Kathleen O'Connell

Congratulations! I know you're looking for classical music, but Talking Heads' "Naive Melody" — the tenderest little "we're spending our lives together" pop love song ever (yes! from Talking Heads)— might be nice for the party: Home is where I want to be Pick me up and turn me around I feel numb, born with a weak heart I guess I must be having fun The less we say about it the better Make it up as we go along Feet on the ground, head in the sky It's okay, I know nothing's wrong, nothing Oh! I got plenty of time Oh! You got light in your eyes And you're standing here beside me I love the passing of time Never for money, always for love Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight Home, is where I want to be But I guess I'm already there I come home, she lifted up her wings I guess that this must be the place I can't tell one from the other I find you, or you find me? There was a time before we were born If someone asks, this is where I'll be, where I'll be oh! We drift in and out Oh! Sing into my mouth Out of all those kinds of people You got a face with a view I'm just an animal looking for a home and Share the same space for a minute or two And you love me till my heart stops Love me till I'm dead Eyes that light up Eyes look through you Cover up the blank spots Hit me on the head I got ooh!

Many, many years ago I read an interview with Heather Watts in which she discussed the (to her mind at least) lackluster first five years or so of her career. She approached Balanchine for guidance and he recommended that she go watch (if I recall correctly) Gelsey Kirkland in T&V. "I wasn't even good enough to be in the corps of Theme!" she remarked to the interviewer.

She was indeed! But then she was great in everything. I could never understand why her career didn't get more traction—to my eyes, she was a more interesting dancer than some who made it to the soloist (and even principal) ranks. Not just technically strong—actually interesting. She was in my fantasy cast for a lot of things. I will miss her.

I'm not disagreeing, but it wouldn't be the first time a company's artistic leadership (and not just ABT's) appeared to be unfazed by something that looks less than ideal (at the very least) to the audience.

Maybe the artistic staff thinks she looks just fine?

I've often wondered if NYCB's 21st Century T&V ballerina casting has been more or less dictated by the requirements of its male roster. When Ashley, Nichols, and Kistler were dancing the role, the company had a luxury contingent of taller men to partner them like Sean Lavery, Adam Lüders, and Igor Zelensky. Lavery certainly put the lie to the contention that the male role is better suited to a shorter dancer: I think he was something like 6'3" and all legs.

During the first decade or so of my NYCB-watching career, I only saw taller dancers like Merrill Ashley, Kyra Nichols, and Darci Kistler perform T&V's ballerina role. Nothing against Fairchild, Bouder, and Peck, but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the company's taller women get a shot at it—and would very much have like to have seen Teuscher dance it.

Honestly, it doesn't matter what Macaulay meant. It's rude for anyone to refuse to refer to someone by their name, and worse than rude for a person of Macaulay's public prominence to do so. He's a journalist: part of his job is learning how to pronounce the names of the artists he writes about. He's also a human being and part of that job is according every other human being the dignity that is their right, rather than treating them as vessels for his wit.

Woo Hoo! Olga Tokarczuk! I really enjoyed Flights, and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is the next book up in my TBR (to be read) pile. There's a good article about Tokarczuk and her work in a recent issue of The New Yorker: Olga Tokarczuk's Novels Against Nationalism. There's more than a little controversy around Handke because of his friendship with Slobodan Milosevic. Handke delivered a eulogy at Milosevic's funeral, and said once in an interview that he considered him a "tragic" man. I think many people would consider that to be a rather generous assessment.

There is another: Richard Danielpour's opera Margaret Garner, for which Toni Morrison wrote the libretto. I saw it in 2007, when New York City Opera was still alive. Sigh.

I tried that thought experiment myself. Then I went and watched some videos. I think there may be just too much recognizable Japonaiserie in the movement vocabulary to keep it from seeming like "a work that comments on a culture by someone who isn't a part of that culture," as On Pointe so aptly put it, even reduced to leotards without the wigs, costumes, and sets. (And the more I look at it, the cheesier it seems.) Anyway, here are two clips to compare / contrast. The first is of Miami City Ballet with costumes and sets. The second is a clip from a Sarasota Ballet rehearsal in practice clothes with no sets. The clips are from different sections of the ballet, but some of the motifs from the first are repeated in the second. Note that the ballerina in the Sarasota clip is Asian. (I don't know the Sarasota dancers well enough to know for sure who she is - perhaps Ryoko Sadoshima, who was born in Japan.)

Honestly, I think Bugaku is a ballet we can do without. Simply presenting it with an Asian cast won't address all of its flash points: Asians aren't interchangeable, just as, in some contexts—whether benign or charged—Western Europeans of different ethnic or national origins aren't interchangeable. Furthermore, Bugaku does more than riff on the style of another culture's dance traditions: it appears to be saying something about the way that culture structures the intersection of hierarchy, gender, and lust. Stripping off the wigs and the kimonos might not be enough to take away the taint of, for lack of a better term, the Western gaze. Not every work by a genius is a work of genius. I think we have enough Balanchine to let Bugaku go. ETA: Just to be clear, I'm not criticizing anyone's interest in seeing Bugaku: ballet devotees are rightly curious to see and evaluate as many works by a creator of Balanchine's stature as they can. In this instance I think there are other matters that need to be taken into consideration. For the record, I've both lived in Japan and, as an employee of a large multi-national company, done business in a number of Asian countries. That's the filter through which I see Bugaku.

