dirac

I have the impression that many dancers do have voices that tend to be on the high pitched side, although it doesn’t seem to be a contemporary development. (Of course, some opera stars don’t have wonderful speaking voices, either.) Younger dancers tend not to be the most enlightening interviews anyway, although I still enjoy reading/seeing them, because they’re still developing as people and artists. I don’t think they’re necessarily aiming at a ‘perky’ effect, it’s just that they’re, well, young and perky.

Yes, all of that was in “Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas,” which is well worth checking out, lorenzoverlaine – it has interviews with Tallchief, Mary Ellen Moylan, Merrill Ashley, Allegra Kent, Melissa Hayden, and Darci Kistler, and has some great early footage, including the Berceuse clip. Wonderful movie by the late Anne Belle and Deborah Dickson.

One can certainly understand why some dancers refuse to allow films of themselves to be re-released! Balanchine chose Tallchief not only as a wife and a prima but as the dancer around whom he would build a company. He staked pretty much everything on Tallchief and she repaid him in full. As Arlene Croce pointed out, he recreated many of the canonical roles of the repertory on her. It's true she doesn't look like the dancers of today. She's smaller, as many of the dancers were then, and she doesn't conform to the Balanchine dancer stereotype - she has a largish head and shortish legs, for example. These questions are worth asking, lorenzoverlaine, and I'm glad you spoke up. (The clip of Tallchief doing the Berceuse from Firebird in a television studio, despite the plainly cramped circumstances, is a beautiful bit of film.)

Denial. I regard those as representative of ballet as the Barbie doll is of an actual woman. Edited to add: I love the dancing in "What's Opera, Doc?", even if the turnout is inconsistent. My young nieces enjoyed the Barbies. Haven't seen them myself.

Thanks for those examples, Eric, and I agree with you on both counts. I seem to remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon with a ballet theme, but it's been aeons and I could be wrong. Thank you for the great topic. In recent years we've seen the virtual abandonment, on the big screen anyway, of hand drawn animation in favor of computer animation, although the former still has some advantages over the latter. I think that dancing characters can look quite good in hand drawn animation, but movement in CGI can still be very clunky. And classical music can go very well with cartoons.

I can't find it in my heart to condemn companies who are doing this from hunger, either. I wish they wouldn't but these days, especially, it's not for me to judge. jonellew (and thanks for starting this topic) is right to say the lobby is the better place, but that's not where your captive audience is.

The aesthetic effects of rampant tooth bleaching is another subject. Most distracting. Kind of surprised that the name of Jacques d'Amboise doesn't seem to have arisen yet in this thread. My impression was that he sometimes played direct to the audience and opinions were divided about this.

Opinions can and will differ. That was just my impression.

Oh, I’m sure they do. I just thought he sounded a trifle sanctimonious. If the criticism is fair, it can and should stand on its own without any little homilies about the bad example Kistler is allegedly setting for young dancers.

I think enough of these remarks will actually win sympathy for Kistler. Macaulay should call it as he sees it, of course – he wouldn’t be doing his job as a critic if he didn’t – but I thought he went a bit overboard.

He’s not quite as categorical as that. He refers to the opinions of unnamed observers (“some say.....people asked whether”) without quite committing himself. Still, very high praise indeed. In general the article was most positive, if a trifle grudging in spots. He might have tried to work in something gracious about Kistler amid the criticisms, and it seemed a tad disingenuous of him to offer the excuse that his criticism was harsh lest younger dancers be misguided by Kistler's example. Hmm.

It's in Afterimages, and I assume in the comprehensive anthology of her New Yorker writings. They've always given me a similar feeling - the lifts have almost an interplanetary feel, as if they're taking off for another world. Thank you, cubanmiamiboy, for including the definite article in your original post. ("The Four Temperaments") She's awesome.

I don't think the type has disappeared entirely, but I see what you mean. I'm not sure that it's such a bad thing, though. Rita Hayworth in the movie spends most of the time taking Glenn Ford's abuse for her slutty ways - it's borderline masochistic. Not much 'empowerment' there. (I like the movie anyway, though.) Linda Fiorentino made one good FF movie ("The Last Seduction") and a serious turkey ("Jade"). The character played by Greta Schacchi in the film of Scott Turow's "Presumed Innocent" is an interesting variation on the type; this FF is a career woman climbing to the top via sex with men who rank higher on the food chain, and she winds up getting clubbed to death, which most of the other characters in the book seemed to regard as condign punishment.

I remember seeing it in her Journals??

sandik plucked this article from The Independent, which is well worth checking out. I thought I’d make a new topic for it. Any thoughts? I note for the record that feminist thinking on the ‘femme fatale’ character is considerably more nuanced and sophisticated than it’s presented here.

I agree. Back in olden times, any movie of three hours had an intermission, with orchestral introductions and interludes. (Lawrence of Arabia had one, sandik, if you remember.) Now even if the movie closes in on four hours you're expected to sit there, so I'm just careful not to buy a Coke. Nice review, Mashinka, thank you for reporting back. Thanks, sandik.

Obituary by Jack Anderson in the Times.

Another modern dance review by Leigh in the Post, this one vividly evoking the Taylor troupe.

Thanks for posting, sandik. Sad news. The little film posted on the Center's web site is worth checking out. A beautiful dancer as well as a very beautiful woman.

It's really too early to tell, but Drew pointed this out earlier in the thread: Maybe not such a big difference, perhaps??? I add my greetings to carbro's, drb. Nice to see you posting again!

Thanks for those, Quiggin. (Off topic - I browsed through Isherwood's diaries when they first came out and I was almost sorry I did. I didn't think he came across too well.)

Thanks, Kathleen, this is great reporting for those of us who can't be there, and thanks for the article, bart. Has anyone else been there yet?

Good choice. As SanderO says, hard to go wrong with Verdi. And do tell us how you liked the performance!

I really liked it, although it’s a cult film not for every taste. Much of the imagery is surreal and striking and the cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, did some great work here. It was directed by Albert Lewin, who also did another interesting failure, the The Picture of Dorian Gray with Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, and Angela Lansbury, and he went all out on this one, trying for mythic significance and not getting there. But the trip is worth taking, all the same. Gardner’s performance is not good but she is so beautiful she stops the breath and the film is worth seeing just to drink her in. There is indeed bullfighting, and a real bullfighter, Mario Cabré, in the picture. Like Gardner, his performance is weak but he looks great (they had an affair during the filming, causing Frank Sinatra to go into frenzies of jealousy). I think so, too.

I don’t mind them if they’re bad in the right way. I still have fond memories of their musical evocation of “Crash” a few years back, which was strongly reminiscent of "Night of the Living Dead." The “Slumdog” songs were enjoyable and a big improvement over the usual Disney material.