Helene

I can get it to resolve on Firefox and IE 7, but I get about three seconds, and then it starts buffering again. He's got great bones, though! The article says he will dance in New York until January or February of 2008 and then assume his role with RDB in the summer of 2008.

We just received the following press release announcing a tribute to Ann Barzel, emphasis in blue added:

I've updated the Rules and Policies to include non-English links as sources of official news, as long as there's a short summary or translated outtake in English. We appreciate the official news posted by Ballet Talkers who are fluent in other languages and who can keep us up-to-date on official news from around the world

The National Ballet of Canada's website has a short interview with prize-winner Tina Pereira.

I actually get the impression he loves classical dance. Imagine that.

What a voice, to fuse dance history and personal experience in such a personal, visceral way! If this is "dry" writing, I'll take it any day.

Most theaters have areas for wheelchairs and with moveable seats specificially for people who have physical issues that make them need more rooms or ability to move more freely. One of my friends uses these seats when she comes to visit me, because she has severe scoliosis, and it allows her to lean in whatever direction she needs to at will. Even though her condition is quite visible, that's little comfort to a person who is sitting behind her and whose view is blocked if she sits in a fixed seat in a row. I've sat in them when they've been free and I've come in just before the performance starts, but where I don't want to bother 10 people to get to my seat, at least until intermission.

Saturday, March 31 Aszure Barton's Les Chambres des Jacques, performed by Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal is reviewed in The Boston Globe: Claudia La Rocco reviews choreographer Levi Gonzales in The New York Times. Gia Kourlas reviews Second Avenue Dance Company's spring concert.

25 minutes in a fume-filled garage, and then who knows how many more in the Mercer mess.I attend the Q&A's, so that's not an issue, and I head in the opposite direction of Mercer. But I can appreciate how the experience of two plus hours of beautiful dancing (or opera or symphony) can be ruined by a hell commute home. I think you're right about the Simon Says aspect of standing ovations, especially at the Opera House, where the lights are down. (Although, in NYC a couple of years ago, my best friend and I were glared at two days in a row for not giving Vanessa Redgrave a standing O for Long Day's Journey Into Night and for all of Movin' Out. So I'm not sure it's better there.) But at the symphony, where there is brighter lighting, and no orchestra pit to separate the front row from the stage, it seems like the front rows are up on their feet before the reverb ends. (And, because the lights are up enough, the only people who leave usually skulk out, bent over.)

My two favorite pieces of Handel vocal music are tied to specific performances: Lawrence Tibbett singing "Where'eer You Walk" from Semele -- alas not available on any available commercial recording I know of; George Jellinek played in on "The Vocal Scene" many years ago -- and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing "Ombra mai fu" from Xerxes (also called Serse), which is available on her "Handel Arias" CD. The latter, especially, is so personal. In the March 2007 issue of Opera News, in a review of a posthumous release of "Neruda Songs" by her widower, Peter Lieberson, F. Paul Driscoll wrote, Earlier, she brought the same quality to "Ombra mai fu."

I have a permanent crick in my neck from being in the last row at City Center (before the renovation). It looked like one of those fancy straws where there are several spirals in the middle. Just from trying to gain a glance at the stage from all of the heads in the way.

I think I'm going to faint I'm not sure who is to be congratulated more -- Hubbe or RDB

Thank you for finding and posting the casts, Chocomel! When looking at the Carmina Burana and Pacific casting, I missed that Jordan Pacitti has been cast in Carmina. He's in three of four ballets in Program A, as well. It will be great to see him back. I was getting worried. The casting is sane -- same casts across all performances. When I saw the *'s noting debuts, I wondered if Paul Gibson's piece was new, and not the piece he did for the gala (although I remembered Glass for the score), but I found my gala program, and except for Jodie Thomas replacing Maria Chapman in the "Quartet" movement, the cast is the same as the gala for three of the four movements. Gibson has added a Pas de Deux for Korbes and Herd. Weese and Maraval are cast together in one of the Trisha Brown pieces. I think that's inspired pairing. Christopher Stowell is bringing the big guns from Oregon Ballet Theatre. I don't know Houser, but I've seen the other dancers, and they are terrific. Gavin Larsen is a lovely dancer who used to be at PNB, and I was thrilled to see her resurface in Portland. It will be great to see her in Seattle again; I think this will be her first performance on the new stage at McCaw Hall.

You're not as much of a novice as you think I think Korbes is a goddess. After I saw her first Odette/Odile, I wondered how she could possibly top that, which she did in her second Odette/Odile. You'll be happy to know that in the first week of Pacific/Carmina Burana, all subscription performances, she'll be dancing in Pacific on Thursday, April 5 and Friday, April 6, and she'll be the wanton woman in red in Carmina Burana on Friday, April 6 and Saturday Matinee, April 7. http://www.pnb.org/season/festwk1-2casting.html (Only the first weekend's casting is up now.)

