Quiggin

13 hours ago, sandik said:

The images from The Cage are an interesting juxtaposition to the score from Fancy Free...

There's a maddening tendency in trailerdom to use the score from one ballet, usually the most upbeat, to cut (and undercut) the other ballets to. Maybe they're implying that at this distance in time, as mid-century modern furniture tends to, all Robbins ballets begin look alike??

First two clips feature Taras Domitro whose way of drawing figures across the stage in comtemporary ballets – if there's an equivalent of pencil line character in dance – is greatly missed this year. 

I was surprised by the discontinuation of emails. They suggested signing up for a newsletter, but the link doesn't work.

On the positive side there are things I do like about the Times' arts reporting, such as the weekly "what to see in the galleries" capsule reviews and the weekly selection of classical music You Tube clips. They certainly do review the big dance companies (downtown was once the province of the Village Voice and I'm not sure where to go now for that). One area the Times has fallen down on is architecture and city planning reporting since Herbert Muschamp died and they replaced Nicolai Ourourssoff with arts-generalist Michael Kimmelman. But then the New Yorker certainly isn't doing its Skyline column much anymore. I do like it that the Times finally liberated the book section from being a subset of arts and let it have its own heading under the table of contents.

Not sure if this culture editor's cv is not that much different from the last one's, and wasn't there anyway a hiatus in between editors? What seems to be important is that the Times is financially better off than before, due to increased subscriptions as a result, in part, to Trump's ascendency – and maybe a little fatigue with secondary sources of news (ie rumor) via the internet.

Yes, part 2, "Quartet for Two," seems like another composition. There's a pas de deux for two men that's quite erotically charged. The men are dressed in what looks like white long johns (I couldn't help thinking of "Brokeback Mountain" for a few minutes). The music was John Adams' "Christian Zeal and Activity," which at some point was given a looped voice-over of a radio minister preaching about the miraculous healing of a man with a withered hand. It seemed to be used as a satirical "found object", but came off as a very heavy-handed, moralizing anti-moralizing counterpoint to the dancing. The audience was very quiet, and I thought some of them, who might be religious but not homophobes, might have been offended by it. 

The second part of "Christian Zeal" was for two women and seemed have many of the same steps as the men but was much less effective. The more formal costumes (not underwear) or the "Serenade"-long hair may have had something to do with it.

I did enjoy the first half, the exuberant Chairman [and Madame] Mao fox trots, with nice references by Adams to Nino Rota and Darius Milhaud along the way.

The company also did a beautiful and very articulate performance of "Serenade" (the only Balanchine this season from a company which used to do lots). The cast included Sofiane Sylve, Frances Chung and Jennifer Stahl. Ulrik Birkkjaer was the man in the third part who so quietly and so minimally hinges everything together. 

For some reason I find "Rodeo" a little less effective on the men of San Francisco Ballet – who are great in other things – than when I see clips of City Ballet doing the same work, especially the very moving pas de cinque with Taylor Stanley, which didn't have the same drama to it here. With City Ballet there seems to be a bit of a retard before the finish of a move, and a very subtle variation in pace. They're not just fast.

1 hour ago, pherank said:

...  “Ostrovsky's comment, She wasn’t blatantly discrediting me, but it felt like she was suggesting that maybe I didn’t experience that” is a description of what court prosecutors do routinely as part of their job.

I kind of tripped up on this statement from Earle Mack: “It was a kind of knee-jerk reaction,” Mr. Mack said, “and he did not deserve that kind of treatment after 34 years of his life running the company, rebuilding the company.” Many people would suggest that it was Martins who let various things lapse in the company before "rebuilding" it to a more secure position years later.

I agree with both of these points.

Regarding the first, here are excerpts from Barbara Hoey's page at Kelley Drye. Her clients, I would assume, are from the management part of the spectrum, not that of labor (except perhaps in some pro bono work).

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An effective communicator and negotiator, Barbara is known as a pragmatic yet tough litigator and dynamic and persuasive trial attorney.  She is consistently recognized in Chambers USA (2008–2017) as among the “best of the best,” where she is described as “extremely good at negotiating,” “tenacious” and has a “laser-like focus.”  Barbara’s objective is to work with her clients to avoid expensive disputes while positioning them in the most advantageous way should litigation ensue. 

