Quiggin

Drew: It'd be awful to lose it as a choreographer's tool, as a contrasting device. Wasn't it originally invented to distinguish the quick from the dead in Giselle? Regarding Diaghilev, Don Q, etc I find it fascinating that when Balanchine first came to the US, Kirstein promoted him as a revolutionary choreographer who would break with all the conventions, break down the procenium, apply Brechtian techniques (: his "Seven Deadly Sins"). That Balanchine's main influence was not Marius Petipa but Kaisan Goleizovsky, and that, disturbed by “the atrophy of the leftovers of the Imperial Theatre, “ Balanchine “risked expulsion” to produce his own experimetntal choreography. And that in Paris, "the choreographer struggled against the bourgeois decadence of Diaghilev's last period and still managed to create notable works." (Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine, Andrea Harris.) After WWII needing State Department funds earmarked for anti-communitist groups, Kirstein re-presented Balanchine no longer as a student of Goleizovsky and the Soviet avant garde, but instead claimed that it was Petipa and Lev Ivanov who were “in this blood.” (Harris). But Kirstein was twice right – compare Symphony in C with the Goleizovsky/New Ballet-like Four Temperaments in 1947. So Balanchine and maybe all modern ballet dance is founded over the precipitous schism, and dialogue, between pre- and post- Russian Revolution art. * Has a new lead critic been announced? Roslyn Sulcas has been writting about "other cultural matters," most recently a long article on a long, quarter mile piece by Robert Rauschenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/arts/design/rauschenberg-quarter-mile-mural-lacma.html

Alastair Macaulay has written his farewell column as head dance critic at the NYTimes and talks about the changes he's seen during his tenure. The choreographers who bode well for the art form: What he doesn't like and thinks holds dance back rather than informing the future: And it is very true that those ballets are what Diaghilev was moving away from (the exception being Sleeping Princess for the well-heeled British audience). https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/arts/dance/alastair-macaulay-dance-farewell.html

Thanks for those – I watched all of the three Give a Girl pieces. Well, diamonds and charming jewel thieves seemed to be a big theme of the 50's movies – Diamonds are a Girls Best Friends, To Catch a Thief, various B movies, etc. And George Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue seems to have been a great source of inspiration to all the MGM musicals. Is there a bit of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty in Gower Champion's search for the right girl in Give a Girl a Break? The color red is very unstable in Fashion Show, almost swallowing everyone up, and seems incapable of holding any detail. And there's the overly happy yellow (yellow is always slightly neurotic according to Eisenstein who wrote a great treatise on the color) of the Fosse-Reynolds dance sequence – which was danced backwards and filmed from tail to head, so you keep winding it forward and backward to yourself as you watch. Gower Champion is as thin as a reed and sometimes almost disappears into his dancing.

Thanks for all the clips. The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes choreography in its gliding and open spacing looks a little like ice skating choreography to my eyes. Not sure if all the Champions' work has that roominess. Three-strip Technicolor has such a strange color palette – perhaps you could say color iconology – that competes neck in neck with the story and songs. In the Grayson clip there are roses and lavenders and a deep carmine red of the velvet dress, the gray and light browns of the curtain and a nice orangey version of flesh tone against which the twin whites of teeth and right earing flash like subtitles. It's like Egyptian painting in its abstractness or Venetian painting in its color signs. (Was Natalie Kalmus our Caravaggio?) Ick factor: Hearing Chevalier sing Thank Heaven for Little Girls separated from the film on the car radio and in venues like Ed Sullivan very much had an underlying ick factor, if not being something bizarrely surreal. There's also the ick factor in Caron's filmography of Daddy Long Legs with a 40 year difference in age between the romantic leads.

Thanks for a reminder about the Judy Garland Christmas special with Jack Jones and "Steam Heat" (did Fosse direct?) and general too muchness. (There's also an extended Christmas 1968 Judy Garland appearance on Johnny Carson where Garland sings a strange and bittersweet Christmas song, "Til after the Holidays".) Three directors' Christmas movies that interest me are: Jacque Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg (resolution scene at Christmas), Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (beautiful and subtle performance by Jane Wyman) and Mitchell Leisen's Remember the Night (Stanwick and MacMurray). The Sirk movie has lush foliage and nice light effects on background walls and an upside down Christmas story – children censoring the parent rather than the other way around. Leisen's story is light – a thief and a prosecuting attorney fall in love – and has the great benefit of a script and snappy dialogue by another Paramount director, Preston Stuges. Leisen was said to be somewhat responsible for the Paramount studio look, but his movies always lacked a certain something for me: too much melodrama without the certain extra someone like Sirk puts in. Leisen once came to a class I took and showed us a print of Hold Back the Dawn. He wore a festive Sargent Pepper jacket and was very jolly.

