Quiggin

Yes, very Balanchinian! With jazz-influenced big band singers, it's singing off the beat and a certain kind of horn instrument-like phrasing that's so appealing, and which Doris Day once had a bit of. I guess Frank Sinatra is the best example of someone who never gave that up – and even passing it on to younger singers like Paul Anka and Bobby Darin. (Abbey Lincoln does a wonderful version of Day's "It's Magic.") Surprised not more was mentioned in the obituaries of the moment in the early eighties when Rock Hudson appeared on Doris Day's tv show and in effect broke the story about AIDS to the American public – and to the Reagans. It sort of put an end to the 1950s Hollywood age of innocence. It was a huge news story at the time. The Times Monday sequestered it in a gentle parenthetical note. Added: As a result of Love Me or Leave Me, Columbia reissued Ruth Etting's recordings which became very popular in the early days of Notes on Camp. Interesting to compare the Bix Biederbecke-like accompaniments of Etting with the brassy "stereophonic sound" of the movie soundtrack which sounds now more like camp to our ears.

According to Variety, Doris Day's early career crisscrossed that of Bette Hutton's, filling in for Hutton in Romance on the High Seas, and almost playing Annie in Annie Get Your Gun for which Calamity Jane was a kind of consolation award. Day's acting and singing was always too buttery smooth for me (as the Guardian characterizes it) to give most movies she was in much depth or counterpoint. In Young Man With a Horn, based on the Dorothy Baker novel (with Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall as parts of a trio), you get a glimpse of the more interesting jazz/big band singer she had been been in the 1940s – and which, had she preserved, might have given her an occasional play on Spotify alongside 50s singers like Dorothy Dandridge. I liked her in "Man Who Knew Too Much" with Jimmy Stewart, as slightly loud, oblivious Americans abroad. In Hitchcock/Truffaut she says she felt that the taciturn Hitchcock didn't like her performance and would have preferred Grace Kelly. Hitchcock: "I said nothing because you gave a good performance. If it had been otherwise, I would most certainly have said something." Young Man / Horn trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmREGcpAx7A

Thanks for the link. The Walkaround sets are Jasper Johns' versions of the Duchamp Glass – funny blocks of stage furniture that look like oversized cribs or aquariums alongside the dancers. I now realize the Barbican projections were part of a project originally done by Richard Hamilton for Cunningham in 2005. They do look a little flat and low contrast as filmed. I like the score that Christian Wolff directs.

I pulled the original San Francisco Ballet casts from 2014 Ballet Alert posts - WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2014 —7:30PM—OPENING NIGHT Symphony #9 Sarah Van Patten*, Carlos Quenedit* Simone Messmer, James Sofranko* Taras Domitro* Chamber Symphony Davit Karapetyan* Sasha De Sola*, Mathilde Froustey*, Lorena Feijoo* Piano Concerto #1 Yuan Yuan Tan*, Damian Smith* Maria Kochetkova*, Vitor Luiz* TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2014 —8:00PM Symphony #9 Mathilde Froustey*, Luke Ingham* Lorena Feijoo*, Pascal Molat* Hansuke Yamamoto* Chamber Symphony Jaime Garcia Castilla* Dores Andre*, Simone Messmer*, Sarah Van Patten* Piano Concerto #1 Sofiane Sylve*, Tiit Helimets* Frances Chung*, Joan Boada* Also tried to piece together the original ABT cast from various sources, here and the NYT - June 2(?), 2013, American Ballet Theatre Symphony #9 Polina Semionova, Marcelo Gomes (Part/Bole second cast) Herman Cornejo, Simone Messmer, Craig Salstein Chamber Symphony (Eighth string quartet) David Halberg, Isabella Boylston, Paloma Herrera, Julie Kent Piano Concerto #1 Diana Vishneva, Natalia Osipova, Cory Stearns, Ivan Vaseiliev There's a short clip of Simone Messmer in Nancy Raffa's intro, followed by Sarah Van Patten & Carlos Quenedit who partnered especially well I thought. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5A5uXZKsDU

And thanks for the clip of Damon Daunno singing Surrey With the Fringe On Top. Seems to have a wider, and more adventurous, range than a lot of Broadway singers, as evidenced in this sequence from Hadestown (which got a thumbs up in the Wall Street Journal today): "Hades covers the world in the color of rust ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K77nr8-uhZ8 From Oklahoma: DD's Girl Who Cain't Say No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QxS_mwH_oo Surrey/Fringe again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ozS9j8bWh4

Saw bits and pieces of the works streamed and my impressions agreed with canbelto's review, though I have a much less practiced eye for Cunningham's subtleties. What I did feel is the loss of a certain propulsive quality of Cunningham phrasing. No matter what wobbles there were in the old days, sometimes charming, there was always a certain logic of how the steps inevitably related to each other, how they bubbled forth out of each other. That was missing here. Did Cunningham ever used Marcel Duchamp stills as backdrops? Didn't quite work for me. I did like the Pat Steir veils at BAM though. NYT: "Pat Steir Gets Discovered, Again": https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/arts/design/pat-steir-barnes-foundation-waterfall-kiki-smith-feminist.html

The costumes of "Two united" made the men look especially puffy and shapeless, not very narcissism-making. Narcissus himself (Joseph Walsh) seemed closer to the Prodigal Son in his argument with the world than in traditional treatments of the myth (such as Robbins simple and elegant Afternoon of a Faun). Even when Narcissus was at rest and looking at his reflection, he had the intensity of a cat waiting to snap a fish out of the water. In Possokhov's The Swimmer of two years ago the protagonist's task was clear – to swim across the county through all its pools and interact with its party goers. Here it wasn't clear what Narcissus was supposed to do other than to choreographically rant. Could he have gone through his mirror image into the other world / world of others? Was he the loved or beloved ( another traditional question in the myth)? There are lots of good paintings at Pompei of the story, which was a favorite with the Romans – perhaps one of them would have made a clearer basis for the set than the Warhol mylar balloon space capsule that occupied a good portion of the stage. Of the other two ballets on the program, Wheeldon's ballet "Bound To" (itself a kind of essay on narcissism) seemed stronger this year. But with "Your Flesh/Poem" Benjamin Freemantle seemed to have ironed out all the rough edges of his solo, which lost some of its unique character as a result. Last year you could sense how it was constructed, see its seams and sutures, feel its stops and starts and stresses, imperfections that made it a more rewarding experience to watch.

All the photographers I've known have studied the history of their medium as assiduously as artists in other mediums, and bring that knowledge to every photograph they take – often not necessarily following it but fighting against it. Interestingly Evans originally intended to be a writer and Kirstein nudged him over to photography. Cartier-Bresson started out as a painter and graphic artist, something he tried to return to (unsuccessfully). Robert Ryman, the painter, came to New York to study with Lennie Tristano and be a jazz saxophonist. Sometimes we're not the best judge of our talents – or you could say that the cross of two disciplines, a successful one built over a failed one (e.g Balanchine the choreographer over Balanchine the composer) strengthens one. Here's a nice set of Walker Evans photographs for a 1945 Fortune magazine article that Kirstein might have facilitated – Balanchine & Ballet Theatre – Also there's always some truth and some poetry to what Picasso says. Even his catty comment about Bonnard – "a potpouri of indecisions" – rings true for me after having wearily just gone through room after room of Bonnardy hesitations at the Tate.

There's also an iffier show at Zwirner New York. (I wonder what Kirstein would have thought of the delightful Franz West show currently at Zwirner London.) https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/young-and-evil It's an interesting discussion between Roberta Smith and Alaistair Macaulay. Macaulay makes a misstep by ranking Walker Evans (arguably Kirstein's most important "discovery" after Balanchine) below Tchelitchew, Naldeman and Lynes. And did Tchelitchew's "sense of light, space and metamorphosis transform Balanchine’s work," as AM claims? Hmmm. Smith says that the clips of Billy the Kid and Filling Station "nearly did her in," but that the excerpt of The Four Temperaments (embedded in the review) is "one of the high points of the show, wonderful to watch, because the dancers are dressed so plainly and none of the men are pretending to be riding horses — or fixing cars."

