Paul Parish

Here it is immaculately done by Marianela Nunez -- with truly astounding pirouettes in attitude as well......

Thanks you Cinnamonswirl for posting that. [NB Even Lopatkina only does the "beat-beat-down" move ONCE-- the other developpes happen without their grace-note.] This little ornament is, I'd argue, MUSICALLY very important -- it is like the grace note before a long-held note in music. Think of the mordant before the first note of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor; it's KEY to the power and beauty of the big gesture, that it started with such a brilliant attack. The lustre of the long-held pose looks dull without the jewel-encrusted edge it should have begun with. If we're talking canonical moves, I'd say this is more important than the fouettes, since Petipa DID choreograph it [which he did not do with the fouettes -- other brilliant moves for 32 counts will do to that music, as Plisetskaya proved with her pique turns].

Tereshkina is very strong -- the only one strong enough [management told me, during the intermission at Zellerbach] that Tereshkina is the only ballerina who can do the petite batterie in Odile's variation -- the double frappe into fondu after the pirouette in attitfude, before the big devellope in ecarte. None of the ballerinas did it here [though I'd bet Kondaurova could do it]. I asked point blank why they did not do it, and the answer was "because they can not do it."

Birdsall -- my friend said one of the cygnets was ill that night and Ivanova was the first one out. Thanks for putting up the picture. it's the feet I would recognize her by, not the face -- the way she did coupe, the way she shaped her pas de chats was what was remarkable.... Leonid of course has a point -- with so many at the top of the hierarchy out, slots have opened up that have to be filled. It's also the case that the movie has given Skoryk a following, and dancers with a following will pull people into the theater.... There are always many factors. Ballet, like opera, is a Gesammtkunstwerk. The Russians use the word spektaklo [sp?, which means moving picture -- so the dancer's look is super-important. What you see is what you get. Vaganova herself was not a pretty girl, and she only made ballerina at the very end of her career, through the force and clarity of the way she moved, which was itself fascinating and made her beautiful when she moved. She was able to analyze this and pass on to others through her teaching....

Irek Mukhamedov -- when the Bolshoi came on tour in 1989 or 90, he stayed at the back during the bows and kept sending other people forward to bow. i was very moved, it was so handsome, so modest, so generous. It was the same tour when Maria Bylova threw her [colossal bouquet of] flowers into the orchestra pit -- but that seemed ambiguous to me, almost a gesture of defiance. Still, it was magnificent. And two from San Francisco Ballet: when Joanna Berman danced Aurora, in her first act she seemed almost completely unaware of the difficulties of the Rose adagio -- all we could see was how happy the princess was, how much she loved all these wonderful people who'd come to her birthday party, she was aware of and alive to absolutely everybody onstage, even hte supers, and constantly exchanging glances with them, as occasion permitted; and another, at the bows for opening night of Don Quixote, when Lorena Feijoo handed her [again colossal] bouquet of flowers to Joan Boada, her Basilio, who'd just been pink-slipped [which was common knowledge to the audience], and let us know on the spot, she cast her vote with her compatriot and partner. [soon thereafter Boada's contract was renewed.]

Thanks for posting that article about ivanova -- i saw her in the cygnets' dance in Berkeley and thougth she was visionary beautiful. I didn't know who it was, but asked Catherine Pawlick who that was [first cygnet out] and she identified her as "my friend Ivanova." Beautiful coupes, beautiful pas de chats.... like gelsey kirkland's, beautiful.

A scholarly friend asks what she might read about the lives of great character dancers -- I'm stumped. Do NOT know where to send her. "Anything on Derek Rencher or Nils Bjorn Larssen. Or Gerd Larssen. Stanley Holden. Wayne Sleep. Sorella Englund." Or those two great dancers at the Maryinsky who always play the king and the queen [Elena Bazhenova]. Rencher was the greatest Rotbart I've ever seen -- powerful and beautiful, mesmerizing. Balanchine himself was great as Drosselmmeyer and Don Quixote. WHo are your favorite character dancers and what do you know about them and how do you know it? Do you know of anything written by or about them?