Wow, Natalia, that sounds not only like a lot of fun, but there's no feeling like being in a stadium as the local crowd is in ecstasy about its skaters. The electric charge is like no other. I saw Berntsson and Verner in 2003, when they were wee lads (well, teenagers) with beautiful edges and good expression, but both were struggling with 3A's. Now look at them! I'm so thrilled for both. If American ice shows weren't so, um, American-centric, both of them would have contracts in a millisecond. Mariusz Siudek was injured during the warm-up: he hurt his back badly, but wanted to continue. His coach, Richard Gaultier, convinced him not to: http://www.globesports.com/servlet/story/R...lobeSportsOther Alexei Tikhonov was also injured. The ISU site had a wrap up article for Day 2, but it's no longer on their site. It's really sad for both pairs, but at least the Siudeks had a magical, if imperfect skate in Warsaw, to an enraptured crowd. For Petrova/Tikhonov, who sacrificed their plans to coach and stayed in to help the younger teams, it was a hard ending. The ISU has announced the 2007 bonuses based on the year's standings, and many of the medal winners in Tokyo won some serious training cash: Ladies: 1st: Kim, Asada (45K) 3rd: Ando (18K) But she always has Toyota... Men: 1st: Takahashi (45K) 2nd: Joubert (27K) 3rd: Oda (18K) Pairs: 1st: Shen/Zhao (67.5) 2nd: Savchenko/Szolkowy and Zhang/Zhang (40.5) Dance: 1st: Denkova/Staviski (67.5) 2nd: Dubreuil/Lauzon (40.5) 3rd: Domnina/Shabalin (27) I hope the Chinese Federation lets S/Z keep some of that money to start a new home! Now, we want to hear about the ballet!

Yes. Definitely yes. No. Definitely no. She put a friendly (to her) bodyguard between her and you, and you couldn't accidentally drop a 20 lb. purse on her foot, preferably with laptop. I don't think there's much you could have done.

Casting is up for the first weekend of Mark Morris' Pacific (music by Lou Harrison) and Carmina Burana (music by Carl Orff): http://www.pnb.org/season/festwk1-2casting.html

I wouldn't call it "Dance Festival for Dummies 101" ()though, although many people attending might be exposed to more genres of dance than they've seen before. There will be pieces whose styles and work will be familiar to ballet audiences, like corps member Kiyon Gaines' Schwa, Ballet Master Paul Gibson's Sense of Doubt, Robert Joffrey's Remembrances, and Christopher Stowell's Adin. I have to admit, I don't remember Torque from 2001, but Val Caniparoli also choreographed Lamberena and The Bridge, both performed multiple seasons by PNB. A treat on Program A will be Jane Eaglen, who will sing Wagner for the Joffrey piece. There will be works from outside PNB that will be performed by choreographers' own companies: Christopher Stowell's Adin performed by Oregon Ballet Theatre and John Alleyne's Schubert performed by Ballet British Columbia on the ballet side, and on the modern side, Donald Byrd's Bhangra Fever performed by Spectrum Dance Theatre and Mary Sheldon Scott's Locale performed by Scott/Powell Performance. (That's what the "fine print" at the bottom of the site means.) While it's too soon to tell how this will fit into Peter Boal's long-term plans for festivals, here's a link to an inteview with Peter Boal from the March encore program. He said that the initial idea came from a critic, who noted the number of important choreographers who are from the Pacific Northwest, like Merce Cunningham, Robert Joffrey, Mark Morris, and Trisha Brown. There are three ways to create a festival: find a producer to invite all of the companies, have the companies themselve produce it, or have one company organize the whole thing, which is what Boal did. The important point is that he wants the dance audiences in Seattle to be interested in a wide range of dance and companies and to be mutually supportive. There's a great short interview with Kitty Daniels, who's the Chair of the Dance Department at Cornish -- attended by Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and painter Morris Graves, with whom Cunningham and Cage collaborated on the original version of the Cunningham piece in Program A -- on the PNB website: http://www.pnb.org/season/festival-daniels.html Since Boal is stretching the company in new directions, mostly in the type of dance that interests him and that he commissed for "Peter Boal & Company," what this festival will do is put in context the contemporary work he's brining to the company. You can buy single tickets. Just click on the "Buy Tickets" button at the top right of this page and then select the date under the program you want to see. There are four sections that list the ticket price as $20. Program A is the closest to a typical program you'd see at PNB: One neoclassical in romantic style (Joffrey), one tango-influenced neoclassical (Gaines), one Caniparoli, and one strictly modern piece by Merce Cunningham. Program B has two jazz, modern pieces (Dawkins and Byrd), one by Toni Pimble to a Dvorak String Quartet -- the piece was chroreographed for NYCB's Diamond Project, for Peter Boal, Jeffrey Edwards, and Stephanie Saland -- and one by John Alleyne, whose style is contemporary ballet. Program C is split between neoclassical (Stowell and Gibson) and modern (Brown and Scott). Another way to decide may be by music. Program A has Wagner songs, Piazolla tangos, a Torke symphony -- his music generally is in the same minimalist genre as Phillip Glass and John Adams -- and a modern score/soundscape by John Cage. Program B has a truncated piano trio by Schubert, Simone/Fuentes/Segal, the Dvorak "American" string quartet, and what amazon.com describes"The musical form bhangra was born when young Indian DJs living in Britain layered dance-techno electronics over the infectious, pounding beats of traditional Indian drums (namely tabla and tholl) and instrumentation. " Program C has music by Bizet/Dylan/Lightfoot, Rachmaninoff, Powell (I know I've heard his music, but I don't remember it offhand.) Are there ballets you've seen that you like or dislike? Music that you'd like to hear, even if you don't care for the dance work itself? Chances are you'd be able to find a program that has an anchor work that matches your likes.

It's one of my all-time favorite dance works. MMDG is bringing it to Seattle for two performances with the Seattle Symphony next March (17-18), and I'm going to be in Sweden for the Figure Skating World Championships I have to admit, for me, in this work, the music is accompaniment. (Or maybe the genius of the work is that the dance is so tied to the music that I find them inseparable, and think it's all the dance.)

I love Handel's music, and occasionally some of it makes me feel like moving -- and, occasionally, like "Queen of Sheba" makes me imagine figure skating -- but in general, apart from genius uses like Balanchine's in Figure in the Carpet, I don't think of it for formal dance. The da capo format, in which the first and second parts constrast, and the third is an ornamented version of the first, poses the same difficulties as much of Chopin's music: by the time the dancer(s) create the mood of the first, they have to catch their breath and do a 180 degree change.

The very small, statistically insignificant sample size of engineers and scientists that I've known personally from Bell Labs were all classical musicians, and very interested in the arts. Through an old boyfriend, I knew a number of graduate students at Rockefeller University in the 80's, and I found a high number of classical musicians among them, including a man who is now a well-renowned scientist, professor, and writer who performed Ives' 2nd Piano Sonata as a senior in college.

It's great to see dancers get opportunity and recognition. Congratulations to them

I went to a seminar during last fall's Ring of the Nibelungen, and one of the speakers was Canadian Opera Company Tuba/Wagner Tuba player Scott Irvine. The entire week was a lovefest about Four Seasons Centre and a hatefest about the Hummingbird Centre. While he was no fan of its acoustics, and said that the acoustics in the Four Seasons Centre probably will extend his career by a decade, he was having none of the non-stop abuse heaped upon Hummingbird Centre. I didn't write down his exact words, but to paraphrase, he said that Hummingbird was never meant to be an opera or ballet house. It was meant to be a place where travelling companies came through with musicals, where the singers had mikes in their hair. It was a decent home as an interim theater, but that the period lasted a decade too long. (The stops and starts and abandoned plans for a new opera/ballet house over that decade have been well documented.)

There are three DVD's that are scheduled to be released by Amazon.com tomorrow (27 March) "Natasha" -- Contents: Extract from On your Toes (Saddler) with Tim Flavin Romeo and Juliet Bedroom pas de deux (MacMillan) with Anthony Dowell Carmen Bedroom pas de deux (Petit) with Denys Ganio Proust Remembered pas de deux (Petit) with Denys Ganio Begin the Beguine show number (Gennero) with Gary Chryst Bach Sonata 1st pas de deux (Béjart) with Denys Ganio Prelude to Les Sylphides (Fokine) solo Manon Bedroom pas de deux (MacMillan) with Anthony Dowell Saint-Saëns Dying Swan (Fokine) solo A Month in the Country pas de deux (Ashton) with Anthony Dowell Showcase (Maen) with The Norman Maen Dancers Subtitles: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish Dancing for Dollars: Bolshoi in Vegas & Kirov in St. Petersburg (Documentary) World's Young Ballet / Moscow International Competition, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ludmila Semenyaka, Anna Pavlova 1969 Moscow Competition, with film clips of Pavlova. Shameless Ballet Talk promotion: These are all available from the "BT Amazon Mini-Store" (link under the logo).

Jonathan Porretta, who had danced with the company before Francia Russell lured him west, guested with Dances Patrelle this weekend, and today's Links begins with a review of the program. Here's Jennifer Dunning's review of Porretta: