Drew

Estelle I had no idea Denard danced that much with ABT -- thanks for filling in the picture (and apologies to thread for going off topic).

Greskovic and Kent disagree, but they do seem to be describing the same dancer...just responding differently. Neither of them sees Silve as a "Balanchine" stylist, though Kent seems to be enjoying what Silve brings to the repertory anyway. Greskovic is more concerned with a larger argument that really isn't about Silve at all: if people are describing Silve as a Balanchine dancer when (as he sees it) she is so obviously not one, what does that tell us about the current understanding of Balanchine? I do think one difference between enjoying "different" approaches to Balanchine today and when Balanchine was alive is that when Balanchine was alive one did not feel that his legacy was under threat or that his own 'schooling' of dancers was going to be lost as a model, as "canonical" (as John Rockwell might put it) for his ballets. In a different historical context Greskovic, for example, might be more inclined to just enjoy Silve's glamor or "old fashioned" technique....

Everyone has their own perspective. I too enjoyed Gregory--but in my memory, her reputation was very much as a ballerina with a steely technique. She always got raves for the quality of her bravura dancing--though a cigarette smoking "grand pas classique" (literally: she had a cigarette in her mouth for the performance) was criticized as over the top. I didn't see that, but definitely remember her as an extremely accomplished ballerina who was always impressive in these types of roles. So, as I recall, she was never known as a dance actress--not to say she couldn't be a dance actress but that was not the basis for her reputation. Later in her career she did take on some famous dramatic roles including Lizzie Borden in De Mille's Fall River Legend. I saw the latter in Chicago and found it an impressive performance, but I was, in fact, somewhat surprised at the time, as I wouldn't have expected her to be effective in a role like that. She was tallish for a ballerina--and a real physical presence--and she made those qualities part of who Lizzie was. I mention that she was tallish, actually taller than many of the leading ballerinas of her day, and she seemed to have trouble finding the right partner. She discussed this often in interviews, and ABT brought in a number of tall and impressive men to dance with her, including Michel Denard of the Paris Opera for a brief guest stint and for a longer term stay John Meehan. They also paired her with Godunov after his defection. In interviews Gregory expressed great excitement about the latter -- and, in my opinion, the interview was informed by the assumption that just as the Baryshnikov partnership had (seemingly) brought Gelsey Kirkland to the super-stardom and acclaim rarely accorded home grown Americans (like Gregory) so this would do the same for her...However that may have been the journalist's way of shaping the interview. In any case, the irony is that neither Meehan nor Godunov really worked all that well with Gregory as a pairing. I saw her twice with Godunov and they didn't mesh stylistically or temperamentally. Others may have liked them better together than I did, but they did not end up dancing together all that often. (I never saw her with Meehan, but they did not pursue a partnership, so I am assuming it didn't work as well as had been hoped. Ironically I did see Meehan partner Kirkland in a ravishing account of Three Preludes which is a purely lyrical showpiece with a lot of tricky partnering.) Actually, Gregory often ended up dancing with Bujones, though they never quite achieved the "partnership" status accorded to pairings like Sibley/Dowell or, for that matter, Kirkland/Baryshnikov. (I never saw them together, but reviews gave the impression that they were outdoing each in other razzle dazzle in ways that were quite entertaining if not always to the reviewer's taste.) I saw her dance the classics, but don't have too many vivid memories. I do recall that I found her much more impressive in Swan Lake which I saw her do early-ish in her career--when she still had "the wittiest nose in ballet since Tanaquil Leclerq's" (that's Arlene Croce) than in Giselle, which I saw her dance years later and which she danced in a very waif-like manner. Since she was not remotely waif-like, this was not, in my opinion, a good choice for her, although she was skillful enough to make Act I "work"--In the performance I saw, Act II fell decidedly flat, as if the romantic style were entirely foreign to her. The Swan Lake, on the other hand, seemed to really fill the stage--it was one of my first full-length Swan Lakes (and may have been one of Gregory's), but I don't think I'm wrong that she was a better Odette/Odile than Giselle. I think the role suited her innately more "grand" presence better than Giselle. I also saw her in contemporary ballets in which I remember her as alway extremely impressive--sleek and strong. The pas de deux she danced with Denard--Unfinished Symphony--I very vaguely remembering as also having a lyrical/sensual quality, and I also thought that was one pairing that really worked. Unfortunately, he never became a regular at ABT--I don't know that they ever danced together again. Also, these were judgments formed when I was very young...I sort of trust myself but not 100%. I remember that "Unfinished Symphony" more vividly that some other Gregory "showpiece" performances I saw, and I like to believe there is reason for that other than youthful impressionability.

Edited to add: I was writing this when Leigh was writing his comment with which I strongly agree. In general, I agree with many things that have been posted but would put it a little differently -- and perhaps a little more combatively. As Hans says, it may be a personal decision as to whether or not one thinks Petipa is a great choreographer -- you can think whatever you want -- but I don't think it's a personal decision whether or not he is one. In the history of ballet Petipa developed the forms he inherited and created new ones. It is true that we aren't always sure exactly what "is" Petipa in the productions we see but we have a good enough idea to understand that he gave the ballet vocabulary an entirely new, extended formal expressivity. One can dislike it--one can find it boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, just as one can dislike classical ballet and be embarassed by men in tights, but personal taste and aesthetic judgment are two different things. In the art of ballet, Petipa is a major figure. Every major choreographer who used the classical vocabulary after Petipa is different than he or she would otherwise have been because Petipa existed. I include those choreographers who have a very different aesthetic, and I don't think one can be THAT influential in an art form without being in some sense great. (The pas de deux as we know it -- in its most extreme, contorted variants-- is a descendant of nineteenth-century Russian ballet, even with its extra men, Benno etc., doing some of the partnering work, more than it is of the Romantic ballet.) Additionally, the ballets he created or partly created hold up to repeated viewings and allow for different interpretations, inflections, musicality etc. I have always considered it potential evidence of a choreographer's mediocrity if seeing a great ballerina in a one of his/her ballets didn't make much of a difference to how the choreography or the ballerina looked. (For me, the example is Makarova in Cranko -- I enjoyed her performance but in those acrobatic lifts it made little difference that it was Makarova being swung around the hero's head at top speed; I had seen far lesser dancers look equally "rapturous"). In fact, Petipa's variations and larger groupings have formal qualities that I would imagine an art student ca. 2005 might be especially able to see and value...Someone who can appreciate the single stroke across the canvas of a Barnett Newman is at least potentially in an excellent position to appreciate the differences between Petipa variations that may seem to string together the same steps. Similarly, an art student today might value an Ingres portrait even if still seeing it as a product of its time and wanting to do something different "today." Mime is an important element in Petipa's full length ballets. In a good full length production the balance of mime and dance is coded to the music and the overall rhythm of the evening in a way that suggests Petipa knew how to make his conventions work to fill the stage for an evening. They may not be our conventions, but that, in itself, need not prevent one from seeing their place in the art of ballet..(Personally, I admit, I'll take the full length Sleeping Beauty over the full length Bayadere any day, and I do think the Tchaikovsky score makes a difference..) I'll add one more point: I could be wrong. I don't think I am wrong, but yes, of course, I could be. But that is not the same thing as saying, for example, that it's a matter of opinion whether Petipa is a great choreographer. In fact, opinions are precisely what can't be "wrong." We all do know what we "like." More generally, I would say the question of whether Petipa -- or Balanchine -- is a great choreographer is a matter of judgment. Judgments can't be proven in the manner of an equation, say, 2+2=4, but they are not purely personal either. There are criteria that can be brought to bear on the discussion, and that should include some reference to the art form in question -- in this case, classical ballet. What art students and the rest of us have learned, of course, is that these criteria have historical limits, that they are not as fixed as they seem, they often depend on ideological assumptions, community standards etc. I agree with those caveats, but criteria don't just dissolve into the air as a result, though it certainly becomes more difficult to talk about them or to apply them consistently. In any case, if one begins with the assumption that ballet is a serious art form, I don't think it's easy to find the criteria that would dismiss Petipa. Ironically, it would be more consistent to say. not that Petipa wasn't great, but that ballet isn't. Actually, I don't doubt that there are people who think that, though probably not too many of them post on Ballet Talk.

