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The Mundy book makes it clear that there were plenty of interesting things happening on this 'side of the pond', in code-breaking terms, so I have to think that it is either more of a political issue, or a cultural issue.

I'd love to hear what you think about it (once you get to that book). There's lots of interesting bits, even with the structural and stylistic issues I mentioned. I had previously read a number of the books about the British code breaking group at Bletchley Park. I'm not sure why Americans have been so slow to pick up the subject here in the US. One thing the American intelligence workers and their British counterparts have in common is a remarkable acceptance of the need for secrecy and to keep their word that they would never speak about what went on in these facilities, ever. Mundy points out that many of the women still refused to say much of anything in detail about what transpired at work in the code rooms. The interesting thing is that the N.S.A. publicly gave permission for WWII coders/code breakers to speak about their work. But for many of the people of that generation, 'your word is your word', and they have been happy to go to their graves having said nothing in particular about their experiences.

Code Girls by Liza Mundy is a worthwhile read about a part of American history that was secret for many years: American code breaking efforts during WWII. And since the book speaks primarily about the many, many women involved in this effort, and how this was part of the general 'women to work' movement that helped to fuel the war effort, it fits in well with current examinations of the role of women in Western culture. Code Girls provides useful information about the massive, and ultimately permanent, structural changes to the American economy occurring during and after the war. The notion that women could have careers too, began to take root at this time. The book is timely in its discussion of women in the workplace, and in this case, women entering into what was a purely patriarchal environment - the military. We also get to hear about various inter-service and agency rivalries in the U.S. military. Another reminder that even during a 'national crisis', when a country is 'fighting for its very survival', there is still an incredible amount of in-fighting and self-serving activity going on. [Samples from the text] 'The women were told that just because they were female, that did not mean they would not be shot if they told anybody what they were doing. They were not to think their sex might spare them the full consequences for treason in wartime. If they went out in public and were asked what they did, they were to say they emptied trash cans and sharpened pencils. Some would improvise their own answers, replying lightly that they sat on the laps of commanding officers. People readily believed them. For a young American, it was all too easy to convince an inquiring stranger that the work she did was menial, or that she existed as a plaything for the men she worked for." "Almost everybody thought we were nothing but secretaries," one of the women would say years later.' 'In May 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt urged the Navy to get a move on. So did First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, joined by advocacy groups such as the American Association of University Women. Barnard's Virginia Gildersleeve and other college leaders also pushed. It was an uphill battle. “If the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women," Gildersleeve acidly remarked later.' 'During this effort Betty was assigned to take some code recoveries to a high-priority room, where she opened a door and was shocked to see a man waiting to receive it who was Japanese… …Determined to hold out to the last, Betty refused to surrender the material she was holding. The man laughed graciously. "I'm an American," he assured her. He was Nisei, an American citizen of Japanese heritage, working as a translator. "You don't look like one," she blurted in her exhaustion, and felt sorry about that remark for the rest of her life.' "It was only now that Jimmie Lee understood the import of the work she was doing. When she asked for leave to attend her husband's funeral in Oklahoma, her request was denied. There were other bombe [early computer] operators getting the same telegrams, and they could not all be allowed to leave. Jimmie Lee stayed at her post. Her father died not long after. She was never able to go home and unburden herself, never able to talk to her father about how much she missed her husband. Nor had she been able to tell her own father good-bye." "Not long after, Alethea Chamberlain came to her station, sat down, and put on her headphones. She was a WAC intercept operator at Two Rock Ranch, a listening station the Signal Corps maintained near Petaluma, California, in a a beautiful agricultural area north of San Francisco. It was a nice posting: the intercept operators could hitchhike into San Francisco. Chamberlain began fiddling with her dial, trying to pick up the Hiroshima station she received. Hiroshima sent out a very good signal. Now all she got was dead air. There was nothing at all. She could not figure out why this was or what had gone wrong, why there was no signal at all coming from Hiroshima." It isn't a perfect book, and in some ways Mundy appears to have taken on too much, since she runs into structural problems trying to cover so much disparate information as well as biographical references to many different individual women. She doesn't have the narrative gift of a Laura Hillenbrand, or long before her, Barbara Tuchman. Tuchman had an especially uncanny ability for successfully threading together discussions of complex ideas with riveting accounts of real events and the personalities involved in them, and doing so in a well organized narrative. Mundy also has a tendency to use colloquialisms so as to create a looser, conversational tone for the work, but I have a problem with history writing that sounds the least bit offhand or presumptive about the events it is describing, and assumes too much on behalf of the reader. In my opinion, historians should never simply assume readers have adequate background information on a subject. As an example of what I'm referring to: "As GIs liberated concentration camps, the world would learn the full horror that had unfolded in Dachau and Buchenwald, a permanent stain on human history." >> This is her only specific reference to the Nazi concentration camps in the book, and it reads that Dachau and Buchenwald are either the only camps, or the only ones worth mentioning. Not a huge deal perhaps, but it sounds a little too sloppy. And I immediately wondered if in the thousands (maybe millions) of intercepted and decoded Axis diplomatic and military message transmissions there weren't references to at least the "work camps" that were set up to support the Nazi war effort. But I don't recall this being mentioned. Of course, if the Allied governments knew in advance about what was going on in these special 'camps' that would be fodder for a whole other book. Here's the New York Times book review: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/books/review/liza-mundy-code-girls-world-war-ii.html

Here's a video of Vanessa Zahorian and Davit Karapetyan's new studio home for the Pennsylvania Ballet Academy. Pretty nice for a regional ballet studio.

OK, that's a little weird. But certainly diverse. I have to wonder though if kids aren't still selecting a doll based solely on how it looks (and is costumed), rather than on a description like, "Polish journalist Martyna Wojciechowska". Note the absence of Russian female 'icons'. Was that too controversial to deal with?

From a recent article: 'The Ballet Position website quoted anonymous dancers who said Hernández had become “cocky” about his status, turning up late for classes. Fellow dancers fear he acts as a “second pair of eyes ready to report back” to Rojo. “It makes people feel very uncomfortable and stops dancers talking freely among themselves,” it was claimed. …ENB dancers have also complained of feeling bullied into working while injured. But Rojo said: “We couldn’t recognise our company in that description. People had left, yes, but we felt it was explicable because a lot of change had been going on. We didn’t feel it was unnatural, that there was anything to be concerned about.”' Nothing about this strikes me as being unique to ENB though - unfortunate yes, but not atypical for a workplace full of different personalities and relationships.

Probably too early to talk about guest artists, but who knows? I think Masha is just "helping" at this point. ;) Maybe this will be your one chance to see Yuan Yuan Tan before her retirement - she could be the Snow Queen as a guest. Choreographers always need dancers to work out ideas and demonstrate, and Possokhov has long worked with certain SFB dancers in creating his new works (so I don't think it's a slight to the Atlanta Ballet dancers). I can only imagine how much work there will be to create a new Nutcracker...

To kick things off for Program 5: Celebrating Jerome Robbins: 3/20 Helgi Tomasson and Patricia McBride, two of Robbins’ most celebrated interpreters, discuss Robbins, his work, and his legacy. The year-long celebration of Jerome Robbins comes to San Francisco with SF Ballet’s Program 05: Robbins: Ballet and Broadway (March 20–25). Before the first performance, join Helgi Tomasson, Patricia McBride, Jean-Pierre Frohlich, and Ellen Sorrin as they share their memories and discuss Robbins’ work on the centennial anniversary of his birth. https://www.sfballet.org/explore/classes-events/celebrating-jerome-robbins Who's It For? Patrons who want to learn more about Jerome Robbins, his legacy, and his connection to SF Ballet. Fees General Public: $15 Dates March 20 5:30–6:30 pm Location Taube Atrium Theater Wilsey Center for Opera 401 Van Ness Avenue San Francisco CA 94102

Here are the 4 short videos promised for February 28th: Unbound On Screen "As part of Unbound, we’ve partnered four festival choreographers with film directors to create short dance films inspired by the emotional impact, daring physicality, and artistic expression of these new ballets." Annabelle Lopez Ochoa - Guernica DANCERS Myles Thatcher Dores André Solomon Golding Julia Rowe Dwight Rhoden - Let's Begin at the End DANCERS Angelo Greco Frances Chung Ulrik Birkkjaer Jennifer Stahl Benjamin Freemantle Sasha De Sola Esteban Hernandez Cathy Marston - Snowblind DANCERS Ulrik Birkkjaer Mathilde Froustey Sarah Van Patten Alonzo King - The Collective Agreement DANCERS Sofiane Sylve Tiit Helimets Max Cauthorn Ana Sophia Scheller James Sofranko Jahna Frantziskonis Solomon Golding

I just noticed that the SFB home page advertisement for Frankenstein has some live motion effects - good idea! https://www.sfballet.org/

Lonnie Week's photo of Dores Andre in her Ochoa ballet bull horns "Mess with the bull and you get the horns"

Maria Kochetkova of SFB posted this on Instagram: BalletRusse: Meanwhile in San Francisco with Yuri. It’s never too early to start getting ready for Christmas #yuriposskohov @gnedvigin @atlantaballet #poom What I get from this video: Possokhov is trying to impress Nedvigin with his ideas for the Atlanta Ballet Nutcracker. Kochetkova likes to poke fun at Possokhov. Yuri Possokhov looks to have been eating too many Christmas dinners. ;) Nedvigin can't help wondering how much this is going to cost.

Jennifer Stahl posted a series of images and quick videos referring to Program 2 https://www.instagram.com/p/BfnIAuTjX20/?taken-by=jenstahl.weitz

Froustey's recent Instagram post regrading Muriel Maffre and Tiit Helimets ("one of the best partners I ever danced with") reminded me of a Helimets interview in which he talks about the pride he takes in partnering (something few modern danseurs talk about). The great danseurs always learn to care about partnering. The "good" ones are often stuck at that level due to their partnering issues. San Francisco Ballet principal Tiit Helimets speaks with Youth Arts in Action mentor Maria Sascha

I don't dislike POB performances of Balanchine to the degree some do. I'm mostly entertained by watching how the French School approaches neo-classical works by Balanchine and Robbins. I basically agree with Canbelto's statements above - what the POB dancers often lack (in Balanchine works) is the requisite 'attack', musical timing (they tend to accent musical phrases differently from NYCB dancers, while the best NYCB dancers appear to 'get inside' the music and play with it), and don't always pay enough attention to the movement and flow between positions (but better than the Russians do in these ballets). The POB dancers don't "eat space" in the same manner that a Tiler Peck, Mearns, Reichlen, Hyltin etc. can do - I think the French dancers just have a different approach to stage presentation, and that's OK with me. But the best performances of Balanchine roles are still happening in the U.S., imo. The changing and deletion of choreographic steps (presumably to make things 'easier' for the dancers) is just wrong-headed. What does it mean to say that a dancer has learned a role, for example the Mimi Paul role in Emeralds, but doesn't perform the same steps normally associated with the role? And it's not a case of learning an older Balanchine version, rather than the last/final version. If a company is going to take on a Balanchine ballet, they should be willing to train the necessary amount of time to learn the choreography. Otherwise it looks like the ballet isn't being taken seriously, or the dancers don't have what it takes. But the issue is rarely one of talent, but of proper training in Balanchine techniques and steps. I don't think people get that as much time as it takes to prepare for dancing Odile/Odette or Aurora roles, it takes a lot of time to get comfortable with many iconic Balanchine roles. If Tiler Peck still has roles she hasn't quite figured out, then no one else should be assuming there's a fast track to learning these parts.

An Unlikely Youth Revolution at the Paris Opera By TOBIAS GREYFEB. 19, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/arts/music/paris-opera-young-audiences.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts "According to the company, it had 95,000 audience members younger than 28 last season — more than 10 percent of tickets sold and 30,000 more than just two years before." “What I think was a mistake at the opera was for many years to persist with a number of productions which were locked into purely vocal performance,” Mr. Lissner said. “Today’s spectators are looking for more than that. They want to experience something theatrical as well. That’s what brings young people to the opera.”

This is fun: Tiit Helimets warms up to a violinist rehearsing:

Mathilde Froustey has posted a notice that, due to a family emergency, the Wednesday, Feb. 21st show will be her last Program 2 & 3 show - she will be flying back to France. https://www.instagram.com/p/BfWkz3hH9MG/?taken-by=lapetitefrench_ She dances again in Program 5 (the Robbins program).

Great information, Quiggin. Yes, that's the kind of person to employ if one has an agenda, or 'viewpoint' to maintain. It doesn't sound like a simple fact-finding mission; rather, the board is worried about containing fallout from the accusations (naturally). But is this the best way to go about getting statements from employees? Presumably Hoey pressed the accusers in ways that would help her decide if they had a strong case to use in court against Martins - and she felt their accusations wouldn't hold up. That's always going to be a problem with complaints over an event from years past: there often isn't much beyond hearsay and the memories of one or two witnesses, and those things can be made to look shaky by a good trial lawyer. I never got the sense that Kelly Cass Boal was lying - the information was just too specific, and plausible.

Here's a review of Program 2 from Heather Desaulnier at DanceTabs: http://dancetabs.com/2018/02/san-francisco-ballet-serenade-the-chairman-dances-rodeo-san-francisco/ [Serenade] "It was Mathilde Froustey that stole this performance of Serenade. Absolutely remarkable, with technique emanating from another dimension – suspended balances, precise directional changes, turns that finished with the accent up rather than down. Froustey soared through Balanchine’s choreography, and in her solos and variations, the focus wasn’t solely on the final shapes (though they were impressive). Froustey danced the transitions." And Froustey's Instagram comment: "OMG. Thank you so much DanceTabs for this amazing review. I don’t think I ever got a review like that !!!!. Exactly 1year ago I was with crutches and boot after my foot injury. In fact I was thinking of quitting dancing. I knew the recovery was going to be very long, I knew I was going to have to almost relearn how to dance and going back on stage seemed so far away... I didn’t think I was strong enough to take it. I’m back on stage, happier than ever thanks to some amazing people who guided me through this journey.. Thank you from all my heart to my 'team' who created this positive and friendship cocoon and worked hard with me to put me back on stage"

I doubt we will ever see a transcript of these interviews. For the investigations to be taken seriously though, it's important for the questions and the demeanor of the investigator to be as neutral as possible. When the interviewee feels that they are being questioned by a prosecutor, rather than an investigator simply gathering facts, then things go awry. It's not about demonstrating "sympathy" per se - it should have been made clear that the company needed to know everything they could about these 'harassment' episodes. “Ostrovsky's comment, She wasn’t blatantly discrediting me, but it felt like she was suggesting that maybe I didn’t experience that” is a description of what court prosecutors do routinely as part of their job. I kind of tripped up on this statement from Earle Mack: “It was a kind of knee-jerk reaction,” Mr. Mack said, “and he did not deserve that kind of treatment after 34 years of his life running the company, rebuilding the company.” Many people would suggest that it was Martins who let various things lapse in the company before "rebuilding" it to a more secure position years later.

As I was reading the article I kept thinking, "define corroborate, please". There were witnesses to a few of these occurrences. And that's always the tricky part in a legal proceeding - finding reliable, believable (by a jury) witnesses. It's always a problem when the interviewer betrays a bias.

I don't think this was linked to before: NYCB dancing Symphony in C with Allegra Kent (1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn1ZVGp0plc Oh the joys of dancing on a concrete floor. ;)

Excellent sleuthing, Sandik - I think you may be right.

SFB just sent out an email reminder about their upcoming 2/17/2018 (Saturday) 5:00pm Panel Discussion. Ballet Talk: Distinctly SF: A Panel Discussion on New Work in San Francisco "Join us Saturday, February 17 for a lively 60-minute panel discussion about the legacy of new work in San Francisco featuring representatives from SF’s dance scene and current and former artists of the Company. Oh, and have a complimentary glass of wine with guests and speakers while you’re there! Tickets are selling fast, so hurry and get yours today!" https://www.sfballet.org/season/events/ballet-talk-sfb-0227/options