Alexandra

I've always been curious about "The Age of Anxiety" and "The Guests." Often ballets that seem dated the decade after their creation are palatable as period pieces 40 years on. I'd like to see how Robbins handled serious material. Save for "Fancy Free," we either get his kiddie ballets or his abstract ones now.

Yes, please, let's stay away from the Hillary Book! I thought that for that book to come out the day I opened the new book forum was very bad timing! I'm sure it will be a very popular read, but really, we will all be much better friends if we stay away from politics. We've lost a few posters in the past because of political discussions (I don't think it's so much that people are offended, is that, at least for some people, if they hold very closely to a particular belief, they just don't want to be around people who don't. Or if someone is the only one in the crowd who thinks one thing, they find that uncomfortable.)

It is frightening, isnt it, the power that a grade school teacher can have over our reading? So many people have been either turned on or turned off a particular author... Libraries. I lived in Baltimore until I was ten and it had a wonderful library. When we moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, the library there -- at least the children's section -- was so terrible that I think that was part of the reason I turned to nonfiction (at first the Landmark series of biographies) and whatever adult, almost exclusively 19th century (becuase it was "clean") books I was allowed to read. But I can still see the children's room at that library. It was scaled for children -- low shelves, so you could see everything, and at the time seemed like the largest room in the world. I'd be frightened to see it now. It's been wonderful reading everyone's memories -- and made me remember some I'd forgotten. Babar -- gave me an excuse not to eat mushrooms for years! I read the Bobsey Twins, although I didn't particularly like them, and Nancy Drew, all of them. I was awed by having $1,000 a year to spend on clothes without anybody telling you how to spend it. I couldn't read "Little Women" until I was in college -- I didn't like to read about girls; they didn't do anything except gossip and cook and sew -- but I adored "Little Men" and read it every summer. I also read "Understood Betsy," Ari. I remember there was a chapter called "If you don't like conversation in a book, skip this chapter," and so I thought, for years, that it was bad to have conversation in a book! And two of my absolute favorites that I'd forgotten about were "Johnny Tremain" and "Rifles for Watie" (the first about a boy in the Revolutionary War, the second about a 16-year-old soldier in the Western Civil War.

Thanks, Old Fashioned -- please post a review. There may well be other Houston fans here who are too shy to post, and you'll lure them out

Hi, Maura -- welcome to Ballet Alert! Thanks for posting, but we don't discuss the dancers' personal lives here. I'm closing this thread -- but if you'd like to talk about Ms. Herrera's dancing, or about ABT performances you've seen, please feel free to post another thread!

Good to read you again, Jeannie (and congrats to your husband ) Thanks for the update. Have you been to other events during the birthday bash? It must be an exciting time to be there.

Something you might find interesting to do is check out Amazon for the bestsellers -- AND you can change countries, and see what the bestsellers are in England, France, Germany -- I think also Canada and Japan.

Melissa, I haven't read "House of Mirth" yet -- that's next on my list. Like dirac, I'd also like some recommendations for "beach books."

Mbjerk, I think what you wrote in the last sentence would be exactly what I'd like to see as a viewer.

What does this forum have to with ballet? Absolutely nothing. At least not directly. I've been thinking of having a Books Forum, or perhaps a separate Books message board, for some time. I've talked with my favorite local bookseller about doing something in conjunction with them, but the logistics seemed too difficult. Dirac had apparently been thinking on the same lines -- we were emailing yesterday, after the Summer Reading thread -- and so I decided to go ahead. Two reasons: 1, for the same reason we put up Other Arts. I would like to have a place where people are comfortable discussing things that are not pop culture, and plays, opera, music are part of the context of ballet -- I think it's good for us to be able to discuss these things, to read about what others are seeing, to see ballet as part of that world rather than MTV-land. 2, I want to support books and publishing, and this is the only way I can. Talking about books encourages people to buy them. And while I hope people will buy books through the Amazon Link at the top of the page, if you have a local, independent bookseller, I'd rather you bought from them, because if you don't, they won't be around in a year or two, and everything we read will be decided by two or three big stores. It's obvious that we have a lot of readers here, so I hope we'll have fun sharing what we read. Please feel free to post reviews -- perhaps we can have a book club (one book a month, whatever), threads on authors, etc. And thank you to dirac for the nudge Adding a clarification of what this forum is for -- please still post about dance books on Books, Magazines and Critics. We have some threads on biographies of actors or musicians on Other Arts, and that's probably the best place for them, unless you want to discuss them as literature. And please, no books on politics. The No Politics rule applies here, too.

