Jack Reed

Alexandra, FWIW, my favorite magazine and newspaper shop in D.C., One Stop, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, (202) 872-1577, says they carry Time Out New York and currrently have the lst-8th August issue. They're open until 9 tonight, if you're in a hurry. (I thought I'd seen it there; leave it to the tourists to tell the locals where things are, eh? Just kidding, of course.)

Here's my email: To Ms. Caroline Miller, Editor, New York Magazine: If the report I've read that New York Magazine will soon discontinue Tobi Tobias's dance criticism proves to be true, I'll be disappointed, because her writing on the subject is of such directness and uncommon rigor (compared to most daily newspaper "critics", for example, except for the Wall Street Journal's) that regular reading of it helps prepare me to get more out of seeing not only something she's written about but even something she hasn't, as though regularly exercising that part of my mind prevents atrophy and helps keep it toned up. The appearance of one of her contributions is usually the main reason I buy an issue of the magazine, so please continue to publish them! Yours truly, Jack Reed

Here's my email: To Ms. Caroline Miller, Editor, New York Magazine: If the report I've read that New York Magazine will soon discontinue Tobi Tobias's dance criticism proves to be true, I'll be disappointed, because her writing on the subject is of such directness and uncommon rigor (compared to most daily newspaper "critics", for example, except for the Wall Street Journal's) that regular reading of it helps prepare me to get more out of seeing not only something she's written about but even something she hasn't, as though regularly exercising that part of my mind prevents atrophy and helps keep it toned up. The appearance of one of her contributions is usually the main reason I buy an issue of the magazine, so please continue to publish them! Yours truly, Jack Reed

Lately looking for a copy of Merrill Ashley's book, "Dancing for Balanchine", I tried some of the sugestions here and then found one in the July issue of the magazine, "Yahoo! Internet Life": http://www.bookfinder.com, which is one of those nice sites that searches other sites for you, in this case, bookseller sites, not auction sites.

When I most enjoy ballet on film or video, it's when I can mostly forget about the camera work and editing and see the dancing, and when I least enjoy it, it's because the director's activity gets in the way of my seeing it. Examples of the first are Merrill Brockway's "Dance in America" programs, and of the second are Matthew Diamond's for the same series. It looks to me like the way to get out of the way is to show the space and let the dancer, or dancers, dance in it. That doesn't mean frame the stage, start recording, and sit down; the video image especially is fuzzy, and the dancers make a more vivid effect if they are seen more distinctly in a smaller frame, but since a shot of the entire stage, when it becomes necesssary, will make the dancers look all the more like ants if it follows a tightly-framed shot we have oriented ourselves to, it's better not to frame very tight. Also, when the dancer travels in a tight frame, the camera must pan closely with her, so that she looks like she's dancing in place and the background is traveling by, which is not at all what's happening. Zooming in from a distance not only flattens out the dancer's image, as has been pointed out here, it seems to flatten the stage space, too, so elevation helps a camera to see even more than it helps me when I'm at the back of the theatre. I think putting the camera in the first balcony helps keep the stage space from looking shallow. So when I taped a ballet-school demonstration with a single camera, I zoomed in at most only enough to show about half the stage. (I would like to have been able to dissolve between two cameras, but that's suddenly a lot more complicated.) When a dancer circled the stage alone, I panned left and right so that when she was near the left wings, she was near the left side of the frame, centered when she was in the center, and near the right side of the frame when she neared the right wings. This way her space may seem reduced, but she is more clearly visible. It's a compromise. And experience teaches me that shots should be held fairly long, panning and zooming should be fairly slow, so the viewer is not distracted from the dancing by constantly having to get re-oriented in relation to what he is watching. (For the same reason, camera angles shouldn't change very much, when more than one is used.) Every situation needs to have a camera-work sequence worked out for it, taking into account what just happened and what will happen next, as well as what is going on now. In other words, rehearse. I always thought it wouldn't be so hard to tape ballet better than some of what's shown on television. The main thing is to get out of the way. Trust the dancing. As so often, something I read that Balanchine had said sums it up for me, and then some: He and director Emil Ardolino were taping "L'Enfant et les Sortileges" and they came to Karen vonAroldingen's solo. He listened while Ardolino explained how he would shoot this sequence and how he would shoot that, and so on, and then Balanchine said, "She's a pretty girl. Just let her dance."

