Mel Johnson

Alexandra, I think you may have hit upon something there! Arts, and particularly ballet, are essentially very conservative when it comes to the business that goes behind the running of a company or other institution. They may well be behind the curve worldwide when it comes to finding the correct fit of administrator to organization!

Boston is traditionally slow on the uptake of concepts the rest of the business world has known for years. They seem to have been operating on the concept that "if you can administrate one thing, you can admininstrate another", which idea was thoroughly disproved in the 1970s and 80s. Now before proud Bostonians jump down my throat - I used to work there, at the Museum of the First Corps of Cadets.

Try looking a bit further down on this forum to the thread "PBS Don Q" and another started by Ed Waffle on Anything Goes. They're both only a couple days since the last post, so they should be visible with the default preference for topic display (10 days).

And sometimes, even Fonteyn was Sheezno Fonteyn, except for the period at the beginning of her career when she was Sheezno Markova. I was watching a film from the early 50s made of Fonteyn dancing the Rose Adagio, and a friend made the remark, "hmph! Sheezno Fonteyn! Omigawd! She IS Fonteyn!"

And besides, if he can yell, "Carrie!", when he should have yelled "Leia!", he can make an audience believe his Siegfried would mistake Odile for Odette! ;)

Denise Jackson retired at the height of her powers from the Joffrey - her retirement was entirely her own decision, and she had no detractors to say, "About time!"

A dancer should hang it up when s/he says it's time...and nobody else does. Denise Jackson of the Joffrey provided the perfect model for this behavior.

And during a recent Ashton conference, several excerpts were danced by Tamara Rojo.

I don't know how long it's been since I've seen ballet on the tube, but this was a really welcome treat! We've forgotten, I think, what Nureyev could move like in his "salad days", carrying only the memory of the fading danseur who should have packed it in long before he did down with us. It is also necessary to be reminded of what a super dancer Lucette Aldous was, and what variety she could bring to a role. Gracious, too, was the treatment of Robert Helpmann as Don Quixote and Ray Powell as Sancho Panza - there should have been a notice at the end of the film saying - NOTE: No Sanchos were harmed in the making of this motion picture! I had never seen this production, or the motion picture, before,* and found it mostly a pleasure to watch, although I don't think the dramatic matters would have worked very well on a stage. In a film, showing the existing conditions in Cadiz before the arrival of the old Don makes good sense. Seeing the old man go mad before our eyes is a revelation under the sensitive treatment of Helpmann. It is indeed a strange thing to watch a danseur classique in old age, with none of the "classique" dimmed by the years! *Don't throw things - I was in Kunsan, Korea keeping the world safe for Richard Nixon, God help me, for most of the time it was out, and by the time I got back to the civilized world, it was gone! Nureyev's material for himself in his first moments onstage is indeed strange stuff, neither Petipa, nor Gorsky, it wanted to telegraph to the audience that this was a demi-caractere ballet, so flex the feet and wiggle the bottom, and you've announced it...except by loudspeaker! I recall the Bolshoi version of this pretty well, and there wasn't a shimmy in a shipload! But we've forgotten how FAST Nureyev could move, and what kinds of effects he could produce on demand at this stage of his life, and it was good to see these qualities again. The matter contained in some of the other parts of the ballet, particularly for the corps told me that Nureyev had either never learned the Gypsy scene or was otherwise occupied whenever it was going on. At any rate, it looked not so much like anything out of the Russian tradition, but instead oddly copied the corps work in Roland Petit's "Paradise Lost" of ungrateful memory. Nureyev must have reworked many of his ideas from the first time he staged this work for the Vienna Opera Ballet, when he partnered Ully Wuhrer as Kitri. Some of the transition ideas are carried through from the old Russian version in which the ancient Knight battles a giant spider to get to Dulcinea who leads him to the Great Hall of the Dryads. A nice touch here, and deserving of preservation in other stage productions. And a word about the Dryad scene - I had been pleased on the whole with the standard of dancing preserved by this video - after all, it was made in 1972, and much as I hate to admit it, that was quite a while ago, and at a time when standard in many companies was not what it is now! What a pleasure to watch a splendid spitfire of a Kitri like Lucette Aldous and see her transformed into the classically pure Dulcinea of the Dryad scene. I further enjoyed the arrow-shooting Amor, but lamented the excision of the delightful Amor variation! What was the problem? It's less than a minute long! The ensemble in this scene was wonderfully drilled and schooled, so that I found myself wondering if I had happened on a bunch of "ringers" from Canada, so cleanly was their work and presentation. And not a single badly cobbled corps grouping in the whole thing! Still, everbody knows where old ballonés go to die - the Dryad scene of Don Q! I was also further pleased by the clear roles Espada and Mercedes play in the drama; too many productions make them just sort of interesting bystanders - here they were active participants! And it was a pleasure to see the old Don returned to a central role in this production and not have a ballet that would better be called Basilio! Another really telling point about the goodness of the production is the integration of children, real honest-to-gosh children, in the crowd scenes, and as, of course, the puppet show. It was good to see Cadiz and the Manchegan plain peopled with a more realistic population than in productions where everybody's at least a late teen. Cinematographically, this production is vivid and vibrant with much color and action, in fact, perhaps too much action as the camera cuts away from actual dancing to cover some comic shtick up right! (Why do they always do that?) And the contrast between Nureyev's acting (opera-house scale) and Helpmann's (motion picture scaled by a wise veteran!) was incredibly unfavorable to the former as he just looked hammy sometimes, while Helpmann could steal the show with lift of an eyebrow! I had not wanted to get a video of this production for fear of what I might see (OK, I did miss some of the Bolshoi one-arm lifts, but Nureyev came from the Kirov, after all) but now I can recommend it most heartily to those who have not seen, as I had not, and especially if you have two or three other versions, to compare and contrast. See this when it is rerun! [ 06-07-2001: Message edited by: Mel Johnson ]

To the amazement of, I suppose, absolutely no one at all, both Richard Chamberlain and La Barb have studied ballet.

A pity that Beecham didn't enjoy ballet conducting more; he arranged at least three ballets out of the music of Handel that were quite wonderful, musically speaking: "The Triumph of Neptune", "The Great Elopement", and "Love in Bath". The first-named is the only one I know of that was ever produced. And now back to our originally scheduled topic: Conductors. In the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the US, they had two main conductors, Igor Butnikov and Claude Monteux (son of Pierre). Monteux was quite all right; he barely looked at the score, and kept his head up and attentive to the dancers at all times. Butnikov, unfortunately, was his senior, and kept his nose relentlessly in the score, and no one, even he, could predict what tempo he would conduct anything at! One night, the concertmaster, out of desperation, had the orchestra follow HIM, not matter what Mister Butnikov did. When asked by an audience member what he had conducted on a certain night, an orchestra member volunteered, "God only knows, but we PLAYED Act II Swan Lake, Scheherazade, and Gaité Parisienne!" [ 06-05-2001: Message edited by: Mel Johnson ]

Rodney Dangerfield! He can do all of the parts Alexander Radunsky used to do with the Bolshoi!

Yes, indeed, forgiveness and redemption and grace (the King, after all, is God's anointed and His representative!)is all part of what Beauty is about. And in the original production, the appearance of Carabosse was meant to point this up! She had her invitation, and she was not danced by Enrico Cecchetti, because he was going to be the Bluebird in that scene, but a senior and very glamourous lady of the company. She showed that not only is forgiveness good for the forgiver, but for the forgiven as well!

Yes, indeed, forgiveness and redemption and grace (the King, after all, is God's anointed and His representative!)is all part of what Beauty is about. And in the original production, the appearance of Carabosse was meant to point this up! She had her invitation, and she was not danced by Enrico Cecchetti, because he was going to be the Bluebird in that scene, but a senior and very glamourous lady of the company. She showed that not only is forgiveness good for the forgiver, but for the forgiven as well!

By the time Petipa did "The Seasons", he had reverted to doing allegorical and mythological themes that his teachers would have found familiar. When he did a ballet d'action, like "Ruses d'Amour" also Glazunov, one is reminded very much of the Grisi/Cerito-type vehicles of the 1840s!

Thank you, Doug - you have cleared up a question that has been gnawing at my mind for years! I had the advantage of having a couple of spare hours while doing research at Harvard, and used it to profit by briefly perusing "Beauty" and "Swan", just to try and dope out the notation, which I found relatively intuitive, but didn't get around to Bayadere. I'm aware of a couple different hands in there and wonder if maybe Sergei Legat had a hand in there for his brief tenure - I know what Nicolai's hand looks like and that wasn't it.

Thank you, Doug - you have cleared up a question that has been gnawing at my mind for years! I had the advantage of having a couple of spare hours while doing research at Harvard, and used it to profit by briefly perusing "Beauty" and "Swan", just to try and dope out the notation, which I found relatively intuitive, but didn't get around to Bayadere. I'm aware of a couple different hands in there and wonder if maybe Sergei Legat had a hand in there for his brief tenure - I know what Nicolai's hand looks like and that wasn't it.

Well, I've seen both the old Royal production and the Royal Danish version, but also have been in a production based on a version staged by Yugoslav ballet master Oskar Harmos, and learned, but never performed, bits of the old ABT production via Martha Mahr, who had learned her version from Alicia Alonso. [ 06-03-2001: Message edited by: Mel Johnson ]

My pleasure, Alexandra. I wasn't feeling very well during the time when the topics were first "hot" and couldn't coordinate my thoughts effectively to communicate on this important issue. But now, I'm back and thinking, so I promise to be a more productive member now! ;) I've seen an editorial cartoon contrasting Bozzachi and Eugénie Fiocre, the original Franz. Bozzachi looked like Maria Callas, only with a bigger nose, and Fiocre reminded me of Catherine deNeuve!

Back to the corn/maize item a bit, with contemporary illustration: The French have for years been convulsed over the American taste for maize eaten straight off the cob. At Cannes, during the film festival, they boil up pots and pots of them, laughing up their sleeves all the time, as maize in France is traditionally thought of only as fit for fodder for pigs!

It should be noted that this M. Bekefy was a participant in both the Moscow and St. Petersburg versions of Swan Lake, and was the original leader of the Russians (Candy Canes) in Nutcracker. He was the grandson of Cesare Pugni, the composer.

Franz is an amiable doofus; he is there to point up an important subtheme of Coppelia, and a source of great humor in drama ever since Lysistrata: It's good for society to have a clever woman or two about in order to keep these silly men in line!

I have often had a sneaking suspicion about Coppelia - that a lot had been lost or become confounded because of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), and the awful Siege of Paris that occurred during it. The original Swanilda, Giuseppina Bozzachi, died as a result, and Saint-Léon only shortly before her. Even for a nineteenth-century divertissement, the third act has always seemed disjointed and odd to me. Maybe it had something to do with the war?

One of my guesses as to the composition of the awful stuff involves phosphorus and that useless nineteenth-century byproduct of making kerosene (paraffin oil), gasoline. :eek:

One of my guesses as to the composition of the awful stuff involves phosphorus and that useless nineteenth-century byproduct of making kerosene (paraffin oil), gasoline. :eek: