Paul Parish

oooooh, I bet you're right-- hmm, I guess that raises my estimation of Peter Martins One thing I must say in favor of Helgi Tomasson is his willingness to use dancers as different as Muriel Maffre (VERY tall, too tall to get into the Paris Opera Ballet) and Tina LeBlanc (very very short) -- they actually alternated in the same role in Mark Morris's A Garden, and were equally wonderful -- It took Muriel much longer to get some of the co-ordination -- there's a baroque port de bras, where the arm makes a circle at the elbow in a vertical plane as the dancer steps backward into pique arabesque, that Muriel mastered much later than Tina-- but other aspects of the role were harder for Tina (making her part register when he stage is crowded with other dancers, for example -- that's easy for Muriel, because, as Balanchine said, big dancers are easier to see) and both were wonderful in it..... We're very lucky to have Muriel -- she was magnificent as Myrtha last night; the amount of attention she gives a role, and the quality of thought she brings to it.... the arabesque promenades were astonishing, each ended with no sense of haste in magnificent penchees... her piques were utterly placed, perfectly still, she could have stayed forever... And her head positions.... I don't know who her coach was for Myrtha, perhaps herself -- but in the first solo, the chugs in arabesque -- three chugs, pas de bourree and three more chugs on the other foot, that one -- she had the most wonderful head positions -- the first chug she was looking down at her hand, that 'Implacable Wili" look, and on the second she pulled her head back and raised her jaw-line into a nobler posture, which tempered Myrtha's harshness somehow But the evening was weird -- the stars did wonderful things, but their effects cancelled each other out.... and for some reason Yuri Possokhov entered holding his cloak over his face like Dracula -- actually, it looked 'Arabian," with his nose buried in the elbow. There are other ways to suggest you don't want your friends to know you're doing this.... and THEN, after dismissing Wilfrid, he did first arabesque before running over to knock on the door..... This production does embroider the fabric of the ballet with extra-pretty step at every opportunity, but THAT is not an opportunity..... and today at the matinee Parrish Maynard did not do that.... Actually, Parrish and Kristin Long were wonderful -- last night's show did not jell -- it was opening night, and all the critics were there.... today's was the sat mat and I didn't see another critic anywhere ("nobody there but the audience"), which doubtless left the dancers much freer to become absorbed in the real job of dancing in character..... Lord they were good..... Each knows the difference between a dance effect and a mime effect, and how the two lean on each other, and how much slower the beat is for a gesture than it is a dance-move..... Kristin was .... well, she was like Mary Pickford; the performance was simple, wholly admirable.... I was in tears... Parrish was in tears at the end. It was like Baryshnikov's interpretation except with a different start -- Baryshnikov was from the outset a nervous wreck except when Giselle was around, Parrish is not that unstable but he's not just getting in over his head, he's following his heart for the first time, and it seems innocent enough to him.... each interruption by "his world" throws him into massive confusion, and he can't make "his world' go away like he did Wilfed..... he was in tears at the end, she made him see what he'd lost...., we all saw it... Kristin Long is another dancer who might be made to starve herself down some before she could get IN elsewhere...... We are SO lucky to have HER.......

