Paul Parish

Lewitzke is a thrilling dancer..... just standing there, she's a knockout.... rumor has it that Mark MOrris walked into the studio one day, saw Lewitzke wearing a black long-sleeved leotard and black wrap-around skirt (tights and pointe shoes of course) for class, and decided that that's how the women should be dressed for his new ballet, A Garden...... I don't know that it's true, but I'd like to believe it; I love the ballet, HATE those costumes, and only such a story could explain why they're wearing such school-wear.... Lewitzke would look stage-worthy in anything. She had a great role in the second-cast of Liebeslieder Walzer, alternating with Maffre (staged by Karin von Aroldingen ); it was a noble performance....

Brioche, I have to thank you -- not just for setting me right about the Blancas, but for reminding me of Jennifer Blake. I was thinking of her when I made the post, but couldn't remember her name. Michelle Wilson was a lovely dancer, too -- but I was never there on a night when she took my breath away. Jennifer Blake, however, on a regular basis would come onstage like a comet -- in Ballo della Regina -- do you remember that? -- she was the girl with the grands jete/pas de chats, and she entered flying -- I believe this was also a role Wilhelmina Frankfurt danced, but maybe my memory has slipped again.

Priceless, Mel -- what a great story!!! Sarah sessions had to do thatone night when Lucia Lacarra was ballerina in Agon - - Lacarra looked great , but her timing was hers alone, and Sarah (among others -- I think Askia was in that cast) had to make everybody else look like they had a clue; there was some pretty big thrashing going on, and since hte energy was so high ,and that's so appropriate for Agon, it wasn't a BAD performance.... but htey sure weren't together.... and yes, Ballet Nut.... Lindy Mandradjieff !!! reminds me, Elizabeth Miner, who IS still here, is an exquisite dancer..... And Blanca Como was the best thing at the gala -- the way she danced Norwegian Moods was completely enchanting, so soft, but with an edge to her timing that took my breath away... A marvellous creature... A big break for her...

On a thread about Dances at a Gathering, so many people posted about Delia Peters, whom they'd loved as the girl in green "though she was only a corps dancer" -- it made me think -- the corps dancer we all love as if they were a principal should be a topic of its own. I'll start if off --I can think of 4 or 5 right off the bat in San Francisco -- but i hope others will join in I'll start with Kim Davy, who isn't here any more.... but in Symphony in C, in the last movement, there's this tiny moment where 2 girls run forward from the back, doing hte first port de bras as they go, and make a huge circle and run back to the back, before the next big section begins -- Kim was the girl stage center left, and she made this one of the HIGHLIGHTS of the entire ballet -- it's just a run, but the phrase is kind of like a drumroll -- it announces that something even MORE wonderful than everything so far is ABOUT TO HAPPEN, and she made it like a cascade of pearls....... And there was Askia Swift, also gone -- to Ailey? -- wonderfully musical, always, in everything. He wsa especially thrilling in Val Caniparoli's Lambarena, the plastique in the jumps was amazing, and the part of the body that initiated the movement -- it's a character ballet, with lots of Senegalese movement fused with ballet -- was always extremely clear -- his ribs were so expressive..... And Chidozie Nzerem, who's also African American - -still with SFB, and a wonderfully answerable dancer-- when he was young, he was rather rigidly classical -- he was one of Larissa Sklyanskaya's greatest students, and his clarity and power were so noble and so Russian -- I saw him do the barrel turns from Corsaire at the student show, it was like the young Nureyev -- He's a wonderful character dancer -- as a guest at the Nutcracker party he steals he show, the character has been so thought through -- and of course, as the black face at the party, he does stand out..... But he does nothing to grab focus; he just is responsible for what you see. I LOVE that. As the tuba in Robbins fanfare.... He understands the vaudeville side of the role; he's a scream. And in d'Amboise's role in Western Symphony, again he understands the relation of the creature he’s presenting to antecedents in American popular theater and he uses all the tradition -- he's got some black shtick, he's got some cowboy shtick, he's got his Russian tricks, he's got his sweet danseur noble deference (as he ducks under her leg, well, that's what a cavalier would do, the lady's the man, its SO SWEET).... And with Leslie Young (who's Chinese American), they really look like the old wild west, where such racial mixing on an absolutely equal basis was a real possibility, maybe the first place in the world...... Not to mention Sara Sessions, the TALL GIRL in everything who was never out of the corps and in everything, a wonderful dancer, supple of spine, in modern stuff (Lar Lubovitch' has his corps BE the storm in Othello -- kind of an awful ballet as a whole, but with so MANY redeeming features, and she was fantastic), perfect in Agon, feet like arrows, wonderful elance.... perfect as the Wili center left in the back row, very fine in "Company B" -- and now the poster girl for ballet.co (here's the link to her interview.... http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/y...ra_sessions.htm) And that's just a start.....

wit is a wonderful quality in a dancer -- Monica Mason had it in everything.... it makes them accessible. THis shold be a tpoic of its own -- the corps dancer whom everybody loved. I can think of 4 or 5 right off the bat in San Francisco -- startng with Kim Davy, who isn't here any more but in Symphony in C, in hte last movement, there's this tiny moment where 2 girls run forward from hte back and make a huge circle and run back to the back, before then next big section begins -- Kim was hte girl stage left, and wshe made this one of the HIGHLIGHTSA of the entire ballet -- it's kind of like a drumroll -- it announces that something even MORE wonderful than everythign so far is ABOUT TO HAPPEN, and she made it like a cascade of pearls....... And there was Askia Swift, also gone -- to Ailey? -- wonderfully musical,always, in everything. He wsa especially thrilling in Val Caniparoli's LAmbarena, the plastique in the jumps was amazing, and hte part of hte body that initiated the movement -- it's a character ballet, with lots of Senegalese movement fused with ballet -- was always extremely clear -- his ribs were so expressive..... And Chidozie Nzerem, who's also african american - -still with SFB, anda wonderfully answerable dancer-- when he was young, he was rather rigidly classical -- he was oneo f Larissa Sklyanskaya's greatest students, and his clarity and power were so noble and so Russian -- I saw him do the barrel turns from Corsaire at the student show, it was like the young Nureyev -- He's a wonderful character dancer -- as a guest at the Nutcracker party he steals he show, the character has been so thought through -- and of course, as the black face at the party, he does stand out..... but he does nothing to gravb focus, he just is responsible for what you see. I LOVE that. As hte tuba in Robbins fanfare.... he understands the vaudeville side of the role; he's a scream. And in d'Amboise's role in Western Symphony, again he understands the relation of the creature he;'s presenting to antecedents in American popular theater and he uses all the tradition -- he's got some black shtick, he's got some cowboy shtick, he's got his Russian tricks, he's got his sweet danseur noble deference (as he ducks under her leg, well, that's what a cavalier would do, the lady's the man, its SO SWEET).... and with Leslie Young (who's CHinsese American) , they really look like hte old wild west, where such racial mixing on an absolutely equal basis was a real possibility, maybe the first place in the world...... NOt to mention Sara Sessions, the TALL GIRL in everything who was never out of hte corps and in everything, a wonderful dancer in modern stuff (Lar Lubovitch' has his corps BE the storm in Othello -- kind of an awful ballet as a whole, but with so MANY redeeming features, and she was fantastic), perfect in Agon, perfect as the Wili center left in hte back row, very fine in "Company B" -- and now the poster girl for ballet.co (here's he link to her interview.... http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_99/ma...ra_sessions.htm) And that's just a start.....

Seymour was tops.... a really complex person, simultaneously old and young, whimsical and thoughtful, ardent and shy, playful -- she had a way of dragging her feet, she dug her toe in and held back and let herself go at the same time..... But hte thing about talking about particular dacners -- though that is SO tempting, and God knows, I'm grateful to you all for mentinoing Delia Peters, -- could somebody please try to characterize her as a dancer -- I have no picture of her in my mind at all, if Glebb loved her she must have been something.... well, after all that, what I love most about this ballet is how the ENSEMBLE takes you into an ideal world, a place where Poles and Russians and Jews don't fear and hate each other, where the movement wells up from a common pool of rhythms and postures and little brushes and tilts and turning-in and turning-out that makes a common lore and a common heritage, an ETHOS like that in the family of any mixd marriage where the children must try to reconcile the traditions of the parents -- which will make it forever relevant.... the peaceable kingdom that Chopin was in love with and lamenting and hte whole of Europe came under the spell of in 1848 has a lot in common with that one in 1968 that so many people thought we could actually bring about if we just hoped hard enough..... That's not ALL there is to it, but it is what makes it a great work, in the company of Wordwsworth's Immortality Ode.... It's already there in the music, what's miraculous is how approproate the dances are to the music, and how much they actually add to music htat was already so great .... It's the "place for us" that Robbins so often made dances about... and into this mix I guess should go the reconciliation of hetero- and homo-sexuality --it's there in a powerfully sublimated way, nothing direct, but it's pervasive......

