Helene

That's like someone from Jerez complaining that people from Seville were dancing Sevillanas too softly. (Although I'm sure it would be expressed as rudely and as offensively as your friend heard, but I don't know how to say it.) Competition distorts many things, such as my favorite modern era ice dance team, who, apart from style, perform all of the figure skating elements that are totally inappropriate to the form in this mambo-rhumba combination

The lack of the presumption that people post with good will is one of the main reasons we have a policy against discussing the discussion. Back to ABT, please.

If it's fall, I never know what people mean by "last summer," and I usually wuss out and say "summer X" or avoid it altogether, but this clarifies usage.

I loved Sabrina in that. I hadn't seen her in her original season, but I can see why she would have been chosen as the season's wild card.

Is the b-roll the rehearsal footage?

Welcome to Ballet Alert! vidalangie. We're an audience site. We do have both active and retired dancers as members, and we are happy when they share their experiences, but our members are primarily writing as watchers, and we's be happy to hear about performances you've seen and for you to join in the general discussions about ballet as an art. You may be interest in our sister site, Ballet Talk for Dancers, where there are forums for adult dancers and young dancers, and the focus is on doing: dancing as well as costume construction and design, set design, etc.

When you see them in "real life" next to each other, Derek does tower over Shawn, which it why I was so surprised with this dance it wasn't that obvious. Max with Kristie is never going to get the villain edit, so it had to happen to someone. He's the Erica Kane of DWTS, though, so maybe next season. I find it very frustrating that I can't learn a thing about ballroom dancing from listening to the judges on this show.

More casting clues: from this PNB Facebook post, Margaret Mullin is seen working with Chelsea Adomaitis and William Lin-Yee.

Although having coaches that are from 1.5-3 generations before their students helps to mitigate this, in an art form with an oral tradition, especially, there's often a myopic vision of what "history" and "tradition" are.

Watching Melissa, I realized that it's not just performance quality that's a disadvantage to the "lay" people on the show, but also the lack of physical fearlessness. Bristol would have died trying the crazy lifts that Melissa threw herself into, and she didn't channel her competitiveness into physical competitiveness in that way. Watching Shawn and Derek -- and maybe it was the hat or the different posture and hold demands, but he didn't seem much taller than she -- Sabrina and Louis, and Melissa and Tony, was really a joy, because the dance was equally about the star as the pro, and if she were on a dance floor, I would have happily watched Sabrina for hours. I was disappointed that every time I got a sense of Gilles, Peta would become the center of attention.

I think that there are many instances where performers do this, because it's being professional to fulfill a role in service of a higher goal. One that struck me was when Tom Skerritt portrayed Don Quixote when PNB performed Ratmansky's "Don Quixote." Skerritt is a film actor, and there were many wonderful things he did with his eyes and his face: he was especially effective showing Don Q's mood swings very vividly. He's also moves elegantly. However, compared to veteran Seattle-based actor Allen Galli, an actor with much experience in musical theater -- he really had the compas down in the little Flamenco riffs he did -- who played Sancho Panzo, Skerritt was the visitor on that stage. San Panza is already a part in which upstaging is built in, and I thought it was a remarkable act of generosity that Galli was very careful to modulate his portrayal to Skerritt's. He could have left Skerritt in the dust.

"Jardi Tancat" is from 1983, the year Balanchine died. I do give it credit for exposing me to Maria del Mar Bonet, although I'd much rather have discovered her from the DVD of his own dancers performing "Arenal."

Aiming for the 1980's is questionable.

Karina was crying because she fell and was disappointed with herself.

The majority of Petipa-based classics that are performed by American ballet companies are danced by American-trained dancers, very few of whom have purely classical advanced training and are primarily neo-classically or eclectically trained. That hasn't stopped many of the companies, even the ones founded and/or headed by former Balanchine dancers from staging them successfully and to audience acclaim, even those companies, like Ballet Arizona and Oregon Ballet Theatre, that are smaller.

It's like after peace is declared, and almost everyone is genuinely happy, but there are a bunch of people who continue to be tortured and killed or tortured and raped, because the news hasn't traveled fast enough or because they can be.

