Kathleen O'Connell

City Ballet can't just order up great works, as the Diamond Project showed. What widely admired choreographers are languishing for lack of commissions? What great contemporary ballets should it import? Great dancers are best shown in and are in part formed by the demands of great material, and Balanchine and Robbins provide it. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to suggest that Balanchine was the Shakespeare of ballet. It's going to be a while before an equivalent genius emerges. Until then, we're going to have to take our pleasures where we can with John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan -- and hope that at the very least there's a George Bernard Shaw in the offing.

To me, that supposed commitment of preserving the old works and creating new ones, seems to be in reality, more heavily weighted towards caring for and re-staging the old. If you want to see smoke come out of Robert Gottlieb's ears, just try saying that within his earshot ... Until very recently, the general critical consensus seemed to be NYCB wasn't committed enough to the careful conservation of its Balanchine repertory ...

One thing to keep in mind, of course, is that the company commissioned ballets by choreographers other than Balanchine even when Balanchine was alive and in his prime. It may have been Balanchine's company, but the commitment to new choreography was more than just a commitment to new Balanchine (or later, Robbins) choreography. Cunningham's "Summerspace" in NYCB's rep, after all ...

I've read the first three "Patrick Melrose" novels and have been steeling myself for the final two. By "read" I mean "listened to the audiobooks," which worked well for these novels: the narrator was excellent and I suspect that I wouldn't have made it through Patrick's epic bender in "Bad News" otherwise. (I'm pretty sure I got a hangover by osmosis.) But they are excellent books -- and funnier than they have any right to be. I didn't much like Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" to begin with, but comparing Theo's East Village drug adventures with Patrick's made it seem like particularly weak sauce, despite its way too many pages. While I wait for David Mitchell's new novel to come out, I've decided to read Lev Grossman's "Magicians" trilogy, since the final volume has gotten some very favorable reviews. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the first one, and I can't quite figure out who the intended audience is. It's a little more grown up in some of its concerns than your typical young adult novel, but doesn't quite feel adult adult either. I'm thinking maybe a bookish 19 year old who grew up on Narnia and Hogwarts, with a little of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy thrown in? (Now Pullman's novels are some YA books that adults have every reason to enjoy ...) But none of the new fiction I've read so far this year has really grabbed me as much as two new novels I read last year: Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers" and Caleb Cain's "Necessary Errors."

I know two people who made small investments in a few Broadway musicals. They weren't theater people and (to the best of my knowledge) weren't plugged into a network of theatrical investors. I don't know if they made a decent return, or even if got all their money back, but they had a blast and felt very proprietary about "their" shows. It may be that the Kagans are trying tap into the kind of investors who want to have a little fun with their investment "mad money" and hadn't realized they could throw the dice on a Broadway show.

Check out this New York Magazine slideshow of gorgeous photos of Lauren Bacall lookin' gorgeous, from age 19 right on up to 85. Lauren Bacall Could Teach You a Thing or 2 About Style

The Library of Congress has made a concerted effort to get some of the gems in its collection digitized and freely available on line. Go here to browse what's available. And here for the Ballet Russes materials that have been digitized. I don't know if the LC (or any institution) will ever be able to get everything on line -- quality digitization takes time and money and making it all readily available online takes servers and bandwidth. And some materials may simply be too fragile. But it's a nice start.

The steps, of course, just like everybody else. I don't think an enthusiasm for fashion and a taste for ballet are mutually exclusive. In fact, I suspect that they might complement each other: ballet is visual and stylized, much as high fashion is. Sure people who enjoy attending orchestral concerts might also like the ballet and it wouldn't hurt to let them know that they'll hear something besides 19th century theater music. And of course they already know that buying a ticket and showing up at the theater for a live performance is a thing, so there's that battle already won. But given that they are apparently shrinking in number and graying along with the rest of us, I don't think crafting a marketing campaign that specifically targets them would materially ratchet up audience growth, which is what every arts organization is scrambling to do. And frankly, I wouldn't want to compete with Carnegie Hall's board for gala dollars. Some music lovers won't like what they hear at the ballet, though. They might object to the quality of the playing or to the adjustments in tempo and phrasing that are required to make concert music danceable. And a lot of them would blanche at the thought of having to listen to anything composed after 1890.