Thanks, RG, for the heads-up! I have wanted to see this for LONG time. i'm going to do it SUnday!

Thanks for introducing me to Kreisser, Pheranc. I especially like that overhead shot. frankly opulent.

Here's Osipenko in hte White Swan pdd [with Markovsky], magnificent performance -- much like Makarova's with "singing" phrasing A very poetic dancer.Let me also underline how illuminating Lobenthal's piece in Ballet Review was for me. in Raymonda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvqSS2LD7Ns and here in a neo-classical piece without a name, VERY VERY beautiful, with Nisnevich fantastic line in this ballet, which has a wonderful attitude/arabesque. [Probably jakobson, huh?]she's now well-represented on youtube. there's a compilation called "Osipenko the BEST" I am a fan

A friend asks: Are they the same-- I'm assuming the swimming lesson is where he's kneeling with Terpsichore on his back-- but the flying lesson?? Do you know? Thx. I do NOT know and think it's a great question. Anybody know?

Christian, what was it that you did not like about "the worst Odile ever?" And how was her Odette? Her many detractors, and her many fans, seem to argye askew from each other. People who post YouTube clips in her DEFENSE put up instances of such bad dancing it's hard to believe the "supporter" isn't really an enemy in disguise. But anything can be done with edited, compilations to make a dancer look unmusical. I'd like to know what someone who saw a whole performance thought of her ability to BUILD a performance over the whole evening, and would LOVE to know your opinion, since I share your tastes in so many ways.

Katherine, this is such a delightful post; and god know, spell-check has done horrible things to me. But I DID have a live editor once change "pointe shoes" to "pointed shoes," I am not making this up, and asymetrical became symmetrical somehow once it was out of my hands.... Worse than that, but I won't go into it.

CHOICE!! Ballets Wusses is REALLY good.

I LOVE this video of Ruth Page. I believe her -- it DOES feel good. I went to class this morning and had pretty good luck to the left. my right leg's [in the immortal words of Monty Python] hanging off something awful.... Everybody's got their own personal reasons. For me, it's very satisfying to dance musically. If you can't turn, you can balance. If you can't releve, do it on flat. but dance it. if you can't stay up, you can deepen your plie. It helps when the teacher makes beautiful combinations. Sally Streets is a fountain of wonderful phrases. They just pour forth. SOme of them are really exercises in changing directions. Some have a lilt. Today, we had a lot of down-downs [e.g., where you land in coupe, stay down and coupe with the other foot]. Wonderful rhythms. I am so lucky to be able to study with her. BTW, it's LIKELY that sally was in the corps of that fabulous Western Symphony we all love so much. She was in the original cast, and she moves like that -- you DO stop, but then you go again IMMEDIATELY.

th Guardian's review is up already, she likes it. posed on SanFranciscoBallet site and Facebook SFB.

I watched it again today, liked it even better. The corps is CONSTANTLY on the move, and they're SO full of moxie. their attack is thrilling. Tanny made me laugh out loud with her mule kicks and her applejacks and her turned-in bird steps -- but frankly, I think it's the corps that makes this one so great. It is a GREAT ballet masquerading as a bumptious divertissement. And maybe Balanchine was right to cut the Scherzo -- it is fun, but the whole is tighter and maybe funnier without it -- though i DEFINITELY prefer this to every other performance I've ever seen.

