Kathleen O'Connell

Martins had Liam Scarlett choreograph 2 works: Acheron and Funerailles. I don't think Scarlett can be called a "brand" yet.

Oh, most definitely a brand. He's still in his 20s and has already created work for (in alphabetical order) ABT, Ballet Black, The Ballet Boyz, English National Ballet, K-Ballet, Miami City Ballet, New York City Ballet, Norwegian National Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and, of course The Royal Ballet, where he is the company's Artist in Residence (and the first to be named to that post).

Everyone wants a Scarlett of their very own, the same way they wanted a Wheeldon and an Elo.

The July issue of Vanity Fair, featuring Caitlyn Jenner, has an article titled, "Tchaikovsky's New Queen," that profiles Misty Copeland.

You can access the article -- which was penned by none other than Heather Watts -- on line here. The online version is accompanied by a 5 picture slide-show of studio shots by Patrick Fraser.

Peter Martin's commitment to new work is not simply by commissioning work. All the choreographers you name, Wheeldon, Peck and Barak, came through the SAB schooling system and into NYCB. While Martin's might've delayed commissioning their work and he is by no means a perfect AD, the system (NYCB/SAB) he leads has cultivated these choreographers. Lets not forget about Edward Liang too. I don't think any of their work is on par with Balanchine, but I don't think that is merely a coincidence that these choreographers come from his establishment. ABT has recently presented Marcelo Gomes choreography, but as much as I respect him as a dancer, I don't think choreography is his strong point. Also, I personally feel he got his chance to choreograph based on his star power that comes from being a principal. I highly doubt KM would ever commission a corps member to create a new ballet for the company.

I absolutely agree that Martins has continued -- and, one might argue, actively expanded via The New York Choreographic Institute -- NYCB's tradition of cultivating home-grown choreographers. (And we should add Benjamin Millepied to the list of choreographers who have come into their own during the Martins regime.) And, as I mentioned in my original post, he should be lauded for it. When Martins looks outside of his own organization, however, he rarely selects a choreographer who hasn't already built a solid reputation as an established talent (Ratmansky, e.g.) or a generated a ton of buzz as a hot young newcomer (e.g., Scarlett). So yes, Martins cultivates talent in-house and commissions new work from the usual suspects, but I don't think I'd go so far as to say that he's "the only ballet leader that is active seeking out new choreographers."

Martins is probably the only AD in the US who's managed to secure the kind of funding the systematic, large-scale cultivation of in-house choreographic talent requires; he's also got the biggest pool of talent to draw from. Other ADs, including McKenzie, simply don't have those resources. Keep in mind that ABT pays Ratmansky almost as much as it pays McKenzie; there probably aren't too many dollars left to develop a pool of in-house choreographic talent, and the company may not see that as critical to its mission. McKenzie and the Board (and this board, too ) may think the company's money is better spent elsewhere -- maintaining its bread-and-butter rep of big story ballets, e.g., or its heritage works, or its Ashton rep.

But it is shameful that Peter Martins seems to be the only ballet leader that is active seeking out new choreographers.

Hmmm ... I think I must respectfully disagree here. It seems to me that Martins rarely, if ever, commissions new work from choreographers who haven't already established themselves as a brand, with the obvious exceptions of company members such as Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck, and Melissa Barak. (Note that Troy Schumacher had been working on his own for a few years before Martins began commissioning work from him.) Martins is to be lauded for his insistence on new work and for fostering The New York Choreographic Institute, but I'd consider him pretty cautious when it comes to awarding commissions -- he's not the kind of AD who's going to color outside the lines, so to speak. PNB's Peter Boal is bolder in this regard, and it will be interesting to see what Lourdes Lopez does in Miami post-Morphoses.

From everything I've read here and from the handful of performances I've seen over the last five years, in terms of stars and up-and-coming stars, NYCB is an embarrassment of riches.

One sign of the depth of NYCB's bench is the fact that a number of principals and soloists have effectively been off the roster for a variety of reasons -- star turns in musicals, injuries, maternity leave -- and the casting palette has paradoxically seemed the richer for it. (And I mean no disrespect to the dancers who have been out; they all have roles in which they shine.) NYCB's repertory is an advantage here -- the whole program doesn't fall apart if someone doesn't work out as one of the mixed bill leads, but a barely adequate Giselle or Aurora can make the evening unendurable. Ditto the scale of the Theater Formerly Known as State vs the Met's: it's relatively easier for a young or as yet untried dancer to project in the former, but It takes a real star to fill up the latter. I sometimes convince myself that half of ABT's problems would vanish if it could decamp to a more congenial venue for at least part of its long NYC spring / summer season.

