern dance company headed by Jacek Luminski, who's one of the most remarkable dancers I've ever seen -- he's stopped performing, but he teaches -- his class is mobbed -- he's so lifted, it's like a cobra standing on its tail --

If she's the dancer I THINK she is, I've seen a videotape of something -- A Lithuanian friend/critic V. Mozuraitis showed me something , quite soulful, bird-like, strange... They think of her a little like the Soviets thought of Mezentseva....

Kirkland's interpretation would have been worth walking a mile to see..... THat's a very intriguing idea... PS -- speaking of intrigued, I'd love to know the source of your screen-name, Thalictum.....

Dale, Thalictum, what you're saying makes senseto me. THanks for sharing the knowledge you have of the performance and rehearsal tradition...... Dale, I hope you'll share with us how you respond to Kaye on the film "at the Library......" -- what a fantastic resource, how marvellous to be able to get to it without having to cross the continent.....