Petra

I also saw the December 2nd, 17:00 show. I totally agree with canbelto that it was a great performance. I suspect that this is a good time in the run - the dancers are warm but they aren't exhausted and over-worked yet. I will admit that I wasn't blown away by Wendy Whelan. I know she is supposed to be a very special performer but this really didn't come across in her Sugar Plum Fairy. She seemed too stiff. The partnering with Philip Neal was wonderful though with seamless shoulder lifts. I liked Reichlen's Dewdrop. Last year, Bouder made me cry during the Waltz of the Flowers and I was expecting a let-down this year. As Reichlen and Bouder couldn't be less alike, I was able to enjoy the differences rather than compare the two. The way Reichlen dances Dewdrop, you'd never guess this is an allegro role - she is all port de bras - an art nouveau Dewdrop. It reminded me of Titania in Balanchine's Midsummer's Night Dream. Kathryn Morgan was adorable in Marzipan. I would love to see her in something more substantive. I think of Marzipan as the underdog dance in Nutcracker - it looks so difficult, but it never gets the applause that the higher-flying dances do. I love this ballet. As far as I am concerned, the luxury of seeing Balanchine's Nutcracker on an annual basis is one of the major advantages to living on the East Coast of the US.

cubanmiamiboy, is there any film industry in Cuba? Any thing you would recommend seeing?

Not to defend the gulags in any way of course, but the crucible of great art and invention often is suffering (real or imagined). This concept is famously presented in the movie "The Third Man": "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

I'm a working mother so I suppose it's up to me to rush to Fournier's defense... I don't mean that seriously but if you look at the article, it does look like the sentence about 'cats and memories' was edited so there may have been more context than we know. I know it seems unlikely given the huge volume of discourse about motherhood and parenting drowning the media these days, but there still is prejudice against mothers in the workplace. I doubt that a sleep-deprived new mother was thinking of anything except presenting herself and her beloved child as best she could. More pertinently, although most mothers (whether working inside and outside the home) do regard themselves as being more efficient, better multi-taskers, packing more into a day, etc. than others, I'm not sure that those qualities are particularly important for a dancer in a big company. Sure they have to cut down on their socializing, but unlike office workers who can talk on the phone and write a document at eth same time, a dancer can't take class and rehearse simultaneously.

No memories here - I'm too young and I have no family connection to New York. However I visited Ellis Island this past Sunday and I wanted to acknowledge the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th - on their way to make NY and the USA what it was in the mid century. About a third of the immigrants that were processed in Ellis Island remained in the NY area. They were the artists and the audience that made it happen.

Wolcott is the kind of writer that gives blogging a bad name. He is not self-publishing - his blog is part of the Vanity Fair website, and yet his writing style is that of a pretentious knowitall teenager on myspace. There is no nuance - Whoever agrees with him is wonderful and whoever disagrees with him is despicable. I've got to be suspicious of a grown man who regards Holden Caulfield as his idol. Especially annoying is the way Wolcott discloses his connection to Jacobs. It isn't petty for a reader to want to know whether writers who quote each other are married.

A comment on the Tolkien suggestion: I think that there are too many non-human characters for it to work as a ballet. I think a sci-fi or fantasy book could be adapted, but you need to have human (or superhuman) characters in order to really work as a longlasting ballet and not just as a gimmick. A movie that could be adapted to a ballet is Blade Runner (I've never read the Philip K. Dick story it's based on). The story is straightforward and familiar to many. There are a relatively small number of main characters and their physicality is part of their characterization. The question of who is human, who isn't, can we tell the difference and what does that difference matter are all questions which are eminently suitable for a ballet. It wouldn't hurt if the lead were as yummy as Harrison Ford...

I don't accept the notion that a new narrative full-length 'classic' is no longer possible. After all, a large portion of the ballet audience wants to see narrative full-length ballets. I think one problem is that the narrative full-lengths that have been created in the past few years have either not been 'real' ballets (i.e. Matthew Bourne) or not been 'good' ballets (i.e. Dracula), and this has led many of the more knowledgable or adventurous audience members away from the narrative full-lengths. Another issue which is addressed in the way bart phrased the original post is that the ballets we consider 'classics' exist in any number of different versions, and that is part of what makes them a classic. Today of course ownership of intellectual property has evolved since the 19th century and no one could get away with adapting a ballet as stagers do with the Petipa ballets. For instance, as far as I know the MacMillan Manon is the only one out there. Why is that? Has no other choreographer been interested? Is the ownership of the choreography linked to the music so no one else can use the music? As to which stories could be choreographed, there are dozens. For my part, the key should be that the story can be easily understood with just a brief glance at the synopsis and that the story has universal appeal. Greek myths: for instance, the story of the house of Jason and Medea, the Oedipal stories and so on still strike a chord and are very relevant to our life today. If these stories succeed as straight theatre and as operas, why not ballet? On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend adapting Jane Austen's books. Even though they too strike a chord in our hearts today and can be easily adapted to the ballet stage because you can alternate intimate scenes with ballroom gatherings, they require a very understated and low key approach which is usually the opposite of dramatic dance. (My mind is boggling imagining Nureyev as Darcy ). For an original story, I would like to see an original story set in a period/location with lots of social dancing. What about a story set in the Prohibition era - a DEA agent (or whatever they were called then) falls in love with a dancer in a speakeasy. You know it can't end well...

Horrror is not my genre. I get scared far too easily and I don't understand the appeal of gratuitous scarifying (that isn't a word, is it?). If I have to see a horror movie, I prefer the 'paranoid' type like Rosemary's Baby and The Others. Nicole Kidman and Christopher Eccleston made an excellent couple in The Others.

