Jack Reed

I haven't noticed a recording of exactly that music, as a ballet suite, but I believe the pieces, all by Chabrier, are the Joyeuse Marche , Bourree Fantasque, Prelude [or Overture] to Gwendoline, and Fete Polonaise. I've never heard a recording of the Gwendoline Prelude, but I haven't looked for a while either. (I'd like to have this music to see what memories of the ballet it brings back. Is that perhaps also your strategy?) There was a really superb 1965 recording by Ansermet and his Geneva orchestra (L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande) of the first and last pieces on the London label (currently listed as 433720 at arkivmusic.com); he got the fragments tossed wittily around the orchestra in the first part of the March clearly presented in continuous phrases, for example. There's also a 1987 recording by Michel Plasson with the Toulouse orchestra which is much less clear, both as to recording and performance, but it has the three fast movements. John Eliot Gardiner has also recorded some of this music, but I find his conducting rather crude, sometimes to the point of violent. I'm even less of a Paul Paray fan, but his CD has all four pieces, according to the photo of the cover on Amazon.com. (The NYCB site says otherwise, incidentally; too bad.) You could click on the ad at the top of the page, and BT will get a little payment. (There are some other recordings by artists I have never heard, or even heard of, so I can't comment on them.)

Details are still a little sketchy, but here's a link: http://gettysburgfestival.org/program/genre_dance.asp It looks like the programs will be pas de deux and a few complete ballets. I might mention that tickets go on sale March 15.

Sunday afternoon, 24th February, was another strong performance, almost like Friday evening: Catoya was in Serenade, in a secondary role -- as "Tema Russo" begins, she's in the middle of the five -- and although any role with her in it might no longer be secondary, she has too much good sense, too much good taste, to grab attention in what she does; so she gave us an outstanding but properly modest rendition, and, as you may be ble to tell, my admiration for her continues to grow. Wu still being out, she was subbed for by Jennifer Kronenberg -- I'll make it Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg, like it is on the cast sheet -- as the Girl Who Falls, etc, etc, etc. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not complaining how this role winds on through the ballet; it gives whoever is in it -- and Villella has some nice women -- a big opportunity to unfurl some fine dancing and some characterisation too, if they so choose. Kronenberg is an interesting contrast to Seay, shorter, apparently, but larger, apparently, in motion. Longer arms and legs, especially advantgeous in Serenade, where she danced brightly and expansively early on and also fully realizing the unearthly drama at the end -- I mean, she has her mortal side, but the three also seem to me pawns of the supernatural, the boy the most clearly, of course, and the girl who brings him in, whatever her character-name might be, most clearly an agent of the supernatural. In Pas de Dix, I got an actual response to my rhetorical request for the various Kronenbergs to dance on -- she came back on and, in due course, began her variation here with head well up to announce this would now be very much in The Grand Manner, and having introduced it that way, she proceeded to perform it grandly. Were we suddenly back in Old Russia? Had she been listening to Villell'a introductory remarks about how this ballet shows where Serenade came from? Whatever her method, which I suspect is more physical than intellectual, and power to her, it was yet a different Kronenberg before us now, and a superbly different rendition of a different part from just minutes or hours ago. Her partner was Rolando Serabia, who had danced the previous matinee with Seay, and this time I thought his variation was better organizeed at no cost in brilliance. I'm sorry to differ a little with his fans here, but I still prefer Penteado in this for the way he fits clear small gesture into clear large phrases fitted into sequences clearly placed about the stage. The first movement of Bourree Fantasque featured Andrea Spiridakos and Alexandre Dufaur, and this pair seemed to me to have an edge over Allynne Noelle and Alex Wong at Saturday's matinee by more deftly and easily participating in the subtle and not so subtle ballet humor in this movement. If you can't have Kronenberg and Cox in this, that is, who the evening audiences got: This star pair may have been a tad less good as a comedy ensemble, though, and seeing Spiridanakos and Dufaur combine was a different treat in its own right. Wu had been cast in the "searching" 2nd movement; and although Villella seems to think of Bourree Fantasque as a rousing finale, which the third movement certainly is, building and building with those eight waves of massed grand jetes diagonally across the stage, and beyond, there's -- well, there's always "more" to a Balanchine ballet, isn't there? -- more in this case being the searching-finding-losing kind of pas de deux in this 2nd movement, which resonated for me with the events of the last movement of Serenade, only here the whole business is "lighter", and instead of an apotheosis, there's that bang-up finale. So, a wonderful program, as one person remarked to me as it ended Friday evening.

Well, Saturday night's (the 23rd) Serenade was a little different, I noticed; after all, even the same cast will come to something a little differently each time, if they're good, and the ballet is something alive to them, as they are to these dancers, this company. Seay's "darkness" was mostly gone, and the ways she got up from the floor were not routine moves anymore -- she knew she had to get up, and these moments, while hardly the whole ballet, were a little blank Friday I thought, but Saturday it looked as though she felt a calling or something, making it time to rise again. Little details like this will change a ballet for us, too. Seay also subbed for the ailing Wu in Bourree Fantasque 2nd movement again, and Catoya appeared only in the third movement of this, with Penteado, her only partner this weekend; they're superb, together or separately! There was news of Carlos Guerra: He is expected to dance the first installment of Program IV, in Miami, only, and then have his surgery. Skipping back to Pas de Dix for a moment, this version does not have the male quartet number I've read about: It's ensemble with principals, female variation, female variation, variation with two women, princial male variation, principal female variation, ensemble-coda. Jeannette Delgado Saturday night gave a very creditable account (with Penteado; his large, shapely clarity, continuing the dance from beginning to end in his variation pleased me better than Rolando Serabia Saturday afternoon, with Seay, but Serabia showed flashes of briliance); but nobody but nobody dances like Catoya! And the audience likes it very well, every time. Those waves of grand jetes toward the end of B. F. are almost too much, but not quite!

(from Ft. Lauderdale, FL) Whoops! bart, you must have reported Villella's remarks accurately, for he said on Friday night that "This guy became referred to as The Dark Angel", while Saturday afternoon he was more equivocal. But the brief post I put up is the way I've always thought of the role and how I've heard it spoken of. Ah, well, post in haste, regret at leisure, right? Undeterred by that gaffe, I will try a few more remarks in haste on a shared computer. iwatchthecorps certainly saw what I saw Friday night; Catoya was really phenomenal in her variation in Pas de Dix, and I would expect her to do that again Friday night in Miami. Everybody, go! (I'll be elsewhere on previous a committment.) She even had the opening-night crowd, not the best, in her control; they applauded all over the place in the opener, Serenade, which is understandable, but when they started to break out again, loudly, in her variation, they stopped abruptly as she continued; they too couldn't break their attention away from her. A real triumph! But I liked Serenade with Seay quite well; her dancing was dark in the first sequence of jetes, and loooked like a harbinger even if you didn't know the ballet from before. She was in fact The Woman Who Falls, but on her re-entrance as the Girl Who is Late and then again in Tema Russo she is bright like the others, even smiling a little in T R at first (Zou was a good partner for her). So I liked this difference for what her dance intelligence brought to it. I was glad to see Bourree Fantasque again, having seen it a few times at SAB Workshop in June, and liking Chabrier's tricky, witty, frothy music. And I really liked seeing another of the dancers called Jennifer Kronenberg, with her sharp, quick wit. Saturday afternoon, in Serenade we got the light, soft, clear, clean Jennifer Kronenberg -- all those at once, not bad -- and so: Will the real Jennifer Kronenberg please stand up so we can tell who you are? No, no, I mean, will the real Jennifer Kronenberg please keep on dancing? We love all of you gals! Friday night the Catoya phenom reappeared in the third movement of Bourree! Wow! Jeanette Delgado acqitted herself well Saturdayafternoon, but, well... Actually the delight of that performance was her sister Patricia, who made the quirky turns under her partner's arm flow into a lovely sequence and then, as the music subsided and he moved away, bourreed down front to us and let her smile subside too, unusually for her, and making her dance more complete in this way. More when I have a chance.

(from Ft. Lauderdale, FL) Keeping in mind that angels enter our lives to bring us guidance, it's the girl who brings the boy in who's the angel. (Sorry to be blunt, but my time's up on a shared computer.)

Odd? bart, did you say odd? With a straight face? I think it's great that she can and does do those both so well! But I don't agree that the Siren is unfeeling; she's very cooly calculating, very much in charge; she's been here before, she's in it for the dominance, not to mention the spoils (she snaps up the Prodigal's gold medallion, an emblem of what else she and her goons have taken from him, and exits triumphantly! (Or so I saw it.) She triumphed again, and loved it. She loved; we don't exactly love her, although that's not beyond my furthest imaginings... But, yeah, it's the spirit this company has that is too often lacking in Balanchine today. (Farrell's company has it too.) Kourlas saw that. (What's going on at the Times? Are they opening their eyes? Why? Not that I'm unhappy; I'm curious.)

The articles by Percival were worth the price of the issue -- and we got a lot more, too! Thanks, Alexandra!

IMHO, if Serenadeain't a powerful emotional experience, it ain't ballet history, either; it's a fizzle. Sounds like a superb staging and also that you got it, bart! Some ambiguity is usually essential in Balanchine-ballet. "Balanchine didn't push any of his messages, so we would get all of his messages." [Who said that? Any guesses? I'll reveal it later, especially if no one gets it, but the truth of it is more important than the source, or the "authority".] I saw SAB's staging, and had a very good time with it, so I'm looking forward to seeing MCB's next weekend. I'm also encouraged by Sharon McDaniel's review in the Palm Beach Post, where she says Kronenberg's personality is out-front in the escapades in Bourree; sometimes the cool reserve she has, which worked so well as Siren in Prodigal Son is not necessarily the most effective approach to a role, and I hope I get to see her in it a couple times at least. But New York needs to have a chance to see Balanchine, not the caricatures and travesties they've been getting (to judge from what little I've seen).

I'm surprised by the links to YouTube -- I didn't think we were supposed to do that, but I'm often a lap behind. Maybe Villella's returning to Don Q partly to work on it some more -- remember that he put Ballet Imperial in rehearsal in August but presented it in March, preparing other rep along the way. My own take on MCB's approach, in contrast to the Royal's at one point in their history anyway, is as a clarified, streamlined, abstracted treament, as a huge string of Divertissement, a la Balanchine, and, as it happens, I prefer its bright directness, not inappropriate to a wedding of youngsters, IMHO, to the weird complications, including an interruption by Carabosse omitted in Florida, of the Royal on my video. As for Tchaikovsky's Beauty music, I thought "Cinderella" was maybe a little thin in Florida by comparison with the other numbers, and I remembered that on the video I watched as a warm-up for the experience, An Evening with the Royal Ballet, it's replaced by -- wait for it -- "Russian Dance" from Nutcracker! (There are, as I say, several things to make you blink in this version.) The Opus One Orchestra played it well, respectfully and sensitively, which Tchaikovsky doesn't always get. But I too was surprised by Jordan Levin's passing disparagement of this score. She's good for a general-audience publication critic, I think, helped by her dancer background -- I looked up her bio on the Herald's site -- but maybe, in this instance, hindered by it as well. Dancers often approach things differently; they mostly inhabit a different world.

Edward Villella maintained the same proportions in the time he spent discussing the three ballets of Program II in Fort Lauderdale as bart noted above: A critic in West Palm Beach asked, by way of objection, Why three different ballets? Because we have the ability and because we give you a choice. Ravel, Sinatra, and Tchaikovsky make a spectrum. Critics? There are stupid critics and informed critics. [Maybe Villella would have been happier with the review by Guillermo Perez in the 16th January Sun-Sentinel. Perez found the program united by a ballroom-glamour theme. Glamour, three ways.] In La Valse, Villella found reference to Poe's Masque of the Red Death and remarked that abstract ballets make you think. La Valse. Do these two disagree, then? No, I don't think so.] [When the curtain rises, there are three women on stage.] Who are these three women we see in their 1940's Dior look? They kneel and read their hands [like books]. They know more than we do, and, knowing, they will guide us through the ballet. They are harbingers. Couples arrive, content with their situation. [The first two waltz couples.] Balanchine introduces another woman, not so frivolous; undulating: She goes away and comes back. Trying to leave, she's pulled back by her man. Romantic? Or something else? As she looks at her man with curiosity, the three harbingers return one by one and inform him, beyond what he got from his partner. [Prophecy. I seem to recall the three on the right, inclining their bodies toward him, with their working foot back. Anybody else remember this bit? I don't know whether this is exactly what Villella meant, though.] This man does a double air tour, puts the back of his hand to his forehead and exits, as though he's got the idea. The Lady in White arrives -- goes forward, and is pulled back. She tells the man [raised forearm and hands, head turned away], No, you are not the man I seek. But they dance a beautiful pas de deux, ending back to back, arms linked, suggesting a less positive resolution than he might have wished. In Part Two, a frenzied beginning... A grand ball, or a darkness within a grand ball; the corps suggest both frivolity and darkness. Frenzy builds and suddenly stops. The figure seen before [at the end of Part I] appears again, with an assistant. [The figure and The Lady in White] dance together. He gives her [black gifts]. He dances her to death. Balanchine told his story as poetry, so we can enter, looking, and participate. Every gesture has three or four meanings, from three or four points of view. Is Death the man she came to dance with? Is this the death of an era? One level of Dante's Hell. "There's a story here, guys, if you want to participate." [During the question period after Villella's remarks on Saturday evening, I put my hand up.] Q: You speak of three harbingers, not two, not four. V: Maybe the three fates? Or, one knows the past, one the present, one the future. [There's something about three-ness. Two could be buddies, a pair; four, two pair. With three there's an odd one out, more tension, they're not, as we say, paired off, each matched with another, a more settled arrangement.] Regarding Nine Sinatra Songs: Are these different couples? Or the same one at different stages of life, slices of a single life? [One of the performers said afterward, It's like Lincoln Road. there's a bunch of separate parties in different restaurants and then at the end they all come outside. Like montage in film? I asked. Like montage. (Lincoln road, BTW, is a pedestrians-only strip a few blocks from MCB's studios in Miami Beach with lots of restaurants, shops, bars, and a small theatre.)] At the end, they all dance in a similar style and relationship. [Hmm. I also saw reprises of their earlier dances. It's like Tharp to put together the apparently unrelated.] As bart said, Villella didn't spend much time on "Sinatra" and "Aurora", but he said that Aurora's Wedding was where La Valse came from. You have to respect and lean upon what has gone before. Over the four performances, there were more questions and answers: Q: Next season? V: A new work of about forty minutes length, and we'll close next year with a reprise of Don Quixote. Q: Bring back Stravinsky's Firebird? V: I'd consider reviving that, but Jerome Robbins also contributed, and that makes the rights issue more complicated. Q: Is the music for La Valse Ravel's reflection on World War I and the Austrian aspect? V: That's a good possibility. Q: Will we get all nine Sinatra Songs today [sunday afternoon]? V: One less. We have nine injuries. Carlos Guerra tore his shoulder, and his cover has a foot injury. It's like the [Miami] Dolphins. You play with your first team when you can. Q: Will there be an orchestra for The Nutcracker? V: Money! It's fifty-fifty, tickets and contributions. That's about all the account of Villella's remarks my notes and memory will support at this point. Others who also heard his remarks in other venues feel free to add or correct.

