Alexandra

Hi, David -- welcome to Ballet Alert! I asked a colleague who's quite knowledgeable about German ballet history, and he'd never heard of it, but said he will ask people he knows in the German ballet world and get back to us. It may well take a few days. Thanks for the question.

This press release just in: NEW YORK CITY BALLET TO NAME HUGO FIORATO CONDUCTOR EMERITUS Original Member of NYCB’s Artistic Staff Will Be Honored on Tuesday, May 18 Hugo Fiorato, the only current member of New York City Ballet’s artistic staff who has been with the Company since its founding, will be named Conductor Emeritus at a special tribute evening planned for Tuesday, May 18, 2004. Mr. Fiorato, who was concertmaster with NYCB when it was established in 1948, has been the Company’s Principal Conductor since 1989. Although he is retiring from this position, he will continue his association with the Company for future seasons, under his new title. On May 18, the Company will perform a tribute to the music of Italy with an all-Balanchine program of Ballo della Regina, Square Dance, and La Sonnambula. Mr. Fiorato will conduct during the evening, and will be honored by the Company in a special onstage ceremony. As of that performance, he will be named Conductor Emeritus, a title that he will be the first to hold. “Hugo Fiorato is one of City Ballet’s great treasures,” says Peter Martins, Ballet Master in Chief. “His respect for a score and his sensitivity to the dancers combine to make him an ideal leader of our orchestra. He is cherished by dancers and musicians alike, and it is a real pleasure to be able to honor Hugo in this way.” Mr. Fiorato has conducted the NYCB Orchestra at the New York State Theater, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and on tour. On international tours, he has conducted various orchestras for NYCB’s performances, including the Japan Philharmonic and Lamoureux Symphonie Orchèstre de Paris. Mr. Fiorato has also guest conducted the New York Philharmonic and the Boston, Cleveland, Miami, Houston, and Washington Symphonies, among others. He was conductor and Music Director of the Boston Ballet for eight years, and of the Long Island Symphony for three years. In addition, he has conducted command performances at the White House for Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. Mr. Fiorato, a native New Yorker, began studying violin at a young age and made his concert debut at the age of six at Carnegie Hall. He joined the National Orchestral Association, led by Leon Barzin, in the 1940s, and eventually became concertmaster. Barzin enlisted Mr. Fiorato’s aid when asked by Balanchine to assemble an orchestra for performances of Ballet Society. When Ballet Society became New York City Ballet, in October 1948, Mr. Fiorato was concertmaster, and he soon began conducting performances. He was named Principal Conductor in 1989. During the 1940s and ’50s, Mr. Fiorato also was concertmaster for Leopold Stokowski, Bruno Walter, Georges Szell, and Sir Thomas Beecham. In the 1960s, he taught chamber music courses at Sarah Lawrence College, and Orchestration and Conducting at Teachers College at Columbia University. He formed and for 28 years played with the WQXR String Quartet. Tickets for NYCB’s spring 2004 season, which runs from April 27 through June 27, are available online at www.nycballet.com, through Ticketmaster at 212-307-4100, and at the New York State Theater box office. The New York State Theater is located on the Lincoln Center Plaza at Columbus Avenue at 63rd Street. For general information on tickets for any New York City Ballet performance, call 212-870-5570, or visit www.nycballet.com. Leadership support of Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration is generously provided by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Solomon and Gillian Attfield/Harriet Ford Dickenson Foundation. The European Festival is sponsored in part by Movado with major support from The Florence Gould Foundation for French programming. The Balanchine Centennial Celebration is also made possible by gifts and grants from Altria Group, Inc., Perry and Marty Granoff, Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation, Mattel, Inc., The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ambrose Monell Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Point Gammon Foundation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Shen Family Foundation, and The Shubert Foundation.

Taglioni and Elssler and Grisi had lovers....but they made their own money. There certainly were "protectors" in the sense that perky writes about, though. In Paris, rich young gentlemen were allowed access to the green room where they could pick a mistress. Ivor Guest's books have some lovely stories about some incidents -- the cattiness, etc. There were a few social issues, though, around this. First, for centuries, performers could not receive the sacraments, and no person from a "respectable" family would marry a performer -- I think that's why so many dancers married other dancers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Second, in 19th century France, a woman was, in essence, owned (in the sense of actions and finances controlled) by either her father or, after marriage, her husband. UNLESS she could get herself on the rolls of the Paris opera or ballet. then they were responsible for her. This attracted a certain type of young woman -- someone not fond of societal constrictions!