Darcey Bussell also started out in gymnastics. I think it used to be fairly common for energetic little girls to do both ballet and gymnastics or skating. It's probably less common today as more traditionally male sports are open to girls and as you have to invest much more time in each individual activity at a much earlier age.

There are male starlets today too. Leonardo Di Caprio was a starlet before he became a star. Many of the young TV actors are starlets - I'm showing my age by not being able to think of one off the top of head, but I'm thinking about shows like 'The OC', 'Prison Break', etc. In my day, they would have been Jason Priestley (90210) and Bailey Chase (Party of Five).

Where is Heidi Cruz?

It's one of the perks, actually. I'm currently re-reading/reading aloud to my son D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.

pp, I don't think a board dedicated to classical ballet would ever ridicule someone who is nuts about the 'pretty'... I have no visual art education but I would think that ballet-lovers have a greater facility than most to recognize and appreciate both the aesthetics of a painting and the rigour and technique required to create it.

I would also recommend the Frick for anyone who hasn't been there yet. The collection the Fricks managed to amass in such a short period of time is mind-boggling. I was expecting the Fragonards as they are mentioned in every listing of the Frick, but to stroll into a room and be suddenly confronted with Holbein's twin portraits of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More is an incredible experience. These portraits are so iconic in a certain segment of our popular culture (count me as one little girl who fantasized about being Anne Boleyn took a great interest in the formation of the Church of England) that it is amazing to see the originals. Edited to add: If I am able to get to the City on Museum Day, I will probably take my children to the Greek mythology exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan.

I think there are quite a few such publications of poems. I know (and own) poetry books which have Hebrew original and English translation and others which have the English original and Hebrew translation.

Interesting comment, bart. I agree that Austen seems more contemporary than Wilde does, but I don't think it is the value system, but rather the stylistic qualities of Austen's work. Actually if you strip Wilde's epigram (and I wasn't familiar with it before you wrote it here) of the 'nonsense', Wilde like Austen is saying that a successful marriage requires work. Of course, in those days, it was of great importance that a marriage work. There was no easy way out.

What perky said... A special thank you to Alexandra and Leigh - a number of old threads have been revived lately and reminded me how much I have learnt from Ballet Talk and from Alexandra and Leigh in particular over the last years. Bravo!

I read a lot of Enid Blyton as a child. I enjoyed them and certainly won't prevent my children from reading them. However, I think it's fair to state that those books are indeed "part of the capitalist bourgoisie infamous past (or not so past)". In a free society, we can read books and enjoy them while recognizing that they were written in a different era in a different context. After all, Blyton's people were never actually nasty to the underprivileged - just full of their own superiority.

And you would be welcome to it! Only you probably wouldn't like it. It doesn't know how to do anything that produces significant amounts of MONEY! By then neither do the brains -- not to mention bodies, dedication, training, artistry, and generosity -- of 99% of our beloved dancers and choreographers Mr. Wheeldon, however, may possibly be part of the other 1%. No disrespect intended at all to Wheeldon - he clearly has all the qualities Helene mentions, including generosity of spirit

I did. I love conceits in literature - poetry and prose. I love the idea of people being passionate about intellectual pursuits, a relatively new idea for me at the time I read it (probably in my late teens). The post-modernist discourse isn't quite as heavy handed as some of Byatt's later books like The Bibliographer's Tale. Try AS Byatt's books about Frederica Potter: The Virgin in the Garden, Shadow of the Sun. Potter is a very real although fairly dislikeable character as are the rest of her family and the depiction of England in the '50s very intriguing. In a recent interview with Julie Delpy, Delpy mentioned that her next directorial oroject would concern a Dracula-like Countess. I assume this is the person she was referring to. I wonder if that project will materialise. I'm not sure I see Delpy in this role, but I would like to see her try. Quite unusually, I am actually reading a book, "The Women's Room" by Marilyn French. It is the well-known ("Classic"?) feminist text although it isn't just about women, it is about the rise and fall of the American Dream. It is remarkably, almost scarily, applicable to today. It is an easy read because the chapters are very short but after a while all the characters are jumbled together - was everybody unhappy, unfulfilled, longing for something else? What bothers me about the book is that although French mocks the pursuit of happiness and a quick buck as played out in the '50s, she too seems to make the point (and I'm only in the middle so this may change) that self-fulfillment is the ideal and sacrificinhg for others can only have negative consequences.

Maybe this is Wheeldon (or Macauley's) homage to Balanchine's well-known ballet "Serenaad"?

(Similar considerations did affect Thompson in another film, however, ‘Carrington,’ where the casting really wasn’t age-appropriate and it did hurt the picture.) dirac, can you explain what you meant here? I enjoyed this movie a lot - but I'm not familiar with how old each character is supposed to be.

There is social dancing in (almost?) all of Austen's books and at least the period clothes can be easily adapted for ballet dancing. I think either Boris Eifman or Maurice Bejart would do a good job of chereographing a ballet 'loosely' based on the life of Jane Austen and including ALL Austen's heroines too as manifestations of her sub-conscious. Ooh, I like it!!!

Well, the Jane Austen bandwagon knows no geographic boundries either. A new Hebrew translation of 'Pride and Prejudice' is in the works, replacing the existing 20-30 year old translation which is out of print. Interestingly, the translator will be Irit Linur, the very first 'chick-lit' Hebrew writer. Her first novel 'The Siren's Song' was material in revolutionizing the Israeli literary world and creating a bestseller driven market. Sounds promising... On the other hand, Linur is a self-professed Janeite and she has experience in translating.