The TCM search function brings up a 20-minute "short" at 5:36AM. Am I confusing this with "Gaite Parisienne", the 1954 Victor Jessen film available on VAI 4384? Yours truly, "Confused in Chicago"

Sorry to leave your question dangling, Amy, but I've been on the road. Anyway, in this particular case, since the problem I've seen doesn't happen over the entire DVD, it's hard for me to think that the player is at fault. I think it's careless mastering. (I want to say again for clarity's sake that the DVD where I've seen this is the one with Tzigane. The second-hour program on it is pretty much okay.)

I wrote the following comments Saturday, 26th January, but I haven't been able to post them before, so they read a little out of sequence with where the discussion has gone in the meantime: Friday evening, 25th January 2008, in the AuRene Theatre of the Broward County Center for the Performing Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL: Seay's performance of Lilac Fairy made the whole staging of Aurora's Wedding worthwhile for me; and of course we got with it Catoya's and Penteado's Blue Bird, although much of this suffered from the slowish tempos remarked on here already. The second theme in the adagio (which the girl dances) was in pretty good tempo, though, and I have on good authority that the variation was quite fast enough from her point of view; throughout, her dancing was superbly clear and shapely phrased, if maybe a tad routine, so that if I had never seen her dance before I would have been left eager to see her again in something where nothing seemed held back in tempo. But Seay's grandeur and fullness, her supple, nuanced and detailed phrasing, and her depth of implication, made her the ruler of this scene in both the classic and contemporary uses of the term. It was as though the other roles were clearly and sharply drawn and colored on paper but hers had also been artfully and realistically shaded so that it stood out three-dimensionally from the plane of the material it was drawn on. Like Sugar Plum in The Land of Sweets, Seay's dancing showed us that this was her realm, so that her elevation at the end made sense this way even without, this time, the context of the narrative which normally preceeds it in the full-length production. Wu's Aurora was aptly bright and clear and very well received. (By "apt" I have in mind that her Aurora is a young newlywed, simple and naive, in contrast to Lilac, who is ageless and wise.) Concerning the quality of the music, I'm not totally in agreement with others' comments above. Some numbers are pretty generic but Bluebird is something of a hit for me. (Part of the reason may be that I first encountered it not in the theatre but in a recording of just that pas de deux, arranged for a war-time reduced orchestra and conducted with characteristic vigor by the arranger, the well-known Tchaikovsky enthusiast, Igor Stravinsky.) Having referred to Nutcracker, though, I'll add that I think that's the real masterpiece among the three well-known Tchaikovsky ballet scores, not least in the specific "directions" for the choreographer the composer supplies in the Party scene. (I think no other choreographer hears these directions as well as Balanchine does, but that's another story.) Concerning MCB's mounting this act at all, although I also see, as others here have, that it doesn't look like these dancers' native language (except for Seay, who can and usually does put something on and wear it as though it were custom-made for her, whether the result is "authentic" or not -- example: Diamonds, on Program I), I think it's justified on several grounds. For one, recalling the story that keeps coming up of one dancer or another saying to Balanchine, "Oh, Mr. B., I don't think I'm ready for this," and Balanchine replying, "That's why you must do it, dear! That's how you get ready!", isn't it worth the attempt for what the dancers can get out of it? Granted, I think I've seen greater successes, like Ballet Imperial, which, Villella told us, he was told by "one of the New York critics" the company was not ready for, but which, with Catoya, was spectacular. We can, and really should, still make valid comments about the results, of course, but the choice of repertory is not exclusively about us; it's about the dancers' development, too. And then there's the audience's development. At the end of his pre-performance talk, Villella asked for questions and got a statement from the from of the balcony, where a man who said he'd been watching the company for 23 years wanted to thank Villella for taking the repertory away from Balanchine toward other choreographers. It used to be nearly all Balanchine, he said. *sigh* I'm sorry if this sounds condescending, but some people just don't seem to know what they're missing. But south Florida doesn't get to see -- who would you pick for Sleeping Beauty? The Kirov? Okay. Or Tharp's dancers doing some of her dances? Or Taylor's showing his? So, even if not so successful from dancers apparently born and bred to other dancing, this kind of programming serves yet another cause, IMO. I had come to Florida in the hope I might get to see Seay reprise her Girl in White in La Valse, and she was scheduled to do that, but owing to injury to Guerra, her partner, they were replaced by Tricia Albertson with Didier Bramaz. The ballet went well enough, indeed Croce calls it "indestructible" and "dancer-proof", although the implications Seay showed us in the past were not so large with Albertson this time. I gather that Guerra's injury, a ligament associated with a rotator cuff, as we were told over the public address system, may even heal without surgical intervention; how long before he's back dancing remains to be seen. With Guerra out, Nine Sinatra Songs became Seven; the last four of the duets were pretty effective, with Albertson and Daniel Sarabia's sharply pointed-up "Somethin' Stupid" not only effective in itself but a good set-up for "All the Way" with Seay and -- after a long absence -- Mikhail Nikitine. These two were far and away the most elegant couple of the evening up to that point, I thought. Patricia Delgado and Alexandre Dufaur also gave an energized performance of "Forget Domani", leading aptly to a performance of "That's Life" with Katia Carranza and Renato Penteado which, however didn't always realize the reckless abandon it's sometimes had, and the usually heart-stopping bit, with the girl hurling herself across the stage at her partner, who puts on his jacket after she's launched, like a missile, on her way, then to catch her on his hip in the nick of time, IIRC, didn't quite come off that way, Penteado's jacket not cooperating with the maneuver, which leaves no margin for error, and he discarded the garment by the wing when he could. Otherwise, the two danced with much of the requisite crisp snap. (The jacket trick went more smoothly in later performances.)

It's not the main thrust of this discussion, but I'd just like to put in a word for new CRT's -- I think Consumer Reports's claim, that they give the best picture for the money is correct, with particularly beautiful black. But then why doesn't C.R. review them? I'll never understand. That may even contribute to the continuing drop in sales of CRT's, aside from the inconvenience of their bulk and weight, not that panels are lightweight either. Anyway, I'm very pleased with my 30" CRT Sony HD-TV, just a couple years old now; it seems to bring out the best in everything I feed into it, including what I've recorded off-air on my hard-disc HD recorder. (No ballet yet, but someday?) But more to the main theme here, Warner Brothers (whom we all love for what they did to Mr. B's Nutcracker, right?) has lately announced they're not going to release any more HD-DVD, haven't they? Sounds like the beginning of the end for that format. I share carbro's thoughts, as do many of our countrymen: Let 'em sort this thing out, and then we'll consider purchasing. Yes, as Amy reminds us, the framing matters! Now they've got even less justification for partials. There's been some sarcasm hereabouts about that, IIRC. Closeups in HD. See the makeup cake on the sweat, and never mind about how the dance and the music form a partnership, or not. (Can you see dance in a "partial" -- a shot showing less than a dancer's full body?) *sigh* With HD, they could just about frame the stage and sit down. Just about. As to synchronism between sound and picture, I think everything has become so arbitrary in the digital age that it's mainly a matter of whether anybody's paying attention or not. For example, the first hour of one of the two Choreography by Balanchine DVD's is badly off (the one with Tzigane), although the VHS issue was fine, and the rest is okay (except maybe McBride is a little late in Tchai Pas at the very end of the four programs; there's discussion about this on Amazon.)

I would like to have seen this, and I will wait patiently for the PBS (or other network) broadcast. But, PeggyR, why former dancers as dance directors? Why not some ballet fans, too? For example, have you seen any of Merrill Brockway's work? He directed Dance in America for many years, including the four "Choreography by Balanchine" programs, to some acclaim, I think, not that I agree with every detail in his work (I can always quibble!), and he never danced as far as I know, but trained in the University of Indiana Conservatory of Music, IIRC. He was often in Balanchine's theatre, and not in connection with a television project, by any means. I don't know about Matthew Diamond's sensitivity to ballet, having seen some of his first Dance in America shows, which looked very busy and cut up, but Helene's detailed account of the action leads me to think we can see pretty well and gives me hope. But if your meaning is, let's have the project in the hands of people sensitive to dance values, then, yes, by all means! Watching some dance on screeen, I wonder, What were they thinking? Recently, Morris's Mozart Dances, for example. Sometimes I think dancers and ex-dancers are not exactly the best ones, for that matter. I remember reading years ago positive comments by Paul Taylor and by Twyla Tharp when their dances were shown on television in what friends and I thought were quite cut-up treatments; of course, it was probably all publicity for the broadcast, and maybe they were pleased (I hope so), but I was left wondering why. Maybe on the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" theory, and even an obscuring presentation on television probably sells tickets. But some remarks by former dancers have led me to think yet again that they often see things differently from fans, some apparently thinking that closeups, which don't let us see a dancer's movement fully, are a good thing, or that showing one side of the stage or the other, when the whole stage is active, is the way to go. Sometimes I think the answer to the "What were they thinking?" question is, "Making a commercial," where so many of the images rudely come straight at you, and rapid cutting from one shot to another is the norm, as though the only point to the excercise were promotion. Would a calm presentation of the dancing be less effective promotion? I'd love to read careful investigations into this question, the relation of -- well, with the Internet, we can no longer just say "television", right? -- the relation of dance on screen to audiences in seats. But to return to the topic of Nutcracker in cinemas, I remember when Warner Brothers released George Balanchine's The Nutcracker here, it closed in midweek, the audiences were so poor. The only first-run film I've ever heard of to do that. Procrastinator that I am sometimes, I didn't get a chance to go and experience the audience reactiion, such as it was. Streaming out the door, evidently. *sigh*

I take back what I said about Jacobs. I confused her with some one else whom I'm too embarassed to name. I think Jacobs's review isn't half bad. She evokes performances well enough and comments about them in illuminating ways so that her thinking might also apply to performances I might see in the future, and developing my appreciation of whatever I see that way has some value for me. But I can't judge any correspondence, or lack of it, between her descriptions and the performances she saw, such as those by Part, not only because I wasn't there, but because I haven't even watched those dancers that much. And her sentence about "you're not really fit to judge her" seems a bit much to me too.

The tenth annual season will consist of four performances, Friday and Saturday at 7pm, Saturday at 2pm and Sunday at 3pm; the first cast will dance the first two performances and the second, the remainder. The choreography is mostly by former Balanchine dancer Daniel Duell, with a couple of numbers by Balanchine. Ballet Chicago is primarily a school, so that these performances draw from the school's better students and typically some visiting alumni. Music is recorded but the production is fully costumed, with essential props and backdrops. Ticket prices: Adults, $20 and $30; Children $12; and Seniors $16 and $24. Call Ticketmaster at 312-902-1500 or visit the Athenaeum Theatre box office, 2936 N. Southport. For more information, call Ballet Chicago at 312-251-8838.

You're welcome, TutuMaker, feedback of any kind helps keep me going here. But speaking of costumes, did you view the "slide show" accompanying Macaulay's review? Four excellent pictures, plus one with some feet cut off, but still very good image quality. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? What did you think? In general, in answer to bart's question, he saw what I saw, and caught it in fewer words, and I was glad he was there. The world -- our world, anyway -- deserves and needs to know what's going on there. That said, there may be a little more from me when I get the chance...

(from Washington, DC) Friday's program began after a spoken announcement that it was "lovingly dedicated to Maurice Bejart, mentor and friend to Suzanne Farrell"; a picture of Bejart was among the inserts in the program. Leave it to Mr. B. to know what he could leave out. When your ballerina can waft on stage like a piece of chiffon, you don't need a scarf; and anyway, aren't scarf dances with a scarf a little corny? But that's how Bonnie Pickard wafted on from the right wing at the beginning of Ballade when "Program B" began on Friday evening, the 23rd. I don't remember having seen this ballet, danced to a characteristically flowing, delicate and lovely piece by Gabriel Faure' for piano and orchestra, ever before, and it was the high point of Friday evening for me. Not actually a "lost" ballet, it deserves to be seen more often. If I describe a couple of details, you may get the tone of the piece: Pickard's excellent light and delicate partner was Runqiao Du; and a particularly nice detail in the choreography came when, on one knee behind Pickard for a moment, Du put his arms in a circle around her knees, lightly hugging them for an instant, and then took them away, while Pickard kept on moving without having acknowledged him. And Balanchine's way of bringing on the corps was also delicate: A girl from both sides at the back, then a couple more from each side, then a couple more from each side farther front, and so on until there were ten. At one point, Pickard does a series of gentle turns on pointe into the wing with one bent arm curved around her but the other raising her hand over her head; a moment later, with Pickard absent, this figure is echoed in the corps. At the end, the stage having cleared of everyone else as the orchestration of the music thins out, Pickard wafts off into the same wing she entered from, all by herself. Holly Hynes' costumes for this were just right, I thought, Du wearing white with a pale gold jacket, Pickard in champagne and the corps in medium raspberry, with swirling mid-length skirts; Jeff Bruckerhoff's lighting helped make the ballet a delight to see, not distracting from it. Glenn Sales was the superb pianist. On Saturday aftrnoon, the 24th, Natalia Magnicaballi alternated, also with Du, and while the piece was still wonderfully light and flowing, luminous even, with her, she seemed a little less well suited to it this time (her only time, alas). Ballade followed the first intermission, and was itself followed, after a pause, by Pithoprakta, whose subtitle reads, "Action by Probabilities", which could hardly have been more different from Ballade, showing Balanchine in his Merce Cunningham mode. A rapid knocking sound begins before the curtain has quite gone all the way up, giving me the momentary illusion that the curtain machinery was doing it. We first see the dancers on a dark stage silhouetted against the light from a huge diagram projected as a backdrop. One after another of J. Russell Sandifer's pools of light soon reveals the cast: the principals in white unitards, Elisabeth Holowchuk with a skirt of cloth strips, Matthew Prescott (Friday evening) or Kirk Henning (Saturday afternoon) with a belt of large open squares. Soon spread across the back, the mixed corps, which is hopping around, quickly waving their splayed hands over their heads, is in unisex black shoulderless body stockings held up with crossed straps. More apt designs by Holly Hynes. I liked all of this, and pretty soon I began to see how the stage action coordinated with the various commotions emanating from the pit: Even in his Merce mode, Balanchine is still Balanchine. And getting some pretty startling things out of his dancers: With the principals downstage left, Holowchuk turned in attitude on pointe with a hand extended for support from Prescott, who circled her in a half crouch, his hand palm up under hers palm down. Okay, so what? We've seen things like that before. The difference here is that their hands remained separated by two or three inches; there was no actual support or any contact that I could see. But around together they went. And this major pas de deux went on through more such surprising developments of familiar-seeming ideas. The piece never lacked interest, or fun. Indeed, Holowchuk was constantly on her feet, while the corps got to sleep or play dead or something across the back a few times, and even her partner reclined. At the end, the corps having expired again, Holowchuk faces us, down on one knee, with her wrists crossed over her head and her fingers fluttering in front of her face. After about nine minutes, the music has similarly died away, and I wondered, now what? Then I noticed the curtain descending. Program B opens with Bugaku also, and on Friday evening it was led by Magnicaballi and Cook; it must not have hurt that I had moved up to one of the best seats in the house from my previous locations, but both their performances seemed more effective. Still, Saturday afternoon's, with Pickard and Redick again, was yet more effective, with Redick's more fearsome movement and Pickard's fearful response (if you watched for it; she didn't overplay it). Meditation and "Fourth Movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet", as it was called in the program, concluded. (I think this is marked Rondo alla zingarese in the score; would the translation, "Gypsy Rondo," lead people's attention in the right direction, to the fun character and the repeating structure of the piece? I don't know.) Meditation, danced by Magnicaballi and Du on Friday evening, was strangely less effective than I had thought it might be, considering the feeling Magnicaballi often gives her dancing, and Du was often emotionally rather remote in this. But on Saturday afternoon, this big little ballet was powerfully realized by Pickard and Mladenov; the dancing was large and clear throughout, and so was his emotional transformation from something like melancholy to renewal. In The Old Days, of course, Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise would whip through the end of "Brahms-Schoenberg" with physically dramatic challenges to each other raised to the point of making me think, "Let's not somebody get hurt up there, now!" Friday evening Pickard and Mladenov did this in rather easy tempos, she giving a particularly faceted, burnished and charactiere performance; on Saturday afternoon, Ashley Hubbard essayed noticably livelier tempos with less nuance and shading, less "color", also with Mladenov. Pickard hints just a bit at her "character's" change of attitude toward her partner, Hubbard brings more of the old energy -- they're both valid realizations, if a little tame for those with long memories. Saturday evening brought Program A around again, and brought me to a still closer seat. I took more to Magnicaballi's way with Bugaku this time -- probably not because of the distance, though. I think she's absorbed it more, so it can come back from within her more; or maybe not. As usual, her dancing had at least a large, simple, unembellished beauty in a slightly creamy way, a less-is-more approach, and what I felt more sure of tonight was a sense of seeing through and beyond what she was doing to a larger, implied world, in contrast to looking more at the more developed, embellished and explicit way Pickard inhabited a nearer world as she danced this role. Pas Classique Espagnol was repeated with the same cast, and from a closer distance the unfortunate contrast between the well-lit ensembles and the dimly-lit principal numbers seemed greater. The principal dances are the more important; why should they be harder to see? A woman next to me called the costumes in this one "boring", and I don't think they're quite up to the standard Holly Hynes reached in Ballade and Pithoprakta -- or Meditation, for that matter, although these are very similiar to what I have seen years ago on Farrell and d'Amboise, in particular the sport-shirt-and-slacks ensemble on him. Houses were smaller on Saturday than during the week; and the Friday and Saturday night audiences elected not to applaud at all during the costume-change break in the middle of Bugaku, while the Saturday matinee audience clapped during that break and after the acrobatic pas de deux which immediately follows it.

