Quiggin

Here's Ib Andersen helping with Oberon – from Lourdes Lopez's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BCAoy1iDYm4/

He's so wild and low slung, like Caliban, or from the Nijinski side of the Diaghilev ledger. Looks a bit like young Lucian Freud at moments and she (Terpsichore?) like Bea Lillie with her alert chin. Good antidote to current blond versions. Now for a copy of Villella's interpretation.

Translations from famous paintings to theater are generally tricky and they often weigh down the show with "look at this" and "guess where this is from" or "why is this here". I found the women's costumes in Magrittomania pretty offensive too – and humiliating. Why didn't the men have to wear awkward strap-on props to make them look equally naked? This was not the sense of the Magritte painting. On the other hand, in the original story by ETA Hoffmann, Dr Coppelius causes Frantz to have a psychotic break and almost strangle Swanilda, as I remember, so he perhaps deserves a bit of shaking up. Anyway Coppelia was a delight, best SFB Balanchine I thought since Symphony in Three Movements. The mime work was endlessly fascinating and the third act had treat after treat – who knew where it would end. Unluckily missed Chung, but did see Silve, Zahorian (dancing very strongly) and Domitro.

Ballet competitions are closer to track and field events – if they're at all a sport. They may intersect – or at least the ideas do – in the ballet Agon but really only there. Sports don't have a narrative and are at best, in terms of art, improvisations. You wait for Steph Curry to do certain fascinating and witty tosses of the basketball, you wait for the ball to describe complex interweavings among players that only the Warriors can do, you listen to the long roll calls of statistics by the sports announcers (like the caller in Square Dance). Basketball can be occasionally "balletic" despite all its clumsy falls and odd gestures, but it's not ballet. You could say that sports are messy free will and ballet is elegant predestination.

Mostly from my early nineties NYCB fifth ring ballet going days: Symphony in C – the merging for four discrete systems of operation at the end was mind blowing Emeralds The Four Temperaments Donizetti Variations – how big a small ballet can look Ballet Imperial (at some later point) Also. when I was very young, a primal image of Edward Villella on tv making great leaping bounds around the stage.

This sounds like the most plausible scenario. Brigitte Lefevre's comment – "a boy who has a lot of charm, a skin-deep curiosity, envy of many things" – seems harsh but something of it rings true. A Balzac-like tale perhaps.

I agree with Peggy that it was a bit lackluster and, as galas often are, all over the place. Frances Chung reminded me of Tina LaBlanc (with Isaac Hernandez in his debut) in the Tchaikovsky pdd several years ago. Even though their attacks are a little different – Chung's less sharp, more rounded (Chung looks a bit like like Maria Tallchief in stature) – I wondered if LaBlanc, who now teaches in the school, had coached her. Rubies was the most disappointing, though Maria Kochetkova and Pascal Molat have done it well in years past. This time there was none of rubbery see-sawing between the partners, it could have been anyone's choreography. Would have like to have seen a bit of Justin Peck or Alexei Ratmansky's work since they're doing such innovative combinations of partnering. This would have helped break up the parade of pas de deux – and twice in a row in same color costumes (rubies red and Tchai pdd pink). Liked the lovely and complex shapes the students made in Coppelia Waltz of the Hours. Audience a bit more uniformly tastefully attired than in past years. And so white business class – what with Hayes Valley just outside and the Mission only a short bus ride away.