&

Barbara routinely represents clients in high-profile litigation.  She has litigated and won more than a dozen jury and bench trials involving claims arising under Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as well as the False Claims Act, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), New York State Whistleblower Law, Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). 

https://www.kelleydrye.com/Our-People/Barbara-E-Hoey

As a photographer seeing this image, without any reference to the person or to ballet, this reads like a document of starvation after a war. That's how it would be used at a photo agency. The formal values suggest a very grim ordeal. Part of it is the sepia/b&w, the shadowy lighting, and the positon. It doesn't read as skinny or shaming of anyone's body size to me. It also could be part of the 70s performance art. Unfortunately I don't think WW realized how it looked from the outsize. 

To me words are acts. When Copley said outloud how he imagined the chorus member, he was stripping him in front of everyone in the room. It would also stick in the other members' minds afterwards. They would have to joke with  him about it to diffuse its taint.

But it doesn't matter if he had been traumatized before, everyone should be treated with equal respect.

San Francisco Ballet did whole Apollo ten years ago for their big Balanchine celebration, very successfully. In that spirit they tried Square Dance with the caller, but it didn't work.  Helgi Tomasson said there was something with the band on the stage not being able to hear the orchestra.

Also, the reverse of Apollo, the original Square Dance is shorter. And it doesn't have the haunting male solo, which came later - sort of a fifth Temperament.

I hestitated to see this production of "The Sleeping Beauty," as I had seen the Mariinsky's version (Vasiev's?) here in the Bay Area ten years ago with Vishneva, Zelensky and Korsakov (Bluebird) and still had some pleasant and not completely faded out memories of it. 

But I did enjoying seeing this "Sleeping Beauty" Saturday night. The company looked handsome in it, Ana Sophia Scheller was lovely, her dancing clear, and Angelo Greco was especially good in the vision scene. 

To Claudia Bauer's point, it did seem as if there were two ballets or stories – that of the sets, heavy and baroque (like the gold rush-monied lobby of the Fairmont Hotel), too much, and the pearl encrusted costumes, all wanting to be admired – and the story itself and the delicate choreography which needs no apology. It would be interesting seeing the ballet set against light Tiepolo drawings or Jacques Callot etchings or the kinds of sets Christian Berard did for the orginal "Mozartiana" in 1933.

Which would be a great match for the wonderfully complex (and kind of radical) choreography of the Fairies' variations, which were the heart of the show for me. And where you feel the past is being transmitted, not in the expensive surrounds.

I did miss the great transition of the kingdom into a sleeping one, into being overgrown and abandoned and Prince Desire coming across it and seeing all of it, as in the Maryiinksy version. This lacked that overview, was too interior.

I also thought (with Bauer) that the change of Princess Florine's name to Enchanted Princess was all wrong. She is not an enchanted princess, but rather he is an enchanted prince (Prince Charming) who has been changed into a bluebird by an offended third party. Princess Florine is kept in a tower and the Bluebird visits her secretly at night bringing her little presents. Some of that melancholy backstory is somewhere in the choreography. (I also like productions where there are wavy sleeves and loosened feathers.)

Those quibbles aside, it was a very happy evening.

54 minutes ago, nanushka said:

If there were a second “she,” or a second “he,” wouldn’t it be exactly the same problem? I don’t see how it’s different.

In context, pronouns always have referents — whether indicated by gesture, by intonation, by syntactic proximity, by logical inference, or by other means.

I think that mixing singular and plural is the big problem. And unfortunately written English doesn't have any of the rich store of emphatic particles that ancient Greek did – all the different shadings of reallys, very much sos, trulys - that help transcribe tone of voice. English is ambiguous as it is without making it more so by tossing out the they. And without rules, you can't be free, at least in poetry (and in ballet!). I'm sure that Elizabeth Bishop, let along Marianne Moore, both very precise in their use of the word (poetry is not a fuzzy business), would not approve. 

But I do think that gender fluid issues could be an interesting subject for everyone if they were linked to the full range of existential questions of being. But we don't do philosophy much any more.

On the level of practice, how do you say:

"She and he" went to the dance.
"Oh, did they."
"No, they didn't go. They stayed at home."

I watched a bit of a small memorial service for a transgender person at UCLA, Doran George, and it became confusing when some of the participants used they singular, though everyone tried to respect it. 

It really seems to be an existential question that language is being asked to solve or accomodate until later.  It needs its Thomas Berhard or Rimbaud or Colette to write about brilliantly from the inside and guide the rest of us. (Or Elizabeth Bishop: "you are an I ... you are one of them", first realizing as a child that she is alive, she is a person, is made of the same material as her surrounds. ("In the Waiting Room").)

2 hours ago, nanushka said:

Hmm, sorry, maybe I'm being obtuse. But what's the problem there, could you explain?

I was just trying to lay out what I saw as the differences between the two instances.

That is, in the first case one uses their as a substitute for, or instead of, her, his or its.

In the second case one is using it, she, he, their interchangeably, in parallel.

You could say their is the common denominator in the first case, whereas in the second case its, her, his, their are all numerators - to borrow an image from math. To me they seem structurally different.

I also meant that language evolves organically, not artifically - as in Greek where the demotic won out over the artificially constructed katherevousa. So we'll see what happens a few years ahead.

My other comment, to sandik, is really off topic and just an observation the sometimes the young are more inflexible that their parents. Not really about our language discussion. Supposed to be a little humorous or point out an irony.

3 hours ago, nanushka said:

Certainly one key thing that none of those older historical examples of the singular "they" have is a specific, named referent...

The problem I see is that "their" is the equivalent of his, hers or its (no apostrophe!), while "they" singular has to stand alongside he, she and it. It's like saying chair, table and furniture as coequals. So it really doesn't build on the precedent of the "their" usage of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

All language systems including supposedly primitive ones like pidgin and slang do have their "rhymes and reasons", so when you drop a word, when you contract a thought, the other person knows what you mean - like in jazz when you leave out a note and the other notes in a phrase fill in. It's more the overall structure that allows this - and the differences between words as much as the words themselves. You begin to lose a little of the musicality of language when you add artificial constraints.

sandik -

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Younger, more flexible brains...

Maybe younger, more inflexible brains. Less tolerant of inconsistency in their elders, who've learned to deal with all the contradictions and paradoxes of life and are therefore more agile in their thinking. I'm reading J M Coetzee's "Boyhood" right now and you're taken aback by how very severe he is with his mother.

Also came across this while commuting on the streetcar this morning which may tie into the topic -  

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These locusts by day, these crickets by night / Are the the instruments on which to play / Of an old and disused ambit of the soul / Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery.

 ... A new aspect, say the spirit's sex, / Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes / And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one / Meets nakedly another voice.

Things of August

 

6 hours ago, nanushka said:

A very basic introduction can be found here.

I find the Shakespeare example there to be especially interesting, because their so clearly has a masculine singular referent:

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.    (Comedy of Errors, IV.3)

Thank you, that's very helpful. I think though the change in the 19th century wasn't so arbitrary – it probably went along with teaching Greek and Latin, two highly inflected languages, at the same time. Interesting that Jane Austen used "their" so many times. Also may have been a kind of regional use – varying in different parts of England. You might be able to tell what county a person came from by it.

I do agree – trying not to step into any of the controversy – that the use of singular "they" is more difficult (that's what originally puzzled me) and there isn't the same history that helps make the change over. 

The problem is that English, being a weakly inflected language, is at times somewhat ambiguous. Using "their" for first person singular possessive would further limit ways of signaling agreement between subject and predicate. Would be difficult to tell if the pronoun is referring to one or more persons.

I wonder how this is being treated in French or Spanish or Greek where the rules are more consistent and adjectives have grammatical gender – m., f. and sometimes n.?

7 hours ago, nanushka said:

(which is based on a "rule" that actually goes against literally centuries of common usage, both colloquial and literary)

What are some examples of common usage? That might help to set up a precedent and make the grammatical transition smoother.

pherank:

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Adding a 'disclaimer', shall we say, to program notes is a very one-sided approach.

I always like book reviews and art history notes where the reviewer follows the trajectory of a work, how it was initially accepted, its controversies, and how we see it now. This is often done in a scholarly and entertaining way in the NY Times, and the New York and London Reviews. What's often the case is that there are reviewers who "get" the work early on and clearly. For instance there was a very understanding review of Robert Frank's "Americans" done in the New York Times when the book first came out but which everyone forgot about afterwards, so there was subsequently the myth that it was universally panned. And Kevin Thomas wrote a very appreciative review of one of Truffaut's most underated movies, "The Soft Skin," in the Los Angeles Times when it was first released. The "stations" a work of art passes through, its endless lives, are always fascinating.

Program notes could devote a paragraph to a kind of "historical intent" of the work without boring anyone too much. I agree that SF Ballet has done many excellent "Pointes of Views" pre-ballet programs. However, the ones I've sat in over the past ten years have only taken in a tiny fraction of the audience members who would see the ballets during the 10 day run, and the q&a s have been limited in number and in scope.

Regarding Nancy Goldner's interpretation of "Bugaku,", which she develops in much greater detail than what I quoted above, there are earlier reviews that also signal that this is tricky territory. Jack Anderson says,

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Alone at last, bride and groom dance a highly erotic pas de deux that is also a battle of wills. No longer demure, the bride is someone with whom the groom must contend.

Clive Barnes:

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Mr. Schaufuss was feral, there was a suppressed violence to his movements, a coarseness to his interpretation that almost denied the role's conception. Edward Villella played it was a menacing gentleness, and that seemed right. Mr. Schaufuss dances it with a gentle menace, and that seems subtly wrong. The ballet is not meant to be a rape but a marriage.

I thought Robert Garis's take was amusing in that he almost puts a Hollywood ending to it:

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Balanchine had never before invented anything as perilously close to the unacceptable as turning Kent’s extended leg into a phallus. But this erotic adventure was produced with his familiar tact and taste … And to cap it off their [Kent and Villella’s] dance identity gave a witty American normalcy to this work of extreme artifice.

Actually not too many people go to the pre-performance seminars in San Francisco, maybe 200 to the Green Room against a week's run in an opera house of 2,500 or so seats. Program notes would be better – and ones which outline the problems up front – by the second paragraph – and clearly.

For instance with "The Cage," just as it's often noted that Prokofiev didn't like Balanchine's choreography for "Prodigal Son," here it could be said that Stravinsky didn't care for Robbin's choreography, and when he gave City Ballet permission to use the score, he thought Balanchine was the choreographer (which is sort of amusing). You would also have to gently fill in the early 50's post war atmosphere of low grade misogeny and all the paranoia regarding the red scare. (Michael Baxandall's "Pattern's of Intentions" might serve as a good template.)

With "Bugaku," you could note that the choreography was controversial from the beginning, not just now, and that Arlene Croce, Jack Anderson, B F Haggin and Robert Garis had to work around its problematic asian overlay in order to defend it (Allen Hughes at the Times decidedly didn't). Croce: "though there are moments of satire in the geisha-girl pantomime (as well as some nasty pseudo-Oriental mannerisms), 'Bugaku' is the nearest thing in the New York City Ballet repertory to a Bejart ballet."

And Nancy Goldner has quite a discussion on "the sexual violence" in the ballet in her "Balanchine Variations". "What ensues is rape, but not the conventional kind. In "Bugaku," the woman is a complicit party to the mating, because, as [Allegra] Kent says, it is ordained, and they both emerge from it as inscrutable as they are for the entire ballet."

*

When I was in high school, the first year English Shakespeare play that was assigned was "Merchant of Venice" (third year was "Julius Caesar"). What a thing to throw to ninth graders – in a small San Joaquin Valley farm town – to try to figure out! (though I do think, like Drew, that it's ok to occasionally perform.) My parents were rather enlightened as far as social injustices were concerned, and over the years I felt I have been too. Except... Except I've recently realized it hasn't been enough. These corrections for horrible things – like removal of statues of Justice Taney who wrote the Dred Scott decision from state house property or Justin Herman's name from a plaza in SF – are coming way too late. What excuses have we made to ourselves over the years, how we've sequestered the sting of these terrible symbols from ourselves, saying these little things really don't matter, just look the other way, etc. You'll just upset everyone if you make a fuss. 

I think the key might be when we say "some people might be offended." It might go deeper and be broader than that.

Thanks atm711 for your firsthand observations. How wonderful to have seen all that – and the Balanchine ballets in such depth.

To Jerome Robbins, Marie-Jeanne, Mary Ellen Moyland, and Tanaquil Le Clercq, I'd add Jilliana and John Kriza.

Sidenote: The Times' reports, towards the end of the article, that Deneuve also made a strong statement last March defending Roman Polanski. “It’s a case that has been dealt with, it’s a case that has been judged. There have been agreements between Roman Polanski and this woman.” 

Expanding on Kathleen's post above, it's difficult for me to completely figure out Barbara Hoey's role in this.  A press release at Kelley Drye welcoming her back to the firm says this :

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She has defended employers in single-plaintiff and class action litigation and has won more than a dozen jury and bench trials involving claims arising under Title VII, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, False Claims Act, New York State Whistleblower Law, Family Medical Leave Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Is she an advocate for City Ballet or is she a mediator? I assume she will help bring the company up to date on current fair employment practices and workplace standards. But dancers might not want to be completely candid with her as she might not be representing their personal interests.