oooooh, I bet you're right-- hmm, I guess that raises my estimation of Peter Martins One thing I must say in favor of Helgi Tomasson is his willingness to use dancers as different as Muriel Maffre (VERY tall, too tall to get into the Paris Opera Ballet) and Tina LeBlanc (very very short) -- they actually alternated in the same role in Mark Morris's A Garden, and were equally wonderful -- It took Muriel much longer to get some of the co-ordination -- there's a baroque port de bras, where the arm makes a circle at the elbow in a vertical plane as the dancer steps backward into pique arabesque, that Muriel mastered much later than Tina-- but other aspects of the role were harder for Tina (making her part register when he stage is crowded with other dancers, for example -- that's easy for Muriel, because, as Balanchine said, big dancers are easier to see) and both were wonderful in it..... We're very lucky to have Muriel -- she was magnificent as Myrtha last night; the amount of attention she gives a role, and the quality of thought she brings to it.... the arabesque promenades were astonishing, each ended with no sense of haste in magnificent penchees... her piques were utterly placed, perfectly still, she could have stayed forever... And her head positions.... I don't know who her coach was for Myrtha, perhaps herself -- but in the first solo, the chugs in arabesque -- three chugs, pas de bourree and three more chugs on the other foot, that one -- she had the most wonderful head positions -- the first chug she was looking down at her hand, that 'Implacable Wili" look, and on the second she pulled her head back and raised her jaw-line into a nobler posture, which tempered Myrtha's harshness somehow But the evening was weird -- the stars did wonderful things, but their effects cancelled each other out.... and for some reason Yuri Possokhov entered holding his cloak over his face like Dracula -- actually, it looked 'Arabian," with his nose buried in the elbow. There are other ways to suggest you don't want your friends to know you're doing this.... and THEN, after dismissing Wilfrid, he did first arabesque before running over to knock on the door..... This production does embroider the fabric of the ballet with extra-pretty step at every opportunity, but THAT is not an opportunity..... and today at the matinee Parrish Maynard did not do that.... Actually, Parrish and Kristin Long were wonderful -- last night's show did not jell -- it was opening night, and all the critics were there.... today's was the sat mat and I didn't see another critic anywhere ("nobody there but the audience"), which doubtless left the dancers much freer to become absorbed in the real job of dancing in character..... Lord they were good..... Each knows the difference between a dance effect and a mime effect, and how the two lean on each other, and how much slower the beat is for a gesture than it is a dance-move..... Kristin was .... well, she was like Mary Pickford; the performance was simple, wholly admirable.... I was in tears... Parrish was in tears at the end. It was like Baryshnikov's interpretation except with a different start -- Baryshnikov was from the outset a nervous wreck except when Giselle was around, Parrish is not that unstable but he's not just getting in over his head, he's following his heart for the first time, and it seems innocent enough to him.... each interruption by "his world" throws him into massive confusion, and he can't make "his world' go away like he did Wilfed..... he was in tears at the end, she made him see what he'd lost...., we all saw it... Kristin Long is another dancer who might be made to starve herself down some before she could get IN elsewhere...... We are SO lucky to have HER.......

I'm ....... hmmmmmm, how to put this -- I'd LOVE to know what Scheherezade was like when it was new..... choreographing that kind of movement for groups, how in the world did he get the rhythms set and estabish the ensemble....... Having seen several different versions of Petroushka, I'd have to say the BIG difference between them was how organic the crowd movement seemed in Oakland Ballet's version..... the episodes each had their shape, their natural growth and subsiding, like waves -- like in Debussy's La Mer, the vagueness ("vague" is french for "wave") of it was what was wonderful, it wasn't fixed but it was FAR FROM being a mess.... like in Mahler's music, too, or Wagner's, there was a whole aesthetic built on this oceanic "flooding" movement, they were trying to imitate a complex natural phenomenon, and Fokine was far-gone in it -- Art Nouveau was very much about that --I wish I'd experienced it when the practitioners were in their prime.......

I always thought hte company with the Balanchine bodies was Merce Cunningham's -- but even HE had room for great dancers who weren't particularly long-legged (such as the great jumper Ellen Cornfield). Balanchine -- Lauren Hauser was a swell dancer, but she didn't have a Balanchine body.... and re Darci, when she was young, she DID have a very round face...... but the legs were aggressive and long... THe only directors that were really strict about legginess were Ziegfeld' and Busby Berkeley.... Paul Taylor is worth a dissertation on his typology -- the tall motherly one, the crazy aunt, the darling little girls...

I always thought hte company with the Balanchine bodies was Merce Cunningham's -- but even HE had room for great dancers who weren't particularly long-legged (such as the great jumper Ellen Cornfield). Balanchine -- Lauren Hauser was a swell dancer, but she didn't have a Balanchine body.... and re Darci, when she was young, she DID have a very round face...... but the legs were aggressive and long... THe only directors that were really strict about legginess were Ziegfeld' and Busby Berkeley.... Paul Taylor is worth a dissertation on his typology -- the tall motherly one, the crazy aunt, the darling little girls...

That was a mighty thorough run-down from Sylvia -- I'd only add to it that I really LOVE the Cinderella-- it's from the older period and shows what RB dancing was like once -- the ensemble is remarkable, just remarkable -- they all really seem to belong together, and Helpmann and Ashton himself as the ugly sisters are .... well, they give you something to THINK about. If you wonder what Alexandra means when she laments what the Dances have lost in letting their old traditions go, part of it is the unbelievable beauty of clean pure dancing, esp clean pure MALE dancing -- but it's also the loss of the thoughtful, beautiful MIME continuity, against which the pure dancing stood out like jewels set in old -- i.e., the mime wasn't a jewel, but it WAS gold...... Ashton himself is maybe the best thing in it....