Well, golly, you guys -- Rachel!! I don't know where to start -- It's easier to talk about Helgi's new piece, on program 3 but I'll maybe post on that later... I saw this program twice, and was very moved by Dances at a gathering..... I took a friend who learned ballet in China, where as a child the first few years she actually studied from books, with no teachers.... She rose to become a people's artist, and is now teaching, a BEAUTIFUL dancer. I say all that because her response was very important to me -- she had never seen Dances at a Gathering before. It was all I could have hoped for. She was like staggered by Robbins' invention..... the tenderness, the playfulness, the reverence, even.... the heel clicks, the bows, the reverences of every sort that come up over and over again in the dances, how pure the sentiment of fellow-feeling is, and how omnipresent -- and when it's NOT, as in the dance for the 2 boys (brown and purple) how that only heightens the sense of an idyll, a danced utopia.... The whole was greater than the sum of its parts that night -- I can't even remember who danced the girl in pink - I could look it up, but... she was fine. The three girls were wonderful. The boy in green and the girl in mauve were wonderful, in the slow sad mazurka with the battements lentes -- heartbreaking. The point really was the ensemble.... The outstanding dancers were Kristin Long in yellow and Hansuke Yamomoto in brick, and it's appropriate for them to bring the mood up that high.... Elite Syncopations fits really well with it on a double bill -- both are character ballets, to piano music that has an idea about dancing (i.e., Chopin and Joplin have ideas about dancing) -- and yet they're so DIFFERENT, in tone, attitude, spirit, the on so refined, the other so raffish. Elite went over wonderfully in SF, which is still not that far from its own Barbary Coast days. If you've never seen Elite Syncopations, it's a comedy of atmosphere; with no more story than DatG; its references are not to Mazurkas but t o Pigeon Wing and other rag-time dances, and a preposterous plastique of its own -- with lots of steps that turn in after things have already gotten going. At one point the corps is doing grands jetes sideways with their legs totally turned in, like flapping wings -- they're hilarious, I left the building trying to do them. The variation mentioned above that Lorena Feijoo and Katita Waldo did on alternating nights is sure-fire, an absolutely fantastic character dance, that involves demi-detournees to b-plus with the butt stuck out.... Pardon my language, but the dance itself is intentionally rude in just that way, the character is as brassy as Mae West..... Both casts of Elite had wonderful moments -- though I don't think the ballerina's role (Merle Park was famous in it) was a success. Julie Diana worked very hard but didn't make it interesting; I agree that Yuan Yuan Tan was spot-on in it, but I kept finding that I wasn't watching her but was completely waiting to see how her partner, Yuri Possokhov, would upstage her. He was playing it like a bored businessman out with his vain wife -- she'd kick her leg up to 180 degrees, and he'd roll his eyes ("there she goes again') -- he was simply fabulous, and he got his effects by doing almost nothing, and actually by making you wait -- for he didn't react like this every time -- it's a gesture we all recognize, the shoulders are set like concrete, the neck is pulled back, like a turtle's when he's trying to retract his head into the shell; the Trockadero who played Taglioni did something like that, and the effect was Trockadero-level uproarious, at least to me; he got HUGE applause at the bows. And the tall girl-short boy duet was just as funny as everybody has said -- it's marvellously constructed, so that at the end of the dance, after he's ducked under her battements and she's tried to jump over him but gotten stuck and fallen on top of him, on the last beat of the music, his knee goes out and the heap collapses utterly..... Both casts did it well, though Maffre and Sofranko were tops -- Actually, Sofranko (a corps boy, one of Harkarvy's from Juilliard I gather) is a wonderful dancer -- he's always vivid, clear, clean, and sweet, you always notice him -- but this was his first big break -- and long before the duet he was doing wonderful solo bits. His plastique comes from the athletes in Les Biches -- torso contracted, legs making turned-in coupes, arms making biceps, hands making fists -- and he's a little darling live wire... Wonderful part, wonderful performance.

I just clicked on it, the picture apeared, and I had the same response as before -- tears just spring to my eyes, it's so beautiful, the waist, the rotation, the feet, the ribs, shoulders, the HANDS! hte turn of hte head, the gaze, the intake of breath......everything you want to see is there -- it's pure gold.......

Actually, I just realized some of the implications of saying Kronstam reminds me of Allegra Kent -- If you haven't read the book or don't know much about Kronstam, you should know that he was one of the great, the very greatest, interpreters of the role of the poet in Night Shadow, or Sonnambula -- i.e. the counterpart to the sleepwalker, which was one of Allegra Kent's greatest roles..... And I couldn't offer a better example of he depth of Alexandra's insight than her paragraph on the OLDER Kronstam's interpretation of the role -- so I'll quote the paragraph: "While some dancers have a fixed idea of a role and keep to that idea as they mature, Kronstam deliberately aged his characters as he aged. in this case, age brought richer pathos to the ballet. Rather than the tragedy of a young artist slain before he can begin his life's work, the tale of unfulfilled promise that Kronstam danced at twenty, his portrayal of the Poet when he was in his late 30's and early 40's deepened to something at once individual and universal. His older poet was a man who had never fulfilled that early promise, never found his muse. Perhaps he is acclaimed -- he must have been, to have been invited to such a gathering -- but he has yet to create a truly great work. The Sleepwalker thus represented not just an unconsummated love, but an unworshiped muse, and the notion of an artist in maturity, cruelly cut down seconds after he has finally opened his soul and could realize his full potential, was immensely poignant." "The opportunity to grow up in a part, to develop it, was one of the reasons that Kronstam chose to remain in Copenhagen rather than laucnch a jet set career. 'I did Sonnambula for twenty years. Then you really get into the role, and you really know what it's about......." "It's often said that a dancer finds something new in a role every time he or she dances it, but Kronstam had a different idea. 'You don't find new things in the ballets, ' he said; ' you find new things in yourself, because it's yourself that changes.' (p145) He's a deep , honest man, and the book is very good company.