One thing that's changed since last season - student-workshop season, that is - is that we didn't used to include kids' names, lest they become stalker targets or something, right? Was there discussion here about that? If so, I missed it. As to which policy is better, I'm not sure, but prefer to err more often on the side of caution.

(from New York) I agree with the positive comments about Aloff's writing, and so I asked her here when we would see more from her in The Nation. Sorry to be the messenger who brings the bad news, but she said it was a one-shot piece.

Juliet, I think your timing estimates add up to about a 2-1/4 hour show, in other words getting out at 9:15PM. Ending at 10 would mean a three-hour program, quite a record-breaker in my experience. But Leigh's advice ought to be safe. As to dress, this is after all a school performance, not professional theatre, and I've seen over the years a wide range of styles in the crowd, so blending in shouldn't be a worry.

Actually, there are some seats for Monday night at $60, merely twice the Saturday rate. See http://www.sab.org/workshop2.htm for details. Monday's cast is usually the pick of the others, when there are double casts. BTW, Monday's performance is at 7.

Liebling, for finding Mozart too "perfect" for choreography, Balanchine sure tried hard, didn't he? He choreographed parts of the Divertimento in B-flat twice (Caracole and Divertimento No. 15), parts of the g-minor string quintet (Resurgence), Sinfonia Concertante twice, and Mozartiana - Mozartiana! - more than twice. So maybe what the story you heard means is that he considered his efforts inadequate to the challenge. (Farrell writes of his making the last Mozartiana, "...he found it necessary to try once more ...") I too find this Divertimento sublime (at its best, in the adagio); and Taper, Balanchine's biographer, writes that Balanchine was "in a kind of rapture" about this music at Caracole's premiere. Nevertheless, my vote is for Stravinsky - another admirer of Mozart's music, BTW - for the enormous range and superb quality of the scores he wrote for dancing.

Liebling, for finding Mozart too "perfect" for choreography, Balanchine sure tried hard, didn't he? He choreographed parts of the Divertimento in B-flat twice (Caracole and Divertimento No. 15), parts of the g-minor string quintet (Resurgence), Sinfonia Concertante twice, and Mozartiana - Mozartiana! - more than twice. So maybe what the story you heard means is that he considered his efforts inadequate to the challenge. (Farrell writes of his making the last Mozartiana, "...he found it necessary to try once more ...") I too find this Divertimento sublime (at its best, in the adagio); and Taper, Balanchine's biographer, writes that Balanchine was "in a kind of rapture" about this music at Caracole's premiere. Nevertheless, my vote is for Stravinsky - another admirer of Mozart's music, BTW - for the enormous range and superb quality of the scores he wrote for dancing.

FWIW, the only time I now remember seeing Mr. B's "Don Q" was a lesson in how what you think of something is affected by what else you see around the same time. In the mid-70s I had made a carelessly-planned trip to Boston where I naively had expected to see a revival of his "Card Game" to which I had ordered a ticket for each of the three performances; discovering a very amateurish non-ballet to the same music in its place, I fled to New York ahead of schedule and rushed to the State Theatre to recover, not caring what was on. "Don Q" was on, and although I had generally avoided it before on the basis of usually reliable advice, this time it was a great comfort (in spite of its earsore of a score) for the clarity, steadiness and firmness with which the spectacle unfolded on stage, more a series of animated pictorial tableaux than a ballet. Plainly the work of a master of the theatre, although hardly a favorite of mine, it told me that I was "home" again, and it reassured me that in a few days the formidable powers behind what I was seeing would be deployed in other ways so that I would again leave the theatre I had entered carrying the fatigue of the evening refreshed and with the energy and optimism of morning. As to the technical possibility of restaging it, I thought there was a film made with Farrell and Balanchine in it. [ March 03, 2002, 10:16 PM: Message edited by: Jack Reed ]

