Ray

Points well taken. I think, though, that many modern historically minded revivals of baroque operas are also creatively superb. (I'm thinking now of productions that employ very contemporary stagings coupled with rigorous, musically authentic practice) That is, the opera world to me seems to be moving beyond the romantic-era dichotomy of tradition/history vs. innovation. Perhaps it's all that MONEY.

This is exactly the question that Scholl's Beauty revival, with its full complement of "the rest," makes us ask. How much of ballet is about spectacle? About the pleasure of watching bodies move together in time? (I think Balanchine's Union Jack tattoo asks similar questions, if in a different way; and Kingdom of the Shades.) And in your "lab," SanderO, why have music at all? Is music the bridge b/t the dancing and "the rest"?

Excellent--contested categories are always more interesting!

I think Hans has replied to leonid's comments in a nuanced and thoughtful way. But I see leonid's point, as I am a huge fan of the baroque opera re-creation "movement"--indeed, I don't enjoy hearing Mozart played by a modern orchestra anymore--and often bristle at the ballet world's paradoxical elitist recourse to "tradition" and coarse market-driven resistance to historical accuracy (ballet company rhetoric often sounds more strategic than principled: middlebrow?). Yet I just don't think the playing fields are equal. The development of music/vocal technique has occured on a far different and older track than the development of ballet, with far less comprehensive documentation of past productions and performance details. "Revived" baroque operas don't entail any diminishment of technique or virtuosity on the part of the performers either. That's why I think we do need to posit questions about how to revive ballets, and consider carefully the effects of that reconstructing. For instance, I think Scholl's "revival" of Sleeping Beauty is amazing, but my love of it doesn't eliminate the problems in reception ("where's the dancing?") that I also acknowledge. (By contrast, historically "accurate" re-creations of baroque operas have found nearly universal acclaim.) While dance tends to operate in a zero-sum mentality--"if this version exists it will render all others impure/inaccurate/missing the essence, etc."--we might back up a bit and imagine that there's room for multiple interpretations. The Met Opera still does Mozart, after all, even if I won't go to see it there.

I agree, Sandi--with certain ballets, familiarity breeds a kind of contempt that might just signal a siesta time, either for the performer or the viewer (i.e., my feelings about Nutcracker upon retiring--"good riddance!"--have softened considerably). And I do love things retro! Maybe a good additional category would be ballets that aren't "timeless," perhaps, but have a kind of retro charm. Lander's Etudes? Kilian's Sinfonietta? Stars and Stripes? This category would be distinct from the let's-revive-it-b/c-it's-so-whacky category: PAMTGG, etc.

From Orlando Patterson's review of The Race Card by Richard Thompson Ford, in today's NY Times Book Review: "[Ford] writes that framing antifat discrimination as a civil rights issue is 'an uncomfortable stretch.' The rejection of a fat but fit and qualified woman for a job as a Jazzercise instructor in San Francisco was defensible, he claims, on the grounds that the company advertises itself as a weight-loss organization: 'Asking Jazzercise to hire fat instructors is not like asking a lunch counter to hire blacks; it's more like asking a cosmetics company to hire models with severe acne.' Furthermore, he says, fat people can change themselves in ways blacks cannot, there is general agreement that being overweight is undesirable and unhealthy, and no significant fat identity movement exists. Whoops! Overweight Americans, far more numerous than blacks, can point to medical evidence that fatness is partly genetic, to sociological findings that they suffer job discrimination and to a growing fat-acceptance movement led by feisty bloggers in the 'fatosphere.' And consider this: The great choreographer George Balanchine held that a ballerina's skin should be the color of a peeled apple, a view shared by many in ballet circles. I can see no difference between Ford's defense of Jazzercise's action and an artistic director's refusal to hire a talented black ballerina because ballerinas are expected to be white, thin and flat everywhere. Justice sometimes requires the rehabilitation of standards unfairly naturalized by convention." I hope there's enough context here to make sense. (Complete review at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/books/re...mp;oref=slogin) Overall, Patterson praises Ford's willingness to take on egregious cases of "playing the race card"; the quoted passage comes in a section where Patterson identifies parts of Ford's argument that don't work so well. It should be troubling that Patterson can draw on ballet's whiteness so easily as an example of unreformed racism.

This is where the sad part of Philly--a large-scale ignorance about Cunningham, much less Brown--becomes a happy thing: events like this are rarely sold out or even very crowded! For instance, in the past I've attended cozy, intimate talks featuring Sara Rudner and Lucinda Childs, which would have 'em hanging by the rafters in NYC. Trisha even performed here a bit ago creating a new work right in front of our eyes, and yet there was room to breathe.

I won't be there (well, never say never) but I bet I'll be the ONLY BTer who will be at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA to see their reconstruction of Tudor's Continuo, as reported in Feb. 3's Links (also here: http://www.mcall.com/entertainment/all-f-t...0,2319099.story. As Brecht writes in Mahagony, "Oh don't ask why." If I'm up to it and not sidetracked by other things, I'll report back.

A press release from Dance Affiliates (at UPenn): For Immediate Release February 6, 2008 Contact: Anne-Marie Mulgrew Project Director, Dance Affiliates (215) 636-9000 ext. 110 annemarie@danceaffiliates.org Molly Petrilla Press Officer, Philadelphia Museum of Art 215-684-7864 mpetrilla@philamuseum.org Dance Affiliates and the Philadelphia Museum of Art present Conversations, a free symposium with the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Dance Companies Philadelphia, PA – Dance Affiliates and the Philadelphia Museum of Art present Conversations, an afternoon of lively discourse, performance clips and rarely-seen archival images, Saturday, March 1, 1:00 pm-to 5:00 pm, in the Van Pelt Auditorium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Ben Parkway. The program commences at 1:00pm (to 2:45pm) with David Vaughan, Archivist and Trevor Carlson, Executive Director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), followed by a 3:00pm (to 5:00 pm) session with legendary postmodernist Trisha Brown, Artistic Director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC), company members and technicians. Panelists include: Bonnie Brooks, Chair of Dance Dept., Columbia College and former Executive Director, DanceUSA, and Lois Welk, Executive Director of DanceUSA/Philadelphia. Participants will discuss the creative collaborations of these two seminal choreographers that began with New York Blue Chip Artists (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol) and avant-garde composer John Cage, and how their work continues to evolve by fusing contemporary dance with new technologies and new challenges. Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown have collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage and have used motion capture technology in creating new works. Both companies have ties with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. MCDC staged Event at the Museum, and Trisha Brown (also a visual artist) has presented a program featuring her drawings. The program is free, but reservations are required. To reserve a seat in advance, call 215-235-7469. (A $2.50 service charge will apply for Museum members: $3 for non-members.) Hailed as a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, Merce Cunningham has been inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, Officier of the Légion d'Honneur, France, Herald Archangel Award, Glasgow, Scotland, National Medal of Arts, Washington DC, and Porselli Prize, Italy. The UK Herald praises Merce Cunningham “as the greatest living choreographer whose creative vision is impressively undiminished." Merce Cunningham is known for his iconic and memorable approaches to dancemaking that include I-Ching chance procedures to cutting-edge technology. In conjunction with the symposium, the MCDC will perform two Philadelphia premieres, BIPED and eyeSpace, February 28-29, 2008, on the Dance Celebration Series at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA. Ticket prices are $50, $40, $30. Tickets may be purchased by calling the Annenberg Center Box Office at 215-898-3900, or by visiting www.pennpresents.org. Dance Celebration is presented by Dance Affiliates and Penn Presents. Its 26th season at the Annenberg Center under the artistic direction of Randy Swartz salutes the 20th century pioneers and innovators of contemporary dance. Parisian art writer Alan Riding lauds Trisha Brown as “one of the grandes dames of American dance.” In 1970, Trisha Brown branched out from the experimental Judson Dance Theater to work with her own group of dancers. TBDC offered its first performances in Manhattan's SoHo district where Brown created works for alternative spaces featuring dancers signaling on rooftops spanning 12 blocks (Roof Piece 1973) and climbing on walls supported by pulleys (Man Walking Down the Side of a Building 1971). Glacial Decoy, Brown’s first (of four) collaboration(s) with the distinguished Robert Rauschenberg triggered Brown’s career on the international art scene. Today, the Company performs in the landmark opera houses of New York, Paris and London. The repertory has grown from solos (Accumulation 1971) and small group works (Set/Reset 1983) to include evening-length works and significant collaborations between Brown and major visual artists. In March of 2003, she made a rare solo appearance at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, where she premiered her live work, It’s a Draw/Live Feed. The large-scale drawings that resulted from the performance are housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Brown is the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. She has been awarded two Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and the National Medal of Arts Award, as well as the French Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts Award. At 71 years of age, Trisha Brown announced her retirement from the stage on February 5th, to focus on other aspects of her career. For information on Dance Affiliates programs, contact Education Director, Anne-Marie Mulgrew 215-636-9000 ext. 110 or annemarie@danceaffiliates.org. For information on the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its programs, contact Press Officer, Molly Petrilla at 215-684-7864 or mpetrilla@philamuseum.org The engagement of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has been made possible by the generous support of the William Penn Foundation. The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, is dedicated to improving the quality of life in the Greater Philadelphia region through efforts that foster rich cultural expression, strengthen children’s futures, and deepen connections to nature and community. In partnership with others, the Foundation works to advance a vital, just, and caring community. Learn more about the Foundation online at www.williampennfoundation.org. Additional support for the symposium is provided by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Endowment Fund for Education.

I've just stumbled on a great BBC program (OK, programme) online, called "Discovering Music." A typical program takes a piece of music apart, explaining in plain terms what's going on--it's for general audiences so all terminology is thoroughly explained or exemplified. Sometimes a program will be on a thematic or generic topic--"Elgar's Englishness" and "Songs" being respective examples. In general, the analyses stick to formal aspects of the music, as opposed to culturally contextual or biographical. The archive, organized by composer or topic name, can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/discoveringmus...ioarchive.shtml. It's great to hear these analyses illustrated with copious audio examples, by the fairly unpretentious and knowledgable narrator. It made me think, of course, how wonderful a similar program would be in re ballet, complete with visual and audio examples. I mean if one can easily spend an hour dissecting a Schubert sonata, surely one could do the same with Serenade.

I'd put Bolender's Souvenirs in that category. And I think NYCB has dumped Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake there as well. Perhaps we can also amend Leigh's classification to include ballets that posterity seems to have doomed to oblivion, at least in terms of inspiring major revivals. Balanchine's Pas de Dix comes to mind, as well as his older versions of Valse Fantasie. And what's happened to Allegro Brillante? Of course all of this depends on what your sense of "purpose" is (i.e., challenges/showcases dancers, promotes a company's or a choreographer's artistic vision, speaks to someone's aesthetic hunger, etc.), or if "dated" carries a negative connotation for you. To me, for instance, Les Patineurs feels incredibly dated and pursues no aesthetic purpose--I can't imagine the gain it confers on any company performing it. I'm sure others feel differently!

Add Dracula and you have a season! I'm surprised that no company has contacted us yet to plan next season's programs for them. Umbrella title: "Lost Masterpieces". Sadly, I think many ballet companies are already compiling and implementing their own bad rep lists, w/o any help from us. The pdd of Ignorance + Arrogance is a popular first choice among ballet company ADs, EDs, boards, and a few stars. And BTW the eponymous Veronique Doisneau does change name to match its performer.

Sorry, but I am going to disagree strongly here with what seems a universal opinion on BT. I like this piece on so many levels: formal, because it makes us pay attention to parts of the structure of a dance that occur while Le Grand Star is performing (this kind of taking apart is something music has done for years, btw); emotional, b/c it makes us consider the life of a corps dancer--who in the French system is fixed in status. I think we have more than enough opportunities to watch soloists do their thing in ways that raise our pulse; it's poignant and revealing to have a corps dancer's role--and life--explicated in a way that makes us think.

Yes, those 19th-c robber barons were intriguing in their contradictions, weren't they? Contemporary robber barons are so consistent in their identity as the scourge of humanity.

But I'm soooo curious! I'm also interested in expensive failures, and what they say about the choreographers/companies that produce (or revive!) them.

From yesterday's links: Andre Prokovsky is staging his ballet "The Great Gatsby" for Tulsa Ballet: http://www.tulsaworld.com/entertainment/ar...8_H1_hJazz23352 QUOTE "Andre Prokovsky doesn't mind that most people already know the stories his ballets tell. If anything, using a story as well known as "The Great Gatsby" as the source for a ballet makes the process of telling a story through movement easier." Caveat: my very subjective opinons, based on personal experience, follow. They are my own views and in no way represent the views of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. I was part of the first incarnation of this expensive fiasco in 1987, which Pittsuburgh Ballet Theatre premiered as part of the opening celebrations for the newly renovated Benedum Theater. Mr. Prokovsky was, in my opinon, an incompetent choreographer. The "American Dream" scene was a joke; it ended with Daisy, dressed as the Statue of Liberty, perched on Gatsby's shoulder, torch aloft. (During rehearsals for it, he once looked at the 18 of us and said, "Make a star shape." Being good do-be dancers, we did it, somehow.) Most of us had more than a dozen costume changes; in that scene, I was a tap-dancing cowboy just kind of jamming up there on stage next to the tapping Salvation Army nurse . No matter that some of us knew more tap steps than others (he did not provide any). That experience went straight into my Big Book of Bad Ballet Stories (subsection "Reasons to Retire"), providing me with countless hours of mirth in my post-dancing dotage. Too bad it cost PBT over $1 mil. Later, PBT ended up replacing Prokovsky's choreography Bruce Wells's; they found the rights to the original Gunther Schuller score to be too expensive and replaced the music too.

I can't ID the dancers--I'm sure others will--but I'm intrigued by this study and its review. Despite the rich topic, Lopate (the reviewer) notes that the author Horowitz's "judgments seem shoehorned in to serve his pet theories [including] that the Russians adapted better to America than the Germans did, because they came from an expansive, polyglot country undergoing innovation [...]." From the sound of it, this produces disappointing results, especially considering that many German exile composers shaped Americans' perceptions of what "movie music" should sound like (sidebar: I think movie music is woefully under-studied). In other words, if Lopate is correct, while the book's title promises that the study will focus on how these artists "Transformed the American Performing Arts," it seems to retreat into biography that examines how they were often "stifled." I'm not sure how useful this cultural study is if, in Lopate's words, Horowitz "seems something of a Eurocentric snob when he argues that America too often infected the sensitive exiles with superficiality." That seems a trite observation when you're talking about Hollywood. And Lopate quotes Horowitz as concluding "Taken as a whole, 20th-century American immigrants in the performing arts were not able to sustain a full growth curve upon relocating." I'm enough of a snob to be turned off by the use of the phrase "full growth curve" applied to creative process and artistic production. Finally, I think Lopate is spot on to conclude that "Some of the exiled artists may have gotten (to quote Weill) 'lost in the stars,' but we are the grateful gainers."

Thanks for all of your details--now my curiosity is piqued. And a corps standpoint is a GREAT one!

I'm very skeptical about how this will turn out. Choreographing a ballet to a familiar, well-known, full-length masterwork only heightens expectations (see the work of John Neumeier); there are a lot of elements to balance here, and Weiss's track record doesn't suggest to me that he is up to such a monumental undertaking. Figurante, your description implies that you've seen the ballet. What about the choreography did you find "engaging"? And can you describe what Weiss's "religious miming" looks like?

.....The timing of it can only make this an attention-getting stunt. .... Wasn't Britney once again taken by ambulance to a hospital's psych ward last night? I can't believe that a company as 'serious' as the Rambert would be doing something as sad and tasteless as this. Long before her current troubles, Philadelphia modern dance company Headlong Dance Theater performed Britney's Inferno, a 2002 dance that was more about audiences and the culture of celebrity than her particular problems (from their website: "an evening-length piece about the rise and fall of a star in a pop-cultural hell"). It was fun, smart, and prescient instead of prurient. (I know, it's not ballet but I thought an interesting point of reference.)

Pittsburgh Ballet did it as late as 1986-88. The complete ballet. Not fun to dance, btw! And I believe Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet (under Tallchief) did it in the late 70s/early 80s as well--I remember hearing from a friend who was involved in excruciating rehearsals for it. (Which makes me ask, since most of the old Chicago rep was based on her personal repertory experience, did Tallcheif ever dance it?)

Gwen Verdon to Fonteyn, in ballet class in NY: "Look at us, the last of the red-hot mamas."

But couldn't we say that in all these examples it somehow evokes the "folk," and the folk of a country other than that of the ballet's origin? I wonder why? "Civilized" people don't touch their head?

Yes, and Polish to the Imperial Russians connoted "folk"--and there are other moments in the ballet where the dancers do more explicit character-like steps (the moment I'm thinking of is in the movement after the pdd and repeats twice). But I seem to remember in the distant past an interview with Farrell about the gesture--perhaps someone with a better memory than me can recall it (she probably just said "it doesn't mean anything, Mr. B. just liked it...). Could another "Russian" possibility for the gesture be something someone does in Bayadere?

...which i've seen in some versions of the Nutcracker's "Russian Dance" when danced by a couple of female dancers and a male. One could also argue that this is what the lead ballerina in Diamonds alludes to when she makes a similar gesture in the pdd.