Paul Parish

oooooooooh it's such fun to read y'all..... I wish i'd been there to see how it went, and to compare how they look at City Center with how they look at the Opera House... I do wish you all had gotten to see Tina le Blanc do Night..... it was made on her, and it's hard for me to imagine Ms Zahorian replacing her, though Zahorian is fearless and fleet.... Tina is REALLY SHORT, and Ben Pierce is REALLY TALL, and hte chemistry between them was fascinating (esp since he can be mighty bland, still, in Night he was kind of like Conrad ludlow in Barocco, the avocado in the salad, and he really made le Blanc soar)...... But Night IS too long..... Every time we've seen hte Paquita pas de deux, it's looked so stuffy.... despite Feijoo and Solomakha, who're both very fine dancers, they look awful in those costumes, which are the color of something you don't want to drink -- you should have seen them in Dances at Gathering, or him as the prince in Swan Lake, dreamy, soft, floating, ardent, poetic -- in re Tan -- when she first appeared here ( she was REALLY young then) her show-stopper stopped the show -- it was Esmeralda, and she actually got lost in Italian fouettes -- just LOST -- and the audience didn't care at all, she was electrifying, in a huge bravura wire-drawn-but-made-of-steel kind of way, and hte audience totally forgot hemselves and shriekd and howled and bowed down...... but she had this Russian-Chinese training that's fine in all that stuff where you're so exposed and it's total placement anxiety but you almost never move, and we all wondered if she'd be able to do Balanchine, and then she came out as the secod violin in Barocco and was wonderful, esp in the finale, she really danced..... She can indeed be really dull; she made almost no effect in Rubies; worse in diamonds, she hit all her lines but never danced; but in Dances at a Gathering she was awesome, esp in that dark scary Scherzo towards the end, she was like a thunderbolt -- I mean it, i saw it -- we all did, if there's terror in the music, she can be sublime.... I'd have to add that she made a character out of Desdemona that I didn't see in othe performances of the role -- she has -- maybe from her training, or maybe from hte qualities the Soviets adn hte Chinese value in heroines, an ability to portray a tragic HEROINE, someone who's going to die for her beliefs but she's not wrong and might does not make right and she's not just pitiful; I don't want to belabor this, but in fact there are NOT many actresses today who can play Desdemona in the play as a heroine rather than as a lovely weakling/ fool, but Tan had some heroic stuff to her.... People here complain about Kristin Long in Rubies, though I love her almost all the time.... RG, I wonder what you thought? She's not Patty, who was inscrutable, that smile could have meant what it seemed to but maybe not -- I never saw Patty do it, except on video, but i actually think Ms Long is radiant in a similar kind of way -- the bodies are for sure as different as can be, Patty wasn't very turned-out nor creamy in her action, but her timing was so preposterously right, WHO CARED? Long is rounded; secondly, her feet, though they are incredibly strong, she can melt up and down through them like butter; and 3) she's so rotated it's a joy.... and HER timing is so wonderfully right, I love the way she dances Rubies, but it's her own way of hearing hte music, and she has a sweeter, less Broadway-Baby relationship to her partner -- and Gonzalo Garcia has less of the rascal to his stage-personality than Villella...... Years ago, when Maffre first danced the tall girl in Rubies, she often failed to prepare her pirouettes without terror -- she literally couldn't get her feet into place and plie fast enough without turning in noticeably, and though she never wiped out in those turns, it was an ordeal for us as well as for her; but she mastered that long ago, and has commanded the stage in that role for years, building her performance towards the penchee exit, which she did with tremendous brass (if you didn't like her grand plies in second position, I don't know what to say; she spread her knees sideways and offered her thighs like park benches, it was simultaneously irreproachable and shocking).... SHe DOES tend to dance Balanchine bad-girls as if she were Mme de Pompadour..... who was quite a bad girl, if I've heard right; if hte manners aren't quite jazz-age, still, I'd bet Mr. Combs would be impressed. ........Hmmmmmm.. I've gone on and on, gotten kind of carried away.... and I realize I wich I could talk with manhatnik half the night and find out what you all are used to in Rubies -- I know, al lot of what I 've HEARD has been complaints about Rubies, esp how wrong wrong wrong wat's her name was; was Long an improvement on ...... tracy, Margaret Tracy? on would like to know..... That's just for starters.....

If I may join in on a question where I wasn't asked, I've got a reflection on Alexandra's answer to Watermill's question...... I write for newspapers and magazines also, but I've never written for a daily -- don't know that I wouldn't under the right circumstances, but I'm not a reporter. I'd have to be asked; I'd need to believe they were willing to risk it. [Warning -- if this starts to sound very self-centered to you, it'll probably just get worse -- so maybe if it seems that way, just skip it; I’m offering it to anybody that's interested in why somebody writes, what I know about my own case. I don't mean to offend you.] Thank God people ask me. For I'm certainly like Alexandra, I do it because I have to -- on the way home from the show, I'm still talking about it when everybody else is changing the subject, and I say a lot of things and then wonder if that 's what I really think, or was it a version of that, it wasn't totally wrong but well, really it was MORE LIKE THIS ..... TO sort it out, I really have to write it down....and rewrite it.... Sometimes I find myself going around for the rest of the week doing a dance I've seen (monkey see, monkey do....), like after Billy the Kid I kept doing that thing where he rolls his torso up through the spine and his shoulders mantle like a cobra and then he throws his head forward and looks like Defiance on a monument..... it was like a catchy song that had gotten into my head except it was a dance...'why am I "singing this song"? What about it has gotten so deep under my skin, and I think about it and think about it..... and that sort of thing makes me think Billy the Kid is a great ballet, it's on my mind....... But then I had to share that, partly because it makes me feel like "am I crazy?" would anybody know what I mean? It's like Billy the Kid's like Dracula with the cape, he's becoming like a vampire, every time he kills somebody he does this weird thing with his back and becomes all glorious, magnificent, it's horrifying, but it's fantastic, look how gorgeous this is, he's becoming "Billy the KID" the one and only, ever more isolated, ever more famous,, lonelier, deadlier -- you know what I mean? Am I crazy for thinking this? And so on.... that feeling like you're BIG with some understanding, some conception, which is the offspring of the understanding that's in the ballet, which makes it pregnant, important, great in a way that other ballets like Filling Station are not...... And you want to see if anybody agrees.... Writing is where I figure things out like this -- I mean, it's like I've got to think about it and think about it and get my mind to slow down enough so it gets in synch with my hand -- me, I think best with a pen and paper, I can spell in longhand, and besides, there's something so kinetically pleasing about having my shoulder and elbow and hand going in synch that it calms me down, and my thoughts start to line up and come out in order, like dancers in a figure, and they've got an order to them that I don't know about till I see it but it's basically a paragraph, and as Gertrude stein said, "a sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is" -- and they come out and it's not until they do that, that I know what I think, and then I wonder if what I've written IS what I think, sometimes it's not, but often, dadgum it, it IS, or it's CLOSE..... What Watermill asked that twigged me was in asking if there's a sense of power in reaching a large audience, and I think s/he asked it in a more innocent way than Alexandra took it -- well, in any case, I'd say there IS that for me, in that it UNDOES a feeling of powerlessness generated by the introspection -- when you get so inward that you actually approach the truth, and grasp it, or some of it, you've got a treasure, but you can't stay that deep inside yourself, -- especially not with this new burden, it makes you so much heavier, and anyway you've GOT to come back, but you've already used so much of your strength getting IN there -- Tovey said playing the late Beethoven piano sonatas was like rock-climbing, and he's RIGHT -- your fingers are swollen, you've just been clawing at the piano and hauling yourself along-- and writing is in its own way, like that, even if you’re not bringing back what Beethoven brought back, still, it's what your strength can get at, and-- bringing this back and offering it to the community gives you a function in the society that feels like it's something close to what you OUGHT TO BE DOING WITH YOUR LIFE, and that makes you feel good and tired, tired and good, and like you've got some virtue you can point to when the angel of death comes...... and if it's only the angel of sleep, well, then you get to wake up and see if anybody is grateful..... and in the morning how many stupid things it looks like you said along the way, you didn't mean that of course, and anyway it's not the POINT but if you read certain phrases in another mood, it looks like you meant something you didn't mean at all and don't believe and wouldn't say, so you've got to change the phrasing so it doesn't suggest that. Or maybe you made some silly mistake, and maybe it's not too late to change the Amores to the Heroides (the mistake I made in my last piece in ballet review, it's too late, that's in print). Every piece has got a mistake in it. Denby, whose soul is with God, once confused 2 dark-haired ballerinas -- Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso, I think -- wrote about the wrong one IN THE PAPER--o lord how did he ever live that down? -- he must have been mortified, but anybody can do it. Roger Angell, in his obit for Eudora Welty only a year ago in the New Yorker, his last paragraph began "Mrs. Welty" which he certainly knows better than (if ever a lady went to her grave a virgin it was Eudora Welty). Some copy-editor did that to him, but it happens to us all...... and how do we go on? Well, Denby stopped as soon as the man he was replacing returned from the war -- kept on writing "more considered pieces," but that gig was up..... Because he no longer had the invitation? To leave the terrors of writing for the dailies to the journalists???..... I wonder about that. But what a loss for the rest of us. Walter Terry wasn't bad, not at all, but he couldn't use the idiom like Denby. Grace under pressure......

