Quiggin

Thanks for the descriptions. Sound like all Coppelias have something to recommend them. Yes, Swanilda does save the day and Franz is a bit of a dolt. (In ETA Hoffmann's original stories, which share characters and themes with the Nutcracker, the Franz/Nathanael character has something of a psychotic break, at least as I remember the wayward plots – and which are all well worth rereading.) I'm almost embarrassed sometimes how much I love the uncomplicated music – even hearing a few bars brings up memories of the ballet.

Medici.tv just put up a nice 2 1/2 minute clip of Ratmansky's Coppelia. Roslyn Sulcas in today's NY Times says Ratmansky "infuses the ballet with new life," but the Danilova-Balanchine version always seemed pretty lively, at least the SF Ballet production did. Comparisons anyone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rluXtSgu3a8

First naming became an issue for me in "Ninth Street Women," about the New York School painters Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. I'd not be able to keep up with which Joe it was: Joe LeSeur or Joe Hazan? Only with Edwin Denby did I feel I was on solid ground. For me there is a bit too much intimacy in a biographer calling their subject by their first name. The biographer and subject are not really equals and first naming implies that. The distance between them should be established in some graceful, or amusing, way (Shakespeare's first biographer called him "this William"). With Homans, I sort of accepted the first names basis, as if everyone were in a big rehearsal room. What I objected to were the quick Homeric thumbnail sketches of each person she introduced, their ethnic background, their often absent father or mismatched parents, etc. It was too digressive and not that interesting. With composers and writers I like last names if they're no longer alive and first and last if they are – at least in the first reference. The sound of the name might figure in – you say Hemingway, last name, but also F Scott Fitzgerald, first and last, Suzanne Farrell than Farrell. Igor Stravinsky might be the composer whereas Stravinsky seems to me, less respectfully, the brand. You could be formal for a while, then break it as if coming in for a close up. The LeClercq / Tanny performer / woman (long shot / close up?) variation seems like a really good solution.

I agree. I saw Orpheus twenty or so years ago (with Wendy Whelan) and was a bit perplexed in that it didn't stylistically match up with Apollo and Agon with which it was often programmed, once as a "Greek Trilogy." But there was something so minimalist and unusual about the moving curtain, and the pas de deux is full of Balanchine invention. It is time-locked in art deco modernism, but Noguchi and Balanchine make it into a superior variety. Just remembered the play about its making, "Nikolai and the Others" – https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/theater/nikolai-and-the-others-relates-the-making-of-orpheus.html

Great rehearsal photos in Gia Kourlas's piece. Loved this:

Of all Balanchine's ballets, Apollo seems to me to have the most potential for dead spots and empty transitions. Villella's had none, it was all structure. Everything he did had meaning, was taking him somewhere that was important. Yes, quite thrilling.

Kurt Froman has a short, blink of an eye, clip from the Russian tour in 1960. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=420370888580059 Added: Villella's Apollo, with its incredibly pure lines, is also available here and there (it's part of a television documentary on V). Might give an idea of what his Prodigal Son was like.

Yes, I would say the black and whites, like The Four Temperaments and Episodes where Balanchine uses Soviet Constructivist vocabulary on which to built his works. (Of course these could not really be made explicit points of reference in a press kit during the Cold War.) The B&Ws are perhaps so severe they perhaps don't allow the space of parody (don't know quite how to support this idea). Yuri Tynianov is the Russian Formalist I was thinking of who proposes a theory of parodic apprenticeship, but also Victor Shklovsky, whom Balanchine knew and was amused by. Pierre Bourdieu cites both in his fascinating book on Manet. You can see traces of Meyerhold Biomechanics exercises here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MkzBxHqts/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=invalid&ig_rid=8f4450d9-a0f0-4162-9120-16ab5f82b4a9

[Marginally OT] Interesting that Balanchine delivered Ballet Imperial alongside Concerto Barocco ,"in a burst of creative energy unlike anything he'd had for several years" (Duberman). It premiered in Rio with Serenade and Filling Station. Marie-Jeanne, who was technically brilliant, perhaps a little like Tiler Peck, has some interesting things to say about the difficulty of Imperial/TPC2: Holly Brubach has a good overview of BI/2 in Reading Dance, about the ballet and its score (it was an abridged version rewritten in parts by pianist Alexander Siloti). She ends by saying that Ballet Imperial was "redolent of classical the Maryinsky" & "a caricature of classical Russian ballet." Some of the Russian Formalists of the 1920s discuss artists' apprenticeships in terms of parody and irony – Dostoevsky's parodies of Gogol, Manet's of Goya and Velasquez, Proust of various 19c writers – as a way to find their own voice. It often feels there is an edge of parody humming along in Balanchine's classical works, especially Bizet.

Here's a 3 min clip from Renato Zanella's choreography for Aschenbrödel, or Cinderella. Looks like great fun. Maybe something for ABT to add to their rep? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3knAjb18wtI

I didn't want to sound inflexible. I do like some casting tension – Mahler casts his violas in violins' parts for great effect. Good points about Rubies being built around the tall girl. And wasn't the Siren in Prodigal Son on tall, long-limbed Felia Doubrovska where the contrast in sizes is important? Ashley is always a bit startling to see darting through in the Emeralds video – almost as if she's in another work. Karen von Aroldingen's body seems letter perfect for the earthy first pas of the Violin Concerto. Balanchine – or MMorris – could do crazy things in casting because they wrote the choreography. Justin Peck nicely switched a male/female solo role at Vail last year (can't remember specifically who for who). Drew and I may indeed be switching roles here, or I may be just contradicting myself.

Size maybe not weight affects speed and perceived dynamics. For instance, only the small men were chosen to dance Franz in Coppelia in San Francisco Ballet's production, whereas six foot plus Vito Mazzeo was passed over. Tall Suzanne Farrell couldn't do some of the quick steps that Alexandra Danilova had done in Apollo, so Balanchine changed them for her body type. Emeralds is a liquid ballet, dancers wispily glide through; dancers of a certain size would make the ballet look static. You can't really cast against body type in ballet without it seeming to be some kind of ironic comment on the role.

Interesting premise: that Maria Kochetkova was kidnapped by her Instagram persona. I saw Kochetkova dance many times at San Francisco Ballet and while she preformed well, it always seemed her mind was elsewhere. Perhaps it was a kind of shyness. Along with nysusan, I liked her best in Wayne Gregor and other contemporary works where she really held her own.

Pushkin corrective: Timothy Garton Ash has a piece in the August 18, 2021 Financial Times - "Putin, Pushkin and the decline of the Russian empire" -

And grain shipments that many thousands of people depend on have been stalled. Pushkin mainly wrote part of chapter one and chapter two of "Eugene Onegin" in Odessa, though the idea of Tatiana was born there ("For the first time with such a name / the tender pages of a novel / we'll whimsically grace"). He worked his book for over eight years in many locations, publishing its sections at fairly long intervals. Nabokov:

Yes, that piece really stood out for me, so free and natural looking. Swingers of birches.

Thanks, I didn't know about "Fat Man." I thought the Dorothy Baker connection might help fill out something of Tatlock's bisexuality, especially her sympathy for Pauline who becomes the misfit of the three. "Trio" doesn't hold up that well and I wouldn't recommend it, but "Cassandra at the Wedding," which has gotten a critical second wind, is worth a go. Baker's family-life circle in Berkeley included David Park, Tom Gunn and Mark Schorer, who was Suki Schorer's father, and later, Mercedes McCambridge. Also wanted to note that Ken & Barbie have been attractive subjects for filmmakers before Barbie. Todd Haynes used Barbie dolls in his film about Karen Carpenter, and Gloria Katz, who was the co-writer of American Grafitti and one of the Indiana Jones, made a very droll student film at UCLA with Ken and Barbie lying on a couch after sex and talking about how bored with life they were. It sounds as if this time around the filmmakers are treading the fine line between irony and belovedness.

Oppenheimer looks intriguing. Kind of weird though, the points of equivalency the press finds in the two movies. I once came across a note from Jean Tatlock written in August of 1943, while doing research on Dorothy Baker. About "Trio" Tatlock says, "I read your novel last weekend and thought it was such a beautiful job that I want to tell you so ... If you and Howard ever get to San Francisco, I'm working at the Mount Zion Psychiatric Clinic. Cordially ... " Tatlock is especially interested in how sympathetically Baker treated one of the characters despite her "phoniness and insatiability." Phoniness was a big thing then – think of "Cather in the Rye" – maybe a variation of "imposter syndrome." Wonder if it plays out in the movie in any way.

Thanks for the clip, California. I immediately think of the Platt Lynes photos of Tanaquil Le Clercq and Jerome Robbins, on whom the ballet was set, and who would still seem to haunt it. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/4ec37260-e6e9-0136-b647-3d2f3f5498be https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/264841

Sounds as if Acocella was following up on the talk she gave at UC Berkeley about twenty years ago, "Balanchine and Sex," originally titled "Balanchine and the Crotch," in which she analyzed the pas de deux from "Agon." She also alluded, in an amused, off the record sort of way, to Balanchine's sexual preferences. Interesting that Acocella referred to Mies van der Rohe (though more as a minimalist than as a modernist), in that both artists had European and American careers and both opened very influential, anxiety provoking, schools (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was once characterized as the "three blind Mies"). You might even say that Mies's celebrated treatment of corners of brick buildings at Illinois Institute of Technology – each frontally exposing the "I" beam within – was the equivalent of Balanchine structuring his ballets on the pelvis and the crotch. Both Acocella and Homans seem to stand in awe of the ballets, at the threshold where biography leaves off. About the works, Homans is "more exalted than clear," according to Acocella, and Acocella gives only a bare bones account of what sets Balanchine's ballets apart: athletic skill and speed; musicality and phrasing; and a kind of abstraction. His works such as "The Four Temperaments" were the "modernist extension of classicism." Which could be also stated as the war between modernism and classicism, since Modernism is said to be always trying to clear the slate and establish a new order, a new, all encompassing, light-filled present without a past – a little like Balanchine's bio.

