Helene

Ballet companies are like other organizations and institutions: they have their own social/behavioral norms and implicit and explicit systems, standards, and culture. These things change over time for the same reasons they do in businesses, due to economic pressures, transitions from original founders/owners and establishing members/employees to new ones, growth, shift in focus and product, etc. Ballet companies are ongoing and people stay with them longer than most tap and jazz dancers, who generally are project-based, are employed for a given gig. While I'd expect more conformity in a long-running show, the dancers, like in opera and theater outside the true rep companies, are contracted for stints, some with the limited duration fixed in advanced. The social norms are more fluid. There's no ongoing job with benefits and generally renewed contracts. Being a permanent freelancer requires different life skills and mindset than being a company member, in any profession. Ballet dançers are more hot-house than most Broadway dancers in general, because, especially for women, they have to choose to specialize in ballet at a much earlier age in order to be considered for the profession, and, despite Allison de Bona's example as a college graduate-turned-professional and Violette Verdy's affiliation with Indiana University and her wide network, very few ballet dancers go to college before an elite professional career: instead they go from ballet schools into relatively stable ballet companies. College, if nothing else, gives people an opportunity to broaden their perspectives and find more to bring into their dancing. It was important enough to Diaghilev to take a handful of selected few, including Balanchine, on an art tour in the off-season, something that expanded the choreographer's horizons. Ballet technique also emphasizes being pulled up and turned out, and despite Fairchild's earlier training and emphasis on jazz dancing, he's been a ballet dancer every day for a long time, and it could take him a while to shift his weight and style and not look so "clean." I'd expect him her to find his her groove over the duration. He'll She'll be focused on one set role, compared to being in a ballet company where he shemight do four performances at most in any given ballet over a season, perform in a different program every night, be asked to learn a new role quickly and sub in for an injured colleague, and have a day full of rehearsing multiple roles, learning new roles, working to create new choreography, etc. Edited to add: I got my Fairchild performing in shows threads mixed up. Aside from her brother's jazz training, what I wrote originally applies to Megan Fairchild as well.

Backstage is off limits here. For details of our policies, see here: http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/34250-rules-rules-and-our-mission/

From Dave Zirin in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blog/180960/robin-williams-and-moment-magic?utm_content=bufferf528f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer I loved him in "Dead Again" telling Branaugh to pick one and be it.

NYCB fans often anticipate seeing former NYCB dancers when they appear in NYC with PNB. The company just tweeted: ("Jerome" is Jerome Tisserand.) Korbes was in the original cast of Wheeldon's "Tide Mercuric" and was featured in the central pas de deux with Josh Grant, whom some might recognize from his long stint with the Trocks. With a very short time to make the work, a second cast rehearsed, but only Maria Chapman performed after Korbes was injured first weekend. There were just a few cast changes in the Cerrudo second weekend. Renko had a small role in the Cerrudo, but none of the other NYCB people performed in the Wheeldon or Cerrudo in Seattle. I don't expect single casts for the Joyce, with seven performances in five days, and we still don't know how big the Peck ballet is, so you may see others, plus other dancers you may have seen last year at City Center and at the recent Works & Process presentations, live or streamed.

PNB just tweeted a nugget about the new Justin Peck ballet on November's program, including a link to an Instagram photo of Carla Korbes and Jerome Tisserand rehearsing in the studio. http://instagram.com/p/rqXi2XKRcz/?modal=true

For the time being, we'll get Janet Collins, I'd much rather see a documentary on Raven Wilkinson than a biopic.

The relationship between dance competitions and sports is not so far fetched, although somewhat superficially, since almost all ballet competitions have age limits, and many are rewarding potential, not just rewarding specific performances, which is antithetical to sport, and which is why reputation-judging and political judging are so hotly debated in sports. It's why people hated the restrictions on which professional athletes could compete at the Olympics and were only interested in the "best of the best," not the best baseball players under 22 with less than x years of professional playing. There's no equivalent of a World or National Championship or Olympics in most dance forms that are primarily performance arts. The very top ballroom dancers compete, and like in skating, their competitive resumes get them more prestigious partnerships, coaching jobs, and choreography gigs. Ballroom is heavily competition-based at all levels, hence the push to join the Olympics, which, so far, thankfully has been rejected. The closest things to a Pro-Am in ballet is the non-competing partner in ballet competitions. Top ballet dancers and modern dancers do not compete, although there are a few competitions, like Varna, that attract a small number of future greats. Some ballet schools and teachers have reputations for training competition winners, but, it's rare for the students of company affiliated schools to compete, and some, like SAB, actively discourage their students from taking part. The vast majority of top companies in NA are hiring from their schools, not competitions, even if they offer scholarships to their schools to younger competitors.

It depends on the company and the choreographer and how much each wants the work to be performed given the demands/requirements of the other. It depends upon availability of dancers, especially in a mixed bill program and when only part of the company is on tour, and on time constraints. Stagers can have the same authority or lack of it. It is my guess that Ratmansky trusts his wife implicitly and gives her free reign and/or they discuss and come up with a decision together, when it is their decision to make. According to your own post in the Vaganova graduation thread, "Concerning Shakirova: over the last two years Renata has been given multiple opportunities to perform with the Mariinsky troupe (she is expected to dance, for example, on July 17 in Concerto DSCH). This explains the level of assuredness and ease she is displaying on stage." The 2013 premiere was less than two years ago, and he and/or his wife might have very well seen her then. On the other hand, Ratmansky didn't have to see Shakirova dance during the time of the premiere, nor did his wife. They've both got eyes, ears, and wide networks, and if Shakirova had been cast as a 7th-grader or 8th-grader, she may have come to their attention through management, colleagues, video, etc., or she may have been cast on the basis of class as late as the casting process. We won't know who cast her unless there is official news about it. If he did cast Shakirova, she would have appealed to him or to his wife, if she did the casting.

My favorite books so far this summer have been the recently translated Maria Kallio murder mysteries by Leena Lehtolainen, Finland's renowned mystery writer: "My First Murder," "Her Enemy," and "Copper Heart." (According to the author bio, this series has been adapted for Finnish TV.) The protagonist is a policewoman/lawyer whose family would like her to drop police work. I'm hoping these continue to be translated into English -- they've been translated into other languages for a long time -- especially since these books are from the mid-90's, and she's published every year since. I also enjoyed "Save Our Ballet" and "Balanchine's Dancing Cowboy," and I'm very glad I read Barbara Bocher's "The Cage." I've put aside Daniel Pink's "Drive" to read "Alone," the new John Curry biography, which I'm reading very slowly. Reading about Curry is far from enjoyable -- he was rarely a happy man -- but I'm glad to be immersed in thinking about him. The opposite of the rather dreadful "Push Dick's Button" by Dick Button. I'm also in the process of re-reading Lis Harris' "Holy Days," originally a multi-part series in "The New Yorker" about a year of (mostly) weekends she spent with a Lubavitch family in Brooklyn, and slowly pushing through Tito Gobbi's memoir, "My Life." So much had been written about living in Vichy France under German Occupation and about German artists and whether they left or stayed and how and why that it was interesting to read something about what it was like in Italy under German local control. It's a physical book, though, and right now it's sitting in another city.

What does the program say? We've had plenty of people reporting back from London. The ballet info on the Mariinsky.ru website from July 2013 shows: Choreographer: Alexei Ratmansky Assistant Choreographer: Tatiana Ratmanskaya There's nothing to indicate that there was a stager, and I don't see any listing for the London performances still on the website. There's nothing on the Royal Opera House website about a stager, either, simply a choreography credit for Ratmansky. I haven't seen any references about the staging in the British or US press.

I don't doubt for a moment that stressing athleticism is meant to address the myth that ballet dancers are either effeminate gay men (or, occasionally, effeminate straight men, unless their love life is the stuff of straight male fantasy) or are delicate female creatures to be put on pedestals, worshiped, and moved around the stage by a man, and never, ever lesbians. Look at sports: it's not as if Rudy Galindo being out has inspired many male figure skaters to be out publicly or Greg Louganis' book and coming out has inspired many divers to come out, let alone many athletes who compete in professional team sports or tennis players and golfers who are after those big endorsement contracts. Edward Villella's plaited muscles graced the cover of a national magazine to show that the former boxer was an athlete, but that wasn't even in classical ballet: it was in "Prodigal Son." Yet it countered the image, just as the Novice in "The Cage" and the women in "A Million Kisses to My Skin" belie the helpless female stereotype that causes many feminists to throw out the classical baby with the bathwater. The incentives are there to say, "We're athletic!" "We'll jump across the stage and wow you with our power!" "We're Americans and don't need all those crowns and all that hierarchy!" But in between ballet dancer = sport there are two different things. The first is ballet dancers are as trained, strong, fierce, and fearless as any athletes out there, and that what they do could fell professional athletes in other sports. That is asking for respect for what it takes physically and mentally to make great physical feats look effortless. I suspect that many would do cartwheels at the 85% statistic. The second is ballet competitions. There are several kinds of them, just like in opera. Some are scholarship competitions. Some are looking for potential rather than finished product. Some are looking for who is the best dancer, no matter how that is defined, on those competition days. (That doesn't mean that there isn't scouting among the judges or audience for their own companies in which they are looking for specific types of dancers [height, style, partnering skill] who may or may not be unfinished, but that's not always part of the formal competition.) It's easy to confuse competition with sport, since there are winners and losers -- no matter what the criteria, someone is holding the trophy/plaque/check at the end -- not just audience that's seen "Swan Lake," even if that competition were strictly interpretive and not overtly technical. I think the steps between, which are distinct things, get conflated into the dance=sport argument, and it's unclear how those 85% are thinking of sport and dance. Wonderful article, Alexandra!

We don't know if he did, although most of the time a choreographer of Ratmansky's reknown does pick or at least influence the choices heavily, but he doesn't have to have seen her on stage to cast anyone. Returning choreographers may have had knowledge of and/or experience with a dancer from prior visits and new choreographers from video or other engagements. Most non-resident or emeritus choreographers don't know many of the dancers before they work with them, and they use class, AD referrals, a roster the AD makes of available dancers, workshops, and/or rehearsals as tryouts, depending on the company and the circumstances. Perhaps someday he will describe the process in an interview.

I thought the Soviets eventually expunged most of what we'd consider modern dance as decadent along the way. I didn't realize there were still remnants. I wonder that Russia looks so much to the West when it adds rep, rather than leveraging what was there..

Here is a sampling of articles in the Western press and pravda.ru that refer to Gergiev's fundraising activities: http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/gergiev-the-great-1.1241708 http://english.pravda.ru/russia/economics/16-04-2013/124290-gergiev_mariinsky-0/ http://www.enca.com/life/ambitious-mariinsky-supremo-launches-new-petersburg-theatre http://www.mariinskytrust.org.uk/mariinsky-theatre-trust-long-history/ http://www.colineatock.com/valery-gergiev.html http://www.thinkrussia.com/life-arts/week-russia-gergiev-and-his-love-theater http://www.ottawacommunitynews.com/whatson-story/2128938-it-s-all-gravy-for-gergiev/ http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2014/02/05/valery-gergiev-the-powerful-and-polarizing-maestro http://www.arabtimesonline.com/NewsDetails/tabid/96/smid/414/ArticleID/195812/t/Mariinsky-Theater-unveils-new-stage/Default.aspx http://seenandheard-international.com/2012/04/thirteen-years-on-gergiev-returns-with-a-masterful-parsifal/ http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/may/16/classicalmusicandopera2 http://www.gmn.com/artists/artist.asp?bio=true&id=1008 http://alb.merlinone.net/mweb/wmsql.wm.request?oneimage&imageid=6387702 The Mariinsky Theatre Trust (UK) was established by Gergiev, as was the Mariinsky Foundation of America (formerly White Nights Foundation of America.)

From the Guardian article, What a great quote. And

At the end of post 99, the poster makes it clear that the issue is training, which is discussed further in post 100. Edited to add: Dancers who are not trained in a company style but join the company are hotly debated no matter what the company.

Choreographers generally do get to pick who they want. Balanchine used to make some casting choices that drove critics and fans off the deep end. (For all of Robbins' sadistic methods, at NYCB at least, I don't think I'd ever seen a miscast Robbins ballet when he was in charge when I left NYC.) If Ratmansky chose his "Concerto DSCH" casts in Seattle when the work made its PNB premiere, in the role created for Ashley Bouder he cast one dancer who was technically dynamite and one dance who was not. The latter must have appealed to him in some way that eluded me.

I don't know of any "modern" dance in the Soviet Union that required a new movement vocabulary. Were there such dance movements which ballet dancers would leverage, and, if so, what are they now?

It was a fantastic program. It's funny that in programs like this, there are a wide range of "favorites" and "bests." I was just happy to see the love and respect shown towards Jenkins. The KING FM schedule is up for 23 August, but only until a listing for 6:51pm, for the Myslivcek Sinfonia in C. A YouTube recording of this piece clocks in at 8:35, which leads me to guess that the taped broadcast will begin at 7pm. It was a long and rich program. I hope they include Joyce Castle's appearances as MC, even if some of the jokes were visual, the spoken tributes by Grimsley and Blythe, and especially Stephen Wadworth's ending tribute and Jenkins' comments from the stage.

If you read the original post, and not even all that carefully, you'll see the distinction made is between the dancers trained by Vaganova teachers in the Vaganova style, and those who haven't, not where they are born or their ethnicity or even in what country the school is located. Whether you agree is another story.

I'm still too verklempt to write about it, the the Speight Jenkins Celebration took place last Saturday in McCaw Hall. alert!!!!!: Seattle Opera just sent out email to attendees with a reminder that the concert will be broadcast on KING-FM including online on Saturday, 23 August. Unfortunately, there's no time listed and the schedule as of this moment only goes through 22 August. Perhaps tomorrow it will include 23 August. The concert raised a million dollars; the singers donated their fees for the concert. This is the program: Part I: Act II, Scene 1, Die Walkure, Wagner Alwyn Mellor & Greer Grimsley; Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor "Ah! que j'aime les militaires", La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein, Offenbach Stephanie Blythe & Choreus Men; Carlo Montanaro, conductor "Au fond du temple saint", Les pecheurs de perles, Bizet William Burden & Brett Polegato; Carlo Montanaro "Vi ravviso", La sonnambula, Bellini Arthur Woodley; Carlo Montanaro Act I Finale, Die Walkure, Wagner Clifton Forbis & Christiane Libor; Sebastian Lang-Lessing Death of Boris, Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky Peter Rose & Chorus; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "Pace, pace mio Dio", La forza del destino, Verdi Mary Elizabeth Williams; Carlo Montanaro Iago's Credo, Otello, Verdi Gordon Hawkins; Carlo Montanaro Act III Duet, Otello, Verdi Antonello Palombi & Nuccia Focile; Carlo Montanaro Pierrot's Tanzlied, Die tote Stadt, Korngold Brett Polegato; Sebastian Lang-Lessing Liebestod, Tristan und Isolde, Wagner Alwyn Mellor; Sebastian Lang-Lessing Part II: Entry of the Guests, Tannhauser, Wagner Seattle Opera Chorus; Carlo Montanaro "Mein lieber Schwan", Lohengrin, Wagner Issachah Savage*; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "J'ai gravi la montagne", Samson et Dalila, Saint-Saens Stephanie Blythe & Greer Grimsley; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "Kuda, kuda", Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky William Burden; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "My Man's Gone Now", Porgy and Bess, Gershwin Mary Elizabeth Williams & Chorus; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "Soave sia il vento", Cosi fan tutte, Mozart Alwyn Mellor**, Kate Lindsey, & Peter Rose; Carlo Montanaro "Vissi d'arte", Tosca, Puccini Christiane Libor; Carlo Montanaro "Non piu mesta", La Cenerentola, Rossini Kate Lindsey; Carlo Montanaro "L'atra notte", Mefistofele, Boito Nuccia Focile; Carlo Montanaro "Wotan's Farewell", Die Walkure, Wagner Greer Grimsley; Sebastian Lang-Lessing "Wach'auf!", Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Wagner All soloists and chorus; Carlo Montanaro, conductor The set was designed by Robert Dahlstrom for Ariadne auf Naxos, with a Serra-like sculpture in the center of the stage through which the singers could walk. John Keene was the Chorusmaster. *There was a cancellation, and as part of the Celebration concert, Speight Jenkins chose his favorite from the Wagner Competition last Thursday, Issachah Savage, who re-prised his second competition selection from Lohengrin. Edited to add: Some chatty news from Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2024292213_nicolenamesxml.html The review: http://seattletimes.com/html/thearts/2024283644_speightfarewellgalaxml.html

Egads, those are substantial changes. I'd be very unhappy had I purchased tickets based on the first program, whether they actually we going to perform "Carmen" or Solo for Two.

If a ticket is for a specific venue on a specific date for a specific time (and often, a specific seat), and the producer can change the program and/or casting, I don't know how it could be legal if the producer fails to produce a show on that date and does not offer a refund, even if there is a reschedule on another date. I would request a chargeback from my credit card company, if a venue refused to refund under those circumstances. I've never had that happen.

Many thanks for answering. I wasn't paying close enough attention and thought that these were separate events. "Carmen" is certainly a different kettle of fish. Honestly, between the double-bookings on her part and this switch, it would take a lot to get me to buy a ticket specifically to see them.

Do you remember what the original program was advertised as when tickets went on sale and how long afterwards the program changed? I'm not a fan of bait-and-switch in general, even if there's a disclaimer that "Program is subject to change." Two of the three works were based on the choreographers' previous works, all of which had been reviewed. I haven't seen much to suggest there was a substantial difference in the versions Osipova and Vasiliev danced: if the choreography was good before, it is unlikely these versions are bad. If the older versions were weak, they'd have needed work to make them better. The piece that has gotten the best reviews has been the new one. Of course, most of the pieces when reviewed earlier were danced by contemporary companies, with dancers for whom that was their style and who were versed in the technique. I think there is a distinction between bad or weak choreography and bad or weak performances if the choreography. There is never any reason to assume that even a great dancer will be good in a new genre, especially in such a short period of time. Baryshnikov did White Oak for how many seasons? While the process was interesting to watch, if you like watching the process, even he wasn't notable in much of what he danced after dedicating a lot of time to it.