Alexandra

Thanks for the specifics, Manhattnik. It sounds as though there isn't any direction, at least of this particular production. That it's a production that's been in repertory so long that nobody thinks about what s/he is doing. I especially liked your contrasting the cutting of Giselle's mother's mime speech about the Wilis with the leaving in of other extraneous mime speeches. (Makarova did something similar in ABT's "Swan Lake" that used to drive me crazy. She wouldn't do the beautiful mime passage of "my mother's tears filled this lake," etc, but kept taking an arabesque and miming "don't shoot the swans" over and over. Except, of course, they weren't swans by that time. This has become "standard" now.

There are a couple of things that you mentioned that may be a result of the Kirov's having an alternate version, though. The gesture of Albrecht going for his sword, I have read, is Western tradition, not Russian/Soviet. (In Erik Bruhn's biography, he is quoted as saying he learned that gesture from Igor Youskevitch, at ABT. Whether Youskevitch was the first to perform it, I don't know.) Also, I've seen the double daisy trick before. It can work if it's done well (usually done in the Albrecht the Cad interpretation, as opposed to the Albrecht in Love one). I think the point is that he doesn't believe in peasant superstitions, plucks another daisy to show her that it's the luck of the draw. Well, at least that's the way it looked when Rudi did it.

Alexandra

Paul, I think it seems obscure because most of us don't think about what production we're watching; we're there to watch the ballet, which usually means the dancing.

To some (definitely me) it matters a great deal which production of the ballet I'm seeing, and how well or ill it has been staged. (When you see "Theme and Variations," you expect to see a principal couple, four demisolist couples, and a corps of twelve couples. You expect certain steps. You expect that the costumes may vary, but will not likely be tank tops and blue jeans. Same for "Giselle," except there are production details -- props, mime, gesture, etc. -- that need to be taken into account as well.

To me, this was instinctive; don't know why. The first time I saw "Sleeping Beauty," (Nureyev, National Ballet of Canada) I wanted to know if I was seeing a "real" Sleeping Beauty and was very interested that the reviews pointed out that Nureyev had added several solos for the Prince, and why the Prince hadn't danced them in the first place, and what music he had used, and what had happened to the dances that had once been danced to that music. Maybe because I live in a city that has no home company (pace Washington Ballet), and so didn't "settle in" with any particular production of any particular ballet, I got used to seeing different productions of the same ballet done by different companies, and I definitely think it's the critic's job to know when something has been changed and to point it out and pass a judgment on the effect. Just as a music critic should notice if someone drops the second movement of a Mozart concerto, played on a synthesizer and played backwards, into Beethoven's Fifth, or if an actress decides to juice up Ophelia's part by adding a few lovely lines she penned herself.

The state of a production is a reflection of the state of balletmastering in the company -- a situation about which I have posted incessantly, because when something is wrong with a company, or about to go wrong with it, the first cracks show in the balletmastering -- in the rehearsing, in the care of a production, in the way a production is directed. If the action isn't clear in a ballet like "Giselle," that's a problem.

For what it's worth, the reports I've gotten on "Giselle" (about a dozen) are split down the middle. Half have admired the young ballerinas, and for some that is quite enough; but half have found the production soggy and boring.

I would be very interested to know whether people care about the production -- or, perhaps better, how important it is to you. Do you all think that it doesn't matter?

Alexandra

Sean and Barb, what full-length ballets does Pittsburgh perform, and what have you especially liked the Twins in? Pittsburgh Ballet doesn't get much coverage (as you've probably noticed) and so there may be people who don't know much about the company.

Alexandra

Thanks, Jeannie, for starting the new thread, and for your comments.

Sorry I misread you, Manhattnik.

Do you have any details on the missing mime? From what I've been hearing, there's a lot of mime that the old Royal production did not have. (Maybe it's important to know which Royal Ballet production, or at least which decade.)

I think I'd vote for a Prince with authority.

Alexandra

Maybe it's because I was desperate to learn about British ballet history, but I didn't find Vaughan at all dry, and I liked that he understood the distinction between public and private. I thought he gave a good sense of the man and the artist in any sense that interested me. We obviously have a different sense of dry. Dry, for me, in a biography is Richard Buckle's biography of Nijinsky. I love Buckle's wit in other writings, and I know he was writing a serious, scholarly biography, but I think it could have used a little mustard.

