Helene

I've read he'll be working for the DNB this season as a Ballet Master... Griffin is listed as "rehearsal director" in the English language version of the Dutch National Ballet website and "balletmeester" in the Dutch language version. http://www.het-nationale-ballet.nl/index.php?&department=25

I wouldn't say obsessively, but I always thought that Kent Stowell was more interested in developing the women in PNB, based on his choreography and how PNB hired partners for its ballerinas from the outside. Among the Principal Men, none were trained at PNB, although Jonathan Poretta was in Peter Boal's first class, and influenced his choice of PNB. Poretta is the only Principal Man who was not hired after an outside career and who started in the PNB corps. In the past few years, though, the men's contingent has grown so much deeper and many men have been finished at the school. Soloist Casey Herd started in the PNB corps and he dances principal roles almost exclusively, and Pacitti, Gaines, Postlewaite, and Spell all studied at the PNB school before joining the Company. I would expect that with Boal as a leader, the men's contingent will grow stronger, and that he'd choose choreographers that would bring out the strength of the men.

Quiggin, I didn't mean to imply that Zelensky was overweight, but that he seemed more muscular back then, especially in his legs. In white tights the other night, he looked comparatively wispy to me. According to the program, Yana Sebrebriakova danced both the Brave Fairy and the Sapphire Fairy, but according to Rachel Howard's review in The Chronicle, Sapphire Fairy was Tatiana Tkachenko, who also danced the Playful Fairy. According to the program, the Sapphire, Gold, and Silver fairies remain the same for all performances, while Tkachenko is scheduled to dance Diamond Fairy on this Saturday's matinee. I'm not sure if this was an unannounced casting change. Howard also identified Boris Gruzin as the conductor.

Her official retirement is June 2006, but she did say she'd remain as a Guest Artist, choosing her rep with care. There should be opportunities to see her dance beyond the current season.

My first college roommate made me a plant from cutting off a flourishing plant that had been given to her by a very close friend. I was charged with bringing her plant home over holiday break. I killed her plant accidentally. Luckily, I still had the cutting. I think it's a really, really good thing that so many former Balanchine dancers have companies of their own and/or are staging Balanchine ballets through the Balanchine Foundation. Those companies are like the cuttings from the Mother Plant, and the entire Balanchine legacy isn't dependent on a single company.

