Mel Johnson

Right, today's fencing foil, epée and saber are based on eighteenth-century weapons, mostly smallswords, which were smaller and lighter than the two-handed broadswords of the Medieval time, or the Renaissance rapiers, which were long and thin, in length-to-width ratio, but still pretty heavy. They were often combined with the cloak and the main gauche to snarl the opponent's blade and to stab with the "off" hand.

R&J is probably all right with modern fencing styles, but for things set in the Medieval period, a very different school was in place. The swords were great long things, and while they had an edge, the effect was very much like hammering at somebody with a long, narrow club. Most had points, but some didn't which tells us that their whole use was to batter the enemy. The Roman gladius had both a point and very sharp edges, so it was both a cut and a thrust weapon. In R&J, the fighters would likely be using rapiers, and maybe here and there a main gauche dagger. Jean de Brienne would probably heft a sword that takes two hands to control!

Yes, bart, a gladius is the typical Roman sword. It's short and heavy, and the gladiators get their name from it. There is another kind of Roman sword called a spatha which is longer and even heavier. It was the cavalry weapon. As time rolled on, it became thinner and lighter, so that it could be conveniently used by infantry to reach out and touch someone.

Mrs. Adams quickly had the crew holystoning the 'tween decks, so that the oil wouldn't get into the potash! She also taught the captain a thing or two about navigational mathematics, and the cook how to cook! By the time they got to Europe, she was running a tight little ship!

Maybe she would have made a better President than her hubby. Abigail would have known how to deal with Hamilton and Jefferson.

She was amazing! While John was American Minister to the Court of St. James, She went to an audience with King George III, and brought two of her daughters. The King was charmed to find that she had brought her children, "Oh, you have your daughters here, what, what? Love children, have fifteen of 'em myself, eh?" The Queen was less effusive in her greetings, but her eldest daughters and the Adams girls became a tight foursome. You didn't see one without the other three. If you wanted royalty to dress up your party, just invite one or the other of the Adams girls. The other three would come with her!

Even Martha Washington sought out Abby's advice. Mrs. Washington's taste ran to the dowdy, and she knew it. Abigail always knew what the tasteful things were in fashion, and which new trends were going to last. She also could smell a bargain a county off! Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Washington were the great shoppers-together of the 1790s!

There is a fairly sizeable school of thought in that direction, yes.

I wish I had been a fly on the bulkhead when Abby and the kids came over to Europe on a potash merchant. They were also carrying bunkers full of linseed oil. This made them a floating edition of a modern ANFO bomb! Mrs. Adams quickly had the crew holystoning the 'tween decks, so that the oil wouldn't get into the potash! She also taught the captain a thing or two about navigational mathematics, and the cook how to cook! By the time they got to Europe, she was running a tight little ship!

Sure, that's one way of looking at it. Just be careful about over-thinking all the possible interpretations. The music and the steps come first, then motivations can be supplied to bring additional depth. The dancers may well come up with their own, quite spontaneously!

It's not the rehearsal process that's so expensive with Tharp, it's Tharp herself. Her fees are just as high as Jerome Robbins'.

Raymonda is a very taxing role, at least in part because of her omnipresence. But there are some ballerinas who absolutely thrive on that kind of variation-every-time-you-turn-around evening of ballet!

And pardon the personal observation, but I truly believe that McKenzie owes his long tenure at least in part to being a really, REALLY nice guy!

Chancellor Livingston, who administered the oath to GW, said that he could barely hear the President "repeat after me." Washington hated to talk in public, and his false teeth (he only had two of his own left in his head by 1789) didn't make it any easier. Even though we have the text of his first Inaugural Address, we don't know what he actually delivered. He made the Address to a joint session of the Congress, and about a third of the way through, the compound/complexities of the Hamilton/Madison writing finally got to him. He went off-script and just ad-libbed what he actually thought. A Congressman praised the speech for its "candor". His second Inaugural Address was even better. It was 138 words (the shortest on record, not even covering one side of a sheet of paper), delivered to a cabinet meeting, and was perfect for anybody's second inaugural. What he said was essentially, "I've got the job again. Let's go back to work."

I like Jefferson, too! I suppose I like George for the same reasons that Jefferson did. "He always had the most correct information."

Morse as Washington was good. He didn't say much, but then Washington didn't. He was sort of an aerobic listener, and he had an amazing memory for conversations he had had perhaps years before, and the ability, like Napoleon, to put names with faces, likewise remembered over years. Big George is my MAIN MAN, after all.

That would be a good defining statement for criticism of the series. -"grim and authentic"- Things set in the 18th century tend to be written and directed with a solemnity that approaches liturgy. I felt as though I were watching a life in real time. And most life is pretty boring.