Cyclingmartin: The Royal Ballet's version is fun – I always think of RB style as having a bit of music hall insolence, plus that perfect grace and a little quirkiness of Margot Fonteyn to it. Like an English version of a Watteau fete (by way of Hogarth?) in tone. But I prefer the Cornejo-led pas de trois cohesiveness and balance and brilliance. The Kirov Zelensky SL is another thing altogether, there's so much presence and spaciousness and everything done with the right pauses and accents, albeit "low contrast" ones. But – disclosure – 19th century ballet is not my thing, so I'm always missing many of the subtleties of the art of it. Regarding conducting/conducting for ballet/tempos, I came across this interview that George Balanchine did in Los Angeles in the 1940s comparing the two (Balanchine at one point wanted to be a conductor and took conducting classes in St Petersburg with Yevgeny Mravinsky): And in the spirit of the season, here are two recordings of Arabian from Nutcracker. The first is by Mravinsky recorded in the late forties. Mravinsky always plays the textures and inner details at a little expense of the forward drive. The second is by Sergiu Celibidache. In both you can hear the emphatic jcha-jcha-jcha of Russian version of maracas that you hardly hear in other recordings. Also note that Mravinky's time is 3:39 and Celibidache's is a full 5:25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trgXIgK99wQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbkD1TpWxCA And here at a mere 2:47 is Wendy Whelan in Arabian (Coffee when Arthur Mitchell did it) from Balanchine's Nutcracker – full of, if not musicality, wonderful cubo-futurist architecture. And thanks for selecting and posting all those definitive Swan Lakes – would never have come across them otherwise.

I don't know how Herman Cornejo would have been able to get in his brilliant leaps without the orchestra slowing down. (And of course this may not have been the original choreography the music was intended for, as we have seen from Ratmansky's reconstructions.) But don't orchestra conductors always make changes in tempos for different dancers? Danilova talks about John Barbirolli asking her what tempos she wanted that evening (and she not knowing who he was, thinking he was flirting with her, snubbed him). And what are the right tempos? Shostakovich's musicians would always ask him to slow down some of his impossible tempos and he would often agree, saying he that when he wrote the piece was afraid of boring the audience or that he had an old metronome at home that sometimes was off tempo. Furtwangler's sense of time was quite different from Toscanini's, so why not a dancer's?

The old Waltz flowers always looked like Zinnias to me, both in offset petal form and colors – orange, salmon and chrome yellow – as opposed to City Ballet's (Karinska's?) which are lavender and pink in three even tiers. They seemed like a nice wintry reference to Southern California or Mexico. The new flowers look more like single poppies (crinkled icelandic?) in form with a similar color palette. Look forward to seeing them in movement.

Actually before Salonen there was an equally refined music director of the LA Phil – Carlo Maria Giulini, from 1978 to 1984, who did a great Don Carlo, Brahms Requiem and Mahler 9th. And way before Giulini there was Otto Klemperer. And of course, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were around and there was the long lived "Evenings on the Roof" series which featured their work. RedCat at Disney Hall, which they're trying to duplicate here in San Francisco, is a kind of successor to that. When I worked in a tiny record shop in Hollywood, Mel Torme once came in and surprised us – we had a big stock of rare jazz LP's (Blue Notes with two digit, pre-zip zone codes on the back) – by buying a box set of Quartetto Italiano playing the Schumann string quartets. Stayed for a long discussion on classical music with my boss.

Esa-Pekka Salonen becoming head of the San Francisco Symphony is really one of the best things to happen here in the arts in years. I heard Salonen conduct the Symphony a few years ago in Ravel Mother Goose, Stravinsky Firebird and his own Nyx, the orchestra playing with great (coolish) color and transparency and delicately tensioned detailing. Very thrilling performance. Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times assess the challenges ahead: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-esa-pekka-salonen-san-francisco-20181205-story.html Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

I did watch Messmer in rehearsal at SFB and she was showing two younger dancers a part she knew – just a few feet away from me – with great verve. I don't know who initiated it but the person next to me pointed it out to me approvingly. Also I remember someone who had once been at Smuin Ballet told me he never dated fellow dancers – you're together all day and do you really want to make it a 24 hour thing he said. He had lots of other non-dance interests to pursue with other friends. Anyway Kochetkova apparently was no paragon of fellow-citizen socialbility. Does everyone have to be? – perhaps we have emphasized togetherness and keeping in touch a bit too much, along with other cute things like dog and cat pictures.