Congrats to all. Wow that was super fast for Isaacs. Looking forward to seeing them all next season.

Ah, but not as fast as for Lovette: both Lovette and Issacs became apprentices in 2009 and joined the corps in 2010.

ETA: And I see that Taylor Stanley also became an apprentice in 2009 and joined the corps in 2010. A good vintage, that one ...

Congrats to Huxley, Lovette, and Isaacs!

Thank you!

What I meant is this: Pachelbel's Canon and Black Swan are each in their way entirely legible to a sensibility informed by pop. (And let me hasten to add that I yield to no one in my admiration for really good pop; it's both hard to do and genuinely delightful when it works.) People wanted to hear Pachelbel's Canon over and over again the same way they wanted to hear a pop tune with a great hook over and over again: it was a gateway drug to itself rather than an invitation to explore more art music. Because Black Swan draws explicit (and I would argue completely wrong-headed) parallels between the movie's plot and the ballet itself -- indeed going so far as to suggest that a ballerina must literally contain within herself both Odette and Odile if she is to perform the role well -- I can easily imagine someone going to Swan Lake with the expectation that it is somehow going to replicate their experience of the movie, and being sorely disappointed. Whereas someone whose gateway drug is The Nutcracker goes to Swan Lake to see more ballet, not imbibe more nostalgic Christmas cheer.

I think many people attend musicals for grand spectacle of scenery, costumes and so on. Most of the NYCB rep has no scenery and minimal costumes. I actually think that the musical theater audience member looking to try out a ballet would be more drawn to a full length costume/scenery driven ballet of grand spectacle classic like SL or SB.

Yes indeed. ABT's Swan Lake has its problems, but it is most definitely a show.

There are two parts to the crossover problem. The easy part is enticing someone into a theater to get another glimpse of a star, or a story, or a form that excited their imaginations in a more familiar genre or setting. The hard part is the conversion experience. I suspect that Peter Martins' version of Swan Lake isn't going to be the road to Damascus for someone over the moon for Aronofsky's Black Swan.

Well, one lives in hope.

As indeed one should! I've just come to suspect that the crossover effect isn't particularly potent when it comes to ballet and that Black Swan is to dance what Pachelbel's Canon was to classical music.

Would it bring new audiences into the doors of mainstream ballet outlets?

I dunno. Did Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake do that? Did Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan? While the latter certainly seemed to have put a few more butts in seats for performances of Swan Lake itself, did it really to much to generate a new audience for ballet overall? I haven't seen Wheeldon's American in Paris, but would someone who enjoyed that show be happy at a performance of, say, La Bayadère? I can Imagine someone showing up at The Theatre Formerly Known as State just to see Robert Fairchild, chancing on him in Namouna or Le Baiser de la Fée, and walking out disappointed and befuddled, never to return.

From Nancy Reynolds' 1977 work Repertory in Review:

"Incidentally, the choice of the small Villella fit in with Balanchine's conception of the character, which was based on a German source in which Oberon is an elf and Titania very tall. All subsequent Oberons have been small men." (p. 218)

In a 2014 New York Observer review, "Springtime for City Ballet," Robert Gottlieb (a NYCB board member when Balanchine was alive) quotes Reynolds and adds his own observations about the height disparity:

"We were given three casts, the first one familiar and time-proven. In the second, Sara Mearns made her debut as Titania, an appealing and persuasive performance; when she’s anchored by having to dance a specific character (she’s at her finest in Swan Lake), she keeps her sometimes indiscriminate exuberance from getting in the way. Her Oberon was Andrew Veyette, always expanding artistically, but as a couple these two are mismatched: from the start, Balanchine envisioned a short Oberon and a tall Titania. (Nancy Reynolds, in Repertory in Review, remarks, 'The choice of the small Villella fit in with Balanchine’s conception of the character, which was based on a German source in which Oberon is an elf and Titania very tall.') When they’re more or less the same size, something basic in their relationship is lost."

Most casts that I have seen have paired a shorter Oberon with a taller Titania. I always assumed that the height disparity was one of the reasons Titania has a Cavalier to partner her.

Will any of the "guest stars" want to learn this style, or is it just as fine to cast the ballet from our own.?

Frankly, I'm all in favor of ABT's having an important work in its rep that isn't particularly amenable to an international airlift of guest stars.

If KM is mainly a fundraiser, what does Rachel Moore do? Isn't there a development department at ABT?

There's the managerial / administrative side of development: deciding which grants to apply for, which foundations to pitch projects to, planning events, making sure that the organization's shiniest object -- be it a dancer, a choreographer, or whatever -- is seated at just the right table come the gala, sorting out the various patron levels and perks, making sure the "donate now" button works on the website, handling reporting / compliance, etc etc etc. That's what the Development Department and / or Executive Director oversees. Ideally the AD is schmoozing the big donors, personally articulating the company's artistic vision to the foundation big wigs, maybe calling the Mayor or someone on the City Council, etc etc etc. -- i.e., a step or two removed from all the nitty-gritty planning and administrivia and focussed on enticing donors and grantors into pulling out their checkbooks.

My reservations about Mearns' approach to La Valse have less to do with its fidelity to a predefined text than its lack of texture and pacing. In the performance I saw she had it dialed up to eleven from her first entrance and consequently left herself with nowhere to go dramatically. I have similar reservations about her approach to Davidsbündlertänze; her Clara is at the extremes of grief from the get-go. Is her approach "wrong" or "invalid"? Not necessarily, but I at least don't find it theatrically satisfying. Obviously, this is something about which reasonable people may disagree.

I agree about Gottlieb telling it as is - but he can be as harsh as Macaulay as when he (dares) criticize the divine Mearns in la Valse: "... LeClercqs most famous role. Here we had Mearns at her worst. As I've suggested, shes a flinger not Balanchines cool, restrained girl in white who gradually succumbs to a morbid flirtation with death. Mearns enters already so distraught that she might have come straight to the ballroom from the snake pit."

I happen to agree with Gottlieb's assessment of Mearns generally and in La Valse especially, though it certainly could have been -- and should have been -- more tactfully put. Too often Gottlieb sounds as if he's disparaging a dancer's moral fiber rather than offering a critique of the performance he saw them give.

For those of you who would like to search for more Yacobson videos in Cyrillic as suggested:

Леонид Якобсон (Leonid Yacobson)

Леонид Вениаминович Якобсон (with patronymic - Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson)

Some additional search terms to try with his name:

Шурале (Shurale)

Спартак (Spartacus)

Вестрис (Vestris)

Хореографические миниатюры (Choreographic Miniatures)

OK. Bandwidth permitting, I'm going down the rabbit hole on this one ...

I got in contact with Apollinaire Scherr and asked her if, in light of her recent article, she had any video recommendations for those of us who were just learning about Yacobson and weren’t in a position to see much (if any) of his work live. She very graciously sent me the following list along with a few comments, and is happy to have me post it here:

Here are his "miniatures"—an hours worth, from a 1960 film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0TKf4CL2Bo

Here is a 1980 color film of the fairytale ballet Shurale, which the Mariinsky revived a few years ago; this is a very early full length. And in ballet fashion, it too is about a bird woman: a kind of mix of Swan Lake and La Sylphide (she has to lose her wings to love her man) based on a Tatar fairy tale. The score is fantastic. Yakobson had to lock the composer in his hotel room to get him to finish it in timely fashion. There are also many more recent clips from Mariinsky, but not the whole ballet in one go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqxWnKT3eHw

Here is Vasipova in Yakobson's late, "classical" work. He has always had famously acrobatic lifts (very Soviet, yes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWmxiL_tjwU&index=37&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

And old blurry youtube of his Spartacus (which preceded Grigorivich's by a decade)—Spartacus and his true love before he leaves for battle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6MY6wI36P0&index=19&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

Again from Spartacus. What I love about this is the mother of this seductive slave is mourning and lamenting right at the edge of her auction carpet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQyaAkQsdsg&index=28&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

There are more, and I’m not sure I've even relocated the best, but you have to search in cyrillic as well as English, and in all the spellings in English (Yakobson, Yacobson, Jacobson) to get all of them.

I'm out of town and without broadband, so I haven't been able to do more than dip into these yet.

Enjoy!

The Atlantic has just posted an interesting article by Apollinaire Scherr, the Financial Times’ New York dance critic, on Soviet choreographer Leonid Yakobson, prompted in part by Janice Ross’ new book Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia.

Yakobson (of whom I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing** until I read this article) was Balanchine’s countryman and exact contemporary. Scherr views his work as a "the yin to [balanchine’s] yang" and a useful corrective to "the notion that Soviet ballet slept out the 20th century":

"Both Yakobson and Balanchine were formalists. Both understood choreography in essentially modernist terms—as a process of distillation, or “abstraction,” as it is more commonly known. But Balanchine began with the danse d’école, the movement lexicon inherited from the French court, while Yakobson started with the world, even if that meant setting the women’s pointe shoes aside and abandoning the standard turnout of the leg. Russian Orthodox to the end, Balanchine often presented the classical idiom as a veil through which to glimpse the metaphysical. The secular Yakobson saw ballet as a chance to illuminate our irrepressible natures and the eccentricities they breed."

She draws some interesting parallels with both Martha Graham and (!) Bob Dylan:

"But just as Dylan rewired folk, Yakobson—the singer-songwriter’s equal as artist-sponge and “cultural ventriloquist,” in Ross’s apt phrase—updated character dance. He distilled it down to its constitutive parts, to the feelings and impulses that harmonize as personality."

She closes with an observation about Balanchine’s heirs that nails what's so problematic with much of their work for me:

"In the decades following Balanchine’s death, ballet seemed to have reached a dead end. His heirs understood formalism as the most forward-looking and imitable of his many modes, but they didn’t appreciate how much its power depended on the spiritual yearnings and existential wisdom with which he infused the steps. Their work was dogged and desiccated, full of moves that signified nothing."

Unlike some critics however, (Jennifer Homans, I’m looking at you) Scherr thinks ballet’s future is "bright again."

Anyway, the article makes me want to seek out more of Yakobson’s stuff.

**Ahem. Even though, like many of us, I’ve seen this Baryshnikov performance of one of Yakobson’s works, Vestris.

ETA: Bonus footage -- a few minutes of the young Baryshnikov rehearsing Vestris with Jacobson in 1969, followed by a few more minutes of what looks to be a Soviet TV broadcast from about the same time.

OK. Now I'm beyond embarrassed. I just did a YouTube search on Yacobson's Shurale and got 2,930 results ... how I have managed not to notice him before is beyond me ...

I couldn't remember. Last year when I went I was so surprised to see one of the ticket-taking ushers that I remembered from quite a while ago, and even more surprised when he recognized me that the process didn't even register.

I think I know who you mean. I've been handing him my tickets since at least 1978 and he does nod at me every time as if he knows who i am. Going to the ballet just won't feel the same when he retires.

One of the basic technologies is to have a unique ID on each ticket and, when a ticket is exchanged, to de-activate the old number. That requires barcodes, so that if a de-activated ticket is scanned, it can be rejected.

Is NYCB scanning tickets these days?

Yup. They have been for w while now.

Helene -- Yes! Netrebko is a good analogy. Also, Cecilia Bartoli. And Renee Fleming.

I do think that ABT's long season at the Met is one of its challenges. As a theater, the Met is ill-suited to ballet. There is too much stage to fill and too many seats that are fine for listening to grand opera but lousy for watching ballet. (The acoustics at the top of the house are fantastic, but the action looks like it's taking place on a planet far, far away.)

The kind of rep that works best there -- lavishly scaled story ballets -- is expensive to produce and difficult to cast. Not because the company doesn't have good dancers, but because the kind of dancer that can both fill the house and sell it to the back of that house in particular is relatively rare and requires the kind of cultivation ABT can't -- or doesn't -- offer. (How is Isabella Boylston, or any ballerina for that matter, supposed to get her arms around Giselle if she only dances it once a season?)

Three weeks at The Theater Formerly Known as State, three weeks at the Rose Theater (in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex in the Time Warner Center) and four weeks at the Met might allow the company to adjust its programming mix to give due honor to its "heritage" ballets, present its new commissions in an appropriately scaled venue, and, most important of all, get its most promising dancers front and center more often.

What determines who makes it is, for the most part, pure chance. But mostly it is talent OR savvy glad-handing. Copeland has chosen the latter because obviously she doesn't have the technique to wow people with her dancing.

But she does wow people with her dancing. Many of them are not balletomanes, however, and I wonder if it isn't that as much as anything else that rankles Copeland's more vociferous detractors. An equivalent from another art form might be all the hyperventilating over Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman, and Charlotte Church among the more fervent opera enthusiasts. Some of them lived to grab the newbies by their lapels and lecture them loud and long about why they couldn't, shouldn't ever enjoy a moment of Boccellii's singing and if they did it was only because he was a handsome blind guy the media sold to them and did they realize they were complicit in the death of real operatic singing?

ETA: For the record, I want to make it clear that Copeland is a legitimate ballerina. Bocelli has a beautiful voice, but didn't receive the kind of training that would have made him a legitimate operatic tenor. They are alike primarily in their appeal to non-aficionados.