I hope more dancers will answer to give you an inside view, but from the outside, looking at it, I see "Paquita" as a divertissement -- that's the way it's come down to us. I know the full ballet has been reconstructed, but the Paquita that's now "traditional" is a grand ballet classique that Petipa inserted in the original Romantic ballet and that's performed on its own. And so for that, you need to be the Queen Bee -- noble, as Hans noted above. I think there's a tradition of doing "concert versions" of the big pas de deux, NOT being in character -- Kitri doesn't have to look like an innkeeper's daughter in the grand pas de deux. But I think one does have to be grand.

Thanks, Hans -- I think the steps that look like cliches are the parts that aren't Bournonville. I agree with what you wrote -- and I think this ballet is an example of why reconstructing a long unperformed ballet can be harmful. While fragments of the ballet are by Bournonville, much is not, and his plots were never incomprehensible -- but they are if you cut the mime. (Actually, to be fair to the Danes, when I saw this live I had no trouble following the story.) After the 1979 Bournonville Festival, there was a huge interest in Bournonville and several people tried to reconstruct lost works -- long lost, dead ballets, out of living memory. None of them have been successful. (Kronstam, who was the director of the company at that time, turned all the projects down. It was Frank Andersen who brought in "Abdallah" and the really awful reconstruction of Bournonville's greatest ballet, "The Lay of Thrym," which probably killed, for all time, the interest in reviving the old ballets that, some say, really COULD be revived, like "Valdemar" which is there, in the library, steps, music, costume drawings, set designs, ready to go. Dinna Bjorn has also "reconstructed" older works -- none of them live on stage. And the more this is done, rather than enriching the Bournonville repertory or his reputation, it waters it.) I agree with your comments on the dancing, too. The plié was the key to Bournonville dancing, and got lost during the Lander years when the plié was shortened in favor of speed. (Volkova brought the deep plié back in the 1950s.) When I learned how small the dancing space had been, I was amazed at how well they used it, but Bournonville's original theater had a stage that was, according to Patricia McAndrews, only 24 feet wide -- think of "Napoli" with all the sets and costumes and a city's worth of people, and the amount of dancing space they had was tiny. BUT part of the tradition was, as Hans Brenaa would say, "dance big, use all the space available to you." As for the bodies, there are dozens of photos in Knud Arne Jurgenson's excellent (very expensive) The Bournonville Tradition: A Photographic Record) and I was amazed at how slim they were -- the women have layers and layers of clothes and so look padded, unless you take the time to look at their arms, faces and necks, and they're quite slim, and the men could step on stage today, except that many of them were only five feet tall. As for mime -- well, "Pantomime is the dance of the turned in feet." It was interesting that when the Danes brought "Folk Tale" the last time the peope I knew who liked it were the modern dancers. Many ballet fans find no dance in Bournonville. Modern dancers tend to view all movement as dance -- so did Bournonville But there are some stagings of Bournonville where the mime is very static -- there are only a few directors who know how to make the mime dance. Otherwise, it's stop and start: Mime. Dance. Mime. Dance. That's now considered "Russian style" mime, but could be another 20th century change, and not Petipa's fault at all.

Thank you for posting this, kfw. It's a very interesting piece -- for those who want a one-stop-shopping piece on Morris's career, please take a look. While giving full measure to his early works, Jacobs is less fond of his later ones. Here's a paragraph from late in the piece: There's a good bit here on Taylor too.

Glebb, you perhaps missed the edifying experience of parochial school. My 8th grade teacher (Mother Angelita Marie, may she rest in peace) loved reading aloud the stories of the martyrs to us. Her favorite was Maria Goretti (sp?) a 13-year-old who was raped and knifed to death -- slowly, oh, ever so slowly -- by her cousin. The rape details were NOT read, but the knifing ones were, down to that her stomach was so punctured all the dear little saint-to-be asked for was water and they couldn't give it to her......

