Alexandra

Those costuming conventions are one of the things that drove Fokine crazy and led to his reforms. (And thanks, too, for the reviews!)

Perfectly appropriate, but thanks for asking (A brochure is fair game.) I have to say I've found it fascinating that this board, consistently over the past two or three years (and new Part/Meunier fans join in every year), has been interested in dancers that ABT does not seem to be interested in. There's a disconnect in there somewhere! I don't know for a fact who puts together those brochures. Individual photos would have to be approved, but who's chosing them? Management, marketing strategists, designer? A photo might be chosen because they need a vertical rather than a horizontal, or the colors of the costume might go better with the brochure colors, for all I know. (That's the thinking that often goes into design in print media.)

I think there's enormous pressure to "be supportive." I've seen and heard a company press person come to a critic and say, "Mr. X is sure you would want to know that we're up for a make or break grant and this season means everything to us." I've had a company director say, as one example, "It would help us if you would write blah blah blah." And I know how I felt when I panned a small company and then read in the paper the following Monday that it had gone under. I have no idea if the two were causally related, but of course, like the small child who thinks that a citywide power blackout happened because he didn't eat his spinach, I felt guilty about it for months. (And this isn't counting the "friends of Maestro" who'll call and say, "I just thought you ought to know that Maestro has been in a deep, clinical depression since your review last Friday.") Many board members and fans, too, identify very strongly with the company and wouldn't care if someone had Quasimodo do the Sugar Plum Fairy variation on skates. It's our company, it's Our Johnny dancing Quasimodo, and it's wonderful. Of course, on this question I'm totally, utterly biased! I thought Strini stated his "aesthetic values" quite clearly:

Mindy Aloff's Letter from New York this week in DanceView times is about Music and Dance of the Jewish Wedding

Nancy Dalva reviews Ballet Preljocaj for DanceView Times: A Decorative Life

Amy, they're all good questions, but an answer would literally be a book! Carol Lee's "A History of Ballet in Western Culture" addresses all of these. A short answer is that ballet started to move from social dancing to performance (at court) in Italy, was developed in France. The language of ballet iis French, as the language of music is Italian, because when the professionals started to take over in France they began naming steps, etc., in their own language. Opera and ballet began as one art form and -- meaning the court entertainments combined dancing with singing and declaimed poetry -- gradually developed separately. The Italian teachers and theorists kept training dancers, and there was ballet in Italy, but opera was more popular. Paris became the arts capital of Europe and dancers went there to become polished, and also to dance. Italy supplied many dancers to Paris, as well as to Russia, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

While in Tæt på click on Foto and see the Bournonville calendar. (You have to click on each picture to see it; there's one per month.)

It's never to late to report on a performance you saw! Thank you. And belated thanks to Jack and flipsy, too; I missed your posts when they first went up. I love it that people are actually going down to Miami to see ballet! (build it, and they wil come......) Bet MCB loves it too!

Herman, I was curious on one point (Volkova), and that's been satisfied. If I have the time, I'll read it, but it's the end of a very long list. The excerpts in The Telegraph were enough for me. atm, I agree. If Shearer had opened I'd guess she would have gotten a tumultuous reception because of "The Red Shoes". She was known; Fonteyn was unknown. Other opinions of the book? The Amazon reviews so far have been favorable; people are enjoying this book. ARe there others here who liked it?

It's been a long time since college Latin but I think it means "Let no one touch me." Why? (Not something the ballerina says during pas de deux rehearsals!)

Thanks!

That Ashton didn't care for her is true, I think, (by several accounts, including his) and she did get middling reviews for not only Giselle, but Aurora and Odette -- she first danced them as a teenager and had never seen the ballets, so her first performances couldn't have been of ballerina caliber. (I write that, of course, not having seen them!) Just curious -- and then I'll stop debating by proxy a book I haven't read -- what does she say about Vera Volkova? She worked with the Sadller's Wells dancers for most of the 1940s and was very influential on Fonteyn. and coached her extensively in Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.

Fonteyn started working with Ashton when she was 16 (the year that, according to a quote in the Vaughan biography of Ashton, P.W. Manchester said, after one of her performances in "The Lord of Burleigh," "That was the night we all knew she was the one!") If the book portrays her as "simply a reliable Sadler's Wells dancer" that certainly does shed a different light on things. But what?

