Helene

We just received the following message from Los Angeles Ballet: May Mr. Gomes recover fully and soon.

Ballet Talk does not take positions on individual artists. Our mission is to discuss classical ballet. However, individuals may express their opinions here or to the Ardani Artists management.

More from 3 November, thanks to the heads up from YouOverThere. Ballet Nouveau Colorado performed "Nouveau Showcase."

Wkipedia is a voluntary, community encyclopedia. In the last few years, rules have changed to require citations (online or from physical print media), even for the most basic info -- ex: "Ballet Society gave its first performance at High School of Needle Trades in 1946"-- which can be tedious, and these aren't always easy to find these for dance companies. Anyone who is interested in a subject may write or edit, anonymously or through a username/password. If someone doesn't like what's in an article, s/he may edit it or delete information. There's a "talk page" mechanism by which one can negotiate what is in an article, but it takes patience if there's someone else who has a vested interest in the subject, and when contributing, it can take a strong stomach to know that info won't necessarily stand as written. The admins are very careful to delete anything they know comes from a publicity/PR/marketing source, unless it is completely factual and backed up by citations that are unbiased. For example, calling a regional company "America's best company" would not be considered unbiased and backed by critical consensus.

I was racking my brain to try to remember in whose autobiography I read this, and Paul, you hit it on the head

November 3, 2007 Maureen Fleming performed butoh pieces inspired by the poetry of Yeats. Roslyn Sulcas reviews Ashleigh Leite's "Crawl Space" for the New York Times. (Danspace Project, through tonight) A performance of three of her pieces will be presented on January 9-12 at the Sydney Opera House in tribute to the late Tanja Liedtke

On the other hand, Jennifer Dunning hated it: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/arts/mus....html?ref=dance

Tharp is also having a bit of an artistic revival with ballet companies: in addition to In the Upper Room, which, like its equivalent in opera, Iphigenia in Tauris, seems/seemed to be everywhere in the last couple of years, she is doing a new piece for Miami City Ballet, and a new piece for Pacific Northwest Ballet. Edited to add: in RM Campbell's review of PNB's In the Upper Room, he writes:

In one of the recent Q&A's, Peter Boal described the mechanics of the part of the Pas de Deux in Prodigal Son where the Prodigal is sitting with his knees bent, and the Siren slides down his shins to the floor. It had always looked to me like he pushed is feet forward to an outstretched position, but he actually pushes backwards to extend his, by then, sweaty legs. He said that during rehearsal, one of the Sirens had slipped and fallen on one of the Prodigals, and he mentioned that Merrill Ashley had once fallen back on him. He didn't say whether during performance or rehearsal, but "ouch." It reminds be of how the men on pairs teams are trained to let the woman fall on them if there is a problem with a lift, assuming they are still moving at the same speed.

Casting is up for week 2: http://www.pnb.org/season/cont-casting.html First-timers in Agon are: Sarah Orza-First Pas de Trois Carla Korbes, Miranda Weese, and Kiyon Gaines-Second Pas de Trois Ariana Lallone (with Olivier Wevers), and Lesley Rausch/Karel Cruz in the Pas de Deux In Caught: Casey Herd In In the Upper Room: Noelani Pantastico in Ballet Couples Please attend and tell us what you think

I don't know -- try saying that you like Cats or Les Miz or Phatom and you'll get quite an earful about what real musicals are I understand why people are intimidated by Merce Cunningham or Pina Bausch or Jerome Robbins' pieces like Watermill, Moves, and The Dybbuk, or anything touted to be intellectual, but what I don't understand is the barrier towards most classical and neo-classical ballet: abstract or not, you go to the ballet, and you see gorgeous naked people. OK, maybe not completely naked, but how much more visceral and basic do you need than beautiful young bodies moving?

