Helene

There's support, and there's support. Dancers, staff, and board members have big networks and can help with many things. Messmer said to Gia Kourlas, I'm pretty sure there's a similar network of landlords in Queen Anne in Seattle that love to have dancers as tenants: most are in class by 10am, may be back home for lunch or a nap, and get home later to cook dinner and collapse, six days a week, which sounds pretty low-maintenance to me.

Not another one from ABT: Mathilde Froustey from Paris Opera Ballet, who will take a one-year sabbatical.

A kind person sent me an email to point out that it was the demi-soloists who have the bejeweled helmets, not the corps members, who wear the butterfly clips: I like the idea of the soft tutus much more than the implementation, especially since they're cut above the knee. They don't seem to be this or that. I've never been a great fan of most of Karinska's designs, though. POB managed beautifully with slightly soft formal tutus for "Diamonds," but the stage at the Bastille is so huge that when they do the last act of "Raymonda" as a stand-alone, it looks like none of the guests arrived for the wedding, and in "4 T's" Melancholic looks like he's doing his solo in the middle of the ocean.

This is great news for San Francisco Ballet.

In the early '70's, the two biggest draw couples in the classical sweepstakes at ABT were Carla Fracci/Erik Bruhn and Natalia Makarova/Ivan Nagy. ABT was dominated by foreign Principals in the '90's and '00's: Bocca (1986-2006) Carreno (1995-2011) Corella (1996-2012) Dvorovenko (1996-2013) Ferri (1985-2007) Graffin (1988-2005) Malakhov (1995-2008) Ananiashvili (1993-2009) Wikipedia is not exhaustive -- they left out Nagy for Pete's sake -- but once the company went big in full-length classics, there have been many foreign-born stars at ABT, and few of them rose through the ranks. From an article in the LA Times about Marianna Tcherkassky's impending retirement: According to McKenzie's ABT bio: He did not work his way up the ranks at ABT as an American dancer. From the wording, I can't tell if he was promoted to Principal Dancer in December 1979 (under Lucia Chase) or in December 1980, under Baryshnikov.

According to this article, Carla Korbes has had to withdraw from "Swan Lake" with New Zealand Ballet, and Karel Cruz will partner Gillian Murphy. I hope Korbes will be ready for Vail; I suspect that she and the company will be conservative about whether she'll dance in the preview. PNB is performing at least seven ballets, and only a subset will be on the preview program.

Many thanks for posting, Plisskin! I am very excited about this move: of all of the non-guest dancers I've seen in my last few visits to NYC, Messmer was, by far, my favorite, and she's even more reason to get to San Francisco for the Ratmansky program in 2014.

According to the Wikipedia articles on the Hungarian national anthem, there is one official anthem and two unofficial ones. Mme. Hermine linked to "Himnusz," the most well-known musical version of the official national anthem, which had several musical versions, according to the article on it. Of the unofficial ones, there are a few phrases in the Rakoczi March (circa 1730) that remind me of "Raymonda," but that could be just genre similarities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg2nfDJrRxU Szózat (1840) is the other unofficial anthem. I don't hear much of a similarity to music from "Ramonda."

We received a query with three questions: 1. Does anyone have a translation of the program notes for the La Scala Raymonda or know where one could be found? (is there an online version that could be machine translated as a start?) 2. I'm particularly looking for the Hungarian source material for Glazunov's score. So many of the tunes in Act III are clearly taken from folk tunes, but which ones? 3. Also, is the Hungarian National Anthem a source for the last big tune? Any responses to any of the questions would be greatly appreciated (If there's anyone who prefers to answer privately without posting, we'd be happy to hear from you via our "Contact Us" link.)

I think Alexandrova not apearing on tour is like Fonteyn not appearing on tour, and that there are plenty of reasons for morale to be low. Aside from the turnover in artistic directors over a decade, since Filin's attack there has been turmoil, instability, and abrupt change, and while some thrive on this, for the majority, it's threatening and demoralizing. I don't think there's any question that Bolshoi management's strategy was to let Tsiskaridze's contracts expire. If it is true that by tapping into his pension early he gave up the right of perpetual employment and converted to short-term contracts, it's a trade-off he was willing to make based on his judgement about what actions management would be willing to take.

I can understand why the dancers would take umbrage at a non-dancer critiquing them, but Filin, as AD, gets to decide whose advice he wants to take. He wasn't happy about the artistic council in the first place, and most people don't rely on people they don't trust.

