Helene

The only listing for the 2007 Lincoln Center Festival is for the Kirov Opera, which is bringing two cycles of the Ring of the Nibelungen. Mostly Mozart Festival runs from July 11 through August 25, and there could be a dance event, although most likely modern. None of the program info is up on the Lincoln Center website, though, and I can't find a mention of the Festival on the site. If you can travel to Saratoga Springs for a couple of days (180 miles in each direction), you can see New York City Ballet perform from 3 July-21 July, Tuesdays through Saturdays, with a gala performance on Bastille Day. Programs are TBA on the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) website: http://www.spac.org/spac-calendar/index.as...20City%20Ballet Also, according to the website, you can get to Saratoga Springs by rail or bus: Has anyone on BT travelled this way? If so, do you have any suggestions or recommendations?

Paul, I too was moved by your tribute to Stephanie von Buchau. I had just read her article about Don Giovanni recordings in Seattle Opera Magazine -- DG is opening in a couple of weeks here -- when I heard she had died. I didn't attend SFB's Nutcracker because I've never liked the ballet enough to travel especially to see it, although I've seen performances where I was already planning to go for other reasons. I'm much more interested in the Rep season, which is opening soon.

If they had "spoken" to her, or paid her big issue any mind, I suspect a more moderate party could have nabbed her attention as easily as the BNP.

The irony is that Clarke actually joined the BNP because her partner said, to paraphrase, "put your money where your mouth is if you're so convinced of your stance."A number of BTers have expressed confusion over how she could have a Cuban-born partner of Chinese descent and still be against immigration, still loved by that partner, and how her foreign-born co-workers would be able to stand her. She actually said that she is not against all immigration -- she said that those who worked were fine because they could be tracked by the government by tax and bank records, etc. -- but that she was against mass immigration. And I suspect many of her co-workers would not exactly embrace a free-market situation where all beautifully trained dancers would be eligible for the rare work visas that they hold.

He does have Lourdez Lopez to handle the admin tasks, according to the Times article. I have to wonder if Martins is smiling to himself, knowing that in his new position, Wheeldon will have to spend some of that studio time fundraising (and understanding how much energy and time it takes), although having partners like Vail and Sadler's Wells sounds like a great way to ensure base financial security. What I find promising among the 30- and 40-somethings that are starting small troupes or taking over companies as they ease out of performing careers are the murmurs of cooperation among them.

[ADMIN BEANIE ON] Please do not characterize other posters in your responses. Each of us draws our own conclusions when reading the threads. [ADMIN BEANIE OFF]

Many thanks for the information, Mr. Gordeev. We have many balletgoers from the New York City area on the boards, and it's great to know that they don't have to choose.

We've been discussing the 2007 New Year's concert on this thread. No one has mentioned concrete yet, though -- yikes!

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What a wonderful photo of Dudinskaya; her profile is to die for! And Shavrov is quite the fox

I think we will finally meet! I parted with some flight miles that I had been hoarding for some inexplicable reason; the fare you got is 2/3 the cost of flying from SEA to SFO! Unfortunately, I can't fly in for the evening of the 1 February, which I regret, because Paco de Lucia is performing at Berkeley that night, but I will be at Program 1 on 2/4, and at Program 2 for the matinee on 3 Feb. (If I like the program enough, I will try to snag a nosebleed seat for the evening, but I may just sit in the sunken Japanese tub in my hotel, if my room is lucky enough to have one.)

Assuming Woetzel was quoted correctly in this and in the Vail Festival article, if he wanted a model for speaking diplomatically and with propriety, he needs to look no farther than Peter Boal.

Yes, yes, and yes. Why should her career be in jeopardy for making a choice to support a legal, if repugnant, political party in a free society? Does she have less right than an average citizen to make a legal, if repugnant choice? Does she have less right than an average citizen for being ill-informed? Does she have less right than an average citizen for being not-so-bright? Freedom can result in ugly choices.If ballet were run like movie box office, then we could vote with our dollars or pounds by boycotting Ms. Clarke's performances. But as we've seen in just about every major ballet company that's reviewed here, the Artistic Directors are not making casting decisions based on our votes. And sympathy for fascism didn't hurt the reputation of members of the British Royal Family post-war, or Sonia Henie, or any number of US politicians who were KKK members until it became inexpedient, or Richard Nixon, who became President after being Joe McCarthy's right hand man.

You are the first to review Letestu and Martinez for Ballet Talk, Ilya; thank you! I'm sorry you missed Hurel and Ganio, but it sounds like you enjoyed a second Letestu/Martinez performance very much. Was the filming for the DVD done entirely from one performance? In some of the more recent DVD and televised releases in the US, a second performance is filmed from which to splice in passages where technical difficulties were overcome or camera angles weren't optimal.

The official reason may be because she's on the public payroll; ironic, no?, that the theme is "your tax dollars are going to support someone whose beliefs violated the charter of inclusiveness" when taxes are one of the BNP's main whipping boys. But I have several suspicions that aren't quite so generous.

I think her comments suggest that she hasn't.If nothing else, there is enough publicity about Ms. Clarke's story to show what the BNP and Mr. Griffin are made of, and this may cause potential targets of the BNP's strategy to recruit "respectable" people to think again, especially if they had been flirting with the idea of supporting the BNP.

Yes, she's a public figure even if she's no Darcey Bussell. (Judging by the interviews she's not exactly shying away from the discussion, either.) From the point of view of being a citizen, why should she shy away from the discussion, when she's being pursued by the press, particularly in light of pressure to fire her? She was outed by an undercover reporter, not because she showed up at a public rally. Should she have crawled into a corner and denied her political beliefs? She's not making the excuse that she needed to join a party to keep her job; she actually thinks this party's call to action reflects a change she wants to be made. Read carefully, her words reflect someone who lived through a terrorist scare in her own country, allegedly caused not by foreigners but by the children of immigrants, although the lack of indictments is less publicized than the original story. Citizens of the UK wouldn't be the first to accept a curtailment of civil rights and a call for stricter border controls in the wake of a terrorist scare, nor a move to the right.Professionally speaking, it isn't necessarily the brightest move. I would not watch her as an artist without her words clearly in my head.

What a wierd combination. In an recent interview with Zakharova that volcanohunter translated on this thread, the dancer mentions that "Among her classmates, only Denis Matvienko, with whom she has danced when he has appeared as a guest with the Bolshoi, stuck with a ballet career." It sounds like they have an established partnership, if it is not either's main one.

There are cases where party affiliation has been linked to employment or unemployment in ballet. The most blatant examples were under Soviet rule as it evolved. Maya Plistetskaya describes with distain those dancers who wore their party affiliation like a badge, as well as the number of ballerinas who were married to bigwig party officials and military men, who not only afforded them career paths, but protection from political maneuvering. Valeri Panov describes being denounced by his colleagues as a virtual enemy of the state when he asked to emigrate. Ballet in Germany was under the wing of opera houses, and with the passing of Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, there have been numerous debates about which opera house employees needed to join the Nazi party or risk their careers, as she said she had done. With the recent trifecta of biographies of Jerome Robbins, by Greg Lawrence, Deborah Jowitt, and Amanda Vaill, Robbins' "naming names" during HUAC hearings has become one of the defining factors of his career. Milberg describes how Balanchine didn't have to name names, because of his attitude that as a person who escaped Communist oppression and considered Socialism the equivalent, it was obvious that he would not be part of or befriend either. Under the McCarthy era the right to be members of parties when they were legal was brought into question; it is a danger in the Clarke case that she will be hounded in similar, if unofficial ways, as evidenced in a story from today's Links: BNP ballerina defies rising clamour to sack her Not as vicious as being confronted by an entire company, like Panov, but in the same spirit.Then there is institutional pressure, which has been described about Balanchine. In her recent book In Balanchine's Company Barbara Milberg Fisher describes how, as a young dancer, she wore a button for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace during the 1948 Presidential election, and how Balanchine urged her to take it off, figuring she was a naif being taken in, and not understanding that she had grown up as what is generally known as a Red Diaper baby, where left politics were as much part of the meal as food. (Was it ViolinConcerto who gave us this description?) Suzanne Farrell describes how Balanchine told her to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, which surprised her, because all of his other counsel had been to vote straight Republican. (He disliked Nixon immensely.) In a company where dancers were known to hide their suntans from Balanchine's scrutiny, and who lived for his approval, they were unlikely, as Milberg did, to make a blatant political stand that countered his.

According to the article, Ms. Clarke expected her membership in the BNP to be private, and it was only when a reporter went undercover to join the BNP that her affiliation with it was exposed. She was not out to be a spokeperson or poster child for the movement, which she's reluctantly become. In a free society, Ms. Clarke has the right to join any legal party and to speak about politics, if she so chooses, just as any artist does, as long as s/he doesn't speak on behalf of her organization. Whether this is advised is another story, because it is possible for audience members to decide not to attend ENB when she performs or for a donor to become a former donor in order to not support any organization she is a part of. But in her case, she didn't expect to be a political figure publicly, and it was only through an extraordinary circumstance that she has.

To those who celebrate New Year's on the solar calendar (), have a happy, healthy 2007!

My favorite Drosselmeyer performance ever was by a dancer who wasn't known primarily as a character actor, Francisco Moncion. (At least part of this time he was listed in the roster among the Principal Dancers; there was no special "character" category.) His Drosselmeyer was particularly kind, and the scene to the violin cadenza in which he looked after the sleeping Marie and the broken Nutcracker and in which he cast his spell was perfectly paced and wonderous.

In Sandra Kurtz's -- that's "sandik"'s to you -- year-end review of dance in Seattle in 2006, she ended with a tribute to Fleming Halby, who retired as PNB Principal Character Dancer and Principal of the Seattle school.

You'd think that since cinemas make beaucoup bucks selling junk food at a tremendous markup, they'd welcome opera intermissions. (And as a long-time Seattle Film Festival goer, I can attest that hungry moviegoers will eat anything.)

My favorite Bejart story was one that Maya Plisetskaya told. She had come to work with him, having gotten special permission during Soviet times. She could not in that short period of time follow the counts and permutations of movement and score for Bolero. She was about to give up and go home, but he was concerned that there would severe sanctions against her if she didn't perform. So that she could perform, he stood on something at the back of the theater, and prompted her throughout the entire performance.