drb

... Hopefully there won't be any autobiographical Martins Family ballets any time soon....

Perhaps they could commission Eifman to do it. It would only be fair....

I'd have expected Part to be type-casted as Lilac (which I still hope she dances too). This is a bonus almost too good to be true: Mariinsky in Mariinsky!

Another huge plus is that Veronika's partner is Gomes, meaning he won't partner Vishneva: Diana's partner is now scheduled to be soul-mate Vladimir Malakhov! Even if the AD's creativity is not completely subdued by Gelsey Kirkland, such partnerships as these two pairings will deliver the goods.

...

I would like to also add that I have the video of this performance and last night Gillian Murphy and the ABT in general carried it beyond to a new level of excellence. ...

Actually, every Swan Lake of hers that I've seen has far surpassed the video: it helps when the ballerina is not dancing after an injury! It also helps when she's working with a partner with whom she's developed a rapport and chemistry, although I suppose one (but not I) can understand the commercial need to cast for maximal star-attraction for a telecast/video. I'm assuming her Detroit Siegfried was Ethan Stiefel, as listed in ABT's casting? As a long-term couple and frequent partners, that must have contributed greatly. And bravi to the Detroit audience for giving such a joyous response to dancers without the cachet of Russian names!

I hope someone will review her second Detroit performance, where her Siegfried is listed as Jose M. Carreno. He was her Siegfried for some performances a few years ago, including that magic matinee with the bawling kids, that they transcended with one of the most intense White Swan pdd's I've ever seen.

... The YAGP 2007 Gala starts at 7 PM, Monday April 30 and a ticket is also valid for the Awards Ceremony that begins at 5 PM.

Just checked City Center and tix are getting scarce. Top priced seats left are way to the side and mid Mezzanine Center only has singles left. Rear Mezzanine does still have good centered seats remaining.

The stars, from YAGP's site:

Aurelie Dupont and Manuel Legris

(Paris Opera Ballet)

Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares

(Royal Ballet, England) - NY Debut

Alicia Amatriain and Jason Reilly

(Stuttgart Ballet) - NY Debut

Cecilia Kerche and Vitor Luis

(Ballet of the Teatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro) - NY Debut

Sang-Yi Han (Monte Carlo Ballet, YAGP Alumna)

Isabella Boylston (American Ballet Theatre, YAGP alumna)

and David Hallberg (American Ballet Theatre)

Stella Abrera and Sascha Radetsky (ABT)

Paloma Herrera (American Ballet Theatre)

Ashley Bouder (New York City Ballet)

and Joseph Phillips (San Francisco Ballet, YAGP

Alumnus)

Rubinald Pronk and Clifford Williams

(Complexions Contemporary Ballet)

MOMIX

International ballet super-stars Manuel Legris and Aurelie Dupont (Paris Opera Ballet) will lead the international all-star cast in "Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow," Youth America Grand Prix's annually sold-out Closing Night Gala. These leading ballet dancers will join the finalists of YAGP ballet and contemporary dance competition in one spectacular Gala evening.

...Similarly, have BT posters noticed that even though there are many Asian-American women students in SAB, there has never been ONE admitted to the Company? But that's a different thread.

That is weird, hopefully someone informed on this issue might start such a thread. There are a number of star-quality Asian ballerinas in other companies, and if you look at lists of recent competition winners...

Asian men don't seem to be faring all that well at NYCB either:

Masahiro Suehara, an Asian male dancer who impressed The Times, BTers and me this winter in Balanchine (Tea in Nutcracker) and Martins (Jester in Sleeping Beauty), is now with LA Ballet and earning praise on a LAB BT thread for his work in Bournonville. While, perhaps, talent in works by these three choreographers would not bear directly on one's future value to City Ballet, his departure (sure he was just listed as a guest artist...), and that of Edwaard Liang, seem to leave the tall William Lin-Yee as NYCB's lone Asian-American. Given his excellent partnering and chemistry with Kaitlyn Gilliland, he could be very important to the future of the company; I hope he stays.

That the word "principal" only appears as a spelling error in an article on a dancer this good is an embarrassment: no, not to the writer but to a management that keeps such a charismatic star in the corps.

