Helene

He's not in the closet. Not all out people divulge details about their private lives, and some who had in the past have decided not to anymore, which is their right.

Which is easily fixed by taking it down a hair or two.

Yay for DeLuz and his mom doing Sevillanas -- ole!

I disagree: I once went through the entire Balanchine Catalogue, and after removing the pieces d'occasions, the redos, the works for operas, plays, musical theater, and movies, and other pieces that weren't part of ballet programs, the number of surviving ballets is quite extraordinary, especially given how prolific he was, and of the ones that are still performed, I think very few of them are meh. Some are stronger than the others, some are problematic, and some are in a style that some people just don't like, but that doesn't make them meh. Balanchine had a very high hit rate, in my opinion. His experiments were when he was a student, and he had a lot of practice making short ballets for the opera, both in Europe and at the Metropolitan Opera for a couple of years. I'm not arguing against new works; I'm arguing against expecting works at the same level as the average Balanchine ballet. And when new works are performed next to masterworks, they tend not to hold up well, but when they do, it's a bonus.

Marina Harss tweeted a photo:

Here's a link to Michael Breeden's and Rebecca Ferraro's pre-promotion, but recent, interview with him: https://conversationsondancepod.com/2018/10/01/daniel-applebaum/

Peter Boal said in a Q&A that there was a period when he was dancing primarily Principal roles, but there hadn't been promotions in a while, and everyone was left in a holding pattern until a mass of dancers were promoted at once, including him. So it's not unprecedented in the history of the Company to have stretches where there were few or no promotions. Merrill Ashley also wrote in her book that when her frequent partner -- IIRC, Robert Weiss -- was promoted, people came up to congratulate her, because they assumed she had been promoted with him. She hadn't, and Peter Martins gave the advice to not say anything. She was promoted later. She wrote that she thought that her promotion may have been delayed because Balanchine thought of her, Colleen Neary, and Christine Redpath as a group, and that he wanted to wait until they all were ready, so he could promote them together. Redpath topped out as a soloist, and Colleen Neary may have as well.

That is wonderful news!!!!

Congratulations to them all!

PNB posted a very short snippet of Eckman's "Cacti" to Facebook, and it looks like a whole lot of fun to do:

If they're re-doing the book, could they please change the scene where Anita sings "A Boy Like That" and instead of eschewing logic and apologizing with the insipid "I Have a Love," Maria summons her will, looks Anita in the eye, and yells back, "BERNARDO KILLED RIFF, YOU STUPID COW!"? Okay, maybe not "YOU STUPID COW." Then they could leave out the insipid "I Have a Love." They could stare each other down, and then, wordlessly, react in any number of ways, until Spielberg cuts to the next scene. This will never happen, given that it's Spielberg, who felt it necessary to insert Schindler's big speech into "Schindler's List."

What I'm hearing is that the new choreography at NYCB isn't worth many views and doesn't hold up to the masterworks, which is not surprising, since few choreographers have had a hit/stick rate like Balanchine, Robbins, Macmillan, Ashton, and Tudor, at least when their primary and secondary companies were committed to training and performing them. With Ratmansky, it's harder to tell what his stick rate will be with ABT: it seems to be stronger at NYCB and other companies for whom he has choreographed, and, in the case of Concerto DSCH, among a number of other companies; his focus now seems primarily on Petipa reconstructions at companies that have the money and the commitment. Enthusiasm for Peck and Wheeldon seems to be among the companies outside NYCB for whom they created one or two works, which also isn't a shock, since NYCB is/has been their labs, and most experiments aren't that successful or groundbreaking but are steps going forward, and the ones that are the ones that have been are performed by other companies, like "Year of the Rabbit," "After the Rain Pas de Deux," and "Polyphonia," and have had legs. Much European contemporary ballet -- that's 40 years worth at this point -- has never been to the taste of NYCB audiences whose eyes have been honed by neoclassicism. And that's aside from the main challenge that NYCB faces, which is that its rep is so vast every season -- no other major company in the world comes close, not the Royal Ballet, Mariinsky Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, the two-venue Paris Opera Ballet, Dutch National Ballet -- that they don't even have the rehearsal and coaching time for what they have, let alone time to workshop new styles and dedicate company classes in the lead-up to them, even if that's not a deep dive much of anywhere in North America. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a lot of dancing has to happen via shorthand, that the dancers tend to slot into what they know, which is a cycle in itself, and given the strain of different styles on their bodies, they need to be self-protecting to be standing in any way by season's end. Paris Opera Ballet has long been described as being two companies within a company, with the contemporary branch and the classical/neoclassical branch, and there had been much hair-pulling about appointing etoiles who were primarily in the contemporary branch. NYCB wouldn't have that luxury, even if it wanted to go in that direction. The closest it got was having a tight group of hand-picked Robbins dancers when he was still alive.

Peter Boal traveled to NYC with Lucien Postlewaite, James Moore, and Dylan Wald for his presentation, "Jerome Robbins Centennial Celebration: Male Solos with Peter Boal" for the Guggenheim's Works & Process series. It was presented twice, on October 2 and 3rd. Here is a link to the YouTube video: (There's no note about how long it will be up.) Here is Carol Pardo's piece for danceviewtimes with a commentary and a description of the program (October 3): http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2018/10/robbins-goes-solo.html

According to the SAB website, So unless there is a huge bumper crop, the large majority of professional track students who dance professionally do not get hired by NYCB. Those 20 don't include professional track students who pursue school or other employment. I haven't been able to find class size on the website.

New York City Ballet and the Balanchine- and Kirstein-led companies -- example, Ballet Caravan -- have always danced more than Balanchine, and have always danced more than Robbins during his stints with the Company. In fact, critics wailed intermittently that Balanchine was over-the-hill and passe, and some later claimed that the modern, forward-thinking Robbins had eclipsed Balanchine, and that Balanchine needed to step aside for other choreographers. While most of the choreographers were in-house and followed the neoclassical path -- Taras, Tanner, Christensen, Tomasson, Clifford, Bolender, d'Amboise -- some were in-house and did very different kinds of work, like Ruthanna Boris' "Cakewalk," -- and Ashton and Tudor choreographed for the Company.