Mel Johnson

As an awards show, the whole thing was quite splendid and unusually engaging for a TV presentation. It had real movement and continuity and a "press on" that I don't see in movie or TV awards shows. Billy, with fifteen nominations had to do well, and some categories had two nominations for the same award, so a clean sweep was impossible, or at least, highly unlikely. The show still walked with ten awards. It had a lot of impressive dancing throughout, too. The "Three Billys" were letter-perfect in their performances and in their thank-yous. Kiril's "capper" was a great segue to the next segment, and a terrific encouragement to dance students. All those kids have show business graven on their bones, and were unstagey and natural. Good show, guys!

Ahh, yes. I wonder if the one with the staff is supposed to be Myrtha, as well. I don't see a lot of asphodel in my life, so I'm not a good judge of what it looks like. The streaks, I'll bet, are from a chemical migration, perhaps from wood grain, or even corrugated board against which the view probably laid for years.

Fortescue Mann worked about 1860-1900, the last series he produced, I believe was the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Celebration of 1897. The pastel color on the mount would indicate to me a rather earlier production than later, but sometimes you can't tell.

bent the metal strip underneath it.

Metal strip? The two nails? The staple? The shank, except in specially made shoes (usually for men), is made of leather or composition.

I seem to recall the old Bolshoi production starting off with this music after the procession. The jester and a small band of coryphées danced it.

It may be designed for that, but any dancer can do it as well and better using her/his own hands. Gadgetation, I calls it.

No matter how Nicolini made them, they never hit the stage that way. Pavlova made something of a parade of her preparation of pointe shoes, which she would get in lots of 100 shoes at a time. On opening the crate, if there were witnesses present, she would go into High Dramatic form, and weep and swear that not a single shoe was good enough. Then would come mitigation, where she admitted, well, maybe some of these things could be salvaged. She then set upon an orgy of ripping, hammering, slamming in doors, and other mayhem against the shoes. A shank in this one would be better in that one, the outsole on these needed to be hammered flatter, and of course, ending with the inevitable darning of the shoe. After all they went through, those brand-new shoes needed it, just to hang together. Many students today continue to darn their shoes, even though they don't go through the rest of the process, and the shoes generally don't need it. Hangover from Pavlova.

I have to agree with you, Patrick, and even on the small screen with relative acres of open space around the moving image(s), it still seemed claustrophobic. The dancers did make the show, and that's as it should be, but my concern is in great measure for the craft of making ballets at NYCB. The work just isn't put together well, in my opinion.

Can we start discussing the show more than the intermission here, please? Another symptom of things being not beautiful at the ballet is things that happened while the curtain was down generate more interest than it what happened when it was up!

What I saw in this presentation, in this medium, was that the bones of the show were ill-assembled. The score has been treated as if it had been thrown down a flight of stairs and someone who had heard it two or three times had been told to put it back in order. The same could be said for the choreography. When you've never seen a given ballet before, but get the inkling that you've seen this part before, yellow flags go up. The confirming moment for me was the part of the balcony pas de deux where the B theme comes back cantabile, and Romeo provides gentle support for Juliet as she does hops on pointe in arabesque - right out of the Ashton version. As things continued, I recognized more Ashton (actually lots more, some MacMillan, Cranko, even Oscar Araiz' version seen in NYC with Joffrey. Eclectic is one thing, derivative is another. Quoting a famous bit from another's choreography might be homage, but this looked like plagiarism, and rather disjointed plagiarism at that. It was a bit like reading Shakespeare from Bartlett's Quotations. The outstanding bit of choreography, I thought, was the Mandolin Dance for boy students. It was a good use of their talents, which are usually not much noted, but the dance was unmotivated. When it's presented as part of a street wedding procession, it makes more sense, as these are the entertainers, but these seemed like a troupe of buskers who just happened by. Once the dancing started, though, things were all right. There's something wrong when the high point of a dramatic ballet is a divertissement entrée.

It wasn't even the Fontaine-DeHaviland mix-up, volcanohunter. Leslie Stahl showed that she is not a member of BalletTalk by forgetting who is MARGOT Fonteyn!.

I don't think it's exactly forgetting. It's more like "surfacing subtext", in this case a mnemonic. At least she didn't use FRANK Fontaine to remember how to pronounce "Fonteyn".

Back to my favorite relative, Dr. Johnson:

The work is good and original. Unfortunately, what is good is not original, and what is original is not good.

One of the problems in the original article is the topic sentence containing a sweeping generality of a rather exclusive sort. One exception busts the validity of the statement. The topic sentence is built to be a "hook", in order to drag people into reading the rest of the article, but I can envision a whole host of the students of the students of Rudolf Laban, cocking their eyes and saying, "What do you mean by that?"

That's why I think of Slavenska whenever somebody mentions props. She would do all sorts of things if you just put something into her hand. Sort of a prop comedienne long before it became a genre by itself.

My nominee is Mia Slavenska in the '50s, and that probably because she forgot to take the wrist knot off after the variation.

"MIA! Don't forget to take the...oh, well, nevermind...."

What you're talking about is "civic ballet".

And there have been and are some civic ballet companies which were and are better than some paid companies.

Bourne isn't the answer to anything; his work is something between the drawing of mustaches on the Mona Lisa and the self-referentiality that the article decries. Balanchine, while "dabbling" in movie choreography, produced an uproarious version of Swan Lake which a lot of people have taken for a veracious picture of what ballet actually is!

But something seems to be missing, here. Ubiquity is disparaged and yet, the realization that propinquity begets ubiquity seems to have been forgotten. Balanchine was working in America, and it's a big place! Lots of wannabes were bound to be produced simply by the process of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. What I would like to know is: Where are the Ashton wannabes? Wheeldon seems to be a natural heir apparent, but doesn't pretend to the title. The UK can't depend on getting a genius like Ashton - indeed, no place can - every quarter-century; even he came to England via Ecuador and Peru. Balanchine came to America by another sort of track, but it's largely good fortune that both ended up where they did! Americans and Britons both saw both choreographers at their best, and practically simultaneously. Perhaps it is simply because short story ballets are so much work to produce.

Or, depending on local and state laws, it's at least simple assault. Call a cop.

Commenting to the woman behind opened the gates to her response, which I agree was churlish and rude. If something like that happens again, you can always make lemonade by rejoining, "Why, what a brilliant idea! I'll do that, too! Thank you!"

Fairly often, the True Believers have good connections in the business, which gets them comp seats.

Abridged? I find that most complete recordings of ballets, especially the big 3 Tchaikovskys, are entirely too UNabridged. No performance cuts are taken, so the flow of choreography goes on in my head, interrupted by music that has been deleted from production. Nutcracker is about the only one that doesn't get into this bind very often.

Kirkland always had those feet, at least as far back as when she was eleven, which is when I met her. One of the things which distinguished her from other students with gorgeous feet was that in addition to being beautiful, they were also strong!

Those two are balletomanes, I'm just a maniac. (With a in the general direction of Sam and Bella Spewack.)

Why would the insects be among Oberon's subjects? Aren't they part of the same world as the Lovers and Rustics? Don't you hear (-->here) the bzzzz-bzzzzz-bzzzz of insects?

They're nature. The Lovers and the Rustics are human. And Shakespeare indirectly declares nature figures in the "faerie" realm by naming three of them Cobweb, Mustardseed and Moth.

I had to ask, because the credit roll wasn't much help. They looked unusually well-integrated, and the roll was squashed into the bottom of the screen to make room for a promo for another program. Unions really ought to protest this kind of squeezing out of credits.