(from Washington, DC) I was moved by the tenderness and wisdom of MB's reminiscences of Farrell in "Elusive Muse", and I was glad to see his company perform Rite of Spring in New York years ago (which I saw, incidentally, because I had read of Balanchine's remark, in answer to a question about it, "You can't do it, but it's the best one."), and within the past year, the "Love Scene" from his Romeo and Juliet, performed here in Washington, DC, by The Suzanne Farrell Ballet. So I share some of the sense of loss expressed here, and I am heartened by the thought, as I infer it from some of the posts here (thank you very much) that MB maintained that tenderness and wisdom to the end.

(from Washington, DC) I echo Farrell Fan, Mike, but maybe some one will come in who can answer your question. As I'm having some technical problems, some of my comments may be out of sync with the discussion here; I'm writing at one place and time and posting elsewhere, later, and to explain further, I'm sorry, but as we are all different and will therefore disagree sometimes, I responded differently to Anthony Krutzkamp's performance, as you will see if you feel like reading through everything that's come to me about what I saw the first two evenings, although, as you will see, I think you got the better casts overall, and I'm glad you enjoyed your visit: The Suzanne Farrell Ballet's Fall season got underway Tuesday night (the 20th) in front of a pretty good crowd in the Kennedy Center Opera House; I could see that the main floor had some empty patches toward the rear corners but that people were sitting in the side front corners of the Box Tier, and Wednesday's (the 21st) crowd was good, too, when from the orchestra seats I could see some people in the First Tier. On the other hand, there was a 2-for-1 ad for some performances in the Washington Post. The first all-Balanchine program ("Program A") opened with as beautiful a performance as we might expect from this troupe, although as the ballet was Bugaku maybe "beautiful" is just slightly off the bull's-eye. Natalia Magnicaballi was the bride, in casting against type; I remember with relish her heated rendition of Tzigane at Jacob's Pillow (with Momchil Mladenov, more passionately "awake" than Peter Martins is in the video) and her agitated Dulcinea in Balanchine's Don Quixote. Here she has to work "modest" into her performance, and if she didn't look as accomplished in that, nor did she look so eye-poppingly boneless as Kent did orginally (who could?), it was a vital performance otherwise (as we expect!), and I look forward to seeing her second performance on Saturday evening, not only to see further development of it, but also for what it already is. That said, Wednesday evening brought Bonnie Pickard and Jared Redick into the leads, and I wonder whether I can say that Pickard got the "modest", delicate, and vulnerable bit better without implying Magnicaballi was crudely bold or forceful or otherwise ill-suited to the role, or something, because she wasn't. Magnicaballi's partner was Michael Cook, new to the company, all she needed evidently (as we expect) and clearly classical and evincing some of the role's dignity on his own, and able to avoid getting caught up in the trains in the second part as well, but without the frightening power of Edward Villella in the original cast. Well, we don't expect that, either, but nevertheless, I felt more power from Redick in the role. Karinska's wonderfully imagined costumes, the girls' based on lotus blossoms, were borrowed from San Francisco Ballet, and a slightly simplified version of the original set was used. The "Pas Classique Espagnol" from Balanchine's Don Quixote followed intermission, in new more-or-less "Spanish" costumes by Holly Hines: More in the case of the principals, less in the case of the corps, to my mind. Somewhat simplified, they looked economical but effective. Anyway, the choreography is what does it. At one point in the open rehearsal, one of the three girls did a movement quite effectively, but Farrell called out, "huge!" and on the next couple of counts the girl grew another couple of inches and put them all into what she did, without any appearance of strain or effort. Emphatic and light at the same time; that's the general tone I saw here. The principals on Tuesday were Ashley Hubbard and Momchil Mladenov; their pas de deux is more reflective of the whole ballet, as critic George Jackson pointed out in his simultaneous commentary at the open rehearsal, than the rest of the Pas, and indeed, we sometimes hear the three-note up-and-down figure, dah-DEE-dah, which often accompanies the Don's progress in the whole ballet, "a serious work about human ideals" (Jackson), underlying the music in this section. Near the end of her variation, Ashley's fall, "like felled timber", as Sarah Kaufman put it (at too great length) in Thursday's Washington Post, while certainly a large movement, fortunately had no large lingering consequnces. "Originally more character, now as somewhat reconstructed by Suzanne Farrell, more classique", Jackson said. "...There are balances but they are moving balances. [balanchine] hated the dead spots in some techniques... Ashley Hubbard shows the angularity some see in the space around her when she dances." (I rarely read or hear anyone else's ideas about what some dancers seem to do to their space!) This was the first public orchestral performance of this part of the score since the '70's, incidentally. On Wednesday the principals were Magnicaballi and Matthew Prescott, and I thought this part of the program, like Bugaku, also had the stronger cast the second night: Hubbard was remarkable, with that special effect Jackson noticed, but Magnicaballi infused the part with a kind of steadily luminous and warm classic purity that made it all the more effective, and Prescott was effective as a partner and on his own. The "television version" of Chaconne closed the program; this version omits a pas de trois* for a girl and two boys in the second part (with the mixed ensemble) and a bit of music early on, where there is a sequence of clouds and titles in the video, and we even got a nice projection of white cotton-like clouds on the blue backdrop for the first part, changing to radiating pink streamers, like dawn (or Northern Lights?) for the later part. (Actually, I didn't notice the musical cut on Wednesday.) The cast is augmented by eight to ten dancers (depending on performance) from the Cincinnati Ballet. In her brief "Notes from the Ballet" on the Kennedy Center web site, Farrell says Chaconne has nothing to do with the Orpheus story, and as this is certainly not a story ballet, that's the thing to say in brief remarks, but I'd offer that there may be some intimation of that ancient myth in the dance's first half-minute: The two principals slowly enter an empty stage with downcast gaze; there's something tragic here. In the center, they don't meet or even look at each other, as we ballet-watchers might expect them to, but take paths turning away from each other, to stand disconsolately back-to-back, each with a lowered shoulder; and now we know something of what the tragedy is. For me, Chaconne is all the more effective for moving from this shaded opening moment into the radiance of the remainder; and the famous flute melody we hear at first seems to me to be both wistful or something, and heavenly, arching spaciously overhead. Or maybe I'm wrong. No matter, there are different ways to see Balanchine. With Bonnie Pickard and Runqiao Du on Tuesday I thought the evening ended more strongly than on Wednesday with Kristi Capps and Anthony Krutzkamp of the Cincinnati Ballet. Certainly Capps was plenty lively enough, and she may well have felt, as she appeared to, that she had triumphed in it, but while her partner seemed to be everything she needed, I think his role could have used more supple, molded movement. Sometimes they were young people happy to be dancing together. In Balanchine's timeless ballets, the dancers are more like gods: Pickard never lacked for vitality, keeping subtly rippling detail within continuous flow of shape, and Du suggested a series of classic statues without ever hinting at the weight or rigidity of stone; none of those dead spots Balanchine hated. Kaufman doesn't mention the musical rendition, but it was excellent throughout both evenings -- as we expect from Ron Matson and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra: Especially in Chaconne, firmly shaped phrases and clear textures, and generally "zippy" tempos (some very easy tempos in Chaconne in the rehearsal were evidently just for rehearsal). And I have only one quibble about the uncomplicated lighting, which steadily gave us a good view of the program, arguably excepting the very end of the Pas Classique, where the line of a dozen women across the back is thrown into half light and the principals downstage center have their own separate pool of light from overhead. I thought this undercut a little the high energy reached on stage by that point. *I've since realized this was a very short pas de deux, in which the girl turned in attitude on bent leg on pointe while her partner ran around her in the opposite direction, supporting her by a series of quickly-changed hand clasps.

Okay, points taken, and thank you, but they only show why 17 and 18 are bad choices, don't they? Why "twenty-two"? Said aloud, this number has strong alliteration. I think it comes from the side of Gottlieb that's interested in, and has facility with, what we might call popular culture, manifested also in his collections of lava lamps, and of lucite purses.

Welcome among us, Neryssa! And thank you for telling us about this. We've started to talk about it in another forum: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=25979 Would you like to join in? You didn't say much abut what you saw, and, of course, some of us haven't seen it yet, if we ever do, but we're still interested.

Yes. The essential difference being that Bill Shakespeare knew what he was doing and had done and, presumably, the monkey or monkeys won't.