Quiggin

Kent also says she danced wildly some nights and was surprised Balanchine let her go on. So he did give her some freedom within the company. Joan Brady, who was at the school in 1959 with Gloria Govrin, Patricia McBride and Carol Sumner just ahead of her, says, As far as the relation of the school and the company, Brady says that And I thought this was an honest description of what it was like to be in the School at the time. The Unmaking of a Dancer You could also say this focus was not that different from being a dancer downtown, living on cans of spaghetti and in a cold water flat, or an artist in SoHo in the seventies and submitting yourself somewhat masochistically to the criticisms of other artists and to the general rigors of being a minimalist or second gen abstract expressionist. The past was the past – we tend to want to autocorrect for it.

Did Balanchine really destroy Farrell's career as Steichen seems to imply? Didn't she afterwards dance with Bejart for several years, then come back to City Ballet where she originated roles in Mozartiana and Davidsbundlertanze?

Steichen. A little over the top. He claims that Balanchine (completely is implied) destroyed Farrell's career.

I don't know if this is a factor, but the messaging between the dancers named in the suit may have been something of an open secret that other dancers were aware of but didn't know the specifics of. This could have been through comments overheard on breaks, facial expressions, hudddles in the back of the room, changes in tone of voice, etc. Something a colleague might be slightly curious about but at the same time sense that she or he should keep their distance from.

The Finlay affair became a big story in the press because it has elements in common with the Peter Martins domestic violence incident of which Toni Bentley says, This most recent incident too had a particularly pointed symbolism in that one of the dancers – a danceur noble like Martins – has referred to a female dancer associated with the company worse than an animal: a slut. That's turning the ethos of NYCB – whatever you might think of it – upside down. It's not PR, it's the company narrative. And the reversal makes it a natural story for journalists and maybe even for novelists. Other than Sergui Celibidache refusing to seat a woman trombonist at the Munich Philharmonic in the 90s, there hasn't been an equivalent in the classical music world to Martins firing Farrell and refusing the talents of Villella, Verdy, Clifford and many other "prime movers" of Balanchine technique. As a result it was said in the press for a while that you had to go to Miami to see Balanchine done with proper character and verve. (That might be different now and Miami's example perhaps helped.)

Toni Bentley has just written an article for the Times titled, "The Decline and Fall of New York City Ballet." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/opinion/new-york-city-ballet-decline-fall.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

This exciting program will be going at the Museum of Modern Art this fall into winter. From the prospectus - Good clip of some Judson works below (much more effective with sound muted) – https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3927

I don't think that argument, which was also used in the comments on Macaulay's Instagram page, holds up. What these employees did on their own time, in "non-work-related activity," greatly compromised the image and "good will" City Ballet and all its members have tried to build up over the years. Maybe it's a bit precious, but that's the Ballet's choice. If say an employee of the General Motors design department had written crude and disparaging remarks about the esthetics of a car model on his or her own time and at home and it had gone to the wrong person and been made public, that person too would have been fired. Of course, that's only a narrow parallel, and doesn't take into consideration all the broader workplace factors.

Yes! nanushka: Edward Villella, in Prodigal Son, says that after he returned to the company he realized that Jacques d'Amboise seemed to have more pull than was immediately apparent and that he could decide what roles he got to dance during the year. I've been reading Joan Brady's harshly self-critical memoir "Unmaking of a Dancer" which gives a fascinating and cool-eyed view of life at the San Francisco School of Ballet and later School of American Ballet in 1959, where she was a contemporary and friend of Suki Schorer. Interesting portraits of the Christensen Brothers, Balanchine, Danilova and Doubrovksa, their coaching, and their vanities, but also about the hierarchies, and insider and outsider status, that established itself among the students and dancers. Brady also says that there was always one or two ex-students – "exiles" – studying at the Columbia School of General Studies since the company began.