BT's first members contained a large contingent trained by Mikhail Mordkin. Other sources were SAB (even then!) and various Ballet Russe students. Having a dedicated company in the city your school serves as a big plus; it provides a venue for consumers to view the finished product. The Kirov in DC is a good school, but what company do they fill? The Maryinsky? The Universal? There is no there there when your school is remote from the company.

Corps work was largely the province of the ballet master and/or the regisseur. Dimitri Romanoff was remorseless about "Les Sylphides" - not an eyelash out of place. Other corps as in Giselle were subject to the vagaries of the ballet master schedule and sometimes did not receive the heavyweight supervision needed to achieve "together would be nice!"

The 18th century is my period. But I have to say that John Adams I found boring. The facts were all there, the acting was lively enough, but the direction was monotonous, and the screenplay pedantic. After the second show, I gave up on it.

Yes, that is my impression, too.

Speaking of the various écoles, it is interesting to note that there are a lot out there, but only three that I can think of directly feed companies, or at least have for some time: the mysterious "French School" of the Paris Opéra, the Vaganova School, and the Bournonville School. The Royal Ballet School is often thought of as a Royal Academy of Dance School, and as well, the National Ballet of Canada. Neither one is. They each have their own proprietary curricula, and even though they enter many RAD candidates to examination, they aren't RAD. Will these schools be long-lived and produce many generations of dancers for their companies? Too soon to tell.

PS. The Cuban School is definitely on the radar, but we'll have to see if it survives Doňa Alicia.

I think you'd have to go to the music and see what that tells you.

In Minkus' Viennese-style dance music for this scene, there isn't a lot of melancholy to go around. I'd say that you're on the right track with the idea that the Shades are "in Heaven", so they ought to be fairly cheerful about the whole thing. They've descended to earth again on the fog that falls off the Himalaya Mountains (the entrée with all those arabesques), presumably to visit the old dancing grounds, but also remember, that whole scene is a hallucination - Solor is stoned on whatever it is he's smoking in his hookah! So how good IS the stuff in his pipe?

Not to enter a dispute on the definition of school, merely discussion, but it does not exclusively mean a method, a system, or even a place where a style is inculcated. BT School was an intake point (a "feeder school") for the company, and the company did not use it as a SINGLE-intake point, either. Ballet Russe school was more like that for its record of student placement with the Denham Ballet Russe. Even Joffrey didn't have much of a record of training dancers up from the get-go, and putting them into the company. Denise Jackson is the only Joffrey dancer I can think of who was trained from primary grades at the American Ballet Center. The School of American Ballet is really the only school in NYC attached to a major company which has acted as a single-point supply, and even they have been noted for "skimming", taking high-functioning intermediate students and training them into the Balanchine style after learning the rudiments elsewhere. For quite awhile, they were a "feeder school" for ABT, too, in fact if not intention.

School in the sense of method isn't really found in the major companies in the US. The National Ballet of Canada used to be a pretty dedicated Cecchetti-based place from top to bottom, but no longer. Most schools use the "International" lexicon, freely based on Cecchetti, with interpolations from all over. Even SAB doesn't have a complete method, as it uses the International lexicon instead of having different names for steps to match the distinctive ways they have of doing certain things. I don't know how many dancers in NYCB today are exclusively SAB products, but I suspect that it's fewer than you'd think.

I don't know if such a long-view definition of "school" were in place when it was said, "But first, a school." All we have is little more than a sound bite, and not much of a context of conversation to indicate whether the objective were a freestanding method, or a pragmatic measure for obtaining dancers to dance together.

I have to disagree with that definition of "school".

Whoa, wait a minute - Ballet Theatre School was around for lotsa years, and then under Baryshnikov, there was the Classical Ballet School, and now there's the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School!

To develop ballet in America at a minimum means that America's national ballet company should have a majority of its principals and soloists Americans. ABT's foreign hiring policy has communicated to American dancers one thing: they aren't good enough for national recognition, which has done more to impede ballet's attraction to young Americans than anything else.

I don't see ABT having a problem this way. If anything, the company "looks like America", which has a long and honorable tradition of welcoming the immigrant and the refugee. Many of the foreign-born artists at ABT have become naturalized, and to discriminate based on national origin is simply abhorrent.

I got a little emotional when i saw the Cuban delegation. I must confess that even after having left Cuba a few years ago, my heart still goes for my fellow competitors...

Oh, that's all right, Cristian. Sir Walter Scott wrote in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel":

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

"This is my own, my native land."?

Just imagine if they had taken Yao MING into the company! Taller women would never have to worry about having a partner!

Well, seeing as "het" means "the" in Dutch, it leads to a peculiar redundancy to say "the The".

Grand pas classique = the Great Old Man of ballet.