Helene

Many thanks for the heads up!

The blog entry in the NYT linked in the original post said:

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" with a new design, “re-imagined as a reflection of the South Florida region” by artists with ties to Miami: Michele Oka Doner, who is designing its costumes and sets, and the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, who will serve as dramaturge."

The Trust, at minimum, has to give permission to other companies to perform and re-design ballets. The Trust's relationship to the mother ship is different.

This is great news: Miami City Ballet presented a fantastic mixed bill in Vancouver -- "Ballo," a sublime "Symphony in Three Movements," and "Serenade" -- and NYC and Chicago will be lucky to see them. The PNB re-design was based in Pacific Northwest fauna and flora, and I can't wait to see the MCB designs.

No, she is not. In the last run of "Swan Lake," she was, but her partner, former PNB Principal Dancer Casey Herd was injured. In the first performance for which she was scheduled, Batkhurel Bold replaced Herd in Act III, and Herd partnered Imler in Acts II and IV. She lost her second performance. But I'm not bitter or anything. PNB just published a video with comments by Professional Division students Bella Ureta and Angeli Mamom about dancing in the "Swan Lake" corps: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152923360973952&set=vb.21358443951&type=2&theater&notif_t=notify_me

Casting has been updated to include Von Rothbart, Queen Mother, Jester, Wolfgang, and Benno for Week 1, and shows that Maria Chapman and Jerome Tisserand are not in this run. Carla Korbes/Karel Cruz replace them on Sunday, April 12, and Laura Tisserand/Batkhurel Bold replace them on Saturday, April 18 evening. Here is the spreadsheet: Swan Lake Casting 2 Apr 15.xlsx

Yes, dancers' official media counts as an official source if it is open to the public (ie, you don't have to be "friends" to see the post).

The Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried pairings, four in all, are up for both weekends. As always, casting is subject to change. Friday, April 10: Carla Korbes/Karel Cruz Saturday, April 11 matinee: Lesley Rausch/Seth Orza Saturday, April 11 evening: Laura Tisserand (debut)/Batkhurel Bold Sunday, April 12 matinee: Maria Chapman/Jerome Tisserand Thursday, April 16: Laura Tisserand/Batkhurel Bold Friday, April 17: Lesley Rausch/Seth Orza Saturday, April 18 matinee: Carla Korbes/Karel Cruz Saturday, April 18 evening: Maria Chapman/Jerome Tisserand Sunday, April 19: Lesley Rausch/Seth Orza http://www.pnb.org/Season/14-15/SwanLake/#Casting When casting is filled out, I'll post the spreadsheet.

That's what I did for Olympics tickets: take what I paid and add back the service charge for selling. Maybe this was the reason single tickets were so much more expensive than pairs. I would buy a pair at the lower per ticket price and immediately put one of them back up for sale. Usually my price was a little lower that the other singlets, and I don't think I ever had a ticket up for more than 48 hours. Most were snatched up within an hour.

Still waiting for casting, but I did note the following on the PNB website: Save Money by Attending Value Performances The best availability and lowest prices (up to 22% less) can be found on April 12 at 1:00, April 16 at 7:30 and April 17 at 7:30. No promotion code needed - the prices are already discounted compared to other performances of Swan Lake.

In addition to Carla Korbes' announced retirement earlier in the season: http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/39287-carla-koerbes-retiring/ PNB has just announced that long-time corps member Brittany Reid will retire at the end of the season. She and Jessika Anspach are the last two corps members hired by Francia Russell and Kent Stowell. I'll always remember her Spinner in the lovely black-and-white Art Deco dress and her sweeping Flora. Here is the press release: Pacific Northwest Ballet Dancer Brittany Reid Announces Retirement Following a 15-Year Career with PNB, Final Performances in Swan Lake. Seattle, WA– Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Brittany Reid has announced she will be retiring at the end of the run of Kent Stowell’s Swan Lake (April 10 – 19), following a 15-year career with PNB. "I am going to be married this summer and will be moving to the Washington, DC area, where I plan to teach Pilates,” said Ms. Reid. “I want to thank everyone at PNB – both in the audience and behind the curtain – for an amazing 15 years! You have been my friends and family, grown up with me, watched me grow onstage and off, and made me the woman I am today. I leave PNB for the next phase of my life with joy, and thank you for sharing your lives with me!" “Brittany has been an absolute mainstay of PNB, performing corps, soloist, and principal roles in almost every production over the past 15 years,” noted Artistic Director Peter Boal. “Perhaps more than any other Company member, Brittany has listened and applied every correction, working tirelessly to improve every day. She has been a great support to me and to all of her co-workers and she will be missed. We thank her for her impeccable work ethic, her positive demeanor, hundreds of exciting performances, and countless pirouettes! We wish her only the best in the next phase of her life.” Ms. Reid is from Huntington Beach, California. She trained at the School of American Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet School before joining the Company as a member of the corps de ballet in 2000. Some of her favorite roles with the Company have included Ulysses Dove’s Vespers; David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to my Skin; Helena and Hippolyta in George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and roles in his Serenade and Who Cares?; Summer in Kent Stowell’s Cinderella, and Flora in his Nutcracker. “Brittany Reid was an outstanding member of a generation of young PNB women who created the Company’s reputation in the dance world for having the most beautiful, elegantly long-limbed female dancers in the country,” said Founding Artistic Directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell. “In her 15 years with PNB, she distinguished herself in every ballet, every role in which she was cast. She could never wait to rise to the many challenges of her work with the dedication and total commitment that are integral to her character. And she could never finish making her performances better and better. Brittany has been a superb Company member and a shining example for the younger dancers following her from the School into the Company. Each of us who worked closely with her will always remember her bright eyes, her sweet, open smile, her big hugs, and her surpassing love of dance. She leaves behind her, with colleagues and audience members alike, a wealth of affection and respect.” Ms. Reid has danced leading roles in George Balanchine’s Coppélia (Spinner), Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée,” The Four Temperaments, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helena, Hermia, Hippolyta), and Symphony in Three Movements; Peter Boal’s staging of Giselle (Zulme); Todd Bolender’s Souvenirs; David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to my Skin; Ulysses Dove’s Vespers; Paul Gibson’s Sense of Doubt; Ronald Hynd’s The Sleeping Beauty (Fairy of Temperament and White Cat); Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land and Sechs Tänze (Six Dances); Mark Morris’ A Garden and Pacific; Alexei Ratmansky’s Don Quixote (Juanita); Kent Stowell’s Cinderella (Stepmother and Summer), Nutcracker (Flora, Peacock), and Silver Lining; Susan Stroman’s TAKE FIVE…More or Less; and Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs. She originated leading roles in Kiyon Gaines’ M-Pulse, Morris’ Kammermusik No. 3, and Margaret Mullin’s Lost in Light, and a featured role in Gaines’s ə{SCHWA}. She has also been featured in Balanchine’s Apollo, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, Diamonds, Serenade, and Symphony in C; Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance; Hynd’s The Merry Widow; Peter Martins’ Fearful Symmetries; Marius Petipa’s Paquita; Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH; Kent Stowell’s Carmina Burana and Swan Lake; Richard Tanner’s Ancient Airs and Dances; and Christopher Wheeldon’s Carousel (A Dance). Ms. Reid’s final performances with PNB will be during the run of Kent Stowell’s Swan Lake, April 10 – 19, 2015. Tickets and information are available through the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424, online at PNB.org, or in person at 301 Mercer Street at Seattle Center.

Thank you so much for this, YouOverThere! I'm a Flamenco junkie, and it's great to hear what people think about Flamenco performances.

She was meant to signify electricity. Doug Fullington explained that the theater had just been electrified. The pointed finger (or fingers) is standard for this variation. The original fairies weren't all virtues, but physical things meant to represent those virtues (synecdoches?). Canary for beautiful singing, flour/face powder for beauty, crumbs for good health, etc. There's a thread that discusses the fairies here: http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/4168-fairies-fairies-and-more-fairies/ Also, rg posted a screenshot of the chart of name changes from the original from "Dancers and Dancing" (1967): http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/25771-the-names-of-the-fairies/?p=213624 Violante/electricity could have been a subversive suggestion on Petipa's part, pointing to the future (modernity) and energy that may have been lacking among the chief consumers of his product and certainly the court mirrored in the tale ;)

The last line of the translated article states, "In August 2013 Lunkina became a guest prima ballerina at the National Ballet of Canada, and a year later joined the company roll."

For the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, VANOC created a website where all tickets purchased by Canadian residents through them were linked to a customer account. Anyone who bought a ticket could use the system to sell the tickets to anyone else in the system. The VANOC system charged 10% to each side, which included credit card processing and cost of fraud. I suspect they paid for a pretty big chunk of the system through those commissions, since the seller set a price, and those hockey tickets were going for thousands. Since Visa is such a visible sponsor for the Olympics, they may have gotten a deal on some of the processing costs and/or a transaction classification that didn't allow charge backs, or at least easily. The buyers knew they were getting authentic tickets, and VANOC kept track of the sales trends. (I bet that data was worth a pretty penny.) There were still people hawking tickets at the venues -- the resale system closed a day or two before the event, and it wasn't open to non-residents -- but it meant that the organization only bore the daily administrative burden of printing out the tickets at the venue or the ticket-buying centers for the bulk of resales.

That's exciting news for the dancers and companies in both exchanges!

Congratulations to him! I loved watching him when he was at San Francisco Ballet.

Washington Ballet: http://www.dcoutlook.com/2014/11/the-washington-ballet-to-make-historic.html I think McKenzie will wait to see how "Sleeping Beauty" is received and whether it has legs with the audience.

We have been assigned a promo code for a 5% discount valid through December 31, 2015 on all ballet and opera performances on http://RussianBroadway.com : balletalert Many thanks to Russian Broadway!

English National Ballet tweeted about company awards: https://twitter.com/ENBallet/status/580126966575140865 https://twitter.com/ENBallet/status/580127471477112832

Philippe Noisette tweeted a great photo of Hecquet with her fellow concours winners from last Fall with the following message: The Twitter translation is:

Congratulations to Mme Hecquet

PNB used to have it's Choreographers' Workshop in the Spring, and the dancers used their peers. This made it difficult to fit in with the regular rehearsal schedule, and they decided to kill two birds with one stone: the program was moved to the weekend after the last weekend of the season (the school performance weekend), and the dancers were students, giving them the opportunity to work in the studio on the creation of a work and to have a choreographer make work directly on them.

silvermash reported Hecquet's promotion after Concours here: http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/39533-pob-promotion-competition-2014-15/?p=346541 Laura Cappelle tweeted: