Mel Johnson

It is primarily for strong language. Which is really a laugh considering what you hear if you walk down the hall of most high schools these days.

One further thought on Tudor's being considered "cowardly" for being in America during WWII - Anton Dolin did the same thing, but eventually, he was knighted, so the situation must have been different with regard to Tudor - wonder what the politics were?

The film is still in limited release at only 10 theaters in the entire country! It will be in general release everywhere in early November.

To return for a moment to the original line of this thread, about reading reviews of your own performances; Jean Kerr, the playwright and wife of critic Walter once wrote that she knew a colleague who pasted pans from every critic he could find to the bathroom mirror, so that he had to look at them every morning while shaving. "After awhile," she wrote, " 'Witless and tasteless' had about as much emotional comprehensibility as 'twenty-three skiddoo!' "

Or to hew a bit closer to home, the introduction of one piece of "new" information that can make perfectly respectable companies do strange things to their ballets. I have in mind the picture that surfaced about thirty years ago of Marie Petipa wearing a Lilac Fairy costume that just didn't mesh with the Conventional Wisdom about the part. Quickly, even the cautious Kirov added a fairy to do the variation, although older heads around the co. advised that it was a picture of the original costume from the acts AFTER the Prologue. Scholarly research proceeded, slowly, and by gosh if the old heads hadn't been right!

Are we positive that the Tchernicheva isn't of Fokine's Cléopâtre? It was revived for her around 1920.

And besides, they make such convenient handles for partnering! You haven't lived until you've seen the muttonchop whisker-promenade!

The (Entire) Holy Bible - The Ballet. Jeremiah would be verrrrry interesting to see choreographed - not. And then there's the section that repeats itself four times....

And a brief return to the "Icarus" ballet from the 70s Joffrey rep - the work was an exhausting pas de deux between two men, putatively father and son, in the midst of a huge mirrored construction. The title of the work was "The Relativity of Icarus", and I never figured out what the hell that meant, but there was another character in the work - The Sun - danced by Ann Marie de Angelo, a most mystical and mysterious part, near acrobatics, indeed, sometimes over the line into it. Her character was both hot and cool at the same time, but unmistakably female, providing a contrast to the two men, usually danced by Ted Nelson and Russell Sultzbach. The homoerotic element was there, of course, but it was muted by the strangeness of the sets and music, which was by José Serebrier. It was disturbing, but not, I think, because of its portrayal of a sort of sexuality, but by the nearly Brechtian Verfremdungheit (foreignness).

Perhaps it would run over several nights, like Nicholas Nickleby or the Ring Cycle?

A late comment on Toshiro Mayuzumi's score for "Bugaku". His stuff isn't everyone's cup of matcha, but I've played other works of his as a French Horn player and it's fun to do.

And "ecartele" means "quartered", as in "drawn and quartered". Not a fun way to go.

If anybody feels like it, they can go to the Main Pages of Ballet Alert, click on Great Ballets, Ivanov, and Nutcracker, and there's a lot of material I put up for you.

Remember, we dancing-type people are "them" to the non-dancing world, no matter what the language they speak with their mouths.... [This message has been edited by Mel Johnson (edited September 21, 2000).]

Or "small beer", but that's more about class!

Ah, but it is French, just a specialized usage of a perfectly ordinary word, that probably started as a word for a kind of small bean. Musical terms are not always covered in dictionaries, unless they're unabridged.

I just looked it up in my handy-dandy Grove's Encyclopedia of Music and confirmed it in a nice unabridged dictionary. Books, you know....

Actually, it means "dance of the KAZOOS"! Check the definition of "mirliton" out in a good dictionary! It makes sense, too; even the noisemakers at the Christmas party in Act I have a part in Act II. Ever wonder about that buzzing underscore in the bass lines during the second period of that music?

OK, but at least he didn't drop it the way he did with the first movement of "Scotch Symphony".

In regard to what the Gigue is doing where it is: It makes sense to me because Tchaikovsky put it there, and while Balanchine might occasionally play with the order of a musical suite, or even a symphony, he usually left well enough alone!

I think it worthwhile to note that Villella was not in absolutely the "first flush of youth" when Balanchine set "Tarantella" on him, but Mr. Kitten is at a roughly comparable state of development in his career, as far as experience is concerned. (a parenthetical postscript - lest it be mistakenly construed that I am slamming the formidable Messrs. Villella and Kitten, I merely meant to state that they were both stagewise, craftsmart artists at the times they first essayed this meatgrinder of a pas de deux - it has defeated many other fine male dancers!) One of the most fiendish things about "Tarantella" is its constant flow of pyrotechnics, which is derived, as all of Balanchine is, from the music. Louis Moreau Gottschalk wrote the music originally as a duet for violin and piano, with all of the double-bowing and technical fizz the former instrument is capable of. Its transformation into Piano and Orchestra happened shortly after Gottschalk's death, in an arrangement by his editor, Arthur Napoleao. The Hershey Kay reconstruction of this work goes even farther that Gottschalk himself did in providing left-hand material for the pianist that is just beastly to perform, but at least doesn't include the nearly-impossible intervals found in much of the composer's piano works. Gottschalk must have had huge hands! In all, the Kay arrangement places the piano and the orchestra on equal footings, and makes it ideal for a pas de deux of shared fireworks! [This message has been edited by Mel Johnson (edited September 16, 2000).]

Thoughts of a non-witness to the Bolshoi "Mozartiana" - it has always seemed to me that the childrens' work, especially with regard to port de bras in this ballet is curiously disconnected from the adults they support. I saw it before Balanchine's death and some times after, and there has always been, at least to this observer, an odd mismatch, even when the kids came from the company's own School of American Ballet. Conservators call it "inherent vice".

Victoria Simon was the stager for this "Square Dance". And Alexandra, the allemand was a turning figure "about as close as you're going to get to your partner in 18th century dancing". It is done in opposition with the partners facing one another, then simultaneously, both place one arm to the side and the other behind the back, then take hands and walk a turn about a point. You do the figure hip-to-hip, facing opposite directions. Or hip-to-pannier, depending on how your partner is dressed underneath. English Country Dancing did indeed undergo a sea change when it crossed over to France, and became confounded with the "contra-danse" an existing form there. Newly made elegant, it crossed the channel again, and the dance of the seventeenth-century working classes became the dance of the eighteenth-century aristocrat. A trivia question for 18th-century dance fans: What did George Washington have in common with today's dancers? ANS: When the dancing got tough, Big George walked the figures and marked the harder steps with his hands.

Jeannie, I'm personally very grateful for your having let us in on the opening night performance. Of course, it pleases me to find out that the Bolshoi and Miami danced well, but (old school tie and all that) the good news of Joffrey makes my heart swell and my eyes tear up! Thank you!

Thanks for the great review of a relatively new product, Manhattanik! I recall those performances the first time around, and have to say in Nureyev's and Tallchief's Flower Festival's defense, that his going on in the part was a surprise to both. Erik Bruhn was supposed to be Tallchief's partner, but he was suddenly stricken with appendicitis, and Nureyev was a last-minute replacement - I can't remember whether he had six days or six hours to learn the part, which he had never done before, but the latter kind of sticks in my memory.