Mel Johnson

Well, I can say that I've done my share! Partnering skills start very early, when the boys and girls first meet one another. Each must be respectful of the other. This doesn't mean that they have to use etiquette from another age, it means simple respect. The conventions of classroom and stage manners are built to demonstrate that, but if the respect doesn't come from inside the dancers, it's worth nothing. When partnering lessons start, it is necessary to make sure that the students are self-reliant. You will often hear a pas de deux teacher saying to the girls, "You should be able to do this without him! Forget he's there! Don't depend on him, depend on yourself!" The boys get, "Show her off! See how beautiful she is! Don't lean into her! Stand on your own feet!" and of course, the ever-popular, "If you drop her, I'll KILL you!" The dancers have to learn what it is to execute ballet technique correctly while close to another person. The tutu is good for stand-off, but you're really much closer in some parts of the dance than you are at others. Most pas de deux classes are done in standard practice clothes, no tutus. The dancers have to learn how and when to "put air about themselves" and when and how to step in, and when and how to step back. Only experience will teach these lessons. Some partners prefer to work rather close together, wherever they have been trained. Others seem to want to stay rather far apart. This latter tendency must be carefully modulated to avoid the appearance that they're really not dancing together, but would actually prefer to be somewhere else! When lifts come, the dancers have to be close together, because a "crane" lift, where the man's arms are outstretched, and he's doing a full overhead lift without any jump from the woman is exceedingly difficult, and exists in some choreography, but not in classical partnering. Even in Giselle, Markova (a famous non-jumper) would give Dolin a little help in the change of direction after their line of sauté arabesques. (Remember, this is where Kirkland and Baryshnikov had a major row.) Partnering is just that. It's an equal sharing of the responsibility for how the dance looks. It's 50/50, even-steven, a two-way street. When one fails, they both fail. That's enough to get me started.

In my opinion, a good Nutcracker has a lot in common with E.T. The Extraterrestial. Would the latter show have been good with Elliott portrayed by a 32-year-old? (Oh, wait, wasn't that Close Encounters of the Third Kind?) Could it, and other shows with juvenile protagonists survive the proposed "3-minute excerpt" test? I really doubt it. And I must agree with canbelto. I get no kick from Grigorivich's version, but that's another De Gustibus statment, and hence, not really arguable.

Another problem with international tight money is that the funding for academic exercises (which the reconstructions arguably were) and artistic explorations (another component of their beings) dries up. We can only go with the sports teams, who "wait until next year (and hope!)"

Oh, certainly all ballet is dance, but not all dance is ballet. There are crossovers, and hybrids, and all sorts of fusion, but the topic of this thread is Nutcracker.

And he never believed that he was a great man, in that respect, like Tchaikovsky.

Mime indeed can stand as its own program. Look at Marcel Marceau. But Nutcracker, among all the durable classics, has a way of integrating mime and ballet step vocabulary more than any other, more even than Giselle, where it happens a lot! And national dances are not separate from a ballet dancer's training. They must be an integral part of it. It is less so for historical dance, but it would be nice to get that integrated, too!

Anyone care to join me in the Krakoviak from Ivan Sussanin, or the Csardas from Swan Lake?

With that amount of motion in any company's ranks, it would appear to me to be a harbinger of change in strategic doctrine, not merely a tactical redeployment, if I may use a military metaphor. What that continental shift is, time only will tell.

I may not have seen it at Covent Garden, but I did see it at the Metropolitan Opera House, and I have to say that I'm in Hans' camp. I found it quite dreadful, with one of my few cherished memories being of Dame Merle Park, but then, I thought then, and still think now that she could have danced ANYthing and improved it.

Mostly, he did, I think.

Balanchine even OVERFLOWS the social dancing by a little bit, causing repeats in the fast section of the Grossvatertanz.

I love that Anderson decided to keep the "dum-dum" show of "Pyramus and Thisby" in. The String Symphony is all very well, but I have always missed the low comedy possible in Balanchine's version.

The company would be the Maryinsky, but the ballet would be Balanchine's "Bourrée Fantasque" with Somova/Daniil Simkin in the Adams/Robbins roles. And patience, Cristian, I can feel it in my bones, beneficial change is in the wind.

I didn't construe your post so, either, Quiggin. Perhaps my feelings about Tchaikovsky as a person may be related to my feelings about Robert E. Lee, as expressed by Stephen Vincent Benet: For he will smile And give you, with unflinching courtesy, Prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders, Photographs, kindness, valor and advice, And do it with such grace and gentleness That you will know you have the whole of him Pinned down, mapped out, easy to understand— And so you have. All things except the heart The heart he kept himself, that answers all. For here was someone who lived all his life In the most fierce and open light of the sun, Wrote letters freely, did not guard his speech, Listened and talked with every sort of man, And kept his heart a secret to the end From all the picklocks of biographers. Perhaps it takes ineffable poetry to describe an ineffable human.

It's hard to know what the Shakers did actually, as their flourishing came before the American Civil War, but there were still enough around in the 1930s for Humphrey to do some research with. At the moment, there are only three or four Old School Shakers left alive, there is a community in Sabbathday Lake in Maine which lives by a considerably modified Rule of Life from the original "Shaking Quakers" of Mother Ann's day. There are considerable differences in what Mother Ann actually said of the eventual future of the order. In one, she is said to have said that the order should stop taking new members two hundred years from her death, which would have been 1984. In another, she is said to have said that when the Shakers were down to five members, there would be an explosive revival. She didn't write these down, so all we have is oral tradition. Barbara Grace Pollack, who was the editor of The Art of Making Dances, and a longtime Humphrey colleague, was a friend of mine, but the subject of "The Shakers" never came up in our conversations, unfortunately.

The Doris Humphrey work about the Shakers is called, logically, "The Shakers".

I still wish that when filmmakers do a Fitzgerald story, they wouldn't cherry-pick from other parts of Fitzgerald's work (or life) to interpolate into the movie at hand. "Daisy" has somehow lost her way on the rebound from Jay Gatsby into this one, and Zelda's dansomania has been imposed on Blanchett's character.

No disagreement, Quiggin. I just wonder if Souritz and her colleagues were building a correct picture of Tchaikovsky's music, or whether it were more of the faintly amusing Soviet attempts to claim that Russians invented EVERYTHING. Some Russian flew a powered airplane before the Wright Brothers, or even Langley. Some Russian developed the exact same General Theory of Relativity, only ten years before Einstein. The Russians invented baseball (this one seemed aimed at a Cuban audience). Lobachevsky invented Non-Euclidean Geometry ahead of that Hungarian (there may actually be something to this.) Ivanov actually choreographed ALL the ballets for Petipa, and the damned furriner just sat back and took the credit. Anyway, my main point is that in Post-Imperial productions where Clara/Masha is made into an adult, as much violence is done to the original concept of Nutcracker as is done by imposing over-naiveté to other leads in other ballets. (In college, the composer I dumped on was Puccini. I still don't like his music as much as I like Tchaikovsky's.)

I noted Quiggin's quote of Souritz, and couldn't stop myself (I tried! I honestly tried!) from thinking of Eric Idle commentating on a Monty Python episode, "Tchaikovsky: tortured genius, or was he just an old pouf who wrote tunes?" I am over into the genius camp myself, but cannot for myself justify how tortured he was while he was composing. Psychohistory is such a dodgy proposition, and neither psychologists nor historians will say they like it (although they are both prone to doing it!). I wonder if this search for deep-psyche evidence in Tchaikovsky's works isn't a reaction to the post World War II pop disparagement of the composer as "merely loud". One of the Hoffnung concerts took this to the sublime silliness of having the Dolmetsch Consort play a medley of Tchaikovsky themes on viols and recorders. Cork popguns provided the artillery effect from the "God Save the Tsar" finale. This attempt to psychoanalyze a dead patient is, in my opinion, on the very fringes of forensic medicine, and must be regarded with skepticism. Deep and complex, the composer was, no doubt of it, but it struck me that a number of musicologists attempted to "revitalize" his reputation, (which to me was never devitalized) by ascribing great mystic virtues to music which is just THERE! in order to prove that it is more than "just loud". It doesn't need saving. Apply Ockham's razor here. The simplest explanation is probably the correct one.

bart - My first viewing of Balanchine's must have been in 1958, because I distinctly recall being ten. My latest viewing was in 1998, and I haven't been able to get back since, although I've keenly wanted to. It's really slower than it used to be.

That's my man! But there's another I've seen of him without the headpiece and with one of the two kids picked up in his arms. He's also out of the costume framework, and in shirtsleeves, rather unusual for that time in a photograph.

And if we let in canids in general, there's Roland Petit's "Le Loup". For fox into LADY, there's Jacques d'Amboise's "The Chase".

To give you an idea of the importance of Mere Gigogne's mime, she was a recycled hit character from Petipa's revival of "Le Diable à Quatre". The same mime, a jolly old Mr. Yakovlev portrayed the old lady in both that production, and Nutcracker. There's a photo of him around somewhere, and he does look like a very merry sort who would be good in any comic ballet. I wonder if he were any relation to the great aircraft designer?

Well, at least now we know where Nureyev got the bats for his belfry!

The ones with the bats must be the "Back to Hoffman" types. One of these days, one of these Gothic Revivalist productions will have Frankenstein's monster striding through the show. Same time period, you know. Mary Shelley's book was published in 1818, Hoffman's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" in 1819. And speaking of history, now I have to go look for my great-grandfather's copy in German of the Hoffman short stories. I have an English translation of the stories AFTER the Dumas translation to French which was the work that Petipa used to write the libretto. Sometimes, going from language to language can produce some weird effects; for a demonstration, see Pedro Carolinho's English as She is Spoke, which was written by a Portuguese-speaking author who spoke no English, translating phrases from Portuguese to French (which he also didn't speak) and then translating them to English, producing what he THOUGHT was a useful phrase-book for Brazilian tourists to the US. Mark Twain found the well-intentioned chaos of language hilarious.