leonid17

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA2eXdWTf8

Thank you for posting.

I have compared photographs taken of Nijinsky in 1945 after watching the film full screen a number of times.

It is interesting, but I would like to see confirmation of the event written or published at the time.

What also concerns me is that Romola Nijinska is not in the shot.

Life magazine covered the Vienna story and the photographs they used are replicated at the beginning of the film. The written commentary the magazine gave needs to be taken with a sack of salt.

Before and after the supposed date of this film, Nijinsky is always described as having a shuffling gait.

The video was taken down before I was able to see it, so I can't comment directly on that.

However, it seems to me that the problem with young girls or boys acting/dancing/whatever in a sexually mature way is less with their own self-image, but the with image others have of them. How many women have been accused of 'asking for it' by what some perceive as provocative actions (clothing, movements, dancing)? Yes, girls and women have the right to dress or move however they like, but the sad fact is that those actions may provoke others to act inappropriately. Adults can make a choice whether or not to take that risk; young children cannot understand the possible implications of their actions. That's up to their parents, and I worry about the children of parents who don't appear to understand this.

I think you make a significant point in respect of children when you say, "However, it seems to me that the problem with young girls or boys acting/dancing/whatever in a sexually mature way is less with their own self-image, but the with image others have of them." or, I would say want of them.

Parental exploitation of children in the entertainment world is nothing new. No child makes an independent decision to go to a dance school,

the suggestion has to be made to the child after some kind of introduction to professional dance, often through the witnessing of child performers and as you say the decision is made for them.

I am not sure of the values these depicted children are being given by the wearing of scanty costumes and a raunchy adult style dance routine. One thing is sure, they do not have the maturity to fully understand the concept and the context which for some parents might constitutes a type of abuse. There is no suggestion by me that this is the case of the children depicted in this film.

However the exploitation of minors in the filming has a reality and I wonder how the poster of the film named "21 so fresh", thought the exposure would benefit the children in some way.

I think many concerned with the safety of children in society would not have seen either the clothes or the choreography as suitable for pre-teens and mothers are not always right.

Check this site an d click on picture on the left. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/child-exploitation

I read a couple of the news reports where the girls were reported to be from 7 to 9.

I suspect that if the costumes were pastels or whites instead of red and black, and/or didn't reveal the midriff, there might be less fuss. Some of those moves wouldn't be out of place performed by girls roughly in the same age group at cheer competitions. There does seem to be some sort of national freakout going on over this and I begin to think it's a bit much, but that's the Internet and cable news for you.

Which is not to dismiss ami1436's larger points. I doubt that in this instance the girls will be "harmed" in any way unless there is some damage done by the fallout from this video. The beauty pageant culture from whence sprang JonBenet has been with us for a long, long time.

I think it was less the costumes, but more the hip thrusts which most people would expect to be outside the vocabulary of such young children’s dance activities.

It was a step in the wrong direction, especially if the provocative behaviour is carried off stage and an awareness of the provocation in the child is established. If this happens, a less than desirable self objectification may become part of the child’s persona and become a ready made target for grooming in or out of the dance school. In this I echo perky's concern.

Many girls are now reaching puberty by the age of eight and boys a year later. This has been happening over time and right across the world and everyone knows that sexual arousal comes with puberty and I would suggest that it would be better if children of the age in question did not acquire provocative behaviour either in or out of a dance class or competition.

I am a little surprised at the rather tame response to this clip.

I think many in the UK might see it as a step towards the sexualisation of very young minors.

Edited

well, this hit the internet yesterday like a cyclone, thought I'd link to get your opinions...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjehii-jjHE...player_embedded

Apparently the dancers are ages 7-9 and this type of choreo is now common on the dance competition circuit.

ok, jumping down from my soap box now...

Oh don't jump down yet and save a seat up there for me!

This isn't dance to me. It's writhing and humping (hope that doesn't sound too harsh) with a few ta-da! tricks thrown in every few beats. It's bad taste show dancing of the lowest common denominator. Add having kids dance it and it also makes it disgusting and vile.