I travelled to Berkeley to see Sleeping Beauty and was quite disappointed on the whole. From the audience reaction, I expect this to be a very small minority view. "Where's the Plie?" If I had one overriding thought throughout last night's performance of Sleeping Beauty, that was it. I saw dancer after dancer with long, pencil-thin legs looking superb in sousous and bouree -- and in arabesque once the position was attained -- but feeling two-dimensional when movement and transitions were called for. An exception was Uliana Lopatkina, whose beautiful and expressive arms and neck, and fluid epaulement gave her an authority that not even Vishneva had. (She didn't have to plie -- she was so alive above the waist.) As a character, though, I thought there was zero chemistry between her and Vishneva, and I found Lopatkina's Lilac Fairy rather static and distant. I am sure this is partly because of the way the role was truncated in the scenes that mattered to the story and characterization -- mitigating Carabosse's curse and leading Desiree to the vision and then to the sleeping Aurora. When I read that Sergeyev's production reduced the mime, I had mistakenly assumed that this was primarily from the second act, around the Vision Scene. What I was not prepared for was the incomprehensible curse scene in the Prologue. Carabosse strutted around the stage like a caricature that a young boy would make of an overbearing, spinster teacher. In this condensed version of the curse, there was neither buildup -- Aurora would grow up, Aurora would grow into a beautiful young lady, Aurora would dance away at her debut (doesn't sound so bad, maybe Carabosse is not so bitter after all...) and then she'll prick her finger on a spindle and GOTCHA die -- nor any indication of whether the bad thing coming would be a hurricane, nuclear explosion, disappearance, or some unnamed disaster. Would the court be destroyed? There was not much indication that Aurora herself was the target. The curse was "mitigated" by a series of arabesques on the diagonal, with the Lilac Fair pointing at Carabosse and Carabosse backing downstage. It looked like a power struggle, with the Lilac Fairy winning the battle, but with an enfeebled "I'll be back" Wylie Coyote exit by Carabosse. (Accompanied by bent over addled followers in black, and silly bat-like creatures who had as much power as a stuffed toy.) Besides a coherent story line, what was missing was sense that the Court both underplayed the power and importance of Carabosse's curse and then defied fate. The demand that the Lilac Fairy make it all better, and the bittersweetness of her inability to remove all consequences was nowhere to be found. In this production, the King and Queen promptly forgot the curse -- no extra security to protect Aurora; the only character who remembered it was Catalabutte, who tried to grab the bouquet that was presented by the unknown crone. The rest of the Court had amnesia. Around the Vision Scene there was little development. The Lilac Fairy appears in a flowing lilac "nightie," and the pas de deux was a bit strange, as Lewis Segal pointed out in his review in the Los Angeles Times; between the costumes and the supported arabesque penches it did feel a bit intimate, but was, thankfully, rather short. The Prince didn't need anyone's help doing anything, it seemed: he found Aurora and figured out on his own that to give her a quick peck her on the cheek was the way to revive her and the court, where he promptly ignored the revived King and Queen. (As a Prince, he'd be expected to pay his respect to the ruling monarchs, just as England's Princess Anne curtseyed to the modern oil monarchs of the Middle East. Longevity and accomplishment do not outrank rank.) The only thing left for the Lilac Fairy to do was to show up in the final scene, back in her Court tutu, to give her final blessing in front of a very effective fountain effect upstage center. I would have preferred that the first intermission between the Prologue and Act I been cut, and the mime restored to give the ballet some meaning. Sleeping Beauty is not a pure dance drama or an abstract ballet. Cutting the mime made the dancing portions seem short and incomplete to me, and for all of the people on it, the stage looked strangely empty, except when the students made their appearances. The most effective mime in the entire production was between the King, Catalabutte, and the Servant. First the King OKs the guest list. (Catalabutte repeats the OK to the servant, with the same gestures the King uses.) When Carabosse appears and demands to know why she was not invited, the King blames Catalabutte, who then blames the servant. But when Carabosse rips off Catalabutte's wig and tears out his hair, the servant comforts him, when he could have been vengeful. Neither Catalabutte nor Galifron (the dancing master who is blindfolded at the beginning of Act II) is played as a buffoon, which is common to almost every other production of the ballet I've seen. (Both parts were danced/played by Andrey Yakovlev.) The most effective characterizations in the dancing roles were the suitors: each had his own personality, and for the first time I've seen the ballet, they were not anonymous corps members who prayed that they wouldn't knock Aurora off pointe in the Rose Adagio. I'm not sure I remember which Fairy was which properly, with the exception of Yana Selina's Carefree Fairy, which is very stylized, and which she performed charmingly. The dancer wearing the pinkish/apricot tutu is the one who started with the energy I'd been missing until that point, but it died out a bit toward the end of her variation. I think it must have been Yulia Kasenkova, because when she reappeared as the Gold Fairy in the last act, her energy and three-dimensional dancing was one of the highlights of the evening. (At last, a plie and a big juicy one at that!) Selina was delightful as The White Cat, as was her straight man, Anton Lukovkin as Puss in Boots. I, too, was impressed by the students in the violinists' dance. Unlike the boys who danced with the Ogre, they blended right in, and I wouldn't have guessed that they weren't in the Company. Kudos to Helgi Tomassen and the San Francisco Ballet School. I liked Anton Korsakov's Bluebird. It was a bit muscular, but I thought it was quite clean, if not elegant. (And he bent his knees when he landed, no small favor.) Yulia Bolshakova's Princess Florina was brittle and marred by exaggerated extensions, which caused her to go off center. I liked her persona, though; she was giving to the audience. There is no doubt that Diana Vishneva is a Ballerina in the grandest sense. From the moment she appeared onstage she had a charisma that was unmatched, as if someone had turned up the lights. Her Rose Adagio was rock-solid and authoritative, and she built her performance into a dazzling display during the Wedding Pas de Deux. The only technical issue I saw was that she seemed a bit wobbly in supported pirouettes; she was solid with only one of her partners, one of the suitors. But apart from her entrance and a few moments with the King and Queen, I saw Vishneva, not Aurora. She wasn't a young girl at her first big party, trying things she'd never done before (at least in public), succeeding grandly, and showing delight; she was a World Champion at her first Olympics. Her vision scene made me think of Odette, and although the music suggested purity and repose and not mystery, this was the most developed characterization of the evening. In the Wedding Pas de Deux, she was more like a Queen being coronated than a bride, as if the King and Queen had already abdicated. I'm very used to this in opera, where a fifty-year-old portrays a twenty-year-old, and where the music indicates a lifetime of experience, but perhaps the strength of abstract ballet is that this happens rarely in that kind of ballet. Zelensky danced Prince Desiree. Apart from the aforementioned supported pirouettes, his partnering of Vishneva looked smooth from the Mezzanine (first level up?). He burst out in his first solo, but by the coda of the Wedding Pas de Deux, he looked a bit tentative and tight, if fluid in his turning jumps and soft in his landings. He looked so slender, though, not like the beefy guy from his NYCB days, and at first I didn't recognize him. (He looks more and more like Michael York the older he gets.) There were two things that made the trip: seeing the corps, which was superb, especially in the Vision Scene, and Concertmaster Lyudmilla Chaykovskay's renditions of the violin solos, particularly the music used during the set change from the woods to the Court in Act II, known to audiences familiar with Balanchine's Nutcracker as the violin solo in the middle of Act I. Sadly, we could hear the noises of the set change during the solo; they were indistinguishable from the noise made by the toe shoes of the dancers, which sounded like castinets against the Zellerbach floor. (It was clear that the corps was together, because there were no out-of-synch clacks.) The orchestra itself was loud -- I think it took about ten minutes before it adjusted to the hall with people in it, but once it did, it mostly sounded great, especially the strings. The brass had a few intermittent issues where they didn't blend very well, and they seemed off pitch on occasion. (It was pretty chilly in the Hall.) The conductor for the performance wasn't listed; the program shows Boris Gruzin and Alexander Polianichko as the conductors for the tour. The musicians received as big an ovation as the dancers, which isn't unusual for West Coast audiences.

I think this is one of two key issues in the debate: If during a given period during Balanchine's time there was inexplicable casting, sloppy and uninspired performances, the beginning of Apollo chopped off, etc., ballet goers might expect that the situation would abate and the downcycle would reverse itself because he was there to make it happen. The second is one that kfw raised much earlier in the thread: the issue of ballet being an oral, living tradition where the ballets need to be performed in order to survive and thrive. With Martins in charge, there isn't always the same optimism and confidence that if things are going in the "wrong" direction, the direction will reverse; it's seen as irreparable damage to the core rep, and damage that can't be fixed. On the flip side, some see the rep as resilient and growing through the beautiful dancers that SAB and NYCB keep producing. And some of us see both in the same performances. Drew makes a crucial point: it is very important to debate the issue. I am grateful to the people who have posted on this thread, particularly in how the tone has been kept respectful while debating one of the most critical issues in ballet of the last two decades.

ami and Alymer -- many thanks for your detailed reports on La Sylphide.

The casting insert on the Berkeley program last night listed the following changes from the Berkeley website: Irma Nioradze is being replaced by Novikova (Aurora) and Esina (Lilac Fairy) Shkliarov is partnering Sonova in place of Fadeev, who is replacing Igor Kolb in another performance Vostrotina is replacing Pavlenko as Lilac Fairy Ostreykovskaya replaces Pavlenko as Florina. It looks like similar casting will make its way to Detroit.