Danielle St.Germain is shortly becoming the chief philanthropy officer for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Legion of Honor & deYoung), as announced in today’s Chronicle.She says she is “delighted to return to my museum roots.” Noticed Lola de Avila, Ballet School director before Patrick Armand, in backstage group photographs of “Giselle”. Wonder if she will be working with dancers again at San Francisco Ballet.

In old Hollywood there was a saying that major works made less than satisfactory movies whereas minor works, like short stories in Saturday Evening Post, made very good and sometimes great movies. In ballet Don Quixote is based on a small story within the novel and Nutcracker and Coppelia on ETA Hoffman’s short stories. Onegin seems less good to me than its source (though I do like the duel scene very much), conveying little of Pushkin’s ironic/romantic tone and mistakenly having Tatiana tear up E Onegin’s letter which importantly is kept, though in much folded and unfolded form, til the end in the novel/poem. (Balanchine, who didn’t much like the musical choices of the Cranko ballet, did a series of dances for an opera version of EO in 1948 involving four couples, which one can only speculate about - perhaps there are remnants of it in Liebeslieder?). I can see doing an opera based on Madame Bovary before making a ballet on it. Flaubert is the first modernist and his novel is based on the ordinariness of everyday life and inappropriate choices to mitigate it – at least how I remember it. To translate the novel to ballet form without destroying its tone and formal qualities and without heroising the character of Madame B will be a difficult chore. Maybe Flaubertians will indeed come out and picket.

I can understand why Homans dwells on the mouse motif, since Balanchine signed off many letters to his lovers as a mouse, even making drawings of himself as such. And of course it's a huge part of "Nutcracker" – originally "Nutcracker vs the Mouse King" – which he brought with him to the new world. Regarding scraps, Ruthanna Boris in "I Remember" says Balanchine told her that "you have to look everywhere, at everything, all the time. Look at the grass in the concrete when it's broken, children and little dogs, and the ceiling and the roof." Maybe a little like Manny Farber's idea of "Termite art vs Elephant art." ??? I agree the book does want to be a series of essays, which could be a way of doing a biography, and would let the biographer leave big chunks of lesser material out. It might be interesting to see the male's part in "Apollo" compared to one of the male 4T's solos, rather than linking it as a progression to "Agon" as it usually is. To sweep sideways through Balanchine's life through his ideas and second thoughts, rather than in chronological order.

Very sad. In the early days she used to greet each new member. I had an impression she withdrew a bit as the BA forum became rowdier, with lots of back and forth and strong opinions. I thought of her still keeping an eye on things somehow. Leigh Witchel has a nice post on his dancelog.nyc about the help she gave him in becoming a dance critic.

The counter argument to that, as has been pointed out many times, is once Balanchine had the men to work with, he created the great existential male solos in The Four Temperaments, Square Dance and Fairy's Kiss. As a composer would – which he was – he worked with forms begetting, and checking, forms, variations, shifting keys, etc as on a musical score. That would be a worthwhile project. Elizabeth Hardwick says somewhere that biography leaves you with "the sense of being trapped on a long trip with the subject in the family car.” And sometimes you don't know where the car is going. Homans did an incredible amount of research on her Mr B biography, interviewing everyone she could, and reading published – and unpublished – memoirs. But she often seems to slip in and out of their voices and judgments, without acknowledging that she is doing so. I liked that she restores Marie-Jeanne to her proper place as an influence on Balanchine's middle period, creating the lead roles in Concerto Barocco (originally danced at a less "lyrical," brisker clip) and Ballet Imperial . (There are many references to Marie-Jeanne in I Remember Balanchine.) There's a curious comment on how Balanchine "destroyed" her, which Homans does not follow up on. Karen von Aroldingen seems to be treated least sympathetically of all the dancers and almost made a comic figure. Homans says she "had an awkward classical technique, worked like a demon over the years to acquire a modicum of Balanchine precision.... Made herself into a Suzanne look-alike, took her place ... Acquisitive and nervous about money, couldn't get enough" etc. Serenade and Agon are analyzed for some pages (too many) while Cotillion, the important first "waltz" ballet, goes unmentioned and Mozartiana skimmed over. Christian Bérard, the refined designer responsible for the look of the first Mozartiana and the look of "the New Look," is treated a bit shabbily (“fat, queer, coarse, Wildean"). But there are long stretches of interesting information – about the Zorina - [Massine] - Balanchine relationship and the early Farrell years where her researches seem to pay off. And about the influences of Black dancers on Balanchine, esp in On Your Toes (Herbert Harper) and Babes in Arms (Nichols Brothers). But biography can be a kind of sieve in which you lose the subject of your (the reader's) affections to a thousand mundane facts. And no artist biography, Richardson's Picasso or Spurling's Matisse or Homans' Balanchine, really adds to what's going on on the canvas or on the stage – in a way they often end up nibbling away like little mice at the metaphors.