Helene

The fourth photo added to the album shows the Wllis costumes.

With a heads up that this is from "The Stranger" and reflects a snarky and dismissive attitude towards ballet amidst straight reporting, there's info on Nakamura's and Reshef's retirements: Nakamura was going to retire last season until Peter Boal convinced her to stay for "Sleeping Beauty ", "and it's time, in her opinion, to quit while she's ahead." Reshef said, "I want to leave while I still love it, before my body is broken." http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/bowing-out-when-and-why-ballet-dancers-retire/Content?oid=19671239

An interesting conversation with Olivier Wevers: http://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-entertainment/culture-fiend/articles/a-fiendish-conversation-with-whim-whims-olivier-wevers-may-2014

A lovely photo of Giselle's friends in their brand new costumes tweeted by PNB: https://twitter.com/PNBallet/status/471417451880542208/photo/1 I wish there were captions, because I'm only sure of four of six, with a guess at a fifth: From left-to-right: Jahna Frantziskonis, Liora Neuville, Elizabeth Murphy? (or one of the PD's I sometimes think is Elizabeth Murphy at first), Amanda Clark, Angelica Generosa, and a dancer I can't recognize from this photo (apologies. Elle Macy has a similar smile and dark hair, but think she's even more taller than Generosa.) The comment on the third photo identifies the two dancers as Murphy and Macy: https://www.facebook.com/PNBallet/photos/np.237690132.688777437/10152238686438952/?type=3&theater (All three photos have the same URL.)

Thanks, Buddy . I made the correction.

Congratulations to them all!

No worries!

This is a reminder that other discussion boards, like Dansomanie, are not official sources, and news from them is not official news here. This has been our policy for over 15 years.

I don't think it was a figment of your imagination: I think it's something that may have been synched after you noticed it originally.

Her partner at the Stanislavsky is "Andrey" (Merkuriev ?). She posted the following very short video clips to Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152232692873547

I've been poking around, and I can't find a report of this issue on the help forums. I can't replicate it. Is the date issue still happening? Even if your timezone had reverted to GMT in your settings, that wouldn't explain posts from days ago showing as "Posted today." We often have unexplained sync issues in "Last read," but I don't know enough about the underlying technology/programming to know why, except that we expect "Views" and "Uploads" to take a while to update, because they're cached and updated in batch. I don't know if this is related. Argh.

Not according to the schedule. I thought there was a third piece, because I think I remember Peter Boal saying in a Q&A that the new Justin Peck would get its first performances at the Joyce and their Seattle premiere in November. I don't know if Peck has decided on the structure or how many dancers he'll use or which ones, but the composer on the PNB website is listed as George Antheil. It would be great to get good reviews from NYC to sell the November "Director's Choice" program, especially since mixed bills don't sell as well as full-lengths.

The Joyce program is listed as "Tide Harmonic" (Wheeldon) and Alejandro Cerrudo's "Memory Glow," which was created with the Nureyev Prize awarded through the Joyce. Imler and Leah Merchant shared a role, and they both gave different and dynamic interpretations of it. I wish they were in the same cast, because there's a pas de trois for two women and a man that I think they'd have been fantastic in. Rachel Foster, who had the most prominent female role in the Cerrudo and was one of the four couples in the Wheeldon, is having a baby that's due sometime in September, and October sounds too early for her to be back. (I wouldn't be surprised to see Generosa in the Cerrudo after her tour de force in Molissa Fenley's "State of Darkness.") I don't think Imler would take Foster's place in the Wheeldon; although she'd be dynamite in it, she's probably too tall for James Moore.

In Swan Lake, a lot of the Act II Pas de Deux is still considered sacred: the developpes, promenades in attitude penche, the swoons backwards, the beats into developpe pirouettes, where Odette leans back on Siegfried and wraps his arms around her. There's a difference between what we recognize easily as difficult and what is difficult. As Doug Fullington and Peter Boal have said, bodies are different now and trained for different things. Most of the women in the most recent Petipa program were among the shortest in the company. The fast floor work doesn't fit taller leaner bodies very easily, and much of it has been tossed in favor of bigger movement, often to slower tempi. Those lost things weren't common in style, tempi, and construction: they just weren't big tricks. One of the Royal Ballet dancers in "Striking a Balance" talked about how everyone taking one of the RAD exams at the time of the interview had to do 32 fouettes to each side. This showed that they could master a difficult set of sustained turns, but not much about the quality of either their Odette or Odile, as countless competition videos have shown. It certainly doesn't show a mastery of many of the things that were lost due to the trade-offs.

From a link from PNB's Facebook page, this Marcie Sillman blog feature on Leta Biasucci, she writes a little on Biasucci preparing for Peasant Pas: http://www.marciesillman.com/2014/05/leta-biasucci-has-dream.html

Posted today to Ballet West's Facebook page, a lovely short tribute to the last performances tonight as members of Ballet West by Tom Mattingly, Elizabeth McGrath, Whitney Huell, and Amy Potter: https://www.facebook.com/balletwestprofile/posts/10152852772569008

My question is why are the fouettes sacred when so much else of the ballet is not?

This. Too many things to choose for quotes from this piece by Deborah Orr, but this is mine (as is the emphasis):

Almost all tenors, including Caruso, Gigli, Bjoerling, Corelli, etc. have sung their arias transposed to a lower key, especially as they aged. When they sing a b-flat instead of a C, they aren't singing the notes. If that didn't happen, opera would have been dead a long time ago. Men in ballet have been changing the text since Imperial times, with a significant impact on style. They've changed the structure of some ballets by combining the partnering hero/lead with the virtuoso, and in the originals, virtuosity looked more like the exhausting Bournonville solos than the ones that were characteristic of the Bolshoi men, as we've been witnessing in the excellent series of Petipa reconstruction lec-demos in Seattle presented by Doug Fullington: Desiree/Florimund's original solo alone would have felled most recent ballerinos, with the exception of Thomas Lund (before he retired) and some others, especially in the context of dancing both acts. I think the only reason we are having this discussion is that women kept to the text long enough so that we have a semblance of what it was, even with distorted tempi to allow them to "get the notes in," and that the virtuoso elements retained and that have become iconic intersect nicely as body types and training have changed over the years. Doug Fullington related in one of the seminars the story that, back in the day, when a famous ballerina wanted to change a variation, she was told that people would assume that she just couldn't do it, and she went back to the original; and, today, much of the rest of which isn't even the original, yet we hang onto a virtuoso trick. Where's the reverence for the rest of the original text, style, and tempi? Why is it fine for men to do what fits them best and has morphed into something very different from the original in the original ballets, but for women, it's fouettes or don't bother?

And the brother variation, danced by James Moore:

Alice Coote weighs in: http://slippedisc.com/2014/05/alice-coote-what-opera-needs-is-a-dose-of-tough-love/ I doubt critics would be commenting on Octavian's "dumpiness" if Octavian were sung by a tenor. I'm with you, Kathleen: I'll take Connolly over Daniels any day of the week.

Sorry, Buddy: I just saw your question. "Mericun" = American. Earlier today Ballet Association tweeted: Congrats to Leanne Cope on her casting with Robert Fairchild in Wheeldon's American in Paris, Nov-Jan at Théâtre Châtelet. @cope_leanne To which Cope replied: @BalletAssoc thank you. I'm looking forward to my new adventure very much.

A video of Margaret Mullin being coached in the Peasant Pas variation (by Paul Gibson?):

sandik reviewed Whim W'him's current program, "#unprotected, for Seattle Weekly: http://www.seattleweekly.com/arts/952600-129/opening-nights-unprotected The last two performances are tonight and tomorrow night (Friday) at 8pm in the Erickson Theater on Harvard Avenue just sound of Pine Street, right next to the Egyptian Theater's western facing side. I had expected a much smaller space, but while it seats ~150, with no wings, the stage looks as large if not larger than the ones at On the Boards and Meany Hall. With an exit door far upstage right, the set-ups and endings of the works are dependent on lighting even more than usual, and the theater also impacts the structure of the works, as all the dancers for the piece are onstage for the entire pieces, even when they aren't actively moving and the focus is on a solo or other subgroups of dancers. I saw the show last Saturday night. Unfortunately, I had had a long and stressful day of travel and didn't think when when ordering dinner. I went intermittently in and out of post-dinner carb coma, which had nothing to do with the quality or content of first work, "Les Biches," by Lopez Ochoa. It wasn't simply the movement that was energy-driven, through the ends of the red straws attached to the four women's fingers, but also the group poses that shimmered with intensity. In the post-performance Q&A, Lopez Ochoa said she proposed the title, "The Bitches," and that Wevers thought of "Les Biches," which ties into the part human/part animal personas of the four does. This was not "Bambi." Because I faded out at times, I can't speak to the overall structure of the work, which I experienced as a series of vignettes. Mark Zappone's flesh-covered leotard-based costumes were gorgeous. Andrew Bartee's "i'm here but it's not the same" for five dancers was set to music by William Basinski and the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." In the opening the dancers arranged themselves in still, linear configurations, re-arranging their positions while lights went down. One dancer, Laura Seefeldt, separated from the group and had breakout solos. As I often experience it in contemporary dance, the stillness and the architecture is much more vivid than the breakout movement. Seefeldt's is usually a sharp and dynamic performer, with her movements etched into air, but here she looked pale, and the work as a whole opened more strongly than it ended. Talk about saving the best for last, Wevers' "Above the Cloud" for his entire company was sheer brilliance. Opening with seven giant (5'x5') pillows arranged like a feather bed, to Poulenc's "Organ Concerto", the long dismantling of the bed with the dancer on it was simultaneously funny, dynamic, and aggressive, and the energy and ingenuity didn't stop for the duration of the work. One of Wevers' strengths is the ability to move groups in and out of complicated, close formations seamlessly, and here there was the added challenge of adding pillows to the mix, pillows which the dancers said kept shifting the stuffing when in motion. Another is the way the dancers melt in an out of group dynamics into solos, here Geneva Jenkins, and duos, all the while matching the ever-changing score. This was a pillow fight I'll never forget. If you haven't seen it, and there's a chance to snag some of the few remaining tickets, this is a must see.

PNB published a blog post with 9 facts about the new sets and (mostly) costumes. It's a glimpse into the moving parts of the Act I dresses: http://blog.pnb.org/2014/05/9-fast-facts-about-giselles-new-sets.html