Tomasson does do good work, but it's the official work – or "word" – of the company. As far as the press, it would be a little like Alaistair Macaulay using the company's news releases to write his reviews. The Chronicle surely has access to stringers who work for very little. Not doing so it might have to do with SFB company policy and control. Also many professional photographers on other assignments pass through San Francisco all the time whose points of view on the company would complement Tomasson's. We need more strong voices in the world, not weaker and fewer. Again think of all the great oblique and spontaneous views of companies making work that we have had from Henri Cartier-Bresson (Boshoi & City Ballet), Martine Franck (Paris Opera and Marseilles), Walker Evans (Ballet Theatre 1940), Inge Morath (Bolshoi); Eve Arnold, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Christopher Anderson, etc etc. Here's Magnum's ballet catalogue, full of images to treasure: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2K1HZO4A25KZN9&SMLS=1&RW=2258&RH=1134

I enjoyed watching Simone Messmer dance with San Francisco Ballet. She was an unusual type – like Carol Lombard was among 1930s actresses – and gave a light but unusual color or tone to a ballet. She was especially good in the first section of the Shostakovich Trilogy, in the part that had been set on her at ABT, and I can't imagine anyone else doing it. The dust-up with Kochetkova I believe was about labor issues at the ballet which is something that happen in New York among actors about work condition negotiations, so it didn't seem out of the ordinary. The culture of the ballet here seems to be an insular one, much more so than in New York where you have alternative companies – there is no ABT / NYCB rivalry and cross fertilization and supra-company overview. So I can understand about the intimate dinner where casting was determined. And I've always thought it highly unusual that all San Francisco Ballet's photography – the whole visual archive of the company's work – was the solely the work of the son of the artistic director, Erik Tomasson. Even the San Francisco Chronicle's images in reviews are credited to him. Can't think of any other situation like that – City Ballet had Martha Swope but there were many others including Cartier-Bresson and New York Times photographers, etc, leaving a much more varied visual history behind.

I don't know if it's been mentioned before, but Clifford choreographed at least six works for New York City Ballet between 1969 and 1972, five of which are still listed on the repertory page (one was for the Stravinky Festival). He seems to have gotten lots of press in the Times and Clive Barnes called him "the boy most likely" among the young City Ballet choreographers – though Barnes did have some reservations about an element of "unwelcome brashness" to his dance style. Reading the reviews it could seem that Clifford had done as much as he could there as a choreographer – and as a perennially fresh and youthful dancer. Robert Garis, always a useful reference to City Ballet in the 60s and 70s, says that misunderstandings between Balanchine and his dancers, especially during the intense early Farrell period, resulted in some of them leaving the company. This includes Mimi Paul (who left for a less successful career at ABT), Suki Schorer (who retired early to teach), Marnee Morris, Gloria Govrin and Patricia Neary (who left to lead Geneva Ballet). added:

I agree with Helene that what's in a videotaped coaching session isn't the same as what would be presented in leisurely coaching session. The Balanchine foundation repetiteurs all have their idiosyncracies, not just Clifford – Maria Tallchief seems self absorbed and distractedly watches herself in the mirror as she coaches, Alicia Alsonso tells great stories but can't see anything that's going on with the dancers and has to be diplomatically cued in by Josefina Mendez standing at her side, etc. Clifford is a kind of unreliable narrator, yes, but he is the narrator and 1) has directly watched Balanchine choreographing works and 2) knows how to watch for the common affectations and distortions that have drifted in over the years. Some of what he says is similar to what Croce and others were saying in the 90s, he just says it louder and more in your face. Many of the other dancers, such as Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella, also talk about Balanchine as if they had a special relation to him and know things that no one else knows. Is Suki Schorer the last word on Balanchine technique? Francia Russell or Patricia McBride or Villella who came earlier might have other ideas. Clifford makes a comment somewhere that Balanchine's knowledge of Petipa was pre-Vaganova school, and that his Petipa was actually closer to Bournonville. Maybe there's also a pre-1970 Balanchine idiom that's less focused on getting the details nailed in place and more about the whole body dramatically possessing space. Not that it should supersede what is taught now but can help inform it. I think that's what Clifford wants to draw attention to through his comments and generous anthology of YouTube videos. And that the next artistic director would be open to all that.

