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Hans

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Everything posted by Hans

  1. Hans

    Tutus

    Actually, I had always learned that the whole point of the two-piece construction was to allow for more flexibility--you can't very well do arabesque in what is essentially a stiff leotard. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is how regular dresses were made in the 18th/19th centuries as well, with the skirt separate from the bodice. There are also those tutus often used for Le Corsaire that are clearly a modern invention: they are traditional tutus that expose the midriff.
  2. Thank you, Ms. Leigh. I suspected it might have been there. One quote in particular I cannot get over is this: One of my best friends is a former RBS student, and according to her, the school is very tough and quite strict. It produces dancers for the Royal Ballet, which everyone knows is among the very best six or so companies in the world. Therefore, I cannot understand Johnson's logic when he attacks the RBS's standards.
  3. In which publication did this review occur? Is it online? I haven't read the review or seen the performance, but as for the students dancing "correctly," isn't that how students are expected to dance? Though I admit I am surprised if they made NYCB's jumps look good by comparison; of course, nobody jumps well on a small, slippery stage. Most surprising, however, is to read such insulting words about the Royal Ballet School, which is one of the best in the world...surely they can't have been "ghastly," "abominable," and "disgusting." Those are not qualities one usually associates with the school or its graduates.
  4. I'm just coming from the pun thread and had a really awful idea for a new production: "The Lord of the Ring Cycle" Just imagine the possibilities.
  5. I have Dmitri Roudnev's Best of Ballet Volume V CD, and I love it. The tracks aren't too long, but they are definitely adequate, and the tempi are all very good, with some classic ballet favorites interspersed with the pianist's own improvisations.
  6. Hans

    Give It a Rest!