I actually like Beyonce and that particular video so I'm not a prude.

I hope like me you hit the flag, but I notice complaints have been posted and it is still there.

It's not at all clear how much if any ballet will be in this movie, but for the record here's the trailer for The Adjustment Bureau, in which Emily Blunt plays a ballet dancer.

There is a second or so in this clip just scroll down the page.

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/film/8260...-trailer-online

Two of the most extraordinary clips of the lady.

The first aged 101, the second aged 106 made just recently as described the Douglas Martin obituary.

Mme. Alonso as Lissette with Jose Pares as Mama Simone in the early 60's

On film it seems too broad a performance though it made me laugh a lot. I am sure in the theatre is worked brilliantly.

Madame is so pulled up and centred. Just like she is in Swan Lake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KIqeQHaaBM

The Little Humpbacked Horse

Tudor: Jardin aux Lilas

Ashton: Ondine, A Month in the Country, The Two Pigeons

MacMillan: Song of the Earth

Lifar: Mirages, Suite en Blanc

Balanchine: The Four Temperaments, Stravinsky Violin Concerto

Robbins: Dances at a Gathering

Cullberg: Miss Julie

The two ballets I have not seen live from your list of excellent works are The Little Hump-Backed Horse (which is available on DVD) and Mirage.

Marc Haegemann wrote an excellent review of Mirage and Suite en Blanc in Dance View Times October 20-21 2006 http://danceviewtimes.com/2006/Autumn/06/lifar.html

Thanks for posting, leonid. I was about to post it myself, although I don't know the name. It made me think of some of the old gals I've always been fond of from the era who died in the last few years, like Anita Page (who was a movie star in some of the musicals of the very early talkie period like 'Broadway Melody of 1929', paired with Bessie Love), June Havoc (who was in vaudeville as a child)l and Ina Claire, who was in a number of these shows, even though we mostly know her from her classy performance with Garbo in 'Ninotchka'.

Edited to add: Just read the article, and it's fascinating. I may well read the book about the family which was always performing. Was extremely interested that she was in love with Nacio Herb Brown, who wrote 'Singin' in the Rain', and that she thinks he (and Arthur Freed) wrote it for her. I then looked up 'Hollywood Revue of 1929', about which I've got a good bit of material published in a book, thinking she might possibly be one of the 3 girls singing it in 1 plastic raincoat (I think it's one, not two, will have to check), but couldn't find the name, but a lot of those people were uncredited in those early film revues. I do think that 'Hollywood Revue of 1929' was the first film use of 'Singin' in the Rain', and later the eponymous film would use the songs from both 1929 'Broadway Melody' (again the eponymous, as well as 'You Were Meant for Me') and 'Hollywood Revue'. I'm crazy about this whole Ziegfeld/Vaudeville milieu.

I always find theatrical families interesting no matter what country they performed in. Sadly Vaudeville and Variety swiftly diminished in England with the wider ownership of televisions, that employed performers from these earlier genres.

It certainly is an interesting family and I found this lovely photograph which puts a face (and body) to the lady in question which perhaps papeetepatrick you might compare. See:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Little_Eatons

It has been suggested that, "Singing in the Rain" may have been written as early as 1927 the year Nacio Herb Brown joined The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

Doris E. Travis last of the Ziegfield Girls has died aged 106.

Obituary:- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/arts/dan....html?ref=dance

It's odd for a prestigious company that has steady work during tough economic times is losing so many dancers not due to retirement or new artistic leadership.

If Sokvannara Sar ends up in your neck of the woods, you will be lucky audience members.

I had not heard of this dancer before, but this clip of him in Coppelia variation reveals a lot of charm. Oh yes and a bit of technique.

Go to European Ballet threads to check out Irek Mukhamedov and the Slovene National Ballet.

Having cut his Artistic Director teeth in Greece, Irek Mukhamedov has recently been Appointed Artistic Director of the Slovene National Ballet and is seeking male dancers with a strong classical technique aged 18-25.

Send full CV (including height), portrait, dance photo and DVD to the following address: Irek Mukhamedov, SNG Opera in Ballet Ljubljana, Cankarjeva 11, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija."

Jaš Otrin had previously been listed as Acting Artistic Director, Ballet.

the attached scans show the cover and the central spread of a small-size, 4x6 in., 8-pg. brochure produced to advertise the teaching headquarters of Alexis Kosloff.

the moscow-schooled Russian dancer was married to Alexandra Baldina; his somewhat more prominent brother was Theodore, a.k.a. Fyodor, had a career in Hollywood and established schools elsewhere.

A.K. also published as book, listed as follows in the NYPLibrary listing, which curiously does not give the publication's date:

Kosloff, Alexis.

Title: Russian ballet technique; method of practising foundation steps, potpourri of exercises, suite of dances. With descriptions and music. Edited by Olive Threlkeld Hanley.

Alexis Kosloff was not married to Alexandra Baldina, she was married to his brother Theodore who was a leading actor in Hollywood and was described as a 'matinee idol' playing lead roles opposite Gloria Swanson, Nita Naldi, Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels and Anna Q. Nilsson. With his dark hair and complexion, the ballet dancer was often cast in more exotic roles, often as a "Latin lover" type, Eastern European prince or noble, or Arabic sheik. Kosloff's acting career often relied heavily on DeMille procuring roles for him in his films. Indeed, the majority of Kosloff's film roles are in DeMille directed films. The advent of talkies revealed his heavy thick accent and he retired from the cinema a very rich man.

The book you refer to written by Alexis was published in New York in 1921.

No sooner had Alexis Kosloff arrived in America in 1915, he was appearing on Broadway with his brother Theodore and also moved into acting in the film, “The Dancer’s Peril! in 1917 which is now available on DVD.

Having settled in New York, he began choreographing and dancing in some six musicals between 1918 and 1932. He was involved in an attempt to create a dance fashion to music by Louis Breau and Ray Henderson and appearing in a photograph on the front cover of the sheet music in 1920 called “The Cat Step.” Alexei was also in demand for providing dance entertainments for New York society fund raising events.

You could learn about dancing from Alexis at home as his voice was heard on a piano roll called Interpretive and Fancy Dancing Lessons made in 1926.

Kosloff joined Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on tour in Europe and then danced with the Mordkin Ballet back in America.

When Nijinska staged La Fille mal Gardee with Ballet Theatre in 1940 Kosloff played Alain and later when ballet master with the Metropolitan Opera Company from 1940 he continued to dance in operas.

In his early days in America, Kosloff sometimes appeared with his reputed wife Vera Fredova (who also worked with Theodore Kosloff) aka Winifred Edwards formerly with Anna Pavlova who was to return to England and was known as a remarkable teacher with The Royal Ballet.

Alexis Kosloff retired to Hastings-on-Hudson and died in 1982/83. His house features in tours of “Hastings’ Personalities and Their Homes.”

Ps

When he arrived at Ellis Island his name was recorded Alexis Kosloff and not in the Russian style which surprised me at first but then I

remembered he had been in London and toured the UK where the translation had taken place.

the attached scan shows a page from VOGUE, (May 1, 1937) with a photo/illustration of Balanchine's 1937 ballet to Stravinsky's JEU DE CARTES.

previously the only pictures i've seen of Sharaff's costumes have been in black and white, presumably this colored illustration shows the ballet's color scheme.

Thanks for posting.

The costumes are wonderfull, really designed and beautiful.

Incidently it is the centenary of her birth this year.

The cast included: William Dollar (Joker), Annabelle Lyon (Queen of Hearts), Leda Anchutina (Queen of Spades), Ariel Lang [Helen Leitch] (Queen of Diamonds), Hortense Kahrklin (Queen of Clubs)

"... but in many ways it was a more sophisticated one as well."

