Mel Johnson

This just in! Farrah Fawcett STILL dead!

Given the Transport Security procedures of today, the clear plexiglas "luggage" from this production could be revived and marketed by the Friends boutique. It would save time at airports, perhaps demonstrating that you have nothing to hide. Just make sure that you have very attractive underwear packed in there. I saw this thing in its first season while I was on leave from USAF service, and had just gotten back from a stint in Vietnam. A good thing, as I needed a good laugh.

My impression of "Dances at a Gathering" since my first view of it is that the staging and balletmastering people have been perhaps a bit too reverential in preserving the work over the years. They have been industriously scrupulous about not turning the projection of the dancers into the choreographic equivalent of belting. Subtlety became such a great virtue that now a sort of gnosis seems to be at work, a secret knowledge which we, the audience, aren't in on, and the work has become rather cryptic - at least more cryptic than Robbins ever intended it. Chopin seems to bring out this quality in choreographers. Consider "Les Sylphides" - who are these people, and what are they doing here? What's Waltz to Prelude, or Mazurka to one of the "agonies"? Dunno, but it's a sort of the same question in "Dances".

Just for information's sake, showing Effie in one tartan or another is unimportant, from a strictly Scottish point of view. The idea of "family tartan" did not much matter before the "Caledonian Restoration" of the 1850s, led by Queen Victoria, when she fell in love with Scotland (and where better?) Compare the portraits of Scottish chieftains from before then, and marvel that they wear several different patterns of plaid all at once.

It's a shortened version of bras à la lyre, where the arms and hands represent the cradling of a lyre harp. It's archaic, but identifiable.

The first variation after the nocturne is the Valse (Gb major) Op. 70, #1. It's not very long, but longer than a minute.

Think of it as "Limelight Night". The Yalies would raid the theaters of New Haven and "borrow" the traveling spotlights therefrom, then take them out to the campus and shine the bright lights on the college buildings. Spotlights of that era produced their bright light by playing a gas jet against a block of calcium carbonate until it incandesced, hence "lime - light". It was a very hot, very noisy light source.

Billy... worked considerable effect in the UK, but I don't know about the rest of Europe. It didn't do the same things in the US, so I suspect that the story had a certain societally-linked factor to it. The 1984 coal strike is not broadly understood outside of the UK, and the movie is as much about that as about "dancing boy".

Prophete has an ice-skating ballet (Act III), which is subsumed in toto by the Lambert "Les Patineurs". Etoile du Nord also has a skating sequence which was intended by Meyerbeer to be a party scene in an earlier comic opera loosely based on incidents in the life of Frederick the Great. As it was, it ended up in a comic opera about PETER the Great, and a good thing, too. Pete was a lot more fun than Fred. All these shows cluster, timewise, around the same time as the first "Les Patineurs" ballet, music by Deldevez, which used an innovative kind of inline skate with bronze wheels borne on ball-bearing chases. The invention started a roller-skating craze in France.

On a larger issue, it's good to see that this production will not be let go, to languish in desuetude. It's academically and intellectually a good thing to have about!

From the looks of the tiara, would that be the Leslie Hurry-designed production?

Structurally, you are correct. In order to achieve the parallelism which is characteristic of Petipa, the fourth guy has to be the last to dance with Aurora all through the adagio, with the theatrical effect being that she seems to prefer him! It also fulfills the requirements of "Petipa syndrome" in which you do everything three times, then change on the fourth repetition. In the original production, the fourth prince's costume bore a striking resemblance to Louis XIV, which was a continuing theme through the whole ballet - the autocrat is the best! If I remember rightly, the Messel production for Royal Ballet had him look a lot like Charles II! Rule, Britannia!!!

Great post, hunterman, and it gives me the impression that you're plenty articulate when it comes to arts education! Remember that in the US, a great part of the Ballet Boom of the 60s was driven by Edsel - not the car, the original guy, Edsel Ford, son of Henry. Edsel wasn't particularly well-educated in the arts, but he sure knew what he liked, and was proved right by the tests of time. Although he died in 1943, his Foundation went on to support many and varied arts causes, not the least of which was ballet. Ford programs sent the New York City Ballet into public schools with a hard-to-beat education package featuring a lecture-demonstration of classroom material, technical audio-visuals on stagecraft and other arts as they related to ballet, and closing with an actual Balanchine ballet ("Allegro Brilliante" was a great favorite) as a closer. Edsel's artistic visions were carried on by his heirs. Get involved. You can lend a lot of "real-world" expertise to dance education. You're what's needed most!

Thank you for that. I looked on youtube and sections are available. It looks good. Do companies do it? So many companies do the same works, without having seen the entire piece, it seems that this would be a nice one to add to a company rep. Thank you again. I believe that "Reflections" has been set on other companies than just the Joffrey, but I can't remember which, or when.

Gerald Arpino did it in 1971 as "Reflections" for the Joffrey. It was and remains popular whenever it is presented.

As I recall, there was, in the late 50s, LPs made by Robert Irving and the NYCB Orchestra of "Pas de Dix" (Glazunov), "Glinka Pas de Trois", and another work I cannot recall now on Kapp Records. I seem to remember a pairing on vinyl of the Gounod Symphony and the Bizet Symphony #1 in C, but not whether that was Irving or not. (Edited to add: I remember the former recording well, as I rehearsed to it a lot, I posted before I looked at the inserted pix, so I guess it was Irving, but I remember another, too, on Columbia.)

You are, of course, correct. I don't know where I got that idea from, but it still seemed to me that a lot of Ashton was being threatened by the loss of heirs to the estate, and THEIR heirs and assigns.

http://abt.org/education/dictionary/index.html

Shaw was a personable and pleasant man; his passing began a certain misgiving in my mind about the beneficiaries of Ashton's will - they seemed to be dropping off like flies there at one point. Even a residuary legatee like Wendy Ellis (Somes' widow) didn't make it much longer than he did. An earlier generation might have made of this, Caernarvon-style, "The Curse of Fredankhamun"

That didn't capture his dramatic and comedic ability, largely because Desiré is such a cipher role. His Coppélia, Fille mal Gardée and, on film especially Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet showed him to better advantage. Somewhere out there, there are home movies of him doing Lt. Belaye in "Pineapple Poll" - he's a hoot! (Edited to modify a Freudian slip-Blair did Mercutio in the film, I did Tybalt in a whole different production. Thanks leonid, for alerting me.)

I still miss David Blair, with his accuracy of classical technique, uniquely combined with projection of personality.

Ballet in Moscow Today was first published in the UK in 1956 to issue at roughly the same time as the first performances in the West by Galina Ulanova. It sold very well, and the New York Graphic Society picked it up. It served as a precursor to the first full Bolshoi tours.

There must be less expensive ways to advertise that you've read it!

QUOTABLE QUOTE: "Will somebody tell that young feller, I ain't dead yet?!" -Marius Petipa, on Gorsky

The tradition of "New Year's Follies" was already established back in City Center days. I recall seeing Balanchine doing Drosselmeyer when he produced a little yellow rubber duckie and whispered instruictions to pass it on to the farthest-opposite man on the stage (was it Frank Ohman as Herr Silberhaus?) Von Aroldingen was still in the corps then.