dirac

Wow. High risk repertory.

As I remember the context of the quote is that Adams spoke to Balanchine marveling at Farrell's extraordinary range and that was Balanchine's response. Certainly that was one of the reasons why he found her fascinating.

Thank you for starting this thread, rg, and thanks for the updates, all.

A pity for the dancers, but we don't know if the Met's decision was driven by financial or artistic considerations. When people get laid off or bought out the bottom line is always the bottom line. This is a way to save a little money at no great obvious artistic or PR cost to the company. He probably saw them as deadweight that no one will miss. His explanation sounds plausible enough but it's also true that he was dealing with people who had few weapons with which to fight. Easy pickings. Of course, the Met ballet company is not what it was and this ending just reflects that reality. One wonders if it might have been different, but perhaps not.

Thursday's Children and Listen to the Nightingale by Rumer Godden are back in print.

I only intended a comment on Gottlieb's quoting - via his copy-editor's sloppy work? - "part" instead of "apart" and now I'm wondering how I got into this... Ah. I misinterpreted the italicization of "apart" in your original post. I thought that the use of the italic was meant to draw attention to the "a" in "apart" in the original quote, not as an indication that the "a" had been omitted in the quote as printed in Gottlieb's piece.

Well, Balanchine liked it enough to stick it in to his own ballet. That would certainly be good enough for me..... Hmmm. I read it as the same tense - bodies are clamped and then are slid.

Oh, copy editors and the restrictions under which they work are very much germane to the topic, angelica. I meant that it's a different set of beefs to discuss.

Proneness to errors of this nature doesn't necessarily imply anything about a writer's gifts or lack of same. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a lousy speller, might well have made the principle/principal error. That's what copy editors are for, and some writers require their ministrations more than others. But the careless aren't necessarily the untalented. Copy editors can have their own weird biases and gaps in knowledge, but that's another thread.....

I don't think this confusion is a recent development. We're just seeing it more often because there's more carelessness in proofing and editing on the internet (not that such sloppiness doesn't occur in print, as well). As California notes, spell check is also a culprit. When I post links I routinely see references to "principle" dancers, and if I'm using text with the error for a quote I correct it before posting.

The Voice still has some good stuff in it, although its arts coverage is a shadow of what it was.

Thanks, Birdsall. I think we can say fairly definitely that the great castrati didn't sound like Moreschi, who was past his prime and was never a great name. The famous names combined the physical and vocal firepower of a man with the flexibility and higher range of a woman. It must have been quite something and it's unlikely that countertenors even begin to approach it - but then, like Helene, I find them dull.

Thanks for posting, sandik. The demise of the Voice, with accompanying dramatic departures, has been predicted/announced/analyzed since at least 1974 or thereabouts, but this is different, probably (although some print publications have been able to turn it around somewhat). The Boston Phoenix, which once published Marcia B. Siegel and Jeffrey Gantz on dance (I see Gantz's byline at the Globe from time to time), shut down recently. That's how the media crumble. Good luck on the internet, people. You're going to need it......

Thanks for posting your review, YouOverThere. I think the full title of the ballet is "Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises." Guess they wanted to make sure everyone know who wrote it. I too would think this story unsuited to ballet. Dance can communicate in a general way that "Jake can't make it with Brett and they're sad," "Mike is a drunk," and "Pedro Romero is too young for Brett," but there's lots more to the story than that. It's off topic, but I'm reminded that Mikhail Baryshnikov played Romero in a non-dancing Soviet adaptation called " ."

Depressing, indeed, trieste. Ovation is following the same path as Bravo and A&E - shifting away from the arts and to more (relatively) popular programming so as not to be dropped from the cable packages. That leaves only PBS, which is also vulnerable to ratings pressure.

Much obliged for the heads-up, Lynette H. It's not the same thing as being there, of course, but I do think cinema broadcasts of these exhibits is a good idea. I expect they'd schedule carefully, because I think there'd be a real risk of people going to the cinema and then not bothering to get to the actual exhibition, but the more the merrier IMO. Pompeii itself is in trouble. I hope the Italian government can get it together. Related. I hope anyone who sees the exhibition will tell us about it. Does anyone know of other museum exhibits shown in movie houses?

Great picture, thank you. She looks great. Must have been not long after her return to the company, I'd guess.

The punk look is not kind to the middle-aged, even those with surgical enhancements. Madonna came closest to pulling it off. Christina Ricci was a natural punk when she was still a preteen, so that's not surprising.

I'd say the short answer is, yes, there is a need for a book (or books) that will synthesize the testimonies and other materials already generally available about Balanchine the artist and/or Balanchine the man, and I would bet there there are archives out there to be explored. I would say the immediate need is for a nice solid tome, as Ray said earlier in the thread, and a conventional biography would be fine with me for starters. (You may well be right that two volumes will be called for, but I'd like to see a one-volume attempt. Not going to be too choosy at this point, though. )

Sure is. Thanks for the heads-up, California. Should be good viewing. Sorry we have to wait two years for it, though.

Thanks for posting, cubanmiamiboy.

A belated thanks for the Mosfilm link. I always thought Eisenstein and Prokofiev should have done Ivan as an opera (as it is it's a kind of opera, only nobody sings).

How can I put this respectfully... From my personal point of view, Tallchief certainly did "move on" with her personal life, no doubt about it. But I think when she was in the studio, she more often than not replicated the scene of her own intense training with Balanchine. (Again, this is my own observation.) In the best cases dancers whom she favored (few and far between) were able to learn something from her first-hand knowledge of working with Balanchine. In most cases, though, her approach sometimes made no sense (i.e., most of the young bodies Tallchief had to mold were far more flexible and well-trained from the start than hers ever was); sometimes it was just cruel. Thanks for this observation, Ray. I remember an interview with Tallchief where she said she told Balanchine something like, "George, I teach it to them just the way you taught it to me," but the potential problems with such a literal approach didn't occur to me at the time.

I know enough about Balanchine's life; what I really want to understand is his art. ETA: I'm not by any means suggesting that we ought avert our eyes from the uglier episodes in Balanchine's life. We don't need a hagiography either. I think most of us understand that artists make things, no? That's why we want to read about them; we love the art and want to know more about the person who made it. The issue arises with those who do seem to make careers of being a--holes, and such cases exist. (Some come across as a--holes even when their biographers are trying to put the best possible face on things.) I don't think Mr. B. was one of the a--holes, for what that's worth, but his private life - insofar as he had one, really - was part and parcel of his art, more so than for most artists. The Farrell story is an illustration of that, in a sense: personal human relations are often as not messy and disappointing, but ultimately for both parties the art is what really matters. For myself, I do want to know about Balanchine's art but I think it's time for a more compleat life of Balanchine as well. I hope Homans comes up with the goods.

And got Mejia out of town. Respectfully, pherank, it seems to me you're setting up a sort of "North American" strawman, standing over biographical subjects like a nanny with a wooden spoon, ready to pounce when they get out of line and indifferent to nuance. It is true I don't think artists have a Get Out of Comment Free card to brandish when it comes to personal conduct, but it's also true that private lives get awfully messy sometimes even when the intentions of everyone involved are good. I'm not sure that the Vogue article gives us much guidance as to what Homans' approach will be, because Homans had other themes to develop here, but if she does decide to treat in detail of Balanchine's private life I'm sure she can be trusted to be honest and fair to all concerned even if I don't end up agreeing with her on this matter or other.