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I saw this on Friday, and Broken Wings is simply astounding. Costumes, makeup, music, set design, lighting, it was such a sensory feast. I'm also a sucker for choreography where the dancers continue to perform as the curtain drops. Between this and the MADCAP encore, it's been an incredible couple weeks of ballet for me. (One thing that gave me pause was Diego's wedding scene, when the skeletons were shouting out random Spanish phrases. It was funny at first but the longer it drew out the less comfortable it became.) Agreed as well on Carmen being a bit of an afterthought, though this is the jazziest I've ever seen SFB get, and I did appreciate that Jen Stahl's solo was, for lack of a better word, so butch.

Sorry for the double-post but I wanted to make sure that it doesn't get lost:

Hi folks, I'm visiting NYC in May and have two Second Ring seats to the 5/23 (Tuesday) Robbins/Balanchine III performance. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts have precluded being able to attend -- if anyone is interested in buying the tickets please DM me! Thanks so much.

I unfortunately had issues with the digital season, especially with how it was implemented, so I barely watched anything during the pandemic. Anyway, a question I kept wondering about: does anyone know if MADCAP's spoken dialogue was prerecorded, or if Jen was saying the lines live? I assume the former.

Agreed on all counts! Even with performances I'm enjoying, sometimes I have to corral my attention back to the dancing, but not so with MADCAP. Riveting from curtain to curtain, and in between spellbinding and ingenious, joyous and demented. I don't think I ever saw For Pixie, but from now on I'll be keeping an eye out for Dani Rowe's name. Tonight was absolutely thrilling! A salve for my soul.

I'm waiting for the train right now as I'm on my way to program A, although I did attend the premiere of Cc last week. At first I wondered if I had been so starved of beautiful dance that I was happy to witness ANY ballet, but then Violin Concerto left me largely unmoved. So with that in mind, I feel more confident in saying that Kin was lovely, and Blanc's piece was spectacular (it certainly didn't hurt that I loved the music too).

"Die Toteninsel" was easily my favorite from this past season.

Any recommendations of contemporary fare for 2020? The name of Program 3 sounds apt, as do 5 and 6. However, I just saw Etudes this past season, I didn't find "Snowblind" interesting in the least, and am generally not a fan of Ratmansky.

Certainly not short, and maybe old news, but if you have SF Public Library card, you can watch full-length performances of The Little Mermaid and The Nutcracker through the SFPL website.

I wonder what it's like to have your own personal peanut gallery.

If you don't mind a duffer's opinion, my erstwhile general culture blog on dance and ballet. I also achieved some internet renown for my SYTYCD blogging, but that was another lifetime.

And apropos of the discussion some pages back about the social ramifications of the pointe shoe, I fondly recall a conference where one presenter described ballet dancers as cyborgs, since they use technology to enhance and augment their biological abilities. So, the transhumanist (if not specifically feminist) reading of ballet does exist.

Thanks all for the responses and recommendations! I've finished Apollo's Angels, and SFB does rate a mention... in the author's biography. SIGH.

I've just finished the book and generally enjoyed it -- I'm qualifying "generally" because of the epilogue, of course. I'm a neophyte compared to the other contributors on the board, and so as a historiographic survey AA is a useful starting point(e) (first position?), if you'll permit me the puns. Homans' preferences for ballet as restrained, graceful, and elevated -- in short, an endeavor of elitism -- shows through enough of her prose throughout the book and early on enough that I knew that her tastes and mine diverge. This difference in taste largely isn't an issue (I was disheartened to read that Robbins dismissed Philip Glass's music, as I count "Glass Pieces" as my favorite dance of his) and I thus knew well enough to view her assertions not as gospel truth but as the stories she as a neoclassicist wants to tell -- that is, until that epilogue. There, her aesthetic judgments take on an aggressively ethical dimension that casts a pall on the rest of the book. The tone of the epilogue actually soured my mood when I reached it, partly because for me the most vital and appealing aspects of ballet are the ones she takes as signs of its decline as an art form of today. I adore contemporary ballet for its obvious athleticism (which I might argue for beyond a mere democratization / vulgarization of taste, and connect it more to minimalism in music) and its lack of emotional affect (here I think I should familiarize myself with Tudor), the combination of which delivers a pure dance experience unencumbered by narrative, bathos, etc. (I also have an immediate skepticism for people who announce that an art form is dead or dying and pine for some inaccessible, halcyon past, which to me invariably comes from a reactionary reading of history, but this is a prejudice of mine, and I also can't argue that we're clearly living in a day and age where ballet is a niche and not mainstream form.) All this, and her unnecessary and unfair dismissal of Hodson's reconstructed Rite -- a "travesty"? Really? I also wouldn't describe her prose as beautiful, since Homans largely writes in the transparent register of a historian; any passages of rhapsodizing are too fleeting (or, if I'm being honest, simply not to my tastes) to have made an impression on me as good writing. (There were a few places, however, where the editing failed her; I believe during the Soviet chapters where her diction gets mired down in the plodding lumpenstyle that wouldn't be out of place in a dram-balet.)

Thanks! My search skills seem to have eluded me.