Jack Reed

Just about what I thought, watching the "Dance in America / Trailblazers of Modern Dance" tape on Facebook just now. What did Fred Ashton have to do with this? I thought. It's all flowing from her, like a broadcast into space, our "space". (Of course, if we shut off the enjoyment, the transport, of great art, great dance, and think about it, we know - better? - no, just different.) Never mind, on to the dance: Five Brahms Waltzes starts up a little before Sir Fred stops, at 15:02 into the tape. There was another broadcast of another Seymour performance of these dances from the '70's, about a year and a half later, according to my notes, this time in a program called "The Royal Ballet Salutes the U. S. A." broadcast here in Chicago by the Independent WGN station. Pretty content with finding this after all these years, I've not searched the Internet for it.

Posting while Marta was. Looks like we saw the same show, doesn't it? (I remember Seymour's "Five Brahms Waltzes" too! A better video than Markie Polo's silent, hand-held one on YouTube: )

Don't overlook the fact that they've scheduled an "encore" webcast of that performance for 24 hours in the middle of the following week as well. We don't seem to have anyone reporting on location, so I am trying to relay some comments from a friend who is seeing the Royal's season at the Pillow: https://balletalert.invisionzone.com/topic/48135-live-streamed-and-on-demand-performing-arts-videos-spring-summer-2024/#comment-455007

Jacob's Pillow has announced their free live-stream of the Royal Ballet at 8:00 PM EDT on Saturday July 6, 2024: The program and a registration link for the live-stream are here. An 24-hour "encore" web cast of this performance - evidently video-on-demand - is scheduled for 12:00 PM EDT on Wednesday July 10 for 24 hours until Thursday July 11. (The Pillow says "EST" but I'm stubbornly thinking that's a typo.) Evidently, all the 8:00 performances offer the same repertory, with some changes of cast, mostly excerpts, duets and solos from the Royal's repertory. Having now seen the Saturday evening livestream, the word that comes to me is, "Hermetic"; I couldn't get into it at all. Nor did I care for this one, either, but the cast looked better in it to me. Meaghan Grace Hinkis distinguished herself, with the excellent Francisco Serrano, in "If I Loved You" from MacMillan's "Carousel" after intermission on Saturday; I believe that performance will be available Wednesday into Thursday. Mayara Magri, Saturday night's dancer, was unable to bring "Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan" to life; reportedly this is only Osipova's accomplishment. (The cast list is at https://www.flipsnack.com/jacobspillow/print-program-the-royal-ballet-of-the-united-kingdom-2024/full-view.html for now, at least.) Wheeldon's "For Four", to an unidentified Schubert Quartet, has got a hell of a lot of turns in it, but the dancers always look very good in it, very present, and even some of those turns are not filler. The pas de deux from MacMillan's "Carousel", brilliantly acted by Mayara Magri with an excellent partner in Matthew Ball is one of the best times on this program, but I'd quibble about topping my list with it. Trying to sum up, I'd say the program is better after intermission than before.

https://www.balletchicago.org/so/ffOyCohQx/c?w=FlZ6hoScRr38zc6u9Zqv82IwPkGSuG1qsNAFpzJ5BHI.eyJ1IjoiaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmFsbGV0Y2hpY2Fnby5vcmcvIiwibSI6Im1haWwiLCJjIjoiN2QyZDg5Y2ItYjVhOS00MGUzLTkwZTItMTdlMDhhOWMwODE4In0

With a few days to go, Ballet Chicago has announced further details, not on the web page liked to above. For one thing, the new Seymour ballet is choreographed to Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, a work by the mature composer, in contrast to the new Blair ballet, to the delicate, earlier Mozart work with the theme well-known as "Twinkle, twinkle, little star": (Try copying and pasting the link in my subsequent post, below.)

Here’s a reminder that Ballet Chicago’s Spring mixed repertory program will go on in the Harris Theater in downtown Chicago in three weeks, on May 3 at 2:00 PM and 7:30 PM. When I last checked, good seats were still available. (The Harris’s rows are more steeply-raked up toward the back: good sight-lines and acoustics. And there’s a good sound system.) The program holds Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” and several ballets by B.C.’s artistic director Daniel Duell and faculty of the excellent, pre-professional school Ballet Chicago is, most of which I haven’t yet seen, but it’s usually “well-heard”- I like to see what I hear, one way or another. But that’s the key to the moderate prices of these shows: The dancers - the Studio Company, the cream of the school - are not on salary but paying tuition; the music is from well-chosen recordings; and most of the good-looking costumes - which also move well - are made by mothers of the dancers. (The costumes for “Divertimento No. 15” may be a professionally-made exception.) Here’s a link to the relevant web page: Ballet Chicago - Balanchine and Beyond That's an image of B.C.’s “Divertimento No. 15” across the top of the page - B.C. cares not only about the authenticity of the costumes but even more about the choreography and the way it’s danced - Duell did not only dance in New York City Ballet when Balanchine was supervising it, he is among the people the Balanchine Trust has authorized to stage Balanchine’s ballets, and B.C. uses mostly Balanchine choreography in its classes. The last time I saw “Divertimento No. 15” danced by the B.C.S.C. I took along a friend deeper into modern dance than ballet, both as performer and scholar. She told me the last time she looked at ballet was when her mother took her, age seven, and she fell asleep. After the performance my sharp-eyed friend couldn’t get over it: “That was beautiful! That was beautiful! I especially enjoyed their feet.” I couldn’t resist: “Modern dancers aren’t known for their feet,” I said. I got her elbow in my ribs for that. Try this. You won’t fall asleep.

Thanks for the leads, BalanchineFan. I might have done better to explain that I'm anticipating NYCB's short run at the Harris Theater here in Chicago, March 20-23, and I'm wondering whether to attend their "Masters at Work" program with "4 T's" and "Serenade". If all their Balanchine looks like it did in the recent PBS video shot in Madrid and in the earlier one shot in Paris, which looked pretty bloodless to me, I'm not going to pay top dollar to be miserable at what's been lost since the hundreds of performances I watched in Balanchine's day, in the '70's and early '80's. When well-coached by someone extraordinary like Suzanne Farrell did a couple of years ago, they were worth the trip to New York; but not having been in New York lately I don't have up-to-date programs to check, so, yes, I see that I have some research work to do. (That time a couple of years ago a good friend saw news of Farrell's work at NYCB in The NY Times, parallel to your advice, and alerted me. Now she tells me two of the ballets on their "21st Century" program in the Harris - the Peck and Wheeldon ones - are worth considering, having seen them herself.)

Mention of Mary Carmen Catoya reminds me how miracles can still happen - the first time I saw her Emeralds (in the Verdy part) at MCB I kept thinking she was Verdy, though I knew better. (Arriving late, I had had to sit far back; next time, from a good seat, I could see her own unique qualities as well, and by then, I had read my program which told me she had been coached by Verdy.). That's the subtext of my post - how can we learn in advance who's coaching whom so we can be in the right place at the right time? There are places where you can take a chance and just show up - in May 2019, the miracle happened again, in Phoenix, when Arianna Martin took the Verdy role in Emeralds; I was there, having learned that Ib Andersen often got rewardingly authentic Balanchine performances from his Ballet Arizona. But at NYCB these days, it doesn't look so likely.

Can I spotlight for a moment a topic that’s hovered in the shadows here earlier, namely, who stages or coaches performances? There’s been some recognition of other changes - replacing costumes with some shading or color with “pure” white ones - but I’ve noticed the dancing has also become colorless, not to mention slower. I’m “old audience”, the development-office phrase used in the ’80’s for us whose Balanchine experience hooked us on ballet in the first place and most of whom decamped as Peter Martins tightened his grip on how the company danced. Thanks to Dale for the link to the Balanchine in Madrid clip; I followed it onto the Youtube page, where in the right-hand column there was a link to a longer clip, one of the MCB rendition of just a few years ago when Edward Villella was still in charge there. What a difference! The MCB clip took me back to the full-blooded performances we used to see in the theater called New York State, when Mr. B was on his stool in the second wing downstage, audience-left, watching. Part of that authenticity is the faster tempos MCB danced to, as well as - and more importantly than - the costumes. Few remark on line about these differences, even here where we’re anticipating the new season, so maybe there’s little interest in authentic performance, with its stronger flavor, but let’s see. Can anyone point me to information regarding the current coaches at NYCB for the Balanchine and Robbins ballets? Does the company reveal that, ever? Or the press? NYCB is bringing Serenade, In the Night, and The Four Temperaments to the Harris Theater here in Chicago in March, but if the Madrid Square Dance clip fairly represents their dancing these days, I’ll stay home rather than pay top dollar to sit in the audience and be saddened by the loss of life in NYCB’s Balanchine renditions. On the other hand, I made a visit to New York not so long ago when I had accurate information that Suzanne Farrell, no less, would coach a few ballets. The programs consisted of three short ballets - with one of her preparations on each - and the contrast of hers with the others was impressive, even though she was working with dancers who were less accustomed to her authentic approach. Well worth the trip! Hoping somebody can update me on this aspect of NYCB's programming. Who is coaching NYCB's "Chicago" repertory?

Sorry to see it go. Google told me it had a forum for discussing management issues, apparently including marketing, and I continue to feel that arts marketing in general and marketing of our favorite art form in particular continues to be wrong-headed and ineffectual. How was it being discussed? What were the issues? I was never able to register and read the forum - though Google revealed some forum names, their spider (the name of the kind of computer continually crawling the Web, to assemble a search engine's data base, as far as I know) was kept out of the content, and maybe considering the youth of the some of the dancers in some of the forums (whether as contributors or subjects, I obviously don't know) tighter security on BT4D than on BA! was justified. Years ago the man sitting on my right muttered, during the first "wrong" applause, "That didn't look hard," and I said, "Did you expect it to look hard?" "Yes," he said, "they told us it was hard." "They're so good, they make it look easy," I said. "Oh!" he exclaimed. Evidently, he'd been to some introductory event and had his attention misdirected. Looking for signs of difficulty, he thought he hadn't got it. That's what I mean by wrong-headed preparation. Only two nights ago, I was greeted by a Ballet Chicago board member on our way into the performance in the Harris Theater. In a moment, he identified himself and, having recognized me, said he wanted to know how I got interested, how did I happen to be there. Exactly the subject I wanted to discuss. (I later identified his daughter in the program.) I look forward to re-connecting, but without BT4D as a place to learn from and to "mix" with like-minded people it looks like rare chance encounters are mainly what's left.

The dance writer, editor, and sometime critic Mindy Aloff has recently published a critique of Homans’s book much along the lines of pherank’s thoughtful one just above in this thread, though I find hers broader and deeper, and so this seems the right place to post a link to it, especially since her place of publication is not so widely known: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/george-balanchine-mindy-aloff/comments/ I haven’t read the book, but along with pherank and others, having read Aloff’s corrective to much of the book, I’m also puzzled by Homans’s purpose in writing it.

On the other hand, over the first weekend in December, I attended three performances of "The Nutcracker" by our local, excellent school, Ballet Chicago, where neither I nor hardly anyone else was masked, and a few days later I came down with what I'm happy to be able to call "short COVID" - a week or ten days later, feeling much better, I had a couple of negative antigen tests and got back to my life (with regrets at missing BC's last performance, on the second weekend, usually having one of their strongest casts) - so that I can't be so sanguine as my friend Cristian. I don't fault BC for not requiring masks - I think that was consistent with CDC guidelines at the time - but this may not be over 'til it's over, and I wish all my friends, in this community especially, to take due care.

When I watch ballet, I like to see what I hear. It doesn’t have to be obvious, “step-for-note”, but if I can’t discover some relation between what I see and what I hear, I remain outside it. So when people ask me whether they should see The Nutcracker - meaning, here in Chicago, the Joffrey one, I say, no, see Ballet Chicago’s Nutcracker instead; it’s three times the fun and one-third the price: Watching it, I see the music. I hear nothing in Tchaikovsky’s music about building a world’s fair (which took place here in Chicago in 1893), the story the Joffrey production loads onto it; I do hear a warm domestic scene, a party with activities for the guests, which gives way to nightmarish conflict and then to sumptuous resolution. (Not to mention virtual outlines for stage action, mostly for the cast, but not least, for the scenery itself.) But how can something so good be so cheap? Ballet Chicago is an excellent school, where the dancers aren’t on salary, they’re paying tuition; the musicians are on well-chosen recordings, so they’re not getting paid, either; Nutcracker needs only three backdrops, and a few props to carry the story (which you can see at the links I provide below), including a Christmas tree (a more modest one than the 41-foot tree in the NYCB production, though); and costumes - not only good-looking costumes to see but costumes which move well - I’ve learned elsewhere not to take that for granted - made by “The Guild of the Golden Needle,” several mothers of the dancers in the school. This communal aspect, amateur in the best sense - not just people engaged in something without pay, but people who are engaged in it for their love of it, gives the production a charm the professional companies can lack while showing us choreography that may be better “heard” than theirs: Watching Ballet Chicago, I’m happy to see what I hear. This Nutcracker is mainly the work of B.C.’s Artistic Director, Daniel Duell, not only a dancer who danced for George Balanchine in his NYCB, but an amateur musician as well, and Ted Seymour, who danced in the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. Indeed, these and other staff have developed in the Balanchine tradition, and the school uses mostly Balanchine choreography as its syllabus. Their “Sugar Plum” pas de deux is mostly Balanchine’s; Duell has made a male variation to replace the Balanchine one, said to be lost. Duell’s “partner in life as well as in art”, as he refers to his wife, is Patricia Blair, who danced in the Eglevsky Ballet on Long Island when Edward Villella was Artistic Advisor. Now she directs the school and rehearses this production. Here is a link to a BC webpage where you can glimpse the work of those golden needles, among other things: https://www.balletchicago.org/nutcracker There are a bunch more still images on another page on the B.C. site, including the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier (but no video of them in motion; showing Balanchine has restrictions), and many shots of the slightly-disorganized three-year-old-bunny number from the matinees: https://www.balletchicago.org/the-nutcracker. But dance is movement! Here’s video of one of their numbers most popular with the audience, the last scene of Act One, “Snow”: https://vimeo.com/247428800 Here’s the “Waltz of the Flowers,” the second number from the end of Act Two, as the ballet builds toward the Finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mccLr5EY8ng Here’s an abridgment of another version of that number, with Emily Fugett in the lead role, ‘Dewdrop’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa8bxUHOHa4 Here’s the whole first act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwYYsWHHIw (Their second act is not on the Internet in its entirety, as far as I know, just “Flowers”.) And here’s a link to the Athenaeum, where the show goes on, for its twentieth year, for the showtimes: https://athenaeumcenter.org/events/2022/the-nutcracker/

That's the way it really was, eh, Helene? Thanks for the reassurance. It's been a long time, though we have video, and ballet is the art which disappears even before it's finished - not to say incredible in the first place sometimes. (It could be hard to be sure what you really saw even on the way out of the theater.) But sometimes it still seems now like it just happened. And if "that's the way it was for you, too" it must have actually have happened. (My quote refers to another article by the author of the one for which our board is named.)