Helene

It sounds like a wonderful presentation. I particularly love where you played part of the Bizet and asked the audience to imagine a ballet to it, and then showed the actual choreography.

I agree with the T-shirt that reads, "So Many Books, So Little Time." If it's tough going, and not required reading, I would suggest putting it aside, and picking it up in another 5-10 years. There's plenty to read in the meantime.

Please see the thread on the Helsinki competition for a link to the competition website and for updates on the results of the competition:

http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.p...=0entry157617

The finalists have been posted to the site; please see the link to the Helsinki site above.

To get to the list, click the "Read More" link in the bottom right hand corner of the page, and then "this link" under the 31.5.2005 news item. (At least of this moment it says,

"31.5.2005 31 dancers to the Semi-finals. 10 juniors and 21 seniors.

You will find the list of Finalists from this link."

but it is a link to the finalists, not semi-finalists.

Way to go Daniil, who made it to the finals!

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This thread has forked off topic, and is getting speculative about the private and non-ballet professional life of dancers. [Edited to add]: I've removed the original comment and the posts in response.

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If anyone has seen Week 5, Spring Season performances, please share your impressions with us.

Thank you for posting the link, Dansuer85!

Those photos are terrific.

In post-performance Q&A's at PNB, several male dancers have noted that they do weight training. However, weight training technique has advanced in the last couple of decades, as have the machines, and many of the major companies have professional trainers, conditioning coaches, physical trainers, etc. on staff or on consult.

I am not sure there can be another "artistic director" with James there,  certainly a "general manager", but an AD?

It is hard to let the reins go after so much time, unless you are truly willing to conform to someones elses vison for the company - then there is a new AD - otherwise there is simply a manager.  Nothing artistic about that.

I think it depends on whether Kudelka is willing to step back like Robbins did and focus on his own work and stay out of the AD's aegis. If he is, and there's an explicit agreement that he's able to choose the dancers he wants -- which Balanchine allowed other choreographers at NYCB to do -- how much of the budget goes to Kudelka for new choregraphy, and the percentage of Kudelka works that will be produced in any one season, then it could work. However, if these issues are left up in the air and/or there's behind-the-scenes interference from the Board and/or Kudelka is unhappy and the Board sides with him because keeping him is the most important item on their agenda, that's a recipe for a very unhappy new AD.

It is also only fair for the Board to be explicit with the new AD what the limits are for changing Kudelka policy. For example, what if a new AD or a guest choreographer wants to hire Lamy as a guest artist? If that's off limits because it would look like Kudelka was overridden, even if a "new" donor appeared to create a fund to subsidize the fees for guest artists or some other saving face measure, the new AD should know before s/he takes the job, in my opinion.

Welcome to Ballet Talk, jm4364!

We'd love to hear why you loved the program so much -- dancers, choreography, sets, costumes, etc. We don't get to hear much about Ballet Met, and we'd love any descriptions and opinions you might share.

Perhaps because church-based singing holds such respect in the black community, the earlier successes of Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price made enough of an impact that Toni Morrison, whose libretto for the opera Margaret Garner recently premiered at the Detroit Opera, said in an interview aired on Detroit Public TV that while she had known about Price's career, until she worked on this opera she was astonished at how many black classical singers were in performing Europe and the US. Also reported in the piece was that thanks to this opera, 70% of new subscribers to Detroit Opera are part of the black community.

It's seems rather odd to me that similar inroads weren't made in ballet.

[Admin note: moved from the Dance History sub-forum.]

The Toronto Star said he told David Banks and Kevin Garland last Novemeber that this would be his last year.  I do feel though that he should have held off letting Martine go and let the new AD make that decision.

The upside of being a lame duck, even if no one knows you're about to be, is making -- or voicing -- hard and unpopular decisions so that the incoming person doesn't get tarred with them.

But they leave office and become multi-millionaire lobbyists. They don't stay in government.

It doesn't not make sense to me. It's not inconceivable that the administrator shoes were not the ones Kudelka wanted to be in, which is what the CBC article is saying. A break now will give a new AD the chance to put his/her mark on the first seasons in the new venue.

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When there are published or public answers to these questions, please feel free to reference them and cite them on this thread and discuss. Until then, while tempting, speculation is against our gossip policy.

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(Ari and I were posting simultaneously )

If this is announced by a company through a press release or on a Company site or appears in the press, it can be posted in answer to your question.

I guess Indiannapolis' karma for "stealing" the Baltimore Colts has come full circle.

carbro,

Another for describing this presentation so thoroughly. It is hard to transcribe when Russell and Stowell start to interact -- their delivery is very different in person, but when you look at their words afterwards, their voices blend, and if you can't then envision one of them saying it, it's hard to know who said what.

Bold has always been physically expansive, with a light, pliant, flexible jump. His early training was in Ulan Bator, where his parents were dancers, and later in Russia. In most ways he looks the most comfortable in the traditional classical repertoire of the PNB principal men. As sandik notes, though, he's been working hard on expression, most obvious in a new freedom and power in his upper body, particularly as he is cast more and more in neoclassical and modern works. He and Imler pair beautifully together, and he is one of the most physically beautiful men dancing now, in my opinion.

Imler was singled out for praise during the PNB's performances in City Center in the late 90's, and I'm glad you got to see her.

You cannot understand what goes on behind the scenes.  But, it is a stressful situation to be caught between management and patrons.

The one time I moved to a different section to get a better seat was when I succombed to peer pressure -- at age 45 -- and followed my friend from the top tier at Benaroya Hall to an empty box in the Founders Tier at first intermission of Messiah. An usher immediately appeared, and asked us if we had permission to be in the Symphony box. It was clear that he expected us to argue. I started to mumble apologies and was halfway back up to my assigned seat, when the usher said that we could stay if no one else showed up. But it was clear that it was a very stressful situation for him, constantly looking up the staircase to see if the people who had passes/tickets would show up.

That was the last time. It's not worth putting someone else through that stress for doing their job. (I do not feel quite the same way toward meter maids, but I should.)

Pacific Northwest Ballet had once sold a subscription to a secure site where there were monthly video interviews with dancers from all levels. One of the things that was most striking about the interviews with several of the soloists and corps members was a palpable sense of sadness and disappointment when they answered the inevitable question about whether they'd like to be a Principal/promoted, although they all expressed satisfaction with the way they had been cast. There was a flash of emotional rawness to the moment, and I didn't get the impression at all that they felt they had been held down politically or because of a whim of the Artistic Directors, but more of a sense that even at their best with all of their efforts, they just couldn't quite get there.

One of the corps members interviewed is one of my favorite dancers in the Company, and he clearly struggled to be a dancer, despite not having natural ballet attributes. He's made himself into a compelling dancer, one whom I have to fight not to watch when he's onstage. When dancers talk about struggling with the mirror and focusing on their own weaknesses, never being happy with themselves, it's often a successful principal dancer speaking in an interview. It's painful watching great artists, who might be somewhat limited in the way they could be cast in principal roles, internalize the brand of "not good enough," the conclusion a casual viewer would make by glancing at the program and seeing "corps" and "joined XYZ Company in 1992."

Very different from the affectionate, light-hearted interviews that Pauline Golbin is doing.

From Tuesday, 17 May's online International Herald Tribune is an article about a production of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen, produced at the Teatro Amazonas, popularly known among foreign film buffs as the hero's destination in Werner Herzog's film, Fitzcarraldo..

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/10/features/ring.php

The current season of seven operas was done on a $1.6 million dollar budget, although the sets and costumes for three of the Ring operas were paid for in the three prior years, as the operas were unveiled a year at a time until the full cycle was produced. According to the article, in 1997, when the Festival started, it imported musicians from Russia, Bulgaria, and Belarus not only as lead players, but as teachers and holders of master classes. What is extraordinary is not only that "A handful of graduates of the program were among the 75 musicians in the orchestra pit on opening night" less than a decade later, but that among them are musicians like Elismael Lourengo dos Santos,

a 20-year-old clarinetist who spent the first 12 years of his life in a remote jungle community, helping his father fish and farm, and had never seen a live performance by a band until he moved here as a teenager.

"To have this opportunity to play not just Wagner, but the 'Ring' cycle is a real honor and a dream, one that is still a bit hard to believe," dos Santos said after a rehearsal. "If it weren't for the government's program, there is no way I could have gotten this far, because my family is not rich and could never have afforded private instruction for me."

In addition, ticket prices were made deliberately affordable, even on such a small budget, to develop new audiences, even travelling to more remote towns to bring opera to people who've never been exposed to the art form.

How cool is that? (Or, perhaps I should say "How tight is that?," because my 11-year-old friend tells me, "tight" is the new "cool.")

Also how do standing room tickets work? Does the house have to be sold out to give standing tickets or are they availlable for every performance if you ask? Who do you ask? Is this a practice in European concert halls also? I have never seen anyone except the ushers standing.

It depends on theater configuration and company policy, which can change, particularly when they have lots of empty seats and a rush on standing room. If the theater has the space, that doesn't mean that every company that performs there will offer standing room or will have the same standing room policy.

The box office can tell you what the standing room policy is for each company. Sometimes, you can see this on the company website if they have online ordering, because standing room is listed as "unavailable at this time."

Standing room has been a time-honored policy in Vienna at the Opera House, where ballet and opera performances appear in mixed rep. In 1977 I stood nearly every night for three weeks straight, and I saw the same people on line night after night. One was a woman in her 40's, with a reddish, shoulder length flip that was lacquered, so that when she moved her head, her hair moved with it, like a helmet. She held court among the balding, middle-aged men on line. My understanding of German was pathetically rudimentary, but I could tell that she was discussing every performance of every opera she had ever seen over at least two decades.

But I digress from the topic...

Aparently, I'm not the only one. From Pauline Golbin's lead-in to her "Dancer on Dancer" interview with Sean Suozzi on the NYCB website:

"The Vaganova technique is the same training that George Balanchine received at the Maryinsky School. It is the foundation of classical ballet technique."

http://www.nycballet.com/about/dod2.html

The link to the Suozzi interview is located at:

http://www.nycballet.com/about/dod2.html

The Slate exchange did let him express what is sounds like his main point:

"There is nothing more conventional—on the left and the right—than the suggestion that the pop culture out there caters to the lowest common denominator. If the reverse is true even for part of the spectrum of intelligence, that's not something to be taken lightly, if only because it inverts a lot of our assumptions about how mass cultures tend to work. "