There are so MANY factors at play re: Merce -- one is that he and John Cage were living together and john was a major subversive composer who was also playing for Merce's class, and he could not play the piano ver ywell -- so when the dancer finished the exercise, there was John still playing -- which was embarrassing but John got away with deciding that they should both be playing for the same length of time -- it's like dividing up the refrigerator with a room-mate you can't get along with and saying, ok, do whatever you want to on your side, ----- and they composed pieces using sptopwatches, each sectoin lasting say, 35 seconds -- and ran them at the same time, music and movement designs -- while maybe Robert Rauschenberg was turning the lights on adn off at random, as if everything was something you were seeing from hte subway...... And ONe more very important factor is that lots of htis way ofthinking came from the visual artists' concerns that Merce and John were so tight with and who gave them so much of hteir support -- the first money they ever raised came from a whoe lot of NY School painters donating paintings to be sold to raise money -- and you can get away with ALL SORTS OF THINGS if there's only going to be ONE person who actually buys and views your work, which is the painter's usual way of life -- somebody buys hte poainting and takes it home, and you can be eccentric as hell, make paintings out of broken china cups mixed into oil paint and applied with a shovel to the canvas, if somebody will pay 300, 000 dolars for it........ it's not that Merce is a charlatan, butthat the gamesmanship among his painter friends was VERY different from the kinds ofconcerns most "ordinary" dancers had about getting an audience to appreciate what they were doing...........

Echoing of trumpeets had a fantastic success here , performed by that amazing Oakland Balleet -- Ronn Guidi was a nexasperating director, but in retrospect,LOOK at hte ballets he gave his dancers and hte Oakland community -- from Les Noces, and 5 other Nijinska ballets, through Fall River Legend (which when danced by dancers who aren't ashamed to be dancing such an old-fashioned ballet noir, turns out to be the sort of thing Martha Graham would have done in the classical idiom, it was terrifying, especially hte dream-sequence where Lizzie confronted her weakling mother) -- and so on -- Joy GIm, who had a fabulous technique, a magnificent instrument, and a great power in presenting dark emotinos -- she did hte hand of fate, and the dangerous woman in Lilac Garden, and Myrtha, and many others, was just searing in Echoing of Trumpets......

I think Swan LAke is dark -- the idealism that's at hte core of it is not easy, and it's pitted against a very strong power -- it's kind of like the Lord of hte Rings , or the Ring of the Nibelungen, the forces of heaviness, fear, doom are overwhelmingly powerful in it -- I formed my taste on the Royal Ballet production, which is heavily influenced by Hamlet-- the prince is weak....the likelihood of not being able to break through the spells of the "seeming-virtuous" is great...... Rothbart, as danced by Derek Rencher, was a very powerful presence, like gravity, he could wear you down........ The swan queen could not prevail against him by herself. He was by far the greatest Rothbart I've ever seen, the only one I could take seriously -- like the Capulets in Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet, who're also incredibly powerful, HEAVY men....... That one is dark, too, very dark..... I admire Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet more than I can say. Its a very great ballet.......

I'm with Glebb -- a lot of Ashton is fabulously silly -- Facade, for example; Les Patineurs is a wonderful contrivance..... Divertissements are crucial to ballet-- you can't "dismiss them, you'r'e throwing the baby out with he bathwater..... Balanchine said -- and maybe he meant it -- that balllets are novelties; and htey ARE like vanishing acts, or fireworks, they make you wonderfully aware of time passing, passing SO FAST, you couldn't bear it if you actually had to think about it, how fast our moments pass....... SO hte divertissements have this incrediubly sober lesson in htem, like the bitternes in chocolate, how fast the petals fall from the rose..... but how incredibly beautiful htey are at their moment of prefection..... the problem with divertissements is that it takes exquisite taste to make a good one...... I'm at the moment extremely keen on Mark Morris's Sandpaper Ballet; I think it's the best divertissement since...... oh god knows what, Stars and Stripes, maybe Union Jack -- I'v never seen Union J.... dang! Only San Francisco Ballet does it.... but it should be in the reps everywhere.... Paul Taylor is also great at these apparant trifles......

RIck, I have to agree with your list of the qualities that draw you in to the appreciation of a dancer's engagement with the materials of the dance -- especially modesty.... I remember reading Danilova's response to a question, what's the most important quality in a ballerina -- her response was "Modesty," which was like an eye-opener for me.......... I hadn't expected THAT, but of course, as soon as you hear it, you realize, it's the key. I've since started to LOOK for it, just like I look for the vanilla flavor in any dessert -- it's there in everything, including chocolate.. I remember seeing it in Mukhamedov when the Bolshoi came here in like 1990 -- at hte curtain calls, he kept sending everybody else forward and hung back, not making a big deal about it, just as if to say, we each do our parts, I;'ve been out front plenty already, you guys go get some attention... it was wonderful. it was not designed to get attention, it was real generosity.... Old sufi tale -- the pasha asks the sufi how to become generous, and the sufi tells the pasha, sire it will be almost impossible for you, for what you want iss hte reputation for generosity, and you can not get real generosity till you have destoryed the desire for appearing to have it.... Last night ath the Isadora Duncan Awards ceremony here in San Francisco, Joanna Berman said the most remarkable thing when she received the award for her performance in Sleeping Beauty..... She said she'd found in that perfrmance she'd had to let go of her plans... she hadn't really quite expected to do the role at all, she was coming back from surgery on her foot, and , well, Sleeping Beauty!!! and then her partner kept getting injured, 2 or three of them..... the person she danced it with (who was wonderful) didn't start working with her till that day, the day of hte perfromance itself.... so she was just going to have to let it happen, let it be what it was going to be....., but when she went out there she noticed she felt a new kind of freedom, a wonderful way of being onstage... she'd tried to hold on to it and take it with her into future performances..... She'd thought it was a private experience and was surprised to think it had been seen, and it was swonderful to have it remembered and singled out for an award so long after the fact...

RIck, I have to agree with your list of the qualities that draw you in to the appreciation of a dancer's engagement with the materials of the dance -- especially modesty.... I remember reading Danilova's response to a question, what's the most important quality in a ballerina -- her response was "Modesty," which was like an eye-opener for me.......... I hadn't expected THAT, but of course, as soon as you hear it, you realize, it's the key. I've since started to LOOK for it, just like I look for the vanilla flavor in any dessert -- it's there in everything, including chocolate.. I remember seeing it in Mukhamedov when the Bolshoi came here in like 1990 -- at hte curtain calls, he kept sending everybody else forward and hung back, not making a big deal about it, just as if to say, we each do our parts, I;'ve been out front plenty already, you guys go get some attention... it was wonderful. it was not designed to get attention, it was real generosity.... Old sufi tale -- the pasha asks the sufi how to become generous, and the sufi tells the pasha, sire it will be almost impossible for you, for what you want iss hte reputation for generosity, and you can not get real generosity till you have destoryed the desire for appearing to have it.... Last night ath the Isadora Duncan Awards ceremony here in San Francisco, Joanna Berman said the most remarkable thing when she received the award for her performance in Sleeping Beauty..... She said she'd found in that perfrmance she'd had to let go of her plans... she hadn't really quite expected to do the role at all, she was coming back from surgery on her foot, and , well, Sleeping Beauty!!! and then her partner kept getting injured, 2 or three of them..... the person she danced it with (who was wonderful) didn't start working with her till that day, the day of hte perfromance itself.... so she was just going to have to let it happen, let it be what it was going to be....., but when she went out there she noticed she felt a new kind of freedom, a wonderful way of being onstage... she'd tried to hold on to it and take it with her into future performances..... She'd thought it was a private experience and was surprised to think it had been seen, and it was swonderful to have it remembered and singled out for an award so long after the fact...

often the camera is doing the dancing...... it's true.... This is what makes me admire the Disney animators so much -- they're hte folks ho've wthought about this the best.... Al the way back in Fantasia, check it out -- the Nutcracker ballet -- it's dazzling, the way they "frame" the picture and put a mystery in front of you and make it shimmer and then turn into something you recognize...... it's continuous wonder.... the part of it i think is cheesy is te way things you cnant recognize turn always into CUTE things, like minnows wearing false eyelashes and lots of lpstick........ but it's a wonderful use of a flat medium to create wonder using movement.........

WHy not see if you cvan get some Robbins into your repertory? FAncy Free has great roles for men, -- great roles -- as do the dances from Fiddler on hte ROof, which -- from having seen JRobbins' Broadway -- I think are certainly worth a staging by a strong ballet company...... Of course, it may not be easy to get permission to dance those ballets -- much harder to get than Balanchine ances, I gather -- but Glass Pieces, wow, WONDERFUL roles for a male corps..... Interplay... I wonder if it would be any easier to get permissoin to do the Boradway stuff than to do the "ballets" --

ps the exception is tap -- Fred Astaire, the Nicholas brothers lose NOTHING of hteir excitement....... I think it's because you can hear the weight transfer.....

Leibling, I've seen exactly the same thing... I watched a dance at a studio, and immediately saw the "instant replay" -- and was shocked. A very important fact in hte live dance, that the performer had come down off-balanceand gutted it out, didn;'t register as an event of any importance, while it was a big deal if she spread her fingerssuddenly, which hadn't gone unnoticd but was not the POINT.... and on the video it WAS....... It's like the way Matisse flattened the picture-plane and worked as if with cut-outs -- indeed, somethimes he DID use cut-outs....... Merce Cunningham has commented somewhere htat the camera is "quicker" than hte eye -- if you're making a "video dance," he found, you had to cram it with more detail and make everything happen faster in real time, for on the video it would be boring at the live pace...........

well, merde!

[introduction put in by LAW - I've split this discussion off from a discussion on charitable giving in Canada, so that people interested in ballet on film and video can find it! Jump in!] First of all, wizards on roller-blades is a GREAT idea, so's a 3-headed dragon, unless they're so much better than the dancers there's no comparison. So maybe Baltimore, the birthplace of the Madison, will see a rise in interest in classical dance..... But over and over again, the real problem is that to fall in love with ballet, you have to see the good stuff, and you have to see it LIVE-- When ballet was new in the USA, it caught on VERY fast in this country, and interest was ablaze in the 40's, when so many European dancers fled HItler and Stalin and were caught in this country; during and after the war, they toured till they dropped -- which was exhausting for them but a revelation to the people in the provinces -- where most of the people used to live....... and ballet in New York City was electrifying. Ballet does not televise well -- if you dance yourself, you can watch a video and not be bored to death -- But it's just not sensuously exciting.... not like recorded music, where Elisabeth Schwarzkopf can make you swoon through headphones pretty much the same as she could if you'd been there in hte opera house -- Baryshnikov, IN PARTICULAR, who made you feel like your head was exploding when you saw him for real, is not much more exciting than Julia CHild on TV..... Why is this? I think it's because photography leaches out most of the kinetic drama of ballet -- TV already does the same things that the technique does, i.e., it makes people seem weightless, and it zooms in and out on body parts -- a great choreographer directs your eye all over the stage, and all over the performer's body, in fascinating ways.... camera-men hack through this all the time --even in the BEST-directed video... SO TV isn't helping -- it's hurting, really, since it only DISCOURAGES the audience that's never seen ballet, while it pacifies us balletomanes with little dabs of great performances that are increasingly drab or frantic.... And meantime, the folks in Kansas City -- well, they'v got a ballet company, under Todd Bolender, I'd love to see what they're doing -- and in Tulsa, of course, they've got a LONG tradition of ballet (by American standards) .... I'd love to see them -- When Moscelyne Larkin set the "Hand of Fate" pas de deux on Oakland BAllet, it was an intoxicating thing that was VERY different in effect from the Hodson-Archer version done by the Joffrey (no offense, Glebb, nor Millicent) -- all I'm saying here is that there may WELL be excellent dancing in Tulsa, I wouldn't be surprised --- you should have seen the former Oakland-Ballet star Michael Lowe in class this morning in Berkeley, who's retired now as a performer but used his head and upper body like a Massine dancer. There was a grand allegro that included a soutenu-turn where you had to LOOK AT THE AUDIENCE as you went into it, which was very difficult after the big jumps you'd just done, and hardly anybody even tried -- But Michael leaned into it with a smile, as if he were emptying a barrel of roses at somebody's feet, and suddenly you saw this grand old style come to life..... Michael had worked a LOT with Massine (and with Freddie Franklin on GisellE).... he told me after class how when Massine set a dance he showed the head and torso BEFORE HE EVER SHOWED the legs and had Michael work for an hour at least getting the upper body right, with the feet and leg-work only roughed in. Only then would he let Michael know what the details of the footwork were. There can be fabulous dancing in out of the way places, and the lucky people in those places know about it....... But the mass-media are increasingly reflect only themselves. Newspapers and TV and movies and AOL don't so much compete with each other as collude.... The boosters of the new economy all want everybody to think that if it's not mass-media-ready, it's glamorless, not newsworthy, "unsexy' -- when really all they mean is it undermines their tacit appeal to the very large advertisers, which is "we deliver a large audience starving for spiritual nourishment, whom you can sell your expensive toys to...." This may sound strange, coming from a San Franciscan, where the ballet is thriving and there are performances galore....... It's true, our ballet IS popular, it's well-attended and well-supported, children are brought in to see it by the busload, and the dancers and teachers go out into the schools big-time.... But the percentage of empty spectacle is climbing.... The ballet's just showed 2 Tomasson spectacles, Chi Lin and Silver Ladders, that owe a lot to Bugaku -- kinky-creepy-fascinating exotic plastique, extensions everywhere --without having the fascinating kinetic logic Balanchine employed. Mr B was doing experimental dance at the same time as he was engaged in oriental poshlust.... Here, now, the performers of experimental dance are being left to languish in obscurity as if their work meant nothing to the larger community, in a way that's very different from the way it was treated only twenty years ago --

Elizabth Loscavio was not much older than that -- if anything -- when she showed us what fun it could be to dance Tomasson's Menuetto -- which in everybody else's hands looked like nothing in particular, while she was tossing her head back and dancing like a little maenad...... If Sarah van Patten brings any of those qualities, all I can say is thank you, thnk you , thank you....

Zahorian is fearless... I first saw her when she was still at the Kirov Academy DC, they were touring in the Kirov Nutcracker and appeared in SanJose..... She was 3rd cast, the only American, and I thought "she must be SOMETHING if they're letting her do the ballerina role," so chose to go that day.... In that version of Nutcracker -- Vainonen's -- they substitute a ballerina for the little-girl CLara (Marie?) half-way through; she sort of "wakes' out of her dream somehow rather early in the proceedings -- the reason I can't remember this is that just as Zahorian woke up and started dancing, the lights went out -- but hte orchestra continued and she KEPT GOING. there was a ghostly faint light (from the emergency lights) and you could tell that she was AMAZING, these huge streaking extensions sweeping around all over the place -- renversees and such -- which a stage-hand , full of self-importance, strutted to center-stage and interrupted, telling us the power was out all over SanJose and we'd have to wait to see if it came back on..... What an oaf -- and she was like a Sylphide, he couldn't see what respect she deserved SO Zahorian had only been dancing about 15 seconds, but I was dazzled..... and thrilled when her name appeared on SFBs roster the next year, in time for Nutcracker. Went to catch her first performance -- the first role she did here was the Sugar-Plum Fairy at an 11 AM matinee ! And she was fantastic -- so was Guennadi Nedviguine, it was the first I'd seen of HIM, too, we could not believe how softly he landed.... THe remarkable thing about Ms Zahorian -- I almost called her Vanessa, there we go -- was not her assurance, it was her interpretation of Christensen's choreography, which is hard to "make anything" out of. How to phrase it? She actually danced it as well as ANYBODY I'd ever seen before, and better than most... She's strong, brave, eager -- I find myself wanting her to cultivate her feet.... Wonder what others think.....

Sorry Helena, I was kind of greedy there.... thank you so much for ransacking your memory for me.... I DO know how hard it can be to provide details about aspects of a perfomance that made no impression on me... I mean, really, it can't be DONE -- that's one of hte fascinating things about performances, they're NOTHING if they don't stimulate your imagination, and if they DID stimulate your imagination and you get really involved, sometimes what you remember -- or what I remember -- came from MY imagination, not theirs.... Anyway, thanks again....

Well, Rossini's the guy behind Bournonville's wonderful WIlhelm Tell pas de deux -- What a wonderful ballet!!!

Well, Rossini's the guy behind Bournonville's wonderful WIlhelm Tell pas de deux -- What a wonderful ballet!!!

Dear Helena -- THanks so much -- but more , more, more!! In SAn Francisco, I think, we've begun to feel that the big waltz is really way too small... did that bother you? ANd how WAS Sarah van Patten? Which dance did she do? HTe toe-hops one with the pizzicato music? Did it suit her? What is her quality like as a dancer? My favorite thing Tomasson't choreographed is in it -- the Act III Sapphire pas de deux, with hte 5-count phrases and its clever timing... each dancer hits a pose -- on pointe or in hte air, she goes, he goes -- that takes you by surprise, it's like a magic-act, where they conceal the preparartions so cleverly you don't see it coming until it's there -- did it have that effect in Copenhagen? THanks........

I take it back, Divertimento is -- well, I've only seen it once, and it wasn't an inspoired performance, the variations were so-so, except for Stacey Cadell, who was fantastic -- but I believe everybody........... Mozart is fantastically singable..... and whistleable, I used to whistle hte little ordeal-march from hte MAgic Flute when I'd go for lte-night walks, it would attract dogs, they'd lik,e to walk with me, and then I'd feel safe........... but he doesn't make ME want to dance so much as sing.....