Paul Parish

Mme. Hermine, oh yes!! isn't that magnificent? And you remind me, I'll never forget how stunned I was, when Makarova first appeared in SF and did Swan Lake at the Opera House, back in god knows? 74? when could that have been? in any case, as Odile, the first indication she gave of what wwas coming was in her reverence to the queen, which was a DEEP swan fondu, and when she came up from it she gave her a stripper's bump -- not huge, but unmisunderstandable.... the queen took no notice, nobody took any notice -- but I was SHOCKED

this kind of brilliant notion of Balanchine's didiving the body vertically is Dickie Buckle's -- at least, I first met it in HIS book about Balanchine, which I must have read 5-10 years ago; I've been wondering about it ever sinceand most days think he's onto something -- Buckle was the first critic I read who got me excited, I have a lot of respect and affection for him, and feel I owe him a debt personally.

It's probably no accident that they're pretty much the same shade of green that Mizrahi dressed hte swamp-nymph Platee in for Morris's staging of the Rameau opera-burlesque of hte same name, though poor Platee looked rather like Margaret Dumont with her pearls and lorgnette -- she also had green fingers that extended into little suction cups, which she'd wiggle at us when the mood struck her, and green flippers with which she did fan kicks when everybody else was doing fan kicks..... I think the costumes are hilarious, but I can't begin to say why..... so's the ballet.....

that's a great artist for you.... Nijinsky , as hte golden slave, they say jumped up and died before he hit the ground

leigh, I['ll email you... And Alexandra, you're absolutely right about the power of metaphor... the very ending of hte White Swan is the most ravishing portrayal of consummation I've ever seen in any medium -- it's a pianissimo climax, as great in its way as the final aria in Tirstan and Isolde -- The white swan's petite serres create the shimmer of ecstasy, it's not hot or heavy but rather the thrill of true love, two people who've found each other and KNOW each other-- which is what makes Act 3 such a betrayal... it's THE most romantic piece of choreography I've ever encountered. In a way, the metaphor is extremely graphic -- its meaning is unmisundertandable, absolutely objective -- and yet, there's nothing vulgar about it..... why don't they make htem like that any more???? -- it's the sort of thing Balanchine could do, in hte culminations of hte adages in Bizet, the Grand pas in Midsummer Night's Dream, and Barocco..... though in Barocco she's already made her reverence, up and off,.... there's no applause break, so Mr B had to get her out of the promenade and offstage so the music could continue..... the others can swoon and have a moment to come to.... in any case, those are clearly symbols of love -- not realistic examples..... which only means that they're even more powerful, as e=mc squared is more powerful than any particular calculation of matter yielding energy..... PS to Leigh I've seen some very lovely things done with Remy CHarlip's "Woomooloomoo Cuddle duet" -- do you know his airmail dances? Remy draws a page-full of positions (for 2 dancers in this case, and the support is beautifully imagined and very tender) which are to be completed kind of like connect-the-dots pictures.... very playful. But since he leaves the transitions between hte images completely up to the dancers, and they can be arranged in any order, the dance-making itself is still up for grabs and should be considered to be choreography......the images are very very dear, poignant, adorable..... he suggested using Lew Harrison's Lullaby, whch is a very loving piece of music...... That might be worth a look-see......

Thanks, Leigh -- yes, the technique poses huge challenges Keith saw same-sex partnering as a new frontier -- the stereotypes might imprison you or they might be something like Kansas you could leave behind, at least for while.....

Thanks, Alexandra....NOthing against any of those, but NB they're all elegies.... and forgive me, but there's always a threat of emotional blackmail in "this is my story" -- the artists almost always fail to come up with art that truly encompasses that plight, but have to sentimentallize.... as Aristotle said, poetry is truer than history i'm not asking for a same-sex version of "poet and sleepwalker marry and move to Scarsdale" -- but for something with poetic resonance in a generous range of emotions, with somehow complex characterizations -- not saying the protagonists have to be as complex as say James -- could be as simple, psychologically, as Gennaro, but it would be great if they seemed to be representative people recognizably in love and not necessarily doomed.... of course, there aren;'t many paradigms of modern love out htere right now in ANY medium -- and pop music has been devoted to anger for 20 years, so we're starving for it on many fronts....

