Helene

I've never seen Smirnova, but I've read raves of her "Diamonds" especially, where she was partnered by Chudin. Krysanova's Gamzatti was the highlight of the two "La Bayadere"s I saw in Berkeley in 2009: she gave a complex, layered depiction of the character, and her dancing was gorgeous. Chudin was Obraztsova's partner when she made her debut as Odette/Odile. Here's a clip from the Black Swan Pas de Deux that was posted to YouTube:

David Hallberg just tweeted: You can still get tickets for my performance at Nantucket Dance Festival TOMORROW here: http://bit.ly/184pS4u From the Festival website: Artistic Director, Benjamin Millepied and Associate Artistic Director Tyler Angle. Friday, July 26: Evening performance. 6:30 pm, Nantucket High School Auditorium. A spectacular evening of ballet performed by stars of the American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet and New York City Ballet. Tickets on sale July 1st on the website or at the library. Saturday, July 27: Children’s Program. 11 am, Nantucket High School Auditorium. A fun, interactive program for children ages 5 and up. Principal dancers and brothers Tyler and Jared Angle as well as Jennie Somogyi lead children onstage through a choreographed piece based on George Balanchine’s classic “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The dancers will also perform an excerpt from the piece. Saturday, July 27: Evening performance. 6:30 pm, Nantucket High School Auditorium. A spectacular evening of ballet performed by stars of the American Ballet Theatre, Miami City Ballet and New York City Ballet. Tickets on sale July 1st on the website or at the library. I'd didn't know this was happening, or I would have added posted earlier; here are events from earlier in the week: Monday, July 22: Author Talk with Cathy Marie Buchanan, author of The Painted Girls. 5 pm, Nantucket Atheneum Great Hall. Free. Tuesday, July 23: Film NY Export: Opus Jazz Followed by Q&A with the film’s Producers Sean Suozzi and Ellen Bar, and Cinematographer/Director Jody Lee Lipes. 5 pm, Nantucket Atheneum Great Hall. Free. Wednesday, July 24: Youth Master Ballet Classes taught by members of the dance company. Limited to dancers up to 18 years old with at least two years of training. 9:30 and 11 am, Nantucket High School Auditorium. Free, but registration is required. Call 508-228-1110 ext 107 to sign up. Thursday, July 25: Lecture/Demonstration: Assistant Artistic Director Tyler Angle, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, takes the audience through selected dance pieces from the performance program. 4 pm, Nantucket High School Auditorium. Free.

In her early years, I would say Darci Kistler was a great Balanchine ballerina, but, sadly, that was also an injury-laden period. For more of her career, I think she was a good Martins dancer with signs of her former greatness, but is someone a ballerina if they display whatever qualities we define as making a ballerina for a limited time in their career, especially when they decline significantly for an extended period? Maria Callas followed a similar trajectory to Kistler: in most of her later years having showing signs of brilliance, but even when she struggled, but the standard of her material didn't decline. Callas was more of an exception, though: sadly, it's not uncommon for singers to be great for a relatively short period and then fall off the map. If we can come up with what defines a ballerina, must a dancer show those qualities through a significant part of their careers to become a ballerina? Outside of prodigies, is it valid to call younger dancers with relatively limited reps and experience in principal roles, ballerinas? Is being a ballerina a series of qualities, regardless of how limited the experience? (If so, there's a corps dancer I see at PNB that I'd call a ballerina, but people would laugh at that if they saw her resume.) Must a ballerina be at least great, if not equally good, in all parts of her rep, aside from the occasional experiment and/or mis-casting? I think these are underlying issues that Macaulay was getting at in his "part-time" ballerina comment. In terms of rep, there's a difference between companies with a dominant choreographer -- Balanchine, Ashton, MacMillan, Grigorovich, and Bournonville in periods -- or those who primarily "After Petipa" rep of various shades -- where there are exemplars of that rep through the generations, and the norm in North America, where even if there is a house choreographer, typically the Artistic Director, and a neoclassical aesthetic, there is a wide range of rep. I don't know if anyone would argue that Fonteyn wasn't a ballerina, certainly in her rep, but would she be considered a ballerina if she had to dance Forsythe today, Balanchine tomorrow, Tudor the day after next, Kent Stowell's "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" next month, Tomasson after that, "Giselle" the month after that, followed by "Rodeo," not to mention the Morris, Taylor, Tharp, etc. etc. that makes up the typical rep of an American/Canadian ballet company? Going down a different path, have there been any Americans who grew up as children in America, but were mostly trained in national academies like Royal Danish Ballet, Moscow, Vaganova, or POB? I don't know of any until recently, i.e., since the Russian schools began to take tuition-paying foreigners, and many of the ones who are now dancing were "finished" at the Russian schools, having had most of their early training in the US. It will be interesting to see if the McKay brothers, who are training in Moscow and began studies in Russia at a young age and no older than many of the male peers, are Russian dancers or bring something distinctly American. They have at least two older sisters who dance in Germany. According to their "Youth Arts in Action" mentor bios, his sisters trained variously at the Kirov Academy and other US programs (I'm guessing summer programs) as well as in Monaco and the Royal Ballet School, and Nadia Khan's bio lists private training with Eva Evdokimova, Masha Mukhamedov, and Rosella Hightower and the summer program at the Cranko school; both have unusual (Vaganova-based) training in the US and usually diverse training in Europe, and now they dance in Germany. Coming from an international family ballet background might be just as influential for the McKay brothers as being American, or their dancing might turn out to be indistinguishable from their Russian peers at Bolshoi Academy. If it's a matter of training, then it seems to me that a dancer who grew up in another country and was trained outside the US, especially in one of the older academies with a specific style and curriculum, wouldn't be called an American ballerina -- unless she was substantially molded in America, which is pretty much what Balanchine did until he was producing dancers from scratch through his school. The continuum would be those dancers who were trained in another country until they were teenagers, but got their final training in the US and who spent the majority, if not all, of their professional careers in North America, dancing a wide range of repertory, and having works created on them throughout their careers. Melissa Hayden said, "You learn to become a Balanchine dancer by dancing Balanchine ballets." Of course, that meant dancing a substantial number of Balanchine ballets, not having a few Balanchine evenings scattered in the rep, and, for her, having Balanchine give class, for him a lab for his ballets, and working directly with him. I look at Carla Korbes, for example, who trained in NYC from the time she was a young teenager, and while she is a unique combination of qualities, I don't look at her dancing and see any specific school in her basic training. She's more emotive than many Balanchine-dancers, but that wouldn't be unusual in American dancers at ABT. Kaori Nakamura trained mostly in Japan until she won Prix de Lausanne and used it to attend SAB, but her professional career has been in North America, and her movement quality isn't recognizably from some other place.

