Alexandra

Well, in the spirit of the all-inclusive nature of the Internet, why not have a Dead British Actors forum? They have to go SOMEWHERE Thank you so much for finding this for us and posting it -- it's an excellent article, I think -- LONG, but well worth reading. I hope anyone who's interested in acting, or has ever pondered about the magic of the theater will read it. I'm unfamiliar with Simon Callow's work, either as an actor or a writer, but now I'd like to see and read more. The two descriptions of exceptional Gunness performance gave me chills. (I couldn't help but sympathize, too, with a biographer trying to trap an enigmatic subject They always win in the end. )

I thought they were INTENDED to be annoying, like the music

Yes, exactly! Of course, the Super Curator could ensure, in the mythical Ballet Festival of Beauty, that 1) a range of tastes was included and 2) a preponderance of the participants would not be likely to choose a rotten fig, comlete with worms, as his ideal object of beauty (That is, if the Super Curator were taking the idea seriously.)

I'm posting this so that others won't wonder, or waste time searching. Dirac, ever eagle-eyed, just emailed me asking if something had happened to the thread on music you've always been afraid someone would make a ballet to -- yes. It's disappeared. We don't know why. We didn't delete it deliberately, and we don't think anyone deleted it accidentally either. It is possible that someone was posting at the same time there was an internet glitch -- that our server happened to disconnect for a few seconds at exactly that time; it happened once before, we think. Otherwise, we don't know why. Please feel free to continue the discussion -- if you want to repost your brilliant ideas, that's fine, too.

I'd second the "something beautiful" comment -- wouldn't it be nice to have a festival where every choreographer was told to make something beautiful? It would be interesting to see 12 different ideas of beauty, for one thing! Ronny, I think the reason that threads like "Giselle from Hell" are so popular is because it's been open season on the 19th century repertory for 20 years now, and so those of us who see a lot of ballet performances have seen so many revisions, reworkings, rethinkings, very few, if any, of them improvements, that those posts were made in that spirit. There's also the Hex approach -- it's very unlikely that any professional choreographer would take an idea from an internet message board and use it for a ballet. But on the off chance one might be tempted, perhaps fear that someone would KNOW the source of a particular vile idea -- "Hey! That idea for the Wall Street Giselle came from Ballet Alert!" -- would be so humiliating that posting one's worst nightmare is, in a peculiar way, insurance against never seeing it on stage. HOWEVER, wish lists are a different matter. I think it might be useful for dance professionals to see what audience members really want to see -- so please, post, whether it's a festival of "beautiful" ballets, or something of a different vein entirely. Another idea for a festival for me, if I won the lottery, would be to commission scores for full-length ballets by young composers, working with a choreographer. I'd also have to spring for workshops on narrative form, because, as there are so few good models now, I don't think young choreographers can be expected to know how to construct a narrative ballet. But I think the lack of good, danceable (affordable) scores is one of the things holding back narrative ballet. I'm personally tired of seeing reworkings of 19th century novels and would like to see choreographers try their hand at contemporary stories -- IN BALLET. (Modern dance has been doing this successfully, although not frequently, for decades. It presents a different challenge for ballet.)

Thanks for this, Tessa -- any coverage of ballet and dancers in a mainstream publication is good news, in my book

Thanks for that, Jeannie -- also good to know you haven't been swallowed by a giant porpoise

Inspired by something Leigh wrote on the Music you're afraid they'll choreograph to thread -- "I'm a little scared at how zesty our creative energy is in plotting these horrors. Why is dreaming up the awful always more fun?" -- I pose this question. If you could advise -- or hire -- the choreographers of the world to make ballets for you, what would you ask them to do? If you dream of new ballets, whether or not there are choreographers around to make them, what do you dream? NO FUNNY ONES HERE, PLEASE Just serious ideas.

I wondered if this could be the new, high tech equivalent of the old vaudeville "hook".

Giannina, you have to tell us more than that!! Is that the review where Lewis Segal said something like "the Bolshoi hasn't looked like a world class company in 15 years?" I've thought that, too, but it's hard to judge, I think, from a touring company; they're never at full strength. But they're pretty raggedy at principal level and I wanted to get together food baskets for the corps. What did you see? I think it was Bayadere? Who? Details details. Maybe that will coax the elusive Next and Silent Steve out to post

Ah, Delia Peters. She's a lawyer now, I'm told (by one of her clients ) And thank you for posting, kfw. I'm glad I didn't imagine that the house was full, or nearly full, at the performances I attended I didn't write much about "Sandpaper Ballet." I was interested in your comments -- you got more out of it than I did I've liked some of the other works Morris has done for ballet companies (and usually like what he does for his own company) but, perhaps I'd heard so much about this one -- everyone loves it, surefire hit, etc -- I was disappointed. I thought the jokes were tired, and the vocabulary limited. I don't see a point to burying a dozen or so good soloists in what's essentially a work for a corps de ballet. I got very different reports of audience reaction -- where I was sitting opening night, there were very few laughs. I wondered whether people realized it was supposed to be funny. The person I was with had the same reaction. But others, sitting elsewhere, said that everyone around them was chuckling madly all the way through. I didn't get the visual effects you describe either -- but that may have been because I was sitting very close. It was just GREEN GREEN GREEN -- no, Giannina. Not that kind of Green! What you write sounds much more interesting, and often happens when one is farther from the stage. I'd forgotten to write something about Tan and Maffre -- it speaks to their ability, but also to Tomasson's taste as a director. Both have phenomenal extensions. The legs fly up as though they're weightless. And, as a teacher friend of mine (who's no fan of the Extreme Extensions of certain Head-Kicking Ballerinas either) said, "And so it's not an issue, just a beautiful extension of their natural line." The extensions are so high, light, quick and natural that they don't seem like a trick, and the leg floats back down before you're quite sure you saw it go that high. Another example of how technical "advances" can look like art, or not, depending on the way they're danced.

Thank you for all this information, Vladimir. From the photos, many of the dancers are gorgeous -- both beautiful people and good dancers And this is a company we don't hear much about in the U.S., so we're very grateful to know what you're doing.

It's Steve! It's Steve! Well, sir, did you attend? I've been wondering, too -- and where was Ed, when the Bolshoi was in Detroit? Come in, troops. Report!

I think Ashley's size, and clarity, and POWER made a big difference. I expect to see that in Ballo. (Loscavio, at her debut, anyway, was a Princess, not a Queen, but that was ok, because you knew she was on her way to Queenhood.) I remember Ashley's dancing as so clear that you could see each step, frozen in space, like a flash card. She was dancing so fast, and yet she wasn't rushed. It was her coronation ballet. Neither woman here (Feijoo and Zahorian) had that clarity or speed, and for me it mattered. Both were a couple of beats behind the music in the second solo, and so those POW! BOOM! jumps into the music were off. Sunday night, Torrado danced the man's part, and I liked him a lot. He didn't nail it; the leg dragged in the turning jumps, but he was very musical, and I'm a sucker for that in a man SFB has some wonderful big men -- even the shorter men look BIG on stage. Watching SFB, I always think that there, but for the stupidity of the Danish government, could be the Royal Danish Ballet today (perhaps without HT's productions of the classics ). Tomasson nearly took over the RDB when Kronstam resigned as director in 1985; they thought for the better part of a year that he WOULD take it over, but then they couldn't come to terms on salary and union regulations. It's a difficult company to govern. Tomasson was trained by Danish teachers and danced in Copenhagen (though not at the RDB, which at that time was closed to foreigners) in the 1960s. He has Danish sensibilities, and you can see it in the dancing, especially of the men. They almost have epaulement; their arms cross their bodies -- down, over, up, then out -- drawing your eye to the line of the leg and continuing the flow of the dancing to the music in three dimensions, which you NEVER see any more. The beats are splendid, as are the jumps and the small footwork. They aim for, and usually achieve, crisp landings and positions. The modesty of presentation -- no grins, no flopping hair, no wrist flicking -- is admirable. And they look like adults, even the very young. You don't have a sense of kids dancing Broadway, but young artists dancing ballet. All that I admire, and it's very much like Danish dancing of two decades ago. (And all this is living proof that it is possible to go back; or, more accurately, to hold the line and not let something that's good erode.) Perhaps the women are in the Danish mode, too. They seem to be either waifs or merry little things. I like Sherri LeBlanc a lot -- I think I'm in the minority here on this -- but she's ALIVE ON STAGE and I always give 10 points for that. She was one of the girls in Blue in "Dances" (Katita Waldo danced the role in the second cast) and both of them were the ones you noticed. Which, since the girl in Blue has the least to do is probably not the impression that ballet should give. Unlike the men, the women look small on stage to me -- small in presentation, in scale, not in size. That's the downside of Danish-style ballet. "Dances" was very controversial here. There were lots of grumbles from those who remembered the first City Ballet performances more clearly than I. Not strong enough, not City Ballet level, too emotional, and, most importantly, too pallid, not daring enough. I can see all those points, especially the lack of daring, but I still think the company let me see the ballet -- my threshold these days -- and they GOT the ballet, and there were some lovely moments in it. I agree with Ari, as I noted above, that Tan is no Patty McBride -- completely different type -- but she draws your eye, in her quiet way. The pas de deux with the man in Purple (Possokhov) was the emotional high point of "Dances." It made sense that it was the last big pas de deux -- they'd been avoiding each other, yet they were drawn to each other. You knew they'd have to dance together. There's a sense of melancholy in both dancers in nearly everything I've seen them do, and that's what drew them to each other. And they got too close, one word or gesture too much, and she pulled back. It was the most conversational of the duets, and very beautiful. It almost made up for the fact that, as a whole, this "Dances" doesn't have any edginess. I felt we'd seen the company plain, the way it wanted to present itself, for the first time in several season. Recently they'd been filling a festival role for the Kennedy Center -- an all-Robbins program for the Great Choreographers year; the bring-whatever-Balanchine-you-have-in-your-rep-this-season for the Balanchine Celebration. But this time, there were no restrictions. I think when you see the company in what it can do best -- small ballets that have good parts for soloists, who are generally very well-cast -- it is very impressive. But it has a ballerina problem -- several people mentioned that they missed Lacarra, or someone of her level. Tan and Maffre and Feijoo are exotics and they need a general, all purpose ballerina (and will have one in a few years in Zahorian, I think). And the corps isn't ABT or NYCB level. That said, I'd be quite happy to see them for more weeks, every year. The repertory is more balanced than most (see their full season schedule over on the American Ballet Companies forum). Tomasson has a very honorable history of encouraging new choreography, but he knows what to keep and what to discard. They still do mixed programs; the repertory isn't all crowdpleasing full lengths. What he's been able to accomplish in under 20 years is amazing.

Paul, I think I know what you mean about Tomasson's musicality -- I had that sense with Zahorian, too. At the first performance, she hadn 't found it, and at the second performance, she had. His musicality is melodic, closer to Ashton and Tudor than to Balanchine, I think, and, as with Ashton, I often think that a performance is analogous to the needle on an old record-player being slightly off the groove; you can still hear the sounds, but it's not RIGHT, and then the needle would slip into the groove and the sound would be right again. Van Patten was lovely as the second soloist in "Ballo," and she may well be ballerina material. She's got guts. I think she looked miscoached in Serenade and miscast in Prism. Paul, I hesitated to write anything about Long because I know you like her She seemed very likable, but in both Dances and Serenade -- and I'd say this of a lot of the women in solo roles -- I just didn't see any strength or scale -- i.e., the amount of space between the legs in the jumps in "Serenade" And I didn't see any personality; I saw a nice smile, but not a face, if that makes sense. And this, I realize, is one big difference between seeing a company every day and seeing them for a week once every year or two. I'd bet on Zahorian to be your Loscovio replacement

As for Program 2 in general: I saw it twice, and that's about the limit of my tolerance for "Chi-Lin." Structurally, you can't fault it. But it's so BORING. It reminded me of a David Bintley piece in SFB's repertory about a decade ago, something about an Egyptian temple and all these men dancing gods of the lung and liver. It was also BORING. And MacMillan's Rituals -- looks good, nothing there. And if you're going to do something based on Chinese mythology -- or Norse, or Greek mythology -- do a program note explaining it. I think Tomasson and the designer tried to do an explanation through design, with the four coins representing the four beasts being projected onto the curtain, and then kind of hovering over each dancer. But I thought the serpent was a dragon -- or a kind of long, funny Chinese dachsund. And you can't tell from the animals which one is air, water, etc. unless you've grown up in that world. The individual gods weren't characterized -- yeah, the turtle "swam," and maybe Chinese turtles are adept in the Australian crawl, but that's not enough. And Chi Lin is a unicorn, a sexually ambivalent figure -- or representing both sexes, but not a woman. Yuan Yuan Tan is very feminine, not ambiguous at all, and her choreography wasn't ambiguous. So it was a set of dances with a nice set. Maffre did the second performance, and I wondered why? I admire Maffre very much, but in this piece she's so different from Tan in every way -- line, approach, temperament -- that she looked miscast. I thought the "Serenade" staging was not good at all. I'd rank it as the second worst I've seen. On the first night (Wed) it was unbearably choppy, and the dancers didn't seem to know what was going on. Not that there is a story to "Serenade," but the dancers have to have an idea of what they're doing, in the sense that it makes sense to them. Here, we had, "Run on, extend your arms; she extends her arms, count, turn, run off." Feijoo was lovely (the jumping solo) but her dancing was so far above everyone else's, and so mature, she looked like the chaperone at a sorority picnic. The solos looked as though they'd been rehearsed in separate rooms -- Sarah Van Patten especially. DANCE IT BIG!!!! seemed to be her only instruction. Worst of all, they weren't dancing to the music; they were counting. I didn't care that the corps was ragged -- the lines were all over the place -- but I cared about the rest of it. At the second performance, the choppiness was gone, but except for Tan, they didn't have a second cast. The other dancers (Kristin Long and Catherine Winfield) weren't strong enough technically. I find this a problem with SFB in general. It's a company of first impressions. Opening night looks great -- and kudos to this; this opener was the most polished in recent memory. ABT always looks as though they've just rolled in an hour before curtain after a 2-year lay-off on opening night. Which side is front? Is Bayadere the one with the ramp? But SFB was ready for company, and that's great. But they don't have second casts. There's not enough depth. (And one explanastion for the often-commented on difference between newspaper and magazine reviews is that newspaper reviewers only write about opening night; magazine reviewers go back for seconds.) In the first performance of "Prism," Zahorian was in for Long in the first movement and didn't pull it together. At the second performance I saw (Saturday matinee) she did, and the ballet looked much more musical. Sarah Van Patten and Zachary Hench did the pas de deux and it was difficult to watch. Van Patten kept falling off point in the duets and looked visibly relieved when she danced her solos. I thought she was far to young and inexperienced -- technically and emotionaly -- for this, and wondered if we were being used as an out of town try out. She's a lovely dancer, and has a great deal of promise, but she needs time.

I think the audience liked it -- but audiences often applaud the DANCERS rather than the ballet, I think. And I'd also say that whether a ballet is popular and whether it is good are two very different questions. I liked "Prism" more than Ari did, but I take her points. As I wrote in my Post review, I think "Prism" deserves serious consideration -- I agree with Ari that it's a Balanchine derivative, but I think it's better than the usual run of that genre. I also think that Ari's point about it being broken up -- each movement led by a different dancer(s) -- and that this goes against the music is a good one. It's a case of using what LOOK like Balanchine rules the wrong way (think of Tchaikovsky piano concerto and its structure, as opposed to the "one ballerina per movement" of other works). I also thought the costumes were God Awful. Mustard and greige? Screaming lipstick red, with spangles, making the second ballerina look like a Vegas Act, dancing with a man in a rich rose blouse -- beautiful; I'd like several. And then put the man in the last movement in black? And call it Prism? And I'm forgetting the Pumpkin Ballerina in the first movement. Who is the Man in Black? "Prism" doesn't set its own stage. In Balanchine ballets, when each person comes out, s/he has a place in the ballet; you can sense it. The Man in Black could be from outer space, yet he leads the troops as though he's been there from the beginning. All that said, I do think (I'm repeating myself; I also wrote this in my review) that it's one of the very few classical ballets made in the last decade that's worth looking at more than once. And that's not a small accomplishment. I think one of the things we're missing now are the second, third, fourth-rate works. It's not all masterpieces. If you set that standard, you set yourself up for a repertory that's either Masterpieces or Drivel and Dreck.

Okay. This calls for drastic measures. Ari? Samba? Juliet? Ginny Kanter? KFM?? Sorry if I've forgotten anyone

Thanks for posting that, SABgurlie. I hope you'll help give courage to other new reviewers It's so nice to be able to read so many different opinions. And it is good news that at least one 14-year-old guy new to ballet liked the performance -- and good for you, for introducing someone to ballet. Now, if everyone did that, we'd double the audience for ballet in a year! Think of that!!

Yes, I remember your posts on updating classics, Pamela -- and it seems as though this Swan Lake has NOT been updated. We'll await your report on Mr. Cramer with interest.

I haven't seen it, but do have a news bulletin for you The Royal Swedish Ballet will revive Cramer's "Prodigal Son" this year. Check their web site -- it's an interesting season. Quirky, but interesting. Their Swan Lake is billed as "a classical ballet, traditionally staged." I don't know if that's a warning or an enticement. And they have a program from the '50s (the Cramer is on that) and some interesting mixed bills. Not the usual fare.

There have been LOTS of early bios, including LaFosse's (as noted earlier in the thread) and Nureyev's, which was done when he was about 25. (Although according to John Percival, he tried to get out of it when he finally got a job.) That's why I want a Rule. Picture books before 35, word books after

Thank you for posting this, Anoushka.

No takers on "Serenade," "Chi-Lin" and "Prism?" Surely SOMEONE saw this program. [tapping foot impatiently.....]

[Marie Hale, Artistic Director] Ocober 11, 12, 13 PBCC Eissey Campus Theater Allegro Brillante (Balanchine) Lento a Tempo & Apassionato (Vicente Nebrada) Steptext (William Forsythe) Read my Hips (Daniel Ezralow) Nutcracker December 23-28 Kravis Center for the Performing Arts Jan 31-Feb 1 Sphinx (Glen Tetley) In the Night (Jerome Robbins) CompanyPremiere Second Before the Ground (Trey McIntyre) March 21-22 The Lady of the Camelias - Val Caniparoli April 10-13 Company Premiere Bartok Concerto by Ben Stevenson Season Premieres Esmerelda & End of Time by Ben Stevenson An Exciting World Premiere by Jimmy Gamonet de los Heros Royal Poinciana Playhouse May 2-4 Ash by Peter Martins Three Preludes by Ben Stevenson Ballet To Be Announced Percussion for Six Men by Vicente Nebrada PBCC Eissey Campus Theater