I think this was the allegation that implied the company was taking some expanded behind the scenes responsiblity: From section 7 of the complaint, repeated in section 36 as to the $150,000 fine in the Washington DC incident: But we don't know the sources of those direct quotes, at what level of the company they came from or if they came from the company. * Yes, Clifford's account of how the City Ballet was run in the old days also gives you some idea of what happened after Balanchine died. The structure remained but the actors and their interests changed. It became Martins' company and, after Kirstein was gone, I'm assuming it was his board of directors. (Though in a way it may have been Martins' fantasy of the Balanchine model.) What's interesting – and this might happen elsewhere – is that while ballet company itself is looked on from the outside as "girlie and sissy," as one poster says above, there is also a demonstrative straight boy domaine within the company which the press and PR dept always go for. In the early 90s the Times made a big thing about a NYCB/ABT dancer and his leather jacket and motocycles, and in the recent NYCB docu cited above, Finlay and Ramasar talk enthusiastically about their access to attractive women in leotards. (In a Meet the Artist interview, a San Francisco ballet dancer said pretty much the same as his reason for becoming a dancer.) But within the heterosexual domaine is another domaine – of misogyny (classical ballet's ideals turned upside down) and, ironically, homoeroticism (their heterosexuality upside down) in the exchanges, strictly between men, of the "baseball card" nude pictures. (Which are also stolen goods.) There are probably some class differences operating somewhere. In Clifford's low tech old days, the exchanges were probably in "stories" of conquests, but relatively limited in circulation. I'll end my brief attempt at being a sociologist but perhaps others will have actual experiences within companies and can desccribe how various cliques form and when they're distracting and feel threatening. And how the management might monitor them. Here's the Clifford link again on the old days. http://johnclifford26.blogspot.com

Perhaps I'm idealizing but she may also be hoping to encourage changes in the frat boy culture there – and help protect other SAB students. With today's technology it's entirely possible. Incidentally there's a 1968 film Paul Bartel made called "Secret Cinema" in which the boyfried is secretly filmming his girlfriend and the ups and downs of their relationships and showing the footage weekly at a theater in the Village. She can't understand why everyone laughs at her wherever she goes. I saw it years ago and it was both amusing and chillingly plausible at the same time.

And very much also Jill Johnston reviewing the dance scene of the 60s and 70s. James Wolcott, who early on in his career wrote for the Voice, in an NPR interview, says: And of course in the pre Craigslist days it was the source of downtown apartment rental listings. You'd line up Tuesday or Wednesday evening at an Astor Place newsstand for the first copies of week's copies of the VV.

Thinking about the esthetic direction the company might go in – programming rather than administrative responsibilities: There's a program in the Spring 2019 program called, "Balanchine Meets Peck," consisting of New Peck/Stevens, Symphony in Three Movements, and The Times are Racing, which of course links Justin Peck directly to Balanchine. Peck – and Alexei Ratmansky – seem to me to have been creating a way for City Ballet to move around the staid neoclassicism of the post Balanchine years. And Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements and Kammermusik No. 2 (and Robbins' Dances at a Gathering and Glass Pieces) seem to be the ballets that they're working directly from. The revival of Danses Concertantes – triangular geometries and brilliant costumes – also may have been an influence, or at least a confirmation, of that direction. Damian Woetzel, with his eclectic choices, might change this compass point a bit and bring in more of a downtown feel to the company, while Peter Boal's choices might be closer to Martins' and Lourdes Lopez's might be in between. (Also that Woetzel and Boal took classes from Stanley Williams might give them another take on Balanchine than Peck would have.) Disclaimer: I haven't seen the company live since 2006 and since then only from the (generous) video clips at NYCB website and elsewhere, so my construct is a highly speculative one (like Kafka's idea of Manhattan in Amerika).

Woetzel was being presented as a potential successor to Peter Martins in the press way back in 2006. (Don't remember if that was one of the times when it looked as if Martin might retire.) In a NYT interview he said that his then current studies at Harvard would help him be equipped for the job and that he would be "very interested" if it were open. But of course now he's had other opportunities and successes – and obligations.

"No more masterpieces" is a polemic by Antonin Artaud who wanted to move back to a simpler, more primitive theater. In the art world in the past 20 years there has been a move away from the idea of a masterpiece and a master, sometimes considering the artist's work as a "practice". You also think of work as an ongoing series or a constellation, and how the pieces fit within that. In ballet I think the problem is whether the master is a master over his craft or a master over others. A ballet master could be both, and maybe people want to get away from the second meaning even at the expense of sacrificing the first, especially after the Martins years. And at City Ballet now many of the dancers – colleagues – coach and teach each other parts they don't know, so maybe there's less of a hierarchy than when Balanchine was around.

You're right that the usage peaked in the 1880s. However, it was enough of a problem in the art world that Joan Mitchell's biography is titled "Lady Painter." She always pressed the point and, would say, up through the eighties, "Not bad for a lady painter!". And in Town Bloody Hall, Susan Sontag says to Norman Mailer, “I don’t like being called a lady writer, Norman. I know it seems like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us.” Lady, woman, female + art seem to have acted as a downgrade by men to women in their fields. Even here in this recent instagram post, Mitchell, perhaps facetiously, is referred to as a "woman painter." https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj9YtWXhzWq/?taken-by=goldenrock * Actually, sandik, the article was written by a former political writer which perhaps the Times felt was called for. And as pointed out before, the Flemming Flindt's Lesson has kind of old world a master-apprentice relationship.

Maybe "ballet master" is more a traditional European designation, therefore Balanchine and Martins would prefer it. But not really a "new world" job title. Poetess became superseded by "woman poet," as in "she's one of our best women poets" (or novelist or painter, or "Lady Painter"). Norman Mailer is especially fond of the combination in the rousing 1979 documentary "Town Bloody Hall" where he defends his use of the modifying woman or lady as an act of chivalry. Interesting that the writer covering this arts news item was "previously a national correspondent; a political reporter covering presidential campaigns; and a metro reporter covering the police, City Hall and Albany."

The age old answer (!) might be for music to be subservient, if only by a hair, to the choreography. For example, Balanchine chose Mozart divertimentos or his Gluck variations via Tchaikovsky (Mozartiana) to set his ballets to rather than to the denser symphonies or concertos. Ratmansky did well with an unassuming group of Scarlatti sonatas. I wonder why choreographers are drawn to Beethoven sonatas and craggy late quartets rather than the lovely but by no means insignificant Bagatelles. Likewise the Schubert Trout quintet might be already pretty well saturated with its own musical development and visual language (zipping fishing lines and gurgling forellen) to need much more. Anyway the Times had an interesting Saturday piece comparing performances of the Schubert quintet along with comments about the Mark Morris choreography - (at the end of the scroll) - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/arts/music/turning-climate-crisis-into-sound-the-week-in-classical-music.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=26&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F08%2F10%2Farts%2Fmusic%2Fturning-climate-crisis-into-sound-the-week-in-classical-music.html&eventName=Watching-article-click (Includes a lovely clip of Marianne Crebassa singing Ravel Sheherazade.)

Lew Christensen, who was the Apollo of the late thirties, also says you dance Apollo without emotion, just going here and there, one step and the other... And didn't Balanchine use stories when he needed them to make a point in rehearsal (and discard them as easily) rather than for the ballet to illustrate a literary or mythological narrative as Macaulay seems to want? Anyway for me the ending of Apollo is like the extended ending of Emeralds – a real mystery as where the players are going or what's going to happen to them. And so very moving because it is such a mystery.

Seems to be working for me properly now. I get both topics and blogs right away. Thanks!

Thanks. I am able to successfully reset my content to "topics" after I refresh my browser but I find the site defaults back to "all content" on my next visit. This happens with both Safari and Firefox. Perhaps there is another step I've missed to lock in the modified settings?

Thanks for the alert and the links. And what rare and wonderful photographs by Nancy Lassalle, in the Ballet Review article, of Balanchine demonstrating steps and body placement. Suki Schorer: "Plie is the most important position in ballet ... The knees bend, the body starts down, and then the arms come – like a parachute – wrists slightly flexed, the hands resisting, holding on to the air. 'We are not dancing in a vacuum,' Mr. B. liked to say."

Well put, Drew. It's an absolute conflict of interest. I thought of Clement Greenberg, the Nation art critic, who got in trouble for changing the colors on David Smith's sculptures – and other interventions. Also I'm of the opinion that Apollo is simply about the steps and 1920's acrobatics, not about the sets of myths that has encrusted the ballet over the years. "Twelve gods, eternity, transcendence" is for a Sunday school lesson, not for a witty ballet.

Daria Pavlenko danced here at Zellerbach in 2003 – in Diamonds with Danila Korsuntsev. It was one of the best performances of Diamonds I had seen – perfect phrasing. From a 2003 interview with the young Pavlenko in the San Francisco Chronicle with Catherine Pawlick, who was comparing the different generations of Kirov dancers.

For me it's the style of dancing of the black-face children in the Nina Kaptsova clip Canbelto posted that's so archaic and offensive – like something out of an Al Jolson minstrel show routine. Certainly not an ethnographically respectful depiction of Nubian children, if that's the intent. Here's Lewis Segal, the senior dance critic at the LA Times in a recent review of ABT's 1980 Makarova production of La Bayadere, as recently posted in the Links section: Nanushka is correct about Veblen bringing the term "conspicuous consumption" to the fore in the 19th century, and I believe it was revived here in the States in the 1960's with regard to what was then called the "go go years" when the stock market was booming. But Walter Benjamin's Arcades project that Drew cited in another thread could also be a guide. From the essay "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century": This might perhaps reflect the difference in settings between a ballet like Bournonville's "Le Sylphide" (1822/1836) and Petipa's "Pharoah's Daughter" (1862)?