Alexandra

Edith, since the library has moved (temporarily) because of renovations, I don't know. New Yorkers! Please help.

alexandra

Edith, the video library is open to the public, but you have to book a chunk of time (last time I was there, it was two hours) well in advance, and you have to go there knowing exactly what you want to see, or you'll spend part of that two hours looking in a catalogue to find it.

Manhattnik, I don't know if it's open at present. The "party" took place in the good old days when the collection was less crowded. I understand that these days it's jammed with dancers trying to learn their roles from videos.

alexandra

Interesting. The one general praise that Julie Kavanaugh's book has been received is that the writing is quite fine.

A few years ago, two friends of mine went to the Dance Collection's video library on a slow day and had a "Don Q" competition, just for fun. They watched all the tapes they could find of the Don Q pas de deux. They said Slavenska won, hands down. Best technique, best aura, most sex appeal, best everything. Always wanted to see her.

The first thread is taking a long time to load, so I'm starting a new one.

Welcome, Alymer. It's especially nice to have someone else who's sensitive to style differences!

I can't add anything to your post except to second it. It's partly that gossip sells but it's also partly, I think, that in our information age, when it's possible to gather every piece of information, it's difficult to know what to use. Some people, of course, don't find that a problem and tell, or write, everything they know. And some people are afraid they'll be found not to have been thorough enough. Kavanagh may well have been in the latter group. She may have wanted to be conscientious. I also think that the book might be short on the artistic side because David Vaughan's critical biography is so complete it would be hard to better it. None of this makes me either like or admire the book any better, but it does make me understand it.

I asked around about the allegations that Ashton orchestrated an anti-MacMillan feeling in New York and couldn't find any substantiation of it among the New Yorkers I talked to who were there at the time. For one thing, Ashton didn't socialize with the NY critics, I'm told. For another, as some of the people I talked to said, "What anti-MacMillan faction?" (There were several New York critics who backed MacMillan for a long time as the best young classical choreographer, while, at the same time, being worried about why the Royal Ballet was beginning to look a bit different.)

Alexandra

Thanks, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that! There was an editorial in the other big Copenhagen paper, Berlingske Tidende, so strong and bitter that it almost spat blood a few months ago, actually demanding the resignation of the Board chairman, Niels Jorgen Kaiser (whose term has nearly expired, but who apparently insisted on having a hand in choosing yet another ballet director) and the Theater Chief, Michael Christiansen, whose last job (this is not a joke) was Permanent Undersecretary at the Ministry of Defense. Both men are far too powerful and too well-connected to be affected by anything written in a newspaper. My only intention, to be honest, was so at least there would be a public statement that people were aware of what they had done.

Alexandra

Yup. (that's "yes" in slang, Estelle!)

[ March 06, 2002, 01:17 AM: Message edited by: alexandra ]

I'm posting a (l-o-n-g) Op-Ed piece I wrote that was published in the Danish newspaper, Politiken, last week (before the announcement of the new director's appointment), because several people who have seen it have said it should appear somewhere in English. So here is "somewhere"! I hope to receive later today an English translation by Politiken of a commentary by their dance critic, Alexander Meinertz, on the same subject and will post that, too.

Wanted: A Balletmaster at Kongens Nytorv

By Alexandra Tomalonis

(Politiken, June 2, 1999)

When one looks at the troubles of the Danish Royal Ballet these past seven years, one can lay the blame squarely at two feet: it’s all Hans Beck’s fault. When Beck became the Royal Theatre’s balletmaster at the end of the last century, had he proclaimed himself a choreographer and purged the repertory of the Bournonville ballets, the Royal Danish Ballet today would probably be just another mediocre national ballet company and no one would much care who directed it. But Beck had a broader vision. In one of the most selfless and heroic acts in the history of dance, Beck realized that he was not a choreographer of Bournonville’s stature and that filling the repertory with inferior works would lower the company’s technical and artistic standards. And so he became a conservator. In doing so, he gave his company a great gift, and a great burden: a legacy unequaled in ballet, and one that was as fragile and as crucial to its identity and its fortunes as Cinderella’s glass slipper. Beck restored and revived the Bournonville ballets, prepared classes that would keep the dancers in shape to dance them, and so insured not only that those ballets would survive, but that the Royal Theatre would remain a house for classical dancing. He threw down a gauntlet that few have dared challenge: unless you can choreograph something equal or better, don’t try. Someday, he reasoned, there would be another Bournonville, and when that day came, he wanted to be sure that the company would be ready.

Beck’s work as the company’s director is often underappreciated, even ignored, because he was not primarily a choreographer, but “merely” a balletmaster, and the demand for a resident choreographer in Kongens Nytorv since his time (he resigned in 1915) has been shrill and incessant. There have been two in this century: Harald Lander and Flemming Flindt. Neither produced an enduring body of work, though each was immensely popular in his day. Lander ruled the company, and the repertory, with an iron fist. He threw out nearly half the ballets Beck had cherished; ironically, compared to today’s tastes, it was mostly the weighty historical and mythological works that were deemed too ponderous for modern times and disappeared during the 1930s. But the ballets that he spared (nine Bournonville ballets and Beck’s staging of Coppelia) remained the core repertory in the same way Petipa’s did in Russia; the other ballets were nearly all Lander’s own creations. Flemming Flindt’s works were more theater pieces than ballets, and he introduced modern dance to the company, but these works coexisted with both the Bournonville repertory and other classical and neoclassical ballets, and Flindt had first-rate balletmasters on the staff to rehearse them. Beginning with Niels Bjørn Larsen, artistic directors who followed Lander built an interesting repertory of ballets that fit the company’s talents perfectly, such as Carmen, La Sonnambula, Miss Julie, Lilac Garden, Romeo and Juliet, and Onegin.

In the past few years, however, it seems the Danish ballet has lost its way. The company doesn’t look like itself any more, visitors to Copenhagen report. Productions of great works have been seriously under par, and many of the new works have neither fit the company’s personality nor measured up to its past. Most alarming to foreigners, the Bournonville repertory seems in danger of being pushed off to the side, consigned to a separate compartment, to be dragged out on special occasions, perhaps, but no longer a living repertory.

That is why the ballet world is watching Kongens Nytorv so closely this spring, as the Royal Theatre struggles to find a new director, its fourth in five years. We watch in fascination and terror, much as art lovers would eye a wrecking ball driven by an earnest apprentice lurch across St. Peter’s Square with the Sistine Chapel dead in its sights. Surely the driver knows to be careful. Surely he knows the damage he can do. Surely he’ll make that left turn just in time…but, of course, the administrators of the Royal Theater are no mere apprentices when it comes to choosing ballet directors.

The Danish ballet has a curious standing internationally. By virtue of the Bournonville ballets and its history (with Paris Opera and the Maryinsky/Kirov, it’s one of only three 18th century ballet companies with a continuous tradition), the company is ranked at the very top, one of the six or seven greatest in the world. This is an astounding achievement for a company from so small a country. It is often said that when the company is doing what it does best, it is unsurpassed. The company has had a particular genius for taking minor works that are lifeless when danced elsewhere and making them great through performance. Yet there have been those both in and outside the Royal Theatre who have wanted to change the company, apparently thinking that glitter dust is what it will take for the Royal Danish Ballet to attain international standard, as though not realizing that it already has. Unfortunately, often when it tries to make these changes, it goes about it the wrong way, discarding the traditions and the ballets for which it is honored and acquiring more of those to which it is unsuited. Of course, what the international ballet world thinks would be irrelevant if that opinion did not seem to matter so terribly much to the company, but, to put it bluntly, the Royal Danish Ballet will lose its international standing if it persists in emulating what is standard fare in Cleveland.

Many of the aspects of “international standard” to which the company and the Theater’s administration are aspiring are really sub-standards. Most ballet companies elsewhere are supermarkets compared to the Danish ballet’s exquisite boutique. They use assembly line methods to produce and stage ballets and, in many cases, seem to be dominated by the marketing department more than any artistic sensibility. Foreign ways are seductive. For the past fifty years, there has been a very vocal segment of the Danish intelligentsia pressing for revisions of the Bournonville repertory along the lines of what has been done to other 19th century ballets elsewhere, suggesting that the ballets should be periodically revived as Shakespeare’s plays and Verdi’s operas have been revived, by transporting them different places and times and adding Freudian undertones to the plots. But ballets are neither plays nor operas, and while novelty has its undeniable charms, changing a ballet -- moving Napoli to Hamburg or adding the odd rape scene to Folk Tale -- would be like painting tears on the Mona Lisa because one is tired of her smile, or cutting those four annoying notes at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth: not a decorative, surface addition, but an alteration of their essential nature. Ballets are not merely plays with steps in them, but complicated mixtures of steps and gesture, music and drama, architecture and poetry, and tampering with one element without balancing the others is ill-advised. (It’s the choreography of the Bournonville ballets that is so admired outside of Denmark, not just the stories nor the charm of their telling.)

Although recent problems at Kongens Nytorv had been artistic rather than administrative in origin, administrators from outside the theater world were brought in to fix them -- which makes about as much sense as hiring plumbers to run the Ministry of Agriculture because of a drought. The New Team seemed to want to make a big splash, and so it hired a star, who brought with him the requisite revised stagings and international ways. But all artists are not cut out to work within the structure of an established institution, and that experiment ended rather quickly. After an interim period, during which careers flagged and ballets deteriorated, the Theatre brought in a director known for having stabilized a company in distress. This may have been ideal for a company that does not have traditions dating from the 18th century, but the Royal Theater is not a place that most outsiders could possibly understand in less than a lifetime, and so the “Help Wanted” sign has gone up again. Incredibly, to outsiders, the same people who’ve blundered so badly twice will have the chance to blunder yet again. This time, those who have lived with ballet at International Standard on a daily basis for some time now hope they will stop looking for a quick fix and select someone who can do the artistic work of the company and can lead it out of its present crisis: a balletmaster, and a Danish balletmaster, at that.

The craft of the balletmaster is a complicated one. Imagine an orchestra conductor who must teach each player his part note by note, coach him in phrasing and coloration, then not conduct the concert with the players seated, but arrange their movements to be pleasing to the eye. That is partly what a balletmaster must do in staging ballets. Only a balletmaster leader can reverse the bad, new trends. In companies elsewhere, dancers learn the steps from videos and get little or no coaching in style, or nuance, or characterization. In the Danish tradition, in the tradition of the Danish craftsman, ballets were set by hand. The balletmaster walked into the studio and put up the ballet, not from notation or videos (which began to be used elsewhere only out of necessity, in the absence of artists) but from his memory and experience. He taught the roles to each dancer, and he taught them whole: steps and style, musicality and drama, technique and atmosphere. Casting – the placing of the right dancer in the right role – has been the hallmark of the greatest Danish balletmasters, from Bournonville to Hans Beck, Harald Lander, Hans Brenaa and Henning Kronstam. Incisive casting isn’t choosing the quickest learner or fastest turner, but the person most suited to the role by temperament as well as technique. Danish balletmasters have been especially adept at creating dancers, and Danish dancers, for 50 years, have stood shoulder to shoulder with the very best dancers the world has to offer. The same cannot be said of dancers from, say, Berlin, or Australia.

While the drama and opera company directors may be primarily administrators (much like university deans), the balletmaster’s job is primarily that of an artist, and the major problem faced by the Royal Theatre for much of this decade has been the lack of balletmasters of the first rank. As recently as 1985, there were three: Hans Brenaa, Henning Kronstam, and Kirsten Ralov. By the fall of 1993, there were none. Brenaa died in 1988, Kirsten Ralov was eased out a few years later, and Kronstam was maneuvered out of the Theatre in the spring of 1993. Kronstam was the last great Danish balletmaster, and had been the central man in the studios at Kongens Nytorv for nearly thirty years. He has had no successor, and the diminution in the quality of what was seen on stage was evident from the time that he left. When he was there, however, few seemed to realize the value of what he did; it was as though the ballets somehow staged themselves. Recent stagings of Bournonville’s ballets should have put that notion to rest for all time. They have been messy, or watery, or frenetic or, if a ballet is particularly unlucky, a little of each. Some are little more than cartoons. Casting has seemed bizarre: in La Sylphide, for example, young Jameses dance Gurn and old Gurns, James. The “if you can do the steps you get the role” attitude that has spread through the ballet world like Dutch elm disease through the trees at Kongens Nytorv has also reached the Royal Theater.