I've just been re-reading one of my favorite dance-writers, Keith White, who wrote thoughtful candid , subtle essays about dancing for a gay paper in SF until he died about 10 years ago..... of AIDS, not yet 40..... He was a gentle brave guy, and also a real dancer -- Violette Verdy had offered him a scholarship to SAB when she spotted him in Sarasota Florida (taking class from Trinette Singleton), which he declined in order to finish his design degree -- but when he moved to New York he took class from David Howard and Nancy Bielski and others and hung out with the Joffrey dancers (Bobby Blankshine was his best friend) and wrote the first history of the Joffrey, did site evaluations for the NY arts council.... SOmeone we'd have all loved -- I miss him so bad -- and maybe some of you remember him (Mme. Hermine? Leigh? Glebb? but you all may be too young, he moved here in 1980) In NY, Keith ran a nightclub (Flamingo?), worked for CBS at one point, knew show biz as a working pro, could design and construct the costumes (he worked for Grace at one point I think), and hte sets, play the music, do the steps, coach the dancers, and write in such a way that ten years later his reviews, if you love dancing, you realize SEEM like reporting but in fact are giving you the real deal (for 25 dollars per article). I say all this because the thing he said he most wanted to see at hte ballet, that he believed most people wanted to see, and that ballet could uniquely deliver, was romance -- not just sensuality, not just beauty, but character and personality and physicality and technique and art AND love.... and he wanted to see more of it than was appearing; he loved it in heterosexual duets, and sort of deplored the Forsythe Love SOngs (and noticed that Forsythe himself had lost interest interest in Love Songs and had pulled it from his own repertory) -- and he was especially looking for same-sex pas de deux that would do this for gay and Lesbian couples..... He instanced "Gemini," the male duet from Lubovitch's Concerto 622, and duets from Petit's Intermittences du Coeur as some the best so far.... Are any of these still in repertory anywhere? Anybody seen them? Are there new worthy contenders? i'm posting this at least in part in answer to Leigh's and Alexandra's requests for "what WOULD you like to see a chorepgrapher do for you....... that's what Keith would have wanted. If you want to get the audience back to the theater, and not just friends and family, give them a romance with some depth to it, and not just moves nobody's seen before, nor mere exploitation of the body beautiful (dancers' beauty is a pre-requisite, not the thing itself).

Zahorian has better insight into what it has to offer than anyone els I've ever seen do it, the dynamics -- and on a great day I'm sure she can slice it up -- I still wish I'd seen Violette..... Christensen was a musician as well as a dancer, his son is a conductor, his work has its own musicality -- actually, I wish I'd seen Nancy Johnson, who created many of Christensen's roles and had a sense of his musicality, from all I hear, that I WISH I hadn't come along too late to get a sense of.....

thanks koretzky -- well, nutcracker opens Dec 10..... I can't say I'm excited, the productoin is garish and sentimental and makes all the old people look grotesque, and hte second act decor emphasizes whipped cream and chocolate syrup instead of crystallized ginger and toasted pecans and is horribly out-of-keeping with the musical characterization of Konfiturenburg, and the treatment of the children is patronizingrather than respectful -- but the snow scene is great, the dancing doll can be wonderul, so can the belly dancer (Arabian --Julia Adam's arms were like smoke when she did it) and hte trepak is exhilarating..... I've never liked Christensen's grand pas, though Violette Verdy has said SHE likes it -- I wish I'd seen her do it, it's almost impossible to makes it interesting, the dancers have to be so cautious just to get through it.... Vanessa Zahorian arrived in town already dancing it better than anybody I'd ever seen doing it -- saw her at a children's matinee, with Guennadi Nedviguine ( they made their company debuts as Sugar Plum and cavalier at 11AM on a Wednesday or so) -- wow that was fantastic..... that's my main reason for wanting to go -- to see the dancers again, and to see the debuts..... we haven't seen Sarah van Patten yet -- But doesn't anybody else have anyting they want to say about Serenade? what was wrong with the staging?how was the waltz? Re Chi Lin -- it seems to me Tomasson wanted to make something with the flavor of the Golden Idol's dance from Bayadere.... a temple with statues "come to life" and dancing on a scale that justifies all the aspirations of heroic, bravura dancer-athletes, the Chabukianis... It doesn't get there for me, mostly because such things have to take you by surprise and end before you want them to..... also, the music is somehow prosaic

