dirac

Thank you for posting this, Buddy. Yes, a lot of food for thought here.

Thanks for the link, innopac (and for pulling up this old material). What a nice idea. I understand dance therapy has been of benefit to Parkinson's sufferers.

Quite a life. RIP. The book mentioned by Quiggin is by Toba Singer. Here's an article about it.

This is great, Drew, thank you. I've only had time to glance over the piece, but there's much to chew on here. I pulled this tidbit:

Well, young dancers are just that - young. They went to a party and tied one on. As Ian noted on the show, enjoying yourself too much has its risks at what is in effect an office party, but I saw no degenerate goings-on - Ronnie never even took his shirt off - and these young people work pretty hard at their day job. Sisk said "Chase and I's" and I think she said it once. I did wince but it's a common error and I've winced hearing/ reading it in some unexpected quarters. If the show follows an arc similar to last season's, which focused more on dance and company life as the series went on, that wouldn't be so bad. Some of this isn't easy to watch, but then I'm not the CW's target demographic. A problem for the show as a reality show is the lack of a breakout personality to provide a focus and I don't think they're going to find one in this lot. (There is nothing wrong, of course, with not being promising material for a fun reality show.) I still think it's good in itself to have a show like this focused on a ballet company, so I'll hang with it as long as it's around. The ratings were down from last season's debut and they were already small so that's not a good sign. However, the show's online following saved it the last time around. We'll see.

A story by Jordan Levin in the Herald on changes at the company's school.

Rojo is pointing out that most porn is created by men for men, the women who perform function within a male-dominated context, and the end result can reflect that. I don't think she means that the goals or end results are the same. Dance is also about the physical and visual - Mackrell touched on this in her commentary. Yes, porn is primarily for getting your rocks off and usually only that (although the Royal Winnipeg Ballet school student, Jeppe Hansen, who claims he was forced to quit the school for his work in porn videos, appears in pornography that reportedly has artistic aspirations - not the old sort, where they arbitrarily plugged in quotes from Hamlet to keep the cops at bay, but "serious" ones). Thank you for that link, Jane. Very helpful.

Much obliged to you, volcanohunter. I tried a snippet and am curious to see more. I hope anyone who sees it in this format or when it gets to NY will tell us about it.

Season 2 premiere Monday night. Fingers crossed.

Rojo's point was that the lack of female voices does make a difference, hence the need for change.

I think the proposed change is to bring in more female choreographers and the presumed benefit would be to ballet and to its audience. No one is saying there's anything wrong with the individual perspective as colored (or not) by sex. Balanchine presented a gallery of female portraits with few parallels in any art form. Rojo is suggesting that when the perspective is coming mainly from only one-half of humanity, it can get a little skewed. And as sandik points out, these issues are as much institutional as personal.

I honestly don't think that would bother the critical observers quoted in the NYT article unduly. They're questioning the evidence, and so far Craft hasn't produced much in the way of it, as the WQXR piece acknowledges. These are pretty big claims. The questions aren't limited to private lives:

You're very welcome, and thank you for that link. It does appear, however, that Craft's account and interpretation are being questioned, and not only about the gay affairs business:

Rojo’s intent may have been provocative, but I think her intent was serious, and she wasn’t invoking the comparison frivolously. Here’s commentary – also to be found in the Links – from Judith Mackrell in The Guardian: Without discounting Rojo’s observations, pherank, I’d not put too much stock in the generalization. As Mackrell observes, the sample size for female choreographers is still quite small and some, like Tharp, take a very different approach. It’s possible also that Rojo’s conclusions are colored by expectations. Amy, I’m also reminded of the famous quote about Agon – as I remember it, "if the cops knew what was going on in here, they’d shut the place down." In Bugaku, particularly, Balanchine’s intent is remarkably explicit – I think Robert Garis compared the imagery to that in Japanese pornographic prints. (We should probably also note that when we speak of the lack of female choreographers, it's mainly ballet we're talking about - Tharp came from the world of contemporary dance, which has historically produced many women as makers of dances and leaders of companies.)

Thanks for posting, atm711. In context what Rojo is saying is that historically ballet has been dominated by the vision of male choreographers as most pornography has been created by men for men. And as with pornography, this isn't only about sex; it's about power. Women wield power as performers, but in roles and landscapes that are mostly not of their making, driven by male power and male fantasy (in ballet, gay or straight). I would quibble with the way Rojo herself flirts with stereotyping (women are more emotional, men just want to cut to the chase), but her central point is a fair one, and I'm not going to argue with what she says she sees in the rehearsal studio. As Jayne says, this may also be related to Rojo's choice of titillation as a marketing device. From what I read of the mixed bill I gather the results were....mixed.

Welcome! Lima is also known in ballet history as the place where the family of "little Freddie Ashton from Lima, Peru" lived for some years (although he was born in Ecuador).

I'm sorry you're having trouble, Quiggin. I was able to open it myself just now. I had read elsewhere that Balanchine deliberately steered clear of Rite. (Possibly he found the subject matter unappealing as well.) Here's the quote re Schoenberg: I wonder if Craft really means this as a swipe ( in the sense of taking a shot at Schoenberg for personal reasons)? Craft recorded Schoenberg's music, was on good terms with him when Stravinsky wasn't, even dated his daughter for awhile, I think.

The reference was intended facetiously. I guess I have to start using emoticons. That's a stunning piece of video, bart. Thanks. As Craft notes, Stravinsky's intentions as written would have been very difficult to carry out:

Thanks, sandik and Drew. The Hodson/Archer "reconstruction" isn't very inspiring viewing, either. I can imagine the first audience yawning but not rioting. There's a good article by Joan Acocella on the Hodson/Archer efforts.

In re: the new "An American in Paris," it will be interesting to see what use, if any, is made of Alan Jay Lerner's original screenplay.

Astaire rarely took credits but he worked intensively on all his own choreography, usually with a collaborator. Kelly, too. Astaire liked to have the dancing presented in full and insisted on it as soon as he was in a position to do so. When he arrived in Hollywood, dances were often interrupted with reaction shots, examples of which can be seen in very early Astaire pictures like Flying Down to Rio, and often the dancers' bodies were cut off at the midriff or the legs. Astaire preferred longer takes, showing dancer and dance to best advantage - and highest exposure. The camera moved, but it moved at the service of the dance (resulting in the invention of the "Astaire dolly," which allowed the camera to move forward and back with the dancers). As you note, Buddy, he did make use of special effects, in the "dancing on the ceiling" number in Royal Wedding and elsewhere. As far as I'm concerned Astaire is a perfectly special effect on his own, but I do like the "Shoes with Wings On" number from The Barkleys of Broadway.

I'm sure Macaulay understands these distinctions quite well and he didn't mean that pointe work is literally equivalent to Chinese footbinding in all its ghastliness. I certainly didn't take him to mean that. It is also true that some simplistic comparisons have been made in cultural critiques of ballet. I was merely noting that the resemblance has occurred to many other people besides Macaulay. (I don't happen to find all such analyses absurd, but reasonable people who love the art form can disagree.)

Possibly, but Macaulay is not the first to make the comparison nor will he be the last, I suspect. To cite only one such, a passage from Joan Brady's "The Unmaking of a Dancer": "There is a coming of age in first squeezing the feet into tiny satin shoes....even the pain they cause, which can be awful, takes on a mystical significance of its own, like the first blood drawn in battle....It took years for the fruit of such footbinding to manifest themselves, but at the time I was delighted. What a toe shoe succeeds in doing is no less radical than changing the nature and function of the foot altogether..." Peter Martins remarked in "Far From Denmark" that the two dancers he knew that were the most American were Edward Villella and Suzanne Farrell.

Denby was indeed a poet as well, but he also functioned as a journalist writing under daily deadlines, as Martin did and Macaulay does. In fact during his lifetime I believe he was known primarily as a dance critic and not for his poetry, much of which went unpublished for a long time. Certainly his work as a poet influenced his criticism, which was indeed different in approach from that of critics like Martin. Quite a bit of the material in his collections is drawn from the reviews he wrote for the Herald Tribune while Walter Terry was at war. There was one intensely embarrassing occasion when Denby mistook Nora Kaye for Markova (or perhaps it was the other way about) and wrote a (very nice) review of the wrong dancer. (Boy, would some people rake him over the coals for that…….)

A piece by Craft, with some information that came as news to me.