Ed, one of the few TV programs I do like is the Morse series on "Mystery" -- currently in reruns on A&E Monday nights

Just for fun, I went to Yahoo and looked up the local TV listings for Washington, D.C. Here they are. (For our non-American posters/readers to have a context for what we're talking about.) I've been so out of it I've completely missed "Dog Eat Dog." I hope that's not literal, but ya never know. the numbers before the listings are the channels on my cable system, then they're in time order. If there are three listings it's 8, 9 and 10. If they're more, they're half-hour shows. Hope that makes sense. I guess TV 14 and TVPG are ratings -- (14 and up only, Parental Guidance). Channels 6, 8 and 13 are our PBS (public broadcasting) channels. Odd, they're not doing 2 hours of "Antique Roadshow," our usual fare, tonight. 4. Dog Eat Dog CC TVPG Miss Universe Pageant CC TV14 5 · FOX American Juniors Premiere CC Keen Eddie Premiere CC TV14 Fox 5 News at Ten 6 · PBS Globe Trekker CC Nova CC TVG P.O.V. CC 7 · ABC St. Jude Children's Research... According to Jim Repeat CC TVPG Less Than Perfect Repeat CC TVPG NYPD Blue Repeat CC TV14 8 · PBS The Chieftains: Down the Old... CC Michael Ball Live at the Roy... CC >> 9 · CBS AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Hero... CC TV14 10 · FOX American Juniors Premiere CC Keen Eddie Premiere CC TV14 News at 10 CC Sports Unlimited CC 11 · WB Gilmore Girls Repeat CC TVPG Smallville Repeat CC TV14 Will & Grace CC TVPG Just Shoot Me CC TVPG 12 · UPN America's Next Top Model Repeat CC TV14 America's Next Top Model CC Everybody Loves Raymond CC Dharma & Greg CC TVPG 13 · PBS Masterpiece Theatre CC BBC World News Dateline: Africa 15 · USA Bulletproof (1996) CC ® *+ JAG CC TVPG 16 · TBS 17 · CNBC Kudlow & Cramer CC Capital Report The News With Brian Williams CC >> 18 · CSPAN2 Public Affairs 21 · A&E Biography CC TVPG Cold Case Files CC TVPG 22 · DSC The New Detectives: Case Stu... CC TVPG Laci Peterson: Search for Ju... The FBI Files CC TVPG 25 · CNN Larry King Live CC NewsNight With Aaron Brown CC 26 · TNT Law & Order CC TV14 Law & Order CC TV14 Charmed CC

I think there's an age divide here -- although I know several people in their 20s who share my views on pop culture! -- and also a geographic one. I don't think Europe bathes in pop culture the way Americans do. The last time I was in Denmark, the TV doesn't even come on until evening. I saw a quiz show there once. It was a word game, between two players, who used legal pads and pencils. There was a moderator and a young girl with every Danish dictionary at her disposal to check entries. The winner got.....a handshake from his opponent and looked very happy about it. I think Leigh's right -- here, it's all about money and commercialism. But I grew up in the '60s, and pop culture was not nearly as pervasive as it is now. One could easily ignore it. (I write as a Beatles fan; you had to dig through newspapers to find anything about pop music. Hah! The stars' love affairs were not on the evening news, but in movie magazines. Etc.) I heard an interview with a Singapore pop singer about five years ago that sticks with me. He was vehemently anti-American. He was a classically trained musician (violin) who switched to pop music for two reasons. One, because he didn't want to play for small audiences -- he wanted to reach everybody. And two, because if people in Singapore, and other Asian countries, didn't try to create their own pop culture, they would be forced to always buy American culture, which, he felt was vile, and against Asian traditions. (He also thought the government should fund native pop culture and musicals rather than the traditional arts because "the old people will take care of them anyway.")

Ayn Rand -- now there's a forgotten name! (GWTW, by "I'll post third" I just meant that I didn't want to be first.) I was also always reading -- anything. Golden Books, Grimm, Andersen (I prefered Grimm), Andrew Lang's books, a lot of my mother's and aunt's children's books, like "The Little Colonel" (all 15 of them) and the whole "Anne of Green Gables" series. And nearly all of the Landmark biographies -- and Winnie the Pooh, the poems. (I was also very fond of the war poems of Robert W. Service and Rupert Brooke ) My first "grown up" books were "Oliver Twist" and "Jane Eyre" when I was nine, and then I pretty much refused to go back to the children's section. My reading was heavily censored -- I had "Gone with the Wind" read to me the summer I was 12. I wasn't allowed to read it until I was 14. So I read a lot of nonfiction, especially biography. The most traumatic thing I read, at 11, was "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" -- I'd seen "Judgment at Nuremberg" and come out of it convinced by Maximilian Shell (who played the Nazi apologist) that the Germans were all nice guys just following orders. My aunt, who totally shaped my reading, marched me up to the attic and gave me her pre-War copy of "Mein Kampf" and then made me read "Rise and Fall" which had just come out, and then "The Tin Drum." An example of how family can counteract pop culture (vis a vis another thread). I forgot -- Calliope, I also LOVED "Rebecca" I first read it when I was ten and thought that growing up, going to Monte Carlo and marrying Maxim De Winter was a viable career path. I've read it several times since then, and knew I'd finally grown up (at about 35) when I could read the scene where she stuffs the broken china in the back of the drawer without blushing -- I'd have done exactly the same thing. I think I read all of DuMaurier after that, and she wrote about 24 books.

Welcome, AG. You're obviously familiar with the RDB, so, as a Bournonville fan, may I give you a special welcome Muus was the first cast Irma during this period, as I remember it. I must say I don't remember the friends. I just remembered that Lloyd Riggins (who'd be subtantially taller than Muus) danced Abdallah as well. Greve is so tall, and so blond, and so serious, that I can't imagine him in that role, but anything is possible. It's also very possible that Cavallo would have been the Queen of the Harem (I saw Mette Ida Kirk and Schandorff). (And Niels Kehlet and Kirsten Simone were notable in mime roles)

I think it's the earlier one, Mel. (That's from memory, talking to George Jackson, one of whose fields is Viennese ballet and who has a special interest in the ballet, at the time of the reconstruction.)

I agree with Ari. If people want to watch TV fine -- and the point that there's good pop art and bad high art has been made over and over on these forums in several contexts; same goes here. It's the relentlessness of it, and the assumption that if someone hums a few bars of a pop song, everyone will be able to sing the rest of it -- and the reverse snobbery. That if you say, "I'm reading the Divine Comedy" (I'm not, but just to give an example) the response is likely to be, "Well, la de dah" or something of that sort. This is the same attitude that stifles the drive of students not to succeed, mocking them for getting As. The point is not what people like or dislike but the way pop culture in America has wormed its way into everything, leaving no nuclear free zone. I'm editing to add: I don't think anyone is trying to put down someone who likes The Simpsons or (I think this is off the air; it used to be my example of the Death of Civilization) "Married with Children"). And of course, it's possible to watch and enjoy television and still watch and enjoy art. My complaint -- and I think it's Ed's, and some others as well -- is having to live in a society where that IS the culture. It's not the counterculture anymore, or even pop culture. It's American culture. Every civilization gets the culture it deserves....... And I do fear that, like children brought up on Wonder Bread who will scorn either the finest French bread or peasant black bread because it's too tough and dry, as each succeeding generation becomes more blanketed by popular culture, and as the arts try to attract those people as audience members, fine art is going to become so diluted and coarse as to be meaningless. My plea is for some little corner of the society to be Not Pop Art.

Thanks, Hans. What did you think of it I would be surprised if Abdallah were Greve if this is from the '90s. It's possible, but he was with the company for only a year before "Abdallah" was out of rep for many seasons. He's six foot three, though, so that's a clue. The dancers who were cast in it when I was watching it were Hubbe (also blond) and Alexander Kolpin. I believe Arne Villumsen did the premiere, but was not in the ballet long. This is such a reconstruction and pastiche that, despite some good scenes and variations, I don't count it as an authentic Bournonville ballet, I have to say. Shame about "Sylvia" What did you think of the Elfeldt films? (There are some steps in the gypsy dance that Ashton used in "Les Rendezvous" I think.) All the dancers in them are in their mid-40s, and they were dancing in about a five foot square and couldn't move out of camera range, but it's among the earliest footage we have of ballet dancers, if not the earliest.

Just out of curiosity, what were books you loved reading when you were growing up? I'd be interested in knowing, especially, childhood favorites and the first "grown up" books you read. I'll go third.

Ari, it was Ethan Frome that did it. That was required reading in 10th grade, and I never could connect that with That Other Edith Wharton I read about, so didn't try. (I couldn't get through Austen as a teenager either, but had no trouble with Dostoyevsky; "Notes from the Underground" and "The Possessed" were my favorites at that age.) I haven't tried "Ethan Frome" again. I started with "Old New York" -- four novellas -- and enjoyed them; next is "Age of Innocence." I'm almost finished James's "Washington Square." Don't love it, don't hate it. I'd forgotten that I still have books leftover from last summer, popular fiction, "Atonement" and "The Lovely Bones" among others. I got "The DaVinci Code" from Book of the Month, and I know this is childish, but it's such a terrible edition -- cheap cheap paper, print that rubs off in your hands, tiny pages -- that there is no pleasure reading it. I'd rather have a paperback.

Yes, the Garland Dance is by Balanchine, but he did not stage the production and it is not his production.