If I may join in on a question where I wasn't asked, I've got a reflection on Alexandra's answer to Watermill's question...... I write for newspapers and magazines also, but I've never written for a daily -- don't know that I wouldn't under the right circumstances, but I'm not a reporter. I'd have to be asked; I'd need to believe they were willing to risk it. [Warning -- if this starts to sound very self-centered to you, it'll probably just get worse -- so maybe if it seems that way, just skip it; I’m offering it to anybody that's interested in why somebody writes, what I know about my own case. I don't mean to offend you.] Thank God people ask me. For I'm certainly like Alexandra, I do it because I have to -- on the way home from the show, I'm still talking about it when everybody else is changing the subject, and I say a lot of things and then wonder if that 's what I really think, or was it a version of that, it wasn't totally wrong but well, really it was MORE LIKE THIS ..... TO sort it out, I really have to write it down....and rewrite it.... Sometimes I find myself going around for the rest of the week doing a dance I've seen (monkey see, monkey do....), like after Billy the Kid I kept doing that thing where he rolls his torso up through the spine and his shoulders mantle like a cobra and then he throws his head forward and looks like Defiance on a monument..... it was like a catchy song that had gotten into my head except it was a dance...'why am I "singing this song"? What about it has gotten so deep under my skin, and I think about it and think about it..... and that sort of thing makes me think Billy the Kid is a great ballet, it's on my mind....... But then I had to share that, partly because it makes me feel like "am I crazy?" would anybody know what I mean? It's like Billy the Kid's like Dracula with the cape, he's becoming like a vampire, every time he kills somebody he does this weird thing with his back and becomes all glorious, magnificent, it's horrifying, but it's fantastic, look how gorgeous this is, he's becoming "Billy the KID" the one and only, ever more isolated, ever more famous,, lonelier, deadlier -- you know what I mean? Am I crazy for thinking this? And so on.... that feeling like you're BIG with some understanding, some conception, which is the offspring of the understanding that's in the ballet, which makes it pregnant, important, great in a way that other ballets like Filling Station are not...... And you want to see if anybody agrees.... Writing is where I figure things out like this -- I mean, it's like I've got to think about it and think about it and get my mind to slow down enough so it gets in synch with my hand -- me, I think best with a pen and paper, I can spell in longhand, and besides, there's something so kinetically pleasing about having my shoulder and elbow and hand going in synch that it calms me down, and my thoughts start to line up and come out in order, like dancers in a figure, and they've got an order to them that I don't know about till I see it but it's basically a paragraph, and as Gertrude stein said, "a sentence is not emotional, a paragraph is" -- and they come out and it's not until they do that, that I know what I think, and then I wonder if what I've written IS what I think, sometimes it's not, but often, dadgum it, it IS, or it's CLOSE..... What Watermill asked that twigged me was in asking if there's a sense of power in reaching a large audience, and I think s/he asked it in a more innocent way than Alexandra took it -- well, in any case, I'd say there IS that for me, in that it UNDOES a feeling of powerlessness generated by the introspection -- when you get so inward that you actually approach the truth, and grasp it, or some of it, you've got a treasure, but you can't stay that deep inside yourself, -- especially not with this new burden, it makes you so much heavier, and anyway you've GOT to come back, but you've already used so much of your strength getting IN there -- Tovey said playing the late Beethoven piano sonatas was like rock-climbing, and he's RIGHT -- your fingers are swollen, you've just been clawing at the piano and hauling yourself along-- and writing is in its own way, like that, even if you’re not bringing back what Beethoven brought back, still, it's what your strength can get at, and-- bringing this back and offering it to the community gives you a function in the society that feels like it's something close to what you OUGHT TO BE DOING WITH YOUR LIFE, and that makes you feel good and tired, tired and good, and like you've got some virtue you can point to when the angel of death comes...... and if it's only the angel of sleep, well, then you get to wake up and see if anybody is grateful..... and in the morning how many stupid things it looks like you said along the way, you didn't mean that of course, and anyway it's not the POINT but if you read certain phrases in another mood, it looks like you meant something you didn't mean at all and don't believe and wouldn't say, so you've got to change the phrasing so it doesn't suggest that. Or maybe you made some silly mistake, and maybe it's not too late to change the Amores to the Heroides (the mistake I made in my last piece in ballet review, it's too late, that's in print). Every piece has got a mistake in it. Denby, whose soul is with God, once confused 2 dark-haired ballerinas -- Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso, I think -- wrote about the wrong one IN THE PAPER--o lord how did he ever live that down? -- he must have been mortified, but anybody can do it. Roger Angell, in his obit for Eudora Welty only a year ago in the New Yorker, his last paragraph began "Mrs. Welty" which he certainly knows better than (if ever a lady went to her grave a virgin it was Eudora Welty). Some copy-editor did that to him, but it happens to us all...... and how do we go on? Well, Denby stopped as soon as the man he was replacing returned from the war -- kept on writing "more considered pieces," but that gig was up..... Because he no longer had the invitation? To leave the terrors of writing for the dailies to the journalists???..... I wonder about that. But what a loss for the rest of us. Walter Terry wasn't bad, not at all, but he couldn't use the idiom like Denby. Grace under pressure......

thank you, Dirac-- of course, THAT's who Marcia B. Siegel writes for...... well, she's one of those you can think about in the same sentence as Denby and not have to sigh......even when you don't agree with her, you -- at least I -- find I always want to know what she thinks......

thank you, Dirac-- of course, THAT's who Marcia B. Siegel writes for...... well, she's one of those you can think about in the same sentence as Denby and not have to sigh......even when you don't agree with her, you -- at least I -- find I always want to know what she thinks......

Dear BBFAN, Could you pos a link to the Phoenix site? -- I know I've seen VERY thoughtful reviews in that paper before, but couldn't remember the name of hte paper.... I'd like to bookmark it..... tthanks, Paul

Dear BBFAN, Could you pos a link to the Phoenix site? -- I know I've seen VERY thoughtful reviews in that paper before, but couldn't remember the name of hte paper.... I'd like to bookmark it..... tthanks, Paul

I hasten to add, the coverage in the Wall Street Journal (whatever you may think of their editorial page) is always worth reading; that's an impressive newspaper. SO are the L A TImes, and of course, the NY Times, which may be dull sometimes but is respectably informed, and the Times does NOTICE dancing -- sometimes 2 or 3 reviews in an issue -- and never seems to sneer at the size of the audience --

I hasten to add, the coverage in the Wall Street Journal (whatever you may think of their editorial page) is always worth reading; that's an impressive newspaper. SO are the L A TImes, and of course, the NY Times, which may be dull sometimes but is respectably informed, and the Times does NOTICE dancing -- sometimes 2 or 3 reviews in an issue -- and never seems to sneer at the size of the audience --

IT's so good that you miss Martha Ullman West.... I don't know about Boston, but for some time in some cities -- for so long now that the "tradition" has started to decay -- there's been better writing about dancing (and also about other arts) in the alternative papers, such as the Village Voice, the East Bay Express (in the Bay Area) than in such major metropolitan dailies as the Times or the SF Chronicle. In fact, Arlene Croce started Ballet Review many years ago as a mimeographed sheet -- the ancestor of many 'zines -- with a glorious blast at the ...shall we say inadequacies of the critics in the great New York papers (If I've ever read the essay itself, it's been a long time -- but I've HEARD so much about it, I feel I must know it; still, I realize that all the phrases in my head are in fact her friend Pauline Kael's ridiculing "the ineffable Bosley Crowther" who was the fatuous movie critic at hte TImes.) The problems at the dailies are just as often "editors" as they are "readers" -- for the editor decides who the ideal reader is, unless of course it's the marketing people who run the whole show and push everything so the whole paper is pitched to a certain demographic group, often thought to have a lot of disposable income, whose prejudices must be flattered and whose ignorance must be humored, even as their "needs are met" (i.e., they must be told how to spend their scraps of free time improvingly). The cool thing about the alternative papers is that the readers are thought to be the intelligentsia... or at least, they used to be. The cool thing about this site, and about Alexandra's print magazines, is that the "reader" is assumed to have an informed concern about the art; in Boston, as elsewhere, the arts editor may not believe that anybody watches dancing except to look at sexy people and not believe that readers want to know much more than the whee-quotient of any performance.... The BAD news is 2-fold; A) ever since the paper shortage a decade ago tripled the price of newsprint, which was an emergency but it's been over a long time, there's been a draconian restriction on SPACE, which makes it almost impossible to handle a subject that requires considerable exposition (introducing a new company, or style; think of trying to explain what contact improv is aiming at to an audience who'd never seen it; that's the sort of thing the Village Voice was invented for) and B) there have been many hostile takeovers of alternative papers, and excellent writers like Ann Murphy, who used to have frequent pieces in the Express, are kept on the masthead but almost never allowed to write anything.... I've stopped reading the Express regularly (it's not really interesting any more; though it claims to make taste, they're just trend-spotting, not actually thinking), but I haven't seen anything of hers in a long time.....It seems to be mostly restaurants and movies and recorded music, though jazz and blues and indie music still gets good coverage. SO maybe check out the alternative papers in Boston -- maybe especially the Gay papers. And to console yourself, check out the newspaper writing from the great days of the New York Herald Tribune, when theideal reader was I suppose understood to be a graduate of Bennington or Yale or Black Mountain or maybe a man from the motor trade, but the respect for the reader's intelligence and general culture was unbelievable by today's standards -- Edwin Denby's dance reviews are all collected and published -- you can find them cheap secondhand under the titles "Looking at the Dance" and "Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street"; while you're at it, check out the music reviews of the guy who hired him, Virgil Thompson, they're collected, who sets the gold standard for giving you the real deal. I pick one at random -- 3 paragraphs, published March 4, 1941: I repeat, this was published IN THE PAPER one day.... "Revueltas" by Virgil Thompson Europe has often produced composers like the late Silvestre Revueltas, the Americas rarely. Our music writers are most likely to do the light touch with a heavy hand. Revueltas's music reminds one of Erik Satie's and of Emmanuel Chabrier's. It is both racy and distinguished. Familiar in style and full of references to Hispanic musical formulas, it seeks not to impress folklorists nor to please audiences by salting up a work with nationalist material. Neither does it make any pretense of going native. He wrote Mexican music that sounds like Spanish Mexico, and he wrote it in the best Parisian syntax. No Indians around and no illiteracy. The model is a familiar one of the nationalist composer whose compositional procedures are conservative and unoriginal but whose musical material consists of all the rarest and most beautiful melodies that grow in his land. Villa-Lobos is like that and Percy Grainger; so was Dvorak The contraries of that model are Josef Haydn and Satie and a little bit Georges Auric -- certainly Darius Milhaud. These writers use the vernacular for its expressivity. But their musical structure and syntax are of the most elegant. Their music, in consequence, has an international carrying power among all who love truly imaginative musical construction. Revueltas's music could never be mistaken for French music. It is none the less made with French post-Impressionist technique, amplified and adapted to his own clime. It is static harmonically, generously flowing melodically, piquant and dainty in instrumentation, daring as to rhythm. He loves ostinato accompanying figures and carries them on longer than a more timid writer would. He orchestrates a la Satie, without doubling. He fears neither unexpected rhythmic contrasts nor familiar melodic turns. His music has grace, grandeur, delicacy, charm, and enormous distinction. .......................................... That's how people used to write in the paper.... o tempora, o mores....... I read these guys for company. Nobody writing in the paper or the magazines today that I know of can tell you that much in so short a space, nor has such faith that you'll KNOW WHAT HE MEANS....

IT's so good that you miss Martha Ullman West.... I don't know about Boston, but for some time in some cities -- for so long now that the "tradition" has started to decay -- there's been better writing about dancing (and also about other arts) in the alternative papers, such as the Village Voice, the East Bay Express (in the Bay Area) than in such major metropolitan dailies as the Times or the SF Chronicle. In fact, Arlene Croce started Ballet Review many years ago as a mimeographed sheet -- the ancestor of many 'zines -- with a glorious blast at the ...shall we say inadequacies of the critics in the great New York papers (If I've ever read the essay itself, it's been a long time -- but I've HEARD so much about it, I feel I must know it; still, I realize that all the phrases in my head are in fact her friend Pauline Kael's ridiculing "the ineffable Bosley Crowther" who was the fatuous movie critic at hte TImes.) The problems at the dailies are just as often "editors" as they are "readers" -- for the editor decides who the ideal reader is, unless of course it's the marketing people who run the whole show and push everything so the whole paper is pitched to a certain demographic group, often thought to have a lot of disposable income, whose prejudices must be flattered and whose ignorance must be humored, even as their "needs are met" (i.e., they must be told how to spend their scraps of free time improvingly). The cool thing about the alternative papers is that the readers are thought to be the intelligentsia... or at least, they used to be. The cool thing about this site, and about Alexandra's print magazines, is that the "reader" is assumed to have an informed concern about the art; in Boston, as elsewhere, the arts editor may not believe that anybody watches dancing except to look at sexy people and not believe that readers want to know much more than the whee-quotient of any performance.... The BAD news is 2-fold; A) ever since the paper shortage a decade ago tripled the price of newsprint, which was an emergency but it's been over a long time, there's been a draconian restriction on SPACE, which makes it almost impossible to handle a subject that requires considerable exposition (introducing a new company, or style; think of trying to explain what contact improv is aiming at to an audience who'd never seen it; that's the sort of thing the Village Voice was invented for) and B) there have been many hostile takeovers of alternative papers, and excellent writers like Ann Murphy, who used to have frequent pieces in the Express, are kept on the masthead but almost never allowed to write anything.... I've stopped reading the Express regularly (it's not really interesting any more; though it claims to make taste, they're just trend-spotting, not actually thinking), but I haven't seen anything of hers in a long time.....It seems to be mostly restaurants and movies and recorded music, though jazz and blues and indie music still gets good coverage. SO maybe check out the alternative papers in Boston -- maybe especially the Gay papers. And to console yourself, check out the newspaper writing from the great days of the New York Herald Tribune, when theideal reader was I suppose understood to be a graduate of Bennington or Yale or Black Mountain or maybe a man from the motor trade, but the respect for the reader's intelligence and general culture was unbelievable by today's standards -- Edwin Denby's dance reviews are all collected and published -- you can find them cheap secondhand under the titles "Looking at the Dance" and "Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street"; while you're at it, check out the music reviews of the guy who hired him, Virgil Thompson, they're collected, who sets the gold standard for giving you the real deal. I pick one at random -- 3 paragraphs, published March 4, 1941: I repeat, this was published IN THE PAPER one day.... "Revueltas" by Virgil Thompson Europe has often produced composers like the late Silvestre Revueltas, the Americas rarely. Our music writers are most likely to do the light touch with a heavy hand. Revueltas's music reminds one of Erik Satie's and of Emmanuel Chabrier's. It is both racy and distinguished. Familiar in style and full of references to Hispanic musical formulas, it seeks not to impress folklorists nor to please audiences by salting up a work with nationalist material. Neither does it make any pretense of going native. He wrote Mexican music that sounds like Spanish Mexico, and he wrote it in the best Parisian syntax. No Indians around and no illiteracy. The model is a familiar one of the nationalist composer whose compositional procedures are conservative and unoriginal but whose musical material consists of all the rarest and most beautiful melodies that grow in his land. Villa-Lobos is like that and Percy Grainger; so was Dvorak The contraries of that model are Josef Haydn and Satie and a little bit Georges Auric -- certainly Darius Milhaud. These writers use the vernacular for its expressivity. But their musical structure and syntax are of the most elegant. Their music, in consequence, has an international carrying power among all who love truly imaginative musical construction. Revueltas's music could never be mistaken for French music. It is none the less made with French post-Impressionist technique, amplified and adapted to his own clime. It is static harmonically, generously flowing melodically, piquant and dainty in instrumentation, daring as to rhythm. He loves ostinato accompanying figures and carries them on longer than a more timid writer would. He orchestrates a la Satie, without doubling. He fears neither unexpected rhythmic contrasts nor familiar melodic turns. His music has grace, grandeur, delicacy, charm, and enormous distinction. .......................................... That's how people used to write in the paper.... o tempora, o mores....... I read these guys for company. Nobody writing in the paper or the magazines today that I know of can tell you that much in so short a space, nor has such faith that you'll KNOW WHAT HE MEANS....