PNB tweeted a "We Made It to Vail" photo: https://twitter.com/PNBallet/status/360619506739064832/photo/1 Tuesday was the Vail Preview, held in the big studio at the Phelps Center. The dancers wore practice clothing, and the preview also served as a rehearsal: as soon as "Serenade" was over, the dancers went to another studio to receive notes. After a short break, we saw Terpsichore's solo, Apollo's last solo, and the pas de deux, after which we could see Peter Boal giving notes on the side of the studio, while Paul Gibson outlined what he wanted to review in "Tide Harmonic." The dancers marked through a section or two, and then ran it end-to-end. We received a handout with the Vail casting: 28 July, Opening Night (PNB and other guest artists) -- Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater Serenade: Maria Chapman (debut, [Waltz Girl]), Lesley Rausch [Dark Angel], Carrie Imler [Russian Girl], Seth Orza [Waltz Guy], Batkhurel Bold [Fate Guy with feature demi-soloists] Lindsi Dec, Kylee Kitchens, Margaret Mullin, Elizabeth Murphy 29 July, Mixed Bill (PNB) -- Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater Tide Harmonic (Wheeldon/Talbot) Lindsi Dec/Jerome Tisserand, Maria Chapman/Joshua Grant, Rachel Foster/James Moore, Laura Tisserand/Batkhurel Bold After the Rain pas de deux (Wheeldon/Part) Kylee Kitchens (debut), Seth Orza (debut) Swan Lake, Act II Odette: Lesley Rausch Prince Siegfried: Karel Cruz Benno: Jerome Tisserand Baron von Rothbart: William Lin-Yee Two Swans: Chelsea Adomaitis, Elizabeth Murphy Pas de Trois: Chelsea Adomaitis, Kylee Kitchens, Elizabeth Murphy Pas de Quatre: Leta Biasucci, Amanda Clark, Liora Neuville, Carli Samuelson Monday, 29 July: Balanchine in Black & White (PNB) -- Vilar Center Concerto Barocco 1st Violinist: Michael Jinsoo Lim; 2nd Violinist: Brittany Boulding; Pianist: Allan Dameron Maria Chapman, Lesley Rausch, Batkhurel Bold Chelsea Adomaitis, Jessika Anspach, Amanda Clark, Emma Love, Leah O'Connor, Sarah Pasch, Brittany Reid, Carli Samuelson Apollo Apollo: Seth Orza Terpsicore: Elizabeth Murphy Calliope: Leah O'Connor Polyhymnia: Carrie Imler Agon Chelsea Adomaitis, Kylee Kitchens, Elizabeth Murphy, Lesley Rausch [Female Corps:] Jessika Anspach, Amanda Clark, Emma Love, Brittany Reid Andrew Bartee, Batkhurel Bold, Price Suddarth, Jerome Tisserand I assume Lesley Rausch and Batkhurel Bold will do the Pas de Deux, but I'm not sure who will do the male solo in first Pas de Trois or female solo in the Second Pas de Trois. This is the way the casting was broken down in the handout. The corps for "Swan Lake" and "Serenade" isn't listed in the notes. It looked like a full corps (17) in the "Serenade" rehearsal. I counted 14 corps and soloists in other parts, and I think they were all in "Serenade"; in addition, I recognized Jahna Franziskonis, (I think) Elle Macy, and Angelica Generosa, which means the entire female corps is there. Without PD's, "Swan Lake" looks like it will have 16 or 18 swans, which is probably a good thing, given the wing limitations at Vail. The dancers were practicing how to negotiate their entrances and exits with the Vail stage in mind.

