Helene

It has come to our attention that a number of photos from private collections of BT members that have been graciously scanned and posted to the board have made their way to other web sites, most prominently Wikipedia. Just because a photo is over 100 years old does not make it part of public domain for re-publication. We will pursue this with the websites on which the material has been re-published. All photos published on this site from private collections are for viewing off this site only.

Please note, that any photographs uploaded to Ballet Talk by members from their private collections are for use on the site only, and are not to be downloaded for publication elsewhere.

Saturday, March 10 Choreographer Joe Goode's works will be performed today at the University of Maryland, where he's just completed a week-long residency. Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theatre's founder Michael Medcalf is retiring at the end of this season. Le Vu Long's "The Stillness of Us" plays at Seattle's "On the Boards" this weekend, on its way to Dance Theater Workshop. Nacho Duato's Compañía Nacional de Danza 2 performed in Philadelphia. Clive Barnes reviews Paul Taylor Company's fund raising gala performance. Robert LaFosse performed in one of two of Keely Garfield's new works at Danspace Project. Claudia La Rocco reviews Marcia Milhazes's "Tempo de Verão." Victor Quijada and Santee Smith brought Rubberbandance Group and Kaha:wi Dance to Toronto.

There are also two other versions of the Dolin choreography available on tape or DVD: one is on Nina Ananiashvili & International Stars, Vol. 2, with Nina Ananiashvili, Darci Kistler, Rose Gad, and Tatyana Terekhova, and the other is on Alicia Alonso: Prima Ballerina Assoluta, with Alicia Alonso, Melissa Hayden, Nora Kaye, and Mia Slavenska. (On the same DVD, there's also a version choreographed by Alonso, with Alonso, Mirta Plá, Loipa Araújo, and Aurora Bosch.)

Wishing good thoughts for your son... ( )

My favorite moment in Serenade is in the finale, when the three women nest against each other with their heads tilted back, and all of that magnificent hair is flowing. The red-haired Calegari or the blond Kozlova or Kistler, contrasting with the medium brown hair of Watts or Nichols, and the dark, dark hair of Ashley or Lopez or Melinda Roy made my pulse jump. Thank you, Farrell Fan, for mentioning The Cage and Orpheus. I can't believe I forgot those short glam wigs for the insect women or the ropy wigs for the Bacchantes. And carbro for the "Merry Widow" wigs. I think there are wigs in the "Trollops and Dandies" section of Vienna Waltzes, too. I think it would be impossibly warm to dance in a wig, but the Royal Ballet seemed to use wigs for everything, and I guess dancers have gotten used to worse, like hard stages.

Are there any wigs in NYCB productions, apart from character roles like Drosselmeyer and Dr. Coppelius? (Maybe butterflies in A Midsummer Night's Dream?)

A number of films use "Introducing [Actor's name]" in the opening credits. That could be the equivalent of "new," although I'm not sure if that's always a debut debut, or a prominent role debut. (I don't understand the Kidman story. I only saw intermittent parts of the broadcast from India. Would someone please explain?)

I thought she had a third, which she resolved to after petulance, that showed a hurt child. My enjoyment doesn't mean I think she should have won; nor do I think hype should have anything to do with my enjoyment. Having seen Barazza and Kikuchi in Babel and Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, I know there were at least three superior performances. But after Crash, I don't think anything in Babel had a chance, and like in The Godfather, when Pacino, Caan, and Duvall were nominated together, the actresses would have cancelled each other out, even if they had been in another movie.Beyonce would have been silly to think that she could win with a goody-goody role like that. Had her character been the self-centered, manipulative careerist, she might have had a chance. My favorite performance in Dreamgirls was Eddie Murphy's. Such a flamboyant role could have taken it over completely, but that it didn't, to me, showed tremendous skill. The only other performance among the supporting men that I saw was winner Alan Arkin's, and I didn't think it was nearly as accomplished as Murphy's. I agree.

In the premiere in 1962, Conrad Ludlow danced both Titania's Cavalier in Act I, and in the Divertissement (partnering Violette Verdy) in Act II.

It was Adam Luders in that telecast from 1986, in the role in which he gave his final NYCB performance on 26 June 1994, with Kyra Nichols. (It was also Gen Horiuchi's farewell performance at NYCB, as Oberon.)

Thank you, mom2! Congratulations to Ms. Pereira and Mr. Birkkjaer! It's great to know that the RDB school is training men in the great tradition of the company. BTW, Leigh is absolutely right about our policy: a public announcement (or posting of the winners) is official news.

