Mel Johnson

True. Dewdrop is a Balanchine invention. Snow Queens are a Pavlova contraption. Adult casts as children have marked most Russian productions since at least Gorsky's, right after WWI. We'll have to see what comes out, but I'm a little cautious about predicting what the new ABT show will be like.

Incidentally, the Saloon/Baloon foofaraw led to a lot of Prohibitionist-era blue laws being repealed, but by the time that had happened, the clientele at O'Neal's had recognized the revised name with its distinctive superimposed "B" as irreplaceable, so it stayed. So, today, establishments in New York State are free to name themselves more as they please, cf. The Raccoon Saloon in Marlborough, NY.

Research the activities of the Ford Foundation with the New York City Ballet in the early through mid-1960s. There are some things they did that wouldn't play today, but the program was, on the whole, a success. It was a nationwide effort, and the largest to date, but also the most productive, and could be scaled for a regional company and audience.

From some Air Force time spent in upcountry Thailand, I do have some experience around elephants. Both Balanchine and the pachyderm seem to be having a good time, and that's a good thing! As one of my Thai friends observed, "Being cheerful around elephants makes THEM cheerful!" I recall some article naming one of the "ballerinas" "Bessie". Maybe Modoc was Balanchine's lead, but Bessie was his girlfriend?!

It's a little tough to interpret the history of copyright, as it has its beginnings only in the 17th and 18th centuries in English law, which tradition America largely inherited. The Monopoly Act of 1624 was the first English law that acknowledged, positively, that monopoly in any form had a right to exist. The Copyright Act of 1709 (aka the Statute of Queen Anne) positively established that a creator/inventor possessed some kinds of rights over what he had created/invented. Before that, it was pretty much all in the hands of printer-publishers, known collectively as "booksellers". The 1709 act had the effect of affording the creator of a work the exclusive right (a monopoly) to profit from its use for a stated period. When those first copyrights came up for renewal, there was a considerable scuffle among the booksellers who considered "monopoly in perpetuity" to be "odious", in which sentiment I join them.

As if on cue, the Times comes forward with this op-ed: Regarding perpetuity

I suppose I'm leery of monopolies based on an early admiration of Theodore Roosevelt. One of TR's main features for his administration was trust-busting. Like Roosevelt, I have nothing against business making money, but like him, I have to be concerned that the way in which it is done is not only lawful, but ethical. Ballet trusts will never have the same clout as Standard Oil, but the potential for going astray is the same for them as it was for Rockefeller. And I have nothing against copyright, either. A creator/inventor is certainly entitled for fair return on his/her invention, and I can extend that to the first generation of survivors after the creator's death; after all, that's what U.S. Grant wrote his memoirs for, to ensure his family's upkeep and well-being. I'm also chary of today's legal climate, in which the legal fiction of the "corporation" has now been accorded civil rights like (and potentially greater than) real non-fiction individuals. Issues in Artificial Scarcity present themselves here, and the locking up of the art of ballet in a sort of "Disney Vault", renewing its copyrights, perhaps into an unending future. So again I ask my subtitle question, "Who's guarding the guardians?"

Yes, and there is good evidence that C.S. Lewis was acquainted with Letters from the Earth when he wrote The Screwtape Letters in 1942. The issue is still with the transmission of information in both letter and spirit of its creator(s). I am concerned that the several organizations entrusted with these missions may be providing too little of the total content back into the world to allow its permanence. Who's running Quality Control here? Self-policing organizations tend not to after an initial burst of enthusiasm, and simply become noise.

A very related sort of story popped up in today's NY Times - about Mark Twain. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/books/10twain.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper The survival of an heir here, and an overly prim sense of editing has bowdlerized Twain's record. A similar clouding of the historical record happened in the case of George Armstrong Custer, whose widow survived into the 1930's, fighting tooth and nail against anyone criticizing "her Bo." Does this sort of thing affect ballet as acutely? I suspect not, but an overly reverential management of information can lead to errors in transmission, which is deadly for art constantly "at the vanishing point".

When it comes to the Finnish situation, we have to remember that Finland is not the US, and their laws will be interpreted in the light of their own historical precedents, down to the advancing present. It is fun, however, to contemplate Communication as a Civil Right in the US. If communication is a civil right, how do you justify having to pay for a US Postal Service? Or a telephone? Or internet access?

In response to a point raised by bart on the "Tchaikovsky pas de deux" thread, here's a springboard to another layer of discussion: Many choreographers, ballet masters and teachers have left considerable wealths of materials - to name a few, Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, Fokine, etc. Prudently, mechanisms, whether they be simply called Estates, Foundations, Trusts, or all of these and more, have been put in place to maintain the continuing presence of the legacies in the world. One thing I have tended to notice about corporate structures as a whole, whether public or private is the conservatism of the trustees, beneficiaries, managers, and whatnot. Granted, they have a job of preservation of history, but advancing technology seems continuously to outpace them. (If you think arts preservation is technophobic, you should see GOVERNMENT! That's why the wily secret agent will always be with us in the movies. Government often does not know how to help itself when faced with advances.) It is my opinion that all of these dance preservation organizations have completely mastered television. Now they seem to be working on home video recording technologies. Exploitation of the potential of cell phones may be as much as a decade away. The blanket answer for dissemination of information relating to the several benefactors seems to be what government does. If you don't have a complete handle on it, forbid it. Now, from a business standpoint, this course of action is rather prudent. But from a moral standpoint, it is very weak, and leads to the willful suppression of information, which is one of my favorite bêtes noires. I noted with some delight last week, when an AP story broke regarding human rights in Finland. It seems that they have interpreted communication as a civil right. Imagine the implications if that were done in the US!

