Michael

Absolutely. That was a deeply emotional performance. She's very young, I don't think Fairchild can be more than 22 or 23 -- She's amazingly strong technically, everything finished perfectly, everything proceeding in complete coordination from a perfect center. The question for her is one of emotional depth, of projecting self -- That's what she connected to in Baiser, a work where she had no one else's exemplar in front of her to distract. Often these days it looks to me that she's been watching Bouder project -- her Dewdrop for example shows Bouder's phrasing. But Fairchild as Fairchild has more than enough oomph. She's an extraordinary dancer.

I'm getting to this late but, regarding last Thursday -- the Ringer, Neal, Kowroski cast -- Maria Kowroski did, I thought, a fine job of putting Dewdrop over as a whole for the audience, despite it being an incredibly difficult bit of casting for her. Whatever technical notes one may have on her performance, the Flower Waltz achieved a very good result -- both that dance and Nutcracker as a whole succeeded as an experience, and surely that is the most important standard. She emphasized the parts that come naturally to her -- the balances in high attitude alongee for instance; phrased very well and musically throughout; was engaged on stage, warm and passionate; danced lyrically within the piece. And what I particularly liked, she didn't try to blow by the hard parts and the stuff that doesn't come easily to her -- the jumped pas de chats for example -- instead she appeared to gulp down a deep breath of air and attack them. I liked the approach. Speaking of not avoiding the hard parts -- does anyone who dances Arabian still try to do the pirouettes on bent knee in the coda? That's a lovely bit, a challenge in that role: I hate to see it drop out of the choreography, yet in two years I haven't now seen a dancer attempt them. One other note about that performance was how well Jennifer Ringer phrased her dance at the beginning of Act II, the one to the concertina with the Angels on stage. She was brilliant in that musically. You almost never see that well danced: the key to the phrasing is the stops, the "held pauses" in the melody when Sugarplum consistently spots in a series of balances straight downstage center into the audience. See the old footage of Mary Ellen Moylan dancing the role. Ringer got that just right, better than anyone in years. Also, while everyone is waxing enthusiastic about the strong crop of apprentices, don't forget Tabitha Rinko-Gay -- she's one who is surprising me with her strength.

Very interesting, such a different context, I imagine it would markedly change the way I saw it, taking it from a formal ballet to a surreal, or symbolic one, or maybe surreal narrative would be the phrase.

Everything was well rehearsed and performed -- The company as a whole was very impressive. Look how deep and well trained they are: a strong group of apprentices – one apprentice, K. Morgan dancing a principal role in Carousel; a young corps de ballet with great placement, style and depth on both sides of the dressing rooms (Seth Orza danced a principal role opposite K. Morgan; the senior women’s corps is now Labean, Laracey, Keenan, Barak, Muller, Flack, Beskow, Riggins, Walker, etc. – great look, superbly musical, beautifully and uniformly trained and placed and everyone in great shape – the corps de ballet has a company style now that is unprecedented in recent memory); a strong and definite group of soloists, both the official ones and those who solo de facto (e.g., Reichlen, Scheller, Peck, Ulbricht, Ramassar, Riggins, Krohn, Jon Stafford – you won't find a stronger group in any other company, here or abroad; and superb principal dancing last night and a spread of ages here too (Neal, Taylor, Evans, Kowroski, Nichols, Whelan, Sylve, Bouder, Woetzel), even though half the principals didn’t dance (Weese, Fairchild, Hubbe, Kistler, Ringer, Somogyi, etc.). The sole lack is the need for one or two more strong principal men – but that’s not unique to this company either. It’s been years since the company opened a season looking this good, strong and deep. Let’s see now what they do with it, six weeks of Nutcracker, alas, pay the bills. I very much liked the Ratmansky, and Kowroski and Evans in it. Ratmansky has a gift for silhouette and form, and for using the personalities of his dancers. It was inventive and fresh without being ugly or straining after effect. Always classical. Who were the principal dancers this was made on?

Even on DVD, the blocking in Act I of the Royal Danish Ballet's Napoli is amazingly good. The narrative is carried forward from incident to incident within the crowd, with the Ballabile worked in too, and a whole lot of other incidental stuff as well -- It's just so incredibly good, your eye is always directed to what you need to see. Its the sequence, and how the crowd opens and closes and swirls on the stage to provide the focus.

That approach is often true of Julie Kent, I remember one of her Giselle's a couple of years ago when all of the double pirouettes (in the Spissetskeva [impossible for me to spell] version) turned into singles and I did think that it mattered. The question is a good one: It's not what to think of a few mistakes but "What to think when a dancer leaves out the hard stuff?" And I don't know the answer can be general. It depends, I suppose, on what specific hard stuff is left out in what specific role, and whether you care varies accordingly.

Whether or not Part had a technical lapse or two, and I really didn't see one, she was beautiful. The Viola role is a lovely one for her -- she is such a lyrical dancer: melody; the flowing legato nature of a violin or a viola, that's her greatest interpretive gift. She's got that beautiful long line, the extensions, and not just the way she uses her feet and legs, it's in her arms and hands also: and the way she carries her line and her movement through her back, there's never any break in her motion or in the visual picture she arrives at. (It doesn't really matter to me anyway that a dancer dances perfectly clean as long as the bumps in the road don't distract from the overall performance -- of course I understand that this is precisely what we are discussing here -- That people above did find something distracting -- It just didn't interfere at all with my appreciation I guess).

I liked the contrast between Wiles and Part in the Balanchine. It's great to see this work. It relates, I think, to both Serenade and particularly to Theme and Variations. Drink to Me was beautiful on Sat. Afternoon. -- I had forgotten how lovely this ballet is. The materials may be slight -- at times the general composition reminds me of Harold Lander's Etudes, just variations across the stage. But with slight embellishment, adding a little here and there, another couple posed while someone does a diagonal; etc.; a trio here; two couples there ... Morris makes a gem out of it. The lyricisim of the Virgil Thompson composition, the limpid clarity of Morris's dance writing, it's a perfect translation, more ... something is added by Morris, it's more than the sum of the two. I will see this again. Paloma Herrera was terrific in it also, first the strength of the escapes to point, then tearing around the stage in a manege of pique turns and the last lift of her by David Hallberg took the breath away. It's very good to see M. Bystrova and K. Boone getting something to dance (Boone had a lot last fall so it's really Bystrova who got a major dance part in Morris instead of only being the Countess or something in Giselle -- Bystrova is a Ballerina type with impeccable Kirov training [if they haven't let it rust out of her and apparently yesterday it hadn't]; Kristi Boone was in my opinion the one woman to come out of Glow Worm with honor, practically the only one too you could recognize in the gloom; while not the most classical body, she has the most superb musical responses, strength and flow) and they and Isaac Stappas, too, in Morris yesterday had to remind one that all came out of ABT Studio Co together five years or so back. I must say, this would be a more interesting company if more of the younger dancers got more in the Spring.

That definition is very wide dramatically, however, wide enough to accomodate La Bayadere, Raymonda, La Fille Mal Gardee, Don Q, Napoli and many other works. The tent of classical dance accomodates a great deal of theater and a great deal of drama. It's an important point to make because the argument that ballet is not "realistic" is easily distorted or easily trends into the view that it is therefore "idealized" and "abstract" or something like that by nature and that is not true. I don't think that anyone advocates for the view that ballet is by its nature limited to the idealizations of ballet blanc -- La Bayadere or Don Q utilize the device of one of the characters dreaming up a ballet blanc to work one in, but those ballets are examples of how the form accomodates much more than the portrayal of idealized beings and scenes.

While we're at it, did anyone else see Jones' "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin" at Fall for Dance last week? (I didn't). From the description Tom Phillips' gives of it, ending with "The Last Supper as a Lynching Party"[,] the term "Victim Art" does not seem inappropriate. Forget about Croce -- Phillips seems to have found a good example in the plot of this dance. If you have a narrative art that centers on displaying the suffering of a protagonist, and the moral, ethical, religeous, or emotional lessons to be learned -- either by the audience or by the protagonist him or herself (it matters little) -- what else would you call it? Come to think of it, Jones stayed pretty close to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" -- a book that was about as polemical and sentimental a drama as you could have had in its day, that reached the level of propaganda in a sense, and that had large part in making the Civil War. MP

What use, if any, has been made of the ballet music from Tchaikiovsky's The Maid of Orleans? David Brown, in his critical biography of the composer, says of it: "Of course there are some positive things in The Maid of Orleans - even some fine ones . . . [The] ballet includes some worthwhile music, the dance for pages and dwarfs making a sudden retreat towards the eighteenth century for another of Tchaikovsky's rococo stylizations, while the final tumblers' dance, vigorous and characterful, provides by far the best instrumental movement in the whole opera." The "another of [his] rococo stylizations" is the way Brown describes the score for Orchestral Suite "Mozartiana" by the way. Makes me intrigued about the incidental music from "The Maid" and what's been done with it dance-wise apart from the opera.

Very well put Farrell Fan -- A lyrical and expressive voice too in this repertory -- Which allowed him to grow in a very different way -- Actually, this is off topic, but I'd really also like to see him be given the chance to Direct some Balanchine or even some Bournonville at this company. They give everyone else the chance to choreograph but Hubbe has skills as a director that are related to his skills as a teacher (he does I believe give good company classes on occasion and has also taught at SAB) and wouldn't I love to see a Sylphide on this company with Janie Taylor and Ashley Bouder alternating as the Sylphs, and Jenny Ringer and Miranda Weese alternating as Effie.

I agree -- Good examples are on the CD of La Sylphide with Nikolaj Hubbe and Lis Jeppesen. The batterie is very clear and I wouldn't say it's small either. The movements are very large yet effortlessly done. And it's not just entrechats either, it's every kind of beat, especially the big closed beats to the ankle done with the entire leg. Hubbe is a different dancer on this CD than what he became. Age and injuries to his knees took their tole of course. He gained stardom but lost his technique in NY. This is an amazing view of him, he was an extraordinarily fine dance actor too and that also was something utterly unused in his new milieu. But at least no one could say to him, "If you're so special, why are you still here?" He wasn't.

Most ballet choreographers tend also to be/have been professional ballet dancers. Almost anyone who has spent ten to twenty years training and performing ballet can string together a dance in a way that looks very nice to an audience, that looks like "ballet," and that looks really good when performed by the likes of these dancers. Almost any company member at NYCB, given a good live string quartet and Ashley Bouder, Sean Suozzi, Wendy Whelan, Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans, would make a dance that the audience would respond to as professional and be happy to see. Me included. A frame of reference for judging whether a performance like Works in Progress is better than this would be, how much does it differ or does it achieve more than what anyone trained in ballet probably would accomplish given these resources? It's at that point that questions of structure and progression, of how the piece fits together, and of how it compares with other work enters the picture.

Exactly. So why does he insist on essaying this classicism? Wouldn't it have been much more interesting to see what he did with a full length Sylvia on his own company? That I'd pay to see.

On Wed. night, I thought Yuan Tan very impressive. Lovely feet, beautiful beautiful line, deep positions, and dramatically alive. Act II of the Ballet is the best. Morris had an original idea there and worked in his own idiom and Yuan Tan and Possokhov were most interesting. The final tableau was quite uplifting. As for the rest: Morris is not a ballet choreographer of great skill by training or experience. He is a great choreographer in his own material but ballet isn't his metier. His ballet here, the enchainements and staging is rudimentary and thin and at times amateurish. A big mistake was to cut the stage to such shallow depth. The processionals in Act III had no punch. The material for the fauns and satyrs at the opening, likewise. There were few variations so no comment on that. But the pas in Act III was student level with a few pyrotechnical tricks thrown in. What I thought of the Gay Svengali Eros I can't say. This will and has sold tickets because it's Morris doing Sylvia. It should not have been done. Do Act II as a short piece. MP

Reyes Wednesday also brought out the best in Corella. It is a superb partnership because they have a similar value, key or tonal range, specific gravity, something like that. Were they trained together in Madrid? They look like a couple who have danced together for a century. As for his handling of Vishneva: Partnering Vishneva is like Wrestling with an Alligator

Kathryn Morgan is a superb young dancer and will do well as Juliet. My comment was not a comment about her. It was totally a propos of the institution. On the other hand -- We should not underestimate the institutional "pull' towards keeping the girls in the corps "in the corps." You are first rehearsing and now performing Swan Lake, for example, dozens of roles, leads in every national dance, plus a large corps de ballet. Rosemary Dunleavy (the ballet mistress who does the corps de ballet there) in such a context is probably going to resist having anyone important taken out of her mix, which she has worked like a beaver (and worked the dancers like beavers too) to achieve. An apprentice coming into the company on the other hand is cost free from this point of view, she can be rehearsed as Juliet without impeding anyone or anything else being performed. Thus, plausibly (at least), casting like this. But I will bet that there are a dozen other young dancers who would have been happy to do it, and I for one would have been completely happy to see them do it. Now good luck to Ms. Morgan all the same --

How nicely calculated to make all the other young women, who have been killing themselves since last November's Nutcracker time, feel good about things.

Baiser de La Fee was beautifully performed on Sunday afternoon -- Megan Fairchild and Joaquin de Luz were the principals and in fact I believe off the top of my head that they have had every performance of this both this Winter and this Spring. They have this ballet pretty nearly perfect at the moment, in comparison to anything I can remember in recent years (the comparison being certain Peter Boal and Margaret Tracy performances, in one's mind's eye). The corps de ballet too is extraordinarily crisp and well rehearsed in this right now. De Luz is partnering Fairchild much much better in general than he was earlier in their joint career and also gives a strong dramatic reading. He is modest, thoughtful, at moments exuberant, then restrained and fate-struck. Fairchild is at first exterior, doll-like, then increasingly and paradoxically human and constrained to emotion. Her expression, both their's really, at the moment when she is "called" to another world by the entrance of an orchestral theme, was so convincingly done -- The use of her eyes at that instant, the change of expression were very striking. Then a long pace into backbends, in there somewhere also she embraces him at the waist in the deepest of backbends. One also remembers his earlier tour of the stage into little stumbling drops to the knee, his hand brushing the floor forward in a flourish. Lovely performance. I don't expect to see trhis better performed than they are doing this right now, at least for a long, long time. Andrea Quinn also conducts Stravinsky well, she is at her best in that. Earlier Sunday the Ratmansky cancelled for one performance to give the dancers some needed rest, one hopes. Barocco and Tchai pas were substituted and in the latter Ana Sophia Scheller gave a very strong performance. A new cast also went into Fearful with a strong debut by Carrie Riggins in one of the principal roles, and also by Jennie Somogyi and Maria Kowroski -- This is a most interesting and arresting cast. A good day. Unexpectedly and quietly, with many younger dancers going into roles, and distraction and competition across the plaza, the company is dancing at a strong peak right now.

Depending on the numbers they need, they often hold a younger dancer or two back for another year at the school, and those dancers get to the company during Nut season instead of Saratoga -- as with Jennelle Manzi and perhaps some others this year, who didn't become apprenticed (if they ever did) until December of January, but who are now in the company. If the dancers are young enough for another SAB year, apprenticeship after the workshop is not the last word. Apprenticeships now mean how many do they need for Saratoga, who has employment elsewhere, and who comes back to SAB in the Fall.

The Russian Seasons = Les Noces at a Gathering.

Thanks for that as it's very important to get it right and one was only following the program. Those two girls were lovely and impressive. Which girl was which, i.e., which Fecto and which Baden? One was noticeably taller than the other. Though it's hard to describe people in print. I do think that Square Dance was a little bit of an odd choice for a Workshop Piece --Because it's so very devilishly hard and tricky of a ballet. The most you can ask of a student performer, even the most gifted one, is that they get through it credibly -- To deliver more than that require strength and maturity that are simply impossible for any dancer young enough to be at SAB. The last time they did that -- used a piece which required mature Ballerina presence -- was when they did Ballo Della Regina with the Jessica Flynn, Ana Sophia Scheller, Megan Fairchild casting. The students did that very well too -- but it was a ballet that in principal required more strength and maturity than seventeen to eighteen year olds can ever bring.

The students did a lovely job with Bourree Fantasque on Sat. Afternoon: Western Symphony meets La Valse in parts 1 and 2 and then the two of them breed and produce an offspring, part 3. Meagan Mann and Masahiro Suehara had the first, Western-reminiscent, movement: next to him she appears very tall, of course, and in any event she is both very flexible in her back and very very musical and flowing in her response to music. A legato dancer. The Prelude, the La Valse-reminiscent section, was just beautiful -- I think it's the gem in this ballet. The girls spaced over the stage in deep bends with the arms en couronne, two soloists doing the same more prominently in front but with a slightly modern edge to the movement (Gabriel Baden and Lauren Brown -- very good thank you) and then the principal couple: Leah O'Conner and Justin Peck. Very fine performance by them. Some courage there too -- There are those successive pirouettes by the principal young woman in a big unsupported attitude rear, with the turn ending in a pose in attitude on pointe. They are something like the diving penchees in the Nutcracker Pas in that the ballerina launches into to the turn (ending in a pose which must be supported) alone on stage and on faith, with her partner rushing in from a distance to support her at the end only. The first set of turns was a little rocky. The next two perfect. O'Conner is very appealing, it's a fast adagio where there has to be a lot of musical feeling, which she has. The 3d section, Fete Polonaise, is the offspring of the other two, the Western and La Valse contingents criss crossing and weaving through each other -- The cast here was Lola Cooper and Daniel Baker and again a strong job by both of them. Cooper does everything well, jumps, point work, extension, she is both an adagio and an allegro dancer, has good dance intelligence, she can dance a wide range of material. It's a very strong graduating class so to speak. I agree about Pereira and Huxley in Square Dance. Though I thought they started a little nervously -- as who wouldn't. The ballet is a killer for the company's strongest dancers. He has a nice deep pliee, the first section with the hip thrusts was very well danced indeed, you sometimes won't see it as well done at a professional level. She is a lovely rangey girl, I thought -- She had the point work and the phrasing for the quick opening sections, but I was blown away too by the manege of jumps and the long fluid lines when she got to move. Give her some room on the stage and then watch. There is so much praise deserved by all the students. The pressure is very heavy, the material very difficult to dance well, and the physical stress alone is extraordinary. For a seventeen year old girl in point shoes, think of running through Square Dance twice on Friday afternoon and then performing -- some of the corps de ballet girls in two or three offerings, twice on Saturday. The foot was not built to take that abuse.

Except that it was De Luz for whom the audience as a whole saved their most vocal applause. Canvassing those in the my row, my neighbor adored him but felt that Fairchild wasn't totally of his caliber . . . and there I was arguing that in fact she was and is. But she's a little small for the role. And judging by the applause and the shouts, interrupting De Luz's variations even at times, I don't think that my neighbor's view was an uncommon reaction. They are a strange cast for Donizetti to be sure. As they have been for Ballo too. They are both small for the principal roles in Donizetti, compared to what we have been seeing. Both Ringer and Weese have been brilliant in Donizetti recently and both are much taller, ampler, and fuller dancers then Fairchild, they are really different in type, without attempting to name what the types are. And De Luz also is smaller than Hubbe or Neal or others we've seen in this in recent years. (Wish I could remember more of the recent casting, but you can't go wrong saying that he's smaller all the same). In principal I'm not sure I approve of the casting -- but in practice I quite did last night. Just another case of one's reaction in the theater over-riding one's conceptions. Rules are made to be broken I guess ... but only occasionally and not always. I think folks should see this cast. They had the energy and the musicality of Donizetti very right and a lot of that is due to the corps de ballet too. Don't think I've seen Carrie Riggins dance better in recent years.