palacinky

Follow-up on John Markovsky. Here's an article in Russian about a get-together he and Alla Osipenko had in 2008. Markovsky returned to St. Petersburg from Israel in 2005 and has been living at the Savina House for Veterans of the Stage in that city. In the article, Markovsky admits he's an alcoholic but has been keeping himself under control for the past several months. http://ivlae.livejournal.com/17580.html Basically, the article said Osipenko wasn't sure Markovsky would show up for the meeting (he's known to be not terribly sociable) which was set up by critic Olga Rozanova, but he did. He was very self-conscious about some of the photos and videos they displayed of him and Osipenko but ultimately gave his impressions of the work. He said he has no interest in being a ballet coach, even though he's received several offers. If you look at the link, you'll see he looks amazingly good (in 2008 anyway) for someone who's had long time problems with alcohol.

SImone Messmer is a wonderful dancer and will certainly be a principal somewhere, but it might have been a "culture of SFB" thing. I know that, before the season started, she got in a huge argument on Maria K's Facebook page about how backstage union help is paid vs. dancers (Simone's boyfriend does technical theater work--Kotchetkova thought is was unfair dancers were paid less). It was about as knock-down-drag-out an argument as I've ever seen on a dancer's FB page to the point that I was kind of in shock that it was happening in a public place like Facebook. I don't know if the argument was about what it seemed to be about or something else, but it wasn't the kind of incident that the front office would ignore. SFB doesn't seem like the kind of place which welcomes temperament or picking fights.