Paul Parish

THanks for the report on that workshop -- it's so good to hear WHAT people are doing elsewhere.... I agree with Alexandra, it would be so interesting to know WHY the choreographer wanted to restrict his vocabulary.... There could be so many reasons. Balanchine said somewhere that it was when he was making Apollo that the first realized the power of restricting his vocabulary and not just use everything.... Look at hte first movement of Serenade -- there aren't many steps in that, it's mostly running, or the first movement of Mozartiana, no releves at all, no jumps, no turns that aren't bourrees, it's mostly walks and reverences and piques and bourrees (but bourrees ARE piques, and look how many kinds of bourrees, the last ones are in parallel for half the distance and turn out for hte second half) and walks and a back bend; the next movement is crazy with jumps... And Mozartiana is inspired... sometimes people are making etudes..... Sometimes when I'm writing, I'll set myself the exercise of writing a whole paragraph in monosyllables -- it's a GREAT exercise, for it makes you USE the rhythm and pitch of your voice, for real English is full of little bitty words. it makes you sound like you mean it.... Another is to write with my not-facile hand.... Leigh said there comes a point when he's choreographing where he doesn't want to add any steps he hasn't used.... what's up with that? He's an interesting guy, I'd like to know what he means by that.... Leigh? Would you mind? [ March 18, 2002, 10:32 PM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

For our dancers in San FRancisco, Joanna Berman as the cowgirl in Rodeo -- she made that role into something poignant, hilarious, achingly real -- I don't konw if anybody else has ever done it that way, but she brought out all those awkward sides of adolescence like Lynda Barry does in her cartoon-novels. Joanna's cowgirl didn't want to grow up, especially not if she had to be a GIRL, she was fighting it, she didn't want to compete in that arena.... It's been 10 years since I saw her do it, butI'll never forget it... of course, she was fabulous at all the steps, but they were strictly secondary... and THEN the way she looked in that yellow dress, ridiculous, hilarious, adorable..... She is such a warm dancer, when she dances the waltz girl in Serenade, the light is not blue any more, it seems like the sun has come out...

Von Aroldingen was wonderful in Who Cares? Absolutely wonderful -- just horsing around, so musical, like a new addition to hte pantheon of American girls -- I know she's German, but I mean like Katharine Hepburn or Ginger Rogers

quote: Originally posted by Leigh Witchel: Repertory itself can provide conditioning, and it has for years. I assume that's how any ballerina acquired the stamina to get through Aurora before cross-training came into vogue. Famous for it -- in fact Sleeping Beauty itself is a powerful great exercise for any company -- all those fairy variations, including the gold/silver/diamond, to make them presentable... The procedure Leigh's advocating is the classic one-- I've heard from my teachers who studied with Danilova over and over -- you rehearse it and rehearse it, back to back, so you know what your body will want to do when it's tired, master the technique, and THEN go out and dance it and "throw away" your technique, that I'm told was how she built strength and stage presence while preserving musicality.... [edited only to move the "quotes" code so that Paul's post is separated from what he was quoting.] [ March 18, 2002, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: alexandra ]

quote: Originally posted by Leigh Witchel: Repertory itself can provide conditioning, and it has for years. I assume that's how any ballerina acquired the stamina to get through Aurora before cross-training came into vogue. Famous for it -- in fact Sleeping Beauty itself is a powerful great exercise for any company -- all those fairy variations, including the gold/silver/diamond, to make them presentable... The procedure Leigh's advocating is the classic one-- I've heard from my teachers who studied with Danilova over and over -- you rehearse it and rehearse it, back to back, so you know what your body will want to do when it's tired, master the technique, and THEN go out and dance it and "throw away" your technique, that I'm told was how she built strength and stage presence while preserving musicality.... [edited only to move the "quotes" code so that Paul's post is separated from what he was quoting.] [ March 18, 2002, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: alexandra ]

Please, get some rest, but then TELL US MORE..... I am SO eager to hear -- what is the choreography like for Pavillon -- how is it laid out, is it effective, what are hte high points, how are they prepared? is hte little moor featured? There's such a creature in Strauss's opera ROsenkavalier, a darling boy, and the PC police haven't objected to his presence yet...... thank god. A few years back, the Oakland ballet tried dancing hte moor in Petrouchka in blue-face, which was ludicrous -- and especially unnecessary, since hte dancer characterized him so well, he was actually LISTENING to the sloshing sound inside his coconut, you could see him get all upset by it and weren't at all surprised when he started attacking it with his scimitar..... They did Petrouchka very well here, with real character feeling, the bear was wonderful, the hopak during he mummers episode, and wonderful crescendo to the butter-week crowd scenes, the maids sweeping their scarves in the air as that big tune welled up and took over. Actually, you may be interested to know, Oakland Ballet danced a number of those ballets -- Sheherezade... So what was Pulcinella like?

I've heard "ballet" used this way mostly about basketball, especially to describe Michael Jordan.... there's nobody who followed the game at all who wasn't impressed by Jordan's sovereignty, his elevation and grace... Steve YOung, the former quarterback of the 49ers, who's smart, charming, and very articulate, uses the word Choreography with no irony at all in talking about running different plays.... oh and by the way, Charlie Moulton choreographed a huge crowd sequence (for 1000 dancers) that may make it into the sequel to the Matrix.... [ March 18, 2002, 12:47 AM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

quote: Originally posted by Dale: But after revisting the ballet, it makes me wonder whether to place this work alongside La Sonnambula for its creepiness in the divertisments and the "artist misunderstood and tortured by the philistines" theme. [/QB] I think you're absolutely right, and I'd add Davidsbundlertaenze to the list. Yes it's creepy, but it's also creepy if you ARE sort of dead to the world to find how envious and petty, not to mention off-key, the world can be... I heard that Balanchine proposed a sequel to Sonnambula to Allegra Kent -- "Poet marries sleepwalker, moves to New ROchelle" Re Sonnambula, when i saw Emeralds last night, Julie Diana and Damian Smith made the second pas de deux look like sleepwalking..... it was BEAUTIFUL.

re aerobics, whether or not this applies to Sretton's plans (is the Royal Ballet in for a massive dose of Stanton Welch?), during the "dance boom" in America, a great part of the interest that caused the audience to swell was that hte American public AS A WHOLE had become fitness conscious, and classes of people who had never participated in sports, or had stopped, began jogging and bicycling and taking vitamins, old ladies showed up on sidewalks in pastel velour sweatsuits with no embarrassment to it -- and all these people started buying tickets to see Twyla Tharp-style modern dance as a spectator sport. (I once sat next to a woman who told me with no shame that she wished she was getting that workout the dancers were getting on stage. (THey weren't interested in "high" art -- it was the same period when people were saying "wouldn't you rather write a book than read one?") It was a weird time -- but ballets like THarp's "In the Upper Room" WERE aerobic workouts, and there are plenty of ballets entering the repertory that recycle that aesthetic. (ABT just showed one bare-chested one here last September, frenzied thing; Diablo Ballet recently danced something by the director of DC's National Ballet that had hte dancers flailing nonstop for 20 minutes. And to tell hte truth, Nijinska's great ballet Les Noces, and her brother's doubtless great Rite of Spring are dance-till-you-drop "rituals" that get their power from dramatizing the act of exhausting the dancers...... I should confess that I take step-aerobics myelf and love it and think it has improved my overall dancing -- but that's partly because I dance the class, decorate the t-step with pirouettes and beat my jumping jacks... it's helped me find the groove and abbreviate preparations from my dancing in ballet class, so I just listen to the music and GO. Maybe this post belongs on a dancer site rather than an aesthetic question thread.

