canbelto

Oh I also advise you to get the "Balanchine in Paris" dvd filmed in 2016. Has La Valse, Sonatine, Walpurgisnacht and Symphony in C. Shot in excellent HD.

Well I have a "make your own subscription" series. I picked de Luz's farewell as a date. I generally am given the same seat for all my performances but sometimes my seat changes.

No I;m in the same section, just in a partial view seat. They said that that date has so many subscribers that they've had to switch around the seating. Plus many of the seats will be reserved I assume for NYCB dancers, alumni, donors, Joaquin's friends and family, and so on.

The de Luz farewell is being processed. My subscription includes his farewell and I just got a call from a NYCB rep explaining to me the limited seating choices and asking me to choose a section other than my normal subscription section.

Well the thing to remember is Petipa had a very long career (like George Balanchine) and created many different pieces for different dancers and occasions. 100 years from now if a company does, say, Balanchine's Nutcracker or MSND and then does Four Temperaments and rounds it out with Jewels we might say he had "multiple personality disorder" as he himself so self-identified as a minimalist/abstract choreographer. Has there been a lot of Soviet re-choreographing? Yes. But I think that it really boils down to him trying to pigeonhole a choreographer who can't really be pigeonholed.

This is Macaulay's own prejudice against anything that smacks of "Soviet" re-choreographing. He has several such hangups -- another is a new ballet work that doesn't contain any male-male partnering. He also dislikes any MacMillan that goes for a more stylized, romantic approach rather than the aggressively realistic portrayals.

Well but the first two performances with NYCB have by far the best programs. I'm dying to see MCB do Serenade, SFB do Divertimento, Mariinsky do Apollo, etc. So that's what I got.

Nutcracker - either the 1993 or 2011 Balanchine version are great. La Sylphide - Royal Danish Ballet, with Nikolaj Hubbe and Lis Jeppesen Le Corsaire - there's a great version from the Kirov/Mariinsky from the 1990's

Color me shocked. I always thought what made Petipa ballets great was the choreography, not the costumes or scenery. ETA: I find the parade of costumes in those aforementioned Petipa ballets to be the weakest parts of the ballets. The best part of La Bayadere, for instance, is The Kingdom of the Shades when the costumes are just simple white tutus.

Here are some pictures from the original 1924 ballet. The Ratmansky production with the Ryden costumes are very much following the fanciful surreal costumes of that production rather than the opulent grandeur of Imperial Ballet:

It was a joke. But seriously, I'm not sure the spare-no-expense approach to any "Grand Imperial" ballet is the only approach. Do we really want ballerinas like Mathilde K. sewing diamonds into her tutus? It's perfectly okay I think to respect the choreography of the Petipa classics but go for a more modern aesthetic. For instance I thought Ratmansky's Harlequinade AND Balanchine's Harlequinade were homages to a Imperial Ballet work but the costumes and scenery did not overpower the choreography and dancing.

Imperial Russia definitely could not afford the desserts Boy indulges himself with:

I saw this last year and really didn't like it. I wnet back this afternoon and while I appreciated certain things more (for instance the pas de deux between Boy and Princess Praline) and the ending as well as the whipped creams rolling down the ramp (a great parody of the Kingdom of the Shades) the things that bothered me the first time still bother me: 1) The Coffee and Tea duet. Goes on for way too long, and made me fall asleep. A duet between two caffeinated drinks put me to sleep ... 2) The music. It just isn't a very danceable score. It's a lot of waltz but so even keeled. If R. Strauss ever wrote muzak this would be it. Hard to believe this same composer wrote Salome or Elektra. 3) The total lack of a storyline. Even less so than Nutcracker. The dancing was great though. Stella Abrera in particular was delightful as Tea. Simkin - hope he comes back often from Berlin. And his partnership with Lane was wonderful. You could tell how much fun they were having together onstage. This ballet is marketed very heavily towards kids but truthfully unlike the Nutcracker I don't think it has enough substance to keep kids interested. The two girls next to me were fast asleep for most of the ballet.

Sarah Lane posted this instagram which makes it sound like Daniil Simkin is leaving permanently as well:

I agree with Macaulay although I don't think the reason Hallberg is less effective of a dancer is because of his mannerisms. He always had those mannerisms. I remember him before he was made principal and he swept onstage like a natural born prince. I think it's the fact that his dancing is on such a small scale after those horrific injuries that the mannerisms no longer match the dancing. This is what I wrote on my blog after seeing him dance Albrecht this year:

Kaysta I think this is Exhibit A of a Kitri being musical. Maya Plisetskaya of course was famous for her huge leaps, her fierce stage presence, her speed. But in this clip you can see how she uses all these skills not as circus tricks but to emphasize certain facets of the choreography. For instance the way she almost stabs the ground with her feet looks a lot like folk dance. The famous "Plisetskaya jump" is done on the up-note of the music and emphasizes the fact that Kitri is a free spirit. It's this mix of the way she goes so fiercely into the ground (like a folk dancer) and then so high up in the air (like a ballerina) that makes the ballet truly seem like a mix of Petipa and Gorsky. I have seen this ballet many times and always thought the score was charming, but Plisetskaya makes me "see the music" differently -- not as pleasant danseuse music, but as a fascimile of Spanish folk music.

@nanushkaI think "fully embodying the choreography" is more what I mean. Obviously each dancer has individual mannerisms and that is why we love them. For instance I loved that the three Kitris I saw this year at ABT (Boylston, Shevchenko and Lane) all had their own way of making Kitri special. However I used "disappearing into the choreography" because I think that for choreography as complex as a lot of Balanchine or Petipa or Bournonville at some point there has to be a feeling that you are simply watching, say, Swan Lake, or Diamonds and not one dancer's star turn. For instance in the Kingdom of the Shades act one thing the ABT corps could NOT do was disappear into the trance-like magic spell of one shade after another coming down the ramp. You saw all too clearly the wobbles and tremors of each shade. Whereas when you watch, say, the Mariinsky do the Shades scene it is one shade after another, all the same, like a vision. And when I saw, say, Viktoria Tereshkina lift her arm high in the exact same way the shades lifted their arm you got the fabric of Petipa's ballet blanc. The dancers (from Tereshkina the prima to the 32 shades) became the dance. That's what I mean by disappearing into the choreography.

The S&S pas has a lot of YT videos. The Ashley Bouder version is delightful: Aurelie Dupont and Manuel Legris: And of course this is classic:

"Disappearing into the choreography" is maybe a Platonic ideal but this does not mean that I'll only accept that video of Suzanne Farrell and Ib Andersen in Mozartiana or even NYCB and other Balanchine-trained companies dancing Balanchine. I'll also add that "disappearing into the choreography" is not just Balanchine. For instance in this year's Harlequinade I found that Ratmansky was able to coach the ABT dancers to disappear into the choreography. There was very little audience-facing mugging. The results were absolutely beautiful. I also saw the Bolshoi do Spartacus a few years ago and despite the campiness of much of the ballet I had the time of my life. And the reason was the way the Bolshoi dancers threw themselves into every goose step, every thundering diagonal, every athletic lift, the whole company disappeared into the choreography and there was nothing the audience could do except get swept along into the world of Soviet supermen. With the right amount of coaching, training, and rehearsal many non-Balanchine-based companies can get close enough to this ideal. A good example would be when I saw the Bolshoi dance Diamonds. Did they dance it the way NYCB dances it? Absolutely not. However, their 32 diamonds and the main couple of Olga Smirnova and Semyon Chudin did indeed disappear into the choreography, so that I was not really conscious at that moment that I was watching Smirnova and Chudin and the Bolshoi. I was just watching "Diamonds." Here's a performance of Tarantella. Ratmansky does NOT have Balanchine in his bones. But he does have the spirit, the seriousness of purpose, so that he too disappears into the choreography.

I've seen the ballet with five different ballerinas. My memories: Yvonne Borree - just got the poet through the doorway Wendy - carried the poet offstage or at least out of view Sterling Hyltin - carried the poet offstage or out of view Tiler Peck - carried the poet offstage or out of view Claire Kretzschmar - carried the poet offstage or out of view As for ABT dancing Balanchine here are the things they repeatedly miss: 1) The speedy footwork. To use an example Preghiera is 5 minutes of the ballet. Theme and Variations and the coda is about half the ballet. If ABT stars are being called to the carpet for not being able to do 32 fouettes (30 seconds of the ballet) is it acceptable that they can't keep up with the speedy footwork of half a ballet? To me that's not acceptable. Blaine Hoven did study with Melissa Hayden but he's been with ABT since 2003. Balanchine is not something that can be learned overnight. 2) The constant changes in center of gravity. This can be seen in the Boylston clip of Stars and Stripes. The constant changes between working leg/supporting leg in those pirouettes are something she clearly is not used to. 3) Disappearing into the choreography. This is a huge Balanchine ethos. Not that you can't project, but that at certain points you're supposed to simply disappear into the choreography. I saw a Symphony in C where in the sublime second movement Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes were ... Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes. When done right you're not really even supposed to be able to see who is dancing during that moment.

Another example: By 2014 Paloma Herrera had completely lost the ability to do Tchai pas de deux as she plods her way through this 10 minute gala piece: Compare to this: But it doesn't even have to be NYCB. I think for example that this version is way more "true" to the choreography even if it's not Balanchine style either:

It wasn't always this bad. This is a decent performance by Paloma Herrera of Stars and Stripes: This is horrible and I say this as a fan of Boylston and Simkin: This is what the ballet should look like:

I don't think it's hyperbole. They are objectively terrible in neoclassical ballet. This isn't a knock against the dancers. I just think they looked like a fish out of water, as much as, say, NYCB would look if they ever danced Kenneth MacMillan's Manon or Makarova's La Bayadere or Cranko's Onegin. I mean think about it this way. I love Stella Abrera. I think Stella's an absolutely beautiful dancer. But could you ever in a million years imagine Stella dancing Agon?

I love Kirkland's T&V performance. And I should add that I did see ABT do a decent T&V with Michele Wiles and David Hallberg (???) maybe 15 years ago. I'm talking their recent Balanchine performances which really IMO were a disgrace. I loved Veronika Part and enjoyed Mozartiana because it was her farewell but objectively speaking she and Blaine Hoven got almost none of the quick footwork and wit of the work. Yes her Preghiera was lovely but in the Theme and Variations portion neither of them could keep up with Balanchine's steps.

I've never seen ABT dance Sonnambula. I saw them dance Prodigal a few years ago and it was quite frankly awful. ABT doesn't have the on-the-note musicality that Balanchine demands, and unlike other companies I've seen dance Balanchine (for instance, the Bolshoi dance Diamonds, etc) they couldn't adapt their company style and mix it with the Balanchine style. A Symphony in C a few years ago was a disgrace.