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R S Edgecombe

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Everything posted by R S Edgecombe

  1. Not to worry, RG, I have been having such moments with increasing frequency ever since I turned 50 last year. Heather sweet-naturedly calls them my "senior moments"--as when I recently told Mel that I thought ailuros was the Greek word for mongoose, and found out today that the OED cheerfully glosses ailuros as cat. Though it must be Hellenistic Gk, because I can't find an entry for ailuros in my (abbreviated) Liddell and Scott, which was co-authored by Alice in Wonderland's papa (I think--another senior moment threatens!). Thanks for disconnecting the tunic from The Talisman. I looked at Nijinsky's Talisman costume as well, and it's nothing like. I'm not sure I would go with Jean de Brienne, though, because of the wig. It's closer to (but still not wholly congruent with) the Russian idea of Renaissance hair (ie Siegfried or Albrecht), whereas my photo of Fokine as J de B shows him in a "page-boy" of 1460ish vintage. I also think the tunic is a tad too ornate for a medieval setting. The name of those appendages has been eluding me all day--I want to call them tassets, but that's a kind of plate armour skirt (the original of the tonnelet?)--and seem to belong to a later era. I haven't any idea which, though--which is why I wanted to go the Indian subcontinent. I had never paid attention to Roslavleva's nearby photo of Clustine's Stars before, but, thanks to your Anton Simon info, I studied it with great interest for the first time--very appropriately, because it's a picture of Mars and his satellites, and today is being (jocularly) celebrated as Mars Day in SA. I haven't seen the planet yet because of all the cloud, but my mom caught up with it yesterday in the predawn sky over PE, as globular and pickable as a Seville orange!
  2. I think Mel makes an excellent point, RG, and I much prefer it to Keith Money's suggestion simply because the wing clasping IS so distinctive to Sylphides, and has no parallel in Giselle. I was so thrown by the Legat's tunic that I didn't think of making the connection. But I don't think the photo represents anybody IN anything, really. I have a sense that two dancers arrived in a studio with different costumes in their portmanteaux and Pavlova said,"Why don't you hold my wings as in Les Sylphides" and Legat obliged. Her arms are wrong for that moment, which I recall as a sort of aerial breast stroke, not bras adores. Could I ask either of you please to access the photo of the male dancer that RG posted in the Talisman thread and see if his tunic tallies in any way with Legat's? The changes in the Invision software mean that I can now only see the legs! Thank goodness I printed out Kchessinskaya while I could! And could you please tell me if you sound the terminal T in Legat? On the subject of photos, when I went back to the SB shot of Brianza and co, I identified, for the first time, the en traversi pages with their violins that RG and Doug mentioned with regard to the dance following the Rose Adagio. It had never before occurred to me to link them to Act I. Is the woman on the left a friend/maid of honour? Do we know her name? And is the woman protectively standing next to Brianza a sort of duenna?
  3. Thanks for the amusing and informative post, Mashinka. Well, I never! Where there's a will, there's a way. I know that Ivanov had some difficulty over miming the idea of a judge (I think it was in The Magic Flute). His solution was to let the hands move up and down and reach equilibrium--like the scales of justice. Like you, I would be very interested to see the symphonic Massine--or any Massine at all, for that matter!
  4. Jane, I didn't know about the tape, and shall email David Leonard as soon as I log off here. Thank you VERY much. I am as surprised as you to find out that Mam'zelle A wasn't a revival, though I should have been alerted by the Jacobs connection. It's unlikely that ABT would have crossed the Atlantic for an arrangement, though I don't know enough about American ballet to be sure who they would in fact have turned to. Rosenthal was French, I think, but Gaiete parisien prob premiered in Europe. And I wonder how Balanchine came to ask Rieti to give Bellini a make-over. Was Night Shadow originally a European work?
  5. We could be talking about different versions though she does what I describe in my Bolshoi tape, and she did the same in the Cape Town version that David Poole based on the RB, and she did in the one RB performance I saw, except their she tended to brush her hands over her shoulder instead of planting them. I have just stumbled across a picture of Preobrajenskaya in Petipa's Bluebeard that might be the unconscious source of my Florine fantasy. She has a white dove (stuffed, I'm afraid) slung between her index and middle fingers, and two white wings on her head, making her both a bird and a bird observer at the same time (Cf. earlier post.) What is striking is that fact that her free hand is a l'epaule, which makes me think that the echappe moment in the var might have a representational meaning after all. The arched line of the hand as it touches the shoulder is like a bird's wing, especially if it droops slightly as Preo's does. It has also occurred to me that Ashton attempted a similar winged profile, much less successfully, through the hands-on-hip line in Les Deux Pigeons.
  6. Munch. Munch. That's the sound of my humble pie going down, Mel. BUT, thanks to your astute prodding and correcting, I now stand confirmed in my belief that Lormier meant us to read Carlotta's wings as moth wings. I have combed my butterfly encyclopaedia, and am 98% sure that no butterfly has, but many moths have, a marked flattening of the forewing apex, with a concave segment immediately below it on the wing's outer margin. It is a pretty defining morphological feature. As fate would have it, my researches turned up a butterfly that might be said to have, if not a concavity on the forewing inner margin, then at least an inward-tending irregularity--Symmachia mantinea, from Brazil. RG, could you please give us some idea of the setting for Les Caprices du papillon? I ask because I have found a picture in Roslavleva, unidentified as to the ballet, of Pavlova in a Romantic tutu with dorsal wings. Nicolai Legat is holding them gingerly, but he doesn't look as if he's in Albrecht mode. The costume has a faintly oriental look. Is this Papillon, Giselle or something along the lines of? Citrus, I forgot to check Roslavleva yesterday because she is filed away from my coffee table books. The title is The Era of the Russian Ballet, and it provides an excellent introduction to the subject.
  7. I think I might have to eat a huge wadge of humble pie in Mel's presence, but I shall defer the ritual until I have had time to leaf through a book of moths in the UCT library. There was no Luna Moth in my Consolidated Encyclopaedias--I must have been crossing lines with another set of books from my childhood, the Afrikaans Kinderensiklopedie, which I no longer possess. All I know is that I pored over a plate containing a Luna Moth for many hours as a child--not attentively enough, it seems, for an internet search for a Luna turned up a convex forewing, and so too a search for the SA Emperor Moth, to which family the Pine Tree Moth belongs. It seems as if I might have been confusing a concave forewing with the way in which some moth wings (eg those of Argema mimosae) display a quite noticeable flattening at the apex, and then a pronounced concavity below that on the outer margin--which does describe Carlotta's wings as well, though I would need now to go through my butterfly encyclopaedia to see if there are also butterflies that conform to this profile. If there are, then perhaps one should juggle with the idea of bat wings as a source for the mild disquiet that the wilis' unconventional apparatus were probably meant to generate. In my searches I went back to my Field Guide to the Insects of the Kruger National Park, which lists all the Linnaean orders, suborders and families, and I really don't know what possessed when I said that moths belonged the Hymenoptera (cf earlier post). That, of course, pertains to bees and wasps. Moths are just lepidopterids that (in general) fly by night, club their antennae, thicken their thoraces, limit their spectrum to dun, and fold their wings back in repose. Sorry, Mel!
  8. Exactly--conVEX, not concave! I think the Lunar Moth analogy is a good one, but I can't quite picture the line of the forewing. I'm sure it's illustrated somewhere in a curious old set of Consolidated Encylopaedias circa 1940 that my dad bought for my mom when they got married. They came with a free two- volume Webster. Some of the entries are nothing short of astonishing--that for "negro," for example. I shall see if I can turn up the moth in question in one of the colour plates.
  9. Sorry, Hans, I have only just come across your post, having failed to activate the notification button. Ballet is never very logical nor very conscious of scale. Snowflakes danced in Casse, but they also carried wands with snowballs on them. They are snow personified, and yet snow literal falls from the flies, and snow literal is bobbing in their hands. Non sequitur logically, and non sequitur spatially--snow on three different scales. Ditto the roosters and hens in Fille in relation to the hawk that Mere Simon has so brutally nailed to the barn. It's enough to make the snowflakes and Osbert Lancaster's seem positively Picassan in their telescopic play with space! The answer to this and all other such dilemmas is to acknowledge that ballet requires a suspension of disbelief in all but its abstract manifestations, which, are in MacLeishian terms, pure being, not meaning. If Florine were listening to the bluebird, she would surely cup her ear as the Prelude Sylphide does. For me that main a l'epaule is not a mimic gesture. However the smiling up and warding off does seem to have a mimic content, and I think a bird at the wrist would make sense of it. Though it would probably be advisable,as you suggest, to remove it for the rest of the pas de deux. Mel--and this is the reason I have come back to this thread--I think I have found the source of my confusion regarding Eros and the crossbow. It's Caravaggio's Amore vincitore, which I happened to consult this morning. Amor doesn't have any weapon--only his arrows--but in the background is a viola d'amore with its bow laid across it. Clearly a visual pun, and a sort of paraphrase of swords being beaten into ploughshares.
  10. Mel, I was careful to specify the FOREwing of Carlotta's pair--by which I meant the line from the head to apex of the upper wing. Many butterflies have ragged profiles to their margins from the apex down the side of the wing, some so concave there, in fact, that they are called Commas. There is, however, no butterfly that I know of with a concave line like Carlotta's, but quite a few moth species, among them the SA Pine Tree Moth. Can't give you its Linnaean name because I have never studied Hymenoptera. You are quite correct about the Death's Head Moth in Keats. Its most famous iconological appearance in the C19 is in a hideous Tate painting either by Millais or Holman Hunt, called, I think, The Bad Shepherd. He is showing his mistress a Death's Head Moth while the sheep stray dangerously in the background. RG, are you implying that the moth is considered more macho in Russia because it is on the whole dowdier than the butterfly? If so, John Taras cocked a snook at this convention in Piege de lumiere.
  11. Thanks very much, RG. I meant to see if the Music College had yr bk on Friday, but it slipped my mind amid all the other tasks I had set myself--which is often the pattern of my shopping. Clearly I must start taking lists to the library as well as to the supermarket. I shall certainly order it and read it if it isn't. Just to confirm, the title is Ballet 101, isn't it? The only Bayadere I know well is Nureyev's, though I did see the first BBC Kirov telecast with Komleva in the late 70s--an occasion when I tried so hard to commit as many of the steps to memory as I could while the ballet was unspooling that panic issued in virtual memory loss! In the Nureyev version, which mightn't tally with Makarova's ABT (oops, I've just remembered that I have also seen part of a tape of the RB version, which filled me with such musical revulsion that I had to abandon it. Lanchbery's text for Nureyev is less flagrantly dreadful)--to resume after that rude interruption, in Nureyev's version, the fakirs come to Gamzatti's wedding celebrations and do a dance in St Petersburg ethnic idiom, to tomtom accompaniment. That's the dance I mean. Seems too Dionysian for Petipa by far, though the music itself isn't so far removed, I suppose, from the A minor Magyar dance in the Act II divertissement of DQ. And, come to think of it, the blaring idol music could have come from the same hand that wrote the march episodes to the galop finale of DQ Act II. So I need to think long and hard about the whole matter. I shall email MH and ask him if he'd be kind enough to clarify what the music was that he identified.
  12. Oh my prophetic soul (again!). I had always thought that the golden idol might not have been Minkus, or, if Minkus, very souped-up. Could you please give us Zubkovsky's dates, RG, if you have them? I shall listen again closely and see if I detect any non-Minkusian features that might point to a gusset. I also have me doobts aboot the fakir dance at the wedding. Is there any evidence of choreographic insertion here too? A Gorsky/Simon affaire, perhaps?
  13. Thanks for that correction, Alexandra. It seems, though, that Brenaa was a relatively scrupulous Bournonville archivist. He learned spotting from Egorova for introduction into the non-Bournonville parts of the RDB rep. I don't think he would ever have introduced more pirouettes than the master had dictated into any of his B revivals. His big fight with Fleming Flindt centred indeed on the very issue of fidelity to B's intentions--this after FF wanted to commission Riisager to make a "palimpsest" of the Helsted score for The Toreador--just as Tchaikovsly "overwrote" a Minkus original to forge the music that Balanchine used for his T PdD. There is a very funny anecdote in the Brenaa biography irrelevant to this thread, but worth repeating. The most authoritative Bournonville scholar in the fifties was one Vabs Borschenius, who used to carry a huge carpet bag of yellowing manuscript notations of the ballets to the theatre. At one revival that she was supervising, King Frederik IX had dropped by, and VB was so irritated when a dancer started executing wrong steps that she accidentally thumped the sovereign on his back (she happened to be standing behind him) and cried "That's FLAMING wrong." I suspect the king, although a constitutional kind of king, found the attention a touch too indelicate--in every conceivable sense of that word!
  14. Hi again, Citrus. Any excuse to avoid grading essays, so here I am again to tell you that I've just had another thought about Giselle's wings! The reason why they are shaped as they are, with points at the tip, rather than rounded like the Sylphide's, is almost certainly because the designer wanted us to think of moths. I know a little about butterflies, but next to nothing about moths, but even so, I am fairly sure that that concave line to the forewing (as opposed to the convex butterfly line of Sylphide's) can be found in some moths, but never in butterflies. The point of this is to stress the sinister nature of wilidom. The Romantic poet Keats lists a moth in his catalogue of gothic (=scary) objects at the start of his "Ode on Melancholy." That's because moths, like wilis, are largely nocturnal. Also, it's worth remembering that a good percentage of the first audience for Giselle would have had a classical education. They would have known how to "read" the wings because the Greek "psuche" can mean either a spirit or a moth or a butterfly (that's why Keats says let not "the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche"). Butterflies were engraved on Greek tombstones as an emblem of resurrection. All of which shows that Giselle's wings have quite a lot riding on them, in addition to Carlotta's rather weighty (but very beautiful) thighs! Cheers!
  15. That was very kind of you, Jorgen. Thanks so much. I wasn't aware of your post when I added to thread headed "Photographs" a short while ago. I agree that the Ju:rgensen is a veritable treasure trove. And aren't the Bournonville backdrops almost unfailingly delicate and well-composed? The Russian equivalents seem v clumsy by comparison.
  16. The Danes were far ahead of the Russians when it comes to a C19/early C20 photographic record of the Bournonville rep. While it's true that some of the backdrops are generic studio landscapes, a good few were taken on stage, and, more importantly, reproduced choreographic moments characteristic of the ballets in question. Cf, for example, the improbable military lineup of Brianza et al in that St Petersburg SB publicity shot. (Her tutu is so dark that I think she must be wearing her FAST red Rose Adagio number, the one that was offset by a phalanx of "mourning dresses"! Wouldn't cut it in a modern prod!) I spent a very pleasant hour or so browsing Ju:rgensen's anthology of Danish photos on Friday. John-Michael, if you're reading this, and you haven't seen the book in question, it's strongly recommended. Though I am sure you must have consulted it. By the way, I caught up with your out-of-sight music postings on Saturday night, and was delighted to find a fellow lover of music that embodies le/la jolie (can never remember which gender article Tchaikovsky chose)--the principle of sheer prettiness. T's statement about Sylvia and Die Ring is often held against him, but I think it showed enormous courage and integrity. Most of us are terrified of being thought vulgar. I think should follow Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl: "Well, all I can say is, give me vulgarity"!
  17. That's very interesting, Hans. I wonder why tall men jump better than tall women. You would think that the same physiognomy made for the same kind of talent. Could it be that female jarrete dancers tend to have low twitch muscle fibre? Strangely enough, jumping was the only thing I could do well (I am 6 ft 2 inches)--everything else was mediocre to disastrous, esp pirouettes to the left. But my jump started to desert me in my mid thirties and I can now barely get off the ground. Gwendolen, my cat, who jumps well but lands heavily, is TOTALLY contemptuous of my efforts!
  18. That's a good general guide, Hans, but I am a bit of a klutz when it comes to counting beats, and I might very well confuse an entrechat huit with a grand royale if I looked at closing positions alone. Isn't it possible, though, that women would do better than men at prolonged beating simply because they have less flesh and bone to get moving, their stamina prolonged by their comparative lightness? But that might just be the ignorant assumption of an outsider looking in. I remember how, before I started ballet, one of my fellow lit students who had danced to pre-professional level once told me that the challenge in ronds de jambe fouettes wasn't so much in preserving one's balance (as I had assumed), but rather riding out the pain of the working calf muscle. That had never occurred to me.
  19. That's SO interesting. I had always assumed that M's influence had been vectored into the Br ballet via Dame Ninette, and thought of Ashton's patrimony rather as having come from Petipa, with a two additional (and minor) bequests from Fokine and Nijinska. There is a funny anecdote in the Kavanagh in which A self-deprecatingly says, apropos of his not wholly successful attempt at an C18 formal garden at Chandos Place--"My gardens are very much d'apres le Notre, just as my ballets are d'apres Petipa"--or words to that effect!
  20. Point taken, Mel. And you are right, in 1869, the dryads had classical tutus of the imperial kind. In fact an even more important elephant burial ground for ballonnes is SB 2--one of the most sublime moments in all of Petipa where the ballonne-ing dancers link up and travel de cote in contrary motion, like wind-parted curtains of rain. I still weep a few tears whenever I see it! Classical tutus are essential there. I was thinking more in terms of an essentially green/white contrast. The gold would, in my opinion, have been too Versaillish for a Romantic context, one in which tonnelets and heeled slippers had been cast aside for a new (illusory) primitivism.
  21. I actually know Odette's mime, RG, because the gestures are set out in a book I consulted about two years ago. Can't remember the author, but she was taught at the SWB school, where Dame Ninette had hired a mistress of Italian mime to instruct her pupils in an extraordinary number of gestures--several hundred, I think. A Ms A Philips might have been an intermediary--not sure of this. What the book lacked was a coordination of the gestures to that marvellous narrative music in B flat and B major. So there resulted the less than satisfactory experience of looking at oneself in a mirror (this Odette was 6 ft 2 ins and bearded), making only approximate connections to the score. It can hardly compare with a film of Fonteyn or Elvin effortlessly reeling off the story of the mother and the tears and the lake--without beards and always on cue! I did a Google search for the historical Madame Angot, and came up, as I thought I would, with hundreds of entries for Lecocq and Massine. When I narrowed the search with the descriptor "historical," I got historical performances of the Lecocq opera! No win! Estelle, if you're reading this, could you please consult some of your history books? None of mine says anything about this mysterious personage. RG, did you like Mam'zelle Angot by the way? Was the narrative intelligible? Is the choreography good?
  22. Mel, that does sound very nice, but still not wholly idiomatic in my book. The gold belongs more in Beauty III. This is a properly sylvan romance with dryads carrying palm branches, and so telling DQ that he is indeed a palmer come to his holy land. It should rather be costumed rather in the spirit of Sylphide/Giselle. Citrus, I am SO glad you asked this question because it's important to an understanding of the ballet. Thank you very much. It had never crossed my mind before, but I realise now that Carlotta could never have danced a pas de deux like the one in Petipa's Act II if she had those wings on her back. They would have crumpled up very inartistically in the developpe devant au corps cambre, and they would have broken against her partner's tunic in those lifts at the start of the A flat variation. I think they might be called dressage lifts--not sure of that. Any how, those ones that rise vertically from the floor against the male's torso. My guess is that Petipa probably shrank those wings to butterfly size. I have found in my Keith Money book on Fonteyn that she wore these stunted ones in 1967. Bournonville's ballets give us a good idea of what French ballet was like in the 1820s, and probably still was like in the 1840s as well. There are few lifts--if any--in his pas de deux, and the male often dances as the mirror image of his partner. You might remember that in B's La Sylphide, James touches the sylph only once before he accidentally kills her, and that's in the supported penchee at the end of the ballabile. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was added after B's death, but even if it wasn't, the audience is meant to think that she is doing the arabesque without help because his hand is out of sight behind her skirt. The grand pas de deux in Giselle (A Flat), even though it's the kind of adagio that Petipa would come to clothe in sustained lifts for the dancers was, 1841, much more like the Kermesse in Bruges pas de deux, and indeed like the mirror pas de deux that Giselle and Albrecht still dance after first meeting in the forest (that stop-start G major gavotte in unusual 4/8 time). If Giselle had wings as big as a pterodactyl's, she would still be able to dance it without interfering with her partner!
  23. Yes, but the costumes, even though borrowed, were incorporated, and so became part of the ballet's historical Gestalt. And those generic tutus would give rise in time to that most marvellously generic of genres, the ballet blanc, which Petipa homaged in almost all his surviving masterpieces. I think it's a great pity that contemporary designers don't acknowledge this. The Kirov Enchanted Garden in DQ is a hideous conveyor belt of pastel lavatory rolls--imagine how wonderful it would look in white tutus!--while Raymonda I.ii is blue in the Bolshoi tape and their SB II is pink (I think). In my ideal ballet world, all these would costumed in white, with differences only in hemline and one or two props, such as the shoulder to wrist veil/stoles of the shades in Bayadere.
  24. RG, I always feel sad when you say "no more for now" or "I must now sign off," because, like a little boy at bedtime, I always want one more chapter. The fact that the RB films are primarily long distance monochromes to piano music makes them seem slightly less enticing, but I must say I would still love to see their Lac from the fifties. And the Sylvia of course--not to mention countless other ballets I've never seen but read much about. I expected to hear that M's Gaiete P was still in rep, but I was pleased and surprised that so much of Massine's symphonic writing still seems to be around--stills from Les Presages always look most appetizing. Perhaps one day I shall get to glimpse something or other on videotape. I heartily endorse your assessment of the Berard designs, RG. Jane and Mel, many thanks for your posts, but both seem to point to the fictive versions of M Angot. Unlike Mrs Malaprop, whose name makes it clear that she is a Theophrastan character, M Angot, according to Boosey, really existed. I shall try an internet sweep, but I always seem to make a mess of these.
  25. But Ari, this wasn't Cisco (which is what I take SFB to stand for) but London. Somebody in the UK posted near to the start of the year, and Alexandra replied that she was thrilled by the news, which offset a dreary, rainy day in Washington. I haven't the energy to retrace my steps, but I'm sure Alexandra will be able to confirm this good news. The poster said they were also relying on the memories of dancers who had retained the ballet, or parts of it.
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