A good background article by Rebecca Ritzel in the Washington Post about staging "The Winter's Tale" (from Links). And Nicholas Hytner's significant role in the translation of the play into ballet form. Wheeldon's (curious) comment: “I found it quite hard going on the page, actually,” he said. “But, I could see why Nick was so buzzed about seeing the play told through movement. If you knock away the language and boil it down to the bare essence, there is a really a great story there.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/the-winters-tale-the-blockbuster-ballet-that-almost-wasnt/2016/01/14/97e0d3b4-b8be-11e5-85cd-5ad59bc19432_story.html

Clement Crisp has at times an old fashioned acid tongue so his reviews might help in the seance. Anthony Lane could probably tie the performance in knots, ditto Robert Gottlieb though not as cleverly. And there are dead critics whose style was so strong that you can run their possible comments by in your head backwards and forwards like a pop tune. I was priviledged to see two great performances of Winter's Tale at BAM in the early ninities. One was by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the other directed by Igmar Bergman. Bergman set it like a film, in the last part of first act the action turning around the boy Mamillius like a tracking shot. But not being a great Wheeldon follower, not sure how I'd react to this version. Anyway, the late romances (WT, Pericles, The Tempest) with their themes of family loss and restoration - I think are still considered great art.

I think having ballet compnies come to noontime seminars at law firms (like ours used to) and tech companies with dancers and a coach and show the nuts and bolts construction of ballets from the vocabulary of steps and phrases - as if it were building code - would help build a curious new audience. Like Guggenheim words &process. But I think the experience of ballet has to be live, not in clips, it can't be equivalentized in video - where two or three dimensions are lost. And will such a distractable audience stick with it? Also in our changing world, instead of going out to a play or ballet and at supper discussing the event, people now go to dinner and (endlessly) discuss the food and don't go anywhere else. The recent Times restaurant review of Per Se ("slips & stumbles") seems to be cultural scandal of the winter.

In one of Kirstein's memoirs that Taper quotes, Kirstein says that Balanchine is a complete cipher, no one really knows him or what he wants to do. Balanchine the politician was likely saying some of what Kirstein wanted to hear. Balanchine in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1948 gives the impression he still wants to do traditional European ballet – not Pocahontus and Billy the Kid which are the kinds of American ballets Kirkstein wanted earlier for Ballet Caravan when Balanchine had resigned from Ballet Theatre and School of American Ballet and had gone to Hollywood. "Ballets he wants to do include a ballet-oratorio by Vittorio Rieti based on verses by Lorenzo di Medici, a ballet by a new composer dalla Popula, and Alexis Haieff’s Beauty and the Beast:, a long ballet in three acts of at least an hour’s duration. Full length ballets intrigue Balanchine. 'Long works like ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ will come back into favor again–but first we must have the theaters for them,' he says wistfully." Didn't Balanchine audition for the Danish Ballet in the thirties and wasn't there a possiblity that he would have been head of the Paris Opera Ballet if Lifar hadn't returned? It woud seem he could really fit himself in any situation that allowed him to work during that darkening period. (Stravinsky was scrambling for a job in Germany of all places.) And again part of Balanchine's Americaness was fashioned get press coverage in Life magazine and Time. But the ballets were Franco-Russe under the hood and School of American Ballet classes were taught by Russian masters. I agree with Sandik about amplitude and [spatial] freedom. And I guess you can see the differences between Palais de Cristal and Symphony in C, but Pallais has all sorts of the wonderful concertante movements with soloists, demis and corps playing wittily against each other – and isn't that more than enough Balanchine?

At least one figure in the Four Temperaments comes from Balanchine's work for New Ballet in Soviet Russian – and many other parts, Melancholic on the floor, most likely come out of 1920's Soviet ballet idioms (all the while he was voting for Eisenhower). Balanchine could possibly be compared to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also had an European career followed by an American career – and who like Balanchine established a school in the US. Mies's buildings for the IIT campus in Chicago (where I went to the design school of another Bauhaus emigre) are not really American – the proportions are closer to what you would see in Germany. So you might say that the modernism which Mies and Balanchine practiced more European based than American. And praticized in the United States which was a temporary staging ground for much of European culture druing the forties and fifties – think of Adorno, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Mann, deKooing, Albers. And how different it becomes translated into the work of Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Frankernthaler, Cage, Cunningham, Rauchenberg. Actually I don't think of art transcending its time – Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, Gris are full of the Frenchness of France and Spanishness of Spain – they perhaps turn the time upside down and inside out. Balanchine's American folksiness was part of a charming mask. And I don't know if speed is Balanchine's most salient – and desireable – characteristic (if it's really a characteristic).