This press release just in: NEW YORK CITY BALLET TO PAY TRIBUTE TO ITS ALUMNI ON SATURDAY, MAY 1 AT 8 P.M. Nearly 200 Former NYCB Dancers to Be Honored As part of Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration, its yearlong tribute to George Balanchine, New York City Ballet will salute its former members at the 8 p.m. performance on Saturday, May 1st. Nearly 200 alumni are scheduled to attend the performance that evening, and to be honored for their contributions to the Company’s excellence since it was founded in 1948. As part of the evening, NYCB Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins will acknowledge the alumni in the audience, including many who originated principal roles in the ballets being performed that evening — Kammermusik No. 2 (1978), Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (1966). Over the course of the weekend, NYCB will be gathering oral histories from many of the former dancers for the New York City Ballet Archives, to be made available to scholars and researchers. Alumni will also have the opportunity to visit the Archives, which were established in 1999, as well as observe classes at the School of American Ballet and attend private viewings of the Balanchine Centennial Exhibit at the New York State Theater. Among the former principal dancers who will be present for the salute are Jacques d’Amboise (danced with NYCB from 1949 to 1984), Karin von Aroldingen (1962-1984), Merrill Ashley (1967-1997), Maria Calegari (1974-1993), Bart Cook (1971-1993), Daniel Duell (1972-1987), Melissa Hayden (1949-1973), Gen Horiuchi (1982-1994), Allegra Kent (1953-1982), Leonid Kozlov (1983-1994), Lourdes Lopes (1974-1997), Adam Lüders (1975-1994), Michael Maule (1950-1953), Mimi Paul (1961-1967), Melinda Roy (1979-1996), Stephanie Saland (1972-1993), Suki Schorer (1959-1972), Margaret Tracey (1986-2002), and Patricia Wilde (1950-1965). In addition, several dancers who were with NYCB during its inaugural year will be attending, including Doris Breckenridge (1948-1952), Arlouine Case (1948-1955), Jillana (1947-1967), Ninette Kiddon (1948-1950), Helen Kramer (1948-1950), Pat McBride (1948-1951), Yvonne Mounsey (1948-1959), James Radich (1948-1949), Barbara Walczak (1948-1960), and Tomi Wortham (1947-1953). Tickets for NYCB’s spring 2004 season, which runs from April 27 through June 27, are available online at www.nycballet.com, through Ticketmaster at 212-307-4100, and at the New York State Theater box office. The New York State Theater is located on the Lincoln Center Plaza at Columbus Avenue at 63rd Street. For general information on tickets for any New York City Ballet performance, call 212-870-5570, or visit www.nycballet.com.

I think if you look around the medium-sized companies you'll find that there are a lot of dancers from other countries -- this is a recent change. Cincinnatti Ballet sent out a press release a year or two ago listing their foreign dancers. Ballet Internationale and Ballet Arizona have a high component of non-American dancers, as does San Francisco Ballet -- those are a few I can think of without doing a web search, but it's a trend.

If no one has yet mentioned it, check Robert Greskovic's "Ballet 101" too. The Makarova/Dowell is based on the Stepanov notation and is certainly traditiona -- but much of the choreography is by Ashton. (the first act waltz, the pas de quatre and tarantella in the ballroom scene; I blush to admit I can't remember whether this video is Ashton's act IV or not! I think you're on the right track -- one problem of readng and seeing everything that's out there is that a new Swan Lake is likely to be different. Nothing you could have read would have prepared you for ABT's Swamp Thing von Rothbart

Ari's recap of recent Royal Ballet history is my understanding as well -- I'm glad Alymer confirmed it One of the great mysteries is how that silly, old-fashioned Cecchetti training produced so many first-rate dancers, while the new, improved updated curriculum has not. There was a similar situation in Copenhagen. Every one of the directors during the Time of Troubles came determined to revitalize the school and bring it up to date. One teacher from "the old days" came back a year into the First Reform Movement and told me the dancers came to her after the first class she gave and told her not to take offense, but her class was too hard and they wouldn't take it again.

And by bringing in guests to dance instead of developing their own dancers, ABT misses the good will generated by the audience cheering on the home team. To me, a good part of the fun of ballet is watching dancers grow up and into roles. Non-company guests can be exciting and good for the company too -- challenging them, showing new ways of working, all that. But it robs the audience of picking out a corps dancer in their first season and cheering them on up the ranks.

Good questions, FF, and I can only answer, good grief, I hope so! Artists use their own lives and experiences in their work, of course, but great artists filter these experiences -- I don't believe Balanchine put a soap opera on stage. People can read into any performance anything they like, and there probably will always be people who think "OOH, she's his mother-in-law," but does that have anything to do with ballet?

Good point! I doubt that was the intention originally, though, if the name was coined during the company's tour of South America! It would be an appropriate contemporary interpretation, though. But I can't believe that ABT is willfully ignoring good American dancers to take in good non-American-born dancers. vrsfanatic mentioned a few dancers who had USA-training, but they had substantial -- and very good -- training in their home countries. there are some excellent academices in Latin America. Gomes also had a year at POB school which, according to an interview in Ballet Alert that Mary Cargill did last year, influenced his dancing considerably.