I would ditto everything that has been said in this thread about Rockwell's choice of words--though I'm too disheartened to be as witty in response. In fact, I would not be (too) upset to hear this production described as "relatively conservative"--and I can even understand a critic wanting to reassure the ABT/Met. audience that they will see something that they will "recognize" as Swan Lake--but canonical? Canonical means, among other things, not only that the original structure, narrative, music, and choreography have been preserved (with--perhaps--a few caveats concerning widely accepted accretions or deletions that have been in place for decades). It also means that a production can be taken as a touchstone or basis for other productions' departures from the canon, and it implies that a production is widely accepted as such...Obviously, ABT's Swan Lake does not qualify. I was pleased to see Rockwell covering the Bournonville festival and don't like jumping on the Times critic who has, in many respects, a tough job [sic] and is a sitting duck for fans etc.--but this isn't just a matter of disagreement. (One can disagree, say, on the quality of Mckenzie's choreography for some of the Act I dances that typically have to be re-done by whoever is staging the ballet. I think it's poor; someone else may think it does the job just fine--agree to disagree, blah, blah.) "Canonical" is just a bad misnomer for this production and even "earnestly" conservative" implies a production far more respectful of the tradition than this one...

I love Bussell's dancing, but although I agree (based on what I have seen) that she does not have much range as an actress--I don't think "pyrotechnics" is the right word for what it is she does so wonderfully on stage. She has an unusual sweetness and naturalness when she dances and her movements have a rich, "creamy" texture--she dances expansively, with high extensions and a flexible back, but also smoothly and lyrically. Wheeldon created a pas de deux for her that was entirely about her beauty and lyricism. I also find her, to use Sylvia's expression, a very "open" dancer. I first saw her when she was quite young (twenty one or so) in Winter Dreams and in an enjoyable but still unfledged performance of Swan Lake--I was intrigued but not quite won over. Later, when I saw the telecast of the performance Carbro mentions, I was more than intrigued and some guest appearances with NYCB won me over entirely. But I still think of Bussell very much as a Royal Ballet ballerina. I loved her Aurora, and thought she managed to grow from girlishly lovely to womanly lovely across the evening while remaining very much her own enchanting self. I also saw her with the Royal in a slightly less successful performance as Nikiya--she was soulful, lyrical and erotic in Act I--really fabulous--and even more dreamily so in Act III, but in the real Petipa challenge of Act II never seemed quite comfortably 'inside' the choreography. I also thought she was simply dazzling in Macmillan's Prince of the Pagodas, and she did seem to bring out a neo-classical strain in Macmillan that was if not precisely Balanchinesque, at any rate operating in an analogous strain--especially in the final pas de deux. As mentioned above, I did hugely admire her appearances with New York City Ballet in Balanchine: Agon and the second movement in Symphony in C. I would give the Agon special praise for it's "open" or innocent quality...The audience at that performance was deeply appreciative--people could not stop talking about her at intermission--but, as I remember the written reviews of her appearances with NYCB that season, not all fans of the company were won over. (She was noticeably slower than the other ballerinas in Symphony in C during the finale...She looked beautiful but by no means like an NYCB ballerina.) I think I also saw her as a very fetching Titania in Balanchine's Midsummer Night's Dream, but my memory is less certain of that performance. I was also lucky enough to see her in two Ashton roles--Cinderella and A Month in the Country. Ashton's Cinderella is in so many ways a modern refraction of Sleeping Beauty that it's no wonder that having loved her in the one ballet I would love her in the other. But I would add that although Bussell may not be an "actress" she was wonderfully touching and convincing as a fairy tale heroine. I especially remember the great tenderness or her final kind and smiling goodbye to the more pathetic of the ugly stepsisters (the one performed originally by Ashton). Just last week I saw her in A Month in the Country and like Sylvia was very impressed by her Ashton dancing; the epaulement--the whole play of head, arms, shoulders in relation to the rest of her body--and the quick delicate shifts of movement were all articulate and expressive. (The moment she began the first variation--I thought, wow! she can really show, as if effortlessly, how Ashton is supposed to look.) I do think she is fundamentally miscast in this ballet--too "young," too "sweet,' even too "pretty" for Natalia: so, for example, when Natalia slaps her step-daughter I couldn't help thinking that Bussell looks as if she never said a cross word to anyone in her life let alone slapped someone! In general, I found all of the pantomime parts of the ballet rather unconvincing--the frustration with her husband, the nervous laughter when she is accused etc. But the performance was still moving, because the dancing was not only lovely and fluent, but expressive (expressive through the movement), and Bussell's temperament--while not exactly right for the ballet--is very winning in its own way. So, in spite of recognizing that she is, perhaps, not actress enough to bring out all facets of the role I found myself quite touched by the performance. Anyway, I don't expect everyone to respond to her quite as I do--she is one of my absolute favorite ballerinas--but I do think she has a lot to offer and specifically a lot to offer in the Royal Ballet repertory...

Very happy to read about Hojlund dancing Teresina in Natalia's (and Eva Klistrup's) writings about the festival. I only saw a bit of Hojlund when soloists from the RDB appeared in Atlanta, but my reaction to her in Bournonville was very similar to Natalia's--and I also enjoyed her dancing in a contemporary work. I would love to see her again in a big Bournonville role like Teresina!

Dirac -- in making the late James/early James contrast I was thinking mostly of his syntax and how much more elaborated (hypotactic) it gets in the later prose. I have been trying dutifully to come up with ballet examples or analogies but I actually don't feel too comfortable with any -- partly lack of familiarity with some of the choreographers that have been named, but partly a vague sense that even for the choreographers with whom I am familiar the analogies only seem to work in a relatively vague way...not all exageration or high self-consciousness seems to me to "fit" the mannerist niche. At a certain point, too, mannerism may top itself and become something else (or else fall flat): Something like Balanchine's Variations for a Door and a Sigh, in which the ballerina seems like an almost comically exagerated version of a Balanchine amazon goddess perhaps is a kind of mannerist reflection on one his own ballerina "types"--wasn't it created on Von Aroldingen, a dancer he loved, but who was not by any means a "pretty" dancer? But with Balanchine one always feels he is breaking through to give you his own counter modernism rather than a mannerist commentary "on" an earlier style, even when he is commenting on or 'countering' himself...(I would say the same thing about his collaboration with Farrell who, in many ways, looks like someone Parmigianino would have loved to paint...)

For mannerism I would be inclined to put the emphasis on what the national gallery website calls "self-conscious artifice" -- and to note that the great mannerist painters were often deliberately unnatural and often awkward and unpretty as well. Their madonnas might have impossibly long narrow features, their baby Jesuses ultra hardened musculature or bizarre facial expressions, and their colors were often deliberately sour and clashing. It's as if they were screaming "we are not Raphael." (Well, that's one amateur's account of it anyway--and I quite love the handful of mannerist paintings I have seen.) A lot of abstract ballet--particularly of the classical/neo-classical variety--doesn't seem at all mannerist to me, while I can easily see how a story ballet might be mannerist... I think that colloquially the term mannerism sometimes gets applied when some "signature" quality of an artist (choreographer or otherwise) starts to seem like a "tick"... even if a deliberate one. However, in such cases, critics often use the word "mannered" rather than the historical term mannerist (as Amy did in her question): both words may get used as if they were a variant of decadent. For those who have read Henry James, I suppose the contrast between late and early James might give one an idea of one way of thinking about the contrast between mannerism and realism. (That's a slightly tendentious statement, though not as tendentious as equating Eifman and Forsythe.)

Way off topic, but ... I had the worst egotistical cab driver experience of my life in Amsterdam (and this after years of indulging in cabs in New York). It was so unpleasant that it took me quite a while to shake it off and enjoy the city -- where the majority of people I met were, in fact, very pleasant. Slightly less off topic -- Herman: did you ever suspect that corps members were reluctant to go on the record in interviews because they felt more vulnerable to career repercussions than higher ranked dancers? Even if they were not going to say something negative perhaps praising ballet master A might offend ballet master B etc.?

I just came across this thread today and at the risk of wandering off topic had to add that I first thought Alexandra mentioned The Faerie Queen because it is episodic and even dilatory in the way a lot of narrative television is -- new "Books" of the poem introduce new characters and new plotlines in a way that superficially, at least, hardly seems tightly unified in the way Madame Bovary does and most certainly leads to delayed gratification. After reading further into the thread I found she was making an entirely different point! I also find that a lot of narrative television, even at its most "realist," is highly allegorical--as is The Fairie Queen. That is, characters are quite schematic, and in my opinion are often most effective that way, and whatever a show seems to be about on the surface, it often turns out to be about something else. An easy example would be the way most soap operas turn out to be about incest. However, this is a far cry from finding the thesis as outlined in the article very compelling. Pop culture is doing something to us, but to find out what exactly probably calls for a more controlled point of departure than a vaguely asserted correlation with rising IQs . I assume some psychologists are out there at this very minute trying to come up with controlled experiments to answer (or ask) the same and similar questions more precisely. (Not that I exactly intend to endorse the authority of that method either...) I also very much agree with what GWTW says about the oddness of equating reading solely with "explicit learning" -- and also find strangely little said (or even speculated) about the physiological effects of technologies which seem to me must be a big part of the picture of what happens (good or bad) when one engages with television/internet/video games etc. )

In discussing dancers as partners I am primarily referring to the image they create on stage. I mentioned Dowell as a "partner" king because he had several great partnerships -- that is, pairings in which the sum of the two dancers together was greater than the individual parts (however wonderful) and the artistic result authentically and uniquely impressive in a variety of roles. Dowell achieved this with at least two and, in my opinion, three different major ballerinas: Sibley, Makarova, and Kirkland. (I assume some would argue he didn't dance often enough with Kirkland to have achieved a real partnership.) Sibley/Dowell and Makarova/Dowell are pretty generally acknowledged "partnerships" -- that doesn't mean there may not be dissenters out there, but it's not a quirky judgment on my part. I saw Dowell with Sibley in Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, Manon, and a late Ashton work created for them when she came out of her somewhat early retirement. At times they seemed like a multifaceted single being -- "one" unity divided into two sexes. At others their dramatic interaction was deeply moving. Did she enjoy dancing more with Somes? Perhaps so -- I admit I would be surprised to read that she thought she and Somes achieved more artistically as a "partnership" than she and Dowell did. Especially since she and Dowell, as a partnership, created a number of major works by both Ashton and Macmillan. I also found Dowell stunning in a different way with Makarova -- I remember their performances together as more erotically charged and, perhaps, to that degree more charismatic than his performances with Sibley. (He was also older and had become a more extroverted presence on stage.) I have no idea what Makarova says about him, though at least when she began dancing with him she gave an interview expressing great enthusiasm about the partnership. Kirkland who gave performances of great warmth and aplomb with Dowell -- I saw them repeatedly in Baryshnikov's Nutrcracker -- always, as far as I know, spoke and wrote glowingly about him. But without question I am prioritizing what I saw on stage, and while I don't think that has no connection with what the dancers themselves experience I don't doubt the connection is highly mediated. (Fracci supposedly disliked dancing with Nagy...whom everyone raves about as a partner.) In general, an occasional glaring partnering error doesn't necessarily cause me to think a dancer is a bad partner, thought the Sibley/Dowell story Gina mentions did suprise me -- but when I see a dancer who always makes errors or never matches well with anyone, then I think "bad" partner.

In both categories ("partner" king and "plain" king): Anthony Dowell. And, if it weren't for the fact that the vulgarity of the idea makes it self defeating -- I would offer up a classica/neo-classical "purity" kings evening made up of Bruhn, Dowell, Martins, and Boal -- though I might be willing to trade Martins for Tommason or both of them for the classical-with-an-elastic-edge Malakhov. (The other three are non-negotiable.)

Sorry to follow my own post -- I posted at the same time as Leigh and wanted to respond to his comment. The reason I reported the complaint about Acosta was because it specifically cited his "face" not his dancing as the problem. A broader criticism of dancers not fiting in the English style is, as you say, a different matter.

Herman Stevens mentioned the role personal preference plays in people's choices -- I would just supplement that observation by noting that preferences develop in particular contexts. Someone who finds they have to fight twice as hard to get half the recognition in any field -- say, the natural sciences -- may well "prefer" to opt out of it. Someone who doesn't get exposed to this or that art form (or sports activity) may well never develop a preference for it. The Ballet community alone can't begin carry the burden for the general neglect of the arts in American society at large, anymore than it call solve the problem of racism, but it might be able to do a little to make itself more inclusive without in any way giving up the classical ideal. And, the point, of course, is not to find people to "blame" but to ask, as Leigh did, if there aren't positive things that might be done to bring more talented dancers to the classical ballet scene...and, at the very least, to make sure that those who DO prefer it are not being unnecessarily discouraged.

I find Sylphide's remarks very much to the point. Obviously many factors are involved in the 'whiteness' of classical ballet, and ballet companies and schools are not going to be able, on their own, to have much of an impact on larger historical, cultural and economic patterns. But there isn't a doubt in my mind that dancers of color who do succeed in entering the classical ballet world do so in the face of enormous prejudice conscious and unconscious, personal and systemic. Since this is a difficult (painful) subject for most people, myself included, to address head on...I'll go further and admit that as a teenager I used to wonder "but can one really picture a black dancer as [insert name of this or that classical role]?" -- Stupid (or worse) as it sounds, I didn't really register the Dance Theater of Harlem as a counter example because I had only seen them dance Balanchine and other contemporary choreography and perhaps, unconsciously, because I knew it wasn't an integrated company. Fortunately, exposure to Christopher Boatright dancing Romeo with the Stuttgart Ballet and later to the thoroughly integrated National Ballet of Cuba dancing all the Classics (Swan Lake, Giselle, Coppelia) gave me an entirely different view of the matter--and I came to realize that what I had thought was a matter of "artistic" taste was really based in assumptions, habits, and prejudices that I had never looked at adequately. Of course, I speak only for myself -- but I think it wouldn't be a bad thing if the ballet world could broach these issues with a little less defensiveness. One more example (it involves indirect reporting, but I hope moderators will let it stand): someone recently reported to me a dance commentator saying in private conversation that they didn't like Carlos Acosta in "prince" roles because he didn't have the right "face" for it...so I responded (sincerely) that I think Malakhov doesn't have a princely face--Malakhov has a kind of elfin, boyish face, with a not terribly 'noble' even slightly upturned nose. That is, Malakhov, too, is hardly Erik Bruhn. But of course what makes Malakhov very "princely" on stage has nothing to do with his face, but with his lines, his feet, his carriage--for that matter, with how he holds his head. In fact, Malakhov is one of my favorite princes! And it doesn't occur to anyone to comment on Malakhov having the wrong face or even consider his face a serious issue to raise. Well, I would say that likewise, whether Acosta is a great Prince or not has nothing to do with his face -- which many may find quite Princely -- but with how he inhabits the prince roles as a dancer, how he, as an artist MAKES you see him. I myself have only seen him dance Conrad in Corsaire and Basil in Quixote -- but based on those performances I certainly would like to see him as Siegfried or the Prince in Beauty. One of Sylphide's points is that many dancers, at levels less exalted than Acosta's and especially young women, will be discouraged before they can ever even arrive at modest career success, and -- to put this in terms of my own examples -- this is precisely because too many teachers and artistic directors can't imagine even the most talented of them as having the right "face," or looking like the "princess," and not, in my judgment, for any good reason. I should add that although my examples are personal (and include myself) I do agree with Leigh that it is, on the whole, more useful to broach this issue as a systemic problem rather than as a series of personal ones. I don't have answers to Leigh's final questions beyond the old chestnuts -- arts education in public schools etc. I suppose top ballet schools might set up special programs to do a little "extra" talent searching and recruitment among underrepresented groups. (Perhaps a board member of a top company with a school could be recruited to take a special interest in funding this...)

The dancer I always wondered about--in terms of a career that did not seem to be favored by the company's leadership--was Veronika Ivanova. I've posted about her before (and received helpful responses about her later career from Natalia), but one brief appearance made such an impression on me I can't help posting again. The appearance was in an excerpt from Giselle that was part of an otherwise less than top drawer "highlights" evening in Chicago in the early nineties. She and Lunev held the largely NOT "dance educated" audience under a spell while exemplifying the kind of purity for which "Kirov" had, at that time, long been a synonym. They were not playing to the crowd! I don't remember if she was/is tall or short, but I guess she can't have been too tall if she was dancing with Lunev and certainly she was not a "glamor" type of any kind. Years later, I saw the Kirov in a Swan Lake at the Met, and was delighted by her dancing in the pas de trois, but a little melancholy that she was not dancing any 'big' roles in New York that time. I definitely thought she was more than soloist material...though I didn't see enough of her to speculate on what her repertory 'might have been' on tours that, admitedly, had rather limited repertory.

Ari -- thanks from me as well...

Ari -- you may know more about this than I -- did the Kirov reconstruction look to you like the Royal's old version (i.e. pre Ashton/Macmillan/Dowell)? I do think the Kirov reconstruction at least claimed to seek a level of literal archeological faithfulness that the traditional Royal production never, to my knowledge, did. The Lilac Fairy solo is an obvious difference and the Royal also had, over the years, various little additions by Ashton, including an awakening pas de deux (that I assume this production will not include) that signaled that the Royal thought of Beaty as "theirs." I rather assume, and even hope, that that is the approach they are taking -- "their" Beauty. Even the choice of Wheeldon for a new garland dance fits this picture. What I would really love to see would be a return to a more "Ceccheti" style of dancing -- which the Kirov version does not remotely aspire to...but that may be a farfetched idea on my part. (The only Royal production I saw before Dowell's was the one Ashton did in 1970. And I don't have the kind of memory that would have enabled me to make a serious comparison between that production and the Kirov's new-old version which I saw when they first performed it at the Met in New York. I am not without bias, since without question the Sleeping Beaty performances I have seen that most answer to my "inward" eye's image of the ballet were performances of the Konstantin Sergeyev (i.e. Soviet) version danced by the Kirov during a tour of the U.S. in, I guess, the eighties. But at the risk of exposing myself as a Sleeping Beauty dilettante I suspect that had more to do with the purity and quality of the classical dancing than the details of the production--about which I don't have expert knowledge or recall.)

I interpreted "Sergeyev/Messel" to mean that they (the powers that be at the Royal) really want to go back to their own, Royal Ballet, roots and, for that reason, I would suppose that they will not be looking to the Kirov's 'historical' beauty. Perhaps it is an unavoidable reference point, but I wouldn't be surprized if there were a lot of people who would prefer that it not be. For so many years, the Royal thought of Sleeping Beauty as a signature work -- a foreign body that had become, as it were, naturalized. I assume Mason's goal is to recapture that naturalized classical heritage. I think this in particular because, although the very ambivalent reviews of Makarova's production suggest much that didn't work, they did not suggest a wholesale disaster or anything that might not have been improved with some reworking -- and the Sleeping Beauty is not cheap to produce. So why go back to Sergeyev/Messel if the aim (realistic or not) is not to return to their own models and keep references to alternative variations out of the picture? (If that isn't the aim, then why not tinker with Makarova's for a season or two more before giving up on it completely?)

I like the idea of no "untoward" comments, especially since one can hardly review a performance that has not occured. But I do not think discussing casting per se -- even making skeptical remarks about casting -- is always untoward. This is a board with many fans of Veronika Part that has nonetheless had civil discussions about whether or not she is appropriately cast in Piano Concerto no. 2. That is a performance that has yet to occur. To return to Apollo, Yvonne Borree is an at times quite lovely dancer (in my opinion) whose casting has long baffled many of us ... This is also a board in which issues of "emploi" have long been a theme--which is to say issues that necessarily blend into discussions about appropriate and inappropriate casting. (I assume the board administrator's will decide what the "rules" should be...and when something is untoward...)

Hmm...Cohen did stay on her feet at this year's world's. She did not skate perfectly, and I doubt the judges would have given her a gold over Slutskaya's free skate for anything less--which is fair enough.

I wanted to chime in just to express my hope that she can fully recover. When I saw her--I remember her as Dewdrop and in Divertimento No. 15 in particular-- I thought, she was thrilling, a genuine ballerina in the making. However, I am a big believer, too, in people taking all the time they need to fully recover from an injury...Gordeyev spoke about this in an interview some years ago, explaining how he had come back from a serious injury. He was convinced that people didn't return successfully after serious injuries because they didn't allow themselves enough time to recover fully, and had been determined not to make that mistake. Unfortunately I also believe that luck plays a big part in these matters--certainly, I wish the best luck in the world to Jenny Somogyi.

I haven't had much luck with the interactive seat chart. When I click, nothing happens. I will have access to a different computer later today, and try it then.

Thanks again for all these replies -- I am printing out the entire thread. (I feel sheepish about the fact that I did attend a couple of performances at the opera house during my last visit to the U.K. three years ago. But somehow I did not manage to get a very good feel for what the layout was or what the seats were like--other than the very peculiar ones I was sitting in. The one fan I spoke to at that time loved sitting in the front row of the orchestra and claimed no problem seeing feet at all--but that just seemed very unlikely...)