Helene

People protesting the production because they think it glorifies terrorists are planning acts of terror?

Giuliani is planning to protest: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/19/rudy-giuliani-protest-met-klinghoffer-opera and I'd guess that Gelb is tickled pink at how this is all playing out.

NYCB just posted a link to his "Screen Test" to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nycballet/posts/10154744754230529

I'm glad he got his chance to dance what he wanted, but I've always thought he was at his best in demi-charactere roles. His Harlequin, for example, was much more interesting to me than his Siegfried or Albrecht (or the excruciating "Les Sylphides," I saw, in which he could not have looked more bored), and he was superb recently in Mark Morris' "A Wooden Tree," much more so than in lots of the "straight" modern things I saw him do for the White Oak Project. Speaking of Baryshnikov, Philippe Noisette just retreated this great photo of Asylmuratova, Baryshnikov, Ruzimatov, and Makarova: https://twitter.com/Juliet_ME_1987/status/523096019379449857

Lorena Feijoo posted this link to a recording of a BBC news report on her and her sister on her Facebook page: http://www.veoh.com/watch/v15581715YRfbTkq2?h1=Feijoo+Sisters It includes some short but interesting footage from Cuba.

A minute of the bows: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10154739592210529

Taking a detour, more not tight musings from the Met in HD, this time "Le Nozze di Figaro." Or not so much just "Nozze," but "Nozze" compared to "Barber of Seville," both of which use the Beaumarchais source materials, the Figaro plays. I've never read the originals, but from biographical details and commentary I've read, while "Le Mariage de Figaro" was blocked by a ban by Louis XVI until time and revisions caused the ban to be reversed, and "Le Barbier de Seville" was not, and presumably was less biting, Beaumarchais was enough of a political animal that I suspect those familiar with the play would have been disappointed in the political and social Disney-fication of the Rossini, even if they went away humming the tunes. Mozart clearly took a more political approach in the 1780's than Rossini did with the earlier play thirty years later, and opera buffa was a different kettle of fish in each of their hands.

Or a cynical, canny marketer who got free publicity worth $$$$$$.

In "The New Yorker": http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/restless-creature?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter

Tweets from NYCB: La Sonnambula, Dances at a Gathering, Concerto DSCH, After the Rain ppd, Ratmansky/Wheeldon world premiere. #WWFarewell https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523611679066976258 Standing ovation for After the Rain. Up next the Ratmansky/Wheeldon world premiere. #WWFarewell https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523652148132077568 The final bow. Wendy high fives Craig and Tyler.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523662366354178049 Peter Martins and Jock Soto enter first.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523662475892645888 Now it's all the Principal men with single roses.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523662564858015744 Charles Askegard. Philip Neal.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523662734635048960 All the Principal women (Tess Reichlen lifted her up!)https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523662927497531392 West coast representing with Janie and Sebastein.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523663040781496320 Kathleen Tracey. Julie Kent. Albert Evans. James Fayette. Damien Woetzel.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523663692165283840 Jacques D'Amboise just took Wendy for a spin!https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523663786948177920 And now the entire Company...https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523663869714382848 And a big kiss from husband David Michalek.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523664071561084928 The streamers are flowing, the flowers are flying, and the audience remains on their feet as Wendy takes a sole bow.https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523664408615346176 What an end to a glorious evening. All five pieces performed by Wendy, to an adoring audience. #WWFarewell https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523667640926347265 The pile after the bow. #WWFarewell https://twitter.com/nycballet/status/523669948833738754 Retweets with cell phone photos: https://twitter.com/artspl/status/523666173326819328 https://twitter.com/TheFattestFairy/status/523666327832391680 #wwwfarewell link: https://twitter.com/hashtag/WWFarewell?src=hash

Thank you, sasark, for sharing such detailed impressions of the Mariinsky "Swan Lake" you saw. It's great to read a nuanced description of a controversial ballerina like Skorik. We're lucky you've joined the Ballet Alert! visitors to the Mariinsky.

It's hardly just Copeland: when Russian ballet or Russian performers come, and you can only hear Russian in the lobby and everything is greated with lots of screaming and clapping, we start to get complaints here about the audience, and how they talk through everything but their favorites. You can hear groups of teenagers and ballet students shriek for their favorites pretty much everywhere, except maybe NYCB. You can hear it every time someone does 250 fouettes at a ballet competition: the whopping and the whistling and the "whoo hoos." I'll never forget taking a day off work to see a Paris Opera Ballet Wednesday matinee at the Met and scoring a last minute cheap ticket in one of the boxes. When I watched Palais and didn't scream myself apoplectic when Dupond did his turning jumps on the diagonal, the Lady Who Lunched who shared my box and did leaned in while clapping loudly and glared at me (through glassy eyes) for the rest of the performance. Most of us were new audiences at one time. I suspect few of us were all that aware of the subtleties of what we were seeing or how it was nothing compared to back in the day. Of course, maybe Copeland's audiences are seeing something worth hollering about.

I don't know Gorak, but Copeland could make a splendid Juliet. The role was made for Lynn Seymour.

Smirnova and Chudin are scheduled for the June 5 "La Bayadere" with Seo.

Here's the link to the NYT review -- thank you for the heads up! http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/theater/in-on-the-town-the-city-is-candy-colored-heaven.html?_r=0

Like Lucille Ball, Maria Tallchief learned at least some of her husband's language so she wouldn't be left out.

Congratulations to him

I read -- maybe in Taper? -- that he spoke a very old-fashioned Russian.

Maybe not this season, but if Carla Korbes ends up in the NY Metro area, maybe she will end up being a guest. She said she's over being a full-time company member and that the direction of new choreography wasn't good for her physically, but if I were Ratmansky, for whom she danced the central Pas de deux in "Concerto DSCH," I'd be inviting her for coffee with her in mind for the new "Sleeping Beauty." She is at the top of her game. Tereshkina is a goddess.

What I'll miss most are those minds in print. I know we're transitioning to pixels, but I always looked forward to the envelope with Dance View, even though I don't miss physical books in the same way. Brava, Alexandra: you put you blood, sweat, and soul into Dance View.

Got a happy, dappy email from Met Opera about tickets being on sale for "Death of Klinghoffer," after they've pulled it from the HD, and, despite multiple performances of the same cast of other operas on Sirius XM, not a single broadcast of this opera on satellite radio. (The Saturday broadcasts begin in December, after the last performance of "Klinghoffer" in November. Just great.

So true!

Balanchine always said, "G-d creates, I assemble," so they'd be in good company

The Bessies just tweeted: Breaking news: Jessye Norman will present Lifetime Achievement @bessieawards to @DTHBallet founder Arthur Mitchell! https://www.dancenyc.nyc/partner-resources/the-bessies/news Wow.

This is not going to be terribly coherent, but I went to the Met in HD "Macbeth" yesterday, and during the overture, with its beautiful bel canto theme, I started to think about "Giselle," which was written only six years earlier, although Verdi revised Macbeth, and I'm not sure how much what I was hearing was which version. Then, listening to the witches' chorus, I started to think about how like in "La Sylphide" and other operas and literature of the time, the supernatural was so prevalent, but also how borderline goofy the music was, which director Noble reflected in the staging. That made me think of PNB's "Giselle," and the scene in which the Wilis try to seduce the villagers until the Old Man gets their attention and breaks their spell, which reminded me that the Sylphs in "La Sylphide" aren't outwardly evil in any way: they, like the Wilis in that scene, are dangerous because they're seductive. (Eventually both would be dangerous in their own ways, once the seduction worked.) In most productions that stem from the Russian, we usually just see the Army of Myrtha, cold and relentless, then bringing in Hilarion at first and then Albrecht, but in the original, there's a marked contrast between the village men following the sirens' (or, in Harry Potter World, the veelas') call, and Hilarion, who is in no mood to be seduced and had to be forced in. If I followed Doug Fullington's and Marian Smith's chronology correctly, the dramatic shift came when Petipa imported it via his brother, the original Albrecht, saving it, via notation and performance tradition, from oblivion, but not entirely in the original version, or at least what was notated wasn't the final version. Softening Giselle's character into a softer, more traditional mold and dropping the ending, in which Bathilde forgives Albrecht, is part of the Russian tradition. For most of the St. Peterburg audience, what Petipa staged and adapted would have been their only version they knew. The changes -- choreography presented plus the cuts -- would have been presented to a fresh audience, who, while recognizing its Romantic roots and Romantic tutus, were also seeing something that had been shifted and altered for the present. Petipa wasn't simply reconstructing Coralli and Perrot. Aside from Hubbe being no Petipa, is the issue with the "La Sylphide" that the audience is familiar with the traditional approach and staging through, at least in recent memory, a continuous performance tradition plus some videos, and an attempt to adapt/update to current times conflicts with that, while in the case of "Giselle," Petipa's changes were accepted because the audience didn't know the work? (I should have been paying attention to "Macbeth," and Anna Netrebko's Lady Macbeth shook me out of that reverie.)