Quiggin

I meant that overall situation with artistic director, some dancers and choreographer – structurally parallels that which Gottlieb pointed out about the Joffrey – What was exciting about Miami, San Francisco and PNB fiften years ago was that you could see three different regional inflections of Balanchine/Robbins works – Villella's jazzy take, Tomasson's purity (Croce said his grasp of style had "an almost moral tenacity"), and Kent Stowell and Francia Russell's cool crisp version. And it still is in the case of Ratmansky done by ABT and SFB (with Simone Mesmer in both versions of Shostakovitch Triology) and next year with SFB doing Peck's Rodeo.

As someone who doesn't have the means to travel much these days, I can understand that. I trying to think of a way to encourage differences between company philosophies so that everything doesn't begin to look like everything else. Whether in cooking or literature or art it's good to have regional differences even if each of us doesn't get to sample all of them.

But why create a San Francisco Ballet II with the same dancers and choreographers and programming rather than something unique (:part of Gottlieb's critique of the Joffrey)? Maybe as Sarasota Ballet has done. That said, I've never seen the Atlanta Ballet – though I did enjoy viewing their videos on rehearsing Ratmansky's "Seven Sonatas" – so I don't know their pre-Nedvigin strengths and am just speculating here... It'd be interesting to see a map of US ballet companies with a flow chart of their current influences, similarities and differences.

Not a good thing when so much institutional knowledge is lost at once ... Following Robert Gottlieb's characterization of the Joffrey, maybe San Francisco, Joffrey and Atlanta Ballets will share similar repetoire and dancers and aethetic. (As opposed to NYCB/Miami/PNB?)

I skimmed through it, found the Miami Ballet background interesting, also Gottlieb's experience at the New Yorker and his gentle but firm portrait of Shawn. I was curious about his fallout with Candida Donadio who used to be an important agent. But on the whole it was a bit too discreet and you wanted to hear more behind-the-scenes details and some stronger literary judgments. There's less of the sharpened quill he uses in his NY Observer columns.

Thanks for posting the Maya Deren films, pherank, and pointing out the similarities. Deren was very influential when I was in film school – there was that Botticelli image of her on the cover of Film Culture that you'd see pinned up as a poster in dorms and apts. Didn't realize she worked with Anais Nin (brief shot of Nin at 2:40 in "Ritual in Transfigured Time"). Beautiful series of cuts of the dancer at the end of "Study." Peck's film looks as if it was shot on real film stock which is great. Perhaps the beginning of a "slow" dance film movement: without color, without digital, without Steadycam?

I wonder which of Prokofiev's scores was used for the modern piece – "Le Pas de Acier"? I do like the movement of the big triangles. Bolm also choreographed the first version of "Apollo" which premiered (with Ruth Page as Terpsichore) in the US two weeks before Balanchine's version in Paris. Sympathetically reviewed in detail in the New York Times by Olin Downes. You're right, pherank, about the smoothness of the silent footage. I remember seeing a silent version of "Sunrise" where they double printed every other frame, which gave the feeling of time being put through a kind of kaleidoscope and back again.

I don't think the Times mandate was to cover Europe, even the International Herald Tribune didn't do that though maybe I'm remembering it in its last days. The Times regularly covered Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and a good amount of art openings. The Voice covered the downtown scene pretty well, PS 122 and the Kitchen, etc. The Times has seems to have pulled the plug on its "legacy" obligations at the end of 2016. The problem with all this moving to the great internet is that here are 1) there are no editors to guide writers resulting in a kind of waywardness of content 2) there's kind of false balance or false dialectical form to writing online and no overarching ideas or philosophy; a kind of feel-goodness results 3) it comes from a "no place", has no aegis, no agency ... I know that's vague but it's hard to get a grip on but something's missing in this new world.

That does appear to be the case again. Only Anthony Lane seems to have a regular beat, after that there are the semi regulars Peter Schjeldahl and James Wood whereas Hilton Als and Adam Gopnik are free to write department to department. Plus lots of good political commentary upfront. Joan Acocella seems to write more for the New York Review of Books than the New Yorker. On dance but also other subjects. (Of course who will edit the NYRB now that the founder Robert Silvers has died is a big question.)

The readership of the New Yorker is slightly larger outside New York and much of it in California (in San Francisco I always see someone holding a copy on the bus). It might be the magazine of ex-New Yorkers. So while that nationwide audience most likely has access to movies and books and road show versions of musicals justifying the coverage, it wouldn't to a two week dance event at the Joyce. What might be workable is a quarterly or bimonthly column on the dance scene in New York, summarizing the trends along with paragraph reviews of some of the standouts. Richard Brody occasionally does that with film festivals.

Interesting trend in the Peck-era to link "West Side Story" like videos (with Robbins-flavored choregraphy and Bernstein-flavored music) to the stage versions, but in reverse order to that of the old days – the film here conferring authenticity on the stage version instead of the stage version authenticating the (Hollywood) film. Not that I'm complaining, I've always been a fan of big, lush cinematic production values. The © almost looked like an emoji without my glasses.

Many of the interesting blogs I come across are no longer maintained, but The "The Happly Pontist" is still regularly updated. A group of posts on small Scottish bridges (at middle of the scroll) - http://happypontist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2015-12-31T16:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2016-10-17T22:49:00%2B01:00&max-results=38&start=16&by-date=false Just came across the Cloud Appreciation Society blog this morning with news of official new cloud types - https://cloudappreciationsociety.org

WanTing Zhao (also a demi-soloist in “Diamonds”) was excellent on Saturday evening in “Prodigal Son” and made all the figurations work. The only one that didn’t was her command of the sail boat – where Sofiane Sylve made a larger – and more imperious – figure. And excellent was Esteban Hernandez whose acting skills and stage presence were perfect – no holes anywhere in his performance, never out of character. Just maybe at times a touch too innocent looking. Karapetyan was fine and partnered Sarah Van Patten beautifully in “Diamonds”– they brought off the slow movement best of the couples I saw this season. There were details in Van Patten’s performance I hadn’t noticed for a long time – like the strange feather-ruffling of her hands over her face and along the back of her head. (At times she looked uncannily like Sarah Means.) I didn’t mind the differences between lanky and lumpy Aaron Robison and princely Carlo Di Lanno in the “Stravinsky Violin Concerto”. They were similar to the differences between Bart Cook (or Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux) and Peter Martins in the original. And the character of the two arias are pretty different anyway, one romantic and the other comic-existential, like that of a Buster Keaton film. But what a ballet! A compendium of all of Balanchine’s choice ideas and tricks. It’s like a page of Euclid or a Sol LeWitt wall drawing used as a dance score. The dancing is full of corkscrews, quarter arcs, double lines, double verticals, S-turns, zig zag landings, serif-like wrist and heel work. The dancers tap out rhythms with their toes, drag their heels, describe circles around each other, skate across the stage in arabesques, make asymmetrical cats leaps. Stravinsky on his part constructed the music on a hollow “passport” chord that skittishly moves through a baroque structure of toccata, two arias, and capriccio. The Aria I ballerina (Sylve) flutters by as if riding a bicycle backwards. The Aria I man (Robison, perfectly cast) does goofy propeller-armed, wiggle hip walks. She makes a circle in a rolling backbend like a cylindrical millstone and he follows in a larger half circle, his arms the handles of the crank. She follows the rungs of a ladder downwards with her hands and he follows those of another ladder upwards. They swim into the “waves” of each others’ arms, trying to weave themselves together and trying to extricate themselves at the same time. In Aria II Vanessa Zahorian helped me really notice how strange the gypsy/tango “duplex” steps were that Balanchine devised – half on flat foot and half en pointe, each at a different level. The Aria women wear pink toe shoes with black tights strapped over, and little skirts they discard for the slow movements. Some parts of “Violin Concerto” seem like a bare-boned, 70s minimalist version of Liebeslieder Walzes. * PS adendum: There’s a wonderful show of Matisse paintings that just opened at the SF modern art museum (you can really see the sections of the paintings where he scratches heavily into the paint or dry-brushes down to the canvas) – and watching “Prodigal Son” I tried to imagine what it would look like if Matisse had done the costumes and sets, as Diaghilev originally intended (Prokofiev talks about this in his Diary). What a different ballet Matisse’s “Prodigal Son” would have been. Instead of the somber stained glass window sets Georges Rouault delivered, everything would have been bright colored and sharp edged, leafy and patterned-over. Somewhere between the costumes and sets for “Chant du Rossignol” (where Matisse first devised his cut-out technique) and those simpler ones he did for Massine and Markova in 1940. Interestingly, Prokofiev goes on to note that he originally wanted the Siren to be a shadowy "aquarelle" being "seen through the eyes of an innocent youth." Diaghilev argued against that saying there'd then be no reason for forgiveness by the father. And of course Prokofiev ended up hating Balanchine’s choreography (Prokofiev's wife Ptashka: "What is bad is not just that they show their bottoms, but they do it at the wrong time”). Stravinsky later told Prokofiev that he himself never would have dared do a biblical subject for the Diaghilev company, that choosing to do so was Prokofiev’s fatal mistake.

The choreographers who survived seemed to have been relegated to more mundane assignments. In "Theatre in Revolution" Nicholetta Misler gives the example of Goleizovksy being "reduced to designing choreographies for the Stalin parades, such as the banal flower bed for the 1938 May Day celebration." Interestingly the Taganka Theatre of Yuri Lyubimov, founded in 1964, claimed to have connections to the Meyerhold Theatre (Nicolai Erdman 1900-1970 worked in both). Also to Moscow Art Theatre and later ideas of Berthold Brecht. Alexei Ratmansky in his NY Public Library interview mentions the Taganka as a favorite place of refuge when he wasn't taking ballet classes – so in some very roundabout way Ratmansky may have been plugged into some of the same influences as Balanchine had been.

John Clifford has posted a video of the original cast version of Stravinsky Violin Concerto (Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux in Aria I) with some significant choreographic differences from the 1977 Dance in America version. As noted in the comments there's a wonderful short short stretch of dancing from 2:02 to 2:38, later dropped, and the ending seems a little different. I'm sure I'm a minority but I do like the "bad" editing and the way it pulls out all sort of details that you miss in the later version. (More in the style of a Dziga Vertov or lesser Eisenstein film – which might have pleased Stravinsky more than Balanchine.) You really notice the graphic quality of Balanchine's compositions in each still frame, the maltese cross-like layering of hands and feet. Makes the case for Violin Concerto's kinship to Agon, at least in Aria I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aGjY3V8Dw&spfreload=1

These didn't seem so well recorded to me – or maybe at this point I would prefer live performances of New York City Ballet. (Or I may be getting the visual equivalent of hyperacusis where I can't separate awkward details from the main attraction.) I really enjoyed seeing Sonatine though – I had never seen it before – for the economy of means and great inventiveness.

dirac: " .... because that is the direction in which their coverage is headed." Looking for more coverage on shrinking Times arts coverage, I came across this spicy account of an old fashioned fight over turf between theater critics and this (diminished) job description - http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/why-was-times-theater-critic-charles-isherwood-fired.html

Actually I don't mind Macaulay nudging ballet away from standard "heterosexual" couples and hierachies. As a result of that trend, we got to see the mysterious five-male pas de cinque in Rodeo. Wendy Lesser, in The Threepenny Review, notes that: Regarding the Times shrinking arts coverage, here are some sobering excerpts from the Jeremy Gerard Dateline Hollywood report that Emma linked above:

Yes. Very popular here too. On stage rape for the whole audience to participate in; crematory ashes used as a decorative back-lit effect, like snow in the Nutcracker; a caucasian dancer presented in a kind of orientalizing make-up that probably hasn't been used since the 1950's (e.g. Cyril Richard in "Majority of One"), etc. False catharsis = kitsch (Adorno)

I didn't mean commercial, just that as filmed and in the poor video copy, it looked a bit glossy and hard, though I think Tomasson's haunted solo comes over well. I've never seen it done on stage, so thanks for the firsthand impressions. Tomasson said that Balanchine choreographed the solo for him in a very short time, maybe one session. He did a interpreters video coaching Gonzalo Garcia, but never programmed it here in San Francisco – maybe too hard to get all the pieces to fit together. Pacific Northwest Ballet did it no so long ago, maybe Sandik remembers what it there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yKHXS8gH9o

It's not just you. I was rather surprised to see Maucalay's sentimental comments on several Instagram photos taken by a Miami dancer on a trip to Greece. It devalues his reviews which are on the whole a positive thing for ballet. (Though not quite sure about his "A,B,C" pantheon mix of Ashton, Balanchine, Cunningham.) Terrible about the Times cutting back more on classic coverage. They used to hire off-salary stringers to review everything which mustn't have been that expensive.

Thanks, Ashton Fan, for your reports and backstories. Must say I did like McGregor's Chroma done by San Francisco Ballet dancers here a few years ago. Some story or abstract dialectic almost seems to be about to jell but never quite ... surfaces. Good to hear about James Hay and Marcelino Sambe – very graphically incisive dancers whose work comes over well on Royal Ballet videos.

Enjoyed seeing this more than I thought I would. Narrowly focused version of Frankenstein. Some Oneginish traces. At times it seemed like the revenge of Victor Frankenstein's Id, or dark side – at others only that some worrisome past indiscretion was the problem. But beautifully dressed and danced and dramatically effective in parts. Hinged on the personalities of Joseph Walsh, Frances Chung and Angelo Greco to hold things together so nicely throughout. Score very smoothly done, heard bits of Ravel and Stravinsky Violin Concerto in the last act waltzes, someone said Prokofiev Cinderella in the bordello scene – never know if that's a plus or a minus anymore.

)Should be loads of fun. Dominic Burgess looks well cast as Victor Buono. But Jessica Lange looks like Elizabeth Bishop. Side Bar: Great Hedda Hopper film here – and amazing documentary about Hollywood in transition, 1960. A performance piece in parts (HH, and Bob Hope without laugh track); the real tinsel under the tinsel in others (Gary Cooper, the Ben Hurs at the Brown Derby, Marion Davies, Janet Gaynor). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhLix9qnSR0

Actually Shearer seemed to be homophobic and her attitude to balletomanes self defeating since they were her fans, albeit over zealous ones (and this was what the 80s). She wanted to seem smart and she was a lot of the time, she just needed a good editor.