Mel Johnson

Robbins gave us boiling uptempo in West Side. In "Opus Jazz" here he gave us boiling downtempo. A very cool Cool.

There always seemed to have been some kind of subtext going on between and among the movements, particularly the sequence with the girl being thrown off the roof. It sometimes seemed unmotivated, other times there was a growing sense of menace that built through the dance. But exactly why? That had to be some offstage business.

PS. Come to think of it, that's a reversal of the old dramatic irony, where the audience knows better than the characters what's actually going on, and which Robbins had given a good workout in West Side Story. Putting the shoe on the other foot or standing a concept on its head are time-honored Robbins characteristics!

I wonder, I wonder.... I was only half-listening/watching MSNBC a few nights ago, when they had an item about a filming that was going on on the High Line, and when they reviewed the dailies, the director went "OH, MY GAWD!!! Look in the background; somebody's getting out of the shower and doesn't have the curtains drawn. Oh my gawd, oh my gawd, somebody get me a Bromo, fast!"

I wonder if it was this shoot?!

Doesn't surprise me. That impression came over even on the small screen when he and Kirsten Simone would do "Bell Telephone Hour". Erik Bruhn was wonderful, but he almost seemed like an unattainable ideal. Kronstam inspired confidence in the student-viewer, that excellence is a realistic goal.

Wouldn't be a BAD thing!

The ballet wasn't the only place that the Russians stayed true to original design. In "Petrouchka", a figure in the crowd is distinguished by his green 18th-century coat and tall mitre cap denoting a grenadier. The Russian army retained this obsolete uniform for its heavy infantry until the opening days of World War I. Here Silvain and Obukhov wear a very proper uniform for a hussar, complete with dolman. Turns must have been awful unless you took that cavalry over-jacket off. I can't imagine that it made partnering any easier, either!

Silvain also accompanied Fanny Elssler in her 1840 American tour as partner and ballet master.

Just remember, "maybe" is one of the larger words in the English language. MAYBE he could get a broker's license and fill a void on Wall Street left by someone who quit the field.

If with the literate I am,

Impelled to try an epigram,

I never try to take the credit.

We all assume that Oscar said it.

- Dorothy Parker.

I met both Sir Robert Helpmann and Sir Anton Dolin, and found that they were both entirely capable of taking the credit for almost anything said by anyone else, ever. Avoided the esprit d'escalier, I suppose.

Here is Robert Helpmann's take on the topic....

When asked "Would the fashion for nudity extend to the dance?"

Helpmann replied, "No. You see there are portions of the human anatomy which would keep swinging after the music had finished."

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Helpmann

by Elizabeth Salter

My memory may be serving me ill here, but I think the quote is not quite exact. I also think it arose at a performance of Dutch National Ballet because the bon mot was being repeated as we were leaving

the theatre where male nudity had just been exhibited.

I cannot help but be reminded of the anecdotal exchange:

OSCAR WILDE: I wish that I'd said that.

JAMES WHISTLER: Don't worry, Oscar, you will.

Graham said much the same thing.

I have to recall here that Lord Olivier once said that he had a friend who said, "I always felt that the only things that spoilt Hamlet were the words."

In Coppélia, at least, Balanchine had a structure from his youth which was not heavily modified by interpolations or excerpting. In his later career, he had a steady model in the Ballet Russe production, and of course, when he staged it for NYCB, he had Danilova RIGHT THERE to make sure he didn't get away with a lot of mischief!

...They also did Facade. Ben Stevenson did the part of the Gigolo (though he wasn't called that then if I recall)....

I don't think it was called then by its original name - the Dago.

I remember the original Balanchine "Harlequinade" well, and was rather disappointed when I caught a revival ca. 1980, when a lot of featherbedding (to my eye and sensibility) had been added. Mischa Arshansky played the father as a sort of

Dr. Bartolo-type, but after B's Don Quixote went belly-up, the AK (Ancient Knight) started showing up in all sorts of other ballets, and this was one of them.

The sets were borrowed from the NYC Opera's production of La Cenerentola, and have had a life quite exceeding most opera scenery.

That early production was notable for having Gelsey Kirkland, Nanette Glushak, Colleen Neary, Meg Gordon and others -- as Little Harlequins.

It does demonstrate the old teacher's saw about "you have to be really good to look good in an effacé position."

In my book, Historic Modern Dance is made up of the choreographic and pedagogical corpus of people like Isadora Duncan, Fuller, Denishawn, Dalcroze, and their contemporaries. I contend that the "historic" period of modern ends with the beginnings of Graham and Laban.

It's tempting to think that little Sarasota Ballet will be able to preserve the Ashton works and style but I'm highly doubtful that they will be able to accomplish that any more than little New York Theatre Ballet will be able to preserve the Tudor works and style.

But don't forget the generations of Joffrey dancers who danced the Ashton (and Massine) reps during their times with that company, who showed how a company can be a "museum" and simultaneously avant-garde. No matter what the company is doing now, or where, the former dancers have spread out across the country, each one informed by his or her Joffrey experience.

It was Sir Hips in the pyramid with the pistol.

Macaulay touches briefly on the state of Balanchine, but doesn't mention that Balanchine and those around him created a "Balanchine Machine" to run quality control and maintenance on that repertoire. Ashton followed suit in one way by naming beneficiaries to receive the rights to certain ballets, but the mechanism of Estate, Trust, and Foundation was not established before his death. And the some of the beneficiaries found an unfortunate way of dying relatively shortly after him, taking the artistic and legal trail farther from the source. If this were Egyptology, the tabloids would have dreamed up "The Curse of SirFredhotep" long before today. I too am glad of the article just for spelling out who presently has the rights to what!

Barbara, I wrote off the bus, because where I live is no longer served by that vector. When I was a kid, yeah, but no longer. So that means a taxi ride to Newburgh, and then the long and boring bus trip. We here in the Mid-Hudson are literally tantalized by the vagaries of the modern transportation net. Just near enough to seem to be ballet-accessible, but in reality, far enough to make travel problematical.

PS. I think it's pied-à-terre, but I know what you mean.

What drives me to ballet? The train, usually.

While that may sound flippant, a transportation issue is not addressed by the extant questions. The west shore of the Hudson River in the Mid-Hudson region is a place where car travel to NYC has become expensive-to-prohibitive for me, and the voyage to catch a train on the east shore is onerous and fatiguing. It seriously limits my freedom of action when it comes to seeing ballet.

Still on the drawing board; while we were in the design phase, a security issue arose at BT4D, and this project got sidelined. Thanks for the reminder.

Good heavens! Did I pick out Lorna LONDON of the American Ballet amongst the coryphées?

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/obituaries...ry/1088388.html

It is my sad duty to report to you all the death of a wonderful and beloved teacher and friend. I had wondered whatever I could say to find some joy in making this announcement, and then I realized that Miss Mahr was someone to celebrate in her own right, and also someone who can be appreciated through her students. She taught Fernando Bujones before he fascinated the School of American Ballet, and Lourdes Lopez, Victoria Leigh, Mark Goldweber, and...me, among many others. She helped me recover from my first (involuntary) tour of Vietnam, and showed me a standard of ballet excellence that has stayed with me wherever I go. Anybody professional who came to Miami always seemed to end up in Miss Mahr's classes, they were that demanding and that satisfying to take. Now I have to say that I have even more to celebrate, as the Herald gave a lot of column inches to a ballet teacher, and that is a tribute in itself.

May she have eternal rest;

May light perpetual shine upon her. +

That's right; Stephen Hanna did do the flying sequence, which is a knockout! I had the great joy to discover this morning that one of the young women who runs my doctor's business office is Trent Kowalik's cousin, so I could go on all over again about the show. What a boost to start the day!