re aerobics, whether or not this applies to Sretton's plans (is the Royal Ballet in for a massive dose of Stanton Welch?), during the "dance boom" in America, a great part of the interest that caused the audience to swell was that hte American public AS A WHOLE had become fitness conscious, and classes of people who had never participated in sports, or had stopped, began jogging and bicycling and taking vitamins, old ladies showed up on sidewalks in pastel velour sweatsuits with no embarrassment to it -- and all these people started buying tickets to see Twyla Tharp-style modern dance as a spectator sport. (I once sat next to a woman who told me with no shame that she wished she was getting that workout the dancers were getting on stage. (THey weren't interested in "high" art -- it was the same period when people were saying "wouldn't you rather write a book than read one?") It was a weird time -- but ballets like THarp's "In the Upper Room" WERE aerobic workouts, and there are plenty of ballets entering the repertory that recycle that aesthetic. (ABT just showed one bare-chested one here last September, frenzied thing; Diablo Ballet recently danced something by the director of DC's National Ballet that had hte dancers flailing nonstop for 20 minutes. And to tell hte truth, Nijinska's great ballet Les Noces, and her brother's doubtless great Rite of Spring are dance-till-you-drop "rituals" that get their power from dramatizing the act of exhausting the dancers...... I should confess that I take step-aerobics myelf and love it and think it has improved my overall dancing -- but that's partly because I dance the class, decorate the t-step with pirouettes and beat my jumping jacks... it's helped me find the groove and abbreviate preparations from my dancing in ballet class, so I just listen to the music and GO. Maybe this post belongs on a dancer site rather than an aesthetic question thread.

In a very intersting post about Balanchine's Don Quixote, Dale wondered about its place in b's output, and onticed its hops on pointe and turned-in knees... Turned-in knees -- now there's a topic all by itself. YOu see them in Balanchine, and they look very jazzy -- lindy-hop stuff, like in Rubies and Agon ("is Boston shag, dear"). But they're also a standard feature of "Arabic" dances -- Balanchine's "Coffee," in Fokine's Arabic episode in Glinka's opera "Russlan and Lyudmila. And you see lots of pictures of Russian ballerinas from the old days on pointe in turned-in passe, looking very "I am magnificent-- you may adore me" and not jazzy at all..... What's up with turned in knees?

THis is a hot topic... hot ilike a hot potato... Stretton's comment comes with no context, so it's easy to imagine what he MIGHT mean, or what kind of (perhaps crass, or vulgar, or provincial-"colonial") mind-set it "reveals" in him). I haven't seen the Royal Ballet in SO long, I can't comment on what they need -- I saw them a lot in a great period, Sibley-Dowell-Mason-Nureyev, late 60's, when the corps had excellent pointes and there was still enough contact with Ashton that they had epaulement and complex torso work, and the great dancers were musicians on a par with the great singing actresses of the opera. The fitness question really does cut in both ways, or maybe 4 or 5 ways.... the pianist Claudio Arrau was quoted early on in the thread and another thing he's told interviewers is that he has the tradition from Beethoven (his teachers reach directly back) that the object is to keep your body completely relaxed so that no tension in your body blocks the flow of the music, which should move like electricity -- the technique requires only the muscle-response of he moment, so it's more a matter of nervous energy than muscle.... The great dancers who come to mind who danced like that are Farrell and Sibley and Kent -- Farrell had almost no muscle tone at all, her body was like custard; contrast that with the tone of Wendy Whelan, who's a fantastic dancer but MUCH more muscular.... ABout education, look how we live now... It's a crass age.... latch-key children have no monitoring of the sort that Kent had from her mother (she's said that to become a ballerina, somebody ELSE in the family has to be just as devoted to it as the would-be ballerina is; to wit the mothers of Fonteyn, Farrell, Kent... here in SanFrancisco, the mothers of Cisneros, Loscavio, Berman) I have a great weakness for Kent, flat-out adore her -- it's partly because she was the sort of person who loved ballet but also sat in a corner reading Dostoyevsky -- this aspect of her shines through in "the Unanswered Question." It's hard to find someone with the combination of gifts and appetites to be both athletic and sensitive -- that's always been rare.... But just as rare, nowadays, is the long childhood that allows a dancer to have such an education as Tallchief, Leclerq, Kent had -- they were all American princesses -- Kent's family wasn't poor, though they were nearly always broke. even more important is to have the gifts of imagination these dancers had/have.

THis is a hot topic... hot ilike a hot potato... Stretton's comment comes with no context, so it's easy to imagine what he MIGHT mean, or what kind of (perhaps crass, or vulgar, or provincial-"colonial") mind-set it "reveals" in him). I haven't seen the Royal Ballet in SO long, I can't comment on what they need -- I saw them a lot in a great period, Sibley-Dowell-Mason-Nureyev, late 60's, when the corps had excellent pointes and there was still enough contact with Ashton that they had epaulement and complex torso work, and the great dancers were musicians on a par with the great singing actresses of the opera. The fitness question really does cut in both ways, or maybe 4 or 5 ways.... the pianist Claudio Arrau was quoted early on in the thread and another thing he's told interviewers is that he has the tradition from Beethoven (his teachers reach directly back) that the object is to keep your body completely relaxed so that no tension in your body blocks the flow of the music, which should move like electricity -- the technique requires only the muscle-response of he moment, so it's more a matter of nervous energy than muscle.... The great dancers who come to mind who danced like that are Farrell and Sibley and Kent -- Farrell had almost no muscle tone at all, her body was like custard; contrast that with the tone of Wendy Whelan, who's a fantastic dancer but MUCH more muscular.... ABout education, look how we live now... It's a crass age.... latch-key children have no monitoring of the sort that Kent had from her mother (she's said that to become a ballerina, somebody ELSE in the family has to be just as devoted to it as the would-be ballerina is; to wit the mothers of Fonteyn, Farrell, Kent... here in SanFrancisco, the mothers of Cisneros, Loscavio, Berman) I have a great weakness for Kent, flat-out adore her -- it's partly because she was the sort of person who loved ballet but also sat in a corner reading Dostoyevsky -- this aspect of her shines through in "the Unanswered Question." It's hard to find someone with the combination of gifts and appetites to be both athletic and sensitive -- that's always been rare.... But just as rare, nowadays, is the long childhood that allows a dancer to have such an education as Tallchief, Leclerq, Kent had -- they were all American princesses -- Kent's family wasn't poor, though they were nearly always broke. even more important is to have the gifts of imagination these dancers had/have.

GREAT TOPIC!! SO complex, for there are so MANY reasons a phrase /step can be lost -- for example, in Giselle, KARSAVINA herself says, the ballottes should be steps of elevation -- Giselle should soar, the knees bend, the feet should disappear under her skirt, and the body rock back and forth like a bouoy (How do you spell that?) -- nowadays, when women don't build thighs the same and can't alight from high jumps softly, the emphasis is always on the extension in fondu... RE Liebeslieder, Balanchine himself recast it with the wonderful Kyra Nichols in the wonderful Violette Verdy role; I take class from Nichols's mother (the wonderful Sally Streets) and have come to know Nichols a bit -- what a nice person -- and she once told me -- so long ago, I've probably misremembered it -- that she was upset by critics who were upset that she didn't dance it like Violette did, and that she'd confided in a fellow dancer -- Nicole Hlinka, maybe -- who'd said "well, look, Mr B put you in the role. He knows, we all know, you're a very different kind of dancer from Violette, you're very light, she's very ["grounded," or something to that effect]. But he wants to see you dance it, so do it your way....' And she'd taken comfort from that. And Marie Jeanne told me that in BAllet Imperial, the tricky double swivels the ballerina now starts out with -- "I didn't do anything as set as that -- he told me (again, this conversation was 10 years ago, I don't remember word for word, but she's a wonderful conversationalist, and she said something like this) "go out there and when hte music starts, do something crazy -- so I did something -- then the piano did something, and I did something else crazy, not the same thing; it was very jazzy, it wasn't set figures --" the timing was set, but not the moves. Personally, the step I miss the most is in Tarantella, the ballerina's Suzy-Q exit at the end of one of her variations -- the one with the goofy echappes, I think -- that McBride does on the "German" tape I have. In San Fancisco Ballet's version, they replace the Suzy Q with a kind of goofy hobble-off (one foot flat, the other using the pointe), which is funny but not hilarious.... McBride doing SUzy Q makes me laugh OUT LOUD, every time, I never get over it....

I'd love to see a video of Pas de Quatre.... I remember the Trockadero versoin as a deliriously beautiful thinfg, actually beautifully danced, and hte jokes about th e odd things ballerinas DO (like walking on high half-toe, were at least as funny as the cat-fight, and hte funniest thing of all was how much I enjoyed seeing the final tableau over and over and over -- I didn't want it to end, life would be too too ordinary, and I was delighted to have applause milked out of me if they could just keep it from ending...... "Don't leave me," I could almost hear myself say it, I realized they'd made me aware that I felt it, and it made me realize what a contribution they were making....

"Watch Allegra Kent" may have been a variant of "Listen to Elisabeth Schumann sing Lieder," which Schnabel used to say to his students... Kent WAS – from many accounts still IS—a hauntingly musical dancer… the excerpts of her dancing Agon, and especially Symphony in C, shown on the “Dancing for Balanchine” video make those roles unmisunderstandable… When the big tune wells up in Symphony in C, and she dives into that adagio arabesque turn, a big emotion wells up in me; I always cry when I watch it. Very complex things like musicality are much easier to illustrate by example than to define -- Musicality and timing are almost the same thing.. dancers, singers, pianists who have a deep understanding of the kind of music they’re performing tend to know where to elide and where to separate, where to slide in early and where to stretch the phrase out long. The kind of rubato you’d use for Debussy (Claire de Lune is MARKED “tempo rubato”) is different from that you’d use for, say, the Rosenkavalier Waltz (“Mit mir”), and that’s way different from the kind you’d use for “Mack the Knife” (“The cement’s just for the weight, dear”). Balanchine’s leotard ballets all have a lot of African-derived steps – he’d worked with Katherine Dunham’s company on Cabin in the Sky (not to mention the Nicholas Brothers in Babes in Arms) and in fact, there’s lots of jazz, according to Marie Jeanne, in Concerto Barocco. When I learned Lindy hop, which is vernacular jazz dancing, I found my teachers, even in the elementary classes, showing us how to find the front of the beat and hte back of hte beat, since so much of the pleasure in Lindy is in the "play" – “Play” has always been a highly prized feature of the styles of the best Lindy dancers, from Shorty George on, since they’re improvising as they go and may well reshape the whole curve of a familiar step to stretch it onto a saxophone phrase – that’s what makes your partner laugh and the crowd go wild… The most musical dancer in hte jazz world may be Dawn Hampton, who was playing saxophone in the house band at the Savoy Ballroom back in the 50's and is thus a dancer now of a certain age, but she still wins the Lindy hop "interpretive" championships pretty much all the time, for the authority and wit of the steps she chooses to do, the things she makes you hear in the music, and hte way she plays with the onslaught and the aftertaste of the phrasing are just revelations.... All this comes to mind in thinking of Kyra Nichols’s playing with the end of the beat…. I love the way she dances. She was for a long time kind of a tomboy with fastidious accuracy and wonderful feet -- It's been great to see her temperament come into bloom. It's such a pleasure to me to see her phrasing like a jazz dancer (though re Mozartiana, I still think only Farrell's Preghiera really understands what’s going on in the music there – I've watched her performance on that video many times, and only grow more admiring -- she's really penetrated to the heart of the music. Mozart was setting a prayer, a devotion to the body of Christ, and though it’s just strings playing in Mozartiana, there are words to that tune, written by Thomas Aquinas – and that particular melody is a setting of the word death, the sentence is about the uncertain passage from this world into the next – and the way Farrell took those piques – as she said in her book, like stepping from steeple to steeple -- made me feel like shouting "Holy" – my kinesthetic identification was it was like walking in a river, against running water, that she was crossing over into Jordan and as she pulled in from arabesque into passe, she dramatized the precariousness of thie journey into the next life each step was like an act of faith….. of course, Farrell and Balanchine shared this kind of religious feeling, which I think is the key to the role, and other dancers who don’t have it may execute the steps very well, and keep in some harmony with the music, but not be really MUSICAL unless they feel the life-and-death importance of the the IDEA expressed in the music.) [ March 10, 2002, 03:54 AM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

I first heard "technician" used to describe musicians -- say a promising teen-ager who had not yet developed "temperament," or by fans of, say, Henryk Szering who were putting down Heifetz as a mere technician, lacking in soul. Looking backward, now that the dancing is better than the choreography, it's hard to remember that Margot Fonteyn did not turn well, that Pavlova could not do 32 fouettes (nor Danilova, if I remember right -- in fact, I THINK I remember her writing something almost scathing about Legnani turning like a fire-truck).... Or just think back a few years, to Stephanie Saland, a ballerina who couldn't always get the beat to happen in a cabriole -- (see Bournonville Divertissement), but who had such an IMAGINATION, such a feel for dancing... With a creature like Saland Balanchine could still do some wonderful things..... Fonteyn had very fine placement, and such a temperament.... Denby noticed of American dancers back in 1948 already that Balanchine had the gift for understanding the unconscious effect the people he worked with created, and was happy to go with it, and that as the ballets Russes dancers aged their style lost contact with the European manners that had fed it, while with the young American girls who were learning to dance, the more you just let them dance, with a limpid flow of movement, the more comfortable and therefore the more presentable they are -- Ashley's god-like perfection in Ballo della Regina is the apotheosis of this phenomenon, a shy girl who's liberated by having such challenges to conquer hte result is incandescent excellence. But he also made roles that went with the way the particular dancer's body tended to go ("Which way are you falling, dear?")...... roles that now are filled by new dancers, who have to be ABLE to make their bodies fall that way to achieve the natural phrasing the original dancer gave it... A couple of years ago when ABT was here, it was upsettin to see a gala-shaped program with lots of bravura pas de deux on it -- COrsaire and Don Q and Tchai pas -- in which only Amanda McKerrow looked happy technically. And in both Don Q and Corsaire, the ballerinas HAD to do 32 fouettes and couldn't get through them. I'm not keen on display evenings anyway, I find them exhausting, I have to PULL for everybody... won't name anybody, but it was not a good night....

One of the Denbyisms I memorized long ago - -so I've probably got it twisted by now -- was not something he wrote, but something he was reported to have said -- in response to someone who hadn't liked DOnQ and had quipped "Oh yes, it moved me -- right out of hte theater" -- Denby replied "Well, that's where you belong then.' Don Quixote the book IS full of horrible cruelties -- the Russian movie of it is very good at reproducing them, eps the scenes at court are quite unbearable..... That doesn't keep it from being one of the few truly great books. I wish I'd seen the ballet -- it's my greatest dance-regret, other than not having been myself a great dancer.... all I can say is the 2 solos of Farrell's dancing that are shown in the Farrell bio-video -- are flat-out the finest dancing I've ever seen from a pretty girl. It's in Ingmar Bergman land, but beyond -- far beyond pretty, it's far beyond beautiful -- it's not just that she's like smoke, it's not just how instantaneously she changes speed or direction, from whipping to dragging, from skipping to fleeing, from rushing to swooning -- there's a moment where she puts her hand out and it's like she touches death but grabs her hand back and flees before he grabs her--it's the changes of emotional color, of spiritual energy, it's terrifying, or would be if there wasn't some way in which she makes you feel that she's watched over by some power that will not let her come to harm. There's nobody she could teach THAT to.

Hello, DGH -- I wonder who you are. I saw you dance in the Oakland Ballet's incredible performances of Les Noces in 1981 in Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The building seemed to be exploding; the effect of the ballet was so tremendous. (The next day I bought Nijinska's Early Memoirs, which had just come out -- a very important book.) The four pianos, percussion, and choir made a noise like I'd never heard before -- the score is just as powerful as the Rite of Spring -- and the impact of the sforzandi, the sudden incredibly violent attacks of sound, were like an earthquake. The choreography lived up to it -- and the dancers were unbelievably committed, focussed, thrilling, possessed. It was probably the most exciting experience I've ever had at the ballet --literally exciting. They use toe shoes like tap shoes or Irish clogs and are HITTING the floor with them; the steps are bourrees, I guess, but htey're not light, they're heavy. EXTREME taqueterie. ALso, the rest of the program was not so great, so the power of the ballet, and of their dancing, came as a surprise -- WHAT a surprise!!! I'd had NO IDEA you could do that with ballet (which, I think, is what the poster was referring to when she said ballet is not all about tutus....) In Oakland Ballet: the First 25 Years, by the late Bill Huck, he lists the Oakland Ballet premiere as Sept 25, 1981; some of the 36 dancers: Johanna Breyer (bride), Mylene Kalhorn, Philip Sharper)(groom), Lance James [who, incidentally, was a great Billy the Kid, in a production that Loring himself preferred to all others], also Erin Leedom, Joy Gim, Mario Alonzo, and Michael Lowe. Choreologist, Juliet Kando from the Royal Ballet; production overseen by Irina Nijinska. It was big news all over the country. Huch quotes Walter Terry, who saw it performed at the Spoleto Festival: "To see the Oakland Ballet dance Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces is an enthralling, bewitching, riveting experience.... "I recall [Terry continues] the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo restaging many years ago without much pleasure, and the more recent revival by Britain's Royal Ballet with great disappointment. Jerome Robbins's wholly new version [for ABT] made many of us think that Nijinska's original was obsolete. But no more. The Oakland Ballet has resurrected a masterwork of the Diaghilev era.... "It is not simply that the Oakland Ballet has reproduced an innovative and once controversial work with care and historical accuracy. [Terry continues] To the contrary, the company dances it as if it were new, as if the dancers were relishing its primitive energies for the first time.... The company is neither as large nor as technically polished as the Royal Ballet but its crudities are assets in this production." {Huck goes on to say the following: "Irina Nijinska, the choreographer's daughter, who had come to Oakland to oversee the new production, said the same thing but more succinctly: 'I knew they would dance it well. A company that strives only for classical perfection lacks the heavy character movement needed for Diaghilev ballets.'" And I remember Joan Acocella saying something like that to a class she showed Oakland's Les Noces to in Berkeley. The Oakland Ballet also commissioned the reconstruction of Nijinska's Le Train Bleu and of Bolero (originally made for Ida Rubenstein, refashioned a bit later when a more -- ahem--accomplished dancer took the part). Le Train Bleu was very light, but they made it charming (unlike Les Biches, which required a more elegant line and better entrechat-quatres than they could muster, as well as 3 hunky guys who could do perfect entrechat-sixes.... though Julie Lowe was lovely as one of the Lesbians, and Erin Leedom was brilliant as the page boy: she did unassisted pirouettes ending in sous-sus like a knife quivering in the floor, which completely erased my memory of Laura Connor, whom I'd seen do it at Covent Garden; Monica Mason, on the other hand, as the hostess, i can still see her playing with those pearls as her feet toyed with the floor. I reviewed both Bolero and Train Bleu for Bay Area papers and will post those reviews if anyone wants to see them. About televising Les Noces: I've noticed that tap comes through on film much better than ballet -- the Nicholas Brothers, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers lose only a fraction of the excitement they must have generated in person, whereas Baryshnikov, Tallchief are NOTHING LIKE as exciting as I know from my own experience (well, at least with Baryshnikov) they were on stage. Just speculating, but I THINK this is because with tap you can HEAR the weight -- Les Noces ought to videotape well, since it is a percussive dance with the weight sent down rather than pulled up. [ March 07, 2002, 12:44 AM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

Right now I'm all stirred up about Serenade -- sorry, but this is going to be a little wild-eyed. I can't see how Denby could call it serene, for though I love it, Serenade upsets me so. I find it equally formal and emotional -- the first movement is like rip-tides, the "running-dancers" are surging around the "static-dancers" like waves dashing against rocks -- at times, then the formations dissolve and it's like weather in the sky, with storms butting against each other.... and nobody ever slows down long enough for you to make a connection with her before the turmoil takes over again. It's all in the music, the more counterpoint in the strings, the more agitation in the dancers, ESP when hte bass starts churning in chromatic patterns, and ESPECIALLY when the strings get plucked instead of bowed -- the girls keep peeling off that pack they've gotten themselves into in the back left corner running out and racing round each other.... Whenever we get a good look at a single person, she's always jumping or turning in intricate ways -- the first girl alone on the stage does continuous fouette-sautes, then pique-fouettes with her arms surging forwards; the second comes jumping in from the right after hte double bar and does fan kicks and then colossal pique ballonnes backing away from us with her skirts flying up all around her, the Russian girl again comes in and does "entrechat-sixe soutenu" a couple of times and THEN does a version of Polyhymnia's double pique-turns-to arabesque, they're all going non-stop, you can't find an apron-string on a single one of THEM.... It's highly formal, the first half of the first movement ends with a semicircle and just as it comes full circle, you get literally a full circle of dancers wheeling round the stage, every one a ballerina doing a manege of pique turns -- and we still haven't had a dancer step forward long enough -- or stop still long enough -- to single out and connect with, until the grove pattern re-establishes itself and the ballerina comes in and finds her place and starts that marvelous ritual, as hte other girls walk out exiting to the left, and the danseur comes in stage right, comes up to our girl, taps her on the shoulder, and she swoons..... The whole thing reminds me of dreams I've had ever since I went overseas to school and didn't KNOW anybody -- I was in this heightened state the whole time, very high, ungrounded, felt like my soul was "out there," exposed, in hte wind, always looking for someone to connect with so I could calm down. I wonder if Balanchine felt like that when he arrived in America -- I'd swear there's a feeling of crossing the Atlantic in the ballet -- though he'd of course been virtually on his own since HE was boarded at school.... There's something "WRONG" with the corner down right -- I guess it doesn't matter what, Hitler maybe -- like some horrible sun is rising on a BAD DAY over there, and there must be something comforting about the opposite corner up-left -- the girls keep running over there and huddling (it's where the men come from, it feels like there must be some reason for that). It's SO romantic -- not in any pale boy meets girl they move to New Rochelle kind of way, it's tempestuous, like Shelley's Ode to the West Wind: O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being; THou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing..... O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 10 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill; Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver: hear, O hear! [ March 05, 2002, 11:51 PM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

Mary I am so grateful to you........ right now, I'm speechless -- I've got to sleep on this......... Why do I care so?

Well, maybe there's BEEN a Serenade topic and I just haven't found my way to that thread...... (And I'm not complainging about the "Sleeping Beauty" thread - I'm fascinated, and all you who've had a chance to see the Kirov should -- PLEASE -- keep at it, post any observations and all that come to mind about it..... DId it have a BIG FOUNTAIN when the Lilac Fairy came to the rescue? You can hear it in her music -- what was it like? Has anybody else ever thought of Aurora's balances in the Rose Adagio as rising like a fountain, for I remember Elizabeth Loscavio just rising out of the ground like a fountain.... But ... I'm eager to know about Serenade.... how much has it changed since White Plains? did Balanchine choreograph all 4 movements for the Warburg estate performance? when did the pirouettes>Giselle whirls come in, how far back do they go? I think it's generally thought that Balanchine tinkered with it a lot over time, but is that so? How has it grown? Has any ballerina ever dominated it? Anybody remember what RUthanna Boris was like in it? or Allegra or Maria or Tanny? or Gisella Caccialanza? Paul [ March 03, 2002, 11:16 PM: Message edited by: Paul Parish ]

Congratulations -- so glad your project turned out wlel, and that you got INTO it... Just curious, why you picked Kilian? Paul

thanks Dirac -- but did you realize that that video is not the movie but something in hte "Making of" series: On Your Toes: ...The Making Of George Balanchine's groundbreaking 1936 work that featured music by Rodgers and Hart is staged by choreographer Larry Fuller. Along with Haydee, the cast includes Birgit Keil, Randy Diamond, Vladimir Klos. Do you know anything about these productions? Paul

you guys slay me.... Mussell, that's fantastic. Comparisons are odorous, so I'll just say it's up there with Cygne's astounding tale.... Paul