I wonder if the performances in which the dancer takes the most liberties with a role are not the most memorable ones for us. At least when the dancer draws out and develops implications in the choreography we've always felt were there, as in the Gelsey Kirkland Giselle clip. So the progession might be – 1) standard fine performance technically perfect, 2) "musical" performance, and 3) performances where the dancer takes greater liberties, like Suzanne Farrell with Mozartiana, adjusting time and angles, almost falling off point, or Mikhail Baryshnikov in Fancy Free who seemed to be inventing new things for the in-between moments. (Though of course Mozartiana was set on Farrell and Kyra Nichols' later performances were the more orthodox ones, but quite musical.) Regarding the second point if you mean the present era, I don't think you'd be able to borrow (and repay) time with Phillip Glass's compositions, which sound to me like an endless series of hard arpeggios, nor with Wayne McGregor (or if so, how could you tell), but with the solos in The Four Temperaments you might have some leeway.

But "Don Quixote" is not "Timon on Athens" in regards to the rest of Balanchine's work, or another "Pan Am Makes the Going Great." It's a rather central piece. It might be like "Orpheus" in the way "Orpheus" doesn't quite work (and really doesn't relate to "Apollo" and "Agon" as was once the programming intent) but is important to see once in a while as an example of a surrealist influenced ballet. The recent revival of "Danses Concertantes" showed some interesting ideas and geometries Balanchine was working on in 1944 and looked (at least from the clips) like a nice companion to Justin Peck's and Alexei Ratmansky's angular and brightly costumed works. The other thing is that Balanchine's "Don Quixote" is much closer to Cervantes than the very light Petipa/Gorsky Don Q, which is based on a few incidental chapters and in which Don Quixote appears only as a minor character. I don't really worry about a revival taking away other resources – and there would probably be a lot of extra interest to bring in a few extra ticket buyers. Perhaps doing a whole act rather than a series of excerpts might work. But a good theater director, like whoever helped Christopher Wheeldon with "Winter's Tale" (Nicholas Hytner?), would be essential.

The accompanying exhibit of dance notations, programs and photographs goes on through December 18. Interesting that the advertisement poster uses a mild version (no red colors) of 1920s post-Petipa Constructivist graphics as its design basis.

There's also a crazy set of variations by Marnee Morris - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueQe78uYntE The music is definitely a problem, like watered down Stravinsky in parts (and Nabokov had the gall to write terrible reviews of Shostakovich's musc and treat him badly on his US tour). But the contemporary reviews, even Denby's, show problems with the structure which Balanchine kept fiddling with, righting one section at the expense of another. There was also the discomfort it gave the City Ballet audience to see Balanchine himself, or the Balanchine character, humiliated on stage. Croce ("Visions" March 6, 1978) calls it an indispensible Balanchine work, especially with Farrell, but a wildly uneven work. "Its lows (which includes most of Nicolas Nakokov's score) can be very low, but its highs stratospheric." She says it derives less from Cervantes than from Orpheus, Fairy's Kiss, and Sonnambula, its bleak tone Chaplinesque (perhaps like Limelight's). Maric B. Siegel also did a long probing peice on its "weird theatricality" and the differences between the younger and older risk-taking Farrell in it, and how that shifted the earlier too-close-for-comfort worshipping pupil to master relationship for her. All in all it sounds exceedingly difficult to revive, except with a master theater director who could carefully rebalance the parts to whole, and a great cast. (Croce thought Luders was the best Don Quixote after Balanchine.) And who is there who could do the Farrell role today? [Added: I posted this at the same time as canbelto so there's a bit of overlap in our responses.]

Shostakovich said several times that he would one day write his autobiography and explain everything but never did, perhaps never really intending to. Mitchell, Ashton and Cunningham may have felt they really didn't have anything to say or any talent for making anything they had to say about themselves interesting. Isn't it terribly difficult to find some way to grab hold of your past and overcome all its resistances? The most interesting memoirs I've read have been minor or narrow ones, like Calvino's "Road to San Giovanni", or Tolstoi's "Boyhood," or that of Penelope Fitzgerald by way of her short novels. Coetzee's "Boyhood" was also good because it was so direct and simple. I did like this opening by Jack Robinson, whose "Robinson" [Crusoe] was just reviewed on a Times podcast. It may offer a method of sorts.