Not a lot of American dancers in the Royal either, one might note. Is there a training crisis in American dance that's just beginning to surface? I've been thinking about this for a few days, remembeing interviews I've done in the past five years with former or current artistic directors, and others associated with American companies, and comments like "they're being trained for competitions," "they can't phrase; it's just step step step" (said by at least a half-dozen people), "they're so young and so eager and they really want to dance, but they just don't have solid training," "when the teachers who are now in their 60s and 70s retire, we're really going to be in trouble," etc. etc. etc. This may be part of both ABT's and the Royal's searching outside.

Haven't seen it, I'm afraid, but I gather (Susan Reiter reviewed it for DanceView Times a few weeks ago) that it's quite different from the previous productions -- doesn't have Robbins' direction.

Hi, barley -- welcome to active posting! I hope we'll hear more from you I think in the Royal Ballet's case the cause is more easily traced. Under the current EU regulations, any citizen of any EU country can seek employment in any other EU country. Before, tht wasn't the case, and there were visa problems. During the "purely English" years, citizens of any Commonwealth company could be a company member, and many of the company's stars were from Canada (Lynn Seymour), Australia (Robert Helpmann), etc. (Hope I'm representing the EU regs accurately; I'm sure someone will jump in and correct me if I'm not!)

Different perceptions -- my comment about Liebeslieder was based on reports by another San Francisco critic (who also liked it and wished it had remained in repertory) who said that not only was reaction quite muted, but that quite a few people walked out on the ballet at halftime. (I added that to source my comment, not to argue the point!)

I think the basis for ABT's claim to be a national company is that it has, throughout its exsitence, toured extensively all across the country.

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, with the National Ballet of Canada, is going to revive Don Quixote -- at the Kennedy Center next season. (The Center's season was announced about a month ago.)

Another part of the "getting it" question. One often reads and hears the complaint about a choreographer's work that "it all looks alike". One example of this is critics who write about every new classical ballet they see "It's just classroom steps" and "he doesn't go beyond classical ballet." Sometimes a ballet IS "just classroom steps." and sometimes it's "Divertimento No. 15" which is also academic classicism but, one could argue, much more. I think often the "it all looks alike" comment can be defended. I have a theory that great, or at least successful, choreographers have an infinite formula that they can vary: Balanchine's is understanding the structure of a score so thoroughly that he can set steps to music -- same approach -- but produce infinite varieties on this base. Fokine and Bournonville had several infinite formulas, or types of ballets -- exotic folk tales, domestic comedies respectively, as well as local color ballets in both cases. So yes, it all looks alike. But it's all different. (Ashton is the exception to this rule. He has favorite steps, but I can't find an infinite formula in his works.) The more attuned one is to a work, the more examples of a choreographer one sees, the more differences one will find among the works, but otherwise, how does one deal with the "it all looks alike" question?

Hockeyfan's post about a misguided Liebesleder review has had puppies -- there are a lot of subissues in there. Leigh raised one on a thread below -- how do you tell what went wrong? -- and Hans, in his answers on the other thread, raised another, which I thought deserved a thread of its own. There's a school of thought that if you truly understand an artist's work, then you'll like it. It's one of the most frequent complaints I heard, when editing Washington DanceView, which dealt primarily with local modern dance. "Please don't send X to review me. He doesn't understand my work." X would argue that he understood it perfectly, thank you, and it was ghastly. Hans, if he will permit me a paraphrase, wrote that he understood Balanchine and did "get it," but just didn't like it. There is a point of view, and you'll read it in posts on this and other sites, that "I know he's great, but he leaves me cold" or "the works are just so unemotional." That's been the case since the beginning, and will probably always be the case. And one can think of parallel complaints about other choreograohers. For many, Ashton just isn't edgy enough. Many who rate innovation highly don't/can't see the innovation in his works and fault him for that as well. Another part of this issue is, when do the objections stop being discussable? I wrote about this on the other thread and repeat it here. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a repeated criticism of Balanchine ballets that they were lacking in decor -- a perfectly reasonable comment from people whose eye had been trained by Diaghilev but that doesn't take into account Balanchine's aesthetic. They may have argued, "I don't care if he wants us to concentrate on the choreography, ballet is a blending of three arts and he's ignoring one of them." Balanchine eventually "won" this debate, but it was a discussable issue for some time. (By this, I mean that his works became accepted for what they were, not that decor no longer matters generally.)

To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, I can think of lots of examples, both from the 1950s and 1960s, which I read in researching my book (one prominent critic, writing in Dancing Times, of the Royal Danish Ballet's acquisition of "Apollo" in 1957 said that it was a good ballet to get for a young dancer, but it wasn't worth keeping in the repertory) as welll as more recent ones -- but on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1950s and 60s, there was also a repeated criticism of Baanchine ballets that they were lacking in decor -- a perfectly reasonable comment from people whose eye had been trained by Diaghilev but doesn't take into account Balanchine's aesthetic. They may have argued, "I don't care if he wants us to concentrate on the choreography, ballet is a blending of three arts and he's ignoring one of them." Balanchine eventually "won" this debate, but it was a discussable issue for some time. I don't think it's a national failing, though, and as I wrote above, we have to be careful about indicting an entire nation. There are American critics who "don't get" Balanchine either. Some may remember a fascinating review Ari found a few months ago about Balanchine's punk rock "Dracula" by an American critic. I think it could be argued that even if the program had said this, complete with the Balanchine Trust credit, anyone who understood Balanchine would have had alarm bells go off here. The question of "not getting it" versus "I do get it but I don't like it" is both difficult and interesting. Alymer's post above interested me because it touched on the equally difficult issue of how different from the original style can a work be and still be acceptably in the style, as well as what standard are we using? What we see danced today or what we see on video or remember of the first cast? I think the quote Hockeyfan pulled from that Liebeslieder review does fall into the "doesn't get it" category. Criticizing a Balanchine ballet for being too perfumed would set off alarm bells for me. And we also have the "it all looks alike" issue which is worthy of another thread, so I'm going to start one. We've had a lot of very good posts here -- a belated thanks to infrequent poster Lynette for her very reasoned post. And thanks to Estelle for the correcition on the Violette and Mr. B video, as well as your Bejart comment.

This is getting interesting. I checked Payne (his book is "American Ballet Theatre," published by Knopf and the official history) and he has this to say about the name (it' snot helpful): I could find nothing about the name change. There are two references to name in the index, the first the quote above, the second comments about the London tour -- the company was asked to take another name, but it did not. In the mid-1950s, though, it toured under State Department auspices, so it would make sense that the "American" got added then. The only thing I could find, though, is this:

This is from memory, but in the Charles Payne ABT book, I believe he said that it was for the first tour to London. I don't remember the exact date -- late 40s, as close to the end of the war as was practical. I remember his reasoning to be that it was marketing (I don't mean this in a negative way). This was a company new to Londoners, and having the nationality in the name would help identify it.

Small historical point. The National Ballet of Washington was a Ballets Russes heir, and folded in 1974. It had no connection with the Washington Ballet, which began in 1976; its first dancers were all recent graduates of the School. Larger point. I think ABT can call itself THE American company if it wants. We don't have charters here that I can think of, except for The Offical State Flower. Now that takes an act of Congress.

I agree with Ari -- that's the only way to train one's eye (seeing, reading, discussing, thinking and rethinking. And seeing.) Always remembering that it's perfectly ok to just go and have fun -- this is for those of us who want to try to analyze performances. I have found from discussions with friends and colleagues that often on a first night of an unfamiliar work, it's hard to get past the performance: meaning, we see from the outside in: costumes, sets, production values, DANCERS. Good dancers can mask a bad ballet (I think more than bad dancing can obscure the virtues of a good one). I think this may account for the times that one likes something the first time and is more critical the second -- second time, one is more likely to see beyond the first layer. E. Johnson's question is a good one too -- I think it's often possible to tell whether a dancer is off form or just not very good, but not always, because dancers so often dance with pain, yet put on a good show. But I think you can tell whether a dancer isn't putting everything into it using the same skills you'd use to judge whether the mechanic is really trying to fix your car, or fiddling around under the hood, not having a clue what he's doing.

Smoke. That's the only thing I miss about not smoking (I quit 20 years ago). You had your 2 cigarette intermissions and, when things got out of hand, your 3 cigarette intermissions. Great way to keep time.

In (American) football, there are teams that build and teams that buy. Same thing. To answer Leigh's original question, I think the influx of foreigners came when the company started doing full lengths -- after the "Swan Lake" acquistion in the mid-1960s. In Gruen's biography of Bruhn, he mentions the possibility that Bruhn remaned a second soloist for six years was because he was not American (Bruhn came to Ballet Theatre fully formed; he didn't grow on the job). While there have been international stars, the dominance of non-Americans is quite recent -- it parallels the same situation in Britain's Royal Ballet. I think, as always, there are two sides to the question. New blood is good. BUT where are American dancers going to dance? If a young dancer has his/her sights set on ABT, does the current company mix send a positive mesage? The mixed training issue, which was an issue before the company was so international. San Francisco Ballet also has a huge component of "furriners" but I'd argue it has a consistent company style -- in the small and mid-sized ballets and new choreography more than in the full-lengths. It just takes time to build stylistic consistency that is expected in a "Swan Lake," and as long as there is a Kirov or a Paris Opera Ballet around that does have stylistic consistency, that will remain a standard.