Aside from during spoken dialogu, where the score calls for it (contemporary scores), or where the staging calls for it (example, a booming offstage Faffner), needing to mike means the acoustics are substandard for opera, oratorios, voacl recitals, classical pieces with vocalists, etc.

I was surprised no one mentioned Bouder until now. A decade or so ago, she was a star, and her performances were described in superlatives, and she even was invited to perform in Russia, in, if I remember correctly, "Giselle."

Stephanie Saland was the Queen of droll grandeur. She also showed grandeur in Robbins' "Antique Epigraphs."

Many thanks for the heads up!

The exceptions to the rule for grandeur in Robbins were Stephanie Saland in "Antique Eipgraphs" (performance), and , for many interpreters, the women in the second and third pas de deux in "In the Night" (roes).

Thank you for the ID's, dancinginthesnow and sandik.

The posts were removed because the thread is essentially a big spotlight for the Balanchine Trust to find the videos. I'm going to close this thread now, and while it was great to find the clips in one place, it is no longer feasible to post Balanchine videos here.

I've split the last few posts about season two into their own topic found here: Breaking Pointe Season Two

Since you wrote in email that posts disappear after a short while, Inwas trying to test this systematically. Since there's no indication that other video links are disappearing from other threads, it's possble that there is a system parameter that is deleting the posts, but that is not the system paradigm, which fornother similar errors -- example: attempting to post more links per thread than we allow -- prevents the post from being accepted and displays an error message. I was going to suggest that you start Part 2 of this thread.

This is a test post.

In 10 I assumed Orza because the woman looked like a redhead, and the only other redhead I can think of is Emma Love, who's a strawberry blond. In 12 I guessed Brunson because it didn't look like James Moore to me, but it was from pretty far away to get the aerial effects.

PNB released a season preview video: Corrections and additions please; sometimes the faces go by so fast: Louise Nadeau/Seth Orza, "Nine Sinatra Songs" Andrew Bartee/Lucien Postlewaite, "Giselle," Act I Kari Brunson (?) in "TAKE FIVE...more or less" Karel Cruz/Lindsi Dec (?) in "Petite Mort" Garland Dance, "Sleeping Beauty" Carla Korbes, Donkey Pas de Deux from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "Forgotten Land Courtesy of Houston Ballet" (ID in bottom left corner) Men in "Petite Mort" Act II "Giselle," Wilis led by Lindsi Dec and Sarah Ricard Orza (?) Lesley Rausch (see below) Nadeau/Orza (??) in "Nine Sinatra Songs" Margaret Mullin (?) as Butterfly in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Brunson/Casey Herd (??) Mara Vinson and James Moore in "Kiss" (see below) Kaori Nakamura in "Giselle" _________ and William Lin-Yee in "Sechs Tanze" Jonathan Porretta, "Stage of Darkness" (?) Maria Chapman (?) as Myrtha, "Giselle" Nakamura (in Yellow) in "TAKE FIVE...more or less" Batkhurel Bold, Act II Divertissement from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Carrie Imler, Lilac Fairy in "Sleeping Beauty" Tableau from "Sechs Tanze", with Kylee Kitchens, Imler, Lin-Yee, Eames, and two men.

The credits list Lopatkina, Somova, Tereshkina, and Kondaurova, but I thought it was Kondaurova at the beginning and end and Lopatkina in the print article. Somova looks so grown up. Motherhood must really agree with her.

I would doubt that most choreography by men is created for men, or far more than half of its audience would be have vanished long ago. I think the analogy to film in general, most of the visual arts -- simply the visual arts if she wanted to stick to the physical and visual -- and theater, most of which are still male-dominated at the institutional level where Rojo spends most of her artistic life, would be more informed historically, but wouldn't generate as much discussion or capture as much attention.

If starting from the physical to get to the emotional is her analogy of male dominated presentation, porn fails badly, because it's all about the physical and the visual. She doesn't say that male choreographers start with the physical and never get beyond it, and she sounds too direct not to say that outright if that's what she meant, but she could mean that at least some male choreographers do. A more accurate analogy would be to the film industry, but even films with that are mainly physical (including special effects/pyrotechnics physical) and with distinct lack of emotional complexity are mainly a commercial product with a target market of young males.

For years now PNB has sponsored a choreographic workshop featuring choreography by dancers. For the first few years, it was held mid-Spring and company dancers performed. Recently, it has moved to after the regular season, with dancer/choreographers making work on the Professional Division students. Working within company-sponsored programs, even if they, like PNB's, mean a single performance and rehearsals scheduled around everything else the company and the PD students are doing, is critical in having the resources to learn the craft, even if the structure favors he choreographer having worked out the movement on him or herself to be prepared to use precious rehearsal time. In one of the Q&A's in the last PNB program, an audience member asked why there weren't more women choreographers -- the three I remember offhand are Stacy Lowenburg, Margaret Mullin, and Chelsea Adomaitis -- and Ezra Thomson, one of the choreographers, said that the rehearsal period for the workshop coincided with heavy rehearsal schedules for the female corps in "Swan Lake" and "Diamonds" among other ballets. This coming season, it will coincide with "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Giselle." The 2011-12 season ended with "Carmina Burana" (which also used the male corps extensively) and "Coppelia." The big ballets are critical to box office, and almost all of them, with the exception of the Tetley "Rite of Spring" that PNB no longer does, are ballerina-heavy, especially the spring/summer ballets. As long as the workshop is scheduled around graduation weekend, the women will be between a rock and a hard place in terms of participation.

PNB posted a photo of the happy couple after their marriage to Facebook in June: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151546592003952&set=a.439537898951.224264.21358443951&type=1 In one of her last weeks as a Gilbreath, Laura Gilbreath said in a Q&A in June that she will be "Laura Tisserand" both personally and professionally. Congratulations to the Tisserands, and may they have a long and happy marriage in good health

Mr. Urin sounds very impressive, and the word "transparency" in any project is music to my ears.

What Macaulay said was "In particular, the practice of dancing on point may one day seem as bizarre as the bygone Chinese practicing of binding women’s feet." which I don't think is the same as calling it the functional equivalent. He may be thinking in photographic terms rather than video terms, but if people a century from now opened up the time capsule and saw the photographs side-by-side, they might think it odd. He follows that sentence with "Do we still need an art form whose stage worlds are almost solely heterosexual and whose principal women are shown not as workers but as divinities?" which is why I'm having a hard time trying to keep the question from being a slippery target: Is the woman in Aria I of "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" a divinity? Is the women in "Costermongers"? "Is the second soloist in "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.2"? just to name a few Balanchine roles in pointe shoes? Are any of the women in "Pillar of Fire" or "Dark Elegies"? Are the women in "Calcium Night Light," or "Ecstatic Orange"? In "2B"? In "Tide Harmonic?" What roles are we talking about to define a ballerina? Is "grandeur" a requirement? In the Russian and French companies, that traditionally meant being cast in and excelling in certain iconic classical roles, like Odette/Odile, in the style of the school in which they were trained, although POB extended this in recent decades to being able in modern rep as well. If the definition is equally good in the classics as in neoclassical or current rep, then, when it comes to 99% of American female dancers -- i.e., those who weren't trained in Moscow or the Vaganova Institute, the Kirov Academy in DC and a handful of other schools -- they are given an eclectic stylistic education, and they aren't going to look like the dancers who are trained from childhood in the few great European institutional schools, and often it is those virtues that are used to dismiss American-trained dancers. Given the permutations of "After Petipa," those schools show a continuity of training (with inevitable blips), but this isn't Imperial training. I first saw Patricia Barker in the "Nutcracker" movie from the mid-'80's, and although it was Stowell's neoclassical choreography, not Balanchine's, I recognized her as a Balanchine ballerina, and, she confirmed my view when I saw her Polyhymnia in the 1993 Balanchine Celebration, and after I moved to Seattle. I thought in her last few years, when, under Boal, she no longer had the responsibility of being the calling card for the company and Stowell's muse, she relaxed and became a Ballerina in other rep as well. However, for me, being a Balanchine ballerina was enough in itself for her to be a Ballerina (with the capital "B"), just as I wouldn't think of Alexandrova any less of a Ballerina if she wasn't equally stellar in Balanchine than she is in Petipa. That wouldn't fly in Russia or France. As far as Balanchine having Russian teachers in his school, some, like Danilova and Doubrovska, were trained in the Imperial style, but they danced for Balanchine in one of his most creative periods in which he was also ballet master, and they knew what he wanted." Although they and others did, Balanchine famously told Kistler when she joined NYCB from SAB, "Now I will teach you to dance."