Mel Johnson

Water, no, champagne yes, but open the bottle before entering the theater. Better yet, eat a croquembouche before the curtain rises. That way, your mouth will be glued shut from the caramel, and no one will be able to accuse you of talking during the show. And always remember, soaking your feet during the performance is bad form, except in the Family Circle.

Supplementary Rule: After throttling an annoying seatmate, it is not permissible to hang the body from a parterre box without the permission of the boxholder(s).

Well the country does go back a few more years, like 1776, but the Academy IS older than the Constitution.

The old-fashioned bijoux (fake jewels) made of glass used to do that occasionally. They were heavy, and some partners hated them because they would develop sharp edges which cut the guy's hands, and would sometimes get caught in their costumes. They were mostly flat, but they could do that if one side became unsewn.

The long dresses were there before that. I recall them back at City Center, before the company moved.

Wasn't that in the first Balanchine/Francis Mason collaboration, Balanchine's Stories of the Great Ballets? What, ca. 1954?

It does help to reread the entire thread, then click all the links, then think for awhile about all of it. I honestly wonder if the original article was so much decrying the influence of Balanchine, or whether it is more a caution to Artistic Directors and Producers about selecting which works to do, and how to program them. It could also be a cri de coeur to choreographers: "For heaven's sake, get off your duffs and find your own voices!" Let's face it, Balanchine is the ox in the parlor (an ancient variation of the 800-pound gorilla), and many/most of the American ballet choreographers today grew up with him as their primary ballet viewing. Ballet choreographers don't have to adhere to the Balanchine æsthetic, but neither do they have to abandon ballet technique entirely, which was Nijinsky's method. He subverted the third dimension in "Faune", and inverted ballet technique in "Rite of Spring". While it is true that "there is no new thing under the sun", I can sense the feeling of the music writers of the 19th century, complaining of the pervasiveness of stylistic Mendelssohnism.

Don't be concerned about the strangeness of the story-telling. Corsaire was roundly lampooned in its ABT presentation for its melodramatic plotline and narrative style, but it's really typical of the Imperial style of ballet construction, where you get 5 minutes of plot, 30 or more minutes of divertissement, and 3 minutes of denouement and finale per act. Cut to its essentials, it's really not this great love story, but a sort of romantic buddy movie, a la Indiana Jones. On those terms, I find that it makes much more sense.

Remember, it's simply a grand pirouette in arabesque. Æsthetically, you could be right about the intention of either Perrot or Petipa, but remember too that she has a lot of torque to shed in order to be able to start her next series of steps (where she REALLY gets off the ground). Technically, relevés can be good for that. But for Romantic Restraint, one really shouldn't do more than a double to get out of the turns to land in fifth position. Okay, maybe a triple, if you find yourself ahead of the music.

Hans is right, of course. It takes a brave ballet master to take on a star dancer, and say, "Can you stick your kneecap into your ear in developpé? Good for you, now don't, this is 'Konservatoriet'." Some can't even bring themselves to say it to the corps!

That's probably correct. ABT wasn't really strict about that time with the historicity of what Giselle could do. Anton Dolin also staged his various productions with a view toward accuracy, but sometimes, therapy. He would insist on Giselle doing something not so much because Spessivtzeva did it that way, but because he thought it "would be good for her."

1- Sure, it depends on the ballerina. 2- That's the standard original choreography. 3- Sure, I did my first Giselle in 1964. Makarova didn't work that much change into the part, at least none that have stayed.

Englund's interpretations of how the sexes interpret Madge is quite all right, when you think of it. It may not be the same interpretation as everyone's, though. I recall Roseanna Seravalli in ABT's first complete Sylphide, and she made the old woman a mighty adversary! After all, she's an earth spirit, the opposite of the Slyph, an air spirit. Remember, Enrico Cecchetti created Carabosse, in part because she had to be a strong character, and also because she had to be PHYSICALLY strong. That coach that she entered in had only three wheels, and must have required a good deal of muscle just to hang on while miming rant!

That's where my sort of job comes in. I have the curatorial slot at a history museum with a library and an archive. In archival holdings, the institution collects, preserves and holds onto donations in such form as the donor gives them. In a library, usually works collected are in final form. Museums collect, conserve and retain objects for examination and interpretation by scholars in the advancing present and future. We may not know right now what something means, but at some time to come, somebody using the infinite monkey theory of interpretation will say, "AHA!" As you can see, there's a lot of crossover, and that has contributed mightily to my own personal collection of gray hair - also bald spots where I've torn it out. Which hat is collecting what?

That's right. Twitter is by its very nature public information, put out in the clear for anyone to access. It is therefore logical for a library to collect such information in the interest of its preservation. Besides, the donor has offered it, presumably, in "final form", with confidential and inhouse conversations deleted. Ballet Talk could do that, too, if we wanted to. The inhouse matter could be left out of what was offered for preservation or not as the donor(s) prefer. The restroom collection at a museum is really very much the same thing, not just single examples (that's already been done), but an entire dedicated collection of walls from everywhere. It would make for a very interesting conservation and housing challenge. And then there are the "creator's rights" issues....

That's right, let's claim our rights under the 14th Amendment: Equal Protection! Let's all make big signs and go to our next Tea Party and whip up the anarchy! "BALLET TALK TO LOC!!!"

I can't get it out of my mind that this collecting of tweets will be used by some curator of some folklore museum somewhere to justify the collecting of walls from public restrooms. Not just the inscriptions, the actual walls themselves.

And now, courtesy of the LOC itself: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet...witter-archive/

Cross Talk, too, is open to all. Hope you can join us at Ballet Talk for Dancers. A link is right on the banner heading.

Quentin Crisp's input on this ballet would be interesting, though! But I think that while Ashton's choreography is first-rate, the ballet is still lumbered with a score that was initially labeled as "too advanced" for the audience in its premiere years, it became obvious after awhile that the score really was too weak to match the rest of the production and the artistic klang effect prevented the success of the whole show.

I saw this when it first aired, and there wasn't any sync problem at the time. And I was excessively fussy about things like that then.

Sounds like the Hobbes side of Rousseau. Men are born with all natural rights intact, but they give them up one by one for the convenience of being governed. "Enough, awreddy!" seems like a natural response for some to too much management.

We'll know that things have gone too far when an entire company enters, all still tweeting away. Of course, wasn't it Job Sanders who choreographed Gunther Schuller's "Studies on Paul Klee" for Houston Ballet, one of the inner movements being titled "The Twittering Machine"?

In many stagings of the grand pas we see today, Lucien isn't even onstage for the entire entree, so any number of possibilities present themselves. Did anybody do a revival of a complete Paquita after the advent of ballet stage photography? And I wonder about the backmark. Postal regulations regarding postcards varied vastly internationally. It was once customary to stamp a mail item with both the sending AND receiving post offices. Postcards, when they first came out were supposed to be enclosed in a letter envelope, but some countries, including the US, made a special wrapper for the pictorial goodie. Often the card got stamped, not just the canceled postage!

Interesting shot! You have to wonder if the cavalry dolman and the Hessian boots cramped the danseur's style in both partnering and dancing his variation, or are the boots just puttees with ballet slippers worn underneath?