If I remember right, back in hte late 80's, when hte "Iron Curtain" was breaking up, Russian companies started appearing in San Francisco with great frequency -- the kirov, hte Bolshoi, and hte very fine Moscow Classical Ballet, where I first saw Malakhov, as Adam in the Creation of hte WOrld (and Maximova, who was fabulous and looked 14 years old in a Juliet-ish pas de deux -- by Bejart?? in a white leotard and skirt costume that looked like practice clothes)..... ANd some company -- the Bolshoi? did Lavrovsky's Walpurgisnacht, and it was rip-roaring and WONDERFUL, and lots of girls jumped about in the position we call "attitude-front" -- what does the rest of hte world call that? It looks very Isadora-ish to me -- and the ballerina (Nina Sorokina?) was lifted in this position a lot and looked fabulous, and there were some pretty convincing furry-thighed satyrs or pans..... It seemed way too much fun to be a witches' sabbath -- I had not yet seen Mark Morris's Dido, but when I did, i knew now THAT's a witches' sabbath; Walpurgisnacht was really a baccanal, and it was a riot, but it was really joyful. WHen I finally saw Robbins's "Autumn," it reminded me of Walpurgisnacht.... the memory's dimmed, so long ago, now we're on the brink of war, everything seems so long ago, but I felt it was a wonderful ballet, I'd love to see it again -- but then, I'm very impressed by Lavrovsky. THe tiny snatches of his Spartacus I've seen intrigued me no end, and I admire his Romeo and Juliet beyond all others........

Thare's an art, if not a technique, to moving in concert with other people -- I remember the Oakland Ballet, in Petrouchka, could make you believe that hte crowds were really CROWDS -- they had an animating spirit as a group, and htey'd get swept up in things -- the bear incident sticks in my mind hte best, because ... well, it was really kind of mysterious, but the crowd got INTO the bear, especially the children, and started moving like hte bear, and the children were the last to come out of it -- that had a great deal to do with the conductor's sensitivity to them, he was really directing hte whole scene -- it was Jean-Louis Leroux, who's a marvellous musician, but it's also because the company really trained for musicianship -- a distinct Ballets-Russes musicianship, more in hte body than the feet, derived more from Fokine and Massine than from Balanchine -- i.e., it's based on hte character side, rather than hte classical side, and consequently more involved with weight, momentum, the particular kinds of attack, sweep, swing, movement quality AND POSTURE that go with creating a sense of ethos through national dances -- how do you get people to feel like we're in hungary or Galicia, that sort of thing.... and there's definitely a technique to TIMING the mazurka step right, that brush-through does not happen squarely on the second beat...... the Viennese waltz has a very characteristic delay on the second beat, also, that marks it as definitely Viennese.... Most of the time, people tend to think of these things as style rather than technique -- like the tilt of Fonteyn's torso in the Les Sylphides prelude, as she leans to the side and lifts her hand to her ear -- is that technique or style? If it's NOT there, there's nothing much happening.... but there IS an art to varying your soussus -- and it makes hte "world" come into existence, so it's very important.... maybe this is "coaching" ("head is like scent of violets over left shoulder, dear"), or maybe it's "perfection," but it can and does need to be taught......

Thare's an art, if not a technique, to moving in concert with other people -- I remember the Oakland Ballet, in Petrouchka, could make you believe that hte crowds were really CROWDS -- they had an animating spirit as a group, and htey'd get swept up in things -- the bear incident sticks in my mind hte best, because ... well, it was really kind of mysterious, but the crowd got INTO the bear, especially the children, and started moving like hte bear, and the children were the last to come out of it -- that had a great deal to do with the conductor's sensitivity to them, he was really directing hte whole scene -- it was Jean-Louis Leroux, who's a marvellous musician, but it's also because the company really trained for musicianship -- a distinct Ballets-Russes musicianship, more in hte body than the feet, derived more from Fokine and Massine than from Balanchine -- i.e., it's based on hte character side, rather than hte classical side, and consequently more involved with weight, momentum, the particular kinds of attack, sweep, swing, movement quality AND POSTURE that go with creating a sense of ethos through national dances -- how do you get people to feel like we're in hungary or Galicia, that sort of thing.... and there's definitely a technique to TIMING the mazurka step right, that brush-through does not happen squarely on the second beat...... the Viennese waltz has a very characteristic delay on the second beat, also, that marks it as definitely Viennese.... Most of the time, people tend to think of these things as style rather than technique -- like the tilt of Fonteyn's torso in the Les Sylphides prelude, as she leans to the side and lifts her hand to her ear -- is that technique or style? If it's NOT there, there's nothing much happening.... but there IS an art to varying your soussus -- and it makes hte "world" come into existence, so it's very important.... maybe this is "coaching" ("head is like scent of violets over left shoulder, dear"), or maybe it's "perfection," but it can and does need to be taught......