I'm grateful for the book for without it I'd have never known the artist -- he's a splendid example, in fact maybe the epitome, the flower of a great tradition: his reticences are very much in keeping with Bournonville's, but also the places where he goes overboard are ALSO so much in keeping with the choreographer who created all those freaky trolls and Neapolitan fishermen and birdsellers and lemonade-hawkers. In a way he reminds me of Allegra Kent -- such integrity, such fidelity to the world of the imagination, the artist's calling. The photographs are SO well-chosen -- and they do the job Alexandra can't, of providing the first-hand evidence of the nobility of his style. She mostly has to quote reviews written by others, and mostly translated from the Danish, to fill out and back up her argument about his importance and the example he set -- but the pictures show you what she means, and what Nikolai Huebbe means when he praises Kronstam as pure gold -- there it is in the image -- pure gold, heartbreakingly beautiful....Check out the cabriole in efface he's in the middle of, as the prince in Sleeping Beauty, or the Apollo on the cover -- it's not just that he's tremendously gifted by Nature, what a beautiful figure he has -- but look how his body is working! Look at the rotation of the standing leg, the inner thigh coming forward. And in the character and grotesque roles, the intelligence that's gone into the distortions -- what an imagination he had, and you can see what the characters he played offered him, the chance to be sniveling, or stupidly vicious, or swaggering or spiteful or overwhelmingly vengeful, or foppish, whatever -- a wonderful spectrum of characters and emotions he'd never have been able to experience if he'd just been "himself" in the small-town capital of Copenhagen -- but that no other ballet repertory would have offered him, either. The quotes, too -- it all adds up to make you see a wonderful artist, someone whose imagination was almost too powerful for him to stand -- my favorite quote from him comes late in the book: "You’re lost before you enter [the stage] in the big roles. You're very alone, this excitement and this anxiety -- this breathlessness..... I accept the mystique in the art of ballet because it is there. Not the purely technical and the basics -- that's something you work on -- but those who suddenly transform all this knowledge into an experience. It is mystical, it is something that is built into the talent..... Presence, that's what you buy the ticket for, to see it. Otherwise you might as well watch television or go to the movies and see the same movie every night. But what we long for is the unexpected."

Well, Grace, I'd like to see any of those, too -- Karsavina in Carnaval! How I'd like to see a good production of Carnaval!!! Have you? But the urgency to this thread, for me, comes from seeing dances where you feel deep-down certain that the impulses the dance is founded on have gotten lost -- and you wish you could see what it was like with the performers who really "got" it.... which is, probably, usually the dancer it was made for, though this is REALLY a guessing game, so you can guess all you want -- educated guesses are the best --

This review/preview of SFB's Nutcracker ran in the Bay Area Reporter a few years ago, with a picture of Balanchine as Drosselmeyer. In the days before movies, the opera house was the great home of theatrical special effects, stage illusions, fantasies come to life. Dragons emerged from the mists in Wagner; ghosts of dead lovers flitted across the stage in Giselle. The Nutcracker, which had its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1892 at the Tsar's Imperial Theater, is perhaps our strongest link to the kind of mind-blowing theatrical fantasies our great-grandparents saw as young people, and were haunted by for years to come. Even today, I can get shivers at San Francisco Ballet's production of The Nutcracker, when Clara starts to dream and the stage picture begins to swell, the Christmas tree starts to grow and grow and becomes gigantic, and the toys under it emerge life-sized. I've seen it a number of times, but the emotions contained in it mean so much to me, I can never see it without wanting to believe it. It makes me homesick: our family Christmas parties in New Orleans were a lot like this, with mysterious customs, armies of cousins and great-aunts you scarcely knew -- "the sofa people," we called them -- and amazing food, exquisite little cakes. As a gay man with no children, The Nutcracker could make me feel left out -- except that I can identify with the heroine's childless Uncle Drosselmeyer, who gives her the nutcracker and turns her on to the world of the imagination. It's my job in the family to help my brothers' kids with things their parents don't know about. THe Nutcracker is not for children; like Schumann's Kinderszenen, it's about childhood. We see events through a child's eyes: the big family Christmas party, the old folks with their fussy dances, Uncle Drosselmeyer with his amazing toys that move as if they were alive, and the nutcracker doll he gives to Clara, and her stupid brother who breaks it out of envy and spite -- but Drosselmeyer fixes it and she tucks it into a little bed under the tree. And then she dreams she comes downstairs after everybody's gone home to nurse the wounded doll: how Drosselkmeyer is still there, and he makes everything grow, and how a lot of mice swarm around her, and the Nutcracker tries to defend her from the mice but is overwhelmed, and how she overcomes her fears and actually brains the mouse king herself -- whereupon Drosselmeyer and the nutcracker lead her off through the snows to Konfituerenberg, the Land of the Sugar Plum Fairy, where everything is perfect, like Uncle Drosselmeyer's toys that move like clockwork. Like "A Christmas Carol" -- the other great embodiment of the Christmas spirit -- The Nutcracker is about the care that a rich, childless, scary older man gives to a child at a crossroads in life. Tiny Tim is dying -- Scrooge gives the money that saves his life. Uncle Drosselmeyer is rich in a different way -- he is rich in lore, he knows how things tick. The difference is that A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's story -- it is his inner transformation that we experience -- while in The Nutcracker it is Clara's hopes and fears, her inner journey that we follow. The great productions all insist on telling the story; even George Balanchine, who hated unnecessary pantomime, staged a detailed party scene -- a wonderful scene, one of his greatest creations -- and he played Drosselmeyer himself. It's locked into Tchaikovsky's music -- the social dance, the magic swelling Christmas tree, the battle of the tin soldiers and the mice, and the transition to a realm of idealised beauty. The pure dancing is the natural flowering of the growth we've seen take place. Now the fantasy can take its perfect shape in dancing like crystals: the dazzling snow scene, the Sugar Plum Fairy's jewelled movements, and divertissements that explore a variety of romantic moods -- sensuality, gusto, zest, hilarity, tenderness, majesty. It is rich, fantastic, noble, and at times almost unbearably grand. Balanchine was one of many Russian-emigre dancers who began transplantingd ballet to the United States in the 30's; it has gone native, like the eucalyptus tree, and now little Nutcrackers crop up wherever there's a ballet school with at least six students on pointe. Recital versions now function for small communities like the staged nativity scenes we used to dress up for when I was a boy -- they give the town a chance to see the kids dressed up in fancy costumes, and provide a holiday ritual that non-Christians don't find alienating. But for real imaginative power, it's the opera-house productions, with their curtains of mist and snow and the consciousness-expanding power of great classical dancing, that give you a sense that something momentous is going on, that Clara will never be the same, and that you've looked into the seeds of time. San Francisco's Nutcracker is almost great. Its faults are that the children's choreography is too sentimental, the old folks are made to look peculiarly ugly, and the Sugar Plum Fairy's solo does not make sense -- otherwise, it's fantastic. The dance of the snowflakes is a flurry of swirling brilliance, the Russian dance has the reckless wildness you find in Russian novels. The dancers are among the finest in the whole country. BAlletomanes, take note: The Kirov Ballet are bringing their Nutcracker to San Jose December 20-24. They bring twenty dancers from St. Petersburg (where The Nutcracker has been continuously performed since 1892), and a full complement of support from their satellite school in Washington D.C. This full-scale production will not be Ivanov's original -- it was drastically revised in 1934 by Vasily Vainonen It will be fascinating to see what shape this essentially middle-class ballet came to take in the Soviet years, and to see the new young exemplars of the grand KIrov style.

Thank you , thank you for the wonderful report, Michael -- for those of us 3000 miles away, it's fantastic to get such a vivid portrait of the evening, and of the ballerina in particular.... I certainly agree with you about hte importance of characteristic dancing in the first act (which I think is one of he greatest things Balanchine ever did -- it's so poetic, so deeply imagined, and in all hte smallest, finest details -- such as hte mother's dancing with Fritz, and getting caught when hte arches come down, and the Prince's cutting off the Mouse-king's crown and crowning Marie with it, and then hte bed's begining to move like an ice-floe in an invisible river and carry them into the white white crystalline world)

[Note by A.T. I've broken these posts off from a thread Paul Parish posted on Dancers, called Dancer and the Dance. I'd written that I'd like to see Juliette Price de Plane dance the Sylph from Bournonville's Sylfiden; I'd seen bits of it on film.] Alexandra, where did you see that Elfedt film? Who was Juliet Price de Plane? Does the film still exist? You know, dancers can make tremendous effects by making hte costume move fascinatingly -- there's a majestic Flamenco dancer, Merche Esmeralda (I'm sure I've spelled htat wrong), who's as big as Jessye Norman and moves (in hte videos I've seen) very small, but hte effect is regal, shimmering and FASCINATING....

wonderful pictures -- such supple upper bodies, such vivid dancers -- are these from the war years? THose days seem to have been incredibly charged for the Saddlers' Wells group, they were not just part of the war effort, they performed like heroes, under unbelievable conditions, air raids, all that..... and i have to agree with Glebb, it's wonderful to see Larsen in DANCING form....

Hi Lil Lindsay-- One way to get write about something that interests you would be to ask yourself a question that interests you and then do the research -- it's hard to be interested in something you don't know, but htat's the fun part of research -- all that stuff you find out!! a question like "what aspects of court ballet are included in a) Sleeping Beauty? B) Agon? C)Swan Lake? D) Apollo? There's really a LOT there.... or what aspects of folk dancing are present in "Swan Lake? Apollo? Sleeping Beauty? there's a lot of THAT there -- for example, Aurora's variation in the wedding pas de deux is a Russian dance set on pointe... and of course , there's always the primitive aspects of the Rite of Spring Good luck with it; let us know how it turns out.....

This is a new member of the family, dancers you'd like to see in a dance-- This version is about the dances where you just KNOW the people dancing them now have not been coached right, or are dancing a version of the piece that's been adapted so may times for new dancers that it's lost its character. Top of my list right now is what Lew Christensen's great ballerina Nancy Johnson looked like as his Sugar Plum Fairy. Which means, how do you phrase that dance? Where IS the dance in that dance? Violette Verdy has said that she loved that variation, so it must have real poetry -- and I would have loved to see her do it. But I wish to God I could have seen Johnson. The dance has a secret -- it's a paradoxical thing: an allegro that's really rather slow, a crystalline dance that's actually very soft, so the timing, the articulation, and the grace is EVERYTHING -- which is in character for the lady in question. Next on my list is Marie-Jeanne in Concerto Barocco, then comes Nijinska in Papillons -- has ANYBODY seen Papillons? And of course Danilova in Apollo. When she put out her hands, in what spirit did Lifar lay his head in them?