On the other hand, in the Fox News interview linked at Kelley Drye she does say (in regard to the Harvey Weinstein case) that she always tells her clients flatly, "there is no such thing as a consensual affair with your boss." Then she says "if people felt they had to succumb to this behavoir to keep their jobs," it would be quid pro quo harrassment. Of course she may have a way of reading the Martins affairs as consensual.

I had hoped she'd be around much longer and maybe be able to see her on a panel or another ballet she had coached. How wonderful she is in Violin Concerto with her great backbends, and in Davidsbundlertanze and Liebeslieder Waltzes. Robert Gottlieb, in his recent Conversations on Dance podcast, says he finally realized why Balanchine never wanted to revive Liebeslieder. After Suzanne Farrell left the company, Karen Von Aroldingen danced her Liebeslieder role, and when Farrell returned he couldn't not give it to her, yet he couldn't take it away from Karen.

31 minutes ago, Helene said:

If Bugaku is more than the look of its set and costumes, ie, is something more than a Balanchine leotard ballet in set dressing, then the tone and qualify will come through the movement, as long as the costumes don't constrict/interfere with the movement the way the original 4T's costumes did.

I was just thinking of this in conjunction with western painting's borrowings from Japanese woodcuts in the late 19th century. The techniques of flattening the picture plane led to deep structural changes in how subject matter was presented in oil painting, pastels and prints – with Manet, Gauguin and Bonnard. Not just a pastiche of Japanese pictorial patterns or motifs.

If Balanchine's borrowings were structural, and not just dress-up, and helped take his ideas beyond "Agon," they might indeed show in a black and white leotard version of "Bugaku".

Also it's interesting that before the mid-19th century, western borrowings from other cultures were pretty much limited to two: ancient Rome and Greece. They were the models for poetry and architecture. With the rise of the upper middle class and financial speculation in, and trade with, the east, the whole world seemed to open up as a costume and wallpaper shop for the arts.

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I loved Kyra Nichols dancing and I'm glad to hear that she's been working in a prominent university. I hope this change in leadership allows NYCB to perform Balanchine ballets that have been missing from the rep due to Martins' bad relations with the various women who own the rights. Or maybe I'm confused about how the Balanchine Trust works.

This has been one of the major criticisms of Martins' tenure from Croce and other critics – that he fired (in the case of Farrell) or simply didn't make use of the many former NYCB dancers who knew the great Balanchine roles inside out – and from different stages of their evolution. It was a sad waste of good will, and great resources, over a thirty year period.

In defense of Clifford, I believe his complaint was that he wasn't able to coach City Ballet dancers in the roles he originated or knew well after Martins got demonstratively angry with him. Was he really lobbying to run the company?

2 hours ago, sandik said:

Don't know this at all -- where should I start?

Stefano Scodanibbio - Geografia Amorosa - Giacomo Piermatti, double bass

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rfLaYcpz-QU

lots here at Roccato's page -

http://www.danieleroccato.com/page3/page3.html

& to the original list -

Sarah Vaughan and Clifford Brown

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=prIb53T3IFM

Lots of 1950s and early 1960s jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane – and like kfw, "Live at the Wooden Nickel" (Chicago). Also Thelonious Monk Live at the Five Spot (Bowery and Fourth Street).

Beethoven sonatas, in Wilhelm Kempff's understated interpretations – especially the one I remember first really listening to, the happily complex "late" one, #28, op 101. 

The Italian double bass music of the past fifteen years – some pieces influenced by John Cage and Charlie Mingus, according to the amazing Daniele Roccato, who plays works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Stefano Scodanibbio and Franco Donatoni – all with their full range of artifacts and overtones.

San Francisco Ballet recently used fairly extreme "yellowface" makeup for a character played by Carlos Quenedit in "RaKu," and no one seemed to be offended. What happens in the Opera House sometimes seems to be decades off from what happens right across the street in City Hall and in the Board of Supervisors chambers. So I don't know if "The Cage" will be considered controversial.

As I've posted before, "The Cage" seems to me very much a part of the atmosphere of the 1950's when male novelists and playwrights felt a threat from women stifling their creativity. It was part of the general social anxiety as men were returning from the military and taking back the jobs that had been filled by women (my aunt included). "The Cage" seems to act out and exploit this fear. As do Wilhelm deKooning's paintings of Marilyn Monroe-like images of shark-toothed women. Tennesse Williams plays, on the other, hand seemed to be about those marginalized by this process, free spirits trying to escape.