Mel Johnson

It was a practice in BR sometimes to interpolate the pas de trois from Act I into the freestanding Act II, but I don't know about into Act III. Anyway, if they're doing that, then somebody's a good two beats ahead in the jeté diagonals, an eternity when the music's vivo.

Youskevitch was funny. He was charming, and he knew what HE had done in a given ballet, or what his partner had done. Soloists? Corps? "I dunno - I wasn't watching."

Actually, it was only Act III of a regulation Swan Lake as set by Alexandra Fedorova.

I agree. That's a distinctly not-ready-for-prime-time attitude on the part of a dancer. It's obvious Mr. Acosta has never had a ballet master along the lines of Antony Tudor, who would have you wondering if you knew your own name after a couple of rehearsals.

This phenomenon is fed also by the mystique cultivated by some people in the arts. They want to be known, even famous, but they also want to be thought of as unreachable, so much so as to be nearly spiritual beings, untouched by such mundane things as sex. In such a belief system, STDs of all sorts prosper. I think that it was in play with Robert Joffrey, who wouldn't have it known that he was HIV+, or even that what he was dying from was AIDS. Remember the cover story? He was supposed to have been on an experimental asthma drug that attacked his liver. Too many people knew, and spoke out, busting the story.

You could be onto something there, Paul.

The shot looks as though it was carefully set up to be in front of that hanging bit of drop, and spacing of the figures would have been critical. There's not a lot of room to play with, and a grand jeté would eat up space something awful, and be hard to catch in the right place and time.

Yes, most passing along of ballets happens in the oral tradition. Today, if a ballet master is not a principal choreographer, a company will either retain an artist for that purpose, or for learning older ballets, hire "stagers" to make productions soundly based on earlier choreography. In the Royal Danish Ballet, they even have a category called "putters-up", who rescue old ballets from oblivion. Stagers may use any number of tools to supplement their memories, and that's a good thing, but for sheer efficiency, there's nothing quite like somebody who's "been there". Doug's work is made very rich by his deep and wide knowledge of both dance and music history. He not only knows the notation, but is very familiar with content and/or style of the works he's reconstructed independent of Stepanov.

(There is no pejorative meaning attached to that "and/or". For someone less informed, Pharoah's Daughter would have been groping around in the dark! There is very little performance tradition of this ballet to guide the modern stager.)

Bart is correct. Alexander II was assassinated by not one, but TWO bombs thrown by two separate anarchists. They had a third relief pitcher in case they missed, leaving us to wonder at the state of their anarchism. Nicholas II, then 13, was at his grandfather's deathbed, and the experience shook him severely.

A repetiteur is a member of the artistic staff who reports directly to the ballet master, or the Artistic Director in some companies. His job (a woman would be repetiteuse) is to schedule the rehearsals for all the company's repertoire. He may or may not supervise some of them as well.

Furthermore, it could increase the numbers of ballet broadcasts - on radio!

I have to agree with you that the practice of writing a choreographic script is pretty rare. We have to be sympathetic to the composers, as choreographers often expect them to come preloaded with how to write for all types of theater. Most of them don't get much exposure to writing for original ballets, and for a full-evening work, there's even less. A film studio wouldn't think of tasking a composer for a score without some sort of script involved. Ballet producers should do no less.

Would class count? Otherwise Rowena Jackson's legendary 121 fouettés would have to fall.

But who would want a job like that? Worse, who would read the product, and what could they make of the stats?

I really think you'd need somebody to act like Petipa in teaching a composer of whatever eminence how to write for ballet. Having a choreographic script between libretto and score would help immensely. Tchaikovsky hated them, but they seemed to work all right for Beauty and Nutcracker.

But between Burger King and the Eggless, No-salt, Low-cholesterol Spinach Quiche enriched with multivitamins, there is a vast gulf. There are hundreds of fit musicians in there. And we've seen what happens to Burger King in ABT's production.

There's a reason why the old ballets with staying power are built on a model like "five minutes plot, twenty minutes divertissement, three minutes summary, curtain" for each act.

One of the surest ways to make a production fail is for it to proclaim itself High Art. The only thing worse is to be perceived by the audience as "good for you". "Good for you" is sort of the prune juice of show bizness. Trying to teach the audience too much about too many things at one go is a good way to be perceived as "good for you".

It would probably be helpful if the composer were not from the Terribly Serious Concert Composers, but rather from light music. This thing would have to sell tickets, and would be unlikely to succeed if it tried to educate the audience in music at the same time it tried to present good choreography.

I believe the current Mariinsky and Bolshoi productions use more or less the Konstantin Sergeyev version originally shown in 1950, where they went back to the happy ending from the original 1877 production.

What 1877 happy ending? In the '77 and '95, the ending is happy only because both lovers have endeditall and are reunited in spirit, hovering over the surface of the lake.

Speaking as someone who "was there" to see and meet the pre-teen and early teen Gelsey, I have to remember that she was very fond of Kent, and had little good to say about Farrell at that same time. She was always working on something, to the point of "hitting the wall" and trying to push through it, rather an endorphin junkie. We mostly all hoped that she'd grow out of it, but she didn't. It would be idle to deny that there were some who viewed her defection from NYCB with delight, "Good, now she's out of the way," but on the whole, most of us liked her -- a lot! Her crash was a train wreck for us. Ghastly, but too morbidly fascinating to look away.

There's one thing to keep in mind when regarding Kirkland presently as an historic figure: All that most readers today have to go on is Kirkland's own writings, and it's very hard for a biographer to take on a subject like her while she's still around. Time and mortality will probably have to intervene before a full and balanced picture emerges.

If we take the Hogarth, then the ending is clearly the Calvinist style. The final plate of the series is Moll's wake.

And then there's the "Cuban Pete and Sally Sweet pas de deux"....

Composer is not to worry. Wilbur Hatch may be gone, but his memory lingers on in any of a hundred TV and movie composers.

"A Rake's Progress" has been done, rather a long time ago, by Ninette de Valois. That's not to say that a revival of that work would not be welcome. And while we're on Hogarth series, why not "A Harlot's Progress", or for the more respectable, mostly outside of the demimonde, "Marriage-à-la-Mode". But why get stuck on Hogarth? Why not Thomas Rowlandson and his "Doctor Syntax" series? Why not James Gillray?

J'aime Lucy

Now, here's a real concept for a popular ballet libretto, assuming all the niceties with Desilu could be negotiated.

What have we got? Well, to begin with:

Stock characters familiar to an entire audience across age lines.

Plots familiar to same, like those drawn from fairy tales.

No real chance of becoming IMPORTANT.*

Mahler would be a Really Bad Choice for music.

Story told by action, about like a silent movie.

Time period is remote from the modern audience, yet accessible.

* - It could be important, just as long as it doesn't try to be IMPORTANT. I mean, if a choreographer tried to explore the inner demons of Ethel Mertz, he'd get thrown out a window.

And now for something completely the same, a classic Monty Python sketch, "The Village Idiot":

http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/theidiot.htm

This sketch segued into "Test Match".

They can, of course, go anywhere, but the basic academic arm positions run on a plane from first to second. That's chest-high.

In different schools of drama, there's a thing called "Standard English diction" which is neither British nor American, but could be either if it's done properly. Pitt's founders somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean, which is too bad. I've been told that I sort of fade into it when I'm doing first-person interpretation of Revolutionary War-era people. The British and the Americans sounded very much alike, which is why John André didn't get nailed immediately as a British officer when acting as gobetween for Gen. Sir Henry Clinton and Benedict Arnold. In my mind, though, I realize that what I do isn't really correct, as what I use is a 20th-century construct in pronunciation. People in a better position than I to know say that they all sounded much more Celtic in pronunciation, whether your Celts were Welsh, Scottish, or Irish. The Saxons were a whole other trip. And the old power families in the late 18th century were also mostly connected to the Norman Conquest. That had an effect on their diction. The accent we think of today as an "English" accent probably owes a lot to David Garrick and his "Italianate Speech" about which Dr. Johnson gave him such trouble. Maybe John Burgoyne talked that way, but most of them wouldn't have. Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander-in-Chief in North America in 1780 had spent more time in America than in England. He was born in Halifax, and lived in New York City until he was 16. He sounded more like the Americans than some of the Americans.

I finally got hold of a copy of Ryan's The Longest Day, and find that the "Flanagan" character in the movie is a composite of three in the book, none of whom were named Flanagan. I wondered how this character fell into the water on Gold Beach, encountered Colin Maud on Juno Beach with the Canadians, and then fell in with Lord Lovat and his Commandos on Sword Beach. It looks like another case of Producer's Disease. See Gone With the Wind - one or the other of Scarlett's sisters is discovered on, reading David Copperfield. In the book, it's Les Miserables. Why? Selznick preferred Dickens over Hugo, and besides, he'd never read the latter book.