Ditto!

I agree. It still is in Paris and St. Petersburg (not sure about Moscow), but elsewhere it's often the tallest corps girl or young soloist, a "junior" role (tall being the substitute for authority). It's definitely a ballerina role, and great ballerinas have danced it.

It certainly has to be a dancer with authority otherwise the role is lost.

Deanne Bergsma, not a conventional ballerina, but a wonderful Myrtha, not only became an equal in performances with Fonteyn and Nureyev she remains for me an exemplar of the role.

Yes Bergsma was tall, but her authority came from the fact that she understood the role and convinced in every way, establishing her otherworldly

nature with incredibly floatingly smooth pas de bourrée and dramatically only capitulating to the power of love, when Giselle and Loys seek the protection of the cross.

Ballerina's Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Lyubov Yegorova both essayed Myrtha successfully and they were both fairly small.

A historic performer much admired in London. I remember seeing her walking through Leicester Square one afternoon and I ran through the square and round the corner just to come face to face with her startling beauty and elegance.

I remember Miss Horne being chosen to appear on Royal Variety Performance and the papers next day were full of photographs showing her talking to the Queen.

A wonderful singer who moulded songs beautifully and memorably, a gift for us all.

I knew of the names of Flanders and Swann, but hadn't seen any of their work until I found this video, and

this one has set up shop in my head today:

What a wonderful reminder of a more carefree era.

Flanders and Swann were very popular on stage and for a much wider audience on the BBC.

For me they never failed when singing solo or duet and remind me of the days when there was only black and white television.

Thank you for bringing back happy, happy memories. As Simone Signoret said, “Nostalgia is not what it used to be (La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle etait)”

today its just manufactured.

http://www.balletassociation.co.uk/Pages/galleries.html

Click on gallery to reveal a wide range of photographs of the Royal Ballet

Well, not completely, it seems. Still, this is good news.

But on Friday Film Forum in Manhattan will begin showing what is being billed as “The Complete Metropolis,” with a DVD scheduled to follow later this year, after screenings in theaters around the country. So an 80-year quest that ranged over three continents seems finally to be over, thanks in large part to the curiosity and perseverance of one man, an Argentine film archivist named Fernando Peña.

The newly found footage, about 25 minutes in length and first exhibited in February at the Berlin Film Festival, is grainy and thus easily distinguished from an earlier, partly restored version, released in 2001, into which it has been inserted. But for the first time, Lang’s vision of a technologically advanced, socially stratified urban dystopia, which has influenced contemporary films like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” seems complete and comprehensible.

I first saw Metropolis around 1970 and its imagery has remained with me. Though panned by H.G.Wells and others at the time , I am glad to hear that an enlarged version is to be made available.

Thank you for posting the link it makes a very interesting read.

In London I think we have to wait until September this year for screenings.

See Well's review at:- http://erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.We...olis%201927.htm

So I cannot fully agree with “Tosh!” though I have to say, I prefer my prose to be both a lighter shade of purple and perhaps less mannered.

I too like it more when it's a bit less mannered, but I still find much of Jacobs' writing beautiful, this passage included.

my take on, “…an intense sensation of line imbued with deep space, a pregnant dimensionality…”, was that it meant having access to an extensive inner spiritual world, formed by the dancers that goes on and on, but tantalisingly, never quite personally experienced by the viewer.

Interesting. I read "pregnant dimensionality" as an enchanting sense of possibility, as the sort of presence that makes a dancer as riveting to watch at rest as in motion. Better put, as pregnant dimensionality.

To each his own. Style is always easy to mock, as others here have done. Ballet too is easy to mock as mannered and pretentious.

I like your interpretation. I find the imagery in her writing stimulating to read, but, Ms Jacob has a tendency to write for an audience that hardly exists in our brash new world.