The mills of the gods grind slow, but exceeding fine. The Balanchine Machine works fast, but often the results seem coarse, especially in the sense of "community". However, look at their responsibility - a great part of their raison d'etre is to protect the heritage and future of the Balanchine oeuvre, and they're not him, although they employ a great number of highly talented and intelligent people. Balanchine himself proved very generous about getting his work into the world. They need a genius on his level to decide how to protect the rights of the Balanchine Estate et al., while ensuring that sufficient material stays in the world and the public consciousness. It's the same in the teaching wing of the organization; they have to find somebody to organize the "Balanchine Method" into an actual teachable school, and that person has to be another genius as great as Balanchine to formulate a curriculum which can be used and accredited in places in addition to the School of American Ballet. That's not an easy task. Much of what is the Balanchine heritage is held by people who worked directly with him, and with his work, but the method of passing it on is "He said to me...." It's a lot like shooting with a smoothbore musket. The last bounce of the bullet down the barrel determines the direction of travel. Ballet is based on the Oral Tradition, but trying to control what that does makes herding cats look like a walk in the park!

At least they didn't have one of him doing the Cockney Maid.

After the Russian Civil War, they seem to have bailed out of Russia, with quite of few of them going to London, Paris and Berlin, not to mention New York. Big family.

I thought of her, but she just "Russianed up" to work in the Ballet Russe. I'm wondering if this doesn't have something to do with the industrialist-merchant-mining family. They seem to have been very generous patrons of the arts.

Anybody have any information about this group? I'm trying to help a poster on the other board. I know about the fictional one, but this one seems to have been real.

The cultural parallels between this event and FDR inviting King George IV and Queen Elizabeth to Hyde Park for hot dogs are kind of appealing. Reports that the other customers left them alone to chew n' chat suggests that there's still hope for the American Public.

Huh?

Ever see a photograph of Anna Pavlova which had never passed through her own personal darkroom technique, and compared it to one which had? Best is to find a negative that she'd doctored. She must have had a good time with that black paint, making her toes look pin-pointy, sometimes to an unreasonable degree. In photos she hadn't controlled, the boxes on her shoes often look like sagging tube socks.

This post led me to wonder about this transparency medium in stereoviews, so I looked it up. Turns out it was invented in France in 1853 and sold very well into the 1870s as a stereoscope feature. The photo was printed on very thin salted paper, then hand-colored on the back to give color to the view when held into the light. It was supplanted by an ambrotype sandwich made on glass, and colored as before. The glass ones are actually rarer than the paper ones now, because glass is brittle, and paper has some give to it.

My apologies - you are correct, rg. The Hayden/d'Amboise pairing was the standard of my student days, so much so that the originators have become conflated in my mind with the successors. I do believe that Verdy had a version slightly different in the second period of the coda when she danced the pas de deux with André Prokovsky.

The original is what Melissa Hayden and Jacques d'Amboise did in 1960. While changing choreography is unethical when done by the dancers alone, Balanchine set many varieties of his choreography over the years, tailored to individual dancers. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative like "Balanchine never set it that way."

There's really only one reason for huntsmen to be abroad in the woods late at night. They're attracting animals to a shooting stand with a lamp (called "jacking deer" in the trade, and bad practice). And Hilarion is RIGHT THERE with them, suggesting that he's so distracted that he can't even do his job as gamekeeper, further establishing his yutzness.

One of the problems in creating art in the midst of cataclysm is the lack of studio time and space. In the World Wars, there was a rear echelon where these things could be had, but in the light of modern warfare, including epidemic disease as a weapon, there is no longer a rear echelon. All the world is a potential front. There are modern works which speak to the oppression of poverty, as Donald McKayle's "Rainbow 'Round my Shoulder", but ballet has a harder time framing works like this.

The 1841 score has an extended farewell mime scene for Giselle, Albrecht, Wilfrid and Bathilde, none of which is used in any modern production of which I know. (Maybe Mary Skeaping's reconstruction?) As the motifs appear, you can tell who's entering and "speaking". Giselle ascends along the leg of a cut drop above her grave, and the fast music is Albrecht swooning into the arms of Bathilde and Wilfrid, as he has just witnessed a Genuine Miracle, with Giselle's soul accepted into Heaven, or perhaps she is assumed whole, by a merciful God who has observed her Christ-like sacrifice to save an unworthy man in defiance of the Laws of Men. Remember, they're in the forest because Giselle was reckoned a suicide, died unshriven, and was therefore unworthy of burial in consecrated ground. The Romantics were big anti-clericals while at the same time big pro-God. I think it would work, if somebody would do it that way.