I wouldn't mind if they danced in all their balding glory, frankly, but it should be their choice. If they're more comfortable dancing with toupees, they should by all means do so. I just hope they don't feel pressure from the company, or their peers, or the world at large to wear them. They may view their toupees much as some ballerinas (or opera singers) view pinned on hairpieces or wigs: part of the costume—and that's fine too. Personally, I'd like to see a more relaxed approach to on-stage hairstyles in general, and wouldn't mind a few beards in the bargain.

No one is saying that.

As far as I'm concerned, Lauren King's dancing was absolutely the highlight of Saturday evening's performance of Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2. She was delightful six different ways. I mostly went to see Summerspace, but I'm really glad I got to see King's TP2 performance, too.

I think both Abraham's The Runaway and Peck's Pulchinella Variations with their attendant designer togs delivered big time, and I will die on that hill. 😉

Well, in the best of all possible worlds one might hope that the company could contrive to both rake in the bucks and get a few keepers, too however gimmicky the angle. I've got no real objection to the basic concept, although I wonder from time to time if the designers might benefit from a bit more (ahem, a lot more) guidance from Marc Happel.

I agree that the Fashion Gala model hasn't delivered a ton brilliant costuming, although, to be fair, it hasn't delivered a ton of brilliant choreography either. That being said, a few collaborations worked out pretty well. In addition to The Runaway (Kyle Abraham / Giles Deacon): Spectral Evidence - Angelin Preljocaj / Olivier Theyskens (2013) Neverwhere - Benjamin Millepied / Iris Van Herpen (2013) Funérailles - Liam Scarlett / Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen (2014) New Blood - Justin Peck / Humberto Leon (2015) [Not a Fashion Gala ballet, but Peck's The Times are Racing also had costumes by Humberto Leon.] ten in seven - Peter Walker / Jason Wu (2016) Pulcinella Variations - Justin Peck / Tsumori Chisato (2017) Not Our Fate - Lauren Lovette / Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim of MONSE and Oscar de la Renta (2017) Not all of these are top-drawer ballets, but I'd argue that the costumes added something to the whole. I suspect I could find a few more to add to the list, and there have been a couple of near-misses, too. ETA: I saw Neverwhere a couple of seasons ago when it was revived without Van Herpen's brilliant costumes and while I wouldn't go so far as to say it was nothing without them, they definitely added an element of theater that it just doesn't have as a leotard ballet. Kind of the reverse of Balanchine's Four Temperaments.

Well that's some welcome news indeed! And yes, she'd be a lovely, sunny WREN.

Honestly, given the current state of Domingo's voice, I think I might have preferred to hear Željko Lučić in the role anyway. (Lučić, a Serbian baritone who sings a lot of Verdi, will replace Domingo. I wouldn't rush to the theater just to hear him, but if I had signed on hear Netrebko's Lady Macbeth, I wouldn't tear my tickets up in disgust just because he'd been cast, either.) It's a shame Domingo couldn't manage a more graceful exit for the sake of his fans if nothing else.

Somehow that is just perfect. 😁

Some more Frank tibutes How Robert Frank’s Photographs Helped Define America by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker Wanting to See Like Robert Frank by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker The Shock of Robert Frank’s “The Americans” by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker Robert Frank Revealed the Truth of Postwar America by Arthur Lubow in The New York Times How Robert Frank's Vision Influenced and Inspired Generations of Photographers by Keith Jenkins, NPR Jim Casper's 2008 review for Lens Culture of the 50th anniversary re-issue of The Americans, which was supervised by Frank himself. (Note: Tod Papageorge groused about the way Frank re-cropped the images in The Americans when the book was re-issued in the 80s.)

City Ballet the Podcast has finally made it into Apple's podcast directory, which means it should be available in just about every podcast app out there. I have no idea why it took so long, but it's there now.

RIP, Robert Frank. "In Frank’s transforming vision of America, a car is a casket, a trolley a prison, a flag a shroud." Tod Papageorge, "Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence" Also from Papgeorge's essay: "The few critics who bothered to write about Frank’s book [The Americans] when it was first published [1959] detested it; words like “warped,” “sick,” “neurotic,” and “joyless” were used to characterize the work. Although, in retrospect, this response appears hysterical, it should be remembered that these critics – for the most part, writers in the photographic press – were reacting to a style of picture-making as much as they were condemning what they regarded as a captious attack on America. At a time when the dominant public sense of photography’s possibilities was identified with photojournalism and with the cherubic buoyancy of Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition, The Americans presented harsh, difficult reading." I suspect that Frank was one of those artists who may have influenced his detractors as much as his admirers. Not a bad legacy, when all is said and done. I took a few moments to read through some of the comments on the Times' obituary (I know, I know, never read the comments) and it was interesting to note that there were harshly critical takes among them, some of Frank's style, some of what they view as an immigrant's temerity to depict America in a less-than-flattering light.

Adding to the list of Kowroski performances not to be missed: the ballerina in Balanchine's Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir. As far as I'm concerned, Kowroski is to that role much as Teresa Reichlen is to the Rubies Tall Girl: she spoils you for anyone else. I think I've seen just about every ballerina who's been cast in the role perform it, and none of them have been as deliciously witty and movie star glamorous in it as she is. (The ballet is one of my Balanchine guilty pleasures. If I were programming an NYCB Guilty Pleasures Spectacular, it would be on the program along with Preljocaj's Spectral Evidence and, I don't know, maybe Dove's Red Angels or Feld's The Unanswered Question. Or even Forsythe's Behind the China Dogs if the company ever decides to revive it while someone still remembers it.)