Helene

Marina Harss' excellent article about Mark Morris in this week's "Nation" magazine reminded me of something I'd like from Santa: I'd like to see Laurel Lynch dance Aeneas to Amber Merkins' Dido/Sorceress.

We may get to celebrate his birthday again in two years: the year-of-birth on the Ballets Russes documentary website is 1915, but that's probably from the same source as "Platoff." (There's no direct link.) 100th Birthday bash for Marc Platt in Mill Valley, CA this Sunday

Goh Ballet is in Vancouver. It's a pre-professional school. The Gohs trained their daughter Han Chan Goh, long-time Principal Dancer of National Ballet of Canada, and she now runs it, and so were San Francisco Ballet's Frances Chung and former MCN soloist Alex Wong, who competed on So You Think You Can Dance until he was injured. The production is very beautiful: they invested nearly a million dollars in it. It plays at one of the big stages in Vancouver. Anna Marie Holmes choreographed it, and there's some very tricky partnering in it. Drosselmeier was played by a real magician when I saw it last (second season?). It's a high-level student/semi-professional production with top-level guest dancers in the two main roles. In the past, I've noticed that the advertised guests have been from Pacific Northwest Ballet and NYCB; this year, they're from Royal Danish Ballet.

Official sources have reported that Womack has joined Kremlin State Ballet. She will neither confirm or deny this. Official sources can always be wrong and things can change from the time they were first reported.

The first are repeats of a post in the PNB thread. I want to see Tudor. I want to see Tudor enough to be able to see the same dancers in the same roles five years from when they debut them and to see them move from one role to another. In "Jardin aux lilas," three dancers to dance Caroline in some performances and An Episode from His Past in another, with Carrie Imler and Rachel Foster in the same performances in each role. I'd love to see Maria Chapman as Caroline and An Episode from His Past, Korbes as An Episode from His Past, and Leta Biasucci and Margaret Mullin as Carolines. I'd really like to see what Bold would do with The Man She Must Marry to Chapman's An Episode from His Past. I think Porretta might be the strongest dramatic dancer among the men. We see glimpses of that, but usually in either the solo pieces or when he's featured as the center, whether in happy roles like Jester or in darker roles like Tetley's "Rite." (It was a pleasure to watch his Jester in "Swan Lake" last Spring apart from the virtuoso dancing: on the sidelines, he was in every moment, trying to smooth things out for his Prince and get him to lower his pulse and focus.) I'd love to see Porretta as both The Man She Must Marry and Her Lover. Jerome Tisserand could do both, too. The Imler/Foster/Chapman trio as Hagar in "Pillar of Fire," one of my favorite ballets of all time. Porretta and Seth Orza as the Man. Against type, James Moore as the Friend. PNB used to do "Dark Elegies," and there are too many possibilities to list in the company now. For reconstructions: "La Bayadere", as Nikiya Nakamura, Nakamura, Nakamura. She was sublime in the excerpts Doug Fullington has presented in his lecture demos. Lucien Postlewaite would come back to partner her, and Biasucci would be the right height as her Gamzatti. Korbes would be a great Nikiya. Typecasting for Gamzatti would be Imler, Rausch, and Gilbreath. Rausch would be perfect for the Act III Nikiya. I'd love to see Dec in the contrast between the early acts and Act III Nikiya. "Raymonda". Imler. She could do five-seven variations and the pas and the characterization and not break a sweat, and each would be specifically realized. Although I really love parts of "Le Corsaire," I'd vote for "Jardin animee" in Doug Fullington's reconstruction/staging. My ultimate fantasy casting is that Thomas Lund would un-retire to dance Albrecht to Biasucci's Giselle, with Imler's Myrtha and Tisserand's Hilarion.

Dec also said that when Anderson came to stage Petite Mort the first time, she asked people to stand next to people with whom they might partner, and Dec grabbed her husband, a much-in-demand partner, because they had dreamed of dancing in PM together. Thank you always for your insights, sandik! Carli Samuelson has been having a fine couple of seasons, almost stealthily excelling in a range of roles. Amanda Clark has had fewer opportunities, but she's been taking advantage of what she's given. I spend a lot of "Forgotten Land" casting other ballets in my head, mostly Tudor's. I want to see "Jardin aux lilas" with Rachel Foster as Caroline and Carrie Imler as The Woman From His Past in the afternoon, and then Carrie Imler as Caroline and Rachel Foster as The Woman From His Past in the evening. I want to see Maria Chapman in both roles and all three of them as Hagar. Leta Biasucci and Margaret Mullin could also be Carolines, and Gibreath as TWFHP, and Grant as the Fiance; heck, he'd be great as any of Tudor's men. As always, every time I cast Dec in my head, she could go in many ways. All of them would be great in "Dark Elegies." A girl can dream...

Congratulations to him

Considering how little her contemporaries made, and how the chief battle that Dmitrichenko won was to distribute the lowest-level bonus money to the dancers who hadn't been dancing/cast, one could ask the same question of most of the corps. Womack was living rent free with a friend. She spoke about having a contract that yielded about 500/mo, or about 12 days/month under the terms of this contract, but that might have been under her prior six-month contract; from her descriptions, she was dancing a lot less recently. She says she left the company. If it's the case as she hadn't been fired, as one report from the Russian movement stated several times, then, yes, she did, until she didn't, but money isn't one of the reasons she gave. Nor was dancing very little or living on someone's couch. She said she left because when she tried to find out how she could dance more, she was told she'd have to buy roles and to get a sponsor to pay for them and try to use his influence. As far as being advised, she entered into a sham marriage over her parents' objections. I'm not sure whose advice she would have heeded, and it's not as if she had bargaining power within the Bolshoi.

Natalia Makarova was known for a very slow Odette adagio and it was not her 210 degree extension slowing her down. While Makarova may have insisted on slower tempos, I don't remember her overextending to faster tempi and appearing unmusical at the pace she was dancing when I saw her with ABT in the '70's; the issue of distorting the tempos in the first place for effect is a different story.I don't know who would characterize Makarova as a dancer from "these days," though. "The good old days" is more like it. I do not consider it musical when a dancer takes a faster pace, but is behind a hair during those moves with big extensions, when the phrasing is distorted by flicking up an extension in the middle of a phrase that is either bulding slowly or where it would be like putting an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence, or where the strength of the center is lost temporarily to accomodate an extension.

That does not sound good. The Bolshoi Opera, unlike the Mariinsky Opera, is a jewel.

Kolpakova, aside from being a goddess of dance, had a couple of decades of experience on Skorik when that film was made, but the striking thing between her dancing and just about every ballerina dance the role now is that she occasionally flirted with 98 degrees in her arabesque and extensions to second. Everything she did came as an extension of a sublime center/torso. The emphasis now is on extending the limbs and making the dance phrases about extending the limbs, and on top of that, all of those extensions slow things down. Oh, those fluttery beats while hopping en pointe...

Oops, no: I am going to see the Goh Ballet Nutcracker, albeit from the last row.

I saw PNB's production for a decade wondering what obscure piece by Mozart it was, until I was sitting at the Met at a performance of "Pique Dame," from which I had only heard a couple of excerpts before that performance, et voila! I almost did a happy dance in the middle of the opera. Edited to add: PNB re-tweeted this tweet from a parent with photos: https://twitter.com/quixexp/status/407049202208735232/photo/1

This is the Daphnis and Chloe duet from Tchaikovsky's "Pique Dame": http://youtu.be/inF9-rpuqQM?t=4m48s

I'm glad you got in. It's not the most intuitive thing. I'm going to see Pacific Northwest Ballet's production by Kent Stowell and Maurice Sendak. It's the 35th anniversary season. The Goh Ballet production is lovely, but I'll miss it this year.

This thread went over 50 pages today, and I've split off all of posts about the trial and detour discussions about issues raised during the trial to a new thread: Dmitrichenko, Zarutsky, Lipatov Trial

The most precise I've read in one of the articles in the Tsiskaridze and Lopatkina appointments to the Vaganova Academy news thread is the end of 2014.

I think she had wonderful presence and attitude in the last act. Given that she has a reputation for being nervous before big roles, it was great to see her smile in the coda. Three out of four of the men in quartet had double tours to die for. Thank you for posting the videos, Natalia and amiaow!

I've been reading the Opera Lively book, which is a compilation of interviews. One of those interviews is Francois Roussillon, an opera video director who started his own label, FRA in 2009, after his firm, FRA, had been working for other labels. They also do/have plans to do ballet: he said, "[w]e want to release a ballet collection with the Opera de Paris. We want to release a DVD with the Ballets Russes. We'll have "Le Spectre de la Rose" [Weber], "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune [Debussy], "Le Tricorne" [Manuel de Falla], and "Petrouchkha" [stravinsky]." (pp. 247-8, Kindle ed) About 'Petrouchka": "We filmed "Petrouchkha" in 2009 and we did it in studio conditions; we had the possibility of putting the cameras very, very close to the action. It wasn't the kind of filming work that we do in the theater during a live show. It was really another way of working." (pp. 248-9, Kindle ed.) When asked about the cost of producing a DVD, he said, The artistic rights issues for opera and ballet are very different, since singers are, for the most part, contract employees, but it's interesting to note that the physical production costs are relatively stable, and some percentage of half a million Euros, or $700-750K USD (average over the last few years). In another interview with James Meena, the head of Opera Carolina and a man of many hats, Meena discussed music rights: (Since it's the Britten centennial, the royalties and rentals must be adding up.) Opera Carolina had a budget of 2.8m, down from 3.8m -- most of the drop was in government contributions -- and the difference between $800 and $3000+royalties is significant. When PNB produced ballets by company dancers last season, Peter Boal said the budgets were $3,000-$5,000 in total; Andrew Bartee and Margaret Mullin used commissioned scores by young composers.

Your permissions are fine. Would you please describe a little more about what is happening? Are you trying to access PM's through the little envelope to the left of you name? Then clicking the "View All Messages" link? Or by clicking the down arrow to the night of your name and choosing "Personal Messenger"? (Or another way I'm forgetting? What do you see when you get to the PM page, or are you getting an error instead? If you can see the PM page, can you see on the left where it tells you how much space you've used and how much remains?

I don't know how I missed this update, but a belated many thanks, volcanohunter Urin sounds like he would be a great boss.

From Ismene Brown's blog, Zarutsky testifies He's quite the raconteur.

If he were able to blackmail Dmitrichenko, then Dmitrichenko would have had to have something to hide. If Dmitrichenko had nothing to do with an attack, there would be no basis for the blackmail. To claim now in court that it was all his doing sounds absurd on Zarutsky's part. It's very possible that he never told the driver what was up, either to keep him out of it and to not leave an audit trail, or it may have been a joint agreement to See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. However, he did have to have some basis for blackmail, and there has been no suggestion that this was based in dacha-related business dealings or any other type of unrelated scandal. Zarutsky may have set up Dmitrichenko, which when done by the government can be considered entrapment, and he may have exploited Dmitrichenko's hot-headedness and resentment. This fits in very well with Dmitrichenko's colleagues description of him exploding in the moment but having it blow over. However, there are two complicating factors here: first in his role as dancer advocate, he had increasing number of incidents that would fan the fire and spike his temperament, including the compensation committee meeting, and while he might not have had the attention span to plot out an attack on his own, he was engaged in it by someone who did and who kept him involved in it. He didn't just have one major rant over coffee months before. However unhappy he was to engage with Zarutsky since their first conversation, he disclosed Filin's whereabouts knowing they would lead to a confrontation that would result in some form of violence right after having met with management to report corruption, and that's not even factoring in his constant upset over his partner being refused more and more roles, being taught to find a new, female coach -- in one account because Tsiskardize's contract would not be renewed, in another to learn Odette/Odile from someone who danced it -- and Tsiskaridze fomenting discontent about his pupil. The second is that if he had the protection of Grigorovich, he was able to be a thorn in Filin's side in the theater without fear of retaliation -- look at how long it took them to get rid of Tsiskaridze -- which was a longer-term strategy, and he did it consistently and tactically, if not tactfully. He wasn't an oversensitive flake in that respect.

How would attacking Filin make Dmitrichenko dependent on Zarutsky, unless it was either extortion -- do what I say or you will meet the same fate -- or it tied the attack to Dmitrichenko, which it had via the trial and conviction? Although Dmitrichenko claims he didn't know about Zarutsky's criminal past, in his earliest statements, he hoped Zarutsky had forgotten about the attack, but felt in danger if he didn't give Zarutsky money on demand. (Whether a payment, loan, or "loan", Dmitrichenko felt he couldn't refuse.) Zarutsky didn't have to attack Filin to convince Dmitrichenko that he was a dangerous person. I haven't read anything to suggest that the proscecution is trying to prove Dmitrichenko intended Zarutsky to do anything more than smash Filin's face, or that Dmitrichenko approved the acid attack. The prosecution is trying to show that Dmitrichenko conspired with Zarustsky to attack Filin, abetted Zarutsky in the attack by telling Zarutsky of Filin's whereabouts, and is culpable for initiating an attack gone wrong. The judge has brought this up herself, asking Dmitrichenko outright if he thought he was culpable in this way.

You are so right. My apologies.