Many major arts organizations have programs to try to entice a younger audience, often offering discounted subscriptions and/or tickets to members, as well as social events before specific performances. The point isn't just to hear lectures, but to socialize with other people in the general age group, to meet people with similar interests. When this trend started in NYC, I had just aged out of the 35-year-old limit, and by the time they started in Seattle, I had just aged out of the 40-year-old limit. When I was 45, I went to Santa Fe for the opera, only to find on my last day there that the limit for SFO's group was 45 There is a lot of outreach in Seattle, from schools to young adults, in addition to lectures before performances and Q&A's after them. These club-like programs, though, are aimed at breaking down the entrance barrier, along with more younger person-income-friendly ticket prices. Seattle Symphony has Wolfgang, Seattle Opera has Bravo Club, and PNB has Backstage Pass.

Diana Byer Fellowship Awarded to New York Theatre Ballet Dancers New York – New York Theatre Ballet, “the most widely seen chamber ballet company in America”, announced on October 26, that NYTB Company dancers, Julie-Anne Taylor and Mitchell Kilby are the recipients of the Byer Fellowship, a special fund created in 2006 in honor of Artistic Director – and NYTB driving force, Diana Byer, on her birthday. This appeal raises funds to partially cover the salaries of two company dancers, hand selected by Ms. Byer. “ Dancing is 20% talent and 80% hard work and Julie-Anne Taylor and Mitchell Kilby put in the work and improve everyday. They have a tremendous amount of respect for every artistic undertaking”, Ms. Byer remarked during her announcement speech. Julie-Anne Taylor was born in Perth, Australia and began classical ballet training at age 3. At 16, she was awarded the Solo Seal by the Royal Academy of Dance in London, England. She attended The Graduate College of Dance, the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts and the New Zealand School of Dance. Ms. Taylor has received numerous awards and scholarships within Australia and was a finalist in the Genee International Ballet Awards Competition in September 2005. Now in her third season at NYTB, she will make her debut as The Other Woman in Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas, staged and coached by Sallie Wilson, in February 2008. Mitchell Kilby is a native of Newcastle, Australia. He began his training at the Marie Walton Mahon Dance Academy at age 16. After 2 years, he was accepted and received a full scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet School in New York. This is his second season with NYTB and dances many ballets in the NYTB repertory. Diana Byer has performed as a soloist with Les Grandes Ballets Canadians, Manhattan Festival Ballet, New York City Opera, and the Juilliard Ensemble. She received her principal dance training from Margaret Craske and Antony Tudor. She teaches adult professional ballet, point technique, and advanced children’s classes at Ballet School NY, which she founded in 1977. She formerly taught at Manhattan School of Dance, Compagnie de Michel Hallet (Lyon, France), and Cascina Bella (Milan, Italy). She has been guest instructor at the Cecchetti Society of America, Cornell and New York Universities, SUNY at Purchase, the Martha Graham School, and the Cecchetti Society of Canada (Toronto). Ms. Byer has received extensive media attention for her ongoing work with homeless and at-risk children, winning special citations from President George Bush, First Lady Hillary Clinton, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the President’s Committee on the Arts & the Humanities. Ms. Byer coached the principals in the Columbia Pictures film, Center Stage. In the summer of 2003, she gave master classes in the Ballet School of Pécs, Hungary and she regularly provides master classes in schools and performance settings across the U.S. Currently, Ms. Byer is on the Studio Workshop Committee for the Antony Tudor Centennial Celebration to be held at The Juilliard School in March 2008. New York Theatre Ballet President and Artistic Director Diana Byer has influenced the lives and careers of hundreds of students and dancers since she founded the company in 1978. The Byer Fellowship Fund celebrates her contributions, dedication, grand sense of artistry, and other remarkable achievements to NYTB, its affiliated school and the world of dance.

Thank you for posting this, volcanohunter! For Gillot to put her leg up on Pech's shoulder, and then adjust her entire body like a mere mortal would put their arm on his shoulder is extraordinary. And she looks as casual

I had forgotten about the audiences when I saw the Kirov Opera Demon and The Gambler at the Met. I know there were a substantial number of Russian speakers in my section, and at intermission there were lively conversations in Russian, but during the performances, the audiences were quiet in general. I've had the same experience when the Seattle Chamber Players perform. One of the violinists, Mikhail Schmidt, and the artistic advisor, Elena Dubinets, are both from Russia, and there are many Russian speakers in their core audience. Same experience. Maybe it's another opera vs. ballet thing...

That's pretty standard for opera criticism: It's fine, but it's no Bayreuth. (It's fine, but it's no Bayreuth in the 1950's.) You needed to hear Corelli live. Back in the day, the Met had Bjoerling, Tucker, Bergonzi, etc. etc. every night vs. the No Tenors of today. Of course the version you heard was terribly inauthentic, with cuts, the wrong instrumentation, etc. That high note she sang was not only in the worst taste, but it was flat as well. Critics, professional and otherwise, constantly tell us how stupid we are for liking anything. There is so much more information to know in opera. Not only have commercial recordings been around and extensive for over a century -- you mean you can't discuss in detail the differences between the 1952 and 1953 Keilberth Rings? -- the number of pirated recordings that are readily available is astonishing. (Don't even open your mouth if you haven't heard the live [exact date] Callas Aida from Mexico City.) That is in addition to the books and scores that exist for hundreds of years worth of music. If you're not a scholar and don't read music, play an instrument, read the libretto in the original language, and own 19 recordings of the opera you can compare on demand, you can be made to feel like the mud on the bottom of a shoe. I've always found people at the ballet to be very generous with their knowledge, if for no other reason that they are passing down information about performances that don't exist on tape, commercially or pirated, and dancers we wouldn't necessarily know about, due to the dearth of recordings.

I would say that it wouldn't be terribly arcane for two critics or fanatics to be fighting however may years later about Baryshnikov vs. Nureyev, the way opera people argue Tebaldi vs. Callas. I would liken the arguments about who performs Balanchine better to arguments about whether the Met does the best version of Don Giovanni, or whether the flame was being passed to newer companies. I'm starting to understand the different shades of snobbiness, On the opera side: The dinosaurs who sit in the Grand Tier and make their way into the private donor lounges to sip champagne at intermission. They might get photographed at gala XYZ, but they are usually older. Stepping into the Met is a little like entering a Carnegie library, albeit with no stairs: narrow lobby, then a phalanx of ticket takers, into the swirling and opulent interior. The barrier to entrance is as physical as it is psychological. On the ballet side -- which between Diaghilev's Ballet Russes days and Ballet Society had ceded the turf to modern dance for quite some time, except perhaps during Nureyev's most media hip years -- the secret, "It," cliquish, "we're hip and you're not" little private, in-group enterprises. Acocella describes Wheeldon's group in terms that both Diaghilev and Ballet Society would understand; if there's a need to popularize, perhaps it's to neutralize the "in-crowd" feeling. There's a little bit of that surrounding Peter Boal in Seattle: he's trying to build a younger audience, and I suspect he's attracting a younger donor crowd as well. (Median age in the ballet gala seats is well below that for opera.) For Seattle, he's a very glamorous figure. (We don't do well with flashy.) If I were younger and cared, I might be put off by the chic, young(er) people in all of the gala photos, because I wouldn't have belonged among their equivalent when I was their age. It wouldn't have kept me away from the art form, because I'd been attending ballet since I was a young teenager, but were one to approach it cold, the one way that people often decide if they "belong" is by seeing if people like them are doing something or going somewhere.

Everyone makes choices for themselves, but I think there is a lot of value in reading it, despite thhe comment -- here in full context: First, you hear as many people coming back from intermission at the opera, asking each other frantically, "What happens in the next act?," although titles have mitigated their pain, if they read any of the languages offered. Second, a body in motion has a visceral appeal, and less-is-more costumes are commonplace, while classically trained voices are, in most cases, an acquired taste, especially since many people who would have been exposed to them through religious services no longer attend, there isn't an Ed Sullivan, Firestone Theater, or Bell Telelphone Hour to present classical singers on a regular basis, and cross-over to contemporary vocal style is practically impossible: jazz, once practiced extensively by popular singers like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, is now as much of a niche as opera. While I can see people being put off by the formality of Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty or feeling illiterate about steps, most ballet presented today outside Moscow and St. Petersburg at least, is neo-classical or contemporary. (There aren't very many steps in Wheeldon.) In many cases, new ballets (or revived Tharp works) are close enough in resemblance to Cirque de Soleil in pretzel positions, or to aerobics, or to jazzercise that they aren't immediately alien. What similar touchpoints does opera have? Third, the attempt to humanize the performers was used famously in Bergman's Magic Flute during the intermission scenes, and is being revived with Peter Gelb's Met theater broadcasts, with all of the backstage shots -- Anna Netrebko high-fiving her colleagues backastage after an act of I Puritani for example -- and, nonetheless, opera is still the one art form that is a butt of all jokes. (I think partly because it's still acceptable to make fun of fat people.) When I search for Links, I find at least two references by sportwriters, in which an analogy between a player or play to ballet, meant as the highest compliment, appears. The shrieking huge woman with a horned helmet -- turned into the shrewish wife in "Hagar the Horrible" -- is still the poster-child for opera. This suggests a barrier and alienation far deeper than what is felt for ballet. After all, the flexible ballerina is a stereotypical heterosexual male fantasy in a way that Stephanie Blythe, who owns one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard, is not. Fourth, the way that ballet is sold is, "This isn't your grandfather's ballet." Opera may be sold as "Passion! Murder! Jealousy!" but it's still Carmen, La Boheme, and Don Giovanni, not something choreographed the day before yesterday. If anything, this addresses audience conservatism, not snobbery.

I think she's wrong. I think opera still, and always will, take the cake.

Not sweet little Charlie from Seattle

I find the scariest scenes in movies are ones when someone is about to get caught, regardless of genre. I cannot bear to watch the scene in Double Happiness in which Sandra Oh's character is talking at her front door to a guy who isn't even really her boyfriend yet, and her father comes home, discovers them chatting, and freezes her out for the rest of the movie.

I saw one performance of Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Theater in 2005, and you could hear a pin drop. I know that this was neither ballet nor a statistically significant sample size, but do Russians socialize (talk, eat) during ballet performances in Russia?

I wasn't trying to suggest that he got vicarious pleasure out of it, but that many dancers have repeated that he felt that a fall meant that they were dancing all out, and he would praise them. Considering how rarely he gave praise, and how dancers recall remember the rare examples when he did, praise when falling while dancing full out stuck in their minds and recollections. (No one ever said that he was happy when someone tripped accidentally or was injured.)

I personally would rather see adherence to style than to a well-established trick. However, certain aspects of a ballet become iconic, like high notes or ornamentation in opera, and when they aren't performed, even when they aren't written -- like the high note at the end of "Celeste Aida," -- there's a sense that something's missing, and people feel cheated somehow. (I wouldn't miss the fouettes one bit, but then I don't miss the little cygnets one bit either in Balanchine's version.)

Your reasoning is exactly what I thought should be the point: Iphigenia has an internal struggle, one that isn't focused entirely on the acceptance or denial of her brother -- it's bigger than that: what happens when she returns home? (She's already accepted him, implicitly and explicitly in the story, after she learns he's killed her mother.) That is why I thought the physical struggle and the reconciliation between the two of them muddied the waters. I think it would have been as effective if she had gestured to him to leave her alone, leaving him to watch, but unable to act, and she could have come to her conclusion and dropped the scarf representing Clytemnestra, and walked off with him at the end, instead of them being on their knees and looking deep into each others' eyes after a physical struggle. I think that would have been psychologically more true and more true to the original. The happy dance music would then be for the Scythians, who were freed from the tyranny of Thaos and who were given direct instructions from Diana, so that they didn't have to second-guess what the gods wanted by killing all strangers in their midst, while the real drama would be the return of Iphigenia and Orestes to Mycene. Thank you for the explanation of the acts: I still think of the work as CD 1 and CD 2 It was impossible for me to tell the difference in acting between Focile and Plette; the staging did not play well enough to the back of the house, in my opinion. Focile was a more tender and sweet Iphigenia in her vocal interpretation. I wish I hadn't had to miss last Wednesday for work, but, gotta pay for the tickets somehow.