Kathleen, I agree with you, that pas de deux is one of hte most beautiful and mysterious dances in that wonderful ballet -- and (unlike say, the hilarious but VERY modern-dance-y Waltz of the Flowers) it is very classical -- turned-out, lifted, a supported adage with slow grand pirouettes with grand extensions.... I don't know how to begin to say this, but it also seems a truly profound dance: partly because it happens to that deeply mysterious music, but even more because the dance seems to be a tremendously powerful ritual-transformation -- it's like a birth, the young man comes into being, becomes real somehow, in that dance. I don't know how to describe my feeling, except to say that it was TREMENDOUSLY important: Drosselmeyer's love for Clara (uh, Marie) is being poured forth and, being embodied in the youth, receives an acceptable separate life of its own, which is draining for Drosselmeyer but necessary, and the dance has the flavor of Hindu-buddhist myth -- like a reincarnation happening before our eyes, as if the youth is somehow an emanation of Drosselmeyer and emerges as a manifest separate entity in the course of hte dance, like Krishna as a manifestation of Vishnu -- So in a way it's a romance, but not one in which two become one but rather one in which one becomes two, with God's blessing.... Something like that..... It's also got an element of renunciation, as if he's giving up his love for the youth to give her to Clara, as when the Marschallin gives up Octavian to Sophie in der Rosenkavalier... the older folk are making way for the new and literally sending them on their way..... THe Marschallin actually says "in Gottes Namen" as she does it. I feel there's some such spirit in Drosselmeyer's action. Well, there's more mystery .. since the whole duet is repeated heterosexually (to different music, but almost exactly the same movements) at the end of the ballet as the climactic pas de deux for the young man and Marie.... where it "means" something else, and certainly feels different, though it still feels so tender, esp to revisit that lovely moment where "she" balances leaning her cheek on his hand....

Dear Vagansmom, yes , I agree with you , TV DOES have a lot to do with it... at every level, it's so shallow. The sports events, though, I'd have to say are probably better covered at the moment than the news, just given the amount of knowledge the audience is assumed to have about the events, and the length of memory. After watching the fall of Trent Lott (I went to college with him, knew him slightly, and lived through his times on the other side politically), I'm convinced the history of baseball is better served these days than political history. And kfw, well, a) in Berkeley we see guys in biking shorts and athletic tights all the time..... don't y'all? and B) the first examples that spring to mind of the differences between the 70's and now are the trashy exploitative sex-fantasy ballets we used to see in the Bay Area -- especially at the Oakland Ballet, where there was stuff shown on stage that I can't describe on this site, it might make Mr. Barry's daughter blush. Well, I'll give you an idea -- in John Pasqualetti's Rite of Spring, the dancers wore nude unitards with large holes cut out of them in strategic places so none of the truly naughty bits were left uncovered, but hte thrashing, bumping and grinding and simulated masturbation was pretty graphic.... I remember seeing a revival of it in about 1985 and thinking "Oh God, this has got to go...." There was a whole school of "Barbary Coast" choreography -- Ronn Guidi, Pasqualetti, and even Michael Smuin at SFB were all into louche sexiness -- Smuin is a very commercial talent, but he's REALLY talented -- kind of like Bob Fosse. FOSSE!! Well there you go – “Chicago” is in revival, the movie's out -- and of course, there IS a huge amount of very sexy stuff out there right now, especially on TV -- well, when i think about TV, I wonder how I could have said it's more conservative now, for in the 70's things weren't nearly as raw, shocking, outrageous as it gets on TV now -- quasi-porn, even, on reality shows and dating game shows and Jerry Springer -- In a way, the 70's stuff I was mentioning was still unself-conscious, in an erotic dream. The current sexiness is very knowing, AWAKE, brazen, "I'm out to exploit my body, I know what I'm doing, and I don't care." And none of them can do a fouette. The biggest difference now is that the producers are cutting costs and minimizing the scripting. So there are fewer "artists" involved writing and directing, most of the talent has gone into make-up and plastic surgery and the advance people who set up the "situations" where somebody's boyfriend springs it on her on nationwide TV that he's a REALLY a transvestite and doesn't love the poor girl at all and he's been WARNING her but she just wouldn't listen -- IT's like watching a house burn down -- riveting theater at the time, but what a shame, and for life! PS Smuin's louche sexiness. Smuin matters to us here. He was suddenly fired in the mid- 80’s (succeeded by his antithesis, the very cool classicist Helgi Tomasson). The mood had changed profoundly after AIDS appeared, and Smuin was suddenly an embarrassment. His whole imaginative world was just way too suggestive and hot. He had many supporters (he is immensely talented) -- It was a HUGE eruption here, front page news for weeks as the board’s proxy fight strung itself out....

My dear Alexandra, First of all, about Barrie-- don't forget, he's a comedian; they also have their emplois. This is one of them. (Seems to me he’s a lot like Hilarion.) But I am actually kind of nonplussed by your saying that opera and ballet dont tell you the TRUTH. What do you mean? I know there are a lot of people now who don't have a classical education, but YOU're not one of them. It's the essence of my education (which is old-fashioned, for sure) that the high arts try to show you the truth about life, or rather Nature, which is larger than life (much of nature is not living). And you’re always aware that this is impossible, but when a work -- say the Last Judgment, or King Lear, or Medea (anybody in New yOrk, you MUST go see Fiona Shaw in Medea), or Sleeping Beauty – gets close, you’re overwhelmed by the righteousness of it all. As Aristotle said, poetry is more true than history, since history is limited by facts but poetry can show you a case more representative than has yet been observed. From the revival of learning till the 20th century, and with complications through the 20th century, high art has been more or less neo-Platonist. What made an art high rather than merely decorative is not the aristocracy that was paying for it but the aspiration of the artist to pierce through the world of appearances to the world of reality and bring the truth back in communicable form.... For another school, the aspiration was not to pierce -- that's hubristic -- but to be “wisely passive,” worthy to be chosen... and to be granted a vision that takes you to the other side. An image from Seneca which appealed to Renaissance dramatists was the idea of being rapt, caught up, like Ganymede, taken up to Heaven. Per ardua ad astra -- to the stars, to Parnassus, to heaven, wherever, it was always up..... but the work (ardua) was a prerequisite, it only made you ready for when the muse came.... Both opera and ballet are the product of Classical, and neo-classical rationalists, who believed that art has a duty to teach the truth by clothing ideas in beauty (dulce et utile) – Before the high Renaissance there was a Gothic neo-Platonism -- think of Chartres, and of Abbot Suget recruiting every form of gorgeousness to inflame the soul with the love of God. The Renaissance neo-classicists proper-- the painters and sculptors, the dramatists and poets and architects.... The creators of opera and ballet claimed theirs was more arduous then most, for they were trying to recreate the concentrated impact of Greek drama, which involved poetry, music, and dancing to concentrate all the senses on a fantastically distilled image of the truth about life.... It IS hard to see Lully as being whole-heartedly into this, since he was so busy making the case for Louis XIV as the Sun King and the propaganda function is hard to stomach. But then, how free was Michelangelo?.... if we HAD Le Ballet de la Nuit to see, it might be as lofty as that..... Most modernists quailed before the duty to teach, though Auden didn’t, nor did Balanchine – abstraction made the idea only the clearer. The existentialist novelists used anti-heroes, but not out of cowardice. In my tradition, in Mississippi, especially if you think of myth as teaching, Faulkner and Tennessee Williams were squarely in Aristotle’s tradition and achieved tremendous things. I know I was taught this, but I really believe it – the high arts are great because they conceive a beauty greater than they can present, and in that beauty they comprehend the good and the true. Swan Lake is as great as Hamlet, and so is DOn Giovanni, so is Tristan und Isolde...... Symphony in C and Agon are not in their league, but are great. I guess this is my credo.....

It occurs to me that maybe Barrie is a Texan - -it's manly there to give everybody a hard time, all the time -- on principle, it 's part of your seasoning.... Women do it too, but in Texas, the women are so manly the men have to double up.... It's a vestige of the pioneer spirit -- it wasn't easy raising cows there on land so dried up 40 acres wasn't enough to sustain 2 heifers and a bull. My great grandfather amassed a lot of land in north Texas by lending money to German immigrants and then foreclosing on them when they couldn't pay him back; he had it down to a science.) So these guys tease you. But ballet and opera do sort of ASK to be parodied... since they are such extravagant arts in the first place. I just watched my old tape of the Trockaderos again yesterdayand found myself rather chastened by the wisdom in both hte swan and the Taglioni portraits; I doubled over every time Taglioni did that little "my back is killing me" walk around hte stage; she does it several TIMES, which only makes you realize that this is funnier than you can explain, it's funny every time, it's just as funny every time -- I laugh till I cry.... but WHY????? Ballet and opera are fair game, like Socrates is fair game, because they claim to be telling us the REAL TRUTH about the things that REALLY MATTER. If so, say the satirists, why do you get so fixated on all this rigmarole? what do 32 fouettes have to do with the truth about love? Well, there are plenty of choreographers who ask that question.... But Tamara Boumdieyeva, she knew.......

Alexandra, You'v certainly pulled up the hot quote... It seems to me that this is a fashion we're going to have to get used to -- manly men are back, and they're kinda loud about it. (They practice saying what they don't like and wouldn't ever ever do; they rehearse in private and in public; it's a variant of just saying 'no'). They're "true to their code" -- and until here's a cure for AIDS, there's probably some justification for it. It may be a hundred years before we return to the latitude the culture gave to all sexual-fantastic possibilities back during hte the 70's, which was NOT CINCIDENTALLY the era of the dance boom. During that time, casting your fate to the wind was something you were regularly being asked to consider. ("What has reality done for you today?" screamed a poster on hte door of a young English prof when I first came to Berkeley in 1973; it also showed a rock star in very tight jeans and a huge electric guitar.) In fact, codes of behavior and dress codes are back -- thinking for yourself is out, there are procedures for everything.... Some of it is necessary, but it's really getting out of hand..... HE's got a point about watching dogs with frisbees -- it IS a beautiful sight. In re football, baseball, bird-watching, basketball, me, I'll watch anything that's got interesting movement -- kids on skateboards, the dance-teams practicing their funk moves on hte sidewalk in front of Zellerbach hall (I know, I know, thye're going to destroy their feet, not to mention their knees, flinging themselves about like that on concrete, but they're fun to watch....) I ESPECIALLY like watching basketball teams do their warm-up exercises before a game -- the choreography of those drills is extraordinarily tight, the geometry is BEAUTIFUL, but they're moving like release dancers, the momentum is glorious.... OK, I admit it, I like watching a room full of people dancing, I go watch Lindy hop and contact improv in gyms and ballrooms and find it beautiful. I love to watch a bunch of contact-improv adepts making it up as they go -- in fact, I find it exquisite, and also much more interesting than the dances that get choreographed using movement-phrases that have been mined from such sessions..... Similarly with Lindy, exhibition lindy is not nearly as marvellous as a real improvised dance.... Choreographed frisbee throwing, further by hte way, lay at the heart of a wonderful contemporary dance by Scott Wells we saw a few years ago -- very inventive, highly disciplined, floating floating floating, a perfect fit for the soprano duet from Lakme... We were just giddy with glee. Barry might like Scott Wells.

leigh, I hope you do that dance..... and certainly, that moment of offering the hand is big drama and he approach to it can be so sensitive -- the pas de deux in Diamonds, the pas de deux in Robbins Ravel Piano COncerto in G MAjor, there's such courtship in the approach and retreat before the hand is ever offered....

Like Ballet Nut, I saw Sfb's GalaPerformance -- and I hope, BN, you saw Lorena Feijoo as the ballerina in red -- I was in convulsions, that girl has seen some ballerinas! She was shriekingly funny -- the amazing thing was she managed to bring back the era of the endless curtain call -- not just to mock it, but to recreate it -- I never got tired of her, she kept on being funny as she wrapped herself in the curtain, she milked it way longer than van Hamel did here a dozen years ago -- and van Hamel was funny, awesomely funny, in the absurdity of her dancing itself- the tilt of the upper body, which she kept increasing -- she did pirouettes in a jacknifed posture, I thought she was brushing the dews off the hem of her skirt like a sylphide..... but she wasn't as funny, just flat out funny, as Feijoo. Feijoo was funny like Steve Allen or Steve Martin, it was contagious...... Another thing you'd have had to live in San Francisco to see -- Arturo Fernandez, who danced in the Trocks as Yurinova Yurhed, did a piece at the end of his dancing career called "a Day in the Life of a Ballerina", in which he condensed most of Giselle into about 10 minutes and parodied EVERYTHING -- He kept changing styles: he flitted from Markova to Danilova to Alonso, the more you new (as with the Trocks) the funnier it was, but the way he staggered into the lights as Alonso was funny without your needing an explanation...... He danced Grahn, i'm told, with the Trocks, and was probably beautiful -- he had exquisite form in jumps, feathery batterie, so it wasn't ALl broad burlesque -- but he could be wicked, and move from an exquisitely silly effect to something that really racked you up.... oh, and Grace, I remember a Ballet by Bejart that I thought was delightful in hte most preposterous way, I don't know whether or not i actually laughed but I was in a state of continuous delight-- it may have been a version of Gaite Parisienne, I'm pretty sure it was to Offenbach, it was certainly about a boy (and the dancer who played him was fabulous, a complete delight ) whose fairy godmother promised him fantastic successes in life, "but you will be very VERY short" -- they did it here in Berkeley in the early 70's; I;'ve never seen or heard of it again.

"Incident at Owl Creek" sounds likethe story it was based on.... A few years back, here in San Francisco, Joe Goode did a beautiful duet with a prodigy-gymnast, who was still quite a small and delicate-looking boy but was fearless, talented, and highly trained-- the boy's name is Willis Bigelow, he's a dancer as well as a gymnast.... the dance was a kind of "whoops-a-boy" thing, like an idealized memory from your childhood of having fun with your father -- there were some fantastic lifts and even more fantastic tosses and catches, and hte sentiment was playful, loving, and true-to-life -- the kid wanted his dad to really swing him, and it was roller-coaster exciting, while at the same time the choreography was such that it was emotionally startling -- what I mean is, it didn't just look like fancy tricks, the phrases were actually lyrical and hte tricks were worked in so they didn't look like tricks but had dramatic impact.... SO there was a kind of family romance to that, wholesome and bittersweet.... I'm also waiting to see a short ballet romantic duet for 2 men, suitable for a gala, to "There's a place for us"