I gather I am the only person in the world who enjoyed both Benjamin Millepied's choreography and Iris Van Herpen's costumes for "Neverwhere." I enjoyed "Spectral Evidence" too, although I gave Olivier Theysken's costumes higher marks than Angelin Preljocaj's choreography, which is a guilty, guilty pleasure. Sigh. It is very lonely over here. In all seriousness, NYCB's costume shop may be tip-top, but many of the company's costume designs -- most done by theater professionals -- leave a lot to be desired. They STILL haven't gotten "Who Cares" right, and the company's propensity to put its ballerinas in variations on the 50's cocktail dress drives me around the bend. ("Walpurgisnacht" in particular looks like it should be renamed "Debs Gone Wild," and don't get me started on "Les Carillons.") I've got 99 NYCB problems, but the Rodarte costumes for Millepied's "Two Hearts" ain't one. So really, I'm pretty much OK with the couturiers, but I do wish NYCB would let Marc Happel do more on his own. I loved the crinkled paper tutu he did for "Les Bosquets" as well as the ruffly skirts for "Luce Nascosta."

Given the difficulties most American orchestras have raising money and building audiences, targeting symphony-goers probably isn't the most fruitful avenue for a ballet company to pursue. Why wouldn't fashionistas take to ballet as a serious art form?

Ah - found the thread, which I seemed to have missed the first time around. Can't say I buy Wheeldon's logic for withholding the rights, though, given that videos of the pdd are readily available online. I agree that the first half is anywhere near as good as the pdd, although I have seen NYCB throw weaker stuff on stage to fill out a program of short works.

I understand the situation you're describing, but I still want to see the work entire at some point, if only to know that myself. And perhaps to understand why the choreographer made the two together, even if they live quite happily apart. Does anyone do the ensemble half without the duet? Well, Pennsylvania Ballet included just the first half of "After the Rain" in its 50th Anniversary PBS broadcast (which you can watch here). I don't know if they regularly perform it that way, however. It may simply have been cut from the broadcast in the interests of time. It's worth seeing both halves together at least once if you can, if for no other reason than to see Wheeldon was up to then. I'd say watching it feels something akin to watching "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3," with the Pas de Deux being roughly equivalent to "Theme and Variations."

Those were good to read, of course! But I did find it amusing that an ad that makes a fuss about overcoming negative assessments of one's body type -- including not having the "right feet" -- generated comments like this: "Murphy's Gaynors hurt my heart. They actually manage to make a principal at ABT look like she has bad feet." ETA: the comment I quoted was in response to a picture of Gillian Murphy that someone had posted as an example of (and I quote) "a more typical [ballet] body type." In any event, Murphy's feet look just fine to me.

Wow. Lotta Gaynor Minden hate going on in that thread ...

PNB and SFB both have the Pd2 in their rep. But who else (beside NYCB) does the whole thing? Pennsylvania Ballet did it this spring (part of Julie Diana's farewell show) -- anyone else? I never really bought into "After the Rain" being a "whole thing" from the get-go; to me it's always seemed like two short, disparate works bolted together for the sake of convenience. (One of my complaints about Wheeldon's work from around that time was that it felt fragmentary -- like short extracts from some larger work-in-process.) The pas de deux lives quite happily on its own. And although I've never seen the first half presented without the pas de deux, I'm guessing it would work just fine as a stand-alone if it were given a new name and bundled together with some of the other shortish works in the rep like Herman Schmerman or whatever.

I respectfully disagree. Any opportunity to see the Trisha Brown dance company perform before it disbands, which it plans to do in about 18 months, is something to grab on to if you can.

Bergonzi was my very first live Radames (Met 1978). I was a newbie, didn't have a clue, and the production was just awful, but I remember his performance to this day. RIP.

Another FFD objective is to showcase the diversity of dance. Your typical FFD program presents four short-to-shortish works from wildly different genres and traditions. The program I saw last year featured India's Nrityagram performing Odissi classical dance (the only work done to live music), a neo-classical ballet (DTH's "Gloria" with a full complement of principals, soloists, and corps), an urban-inflected contemporary troupe (Vancouver's 605 Collective), and a dollop of late 80s / early 90s European Contemporary (Mats Eks' "Light Beings"). FFD is always careful to program at least one major company, performer, or active choreographer in every program as well as artists who are likely to be less well known, even to dance aficionados. But lordy the ticketing process is a royal pain.

NYCB added "Fancy Free" to its repertoire in 1980, and Robbins, who was in charge of the revival, presumably selected the cast. With the exception (I think) of Kipling Houston, all of the cast members in the 1986 video I linked to above (Stephanie Saland, Lourdes Lopez, Joseph Duell, Kipling Houston, and Jean-Pierre Frolich) were in either the first or second casts in the original 1980 revival. I'm guessing that the 80's cast danced the ballet the way Robbins wanted it to be danced then, for good or ill.

I recall Martins' sailor as being rather more knowing than he is often portrayed today. Think of something along the lines of the gypsy prince role Martins originated in Balanchine's "Tzigane" or his sailor in the Royal Navy section of "Union Jack."

I didn't mean to imply that a purely lighthearted version of "Fancy Free" would necessarily be sappy. But watching the video, and especially, listening to the music again made me think that Robbins and Bernstein might have wanted theses sailors to have a little more edge to them than they would likely have had in a conventional musical.

Go here for a video clip of the section of Fancy Free under discussion. NYCB 1986 Lourdes Lopez / Joseph Duell / Kipling Houston / Jean-Pierre Frolich I really do find it more menacing than playful -- there's plenty of menace in that music, that's for sure -- but of course your mileage may vary. It also occurred to me as I re-watched it that Robbins and Bernstein might actually have intended the passage to have some darker undertones -- i.e., that they were aiming for something more complicated than the Hallmark Channel version of shore leave.

Good questions, but I don't think your implied analogy holds. The guys are acting in sexist fashion, but not because they dislike women. In fact, they're acting like little boys who pester little girls and make them cry. They do it because they want attention. They do it because they like the girls. They may like women just fine, but their behavior suggests that they don't fully respect them: how else should one interpret the freedom they seem to believe they have to take a (weaker) stranger's property away from her and then tease her when she tries to get it back? Casual prejudice isn't only a function of not liking the members of a particular group. It's tied up with respect and power, too. I'm not suggesting that the handbag grab is on a scale with the depredations visited on African Americans, Jews, Japanese-Americans placed in internment camps, etc. -- the shameful list goes on and on -- just that there is nothing wrong with being repulsed by the sailors' behavior now, even if it was typical of its time. (And I'm not convinced that it was.) I see this episode as a failure of empathy on Robbins' part precisely because -- and perhaps just at that moment -- he couldn't see past the casual sexism of his day.

I think they could only humiliate her if she took that as their intent. I agree with Mme. Hermine, and I wonder if that sort of behavior was not uncommon at the time - sexist and regrettable, yes, but unconsciously so on the guys' part, and not perceived as such by the woman, so not actually inflicting cruelty. But the moment makes me uncomfortable today. In regards to dirac's good point about the style possibly having change over the years, I would think that the woman's acting would be even more important than that of the guys. I think I recall someone - Faye Arthurs? - at NYCB in the mid-nineties almost playing along, indicating that she was more or less amused. Still, one feels bad for the woman, and a little embarrassed - at least I was - for the guys, who are acting like boys. What do you think their intent might have been? Also, would we be as comfortable giving their behavior a pass for being typical of their time if the victim of their prank had been African-American or Jewish?

I'm sorry, but I can't see the way Robbins' sailors torment the woman with the red handbag as anything but mean. They may not have meant to harm her, but they had the power to humiliate her, and they used it -- perhaps thoughtlessly, which is almost worse.