Alexandra

These have been great fun to read -- more fun to read than to see in some cases, it seems Thanks to all who've rung in so far and a special welcome to Clare -- I think this is your first review, and I hope there will be many more! Thank you for posting it. It was especially fun to read the comparisons of the different productions -- you all have such stamina! Thanks to Alymer, too, whose reviews are all too rare on this site and to Sylvia, whose frequent reviews are always welcome. AntoP, if it weren't for you, we would think there was no ballet in Italy!

Thank you, Françoise and cygneblanc, for these reviews -- it is nice to be able to at least get a glimpse of what's going on there! Françoise, from what I've read in reviews, Zakharova was not her usual self in Paris -- more restrained, much less extreme. Perhaps Marc Haegeman would comment? cygneblanc, using French terms is fine -- most of our readers know them and if they don't, they can look them up But when we write in English, we use the French terms. Thanks again!

This was posted on alt.arts.ballet this morning and I thought some of our posters with an interest in the Paris Opera Ballet might be interested. There's a new website for former etoile Patrick Dupond. http://patrick-dupond.ifrance.com/patrick-dupond/ (There's an English as well as a French version)

I think that's in that other university, the joke one Does anyone teach ethics anywhere today?

Although it does seem, to me at least, at first glance that the idea of a ballet about Mother Theresa sounds as though it were dreamt up by a group of balletomanes stranded in an airport for too long, I'd go to see this one. Bejart is nothing if not a man of the theater, and I'd be interested to see what he'd do with it. I'd also like to get a few views of Eifman from Europe, and I hope we do.

I think the over-rehearsing problem does exist -- though not so much these days! -- and I agree that it's just as much a problem as under-rehearsing. In conversations about coaching, several dancers have told me that the trick to is bringing the coaching just to the edge, just before it's "perfect," so as to send the dancers into the breach, as it were, still raw -- which sounds very much like what Leigh wrote above. Michael, I certainly can see the point in rehearsing the corps -- it must be hideously boring to stand around while the 6th and the 12th swans learn their parts! I think it's time to have directors in ballet, in the way that plays have directors. NOT the "I am an Artiste and I will change the ballet so that people know it" kind of director, of course, but a director who has an overview of the ballet. Too often, especially in story ballets, I get a sense that the ballet is a series of numbers and that the dancers are illustrating the ballet rather than telling the story. (Fairies OFF, maids of honor ON, where are those rats???.....) There are so many things to worry about in getting a ballet onto the stage -- a big ballet, especially, that I think sometimes the directors/regisseurs/coaches forget what it looks out out front. Michael, I think you and your partners did the right thing -- warring coaches should be sent to the gym to duke it out and leave the dancers in peace.

Lolly, you'll just have to get your friends to start posting about what they're seeing I wish we had more Londoners, too, but I think so many post on Ballet.co -- www.ballet.co.uk -- where there are a lot of Londoners, and many people don't want to post twice about what they're seeing. "Scenes de ballet" is gorgeous, I think; there are those who think it's Ashton's finest ballet. It's for a leading couple and a small corps, and one of its secrets is that Ashton was reading Euclid when he choreographed it and its patterns are very geometric, and no matter where you sit, at what angle you view it, you'll see a completely work; there are no "off" angles. ABT does "Sinfonietta" and it's very popular -- a "pure dance" work with lots of jumps, good parts for the men, especially.

Thanks for posting this, Ari! I voted for Hugh Laing, because I don't have any sense of what he was like as a dancer. I saw Nureyev, not in the '60s, but enough to know what he was like, and have seen both he and Bruhn on tape. I've seen bits of film of Eglevsky and Youskevitch and Villella -- but Laing remains a msytery to me. I've only seen him in "Brigadoon" and I don't think that's a fair measure!

Wow.

[for those of you who may have seen it, I'd replied to mjberk's last post, and then realized that his example of rehearsal practices might make an interesting topic, and so have split the thread off and moved it to Aesthetic Issues. If you're interested in discussing how ballet companies rehearse, come on over and please forgive the confusion.] http://www.balletalert.com/forum/showthrea...70845#post70845

[mbjerk wrote this on the Training Company Directors thread, and I thought it would make an interesting topic on its own.] mbjerk, you make a good case for rehearsing newcomers separately, but how does the company avoid making a performance look as though that's exactly what's been done? I'm seeing it more and more lately -- the soloists are rehearsed to death in a separate room. And then lowered into the production -- in my mind's eye, I see a crane come down, lowering a little plastic bubble that opens to let out the soloists to dance their solos and then hoist them up again when it's over -- as though they have never met the other cast members. The last time I saw "Fancy Free" at ABT the pas de deux was straight out of "Romeo and Juliet" -- beautiful. But it had nothing to do with the ballet. I once saw several performances of "Romeo and Juliet" danced by the Royal (mid-70s) when Cast 1 took the "Cut Down By Fate" approach. The curtain went up, you saw those three men and thought "Oh, how sad. By this time tomorrow, two of them will be dead." And that sense of doom pervaded the ballet. Cast 2 did the "live it on stage" approach. There was no foreshadowing of the tragedy; it was as though it happened to them fresh, that night, for the first time. This was certainly a different approach to narrative ballet from what I had been used to watching and I've always remembered it. Whether there was a director telling them what to do or that the whole cast took its cue from the leads (my guess), it looked so blessedly adult and cohesive. And the interplay between the dancers -- I vividly remember Nureyev's Romeo and Dowell's Mercutio -- could not have come about had Dowell been rehearsed separately and only met Nureyev in a last rehearsal. Have we gotten too efficient? Are companies rehearsing too many ballets for the staff that they have? (If this draws more than two responses, I'll break it off to a separate thread, and I certainly don't want to discourage anyone from responding to the original topic.)