It's a 15-20 minute segment from "Lincoln Center Celebrates Balanchine 100," hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker. The Liebeslieder cast is Kistler, Nichols, Ringer, Weese, Angle, Hubbe, Neal and Soto. Catalogue description of the NYPL holding: https://catalog.nypl.org/search/?searchtype=X&searchscope=98&searcharg="lincoln center celebrates balanchine 100"

Arlene Croce has a long discussion on LIebeslieder Walzer in Sight Lines and Robert Garis has one in Following Balanchine. Garis thinks it was built around Violette Verdy who had been dramatically effective, particularly so, in Figure in the Carpet, choreographed just prior to Liebeslieder. He says that within the ballroom context couples are playing at being in love (which makes it sound a little like Cotillion, Balanchine's waltz ballet of 1933). Of the part Macaulay discusses, Wohl schon bewandt war es vorehe, Garis says Anyway it's wonderful Liebeslieder is being done again. It would fall out of programming, seemingly to be lost, and then appear again. I saw it with Kyra Nichols, Miranda Weese, Jennifer Ringer and Wendy Whelan in it in 2004 and 2007 (one program consisted of Kammermusik No. 2, Liebeslieder Walzer, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet). Sometimes I liked to watch it abstractly like a drawing, how it bisected, inscribed and reinscribed the surface of the stage, and how the men were drawing figures on the floor with the toes of their partners. PBS somewhere has a recording of the 2004 Balanchine Celebration cast, and Jilliana and Conrad Ludlow have Balanchine interviews on their experiences on Youtube. (Ludlow says his names for the partners were: the Young Couple (Jilliana and Ludlow), the Business couple (Hayden and Watts), the Aristocratic people (Adams and Carter) and the Cultured ones (Verdy and Magallanes.) Ludlow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AydZ7jDULik

Joel Grey was in the touring cast of "Stop the World I Want to Get Off" where he may have worked out some of the ideas he later used in "Cabaret." And earlier than that, Grey belted, Grey-style, a rather witty love song love song called "You're Far from Wonderful" in "The Littlest Revue." Ogdon Nash wrote the lyrics, Vernon Duke and John Latouche the music, Ben Bagley was the producer. Charlotte Ray ("Sommer Is A-Coming In"), Tammy Grimes ("I'm Glad I'm Not a Man") and Tommy Morton ("I Want to Fly Now (And Pay Later") were among the cast members. Still seems to be only on old vinyl but worth a listen – no duds. Anyway for me "Cabaret," like "Sunset Boulevard" the musical from Wilder's film, is too far afield from Isherwood's subtle original (via "I Am a Camera") – it loses all its real Berliness in the saturated color and high production values. Added: Pajama Game & Damn Yankees made nice movies. Carol Haney in Steam Heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0szHqIXQ2R8

I liked Simone Messmer when she was dancing at San Francisco Ballet, thought she was especially effective in Shostakovich Trilogy (she was in both SFB and ABT first casts). You might say she's more of a small scale, chamber dancer – maybe the equivalent of Karin von Aroldingen, the "actress" in Balanchine's words, in how you would place her in roles. I don't know what happened at San Francisco and Miami. I do know that Isaac Hernandez and Mathilde Froutsey talked about the differences between the San Francisco and European companies and felt you have an oportunity for more personal training in the latter, that San Francisco has such a short hectic season, there's not enough time to work on a role before you're off onto another one. There are also cliques at the ballet, dancers who associate and work well with certain others, for a while there was the Spanish speaking group who sometimes stood apart, so Messmer may have appeared at a time when it was difficult to find a social place in the company. There are a lot of factors. And there have been wonderful dancers and actors who have had a hard place fitting in moving from Ballet Russe to New York City Ballet to ABT in the early fifties (Mary Ellen Moylan, etc). With Miami it might have been just an unfortunate "third strike" when she reportedly spoke up against what she felt might be a dubious hiring choice for the company. I do think it's harsh to say for any artist to give up their art and go back to a nine to five job for structure, that would feel pretty crushing – I've things like that said about my (quirky) work and so perhaps I'm being oversensitive here. I do realize there's more pressure to conform these days in general and fewer options out there and maybe Messmer is a throwback to a more free spirited generation, but there does seem to be a kind of onus placed on her standing out and on her criticisms which do shine some light on processes we wouldn't otherwise hear that much about.

Thanks, pherank, for the Panero Justin Peck analysis. Maybe Peck's ballets are more dramatically successful when he uses more traditional music scores, such as Aaron Copeland's for Rodeo, which give him a stronger structure to lock into. And thanks, Terez, for your observations on Hurry Up – and Joseph Walsh's naturalness and being a kind of "natural" in the ballet. With the Millepied Appasionata, by borrowing from Ratmansky's Russian Seasons and Balanchine's sublime Liebeslieder Valzer, it does open up some questions about the whys of the borrowing. When say Picasso or Matisse borrow/"steal" from Cezanne or Van Gogh, they build on the implications of the devices or motifs that they felt weren't completely developed in the original (often turning them on their heads) and the resulting art work ends up saying something fresh and new. I don't think that happened here.

Enjoyed Program 2 last night. Thought Isabella DeVivo and Julia Rowe came closest to Balanchine in Divertimento #15, especially the quirky torsion bar twist movements, in an overall good performance. (The first movement variations are always so strange, as if the dancer is doing two superimposed variations at once that only coincide here and there, and in the andante the dancers seem to be sculpting out invisible, off-fulcrum private spaces.) What I did find distracting is that the dancers smiled so broadly in parts which are supposed to be relatively quiet and introspective. Pianists don't smile while they play Mozart inner movements – should dancers? Lots of clean, spirited dancing in the Milleppied/Beethoven Appassionata and nice to see Jaime Garcia Castilla in good form after a hiatus of some months. But the production seemed like a odd combination of stories and effects from Russian Seasons – primary colored costumes in the first movement, white bridal clothes in the second – and Liebeslieder Walzes – women's hair let free in the last movement, change from point shoes to flats. But the progression of narratives didn't seem to develop as clearly as they do in the originals. Hurry Up seemed less compelling on third viewing but sections still stood out. Was still thinking of Mozart from earlier in the evening I guess.

I think Joan Acocella could have said that Balanchine was a giant of 20th century ballet, much as Bach was for music in the 18th, which to me would have been more in keeping with relatively straight reportage of the rest of the piece – and leave it at that. As far a Gogol's range, I think it was Doestovsky who said "we all came out of Gogol's Overcoat." I was also thinking of Wolf's musicality, the conterpoint of singer and pianist, the unique flavor of his work – somewhat like the odd flavor of the slow movement of Divertimento #15 (being performed here in SF this week), with its strange stop and go step patterns and rather bizarre overhead lifts. In general I was trying to link Balanchine with artists of some modesty and unique world view, rather than the biggest and best. It is odd though that Balanchine's stature often seems to have to be justified by dance writers whereas someone like Merce Cunningham's doesn't.

I thought the article was a good summary of what happened at City Ballet – and almost a roll call of many of the discussion points here at Ballet Alert. What struck me as a wrong note was her attempt at assessing Balanchine's status in the arts (which always for some reason dance writers seem to need to defend and polish), as "a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously". That seemed subjective and very personal – almost like a religious conversion – and out of character with the tone of the rest of the piece. Balanchine was a fairly modest man, and instead of comparing himself to Tolstoy, as Acocella does, he might have said ETA Hoffmann or Gogol. (And maybe Hugo Wolf instead of Bach.)

Like PeggyR, I've always had difficulty with the lighting in Hurry Up – very hard time looking through it to the dancing. But there have been a series of works at the Opera House, Scarlett's, Wheeldon's, others, that have had the similarly aggressively audience-facing, seachlight lighting, so Justin Peck's ballet isn't breaking any annoying new ground here. What's troubling for me with Justin Peck ballets is the boy-meets-girl-in-a-crowd moment out of West Side Story fulcrum where the crowd and the background freezes and a pas begins. What I do like about Peck is his handling of groups, his sense of dance as architecture, his witty arrangement of its modules. You see the whole and the parts working together. Anyway Hurry Up isn't a great piece but it has it pleasures (when you can see them)

Callihroe is a latist Hellenistic novel, a first century BC form, when Greek art had lost its way with too much fullness as we're taught in school, and they're proposing to superimpose a 500 BC classical ideal over it – which should be very strange. I read a couple of that group of novels once and they seemed like soap operas or prototypes for Richardson novels. (Daphne and Chloe was like a Stephen Boyd Cinemascope version of a Sappho fragment.) Ratmansky's new project could turn out to be something like a Pre-Raphaelite ballet or a series of Puvis de Chavannes paintings. Not exactly advancing the art. Added: Actually the novels were fun to read, my response was colored by my disappointment that Ratmansky is not doing a contemporary work.

Another factor is that Hurry Up, We're Dreaming got good notices in the press both in Unbound and more recently in the Gala, so maybe the Ballet regretted not giving it a second run. Good press notices seemed to have helped get the full Shostakovich Trilogy a second season. Probably a relink, but in this recent Chronicle interview Justin Peck talks about how he likes to work with the company. (Also likes to watch the Warriors, so maybe there are some Steph Curry moves and screens in Dreaming... Or maybe Kerr and the Warriors watch old tapes of John Clifford in Rubies?) https://www.sfchronicle.com/performance/article/Choreographer-Justin-Peck-brings-his-old-and-his-12500115.php?cmpid=gsa-sfgate-result

Two clips from Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961. Cleo and Demy's Lola were big art house hits in the US for Legrand, well before Cherbourg and Man and a Woman (which was then considered less good). Even Pauline Kael was a fan of Cleo. Michel Legrand at piano, with Corinne Marchand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdjskdSjzhw

My friends all commented on how musical, with what great phrasing, Misa Kuranaga was in the Tomasson Soirees Musicales piece. Benjamin Freemantle looked terrific in a unique take on all the intricate twists and turns of the Agon pas de trois, alongside Jennifer Stahl and Wanting Zhao. But the Stravinsky score was conducted so politely and so without any of its requisite sass that it didn't give the dancers the support and strong beats they needed to really top off some of the effects, as when the three dancers bump shoulders at the end. The Lander Etudes excerpt was brilliant fun – with a kind of wonderful excercise book spilling out on diagonals – and with Sasha de Sola, Aaron Robison and the reinstated Ulrich Birkkjaer all in great form. I also liked the first pas in Hurry Up (despite the overly contrasty lighting) and how refreshingly clean-cut and decisive the choreography was – though with some of the Peck ballets I find there gets to a bit too much of boy meets girl for the first time business. Anyway I enjoyed it all, though as Dreamer said it was more low keyed than in the past. And I noticed the audience itself was a bit more subdued in manner and dress – fewer eye-catching dresses, fewer long trains to be cafeful of stepping on. But the spirit was still there in this difficult time.

Nice program this year. Of course I'm always interested in seeing Rubies and Agon (though "soloists to be announced" is a bit inauspicious). I did like Peck's Hurry Up We're Dreaming but hopefully the lighting will be brighter this time around so there'll be more of it. Alastair Macaulay listed Dreaming in his NYT Best of 2018 but it seemed to have lost out in the Unbound cut for reprise in 2019, so this is a bit of compensation. I liked Aaron Robison very much in Violin Concerto and Urik Birkkjaer in the Chairman Dances male duet and Snowbound last year, so I'm looking forward to seeing them both in the Lander Etudes. Looking over old programs I realize Birkkjaer had danced here in 2011 when he was a member of the Royal Danish Ballet in Sylphide and Bournonville Variations at Zellerbach, so this will be something of old turf for him. Harald Lander in rehearsal with Toni Lander and Erik Bruhn (music begins at the 3 minute mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3dkd5dC5oI

Amy Reusch: Fedor Lopukhov, whose ballets Balanchine appeared in and was influenced by, was critical of the way Petipa treated Tchaikovsky and may have been Macaulay's source. Lopukhov thought that Petipa didn't understand the full complexity and color of Tchaikovsky's music as it was played in violin/piano reductions. Lopukhov (cited out of sequence): more here in Lopukhov's writings: https://books.google.com/books?id=50voOBEhZCsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=fyodor+lopukhov+petipa&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-mprog9_fAhUOlKwKHddnBFsQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=tchaikovsky&f=false

Actually from the beginning Alfred Barr had a strict program in place – like an Arthur Murray dance chart – for how the Modern would evolve, with key paintings in place. (You could say that the Cezanne bather was its Apollo, the savage Les Demoiselles D'Avignon its Serenade.) Currently, PS 1, housed in a former Swingline stapler factory, is MoMA's venue for its scrappier offerings. It'd be interesting to see what kinds of Alfred Barr-like outline for City Ballet's past and future the prospective candidates for AD would imagine and construct – especially those of Damian Woetzel and Lourdes Lopez. Steve Wolfe's painting of the Barr chart: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81386