I think there are two ways of looking at it: I think the majority of the crowd was happy and grateful to a hero, because their lives, and their families' lives were salvaged. It was a big, grand, emotional moment, and crowd dynamics have a life of their own, not to mention how ungrateful and unpopular a person would be for raining on someone else's parade. Having the reality shown doesn't make the majority of the crowd's reaction any less heartfelt. In that case having the other side shown was a more nuanced way of looking at the drama. Take, for instance, the character of Fricka in The Ring. Wagner tried his hardest to make her into a shrewish, unsympathetic, obstructionist character that we'd want to boo off of the stage, and he even gave her stodgy music in "Das Rheingold" to show how conventional she was, but when push came to shove, he gave her impassioned music in the great confrontation with Wotan in "Die Walkure," and Wotan sounds like a spoiled child, and not terribly bright, regardless of the merits of his side of the argument. A stage director could ignore this -- and I've seen it happen, most recently in the San Francisco Ring -- and turn her into a wretch, or a stage director could step outside and comment, or, actually, in this case, let the music do the talking. Yes, at the end of Fidelio, a great deal of good has been done, directly, and indirectly, because the example of someone willing to stand up to brazen authority is a good thing, and the chorus has every reason to sing. But that's not the whole story.

Adding that one of the reasons Marzellina was such a great character in this production was not only because Anya Matanovic's voice was big and not the stereotypical sweet voice, but because she sang so directly and with such passion. She wasn't a Marzelline that was easy to dismiss with a few embarrassed head pats, as if she were aiming so far above her station and as if everyone in a high-security prison had figured out that Fidelio was a woman, and she was the only one who hadn't figured it out. She was more like Effie in "La Sylphide."

Members who review have a choice of posting in the Company forums or Recent Performances, where all reviews were posted until Company forums were created. Company forum reviews tend to get more views, but the discussions there can go sideways.

"Fidelio" opened Saturday night, with the Opening Night cast, Christine Libor and Clifton Forbis as Fidelio/Leonore and Florestan. Forbis was originally scheduled to sing with Marcy Stonikas, who did a fantastic Turandot in August, in today's matinee performance, which I saw, but earlier in the week Seattle Opera sent an email to say that because Florestan is such a difficult role, and because Forbis' cover, Ric Furman was ready, Furman would sing the single matinee performance. (Jenkins also made a very short pre-curtain announcement.) I really like Forbis -- I've heard his Tristan in two different productions -- and was sorry to miss him, but this proved to be an excellent decision on Jenkins' part. Leading up to the production I read a lot of singer interviews on the Seattle Opera Blog, and the singers were diplomatic about the score, talking about how part X really sings, but they had to be careful about part Y, because it was written as if for an instrument, but while Jenkins said in a Q&A that one of the early versions was un-singable, I'm not convinced that this one wasn't written for trumpets with the agility of reed players. Too many singers, including John Tessier (Jaquino), Greer Grimsley (Don Pizarro), Kevin Short (Don Fernando), and even Anya Matanovic, a much bigger-voiced Marzelline that I've often heard, and Marcy Stonikas in her lower register in Act I, seemed to be vying to find the pocket, with the music a moving target. In the program, conductor Asher Fisch is quoted, "A Mozart singer can't sing "Fidelio." I know that's not all Tessier sings, but I've heard his Mozart singing, and it is beautiful, but this role (Jaquino) was impossible. What saved the day was how great the acting and characterizations were. For one thing, is the first Fidelio I've seen where Marzelline, Rocco, and Jaquino are people, not just comic relief, and when Marzelline accepts Jaquino at the end, she didn't get such a shabby deal. (It didn't hurt that we won the cute tenor sweepstakes in this production.) The real triumph was Arthur Woodley's Rocco. Usually portrayed as the unshaven hick with a prison key-ring, Woodley's Rocco was a professional, a military man, warn down by life in this prison. He also sang as if the music were written for his voice. Florestan doesn't have as much character development as Rocco, but within the confines of the role, Ric Furman made the most of it, from his first exclamation, "Gott!!!," which comes right from the Act II prelude, to the final chorus. When he started to sing with a big, open top and seamless range, the first thing I thought was "Prize Song." He has that beautiful a voice. Stonikas in Act II was magnificent, and a beautiful match with Furman in "O namenlose Freude." The production is set in the present, and the prison is a combination of high-tech -- computers, electronic gates -- low-tech -- barbed wire atop chain-link fences, and the dress is contemporary, if the file cabinets in Don Pizarro's office look a few decades out of date. (Who bothers to update the decor of a prison office that's visited sporadically?) The point is that the story is timeless, sadly, and that there are political prisoners in every time and in every regime. The two most powerful scenes were the scenes with the great Seattle Opera chorus at the end of each act. Kudos to them and First and Second Prisoners Theo Lebow and Matthew Scollin: at the end of the first act, they created the contrast between joy and relief at seeing sunlight and the anguish of being shut inside. The very end of the opera was brilliantly conceived. Don Fernando's appearance at the prison is supposed to be a secret inspection, which is leaked to Don Pizzaro, presumably by a spy of his in Don Fernando's department. Here, it's partly a photo op -- he thinks his friend, Florestan, is already dead -- and so much of the press is there to record it, and all of the prisoners' families are there to find their loved ones, that it's the worst-guarded secret in the country. As the family members rush the prisoners, holding sheets with photos and information about their prisoner, you can see both the blazing, mutual disappointment when there was not a match, and the ecstasy when there was. Some of the reunions were quick. A few people were crushed to not find their relatives, but then gradually found them. In the meantime, Florestan had already thanked a merciful G-d who put all to right before he even embraced his wife, and everyone started to sing about G-d had made everything better, and the music started to sound like then end of Beethoven's Ninth, and I was starting to fume. What about the bodies and minds destroyed by torture? What about the families who'd been torn apart? What about the lost time? What about the prisoners who died? What about the prisoners whose best friend wasn't Don Fernando, who weren't prominent, who weren't educated/connected/wealthy? Where were the families who didn't find their relatives alive? What was so perfectly merciful about all of this? But then, a few things happened, aside from the cynical? practical? take on Don Fernando. First, Greer Grimley's Don Pizarro pushed away a swat team, his attitude a "Don't touch the suit" as he walked off surrounded by half-a-dozen guys in kevlar suits and automatic weapons, and horrible as it is, maybe his fancy lawyer will get him off, or there will be a political compromise once another photo op takes over the headlines, and/or maybe he'll end up like G. Gordon Liddy, resurrected as an actor, writer, and talking head. Second, at the very end, after most of the people walk off, happy to be free and heading home, there are two children standing with a woman holding a flyer with photo of a prisoner, and there was no prisoner to be found. Director Chris Alexander had really thought this one through. The orchestra, conducted by Asher Fisch, was superb, a real treat.

If Miami City Ballet were to do "Swan Lake," starting with Balanchine's version might be the best way to go.

Yes, if they use the pre-professional students from the school, and they can use soloists as the little and big swans. Extras acting as ball guests in Act III can work as well.

PNB audiences expect Balanchine to be programmed regularly, but Stowell choreographed a number of full-lengths, including "Nutcracker," "Swan Lake," "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," "Cinderella," "Silver Lining," and "Coppelia" and the 2/3-length "Carminative Burana" (programmed with a one-act, like "La Sylphide"). He also brought the Hynd "Merry Widow" and "Sleeping Beauty" and the ABT "Don Quixote.". (Apologies if I'm leaving something out.) Peter Boal brought the Ratmansky "Don Quixote," Balanchine's "Coppelia," Maillot's "Romeo et Juliette," and the PNB "Giselle.". It's possible that these ballets have kept the company solvent for a decade, between the dot-com meltdown, the seismic upgrade of the Opera House/Mercer Arena fiasco, and most recent world financial crises. If the audience is that skittish if "Swan Lake" is on the program, I think there's danger, Will Robinson. We're not talking about William Forsythe's company doing "Swan Lake." Christopher Stowell has introduced classics to his Oregon Ballet Theatre audiences by producing an act on a mixed bill and later producing the full-length version, which is a prudent approach.

Rest in peace, Mr. O'Connor.

And another in "Recent Performances" about the OC performances: