Mel Johnson

Does anybody have a line on who the dancers and choreographer were for the above-captioned show? It looked to me as though they had taken some pains to come up with pretty good talent, even though our view of it was entirely fleeting.

To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed in this episode, but that particular production value was unusually good for a TV series.

I had forgotten that Youskevitch's group HAD a name. We just called it "dancing for Youskevitch". The company was a pickup group made from students mostly from the Ballet Russe school, but with some others. It headlined Maria, Youskevitch's daughter, but not to the detriment of other talented young dancers.

The Eglevsky Ballet is still around. They used to be a performing outlet for C-level students (advanced) from the School of American Ballet. They have a website. Google them.

Balanchine also had "Metamorphosis", to Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber". It was set on Tanny, and did not last long in rep after she became paralyzed. Old heads at NYCB showed me parts of it, and it must have been a rather interesting and exciting composition.

Does anybody have a link? It doesn't have to be a full obituary, but it's news, and the services are liable to have it.

Endymion would be a rather different situation; Selene (a Titaness ruling the Moon) caught sight of him sleeping in the moonlight. When the Renaissance Classical Revival came along, his story got switched to the Roman goddess Diana. Not much good for pas de deux. You can't do much with a sleeping man when it comes to partnering. Or maybe that's what the satyr was for; he took over when Endymion went back to the rock to catch forty more winks.

If it is indeed she, she did take class at Ballet Russe, but performed a lot with the various Joffrey Ballets. She was a graduate of Fiorello LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, and is currently still Mrs. Paul Sutherland.

Fashion decides what parts receive enhancement. For historical perspective, just look at the bustles of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And it wasn't just then, either. About a century earlier, "cork rumps" came into fashion. There was a cartoon of ladies floating about in the ocean on their backsides. This was at the same time that men were still wearing breeches, and for those poorly-endowed in the foreleg, they could buy "pithen calves" to bolster their appearance. Alexander Hamilton was exceedingly vain about his shapely pins and would wear red stockings in order to force people to look at them! As for arch enhancers, fine for stage, if they're properly fitted, but never for class!

Are you thinking of Brunilda Ruiz?

The tennis of the sixteenth century was most often court tennis, which is real, but a rather strange game combining tennis, squash, and pinball!

The Tudors are always good copy for drama; sometimes they seem to be comporting themselves as if for posterity.

Little do many know that Goldweber danced Thomas Armour's staging of "Prince Igor" many years ago, with the old Miami Ballet. Fitting Armour's background, it was a somewhat Nijinskafied Fokine, but real Ballet Russe material. That was a little before I arrived there; he must have been about 11, and made a very youthful youth.

He's balletmaster at Ballet West now, and brings his capacious memory, attention to detail and high standards with him. A good move for both him and Ballet West, I think.

Sport portrayed in ballet is nothing new. Nijinsky did it with "Jeux", although it was the socialization in tennis that was depicted instead of the game. And his sister presented athletes in her "Les Biches", giving her men hunky posturing and some vigorous vocabulary. One guy does, what, 18 double tours? But this isn't sport. The audience might have to be provided with scorecards which they could hold up for it to get there - I can see it now, 8.7,7.9,8.1,8.1,3.4....

The wiki language is hype. And like all hype, it must be taken with whatever size grain of salt you feel appropriate. It's grounds for challenging the factuality of the article. That's how wiki winnows out intemperate language or bad facts.

Ballet is an art, however, art has near zero pop appeal if it's not tarted up a bit in the ads. There may be such a thing as "dance sport". I just would have a lot of reservations about it. Rather like Dr. Johnson's "Worth seeing, but not worth GOING to see."

All I can tell you is that the Feijoo starts the same way as a variation that was being taught at SAB in 1964, but with different music. That variations get "telescoped" into one another is hardly unusual in ballet repertoire.

I finally watched that clip from a machine where I can hear the sound. The steps to the "Minkus" pas de deux are very similar, but this one has different music. I wonder if somebody "shoehorned" one variation into another. Music could be Drigo. He seemed fond of the harp.

I must confess that I never much liked what RB did to its Swan Lake during the sixties. They had a nigh-on perfect show, and then lumbered it with a lot of useless (for the most part) excrescences. The Waltz, Neapolitan Dance and Act IV corps parts by Ashton are not included in this evaluation. (I wondered what the Neapolitan had looked like before Ashton's version. I found out - jolly good thing he repaired it, the original was actively boooorrrrrrrring, even to dance.)

In the discussion about Osmolkina's RB Swan performances, a tangent formed about the general practice of mime, which makes a good, coherent discussion by itself. Please continue the discussion on the RB's Swan Lake on its thread, and feel free to add to this line of discourse here.

I confess that it's a long time since I listened to this recording (1974?), but if I recall rightly, the additional party of men don't get the full treatment. They escape before the Wilis can put the zetz on them. I thought it had the longer ending with what seemed to be the hunting horns that announced Bathilde and Wilfrid, beating the bushes to find Albrecht. There seemed to be an extended mime passage for the four (with Giselle) before the loud curtain music.

It depended on which city-state you were in. In Athens, actors, including the choros, perhaps especially the choros, didn't have to go to drill. They already did the maneuvers as part of their stage work. Sometimes, actors were selected to be at least one of the two didaskaloi (military training instructors) of the city. They were pretty nimble, and could assume the phalanx or the tortoise drill (opposing spear or projectile force, respectively) as easily as other men walked to the market. There was a lot of prestige to being an actor in Athens, and many applications for their skill set.

Yep. It was Aeschylus. There actually is a large raptor that lives in the Mediterranean, the Lammergeier, which drops bones and tortoises from altitude onto rocks in order to break them open. The story runs that Aeschylus, full of years and honors, was walking on the beach, seeking inspiration, when an eagle, spying his bald pate from above, mistook it for a rock and bombs away went the tortoise. Aesky never knew what hit him.

In musical theater and other stage, there's a nickname for the dramaturge: Scene Doctor. Usually the Scene Doctor works on shows that haven't had their official opening, and the show hasn't "frozen" yet. Some shows opened, but never quite froze - Lerner & Loewe's Paint your Wagon comes to mind. Taking some shows to the Scene Doctor is probably not a good idea. The movie credit "Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Bernstein" is an example. On the other hand, it probably was a very good idea to take Gayane back to the shop and change the libretto from the infamous "Ode to a Tractor" to a more humanist interpretation.

The late Edward Myers, of the Pennsylvania Ballet.

Æschylus did pretty well before he got taken out by that turtle!

Well, isn't K. Sergeyev's SB kind of the standard nowadays...?

Depends on where you are. N. Sergeyev's is kind of the standard for western Europe and environs. K. Sergeyev's is the Maryinsky and associated spheres of influence.

Before that, the term was customarily "dance director", or other similar formation.