canbelto

My thoughts on the first week of Winter Season at NYCB. I saw four performances including all the major debuts: https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/01/city-ballet-winter-season-brings-new.html

I was at this afternoon;s performance. I'll write more later (very tired now) but I thought that the whole entire corps plus Reichlen looked a little under their best. The last time I saw it the corps was so much crisper. Today they all seemed a bit tired and ragged. I have seen her in this role numerous times and she usually blows the doors off the role.

I always thought that the slave pas de deux was meant to show the difference in social standing between Solor/Gamzatti and Nikya. In the first scene we saw Nikya and Solor as equals. They dance together and are in love. In the second scene Nikya is essentially entertainment for Gamzatti. The placid dance is a contrast to her passionate pas de deux with Solor in the first scene. It's a little dance that shows Nikya her place, so to speak.

Looks like he has done a mass deleting of his instagram posts.

Yikes. He honestly sounds unwell.

Sergei Polunin has been uninvited to guest at POB: In translation: "I know the talented artist he is but I discovered public statements that shock me and do not respect my values."

I hope everyone enjoyed the HD!

Think Claire Kretzschmar and Unity Phelan would make good Lilac Fairies.

Really happy to see Stanley debut as Apollo, also looking forward to Sterling Hyltin returning to Mozartiana and Reichlen and Bouder in PC #2.

Hmm. An obligue hint?

I really urge everyone to at least go see the HD. One of the best overall casts the Met has put forward in many years. https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/01/adria-anna-lecouvtrebko.html

I've seen MCB a few times since Lourdes took over and they're a great company. They dance Balanchine idiomatically, they dance modern works well, their dancers have a highly individual style, and so whatever she's doing she must be doing something right.

He is voicing an opinion that is simply not supported by facts. Gender is an identity, but we now know that there are many babies born who are in fact intersex. They might be genetically male but present as having more female genitals, and vice versa. There is the well-known cases of East German women who after artitficial hormone injections began to talk, walk, and look like men. And bringing it back to the arts in nearly EVERY CULTURE there is a vibrant arts tradition of gender-fluid entertainment. In Chinese (Peking) opera tradition, the prima diva role is almost always taken by a dan, which is a male trained from childhood to impersonate the voice and mannerisms of a female. One of the most famous was Mei Lang Fang, who also was the father of 11 children offstage. In Western operas there are the travesti/trouser roles, and also the castrati fetish. Castrati were supposed to have combined the purity of the female soprano with the raw power of a real tenor. They were also adored for their androgynous looks. In ballet Sir Frederick Ashton played a lot with gender bending -- there's La fille mal gardee, the stepsisters in Cinderella. In older ballets there's Madge in La Sylphide, or Carabosse in Sleeping Beauty where traditionally both males and females can take on these roles. Even "ballet is woman" George Balanchine made a number of ballets where the female was dominant and almost predatory, like Prodigal Son, Agon or Four Temperaments. So basically Polunin is simply factually wrong.

John Clifford said in his latest YT video that it will be a "matter of days."

Well looks like you had a packed trip! Sometimes dartboard casting at NYCB for Nutcracker does not work though ... The two operas should have been pretty great and Alvin Ailey is always amazing.

Paquette's farewell was streamed on arte, and there is a YT video of the farewell. Looks like he got the send-off he deserved.

Well LeCrone is someone I cant imagine as SPF. During the regular season she is almost cast exclusively in leotard ballets. She has struggled with injuries as well The Dewdrop was Gina Pazcoguin who is coming back from a major knee injury but was IMO the best Coffee. Thanks for your thoughts and too bad you didnt catch another cast. I tend to avoid final week Nuts bc in my experience fatigue sets in and performances get sloppier.

Here is the post:

It'll be hard to imagine the company going forward as their classicists keep retiring. Does anyone know when Ganio will reach retirement age?

Did anyone go to the final week of Nuts? How was it?

Oops I mistakenly added the wrong video for the doll's dance. S___t. I will add the right video for the Royal Ballet and fix the post. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. As for the vidoe I did at it's the Burlaka version from Berlin. ETA: here is the link with the corrected videos: https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2018/12/comparing-nutcrackers-across-pond.html

I also wonder what they'll do if they have a dancer of color wear the blond powdered wigs. IMO that's the kind of wig that only works for very fair-skinned dancers. I know one of their principals Francesca Hayward is from Kenya but she is extremely light skinned. Even so IMO she didn't look great in that powdered wig.

Thnaks! Finding the videos was actually the most fun. It made me realize how much both versions changed over the years.

As it happens I had a lot of time on my hands so I decided to compare the Balanchine vs. the Wright version: https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2018/12/comparing-nutcrackers-across-pond.html

Best: 1) Joaquin de Luz's farewell. A senior dancer going out at the top of his game, and with class. A wonderful memory for everyone who was there to witness it. 2) Ratmansky's Harlequinade. A wonderful reconstruction of a Petipa charmer, that managed to avoid the pitfall of seeming stuffy. 3) Some consistently great performances from some of my favorite dancers -- Sterling Hyltin's Sugarplum Fairy and La Sylphide, Tess Reichlen and Russell Janzen's Diamonds, Tiler Peck and Joaquin de Luz's barnstorming Fall in Robbins' Four Seasons, Tiler Peck and Joaquin de Luz in Tchai pas de deux. On that note, Balanchine alumni like Patricia McBride, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Eddie Villela coming back to coach roles, and as a result, Coppelia, Rubies, Other Dances and Prodigal Son had details I hadn't seen before. 4) The dancing in an otherwise uninspired Chorus Line revival at NYCC. In the end, only Michael Bennett's choreography really holds up. 5) Anne Rose O'Sullivan and Marcellino Sambe in a really wonderful Tarantella and Tchai pas de deux at the Festival of Balanchine. 6) Paul Taylor Dance Company's final season in 2018 before the master's death in September. Some dances like Mercuric Tidings looked better than ever. 7) Sarah Lane's debut as Nikya in La Bayadere: she was fierce and delicate at the same time. Worst: 1) The NYCB photo-sharing scandal that led to three principals being fired and much embarrassment for the company. 2) Xander Parish's Apollo. Holy hell where do I start with all the ways it was terrible. The muses (young Vaganova grads) were good, but Parish's Apollo is something I want to delete from my brain. 3) The Joffrey's 4 Temperaments which had a smiling (!!!) Sanguinic. No, just no. 4) Natalia Osipova and David Hallberg's Giselle, which found both of them diminished both in scope of dance and expressiveness. I wouldn't say it was BAD exactly but it was disappointing compared to their former selves. 5) Ask la Cour's Cavalier in Nutcracker. Just unacceptable. Bad partnering, bad dancing. 6) The overly frenetic tap dancing that infects most musicals nowadays. They become mind-numbing in their repetitiveness. I rewatched Book of Mormon and how selectively it uses tap and it was like a different era. I also saw Casey Nicholaw (same choreographer) in Mean Girls and there was so much tap it lost all impact.