re the "easy hand," that is indeed a remarkably deft distinction -- though, of course, in sculpture and painting, nowadays there's such CONTEMPT for technique, they have their sculptures made for them at factories and all, and will make paintings out of pigment mixed with broken crockery and larded onto hte canvas, painting s that can't be hung because hte paint will sag and FALL OFF....... with illustrators, it's a lower art, and the respect for craft, inversely, perversely, is higher.... One reason I think that ballet had such a long life in hte 20th century, long after opera stopped happening, was that Balanchine embraced technique as something that the ordinary person will respect -- just the Guinness-book of records rarity of finding anybody who could actually DO htis and make it look idiomatic....... Though of course it wasn't just him, Ashton asked for things that were really VERY hard, and anyone can see it, those intense tilts in the torso while the lower leg is doing double ronde dejambe and hte standing leg is doing (your choice of difficult balancing act)..... and the whole thing had to look idiomatic and poetic.....

re the "easy hand," that is indeed a remarkably deft distinction -- though, of course, in sculpture and painting, nowadays there's such CONTEMPT for technique, they have their sculptures made for them at factories and all, and will make paintings out of pigment mixed with broken crockery and larded onto hte canvas, painting s that can't be hung because hte paint will sag and FALL OFF....... with illustrators, it's a lower art, and the respect for craft, inversely, perversely, is higher.... One reason I think that ballet had such a long life in hte 20th century, long after opera stopped happening, was that Balanchine embraced technique as something that the ordinary person will respect -- just the Guinness-book of records rarity of finding anybody who could actually DO htis and make it look idiomatic....... Though of course it wasn't just him, Ashton asked for things that were really VERY hard, and anyone can see it, those intense tilts in the torso while the lower leg is doing double ronde dejambe and hte standing leg is doing (your choice of difficult balancing act)..... and the whole thing had to look idiomatic and poetic.....

By the way, I would love to see the film Leigh describes -- what a wealth of archival material you all have in New yOrk, my fingers itch... There IS one tremendous excellence to the otherwise mostly disappointing Dance in AMerica/NYCB version of Balanchine's Dream, at least to me Adam Luders' cavalier in hte act 2 pas de deux is one of the most beautiful, noblest undertakings of such a part I've ever seen...... He's not calling attention to himself, but it's just staggeringly beautiful. (As the old joke says, "Madam, you pay for the restraint.")

By the way, I would love to see the film Leigh describes -- what a wealth of archival material you all have in New yOrk, my fingers itch... There IS one tremendous excellence to the otherwise mostly disappointing Dance in AMerica/NYCB version of Balanchine's Dream, at least to me Adam Luders' cavalier in hte act 2 pas de deux is one of the most beautiful, noblest undertakings of such a part I've ever seen...... He's not calling attention to himself, but it's just staggeringly beautiful. (As the old joke says, "Madam, you pay for the restraint.")

Fascinating discussion -- the tiny details caught in the cracks -- like "Baryshnikov's near-death experience in 'Tarantella'" -- are as arresting as the arguments...... I've never seen Balanchine's Dream live, and haven't seen Ashton's since 1969 -- when SIbley and Dowell were Oberon and Titania, GOd what a pair. SO cool and magnificent -- very different from Villella and Farrell, whom I love in hte movie, but they're not STRANGE -- SIbley and Dowell were more like Allegra Kent and d'Amboise in the Act 2 pas de deux, which is one of the most beautiful and satisfying performances I've ever seen, and Kent is in the most lucid and transparent way quite otherworldly (though the rest of hte divertimento I don't find memorable). Sibley and Dowell really cast a spell, the whole world of hte ballet emanated from them -- and they were weird, so cool, so profoundly tuned in to each other, it was like incest without the sex. They had such a rapport, it created a sense of strangeness and power that made them seem like creatures of another order of being. In their pas de deux, they had a sort of "wring hte dirty dishrag" turn where they're each holding both hands and make an arch and both turn under the arch, back to back, that -- if I remember right, it's been a LONG time -- seemed to wring the anger out of them -- each is supporting hte other, but he's supporting her more, and they become reconciled..... Can Kent and Acosta possibly create such an atmosphere? Denby's article about Balanchine's version is really helpful -- he was quite irritated by many aspects of it.... But hte great things in it are out of this world, the scherzo (Villella's Oberon, all those wonderufl chldren) and the 2 pas de deux.

Fascinating discussion -- the tiny details caught in the cracks -- like "Baryshnikov's near-death experience in 'Tarantella'" -- are as arresting as the arguments...... I've never seen Balanchine's Dream live, and haven't seen Ashton's since 1969 -- when SIbley and Dowell were Oberon and Titania, GOd what a pair. SO cool and magnificent -- very different from Villella and Farrell, whom I love in hte movie, but they're not STRANGE -- SIbley and Dowell were more like Allegra Kent and d'Amboise in the Act 2 pas de deux, which is one of the most beautiful and satisfying performances I've ever seen, and Kent is in the most lucid and transparent way quite otherworldly (though the rest of hte divertimento I don't find memorable). Sibley and Dowell really cast a spell, the whole world of hte ballet emanated from them -- and they were weird, so cool, so profoundly tuned in to each other, it was like incest without the sex. They had such a rapport, it created a sense of strangeness and power that made them seem like creatures of another order of being. In their pas de deux, they had a sort of "wring hte dirty dishrag" turn where they're each holding both hands and make an arch and both turn under the arch, back to back, that -- if I remember right, it's been a LONG time -- seemed to wring the anger out of them -- each is supporting hte other, but he's supporting her more, and they become reconciled..... Can Kent and Acosta possibly create such an atmosphere? Denby's article about Balanchine's version is really helpful -- he was quite irritated by many aspects of it.... But hte great things in it are out of this world, the scherzo (Villella's Oberon, all those wonderufl chldren) and the 2 pas de deux.

Thanks, Mel, for that guestbook-- a caution about the "Meaning" of the fairies -- Alastair Macaulay once wisely cautioned me not to get too fanciful about "Breadcrumb," when I was writing something about hte fairies. It's easy for us who love this ballet to take hints of folk-origins of these splendid faberge-like creatures and turn Breadcrumb into "freedom from Hunger" -- but there are suggestions in RG's excellent book (Ballet 101) that the tradition means fertility rather than "never go hungry" -- that is, the child will grow up to bear children happily. We only have to repeat a few times that "it was a tradition to sprinkle breadcrumbs over the baby" or "crumble a new loaf over a baby" or some pretty phrase like that for people to start thinking that that is TRUE, and I've never seen it written anyplace that looked like a primary source to me..... though it's such a pretty idea, I would LOVE for it to be true...... But I do not know of a truly scholarly study of the folk-material behind SB, and I'm quite sure, that when some scholar in Russia DOES produce it, the material will be much stranger than we think. STill, there must be something to it (and it would probably not do any harm to a dancer preparing the role to make up a story and a character for herself)...... in ROland Wiley's book, Tchaikovsky's ballets," there's a pretty long passage quoting Petipa's written notes to Tchaikovsky about how he wanted the music to create the effect of breadcrumbs falling.... and THAT"s pretty big magic in itself, especially considering how spectacularly Tchaikovsky came through --- for that short stretch of music is one of the most enchanting things, to my mind, that Tchaikovsky ever wrote...... My apologies to Becky, this is gettting a little heavy... I'm sure you'll be lovely... i'm eager to hear how it goes..... DOn't you love that music? How fast will you dance it? I've seen it danced at many speeds -- from quite quick to slow and melting....

TO add to what ALymer said, Becky -- Petipa asked Tchaikovsky to create the effect of breadcrumbs falling lightly in the music, which is why the melody is made of those soft plucked-string sounds -- so it's like a blessing, a charming one...... It's certainly a charming dance.... Merde!

wow, I guess my imagination is stronger than my memory..... that was a long time ago.... WEll, she SHOULD have danced the girl in green....

That is a wonderful part, isn't it? I can still see Richard Chen See in that role -- which must be from 20 years ago, when he was in the Oakland BAllet here...... He's been in Paul Taylor's company almost a decade now -- but he was such a snake in that role, his feet were so snide.....

Although of course I agree with Farrell Fan about Gelsey's first book, -- that husband of hers just seems to have gotten off on getting her revved up and self-pitying -- i have to say, she DID go to extraordinary lengths and take extraordinary pains to perfect her art.... Th section where she went to the MAryinskly Theater to watch the Kiorv take class seems like a pretty lucidf interval for her..... and the loneliness she felt, to diascover that she was pretty much the only dancer who wanted to go check out hte fountainhead.... well, I hve a lot of sympathy with her in that...... Yes, I think she projected a great deal onto her teachers and colleagues -- when they asked her to lighten up -- "dance like Fred Astaire" - she didn't believe they could mean that, and if I remember right, implied that they were trying to sabotage her........ I haven't read it for a long time..... wonder how I'd feel now. It certanly has to be taken "with a grain of salt" -- but the clues are all there; child of alcoholics, the perfectionism, the competition with her sister, the acute sense of her physical limitations, her head was too big as a child and he insteps weren't high enough and she didn't grow up to have the proportions she wanted, or rather, the proportions she admired..... but she was a tremendlusly severe critic of HERSELF....... The saddest thing about he book was that it sounded like she never enjoyed dancing until she started doing drugs.... Maybe she needed that release......