At the Danish Royal Theatre, until the mid-1980s, the man in charge of the company was the balletmaster; or, to put it conversely, the balletmaster was the man in charge. He chose and cast the repertory, taught morning class (the necessary daily practice analogous to that of soccer players and pianists), and oversaw those productions that he did not actually stage himself. Administrative work was delegated, just as it would be in any organization: an assistant did the scheduling, secretaries handled correspondence. While artists may dislike administrative work (something often said about Kronstam, who hated going to meetings or making speeches, and was constitutionally incapable of complimenting naked emperors on their ties), disliking something and being incapable of doing it are very different things. It is a balletmaster who is needed now, someone who can begin the hard work of repairing nearly a decade of damage, and who will, one trusts, bring back to the company those artists still living who can help in the restoration and who can provide young dancers with badly needed models. If there is any hope of continuity, he should be someone who worked with Hans Brenaa and Henning Kronstam and Kirsten Ralov and who learned some of their secrets.

What has taken nearly 200 years to build and refine can be destroyed in a fraction of that time. There is a sense of urgency this spring. In another three or four years, nearly every dancer who has worked in any substantive way with a great balletmaster will be gone, and restoration will be all but impossible. The company needs an artist-leader now -- not a clerk, nor a p.r. man, nor a personnel manager, nor a big "name" who will use the company as a colony, nor an absentee landlord dispensing wisdom from afar, but someone who will put the company first, someone who can walk into those studios, clap his hands, and say, "Let's begin working." This time, the Theater cannot say, "But there just wasn't anyone, so what could we do?" The list of candidates has been published, and on it is at least one man, perhaps two, who have every qualification to do what is needed. There is a great fear that the Theater administrators, in their grand and proven wisdom, will not see him. The wrecking ball is geared up, poised for one terrible final blow. Is there no one in Denmark who will stop it?

No apologies necessary, Leigh. My hesitancy about the crossposting was simply because of the bandwidth consumption problem. We have a lot of long, long, long posts and, in web language, that's bandwidth. It's not a problem now; we're not near the limit. If it does become one in the future, I'll let you all know

Can't wait for your review of the "Snow Maiden"!

Alexandra

Lugo, I also like "Striking a Balance" very much. I kept thinking about it during our Swan Lake period, because one of the things I remember about that book was the British ballerinas talking about "Swan Lake" and how difficult it was. I read it wwhen I first discovered ballet, and before I had seen "Swan Lake," so it was odd, indeed! (Barbara Newman also wrote a biography of Antoinette Sibley, but good luck finding it.)

Ruby, it is old, from the mid-'70s, but she did an update a few years ago, with a few new interviews, that was available in paperback.

Have you tried the search engine at Barnes and Noble? The books I have listed on the site is rather minimal. The search engine is helpful for research (you don't have to buy anything to use it!), because if you, say, searched for the Taper biography, it will give you other "suggested" searches, like biographies, dance; or Balanchine; or biographies, ballet, etc.

Alexandra

p.s. They also have a rare books section now, which I found fascinating for browsing. We have a link to that, too.

Please continue posting here. Newcomers, or anyone who has not already answered this question, please tell us how you discovered ballet, either as a dancer or as a watcher (or both, of course!).

If you haven't checked the original thread in a few weeks, there are some new posts on it from Savoye, Lauren and Mary which I think are quite interesting, so please go there and read, but come here to post.

Thanks,

Alexandra

Thanks, Savoye and Lauren, for reviving this thread. I enjoyed reading your stories!

Please reply to Mary's question, or add your own "How I discovered ballet stories" on a new thrad. This one is getting too long, so it will be closed.

In theory, I agree with you completely -- that it's dangerous to think you can make a ballet out of any classic, and that there are many subtleties in literature that don't translate. I thought this about Onegin, too, until I saw a performance by the Royal Danish Ballet (six years ago, before they fell apart). The dancers and the direction of it made it seem like a different ballet.

I found your comment about irony especially interesting. Irony is a Danish specialty, and perhaps that was the key to it. Onegin (Arne Villumsen) wasn't a cad -- the production had an absolute sense of place and cast -- and Tatania (Heidi Ryom) was bookish and awkward. In the dream scene, they did something I've never seen, and that absolutely made the ballet. You knew it was a dream. It was that simple. It wasn't just First Pas De Deux. Villumsen began it cold and distant, and, as the pas de deux progressed, became increasingly warm and ardent -- he became her dream. The performance made me wonder all the more, is it the dance or the dancers. Can a ballet be mediocre choreographically and great in performance? (The reverse is certainly true.) In this one instance, the answer was yes. Which leads to the next question. If a ballet can seem great in performance, yet mediocre in most performances, who's "fault" is it?

Alexandra

Thanks for the video info, Jeannie. I had that one once and somehow managed to lose it! Or at least, it's buried at the bottom of a pile.

I had an interesting experience once, when teaching a "dance appreciation course." I showed them Pavlova, Plisetskaya, and Kirkland. Of course, I wanted them to like Pavlova best -- or at least, not to laugh. And I thought they'd like Kirkland best, because she was the most contemporary and was so young. But the one they ADORED was Plisetskaya. Even the baseball boys wanted to see it again.

alexandra

I share your comment about lack of good videos of Kirkland. There is the Baryshnikov at Wolf Trap, though. Isn't that in commercial release? Or was that only if you taped it? There is a "Theme and Variations" from Live from Lincoln Center, but not in commercial release.

Kirkland's was the the second Sylph that I saw (the first was Gregory, at her tallest and most clunky) and she's still my favorite ABT sylph. But then I went to Denmark and saw Lis Jeppesen.

alexandra

Mary, Van Hamel DID do the Lilac Fairy, and she was wonderful. (In the short-lived Messel production.) But I liked her Aurora better, I think. When she hit her mid-'30s, I got the sense that she stopped competing and started enjoying dancing. Some of her performances with Patrick Bissell -- her Kitri and her Aurora -- were very mellow (I mean that in a good way. Not that she grew lazy.)

When I finally met her to do a brief interview, I was amazed at how small she is. She was one who was always getting criticized for being overweight, or at least looking too large on stage (never bothered me).

alexandra

I can't answer on Guerin; hope someone else can. The only ones I've ever seen are ones a friend taped for me off French TV.

But Makhalina is on a video of the Kirov's "Swan Lake," I think, the Vinogradov production. I will refrain from commenting on that production, since you only asked about the dancer!

I liked Makhalina very, very much when I first saw her about ten years ago -- Giselle, Lilac Fairy, and Medora in Corsaire. She was all young and fresh and dewy and adorable; wobbly turns, but I didn't care. I liked her less later on. I saw a Tchaikovsky pas de deux that was positively lewd. I offer that comment only to say that if she's hiding on one of those wonderful More Great Nights at the Kirov videos, I hope you see it.

alexandra

I've always liked Nichols' dancing, but never understood why so many consider her one of the Great Ones. For me, there has to be more than a pure technique. Some of the things Lillian mentioned have bothered me, too, although I've certainly never dreaded seeing her. I agree with Leigh that she's lyrical and musical, and there are certain moments of performances that thrilled me, but they are small ones. But there's ultimately a lack of polish that separates her from ballerinas like Platel or Guerin or Asylmuratova who, to me, are the great classical ballerinas of the day.

Alexandra

We've beaten -- or praised -- poor "Manon" a lot lately, and it seems that there are those who feel that it's one of the great masterpieces of ballet, and those who would still argue that it was second-rate, at best, were it granted the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm curious to know what you all think of Cranko's "Onegin?"

It was wildly popular in America when the Stuttgart first brought it in the '60s (and wildly popular in Stuttgart). There was the usual divide among critics here, with Clive Barnes saying it was a masterpiece and that Cranko was a great choreographer, and Arlene Croce practically throwing up in Ballet Review, in one of the most passionate, partly vicious, partly funny assessments of a ballet and a company ever written (in which she coined the phrase "pop ballet" of "Onegin," predicting, direly, that it would be the direction ballet would head.)

I missed "Onegin" in its bloom of youth, not seeing it until the late 1970s, and I've always found it very dependent on its cast. I've seen wretched "Onegins," that make Croce's review seem kind, and I've seen very fine ones. I take her point that it's a simplistic retelling of both the poem and the opera, but find the other complaint of anti-Oneginers -- that its structure is too simple, there are no small classical roles (one of the elements that makes a ballet choreographically complex) -- accurate, but not insurmountable. It suited the very young company (many were upset that Cranko had created a work that made his very young company look like a very grand and comparatively established one, i.e., the Royal at that time); we don't know what Cranko would have accomplished had he been able to develop that company had he not died so young.

How do we divide over "Onegin" now? A grand, new idea of ballet, or the end of civilization as we know it? Or something in between?

alexandra

[This message has been edited by alexandra (edited April 23, 1999).]

Please continue to post on Paquita's Dance Books thread -- what books about ballet you particularly enjoy -- here. (Ballet books, of course!) The first thread is v-e-r-y long.

Thanks,

alexandra