Mel Johnson

He does look young there. I started working for him in 1974, and there was already a bit of gray in his beard. I'd say this was a couple of years before, about the time of "Remembrances". He was always meeting people, and mentally filing away material to be used when the proper opportunity presented itself.

Long!

I managed to see "Ballet Imperial" in its 1964 revival with sets by Rouben Ter-Arutunian. I was quite disappointed when I later saw "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #2". It was about that time that I began formulating my Law of Balanchine Diminishing Returns. When the Old Man began tinkering with former works, it often was not for the better.

I think of those as hakama, the traditional Japanese pants worn in kendo. They can be effective if your ballet is set in Asia, or has a Asian design concept, but even there, they don't always work.

"Sylphides" has been done this way. First for a School of American Ballet production, then for a season or two by NYCB. I believe that they used the "Chopiniana" Title, but it was "Les Sylphides" as remembered by Alexandra Danilova and Balanchine. I didn't really care for it, even though the dancers were splendid.

That's opera; this is ballet. The text of a ballet IS, for all intents and purposes, the choreography. If you don't reproduce choreography accurately, you're not faithfully preserving the work. Sometimes, choreographers don't even let the dancers know what they're supposed to be doing. One dancer from a Massine ballet was astonished to learn that he was supposed to have been portraying King Ludwig II of Bavaria. This was after the opening. He thought he had been playing a wolf!

Hi, Lily and welcome to Ballet Talk. "Spring Waters" is just by itself, a stand-alone highlight for those "Highlights" programs that the Russian companies used to do so well. There are no variations, no coda associated with it. It just is itself. It comes from no other longer ballet. You could call it Neo-Classical, but I think that a stronger case could be made for calling it Neo-Romantic.

Fedorova's version wasn't Ballet Theatre; it was Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The pas de deux did make it to BT as a free-standing divertissement, all by itself. Lupe used to dance it with Royes Fernandez, and later Scott Douglas.

I find Balanchine's Act I infinitely preferable to anything else out there. I'm just sorry that the Sergeyev Notations are so vague on what the Battle looked like in the original. Some piano reductions have, however, preserved some of Drigo's penciled marginalia, like, "Mouse picks up (cookie) soldier. Turns him upside-down. Eats him." This gruesome effect brought to you by courtesy of a pocket in the lifting mouse's costume with its open end just below the head. Mouse picks up little boy, turns him bottoms-up, stuffs him down the pocket. "Okay, kid, here we go!!!"

A lot, if not all, of the recent Russian versions show signs of having been frightened in infancy by the 1919-1927 versions by Gorsky. Gorsky seems to have been the one who telescoped Marianne, Clara, and the Sugar Plum Fairy from the original libretto into one, and settled on the name Masha. In the 1927 version, he seems to have featured a Snow Scene with a kickline of dancing Santa Clauses. Thank heaven some things didn't catch on!

Nureyev was doing this a lot in his 1960s choreography. He seemed to want to establish that a man could dance adagio just as well as a woman can. This is the period when the legato male variations got added to Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and the like, most of which were sleep-inducing for me. Polemics in ballet tends to the boring side. The flipped fishes are seen in some Soviet-era choreography, but with different accents, as they generally linked even more spectacular lifts and catches.

Gremin. And here I was shooting for Lt. Belaye, but I guess he's not a choice.

Most prefer to retain their "creator's rights", taking a lesson from Mikhail Fokine, who left the Ballets Russes only to find that he only owned the rights to two ballets that he had created before working for Diaghilev: "The Swan" and "Chopiniana".

After awhile, I think I tuned poor Eddie Albert's narration out, because what he was saying was so very odd. Then I found out that it was far more based on the original Hoffman than the usual, but not to the point of having the Nutcracker being the son of the SPF. That's nowhere!

Given that these were three of my NYCB heroes, I can't imagine how I missed this show. Maybe it was shown during school term. (TV watching was not allowed.)Is there a pas de deux? If so, with whom did Hayden (Sugar Plum Fairy) dance? It couldn't have been her son, could it? So the pdd would have to be Villella and McBride. If so, what was left for Hayden. I can't imagine her taking a role like Giselle's mother. "Oh Eddie, please don't dance. It's bad for your heart. Eat one of my low-fat Sugar Plums instead." Etc. ) I do remember Hayden and Villella dancing the pas de deux in this confusing show, and doing the Ivanov choreography, not the Balanchine. I can recall that with some confidence, as I was learning it (the older version) at the time. Among other TV Nutzes that I recall from that era was a VERY BAD retelling of the story by...wait for it...Mary Tyler Moore, still trying to get her ballet ticket punched after having been the Hotpoint Devil.

Plucking away at those ol' Mystic Chords of Memory - remember, it's been 45 YEARS! - the Bluebirds were in from Beauty, but their music wasn't. I remember clearly Kehlet doing brisés volés to the B period (minor mode) of the Mirlitons music.

The "RB version" is pretty much the standard Ivanov, about 90% unembellished.

I remember seeing this first time 'round, and while it puzzled the bejeezus out of me, it didn't make me actually angry, the way a lot of TV versions of ballet did, and still does. It was a sort of pastiche of several different productions of Nutz from several different German companies with Hayden, Villella and McBride acting as headliners. Kehlet was in from the Danes, but then, he was doing a lot of guesting around that time, too. Copyright would be awfully hard to portion out, if one were to try to do so.

With new work, a company will first have a competent core group of people who know the ballet intimately. These are the "stagers" when it comes time to put the ballet up again. The companies tend to have some sort of video recording, whether tape or DVD, but no electronic means of recording motion have yet been firmly established as "archival", so they have to do the best they can. Film is really the most stable, but quite expensive for inhouse use. And to fill up the redundancy cup, the work is notated, whether in Benesh or Labanotation. With all these data sources, a new ballet can be relatively easy to remount, if the company is able to afford all that information collection. And yes, the choreographer must say it's OK to use it. Marius Petipa doesn't count, but the modern stager has to get paid, too! PS. Oh yes, it's expensive!

We have to remember that ballet masters are affected by what they're brought up with, whether to include material positively, or to react against it. Someone brought up with Balanchine's pas de deux may be led to stage a standard one-and-one adage with variations, or with the SPF variation relocated to the early part of Act II. In this respect, Balanchine answered early criticism of the ballet that the ballerina didn't have much to do until the very end. I do wish that people would stop trying to please critics from 118 years ago! Chances are that they aren't writing much about ballet any more.

Kind of reminds me of Mark Twain on Henry Rogers, vice-president of Standard Oil. "His money is twice tainted. T'ain't yours and t'ain't mine. He's a regular pirate, all right, but he owns up to it, and enjoys being a pirate. That's why I like him."

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that David chose self-promotion over product placement. Northern Quilted Toilet Paper Theater, anyone?

And remember, stick candy doesn't travel well, so if you're in St. Petersburg, of course candy canes are Russian!

♫So long, and thanks for all the fish....♪

Not that I've ever heard about. They can be cantankerous, and could shred a tutu in less time than it takes to tell.