very good to hear about your impressions -- no, CHi lin doesn't work for me, either -- the Chronicle reviewer raved, and that program sold out here, but few balletomanes care for it.... there WAS some spectacular bravura dancing by some of hte men -- Sergio TOrrado as the dragon was Bolshoi magnificent, and Hansuke Yamamoto as the Phoenix also, staggering animal bravura.... but even so, it seemed like you'd just eaten a pound of beef and needed to sleep it off..... We haven't seen van Patten yet -- from what I'd heard, we were maybe getting a new Loscavio.... I guess maybe not (the amazing thing about Loscavio was her OWN ideas) But it's strange to hear that Kristin Long doesn't seem technically strong -- she must have been ill or injured..... Helgi's ballets don't lend themselves to dancers -- his musicality is strange, but REAL, and a dancer who hears it -- as Loscavio did -- can make the case for his choreography surprisingly telling.... but there's only ONE way that it makes sense (unlike with Balanchine, where new dancers find whole new and convincing interpretations)..... and they often can't find that thread; I think maybe that's happened with Prism; I rember seeing it once when it worked, I was dazzled, and then a couple more times when I wondered what it was I'd liked so much..... still, I agree with Alexandra, it's important to have new ballets of the second and third magnitude (Helgi's Haffner Symphony qualifies, also; it should last).

Glebb, this is a great topic.... it's wonderful reading your responses.... I've got too many -- but mine are all long moments, like the LONG promenade at the end of the Barocco adage..... as Suzanne did it with Ludlow, it's nearly 16 counts (or is it 24?) from the sous-sus around into passe around into attitude around around into penchee, inevitable as the melody.... but actually it's the snail -- who called it that? is that what everybody calls it? it is my favorite thing in the world... this summer I was doing a lot of Irish dancing, and thread-the-needle kept coming up in the dances we were doing -- somebody pulls a whole line of dancers under an arch -- and I was studying Barocco and kept finding thread-the-needle all through the adage (and similar stitching motifs, like the ballerina tombe-ing through the spaces between a line of corps girls) and when the snail comes, it's 2 thread the needles happening in sequence, followed by two happening simultaneously, SO SIMPLE but it's fitted to the most intense intertwining of the 2 violins, and the stream of movement is so rich and satisfying it just blows my head off.... it is the climax of the ballet, as I feel it (with respect to Denby, and everybody else who loves it). I showed it to a friend, who then dragged me off to see the movie Rivers and Tides, and showed me a chain of leaves flowing down a river and over a waterfall, revealing the secret deep inner working of the current as you could never have seen it otherwise.... the leaf-chain is maybe 30 yards long, the leaves are pinned together with thorns and Cartier never made anything more beautiful, and as it twisted and surged in the grip of the clear water moving ove the rocks I found myself flashing on Barocco, just in awe of Balanchine's ability to see into the life of things -- it's like seeing where dance comes from...

come on, somebody, please?????

Oh yes, Carbro -- absolutely!!...... THe suppportd pirouettes in arabesque in the middle of Bizet, at the HEART of Bizet, every time I see them, she pours forward into that arabesque and starts to go round and tears spring to my eyes.... I tried to PM you but can't, please PM me.....

I didn't mean it that way - -I don't think she ever did "make a scene" but she doesn't have to. She is really kind of out-of-this-world on a daily basis..... from the little bit I've seen of her in real life...... No wonder Balanchine kept her on the payroll even when she wasn't dancing more than once a year... She is a very great artist, I think -- with tremendous internal contradictions that she's always having to work to reconcile, which makes her self-absorbed in a totally forgivable way. I find myself more fascinated by the clips I've seen of her dancing than by almost ANYBODY else's -- the Midsummer Night's Dream pas de deux, for example, or the snatches of her in Agon, and WHAT wouldn'tI give to see her do Symphony in C -- because of hte power of her absorption in the music, the instinctive rightness of her timing, and also by some way she has of making me feel like I'm about to understand the meaning of life

Tremendous imagination does seem to help performers take and hold the audience's attention -- often it's people whose fantasy-lives take up so much room they don't have great judgment about daily life, or about how "the world' would react to their opinions or associates... I remember reading in Fonteyn's memoirs how much she enjoyed being around Genet, but how tricky it was, because he was always on the run from the police..... Surely Allegra Kent belongs on this thread......

oh Leigh, thank you for asking that question!!! (I can picture Weese in that variation -- in fact, I'm seeing her in that balance where she swivels from arabesque to second and back to arabesque, and she's smiling to see how easy that was and much time she's got left.... I don't know if that's what she did, but I sure can picture it) Loscavio, loscavio!!! I have not gotten over the loss of Loscavio, and it's been 5 years now that she's gone-- but I can still see her in ballo -- it's hard to say what makes a person hilarious, but it's maybe got most to do with an attitude towards difficulty that makes reality look pale by comparison to what you can IMAGINE doing right now -- images that are still bright in my mind -- Loscavio in a LONG sous-sus (like 5-6-7-8) like an exclamation point, as if she's saying "just turn me loose!!" and then she attacks that variation -- it's little develloppes with diamond-bright facettings, just quick a deflection to effacee arabesque and then pas de bouree back to sous-sus, another quick facetting and back -- her foot would some up to sur le coup de pied like a cat's tongue licking the leg -- sorry that sounds a little weird, but you know what it's like when feet are delicious, she was SO on top of things, her legs seemed miles away, and to have minds of their own.... that's a vaudeville tap-dancer's game, I've seen TOmmy TUne do it -- but then of course his legs ARE miles away, Loscavio didn't make such an obvious game of it, just suggested that, but she could play like that.... in the assemble turns to pointe she sliced into them like a hungry man into a steak, and phrased the whole manege of htem like one sweep -- which argues fantastic strength, but I can imagine a dancer doing it who was MERELY strong, and that wasn't the way she did it at all, for her it was fun and it was funny.... The kinds of effects Ashley made -- in that line of little balances after the pique turns to arabesque, where she cut the steps so pretty, like Waterford, and showed a pointe in places where nobody else would have seen an opportunity to create a pose, Loscavio just danced through it as if this phrase was not a big deal, and then would just make you gsp with the way she'd inflect a moment you'd never noticed before -- but the effects did not feel premeditated, the opposite, it was her sponteaneity that was so exhilarating -- it was like she'd JUST NOW discovered some more time, some more play in a phrase and "well, look at THAT" ..... another thing I remember about her performance was the way she could make you feel the difference between dancing underneath yourself and when it's time to travel -- there's a manege of saute failli pas de chats where the pas de chats go to a little pose croise, that comes after an intense jewelry-box kind of thing, where it was almost like that French mime, what's his name, that can make you feel he's stuck in a glass box -- not that she seemed confined during the passage that was all such tight footwork, but you could almost see the invisible window slide down when she looked up and thought. oh, let's move out -- it was like a whole new idea had just struck her, a total reconception of the space -- wait, no, that phrase is from Who cares? (she's been dancing on a dime and then makes tracks) -- but that's another good example, of how her dance imagination just dazzled you -- and anybody who's got a tape of "Dinner with BAlanchine" can check it out, and see if you see what I mean, for she did the WHo Cares? blue girl ("My one and only") on that show, and it gives an idea of what her timing was like, though there's not the magic you could get from seeing her in 3D eat up a huge space.... and the way she could just FLASH (the camera cutting in and out evens that away....)imagine

Thanks so much for your reports-- We had "two" casts of Dances at a Gathering here in SF last spring -- first cast was a fixed group, but second-cast changed like a rainbow from night to night... You might want to know that both Yuan-Yuan Tan (first-cast)and Julie Diana (second-cast) danced the mauve girl here -- pink was Lucia Lacarra or Joanna Berman, both of whom have left the company Perhaps they will alternate in DC -- Diana seems to me more like the pink girl, in her temperament and musicality -- though she was heavenly in hte slow mazurka as the mauve girl, it was Tan who had the potential for tragedy that -- sorry, this is coming out so stilted, but the scherzo at the end of hte ballet calls for some sublime effects, and when those tremendous chords were struck, Tan was like a thunderbolt -- it was magnificent.... and if you liked Feijoo in green, wait till you see her in yellow.... and it might be worth it to go back if you hear that Maffre is going to do green, she seemed to have arrived from a French pastoral, her chin-line was 10 degrees higher than anything we'd seen so far and she seemed to take to this mazurka-land rather like Marlene Dietrich to being a dance-hall girl in hte WIld West-- she was je ne sais quoi in person, delightfully game for these strange rituals; I was totally disarmed...... We have not seen Feijoo in Ballo yet -- Loscavio made the role her own, and found levels of hilarity in it that Ashley bypassed. it's fascinating to hear all this -- please keep posting, everybody

I'm no great fan of Madonna -- though I loved Desperately Seeking Susan -- BUT she gets the credit for discovering voguing and making the rest of us know about that fascinating undergrouand dance form.... For those of you who haven't heard of it, the documentary film "Paris is Burning" is a good source.....

I don't know how to thank you, Mel -- and we need to thank Alexandra for creating a site where we can share impressions like these..... how I wish I'd been there, but I have to say, reading your post, I DID feel like I was there.... some ballets have their own worlds, DAnces at a Gathering has its own air, it's SO tenuous, part of hte pleasure is in that incredible feeling you have that you DON'T KNOW HOW THEY"RE MAKING YOU FEEL THIS, but you know you're breathing differently and you know you've been taken somewhere....

30 years ago when I was a student in England and going to t he Royal Ballet a lot, the word I got from people who knew dancers -- one of my fellow Rhodes Scholars knew Monica Mason and took me backstage to meet her -- was that everybody in hte company, all hte dancers were crazy about Dances at a Gathering and were in hte wings or out front in droves for every performance.... I certainly came under its spell at that time, when it was danced by -- oh Lord, what a cast -- Mason ,Sibley, DOwell, Seymour, Lesley Collier, David Wall, Nureyev.... I only saw it a couple of times, but I was entranced by it, and it was easy to believe that dancers loved it....

Sounds like a great evening -- wish I could have been there. It's great that the Chicago dance world knows how to value and honor such a great lover of the dance as Ann Barzel, to whom we ALL owe so much -- Thanks Glebb, for posting the news, and for going into detail, so we could get a sense of hte event.... Violette Verdy came, it must have been a wonderful evening... Somewhere I've seen a video of Gaites Parisiennes, with Danilova and Frankin, that was pieced together from footage shot by Ms Barzel with her "concealed' camera -- most of the dancers look like Looney TUne figures, especially their shoes -- (which maybe means that Looney-Tune cartoonists were close observers of the artists they burlesqued). I would never have guessed what the qualiuty of hte phrasing was in real Massine dancing if I hadn't seen that video....

Johnny -- It's over a year since you posted your qestion about Carla Blanco, but I can tell you, she's in the corps here, doesn't get used much, but when she's onstage i ALWAYS see her..... Helgi used her in the small corps in Chi Lin, a ballet I don't like, but I certainly did like her -- in fact, all the dancers did well, the problem is the choreography......) SHe's a truly wonderful dancer, modest, an art-concealing artist-- she's so good many people can't tell how good she is, for she does not advertise herself. But she's a favorite of hte judicious....

I'd like to leave the question as open as possible... What's going on in Spain to make dancers trained there so fine?

BW -- I think i've seen that photo, too -- memorable.....