When I think of the Kirov, I think of vaults. It’s not just the rich history of this company, which reaches back into the eighteenth century and is an inheritance to be reckoned with. It’s the arcing interior spaces that live in company style, the result of a shared technique learned in the Vaganova Academy, and a shared city of imperial raiments. All those golden domes against the moonstone-blue St. Petersburg sky, all those cupolas and colonnades. We see these architectural beauties in the dancing, nowhere more clearly than in Kirov women, in the celestial sphere balanced in their upper bodies, and in the Romanesque windows built into their épaulement. Kirov dancing at its best communicates an intense sensation of line imbued with deep space, a pregnant dimensionality. The company was originally named for a woman, Czar Alexander II’s wife Marie, hence, the Mariinsky Theatre.

When I read tosh like that I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I quite liked the allusions to St. Petersburg architecture created by succesive Imperial Russian families, as having a direct relationship to the creation of the Imperial Ballet. Where else could such a company be formed in the era in question. The size and the grandeur of the capital’s building were reflected in the size and stature of the ballet company, personally sustained by various Czars who set the taste of the company by supporting or rejecting a work. Of course a number of the capitals important theatres were part of the Imperial Household supported by the Imperial purse so there is a of reality in creating parallels as Ms Jacobs does and she is correct in stating a, “shared city of Imperial raiments”, given the often extravagantly high quality of the visual presentation of ballets.

The Mariinski/Kirov style, is (was) of an elegant sophisticated, beautiful style, in which Vaganova somewhat reduced the curvature of line originally inspired in part by Italian sculpture and began to assume a radical mutation of the style paralleling activities in Soviet architecture and painting. She was to use a language of form and line to create a compositional style related, but still somewhat independent from earlier aesthetics.

Vaganova was also no doubt influenced by the role of the political dramaturge appointed to theatres to ensure a separation between Imperial and soviet thought. In the process, was I would suggest that she created a certain new angularity to the curvilinear balletic line, in contrast to the Petipa and Cecchetti’s softer linear expression.

The difference in styles was confirmed when I attended a long series of lectures by Anna Marie Holmes in which she used films of the Vaganova Method made with students of the Academy. I was engrossed firstly by the explanation of the Method but much more engrossed when various elderly Legat (and other teachers) pupils stood up and asserted the correct execution of various steps as performed in Imperial Ballet style. There was a particularly extende discussion on where the accent sould be in "flic flac."

Two separate examples of Vaganova’s mutation of the former Imperial style can be seen in her pupils Alla Osipenko and Irina Kolpakhova.

They confirm in their individual take on the formalism of classical Imperial style, but there is also a certain angularity of Vaganova’s

Soviet aesthetic present.

As to “Tosh”, my take on, “…an intense sensation of line imbued with deep space, a pregnant dimensionality…”, was that it meant having access to an extensive inner spiritual world, formed by the dancers that goes on and on, but tantalisingly, never quite personally experienced by the viewer. She again alludes to the feminine when she reminds us that, “The company was originally named for a woman, Czar Alexander II’s wife Marie, hence, the Mariinsky Theatre.” Is Ms Jacob’s not merely echoing Balanchine’s, “Ballet is woman.”

So I cannot fully agree with “Tosh!” though I have to say, I prefer my prose to be both a lighter shade of purple and perhaps less mannered.

Simon, I think it might be more politically correct to refer to an infertile dimensionality.

Sorry, you're quite right. I saw Osipova in Don Quixote and she is really sensational on a technical level, but when I see her dancing she kind of reminds me of that song from Half A Sixpence - "Hold it flashbang wallop what a picture."

Does anyone else know what I mean?

Definitely. More so, because my family knew Tommy Steele's (star of Half a Sixpence) family as our back garden abutted theirs.

From my experience, you are right to compare her to, "Hold it flashbang wallop what picture, what a photograph." I suppose its a near relation to the American "Look Ma I'm dancing."

I was recently informed via a pm from another poster that had seen her more recently than I, to expect much more from her when she appears here in London this summer.