I think Clifford is right to discuss how the company style has been codified in a kind of brilliant, god-is-in-the-little-details way that looks quite different from that of the fifties and sixties. "I could write a whole book on the differences" Clifford says. "And it was very interesting to read about the adjustments needed at NYCB when McBride and Villella coached Rubies recently." I think that's why Miami Ballet's interpretations seemed so interesting when Villella was there. You were getting a different take on the work coming down refreshed along a different heritage route. And it's not necessarily a dead past that Clifford is being particularly nostaligic about, but one that could be built on just as easily as the Martins/Schorer ideas of how Balanchine should be done. And as to why Farrell and Villella and others were not invited to coach at City Ballet for the last thirty or so years, this seemed like a curious – or maybe very diplomatical – statement of justification in the recent Times article on Villella and McBride:

The point Drew makes about judging video recordings is a valid one. The sound and picture are often off – for instance the music for the Cynthia Gregory Rose Adagio is not only flat sounding but seems to warble which means it's not being played at the right speed. I think Jack Reed has pointed out how the PBS City Ballet DVD reissues of City Ballet performances are less reliable in syncing sound to picture than the earlier video tape offerings. (There's also the problem of playback, say sitting close up by a computer or 10 feet back in a proper listening room with books and curtains, in both of which the sound and picture have slightly different times of arrival.) And often times if we've seen a performer live, we have all sorts of clues – the "unrecordables" – that we fill in as we watch the same dancer in a You Tube offering. That said, I'll add Violette Verdy as a fabulously musical dancer – in the film and video recordings offered by Dominique Delouche – in Jerome Robbins' Dances, in Emeralds and in Liebeslieder Waltzes. (Verdy seems to pick a place in the music which anchors everything else, all the smaller currents, sometimes even retroactively so.) Of performances I've seen live, I'd say that Kyra Nichols in Mozartiana ca 1993 was especially musical, Taras Domitro in Four Temperaments and in the Lensky duel in Onegin at San Francisco Ballet, Maria Calegari in general, Kozlova also in that era, Joseph Gordon in the recent Dances at a Gathering video clip (and how he describes the negative spaces around him and his partner). I was going to mention some Symphony in C performances but I think that with that ballet, the musicality is written into the choreography, everything happening a little before it should and right on the heels of the last choreographic proposition. And the elasticity of Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas makes everyone look musical. Farther afield, I thought early Mark Morris in some Purcell pieces made interesting musical choices as did Merce Cunningham in his last onstage appearances. And Valda Setterfield always had a kind of wry Cagean musicality (Cage and music that shifts terms as it goes along, like that of the contemporary Italians, adds another consideration). But I don't know how to define the musicality that particularly appeals to me – whether it's a beat too fast or not ,etc. It's more that the dancer is thinking out loud with her or his movements and sectioning them in odd ways – and neither we nor the dancer knows where it's all going to end up (no matter how many times we've seen the part).

I think it's fairly common between couples to use each other's computers depending on what room they're in. (Purses in the old days – I once heard Susan Sontag, in a bookstore in New York, giggle and say to her partner, "oh Annie, I think my card is in your purse!") Anyway a friend of mine had a version of the Waterbury revelation happen to him when he looked at his email on his partner's computer – which was in the kitchen – and when he opened the first screen, his partner's emails and arrangements for secret dates immediately popped up.

This is an important point. I agree – perhaps in a different way – that company members could sense during class and rehearsals that something was going on between the dissident men through coded remarks, a certain tone of voice – and this could have had a disruptive effect on company morale. It's like something you realize was unpleasant only after it is gone or has been lifted. And, by nature of their senior status within the company, through their "social capital and influence," the women who have posted that nothing was wrong were not really affected or potentially vulnerable.

It is very pertinent. Kerollis talks bout how straight dancers in the company are always having to prove they're straight and by doing so make things unpleasant for everyone else. He goes on to say dropping the PR talking point that ballet companies are a great place for men to date – and touch – women (as in the male dancer episode of city.ballet), and dropping the PR talking point that ballet class is a great thing for athletes to take to improve their football/basketball/etc game would be helpful way to change general perceptions of ballet companies. He invites comments about the podcast from other dancers. Begins about 15 minutes in, Houston Ballet at 18 min.