Ray

Ray, were you thinking of real-life events? Actually, quite the contrary. What I mean is that different poems, books, and plays all have different ways of putting their messages across (so yes, there's more than plot, setting, and character). I don't read Jane Austen for plot or setting, for instance; I'm interested in how she narrates for us the inner thoughts and feelings of her characters. Similarly, I don't want to see the plot of Paradise Lost enacted (and yes, it does have a plot) in any straightforward way. And that's a quality I don't know if ballet can capture except by the use of a cheesy voice-over or lots of program notes. I guess I wonder, along with the romantic-era essayist Charles Lamb, about what happens to the imagination of the spectator when a work of literature is staged (his essay actually argues against staging Shakespeare at all). Here's Lamb on King Lear (warning: lots of romantic-era purple prose ahead): "So to see Lear acted, - to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, - we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old?" What gestures shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending." And here's Lamb on The Tempest: "But is the Tempest of Shakespeare at all a subject for stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted, - they can only be believed. " Just some food for thought!

There's also the issue of how do you capture the distinctive narrative quality of JA's frequent use of free indirect discourse--that is, her frequent reporting of a character's inner state/thoughts from the narrator's p-o-v, without using quotations? (this combines 3rd-person, objective narrative authority with reader-character intimacy). Austen uses it so frequently and so many after her use it that it's hard to recognize. But here's a typical example from Emma: Never had she felt so agitated.... How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!-How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude. Dancing might be able to capture the mood in a very general sense here, but what about the distinctive way it's delivered to the reader? Of course this is something films often steamroll over too. But this raises another big question: can ballet only mine works of literature for plot, characters, setting, and "atmosphere"?

It must be on your local station, alas--it's not on where I live. The one on Beethoven's Eroica was on last night.

Fascinating! Do we agree that the hair was let down only for these photos (i.e., they didn't yet do it in performance)? Another study waiting to be written: The photographic history of Balanchine's work (or Tudor's, or Ashton's, or...).

Rich material, atm! Clearly, there isn't one story of NYCB's beginnings, but many. Now to get historians working! There's no reason you couldn't start it. Even assuming you're not a professional historian, why not start the ball rolling? American colonial history, to name one field of study, has had some great amateur contributors to it. I'm sure you'd have a captive audience here on BT!

My copy, not so great to begin with, is so worn out, and guess where? Suzanne and Ib's variations in Mozartiana, of course! She did some funky and amazing stuff in her solos that kept my remote busy as I paused and rewound, paused and rewound to figure out how she did it!

Atm, are you positioned to write about this? Someone should! This is a great historical argument that I'd love to see someone pursue. Goldner's book is fine as far as it goes (a bit too "preaching to the converted" for my tastes but hey I'm extra prickly), but should not be seen as a substitute for the kind of deep and extended scholarship that's sorely lacking in ballet (and dance in general) despite the recent flurry of long biographies. Goldner's book reminds me of Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, where Vendler offers commentary on each of WS's 154 sonnets. Each study is fairly brief, a couple of pages long at most, and very accessible to any interested reader. With Shakespeare, though, unlike Ballet, a reader can choose from among a vast range of types of studies and commentaries, from dodgy speculative biographies to scrupulously detailed and rigorously documented exegeses.

If you're playing a zero-sum game, that is, in which there can only be one "winner." Not B's finest moment, to my mind.

Thought I'd open a line of discussion on Jérôme Bel and David Hallberg, as reported in the NY Times. I know there are many Bel opponenets in BT land, but I am a real fan, having just seen the latest version of his The Show Must Go On and Pichet Klunchun and Myself here in Philly (part of the ever-expanding Philadelphia Live Arts Festival). I know many people just don't think what he does is dancing, but clearly some in the ballet world, including Hallberg, are intrigued. I love virtuosity and technique and amazing bodies and complex abstract chorepgraphy as much as any balletomane, but Bel makes me think about so many things in re dance: the expectations audiences hold for dance performances, the nature of spectatorship, the place of "high" culture in a pop-infused world, the state of whatever's left of an avant-garde, the status of creativity, sentimentality and sentiment, the lives of performers, the state of dance as a cultural practice, etc., etc.! Why can't one like both ballet and Bel? Interested in what others think... (Admins: please move this topic if you think it belongs elsewhere.)

I think the life experiences of visual artists are, on the whole, far more varied that that of dancers/choreographers. As we've discussed, there are some practical, time-based reasons for this. But conventions of the profession also limit what a dancer- or choreographer-in-training are encouraged to seek out.

A review, by George Jackson in Danceview Times, of Poland's Teatr Dada von Bzdülöw: http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2008/09/philadelphia-fr.html There are still several exciting dances left to be seen: Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On opens tomorrow eve. Jan Fabre's Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day opens tonight, and there are FREE tickets available: Complimentary tickets (limit 4) to Jan Fabre's US Premiere of Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day. Only valid for advance purchases made in-person at the Box Office or by phone. Not valid at the venue door. Mention discount code "Free Fabre" to receive complimentary tickets. Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day Wednesday, 9/10 - Saturday, 9/13 8pm Performances at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre , home of Philadelphia Theatre Company Broad + Lombard Streets http://www.livearts-fringe.org/2008/details.cfm?id=2871 Festival Box Office is located at 127 North 2nd Street (between Arch and Race Streets). Open 12pm to 9pm. 215.413.1318. The Festival website: http://www.pafringe.com/2008/home.cfm Dance at Live Arts: http://www.pafringe.com/2008/productions.c...=dance&f=la Dance at the Fringe: http://www.pafringe.com/2008/productions.cfm?g=dance&f=f

I like this quote: "I find it extremely annoying that they keep repeating everything." AS IF pop music doesn't use repetition of both words and musical motifs!