In this interview Lunkina said that other artists have told her after meetings with Filin that he blackmailed their relatives, but that it didn't happen to her. If Skvortsov is being victimized because of his association with her, I would think she'd know it by now. Whether she'd talk about it in an interview is another story. I also don't see where in the interview she talks about Alexandrova's trade unionism, and according to Tsiskaridze, over 300 people in the Bolshoi signed the letter in support of him. The theater claims this is an exaggeration, but even if the truth is somewhere in the middle, unless the majority of signees were opera and administrative people, is everyone who signed the letter being targeted? Her description of many of Filin's administrative "sins" are what North Americans would recognize from business in general: a new person comes into an organization and brings his own people to do what he needs, with whatever background they have, whether it meets the standards of any of his critics. Surely at this point Filin's assistant is literally his eyes. Her description of how he treats older dancers is reminiscent of Baryshnikov, who at ABT caused much turmoil by sidelining his older former partners and peers and by championing Charles France as his right-hand person; France was also a polarizing influence in the company.

Thank you so much, Kathleen! I'd never heard of the Amargosa Opera House, Death Valley Junction. What a surprise to find it at the end of a series of photos of the great European opera houses.

Dorothee Gilbert, who is Repetto's ambassador and "who set in motion" its new fragrance repetto, re-tweeted Vogue's tweet about the launch of the fragrance, described as "a pas de deux between cherry blossom and musk rose, before an arabesque of ambergris-scented woody top notes": http://en.vogue.fr/beauty-tips/buzz-day/diaporama/repetto-perfume-fragrance/13973

David Brewster, former head of Town Hall in Seattle and current publisher of crosscut.com, spoke to the search committee and wrote an article about the selection process, relevant history on Jenkins' early tenure and a little on how his taste shaped the rep, what Lang could mean artistically to Seattle Opera, and how Lang's selection fits in with other "third generation" selections and what those collective choices say about Seattle and the arts. From the point of view of the latter, the title of the article seems odd, especially given the Mrs. Nesholm's involvement with Seattle Symphony and choosing its successor: An unexpected choice to head Seattle Opera Some excerpts:

If Millepied, at the helm, with the authority to hire choreographers and to cast, won't be able to implement change quickly, why should Hilaire ever have been expected to, especially if his views clashed with Lefevre's? I think that by taking a sabbatical rather than resigning from POB, Froustey has at least a nominal hope of returning. She can see what Millepied can do and decide whether to return under his administration.

Sometimes the second-string infielders are almost as valuable to the team as the star who's out with an injury, and they can sometimes be better players. If Hallberg is being cast -- and we don't know if the dancers previously on the roster were told in advance that they'd be replaced if he recovered or that they were placeholders because the company needed to give advanced casting -- then the Bolshoi thinks he's more valuable on tour than not, just like the Royal Ballet decided that giving the premiere of Macmillan's "Romeo and Juliet" to Fonteyn and Nureyev was more valuable to the company. That doesn't mean it was good to be either Seymour or Gable in that situation. The Bolshoi advertises casting well in advance, like ABT. In a company like PNB (10 days notice) or NYCB (it used to be 7 days), this wouldn't be a public issue.

Many thanks for telling us about this, Albany Girl!

I think dancers, like athletes, look at their competition's recovery schedules and can guess their fate. It's like when the star second baseman recovers in time for the World Series: chances are, he'll make the lineup.

I got to see Loscavio many times when I was traveling to work in the Bay Area in the mid-'90's, and it was always a pleasure to see her dance. What I loved was how she got a "meh" reception compared to the POB, Mariinsky, and Royal Ballet dancers, but after her solo, she got one of the biggest ovations of the day.

If Kochetkova is a "left-over," I'll take left-overs any day. Some of my favorite all-time dancers never fit a constrained mold.

I always default to Firefox and then have to remember to check on other browsers on the Mac and then on the PC and then on the iPad. (Hence the need to state that whatever Safari I'm running on the iPad doesn't work like whatever Safari I'm running on the Mac, which I didn't realized until after I'd posted about how Safari behaves.) The difference in browsers and devices and the frequency of upgrades is why some of the features that used to be in our software, like clearing cookies, has been dropped: it's much more cost-effective to have people do this through their own browser and spend the time and money for features and optimization. Sometimes it's not worth trying to work around all of the behaviors in all of the browsers, like this weird quote box thing.

Here's an article from New Zealand, from te "National Business Review": http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/nz.opera.loses.talented.leader.aiden.lang.41818 I find it interesting that the most interesting coverage -- not just the cut-and-paste from the press releases -- has been done by the business press. What I found most interesting about Stephen Manes' book on PNB was that it was about a workplace, and the business press understands this about arts organizations, and especially that it's not entirely about dollars and cents.

Is the working leg in second in fouettes classical style, though? It's beautiful, controlled, and accomplished, but the leg is still high.I tend to look for consistent placement. I find that many dancers whip their legs to the side in the beginning of the fouettes, regardless of the height, but gradually end the whip and start the pirouette more and more in the front of them.

I found this didn't work on both browsers I'm running on the Mac, just on Firefox, My iPad is not running the latest iPad OS, which may be why I still don't see the box in BBCode mode, but the markup like before the upgrade, even when I'm not in plain text mode. Perhaps someone with the latest iPad OS could describe what they see.