Helene

Did anyone see any of the Vail performances? I had forgotten about the International Evenings, tonight and Saturday. (Scroll.) This year Carla Korbes and Eric Underwood from the Royal Ballet perform (what I assume is) the Pas de Deux from "Agon". I would have loved to have seen that, and would be grateful to experience it vicariously through someone's post about it

And we'd still argue about who should be on each list which makes for fun discussions!

The first time I heard Siepi was also the first time I heard Corelli, and the tenor did not hold a candle -- it was a bad night for him -- to the bass in voice or looks to my 14-year-old eyes and ears, and Siepi was wearing robes as Ramfis. This led to a stand-off with my opera- and Corelli-loving friend, who got even by making fun of disastrous way I tried to pronounce Siepi's name, brawed Joisey accent and all

I'm not a big "Spartacus" fan, but that performance sounds is one I would have loved to have seen. I can't wait to read your impressions of "Coppelia".

I am enjoying these remembrances of corps members who are leaving. It's really sad when cherished corps members go onto other things, even if those things are great. I still miss PNB's Rebecca Johnston, who's in law school, and I think it will only really sink in that Jordan Pacitti, who was managing his own fragrance company when he was still dancing, has retired when he's not onstage next season.

Gediminas Taranda was a dancer with the Bolshoi and was the Abderakhman in both Bolshoi videos (the Ludmilla Semenyaka/Irek Moukhamedov and Natalya Bessmertnova/Yuri Vasyuchenko performances). He is one of my all-time favorite dancers, and even on video, he blows away the stage. There used to be a number of the DVD clips on YouTube, but it looks like they've been pulled, at least in the English versions of the posts. However, they do have clips from his appearance with partner, four-time World Champion and Olympic bronze and silver medalist Irina Slutskaya, on Ice-Age, in a spoof of the White Swan Pas de Deux: I think they even put ruffles on his tutu panties.

She's great, I agree, but it's a borrowed clip from Houston Ballet, there's no attribution, and I don't know the company well enough to recognize the dancers Edited to add: I just searched "Myrtha" in the Houston Chronicle, and only one result came up, not ballet-related. Grrrr.

I'm just not sure if I got them right...

This <1 minute video introduces "Sechs Tanze" and "Glass Pieces", the new company premieres, but is cut so fast, it's hard to get the ID's: It opens with Ezra Thompson (?), Chalnessa Eames, James Moore, Josh Spell, and I'm pretty sure Kylee Kitchens in the Kylian. In the section where the women shake back and forth into second position plie, Brittany Reid is practicing in the background with maybe Andrew Bartee, and possibly it's Emma Love to her left practicing with Barry Kerollis. There's a bouncing on the floor part where the woman in black may be Rachel Foster. Jerome Tisserand is holding his face just before it switches to "Glass Pieces" (and in the still for the video above). There's a nice shot of Carla Korbes, then Jeff Stanton partnering, it looks like Ariana Lallone, and then Batkhurel Bold partnering Korbes. Eames, with the foot stomp, and Spell are in the final shots. Depending on how many casts get on stage, this program, which also includes "Petite Mort" (six couples) and "Jardi Tancat" is going to spread it around, and there are a lot of opportunities in it.

We're almost there, and ideally, we'd like to put this to a close. We thank everyone who's contributed so far, and to those who continue to support us by purchasing through the amazon.com box at the top of the site. We hope ten more people will join the donor list.

Men's and Women's swimming, speed skating, and track events are differentiated by the length of the races competed, but are otherwise the same, with the possible exception of qualifying times. For javelin, hammer throw, and discus, the weight, and for javelin, the length, are different for men and women. For combined track and field events, there is a men's decathlon and women's pentathlon, and while there are men's and women's heptathlon, two of the events are different (60m for men vs. 200m for women; pole vault for men vs. javelin throw for women). In artistic gymnastics, there are only two events that are similar: the floor exercise, which for women must be set to music and interpretive, while for men, it's tumbling and specific strength moves are required, and vault, which the women approach width-wise, and the men must approach lengthwise (launching from one end and vaulting over the length of the apparatus). Men also compete in five events vs. women's four, the additional events being completely different. Figure skating is interesting in that in singles skating there are four main differences between Men's and Ladies' at the senior level: the free skate is 30 seconds longer for the men; the men have an additional required element in the short program and are allowed an extra jump pass in the free skate; Ladies cannot do a quad in the short program, and until next season could not do a 3A in the short program; and there is a required spiral element for Ladies, while the men have to do two footwork passes. (The spiral sequence, which is technically a step sequence, does not count for points for Men.) I don't see any rationale for this, especially since the reason Ladies skating was invented was that Madge Syers came in second in 1902, and The Powers That Be immediately banished women to their own competition. In pairs and dance, the assumption is that the woman will be thrown and lifted, although there have been "gender bender" lifts in ice dance. The Italian team Faiella/Scali has done them a lot. These are the disciplines that most resemble ballet in addressing gender. Synchronized skating is different: men and women compete on the same teams, and they mostly do the same movements. (Even where the men do lifts, there are just as many women who are lifting other women.) If anything, skating is even more bound by gender roles, because it is rare to have a female pair skater who is over 5'4" and 100 pounds, while ballet has a bigger range of height and body type. Macaulay writes, "I will defend the escapism of “The Nutcracker,” but I cringe at the sensationalism, the triteness and the ham that characterize the majority of story ballets, works like “Don Quixote,” “Le Corsaire” and “La Bayadère.” I don't think he's ever seen Ballet Arizona's "Don Quixote", where every person on stage is part of a community that defines the narrative, and Don Q and Sancho Panza aren't just weird old men who crash the village party. It's not like Shakespeare's much-performed comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" is full of depth or psychological insight -- the double-standard for men and women is pretty clear from "Don Quixote" -- but the text makes it rich, much like the dance text is worth watching the ballet. I also thought the Bolshoi did a terrific job of making the characters compelling in "La Bayadere" and "Le Corsaire" when they toured them in 2009. I wouldn't, though, go back to see ABT's versions of either, because I was so bored by them the last time I saw them. Also he writes, "Nowhere more than in narrative has ballet become the land of low expectations. Audiences regularly sit through a poverty of dance-narrative expression that they would never tolerate in a movie, a novel, an opera, a play or even a musical." Wagner had the same opinion of opera, although he would have said "music-narrative expression". (It seems that most people still do.) I think that it depends on the company performing it, and whether the dancers know why they're onstage, what part they have in the whole, and whether they can carry it through with conviction, just like "Il Trovatore", which is often regarded as having the most stupid and improbable opera plot of all, can be made compelling by the performers and the production.

Now that is a mixed bill! Wish I could be there; the casting looks great.

This evening I finished Stieg Larsson's "Millenium Trilogy" ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", "The Girl Who Played with Fire", and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest"). I particularly liked the pacing of the last book, which at the same time reads as the most improbable of the three, if most rewarding from a fantasy angle. Many times I thought Henning Mankell has been there/done that with his Wallender books and several that followed that aren't part of the series. The Bad People are equally bad in Larsson's and Mankell's books, but I think Mankell addresses a society that changed with globalization, the fall of the Soviet Union, and prosperity, while Larsson focuses more on their impacts within government and business. For all the darkness in Larsson's books, there is an optimism that does not exist in Mankell's. Having read Jessica Stern's "Denial: A Memoir of Terror", I was struck by how both Stern and the fictional Lisbeth Salander so adamantly refused to consider themselves victims.

When I saw this thread, I put together a list of who I was expecting to be on it -- Jennings' list, not mine: Nijinski Pavlova Markova Alonso Fonteyn Nureyev Baryshnikov Bruhn Guillem I didn't come up with a tenth. Boy, was I wrong

I finally finished Alex Ross' "The Rest is Noise". I found the infighting surrounding Schoenberg's music dull, but for me, the highlight was Part III: 1933-45, "The Art of Fear: Music for All; Music in Stalin's Russia", "Music in FDR's America", and especially "Death Fugue: Music in Hitler's Germany", which I found fascinating. I also like the next two chapters, "Zero Hour: The US Army and German Music" and "Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties". What followed left me indifferent. While I was poking through Ross' book, I detoured to "Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee", a non-fiction work about the death of an aboriginal man in police custody and the trial/hearings of a policeman. Then I went on to Jessica Stern's frightening memoir "Denial: A Memoir of Terror", in which she tells the story of the brutal rapes of her and her sister as teenagers, how she became a terrorism expert, and how she, with the help of some great police work, learned about the man who had raped them and at least 42 other girls, mostly in their own houses, and often with family members in the house at the same time. On the opposite end of the spectrum was Sharon Oreck's "Video Slut: How I Shoved Madonna Off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince into a Pair of Tiny Purple Woolen Underpants, Ran Away from Michael Jackson's Dad, and Got a Waterfall to Flow Backward So I Could Bring Rock Videos to the Masses", a very funny memoir of her years as a rock video producer in the pioneering days of MTV juxtaposed with her experience as a teenage mother/single mom. I also just finished Stieg Larsson's "Millenium Trilogy". I"m not sure where I'm going next, but I'm contemplating Irene Nemirovsky's "David Golder" -- I loved her series of stories, "Suite Francaise" -- but I'm also looking at two sets of DVD's for the sixth and seven seasons of "Shameless", "La Danse" is sitting on the shelf, and I can't stop myself from re-watching "Dancing Bournonville", at the expense of not having yet seen the Peters Martins profile in the Leth series.

From Mme. Hermine's link, you have to choose Raymond Serrano from the list on the left.

The two companies I see most that routinely have tall ballerinas on the roster are Pacific Northwest Ballet and Ballet Arizona. San Francisco Ballet has some tall women as well. Are the larger companies less heterogeneous in size?

His show was always on in my parents house when I was growing up. When it started, I was four and just watched the bouncing ball,but in the last few years, when I was learning to read, I didn't always recognize the words. I found the whole concept frustrating, because unless the song was on one of my Disney movie or Alvin and the Chipmunks albums, I had never heard any of them before. I don't like karaoke, either

I've been listening to a San Francisco Opera podcast of a pre-performance Q&A with Maria Kochetkova from 27 Apr 10. One of the audience members asked how important the conductor was to her performance, and her answer, starting at ~ 19:00 mark was:

We received an email with the following info: Here is Dr. Beumers biography on the University of Bristol website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/russian/staff/beumers/beumers.html

Hopefully, you get to say, "That won't be for another year, but in meantime, in three months you can see another beautiful ballet!"

I loved the part: I am intrigued by "The Princess of Borscht", too.

Peter Boal's second blog entry about Vail could be titled "The Adventures of Live Theater". http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/notes/pacific-northwest-ballet/artistic-director-peter-boal-on-pnbs-vail-tour-part-2/452380937036 At the bottom of the entry there's a beautiful Angela Sterling photo of Sarah Ricard Orza mid-jete in "Serenade". I think we're extremely lucky that she started to dance again.

I saw Gomes live earlier this year in the small, intimate theater in the Ailey building for Avichai Scher's choreography, and he was amazing. Seeing him up close on a small stage is an experience I would wish for all of the people who see him at the Met and other large stages.

A couple of things: I thought that Olivier Wevers was brilliant this year in "Sleeping Beauty" this year. To me, the high point of his portrayal of Carabosse (in the Peter Wright version) was when she returned upstage left with the spindle. Wevers gestured to Aurora what could have read as "Come here, my little pretty", but instead made a simple, straightforward, commanding gesture. It was as if it were the first time that anyone had been direct with Aurora and treated her like a person instead of a princess, and it was irresistible. Still, whenever I've seen a man portray Carabosse, it always looks like pantomime to me to some extent, and I prefer a strong, proud, beautiful woman turned bitter. For whatever reason, when a man plays Madge, I don't feel the same way. My beef with Ashton's version of "Cinderella" is that unlike in "La Fille Mal Gardee", where Widow Simone and the chickens might upstage the protagonists for a while, the pantomime overwhelms the rest of the ballet, and because the Helpmann sister doesn't die, I always am left feeling that Cinderella is going to have to deal with her manipulation forever, even though there were palace guards, and email and the telephone hadn't been invented. (A different "Happily Neverafter" than Cinderella and the Prince bickering.) That's how toxic she comes across to me, and Prokofiev's bittersweet score reinforces this.