Thanks for posting this, Effy -- I'm sorry; I just noticed it! Well. The Kalendar is truly special! It's undoubtedly well-intentioned I agree, the photo shoot with Lund, and the Rose Gad section, are "let's show them as people and try not to mention anything about ballet." It's going to be a long century..... Here's the link: Young Ballet

Tom Strini asks the question "Can high art survive by aiming low?" in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/arts/nov04/274260.asp

I noticed that too, and wondered if it was the hardwired publisher's instinct -- what's really important is that it SELLS I haven't read this book; I read the excerpts in "The Telegraph" and that, plus conversations with a few friends who have read it, was enough for me, at least for now I am not an admirer the current school of biography, which seems to collect as many stories as one can and put them in a book without filtering them, or placing them in context. This complaint can be made about other recent books as well. If someone writes 15 letters, then all of them get in, regardless of the letter writer's importance to the subject's life, or the veracity or worth of the material in the letters. Etc. From my own experience researching and writing a biography, people lie, or innocently repeat a lie, or can simply misperceive things. When I began writing my book, I was given, by well-meaning friends, the names of three people I absolutely had to talk to. Two turned out to be completely unreliable, at least in part maliciously so, and the third depended on the other two for his/her information. Some dancers could (understandably) only see their careers through the "why didn't I get that role!" lens and had very imaginative answers to that question, which did not include physical or artistic limitations that seemed clear to choreographers, teachers, other dancers, etc. Do you just put in the "I didn't get the role because I never invited him to my birthday party" story and leave it at that? Or do check it and consider that a dancer's torn Achilles tendon may possibly have something to do with an artistic director's casting decision and toss the story out? I also found that some people just lied for the hell of it. There was one particularly vicious rumor that I'd heard from three or four people, checked it with at least a dozen others who were eyewitnesses, and found it false; then I heard it again. When I asked the fourth person, whom I'd trusted, where he had heard this, saying I'd checked this and it simply wasn't true, he was completely nonplussed and said, "Oh, you're checking these stories? That's good. That's good." As for repeating third hand sexual gossip from only one source, there's no obligation to put everything in a book, and there should be some ethical stop in oneself to prevent one from repeating an offhand comment someone made in his kitchen, or at a party, or in the shower, that was never intended to be repeated, much less preserved for posterity. I'm assuming that editors and publishers are driving this trend, and I eagerly await The Next New Thing. But all this said, I was interested to read the (very good!) Amazon reviews that indicated at least two readers, when I checked, liked the book very much, and were NOT drawn to it primarily for its more juicy bits. (Perhaps publishers might check those reviews once in awhile.)

If Leigh doesn't mind, since I'm here, I'll give some answers. I'm teaching ballet history this year, and we just had to grapple with both of these. 1. Deus ex machina was, literally, a device in Greek and Roman theater that lowered a god down from the "heavens" to the stage, at the time when the heroine was tied to the railroad tracks, so to speak, to resolve an unresolvable situation. During the 18th century neoclassical period, this custom was revived, and the term has come to mean that when someone is in an impossible predicament, Fate or the gods, or whoever, intervenews: oh, you're late on your taxes and owe the government $10,000 and, just at the very moment you're about to pick up the phone and tell them to come and take you away, a tidal wave hits the government building, destroys all records, and a general tax amnesty is issued. 2. Apotheisos meant to deify, and came to mean an exemplar -- He was the apotheosis of honor. I don't know how it got into ballet, but one example is the very ending -- as you divined, grace! -- of "Sleeping Beauty" when, originally, Apollo descended from the clouds, surrounded by all the fairies, to bless the wedding and give the broad hint that Louis XIV (the Sun King) had a strong connection with the current Tsar of Russia.

Thank you for this, Leigh -- I look forward to reading more!! And welcome, Martha F. Thanks for your comments, and I hope you'll keep us posted on what you're seeing. I need a "Les Noces" fix -- it's one of my favorites, and I haven't seen a live performance in about five years. Green green (Estelle, some of the emoticons didn't make the software upgrade, unfortunately.)

Hi, Alice -- the Farrell company doesn't offer a year-round contract, so there's a lot of turnover. There's a bit of uncertainty about the company's future now, it seems. This year's tour was cancelled, and there's been no announcement yet of what's in store after this spring's revival of Balanchine's "Don Quixote." I can't help trace your friend, I'm afriaid -- perhaps another one of our readers will know where Erin Ackert is.

Just a quick Administraotr's Note, as I'd missed this -- it doesn't matter whether one thinks that Bourne's "Swan Lake" is good or bad, or somewhere in between. It can certainly be discussed on the site, but on the Modern Dance forum, please.

Sorry, Herman, but all of pre-MacMillan people have not all died off yet! I expect that some of them will be reviewing this book.

Your grandson may have liked R and J -- I just saw a photo!! Sorry it was a disappointment.

Now I'm really curious about "Fancy Free" -- is it a piece that just doesn't travel well? Or is the problem in performance? It's not my favorite ballet, but I've never seen a performance that didn't work with ABT, even with a less than ideal cast. The audience always seems caught up in it and laughs. Good to hear that Gitte Lindstrøm is having a good season. She'd been out for quite awhile with an injury, if I remember correctly.

Thanks for that, Effy, although it does sound like a dispiriting evening. (Talent management. What a lovely, and appropriate, phrase! I think if the "manhandling" you write of in Fancy Free is the scene where the boys steal the girl's handbag and tease her, if it looks too much, that's the fault of either the staging/coaching or the dancers rather than the ballet. It didn't always look lilke that -- it was more like boys in the schoolyard, teasing a girl. But there was never any thought that they'd do anything more than tease her.

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