Since Postlewaite is now 24 or 25, that would have been around 2001-ish. Having a policy at all is acknowledgment that drug use is neither isolated to a few people or to two decades before, although the School with dorms and minors takes on quasi-parental responsibility. Leave it to SAB/NYCB, though, to exercise power in such a draconian fashion (at the old Julliard SAB, so I've heard , students used to smoke pot in the stairwell!). If he was worth apprenticing, he was worth holding onto and--a dirty word in that world--COUNSELING.

This is great for Johnson, but I found the Ballet's press release a bit cryptic. Besides the honor, what does the fellowship mean for Johnson, in material terms? Does a fellowship mean that PGF pays Johnson directly, or does PGF subsidize his salary through the Ballet? The press release alludes to the latter possibility when it says "the Princess Grace Foundation-USA supports the nominating organizations’ fundraising efforts by extending general operating monies to companies hosting a recipient," but doesn't say directly if PA Ballet will receive money on Johnson's behalf or not.

Thanks, Helene, for that observation. So much of what we know/learn about the dance field happens one dancer memoir at a time. It would be great if there were more overaching studies of the dance world, or more bios that use their figure as representative of an era or movement (i.e., the fine studies on Diaghilev by Buckle and by Garafola).

From my own daughter's (and some of her friends') experiences in today's companies, it has not changed for the better at all. Thanks for those words, Marga. Still, my drug-related questions are still on the air. For those of you guys who are more knowledgeable on Company current policies. Is there any help offered to addict dancers...? Is the issue still as big as back on Kirkland's times...? Is it properly acknowledged nowadays...? or on the contrary...Is the "don't ask don't tell" policy still current...? It's my strong intuition that denial, tied to a "sink-or-swim" mentality, is still the reigning mode in the ballet world.

This seems a perfect definition for what has happened with the Balanchine rep and (a related issue) the relative lack of video representations of NYCB in these works. It would be great to hear others' thoughts on this matter, especially in connection with the "gridlock" hypothesis. You can hear an interview with the author here. In "The Permission Problem," a review essay on the book in the recent New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes, "In the cultural sphere, ever tighter restrictions on copyright and fair use limit artists’ abilities to sample and build on older works of art."

In re the Balanchine Trust and copyright issues, did anyone see this new book? Perhaps this deserves its own thread: Michael Heller, Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. From Amazon.com: Every so often an idea comes along that transforms our understanding of how the world works. Michael Heller has discovered a market dynamic that no one knew existed. Usually, private ownership creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, whether a physical or intellectual resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Heller’s paradox is at the center of The Gridlock Economy. Today’s leading edge of innovation—in high tech, biomedicine, music, film, real estate—requires the assembly of separately owned resources. But gridlock is blocking economic growth all along the wealth creation frontier. A thousand scholars have applied and verified Heller’s paradox. Now he takes readers on a lively tour of gridlock battlegrounds. Heller zips from medieval robber barons to modern-day broadcast spectrum squatters; from Mississippi courts selling African-American family farms to troubling New York City land confiscations; and from Chesapeake Bay oyster pirates to today’s gene patent and music mash-up outlaws. Each tale offers insights into how to spot gridlock in operation and how we can overcome it. The Gridlock Economy is a startling, accessible biography of an idea. Nothing is inevitable about gridlock. It results from choices we make about how to control the resources we value most. We can unlock the grid; this book shows us where to start.

A sault and batterie: a felony or just beating a dead horse?

Speaking of being murdered by chemicals, remind me one day to tell the story of partnering the ballerina who went on a millet-only (whole grain, natch) diet for a month...

I've been thinking a lot about what a dancer has to start with in order to be a great ballet dancer. Does she have to begin as a force of nature or can she develop her talent through hard work and scrupulous training? Is it, in other words, about a certain kind of animal power that has to be, to use a cliche, "tamed" (Nureyev), or an inner artist emerging through pursuing her ambition with rigorous practice (Merrill Ashley)? I know reality involves a combination of these features, and that there may be other ways to define these artistic "polarities," but which prevails in YOUR favorite dancers? Which do you enjoy watching more, and why?

Well, to assume to speak for my ballet sisters, how do you trust a partner who is obtuse and unmusical but there 'cause he's nice eye candy (or as Maria Tallcheif used to call it, enraptured by a strong jawline, "poetic" and "vulnerable")? Some of the drug-using dancers I'm thinking of--of course this doesn't mean all of them, nor am I endorsing drug use--were better high than many at their sober best.

Yes, I always found it amazing how some of the dancers I knew could work stoned, high, tripping, on no sleep b/c of being out all night. And many of them were forces of nature onstage. Perhaps part of it was that they were all so young....

Too true. There's a larger account yet to be written about drug use and ballet, especially in the 1980s.

No. You can read Alastair Macauley's NY Times review and find a photo here. Farrell Fan, I'm so glad you'll get to see this! I like this passage in that Macauley review: "None of the Farrell company’s dancers look world-class in terms of physical perfection or technical glory, but all show virtues of absorption and inflection that you often wish more ideally gifted dancers showed."