    Tough time choosing between Romeo and Juliet vs. Serenade, but MacMillan finally won.
  7. I have a tape of a Kirov gala that uses this idea. Yulia Makhalina comes out and dances the adagio and variation from Le Jardin Anime. Then comes the Odalisque pas de trois, and then we have yet another Medora in the form of Altynai Asylmuratova performing the pas de deux from Act II with Ali. They do the adagio, variations, and coda, and then Medora I comes out again with Gulnare to perform the Jardin Anime coda, at the end of which Medora II and Ali pose center stage, flanked by Medora I, Gulnare, the corps, and the odalisques. All they needed was another Gulnare so that she could dance the Pas d'Esclave from Act I, and they could bill it as "Highlights of Le Corsaire!" And how about that Nutcracker in which Maximova and Vasiliev perform Act I and another couple performs Act II? JaneD, I think they should have performed the Rose Adagio on the Born to be Wild documentary. Maybe they could have had four (or even eight!) Auroras . Not to even mention all those entrechats-quatres in Giselle...or Pas de Quatre.
  8. I voted for Carreno. I can't believe Malakhov was trained at the Bolshoi...if it weren't for the long skirt, I wouldn't know who was Giselle and who was Albrecht. And since when are there fouettes in Diana and Actaeon? Sometimes I think Cubans would put fouettes into La Sylphide if they were sure the ghost of Bournonville wouldn't rise from the grave and force them all, wili-like, to dance petit allegro until dawn.
  9. And how about those little pocket flashlights people turn on every five minutes so they can flip through their program during the performance? A few years ago (I don't know if it still happens, but it probably does) the New York State Theater looked as if it were filled with fireflies from all the lights and pages flipping!
  10. Just wanted to clarify that there are six fairies in Sleeping Beauty, not ten .
  11. It would be nice if the ushers would enforce it.
  12. When a dancer has been trained in a particular method and then joins a company that dances a different way, it's usually pretty obvious. ABT, for example, is like a variety pack of ballet styles--when I watch their corps, I can pick out who was trained how. Taking company class helps, and I remember that Suki Schorer wrote that she used to help newcomers to NYCB who had been trained in other methods adapt to the Balanchine style. When I danced at SAB and (to use your example) Tewsley would guest with NYCB, he didn't dance like the rest of the company. Neither did Charles Askegard. Paloma Herrera still has Balanchine arms from the time she studied at SAB. I think it's easier to change styles/methods when one is in a school setting, but it's probably not such a great idea to move back and forth a great deal in the beginning as it can be very confusing for a young child. We've had some discussions about this in the Teachers forum. Company class often is more of a warm up for the day and less of a "these are the five Cecchetti arabesques" type of class. I know firsthand that a large part of the difficulty is getting rid of habits. For example, it was a habit for me to lean forward, round and separate my fingers, and look straight ahead--in fact, when I auditioned for the Kirov Academy, I received a C on coordination! (Everything else--feet, flexibility, &c was in the B range.) Much of the difficulty was in breaking these habits and forming new habits that are normally learned between the ages of 8-10. Most ballet dancers reach a point at which they don't have to think "thumb in, middle finger in, little finger out, all fingers lengthened" or "okay, we're doing tendus to the front now, so my head should be turned to the right and inclined back." They just do it because they've done it that way from the beginning. BTW, I definitely was not being humble (but thank you for thinking I was )--a Vaganova teacher could still spot me in a Vaganova class as easily as if Carabosse had wandered onto the stage instead of Prince Desire! But for those not trained in the same method, it would definitely be harder to tell. In fact, I remember one of my classmates who was in his third year who still had RAD arms--no matter how hard he tried, his elbows stayed stiff and his fingers remained stuck together. Again, it's rather like speaking foreign languages--if a child is trained in Vaganova at age 10 but at age 12 moves to a Cecchetti school, it won't be that difficult to learn the new method. As one ages, it gets more difficult because more habits are formed. PS: Not really relevant to the topic, but fun--I remember an audition at SAB for Boston Ballet's SI during which I amd a friend of mine had several hours to wait between registration and our audition. We decided to do a warm-up class taking turns thinking up combinations, and we did each combination in a different style of ballet until we couldn't think of any more and then started at the beginning again. We did Balanchine, Vaganova, Cecchetti, Paris Opera, RAD, and Bournonville. The other students probably thought we were crazy, but it was really fun!
  13. Trying to change one's arms to fit in with a different style is rather like changing one's accent when speaking a foreign language--just about impossible. When I made the switch from Balanchine to Vaganova, I had to work incredibly hard, and after just a year in Vaganova, my friends said it looked as if I'd been trained that way for five years. However, I could still feel the difference in the way I moved--my dancing is a Vaganova veneer on a Balanchine base, and I can't change that. To this day, I have to struggle with the position of my hands, my epaulement, and all sorts of other things. So while it isn't impossible to imitate another style, it takes a great deal of work every time one dances. It's similar to singing in different languages--one must concentrate on the different vowel sounds all the time, and one still probably won't fool a native speaker of the language.
  14. Out here in Mid-Maryland, we are also getting Nureyev's Don Q, to which I am looking forward. No ABT, though; however, there was a review of it in today's Washington Post. Every time I think Maryland is a cultural backwater, I look at the local performing arts center's brochure and see that Ailey, Momix, Pilobolus, and Trinity Irish Dance Company are coming for another year. I don't know if they just stop here on their way to/from DC, but I love the center's director! Not to mention that our local Nutcracker always features NYCB principal dancers...
  15. Thank you, Juliet! I think that will be a big help.
  16. Does anyone know if a biography of Maurice Bejart exists (I'm sure one does) and if it's been published in English? I have a friend who loves Bejart, but she can't speak French, so my copy of "Conversations avec Bejart" is no good.
  17. A. Why on earth would a man ever portray a swan? Oh...wait. Never mind ;). B. He goes en pointe (supposedly) in technique shoes, thus furthering the myth that all dancers, regardless of gender, dance en pointe as a matter of course in nothing but soft shoes. (I once took one of my leather ballet shoes to a shoe repair store to have a hole repaired. The lady at the desk asked me if I danced on my toes in them...:rolleyes: .) I could add that his feet are nowhere near arched enough to actually stand en pointe, but I think that's asking a bit too much of a telephone commercial! C. The "dancers" in the background are not really very good, and they don't at all represent a typical ballet class, as each of them just seems to be doing her own thing. However, it does have good points, as others have mentioned above--not to mention that it doesn't feature Carrot Top or Alf:D !
  18. I think the notion of Balanchine "dancer-proofing" his ballets is somewhat ridiculous. It seems to imply that if a Balanchine variation is danced without personality, there's still something to see in terms of choreography, but that if a Petipa variation is similarly performed, it just falls apart. Hardly.
  19. Has anyone seen the commercial for 10-10-220 with Hulk Hogan as a ballet teacher? It is pretty frightening.
  20. I don't think classical ballet is extinct. If I did, what would be the point of teaching? It is not really very alive in many places, to be sure, but I would say it could stay like this for far more than twenty years (not that I want it to). It has been pushed and pulled and stretched out of shape lately, and there is too much of an emphasis on glossy gymnastics. I can honestly say that I have not been to many performances in which the dancers really "danced." Part of this is the way ballet is often taught, and part of it is that choreographers use more and more contemporary dance. I think some of this is because choreographers don't realize that ballet doesn't necessarily have a fixed vocabulary--classroom exercises don't dictate the possibilities of the stage. Ballet steps can be adapted to express many different ideas. To paraphrase Valdimir Angelov, look at Swan Lake--the port de bras is not purely classical; it is an example of ballet being modified for expressive purposes. Not to mention that the "fixed vocabularly" charge could be leveled at other dance forms, too. Graham has a fixed vocabulary as well, for example. Nobody complains about it being out-of-date or old-fashioned, even though it was developed almost a century ago. (Actually, I am writing an essay about this very topic for college admissions, so this thread is pretty interesting to me!)
  21. Katherine Kanter wrote: No; it's a Britney Spears song, and it isn't disgusting in that sense, although her singing does tend to make one think of dogs and pavement...
  22. Maybe Leigh could knit her a pair of baggy legwarmers so we could be spared the sight of those unfortunate legs. Bloch model, she ain't.
  23. I took class several times with a pianist who was used to improvising for Graham classes. The tempi were always scrupulously correct, but the beat was not strongly accented. She played very stark, spare melodies that were very beautiful and irregular, which was wonderful in modern, but difficult to adapt to in ballet, which generally moves more regularly--in other words, while the rhythms would have seemed right to a musician, the quality of the music and the quality of the dancing were too much at odds with each other for my taste. Also, "Oops I Did It Again" is rather irritating in ballet class, and if I hear "My Heart Will Go On" during plies one more time, I will wash out my ears with lye.
  24. If my experience was typical, ballet is respected in Western Europe as well, though not as much as in Russia and China.
  25. I probably should have posted this closer to the date, but I received the Kennedy Center newsletter saying that the Royal Danish Ballet would perform excerpts from Napoli at the International Dance Festival in DC in March and couldn't help myself . Click here for more information.
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