Who did you see in "Swan Lake," cygneblanc? And did you enjoy the production -- I know that Nureyev's choreography is controversial

Oh, no apology is necessary! I was just responding to the part of your post that said "I'm not sure if it's a good idea to discuss these issues." We agree. Each forum and web site has its own personality, and it's not my intention to criticize anyone, but our way is to avoid gossip and what you so politelly call "excessive discussion" I thought it wouldn't hurt to set out our rules. So I think we are in agreement -- and I'm very glad of that

The last post is a requirement, Michael, and they can't graduate without passing it with at least a B I'd add a course on Aesthetics, too. And perhaps the course with an awful title that's so necessary: "Dance Appreciation" And then a course on "Dance Aesthetics."

This thread got diverted to a discusison of Bournonville's La Sylphide (Sylfiden); I've moved those posts, which contain photos of Price de Plane in 1905 to its own thread in Ballet History: http://www.balletalert.com/forum/showthrea...=&threadid=8918

I think that's a good point -- I would HOPE that the case of having an artistic director who was not a dancer would never be repeated. But there's a change going on, and more and more the managerial side is taking over. Rather than having an Artistic Director with a management team supporting him/her, you have a management team hiring the Artistic Director to do all that stuff we can't do -- and make hits, and sell tickets. For an executive director's course -- yes. Two years required ballet. Might weed a few of them out that way

Good idea! Less immediately practical, but I'd want a good solid course on dance history.

For our new Paris posters, what have you seen so far this season, and what did you think? Which dancers do you especially like -- or dislikle ?

Cygneblanc, the rule on gossip has some room for interpretation, as do all good rules, I think. What is definitely NOT appropriate is to say "so and so only got that role because she's sleeping with the choreographer." Or "so and so got fired because she's on drugs." That's gossip. There's a good chance that neither statement is true. If everyone is speculating that Osta got promoted because she's married to another etoile, their marriage is public record, I think that's allowable. But one caution -- it's very difficult to know what's going on backstage. If you speak to one or two dancers, you know their viewpoint, but often it's just that -- their point of view. And as someone who spent ten years writing a book and trying to sort through backstage gossip (not at POB, but at the Royal Danish Ballet) I can tell you that some of it is true, and some of it is false -- deliberately so -- and some of it is because the dancer only knows what happened in one studio, and not the others, or overhears something and misinterpets it. So we do have a rule about reporting what someone says backstage that's off the record. Does that makes sense? If not, and you have other questions, please don't hesitate to email me. We want to encourage free and open discussion, but we have to remember that these aren't private conversations, and what it's OK to say over dinner to a friend is not OK to say in what is, for all practical purposes, print. So we use journalism rules here. at@balletalert.com Estelle, when you have a chance, if you'd like to clarify?

We have a "joke" thread going about a mock course for training artistic directors, and I thought it might be a good idea to have a serious one going as well. If you were starting a university program to train artistic directors -- and executive directors -- what courses would you have?

I like that, too, especially the plastic part (I have a friend who constantly reminds me, it's not just that Balanchine is dead, is that there is no Lincoln Kirstein.) I think it might be a good idea if I put up a serious companion to this thread -- if you were starting a university to train artistic directors, company directors, etc, what would the curriculum be?

You're welcome I remember your posts -- I hope I'm right! -- on the French dancrers in Copenhagen, and we'd hoped to hear more from you. The majority of our posters are American, but this doesn't mean we're only interested in ballet in American -- mais non! We want to hear about ballet everywhere, so please tell us about your travels, as well as what you see in Paris. Regarding this particular ballet, I'd be very interested in hearing your impressions of the audience and the reaction to the ballet, as well as what you think of it -- yes, Eifman is very controversial

cyngeblanc, I think there's always gossip when someone is married to someone in the company -- it's an assumption people will make, especially if they don't like, or are jealous of, the person involved. (And thank you very much for not mentioning names -- we don't do gossip here We want to concentrate on what's going on on stage or, occaisionally, in the studio.) I do think there's a problem, with lack of stage presence -- not just in Paris, but other companies as well. Part of it, I think, is a lack of models -- how does one dance like a ballerina if there are no ballerinas to watch? (Although this is not as much of a problem yet in Paris as it is elsewhere.) And partly what I think you're getting at in your post -- they're too "schoolish," too concentrating on technique, on not making a mistake. I was told in an interview I did recently with an American dancer that one company was casting the dancers they could count on -- meaning those who would never miss a pirouette, or have trouble with partnering. Other directors might sent out a promising dancer before they were quite ready, on the theory that they need stage experience. I think trying to guess who gets promoted and who wins competitions can be fun, perhaps, but we'll never know

I LOVE the idea of, er, retired executives from ENRON and WorldCom! Maybe Dance U.S.A. should lobby to get part of their sentences in community service

Vila, please do. As I've said in other threads, there is an interest in POB from the Americans on this board, and we'd love to have regular reports -- so I very much hope you do post! (Not just on POB, of course. If you're seeing other things, please let us know about them.)