But wouldn't he have "loved" any country in which he found work and ended up? I think that was the implication of the PBS Balanchine bio. And somehow you don't think of his greatest works, like Agon and The Four Temperaments and Mozartiana, as American ballets.

Yes, now I see I missed Jack Reed's and your responses above. Again, thanks for posting it.

Wonder if this is the Lew Christensen Nutcracker – the Russian section looks familiar. Really fills the up the stage handsomely.

It seems to be working again. Nice behind-the-scenes background you don't see that often, even on Instagram. http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Meant-for-the-stage-Dancing-with-S-F-Ballet-s-6716140.php Sometimes the Chronicle stories are available after a few days, sometimes they're posted on their free - but very cluttered - SF Gate website. A reporter told me they're having a hard time figuring out just how they want to present their online content.

I saw the SFB Nutcracker tonight, Tuesday the 22nd. There were some cast changes I didn't hear announced – I arrived a bit late – but it looked as though Joseph Walsh was King of the Snow for Luke Ingham and Lauren Strongin his partner, though I'm not completely sure of that. 

 Mathilde Froustey danced the Sugar Plum Fairy role. How I wish the Sugar Plum Fairy variation were done by the Sugar Plum Fairy instead of the grown-up Clara in the midst of the Grand Pas. The Sugar Plum Fairy loses an essential part of her character without it, her great "speech" – plus I would have loved to have seen Froustey do it. Vanessa Zahorian was very solid in the Grand Pas and Taras Domitro as the Nutcracker Prince gave every phrase its just measure. His mime is always surrealistically clear and certain. There was a change I noticed in the staging of the second act. During the Grand Pas, all the characters of the divertissements now gather on the sides of the stage and watch the main dancers from there. This does help dress up the empty space of the bare-bones set, but it lessens the dramatic impact of the last scene when all the characters of the play – whom in the earlier version you haven’t seen for a while – suddenly reappear and circle around Clara asleep in her bed, like the animals of a carousel. I think the earlier version made for a more poetic ending. Here’s the wittiest Sugar Plum Fairy of them all, Alexandra Danilova. She was 49 years old when this was recorded. http://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/alexandra-danilova/sugar-plum-fairy-variation-from-the-nutcracker/

I remember hearing a great, finely detailed Bruckner Fourth from Mr. Mazur in the late 80's. He was the great rescuer of the Philharmonic from the big Zuhbin Mehta movie sound. (Mehta had been in turn been replaced at the Los Angeles Philharmanic with refined conducting of Carlo Maria Giulini.). From the Times' obituary:

Interesting discussion about Sadler's Wells Theatre and non-Theatre, about which there was a little confusion and disappointment during the 1951-1952 US tour. Lots of press releases had to be issued saying it was the "sister" company, not a junior company. People were expecting to see Moira Shearer and Margot Fonteyn, instead of the "charming, youthful, buoyant, capable company" (:Ballet Annual 1953) that appeared. According to the New York Times, the new Ashton "Nutcracker" premiered in England in September three weeks before the US 65(!) city tour, which ended, not started, in New York. "Nutcracker" seemed to be less well received or overlooked here, while the other Ashtons were well liked. As reviewed, this "Nutcracker" seemed to have consisted of two acts and three scenes: Kingdom of Snow with the King and Queen; Waltz of Flowers; Sugar Plum Fairy Sequence and Palace of Sweets, with at least the Chinese divertissement. Here's the LA Times review of Albert Goldberg: The New YorkTimes Anatole Chujoy in Ballet Annual 1953 had reservations about the costumes: "The Nutcracker, of which New York saw only the last act, was not well staged and abominably dressed in a set and costumes by Cecil Beaton at his fanciest, with no regard whatsoever for the dancer." He also mentioned that Cranko's "Pineapple Poll, hugely enjoyed by this writer, was not so successful with American audiences as had been anticipated and hoped for." http://canariesinthemorning.tumblr.com/

acorn, bluebell, buttercup, fern, heather, heron, ivy, lark mistletoe, pasture are significant omissions. No poets for that generation. And if not cowslips, the common name for Primula vulgaris, what are you left with to call those yellow flowers which grow so profusely in lawns in England and France? ,

It might not be that controversial in that the book is about a period of Balanchine's life that few perple know much about - so it will be a kind of prequel for most of us. And it might focus as much on Balanchine's family and his small circle of friends up to the time they defected to Berlin. It could be a very nice sort of Chekhovian or Tolstioy/"Youth" chamber film with Balancine quietly taking in everything happening around him, like the freshly done Malevitch paintings on the walls of his father-in-law's study. There's also the year he took off to study music composition. Hopefully Kendall will have some control over the film and keep it in bounds.

Joan Boada has been dancing fairling regularly with the company - this past season in Ratmansky Triolgy, in Hummingbird and in The Four Temperaments (with Frances Chung). i didn't see his famous Don Quixote with Lorena Feijoo after he was fired - which resulted in his restatement back into the company. Paul Parish could might be able to recount the story. Estaban Hernandez could be a good character dancer to succeed Joan Boada and Pascal Molat (less so Damian Smith). He's a brilliant hoofer (he was in Les Lutens) as well as first rank corps member.

Looking at the 1986 City Ballet clip, the terrible moment comes at the end, in the pause just before the purse is given back, when one of the sailors holds the woman by the wrist. She wins and they pull back, but you feel that that's the moment everything could turn really violent - right then she could so easily be beaten up. I don't think the ballet's successor the Comden-Green On the Town has anything like that in it ... As men returned from war to assume the jobs women had been doing - was Robbins playing on the awkwardness and resentment of this? The fears that lead to Robbins's misogynistic The Cage? (Also In the Night as I remember it has a moment when the woman subjugates herself completely to the man.) Because Robbins did such at times brilliant ballets - especially with the great original cast of Fancy Free - and was so wildly successful, do we tend to overlook the uncomfortable details? Added: looks like Fancy Free is on Miami's first program, with Swan Lake.

atm711 and Cristian, here's Clement Crisp's review today of the Birmingham Ballet's T&V "About Theme and Variations I record that it is a masterpiece in which Balanchines genius makes steps which gloriously illuminate their Tchaikovsky score; that I first saw it tremendously danced by Igor Youskevitch and Alicia Alonso with Ballet Theatre, for whom Balanchine first staged it in 1947; and that BRBs performance showed kittens happily pretending to be tigers."

Good summarizing quote from Teresa Reichlen, pherank. It should be noted Balanchine left the Soviet Union ten years.before Vaganova's "Basic Principles of Classical Ballet" were solidified - so his ideas - and memories - of Maryinsky style might differ from hers. Danivola says something similar about making the preparation a natural par of the flow. Also the new stage at Lincoln Center was a big factor wirh Balanchine rethinking his ballets. In the recent Dance Tabs interview Suzanne Farrell says - "When New York City Ballet moved from the City Center to the State Theater at the Lincoln Center, the new stage was twice the size of the old one. Mr. Balanchine couldnt add more music and more steps to his ballets, so we had to learn how to cover more territory and move bigger. His classes started reflecting that and everything changed. That was, I think, the beginning of his teaching revolution..." Maybe that's why Apollo which was choreographed for a much smaller space sometimes looks so austere and "air conditioned" at New York State Theater. Petrouska might also look more natural on stage similar to the one on which it was choreographed. (Paul Taylor's scaled down version seemed quite nice.)