Another pronounciation I heard a few years after the premier was "pam-tag". The luggage, incidentally, was transparent lucite or similar plastic, mostly stacked artfully in a couple of places on stage; the only movement I can recall from the performance(s) I saw at the Ravinia Festival (the Chicago Symphony's summer season in suburban Highland Park north of the city) was one where most of the big cast supported on outstretched arms a few soloists "flying" horizontally across the stage along gently rising and falling trajectories. (The picture in "Repertory in Review" I can't place, nor do I remember those costumes, for what it's worth.) I also remember thinking the music wasn't much, and that may be why it didn't elicit much from Balanchine. I suppose he chose it out of his concern to have a varied repertory.

Or a way of asking people to remember to listen to the music?

dirac, have you seen the glimpses of Verdy's "Emeralds" in the pictures on pp. 184-5 and 187 of B. H. Haggin's book, "Ballet Chronicle"? Maybe you would like the more extensive sequences from films of her in "Tchaikovsky pas de Deux" and "Giselle", both with Villella, in that book.

Indeed, I think the choreographer himself agreed that no one else ever really replaced her. I think this because of the way he rearranged "Emeralds" after her retirement. It was his practice - and not only his, of course - generally to put lesser variations before greater, so as to set us up for what was to come, rather than to disappoint us by making a later dance anticlimactic; and when Verdy retired, he reversed the order of the solo variations, so that nowadays the "Verdy" variation precedes the "Paul" variation. (He also then added the new last movement to music for the death of Melisand I still find unneccessary if masterful.) Maybe a reminiscence of one of her and Villella's curtain calls would be appropriate. It was after a performance of "Tchaikovsky pas de deux" thay had made a specialty of, with, for example, her coming gradually to rest reclining in the air, thanks to Villella's beautifully coordinated support, in the coda, to the noisy delight of the audience. She got a large bouquet to cradle while she took her first bows, and then, while Villella was taking his, she turned aside and teased one stem out of the bunch. We knew what her next move would be, of course, except that instead of giving one flower to her partner, she laid the bouquet in his arms and darted off with the single flower. Villella blushed. A moment later, taking a solo bow - they usually got about seven for this ballet, as I recall - she found her bouquet laid quickly on her arms again by an arm reaching out between the halves of the curtain. It was unusual at Balanchine's NYCB for the length of the applause to approach the length of the ballet...

Maybe this is a good place to remember that Farrell can also be seen to good advantage in some of the Balanchine Library videos published by Nonesuch: On 40162, she's in "Robert Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze" (with d'Amboise), on 40177, in "Tzigane" (with Martins), on 40178, in "Diamonds" pas de deux (with Martins), and on 40179, in "Chaconne" (with Martins). In the original broadcast of the program on 40180, she dances in "Allegro Brilliante" with Martins, but this is missing from the published video.

That is exciting, not only because of the repertory and casts, but because all the Bell Telephone Hour clips I've seen in archives have fine television directing that lets you see the dancing! I've ordered mine from our (ahem!) sponsor, Amazon.com, by using the link in the banner ad at the top of the page. (Those who want to know more about how this helps us should read Alexandra's post on the Ballet Alert! Online forum.) Amazon has similar prices to those Dale mentioned (except I had to pay $3.99 shipping). So, thank you, Dale! [ November 17, 2001: Message edited by: Jack Reed ]

I'd think the best edition of this kind of book would be the one with the greatest number of ballets described in it. I think that's the 1977 edition, called "Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets." According to its Preface, the first edition (1954) had 131 and the second (1968), called "Balanchine's New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets," 241; "Now," it says, "minus some 40 from the latter, there are 404." So you might want the second edition, too, to have those 40. ("101 Stories of the Great Ballets," mentioned facing the title page of the third edition, is obviously out of the running from this standpoint.) Evidently the third edition was published in 1977 in Britain under a different title; and in 1983, the year of Balanchine's death, a two-volume version was published in Britain (by Comet Press), but I don't know the number of ballets included. I always assumed it was the 1977 edition, but who knows?

I attended a "Corps de Ballet" presentation in the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center on 3rd October and part of a rehearsal the previous afternoon, and I thought I might offer some of Suzanne Farrell's remarks for those of you who would find them as interesting as I did: After a couple of pas de deux demonstrations (I'm embarrassed to admit I don't remember the first one, but Fournier and Huys then did the second "Slaughter" one; Ron Matson played the piano for both), she told us, crossing her legs and slouching a little in her chair, "I don't want you to look at ballet like this, I want you on the edge of your seat" (putting both feet on the floor and demonstrating) "Mr. Balanchine's values were similar." Soon she got up: "I'm going to stand. I can't talk sitting down." Opening the occasion to questions, she said, "There's no difference teaching a ballet I danced from one I didn't... I don't try to impose myself on the dancers, you can't get the best from someone that way." "Tempos change - All we have is now." "I am the beneficiary of every dancer who came before me, and I wanted to give back to ballet what it had given me. I wanted to give to other people." She told us that the island in the Hudson River she and Paul Mejia own, where they give ballet camps and so on, has become named "Ballerina Island" by the tour-boat guides. Bejart's "Romeo and Juliet" was cancelled because Bejart was ill and his regiseur was unable to fly here and teach. Balanchine cut "Apollo" because the first scene shows Apollo looking like he can hardly stand up, and Balanchine had trouble getting that out of dancers who had trained so hard to dance very well; Farrell restored the ballet "because I like it". Balanchine "opened cuts in Serenade because Tchaikovsky wouldn't let him sleep" about them. The rehearsal was for "Divertimento No. 15", and at one point the boy and girl are traveling in the same direction, but the boy, in back, overtakes the girl, "like planets passing in their ... orbits," Farrell said, and I wondered where she learned about astronomy until I remembered that Balanchine used to read Fred Hoyle, the English popularizer of cosmology. And the other explanation I remember was in a similar situation, where the girl was facing her direction of travel, knowing she would be lifted in that direction. "No," said Farrell , "that telegraphs to the audience what's going to happen. Face front so they won't know ahead of time, and give him your back," the girl turned her upper body and bent back - "so he won't have to reach like this" - reaching out with straight arms. The little details that make it magical!

Robert Gottlieb hangs his review in the 8th October "New York Observer" on the peg of contrasting the directions two Balanchine alums have taken with their companies: Arthur Mitchell's DTH has presented Balanchine "pumped up with inappropraite smiles and other cutenesses - they've been selling Balanchine rather than dancing him. This season there's no Balanchine at all"; although he thought van Heerden's "Passion of the Blood" "had solid virtures", he complains of the absence of a convincing DTH aesthetic. Farrell's programs could hardly be more different: "What Ms. Farrell understands completely is how energy at the service of music is the source of the Balanchine look: focused energy, not febrile energy, like so much of Harlem's. ... Her principals were a disparate lot - none of them really distinguished, [i'm sure he saw only some pre-Boal performances] but all of them giving everything they had. ... "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" ... was particularly strong. Canada's Jennifer Fournier lacks amplitude but her cool, precise attack worked well here. Runqiao Du held his own, and the six corps girls were flawless. ... "Duo Concertant" was rescued on the second night by Natalia Magnicaballi and Ben Huys, ... the hero of the whole event. ... He's another guy whose talent Ms. Farrell has unlocked; she did it for Philip Neal last year. Again and again, she makes dancers we know look better than they've looked before. ... Ms. Fournier's cool came across as toughness in "Slaughter" ... the corps was out there prancing up a storm, the comedy came across, and Mr. Huys hoofed charmingly. ... "Chan Han Goh [is] a soft, appealing dancer whose effect is consistent but small. ... "Sonnambula was helped by the strong, vibrant Coquette of Christina Fagundes, the dazed and dazzled poet of Mr. Huys and, again, the vivid dancing of the corps. .... Best of all, the live music, conducted by Ron Matson, enhanced every ballet ... "In the last several months, the Kennedy Center has presented the Farrell company, Engalnd's Royal Ballet and Miami City Ballet, none of which will perform in New York this year. Is our capital city becoming our new dance capital as well?" The whole review is about half a page; I thought it's well worth reading, allowing for his early departure from Washington and even though I don't quite agree completely with everything in it, I post these excerpts because we get most of the reviews here via links but not, usually, Robert Gottlieb's. "Tough", unflattering term that it is, is the word I was trying to find for Fournier's Strip-Tease Girl. It fits. If she eventually learns even a little of Farrell's combination of innocence and sensuality in this part, it will help.

I can remember thinking, after the first few performances, that although they were not evenly achieved, there was a lot that was good and that they looked like they were headed in the right direction, so that it looked promising; and it was very pleasing to see how quickly the promise was kept, not only on stage but also in the pit, where the orchestra produced clearer and more robust performances. By the time they end their tour, this troupe must really be going to look like something!

Some people who have seen several performances, in particular both of today's, thought that this evening's "Sonnambula" was better than this afternoon's, in particular Goh's role. I'd assumed above that improvement came about from further work with Farrell, but asking Goh about this after her performance I learned she had not rehearsed this afternoon, and she ascribed the difference to how the music seems to her at different times and how doing the role several times gives her the chance to live with it. So dancers improve their roles alone, too. I've long thought dancers were pretty special people, and I find more to be impressed by all the time. The orchestra and the solo violinist, Eric Grossman, also seem to be playing better; and this evening's audience was one of the more enthusiastic ones. samba38 raised a good point about lack of promotion from the corps. I suppose lack of time to teach roles is a factor, but one particular young dancer I would like to see advance is Lydia Walker. In "Apollo", she's the Handmaiden on the left and the one who is upright as the two of them bring in the lute; in "Sonnambula", she's also one of the two Guests in blue, the second girl to remove her mask, for anyone else who has noticed her already. BTW, Leigh, would you like to check your parenthetical reference on 10-03-2001 02:12 AM to something I posted? I value your comments but it looks like a word's missing from this one. (posted from Washington, D.C.) [ 10-07-2001: Message edited by: Jack Reed ]

I also enjoyed reading your review, Sonja, and I didn't think it was too long. I think some of my posts are too long, but yours wasn't. (posted from Washington, D.C.)

Thanks, Alexandra, for that remark about "Duo Concertant" as Artist and Muse! I hadn't quite got it - clearly the last movement is about her offering inspiration - but reading your words I felt something click into place. I'm in general agreement with what you say about the improvement. Having seen all the performances so far, I'd add that it seems to have come about gradually, piecemeal, but fairly systematically, as though Farrell watched each performance, noted the weakest spots, and honed them the next day. Incidentally, she mentioned at the "Corps de Ballet" lecture-demonstration at 6 on Wednesday that they were late getting into rehearsals in a studio on 42nd Street because they had hardly started and when it had to be evacuated. So they've had less time than planned. As to egos, don't dancers know when they're dancing better? And seeing some rehearsal, I think they mostly like working with her - she's thorough, sometimes saying why she wants it her way, in terms of its effect, quietly, steadily industrious, never raising her voice, laughing with them when something goes wrong. samba, do you consider Bonnie Pickard a member of the corps? She's listed and often in it, conspicuous because of her brilliant red hair and prominent placing on stage. See if she repays your attention. Or maybe since she's already got some big roles, she doesn't qualify as part answer to your complaint. Also, the "Sonnambula" program goes twice more on Saturday; Thursday was not the last night, or do I misunderstand your remark? Anyhow, I'm in general agreement with Jeannie, Alexandra, and samba, except for Boal. I think I recall d'Amboise doing "raw" without the things I've been complaining about in Boal's interpretation; Martins I remember as making everything continuously visible from the beginning too. Huys doesn't have his power but he has a lot of that virtue. Part of the fun of it is watching things come to life and shine. (posted from Washington, D.C.) [ 10-06-2001: Message edited by: Jack Reed ]