I'm not really sure, because the first ballet I saw was on television, when I was little. Given that it was the early 60's, I would guess either The Ed Sullivan Show, Bell Telephone Hour, or Firestone Theater. I have no idea what was danced or what the dancers wore, but because I wasn't a tiara-loving kid, I suspect it was bodies moving to music that got me hooked, and that's how I came to love figure skating and gymnastics growing up, too.

The trip home from India was fraught with snafus, and, sadly, The Departed was off the movie list for March, and I only got to see three: Dreamgirls, Happy Feet, and Casino Royale. I really loved Jennifer Hudson's sweet vulnerability in the role of Effie White in Dreamgirls, but I preferred her when she was actually singing at the beginning of the movie, not what was, in my opinion, that dreadful soundtrack that encouraged the worst vocal excess. Happy Feet was a visual delight, and an aural one, too, when Savion Glover was tapping. I read that there were those who dismissed Daniel Craig's performance as James Bond in Casino Royale before it was even released because he was blond. I mean, really: spies are supposed to be either black, like my very first crush, Bill Cosby's Oxford-educated, multi-lingual Alexander Scott in I Spy, or blond. Haven't these people ever heard of Ilya Kuryakin? In one episode, when they teamed up the Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s assistant, the blond David McCallum, and the Girl from U.N.C.L.E.'s assistant, the blond Noel Harrison, I though my little pre-adolescent heart would burst. (Of course, my post-adolescent-to-current heart burst at Alec Guinesses's George Smiley, Greg Morris's Barney in Mission Impossible, and Courtney Vance's Sonarman Jones in The Hunt for Red October -- which also featured my favorite performance by Sean Connery.) I've never been a big Bond fan, because I don't find much appealing about the super-suave, interchangeable-arm-candy-on-each-arm, dark-haired man with a side part at all interesting or attractive. But give me a cragly-faced blond with a receding hairline -- and the camera really loves his face -- who looks like he could be cast as the bad guy, who's full of conflict, tension, and need, whose weakness gets him into trouble from which he needs to extract himself, and, voila!, some long-forgotten maternal instinct rears its ugly head, and I'm in love. Don't let the gratuitous action scenes, during which I buried my head in the flight magazine, fool you: Casino Royale is a date movie. Or, as Peter Bradshaw concluded in The Guardian:

Just as a note, there was a similar show from Vercruz called Jarocho, which was a Mexican answer to Riverdance, and when, unfortunately, did not survive past an Asian tour last fall. I saw some recorded material from the show, and "so much more dynamic, so much more spectacular, so much more challenging for the dancers" was exactly how I would describe it as well.

And all over the world, young ballet students will sit spellbound before the screen and think, "All I have to do to make it as a professional is get my leg...I think they've already learned that from Sylvie Guillem (and have ignored any other lesson she might have taught them).

I have to admire both Zakharova and La Scala for pulling this off; it looks like a win-win business deal. For posterity, it will be Zakharova's performances that are discussed, because they'll be on the rare recordings that are preserved. And La Scala will get its name out there.

The best places to find reviews, in my opinion, are in publications where the space limitations and deadlines aren't the same as in a daily paper, and in anthologies of dance criticism by critics of Croce's and Denby's stature, for example.A great place to read reviews is in the print publication, Dance View, and its sister website, DanceViewTimes. There you'll find reviews by Ballet Talk's Leigh Witchel, Paul Parish, Dale Brauner, Mary Cargill, Marc Haegemann, Michael Popkin, Alexander Meinertz, and Eva Kistrup, and DanceView and Ballet Talk founder, Alexandra Tomalonis. Also writings by John Percival, Lisa Reinhart, David Vaughn, Rita Feliciano, and a host of others: http://www.danceviewtimes.com/aboutus.html

Thank you, Mr. Mann. You've been conducting a marathon of performances this week

Saturday, 2 March Former San Francisco Ballet Principal Dancer Joanna Berman performed in ODC/Dance Downtown. Claudia La Rocco reviews Miguel Gutierrez's "Everyone." Gia Kourlas reviews Sally Gross's recent program. An Ordered World Defined With Soothing Spareness Jennifer Dunning reviews Amy Pivar and ann and alexx.

It's a difficult enough model for mid-sized companies to achieve when they only do one or two (SFB, for example) program at a time. Injuries and illness can shatter the best plans, and when there's a new work, the choreographer's initial choices may not always work out in the long run, or the piece can take on different dimensions with more demands.To accomplish this within the demands of a large company with so many performances and program diversity required by subscribers is even more so. I don't know how long NYCB will stick with it, but I suspect there were a lot of lessons learned this season.

When I first read this post, my thought was, "Why, when Gottlieb can write something that I find maddening, do I so look forward to his criticism, when I look forward to finding links to the exasperating Lewis Segal about as much as I do when a read an article on figure skating that sounds like it was written by a Mike Lupica wannabee?"My conclusion is that with Gottlieb, I feel like I'm deeply in the same world, looking at the same thing, even if my reaction is different, while with Segal, I wonder sometimes if I'm living on the same planet as he is. So when Gottlieb writes, "Miranda Weese, Jenifer Ringer, Yvonne Borree are all, despite their varying levels of competence, essentially bland," I find myself arguing as I continue reading, "I don't think Jenifer Ringer is bland. Not sparkly, but not bland. She's got a bloom and a perfume that's more subtle, but I don't think bland..." etc. etc. But when I come to this part, which distills so much into so few words, I wish I had written it.

While Symphonie Concertante was not a graduation ballet, it was a teaching ballet. The leads were a young Tanaquil Leclerq and Maria Tallchief, then in her prime and with a formidable reputation. While the obvious conclusion was that it was Tallchief who would be Leclerq's example, Tallchief expressed in several interviews, including the ones in Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas, that it was she who was being taught by the example of Leclerq's pristine Balanchine technique. It was one of the first "tutu" ballets for the corps that Balanchine created for New York City Ballet. (Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, and Theme and Variations were created for other companies.) American Ballet Theatre has a bit of an exclusive on this ballet, since New York City Ballet had dropped it from its rep. From what I remember of a performance I saw in the early 80's, I preferred it to Gounod Symphony, which NYCB revived in the 80's. It's possible that it has been performed by another company, but I don't remember hearing about one by a company with ABT's reputation. In the US, people are starved for any "new" Balanchine, which probably is not the case in London. Why ABT chose it instead of another ballet to bring to London is a good question. ABT has a deep repertory of ballets by Tudor and deMille, for example, that were created and/or staged for them, and which they are sorely neglecting, and Theme, Balanchine that was choreographed for them.

To give more detail, "Opera-L" is a list, which works a bit differently than a message board. The first few messages, which are emailed to the entire list, are reviewed before they are posted, much like our "Moderated" function. You can choose to get individual emails or daily or weekly digests of all of the posts. There is a limit of two messages per 24-hour period. Responses can be to the writer -- that's the default value in the message screen -- or to the entire list, and an archive of all responses to the general list. In a Moderated situation, it's hard to tell what is being blocked, but I can speak to what makes it through. The only posts that I've seen that are publicly chastised by the board Moderator are copyright violations, since this endangers hosting on the CUNY servers. There are a core of contributors who write beautiful, cogent, historically accurate material and well-reasoned analysis, and I have a mail folder where I keep the best of these. For me, they make the "noise" worth putting up with. As richard53dog mentions, the board is very Met-centric first, and New York centric second. (There's a Yahoo group devoted to performances in London (LondonOperaCommunity], and it provides great information for visitors.) In fact, there was a quite contentious set of "threads" a couple of months ago in which the subject of whether the Met is the center of opera universe was discussed. Be prepared, though: there are clusters of personal insult, direct and implied, that is tolerated, of which "Jane, you ignorant slut" is about par.

Here's the link to the bios page on the Dancing with the Stars site: http://abc.go.com/primetime/dancing/newseason.html The pairings are: LAILA ALI / MAKSIM CHMERKOVSKIY BILLY RAY CYRUS / KARINA SMIRNOFF CLYDE DREXLER / ELENA GRINENKO JOEY FATONE / KYM JOHNSON SHANDI FINNESSEY / BRIAN FORTUNA (first-timer) LEEZA GIBBONS / TONY DOVOLANI HEATHER MILLS / JONATHAN ROBERTS APOLO ANTON OHNO / JULIANNE HOUGH (first-timer) VINCENT PASTORE / EDYTA SLIWINSKA PAULINA PORIZKOVA / ALEC MAZO IAN ZIERING / CHERYL BURKE I think there are a number of inspired choices, particularly Ohno, Pastore, and Ziering.