I see that The Pillow's site confirms the program listed above. It also offers some large photos, including in (last photo) the budding Farrell, Nino Gogua, and young male star Lasha Khozashvili:

http://www.jacobspillow.org/gallery/category.asp?catid=2

From the ananiashvili.com 2005 interview with Bart Cook and Maria Calegari, remarks on some dancers they especially liked:

Maria: There was a boy [Lasha Khozashvili], a natural for Apollo---beautiful like Michelangelo’s “David” with a nymph-type face. He also had a pretty good technique. And there was girl---Nino Gogua--- with dark Georgian hair [she] had the body, feet, extension that even Suzanne Farrell would envy. She also had a natural feminine grace. Of course her technique has some ways to go, but she has such great potential.

Bart: Yes---there was a girl---Nino Gogua, quite green, not much stage experience and she needs to develop strength. But she came through when she had to substitute for injured colleagues. And there were the other ballerinas Tsicia [Cholokashvili], Lali [Kandelaki], Anna.

There are some photos of these and other dancers on Nina's site as well. Of course there must be others to look forward to as well, in a company of Nina plus 15 soloists and a corps of 67.

Subscription tickets arrived today (no word on single ticket orders). Priority exchange dates are Sunday March 25 - Saturday March 31.

Tickets are now on sale for the five Swan Lakes at Spoleto/Charleston, including the two with Nina Ananiashvili and Sergei Filin:

http://tickets.spoletousa.org/eventperformances.asp?evt=15

The company's schedule and Nina's performance dates have been posted on her website:

NINA'S PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE ON TOUR WITH THE STATE BALLET OF GEORGIA FOR THE 2007 SEASON

Cast and schedule subject to change, please double check before purchasing tickets

SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA, CHARLESTON, SO. CAROLINA

Date Theater/Location Ballet Partner/Cast

2007

June 7 Charleston, South Carolina Swan Lake Nina with Sergei Filiin; State Ballet of Georgia

June 8 Charleston, South Carolina Swan Lake The State Ballet of Georgia

June 9, Mat Charleston, South Carolina Swan Lake The State Ballet of Georgia

June 9, Eve Charleston, South Carolina Swan Lake Nina with Sergei Filiin; State Ballet of Georgia

June 10 Charleston, South Carolina Swan Lake The State Ballet of Georgia

NEW HAVEN FESTIVAL OF ARTS & IDEAS

Date Theater/Location Ballet Partner/Cast

2007

June 15 New Haven Festival of Arts & Ideas, New Haven Giselle Nina with Filin; State Ballet of Georgia

June 16 New Haven Festival of Arts & Ideas, New Haven Giselle Nina with Filin; State Ballet of Georgia

JACOB'S PILLOW, LEE, MASSACHUSETTS

Date Theater/Location Ballet Partner/Cast

2007

June 20 Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 1 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

June 21 Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 2 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

June 22 Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 3 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

June 23, Mat Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 4 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

June 23, Eve Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 5 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

June 24, Mat Jacob's Pillow, Lee, MA Performance 6 Nina with The State Ballet of Georgia

(An earlier posting on her site stated that the Pillow ballets would be Mozartiana, Second Before the Ground, Grand Divertissement from Don Quixote.)

Some background information. Swan Lake is a production set on SBG by Alexei Fadeyechev in 2005.

Mozartiana was due to Bart Cook and Maria Calegari, also in 2005. Prior to this Suzanne Farrell had coached Nina in the lead role. Second Before the Ground is Trey McIntyre's ballet to African music arranged by the Kronos Quartet.

Just noticed this on NYCB's site:

Friday, June 22 at 8pm

Kyra Nichols Farewell

Serenade

Robert Schumann's "Davidsbundlertanze"

"Der Rosenkavalier" from Vienna Waltzes

Important Note: Tickets for June 22 have been on priority sale to NYCB subscribers and donors for several weeks. Only a few tickets remain in the Orchestra, First and Second Rings. You may place an order online for Third or Fourth Ring tickets only; but NYCB cannot guarantee that all orders placed can be honored. It is expected that these seats will remain available for only a brief time.

Did Carla Körbes perform in Polyphonia in NYC?

I don't recall seeing her in it in NYC, but she did dance (Whelan's role) in Polyphonia during NYCB's visit to Edinburgh in March, 2001, to very favorable reviews in an otherwise disastrous non-Balanchine program.

A post by bart today in Writings on Ballet references an article on ballet writers that ends with the following remark:

...to quote Denby, from a review that discussed the problem with dance photography:

"A shot can show you only one gesture, which is like hearing only one note of a piece of music, or one word of a poem. The more painstaking the photograph, the more pointless the effect. You don't see the change in the movement, so you don't see the rhythm, which makes dancing. The picture represents a dancer, but it doesn't give the emotion that dancing gives you as you watch it."

Leave it to Denby to get it just right.

This was in the context of the article writer's displeasure with some studio shots. However, I think there are photographers who do capture "the emotion that dancing gives you as you watch it." Recent examples would include Gene Schiavone's pictures of Vishneva/Malakhov in ABT's Manon (I saw the performances live), available on his website, and many of the photos in Rosalie O'Connor's Getting Closer: A Dancer's Perspective (again, including those of performances I'd attended).

Of course the photography I reference was of live performance, and I tend to agree with Denby on posed studio pictures.

http://www.charlierose.com/index.html

The Misha show has slipped off the Rose page, but if you go down the right-hand column and click on his Google site you'll get to a number of old shows. Add to what is already in his search box the word Baryshnikov and you will get the show, and in a much larger size than what has been on before.

Our friends above, at Amazon, give 20 30-second bits of Il Sogno, sort of impressionistic, tonal, standard orchestra, melodic, lyrical. So not likely the kind of his music she'd go for; more likely the creative stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Il-Sogno-Elvis-Coste...73331889&sr=1-1

I see that the videocast is slipping down toward the bottom of the page. Don't know if this means it might cease to be available, but ...

http://www.charlierose.com/index.html

Ballet National de Marseille will be this summer's Festival ballet company, playing at the NY State Theater in mid July. The work, Metapolis II, has a choroegrapher and an architect (a great one, but no music listed), and is about people in an evolving city.

http://www.lincolncenter.org/press_release...FESTIVAL_07.pdf

Has anyone seen this, or its earlier incarnation? Does the company also dance any of the classical rep?

I understand that in Peter Martins's Romeo & Juliet, the title characters will be portrayed by students at the School of American Ballet....

It is probably a good idea to make NYCB's version clearly distinct from the usual productions -- look how much grief Martins has taken from people who mistakenly think his Swan Lake is Swan Lake.

Looking back at the subscription brochure, it mentions bringing together dancers, students and faculty. Also gives a running time of 2 hours 15 minutes, not as long as the traditional, but perhaps there will be fewer intermissions. But the brochure says nothing about lead casting.

One wonders what City Ballet's ballerinas will be doing for two weeks. Even if it were traditional, there'd only be one ballerina job per show. So if Martins uses students as leads, perhaps they will each have a pair of older siblings to extend Mercutio and Benvolio to, say, two women and two men (only speculating). With children, I suppose the balcony scene will be different, you wouldn't want to have a girl risking running down the stairs and a boy doing those lifts...

... but if it were me I'd be curious to see "Red Giselle."

I understand that there's a cultural bonus in Red Giselle: at one point, to Tchaikovsky's Serenade, you get to see a ballerina fall a la Balanchine.

Russian Hamlet (Beethoven/Mahler pastiche) has been especially unsuccessful in America and on other tours, which may be the reason for just two performances. However, in 2000 it received seven performances in the Bolshoi rep, five of them starring Masha Alexandrova in the role of Catherine the Great, mother of Prince Paul (the Russian Hamlet). She liked the ballet (susequently, she has frequently danced a PdD from it at Galas) and said she learned a lot from it, including how to make a lift look beautiful. She also said it helped her overcome a phobia for heights, as she had to come down from a height of 4.5 meters. Since anything associated with Masha Alexandrova, even once-removed (she is NOT in his company), must have some merit, I think I'll go have a look at it.

Thak YOU, Artist, for bringing up this topic, and for prompting the post by 4mrdncr, one of the most helpful and educational posts I've read on BT.

... a girl with a long ponytail dancing a pas de duex. Can you imagine being the guy and getting whipped in the face with that during turns?

Yes.

Long hair was always important to Mr. B. When the teen-aged young marrieds were faced with economic hardship, first wife Tamara Geva had her knee-length hair shorn to make some money. So it may not be a surprise that when he made his Valse Triste (1922) on first muse Lydia Ivanova, her long hair --said to have been thrown with Isadora Duncan-like abandon-- was a crucial component in its performance. And when last muse Suzanne Farrell returned, he created the wildly hair-tossing Tzigane for her.

This season's Walpurgisnacht exploited the freeing of long hair in creating the feeling of frenzie as the beautiful witches began their annual rite. Clues that the hair was real, as suggested by other posters --non-uniform length and color, the natural freedom of flow, certainly led me to believe they weren't using wigs.

However, in leading roles that feature long hair some short-haired ballerinas have supplemented their filamentous failings. You may find specific examples in last year's Dancers thread on Short Hair. I suppose augmentation would be less a problem for a soloist, but would stand out like a sore thumb in the corps. Yet, seeing hair-dancer Janie Taylor this season in the Robbins Faun, well, that was the real thing: cropping that hair would be a mortal sin, comparable to breaking a dancer's leg.

I tried online sales this morning, but it is just like last season: no selection process is in effect.

Caveat emptor.

...This moves me back to Paul Parish's post, which suggested that one that has to look at differences in specific movements.

For instance, if you take a particular dance movement -- port de bras, balances, cambres, rising on pointe or descending into plie, jumping, turning, or whatever -- is there something that Giselle should do ("romantic") that Odette/Odile does differently ("mixed") and Aurora even more differently ("classical")?

In the "long ago" I, a non-dancer, was a ballet cretin, and the Swan Lake/Giselle comparison was given to me so I could see the difference. Back then there were splendid versions of both ballets, readily available. But such was not the case with Sleeping Beauty. Of course, we've since lost Swan Lake too. (But we should all be confident that ABT's Mr. McKenzie will soon return Aurora to her proper environs.) With all the complaints about the state of ABT's aged Giselle sets, I'm sure we won't see that old tattered gem again. Will there be another choregrapher's name attached when Giselle comes back? Of course this is not a problem limited to what can be seen in America. The empirical luxury afforded me at my beginnings seems lost to the Genius of modern-day ADs.

I thank Artist for beginning Paul Parish's project, her words resonate with real differences experienced in those early days. As empirical experience becomes less reliable, such inquiry becomes all the more important. This is a really difficult project, being akin to so many efforts at understanding emploi (put that in BT's Search and you'll find a book-length of material!) here at BT.

In the field of mathematical statistics there is something called variance explained: When comparing a given movement by dancers in two ballets each performed by a different company, I wonder which, the periods of the ballets or the styles (if any) of the companies, would contribute more to the variability we experience in that particular movement?

Years ago I was told the distinction was

Classical: Odette-Odile

Romantic: Giselle

Throughout years of ballet-watching it has been extremely rare to find a ballerina truly excel (I mean absolutely top world class) in both roles, or even to be allowed to dance both (consider the recent hassle at the Mariinsky when Gergiev "allowed" Vishneva (a fabulous Giselle) to dance O/O). The great exception was Natalia Makarova, who was right at the top in both roles. In recent times there was Nina Ananiashvili. Maybe this means there are just a rare few ballerinas who are fully both Classical and Romantic, although many are some of each, as they'd better be if, as Hans points out, they want to work.

I look forward to Gillian Murphy tackling the Romantic rep; it should be beautiful. I've always seen Ashley Bouder as a natural for Giselle, but the role she's tried and of course conquered is Odette-Odile.

Quoting Balanchine*:

"Giselle's innovation is its summing up of what we know as the Romantic ballet. To be romantic about something is to see what you see and to wish for something entirely different. This requires magic."

What he finds unique about Odette-Odile is that other great ballet heroines "have some relation to the real world" whereas Odette-Odile "is a princess of the night, she is all magic, a creature of the imagination."

*Stories of the Great Ballets