Good luck with your project. I, too, look forward to reading your book One small angle I might suggest is that you look into Mark Morris's ballet "Maelstrom," which he created for SanFrancisco Ballet in 1994, set to Beethoven's "Ghosts" Trio. it's a wonderful ballet, set to music which has several haunting, almost spooky passages, for which Morris had the dancers make suddent drastic changes of posture, almost plunging into the new statuesque positions. Many of us saw imagery in it, and the attack, reminiscent of Gorey's intro cartoon to the PBS "Mystery" series. Union rules prevent SFB from showing video clips of any significant length -- but they must have archival copies that a biographer could view -- and perhaps for New Yorkers, there's maybe a copy at MM HQ inBrooklyn. If you live in NYC, you might be able to see it is a wonderful, WONDERFUL ballet, one of his best, long over due for revival; indeed, it should be I think much more widely known; The [arguably] Goreyesque moments are only a small part of it -- but they're memorable to me, and crucial to its overall atmosphere. the MMDC website has this photo available: http://markmorrisdancegroup.org/resources/photo_gallery/63 -- I do not knw if it would be helpful; other images which you'd have to view the video to see are more "Goreyesque."

Adams has a truly amazing sous-sus -- it looks like a sword or a lance planted in the floor. Thanks for posting this -- it's got magnificent energy. Very few clean fifth positions, but the rhythms are VERY precise. leclercq is truly hilarious.

Thanks, Helene. I'm very curious how Londoners will respond to "Beaux," and to the company as a whole. Thanks for word of the intterviews. When you say they are there, do you mean the interviews are up on the site or that the dancers are in london?

THis was officially a secret.... only 30 newsmen attended." Thank you Christian. This was priceless. And thanks, Quiggin, for that awful Bluebird. His musicality isn't bad, but his form is.... ouch. I thought at first it was just from hacving to see it en face,, from the wings -- but in fact from the front it was worse. He was wonderful in Apollo, though, the snips I've seen. And his partnering is very musical in the second half of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFkHU5JLSHo

Thanks, Amy, for posting that performance of the 'Dance in a Bed.' Elizabeth Zimmer has written a very fine piece http://www.dancemagazine.com/in_memoriam/4597 in the latest Dancemagazine that told me things I'd never heard before. And somethings I knew, but she captures them well: e.g., Born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrants, Charlip attended Cooper Union, but soon stopped painting and began taking dance classes. “I thought dancers were free spirits,” he told Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times in a 1977 interview. “The one way I could be a free spirit was to study dance. Little did I know how tyrannical and puritanical they were.” THat's absolutely typical of his wit, which is to say, what he said was TRUE. He was a polymath, he wasn't just a modern dancer. His imagination burst out in many ways. He was very generous towards fellow-spirits. Nobody else has mentioned that he discovered the ballet choreographer Julia Adam, who'd done a little piece for a SanFrancisco Ballet summer workshop that was brilliant and fresh and hilarious, for a show that was just supposed to give off-duty something to kill a long summer. Remy made us all go see it. Her sensibility is a lot like his. I took him once to see The Nutcracker. We met on the steps of the Opera House, and he had a little baggie with some little dime-store grey-ish candies in them; They looked like gum drops or orange slices, but kinda lavender. "What's that?" "These are sugar plums." Who knew? REMY knew. He knew all kinds of things like that. They were wonderful.

She paved the way for Joan Rivers. I remember when Fang handed her a ton of steel wool and told her to knit him a Volkswagen. [There were Volkswagen jokes in those days.] Explosively funny woman.

The comments are partly motivated -- some of them -- by attitudes towards his collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation of Paris. Many condemn him for this -- but others say that his APPARENT collaboration allowed him to protect his Jewish dancers. He was certainly condemned right after the war, but after a year he was exonerated and brought back to Paris and put back in place. Mark Franko even suggests that the apparent coldness of Suite en Blanc has hidden defiance of the Nazis encoded in it. I have seen "Icare" and it was stunning.

Someone called Nickwallacesmith is posting lots of clips of Lifar on Youtube -- kind of a revelation to me. His musicality is remarkable. Much is in French or Russian, bt the clips are very interesting, intriguing -- San Francisco Ballet will stage Lifar's Suite en Blanc next season; his work is not well-known in htis country, and some dismiss it right away -- but the scholar-critic Mark Franko champions him, and we may come to see his virtues. Be on the lookout...