Quiggin

Like Sandik I remember college film festivals, memorably a Girard Philipe festival at UCLA set up by two political science majors who later ended up in DC. After college there was a great series Tom Luddy curated in SF, based on studio's than a director's work, very radical then. The Columbia studios series included the Bitter Tea of General Yen, She Married her Boss, and Gilda which I saw there or at he Los Feliz idouble billed with Lady From Shanghai, a most satisfying evening. You became aware of the production values of the studio, the lighting (dull at MGM, brilliant at Paramount), costumers, general ambience. Peeping Tom was shown one afternoon at college by someone who was good at digging up prints of obscure films -we were warned that it was strange, the first time I remember such a warning. Also at another college series we were shown, completely unannounced, Genet's Un Chant d'Amour. Dead silence for a few minutes, then many, many cigarettes lit up all at once. Yes there's something about seeing movies in a personal series where you know the programmer - or even now in specific movie theaters (as opposed to on your tv) like seeing Ballet 442 a month ago at the Embarcadero theater and hearing bits of dancer talk in the row behind afterwards.

You're right dirac - I overreacted a bit and it's not a genre I'm fond of. Psycho is interesting in that it's two films, the first half hour might be the better one. Peeping Tom seemed like a Rod Serling or early tv half hour but without the neat closure. It was an orphan film for years until the "slasher film" era.

It's funny but my impression is that the Powell/Pressburger films had little influence among filmmakers in the US until it was retroactively conferred on them by Martin Scorsese – and George A. Romero. Godard/Breathless, Penn/Bonnie & Clyde, and Cimino/Days of Heaven were more likely to be the key influences that young filmmakers would cite in the old days. Except for Red Shoes, the Powell/Pressburger films had little distribution in the US where they were considered filmmic oddities, overwrought and creepy in way that even Psycho wasn't. Did it never occur to Michael Powell that he could suggest something rather than trying to control every inch of screen space and time (at least in Tales of Hoffmann)? Even Joseph von Sternberg left some room over for the imagination to relax in. Sorry for being a grouch on this – Scorsese's a good filmmaker but he is a bit of a stage mother to film history.

Unlike PeggyR’s Saturday afternooners, the audience on Sunday seemed (almost) as appreciative of Dances at a Gathering as of Hummingbird. They laughed in the right places and there were collective “ahs” at certain moments, such as when Davit Karapetyan made a difficult but perfectly soft landing – the sounds of good audiences are always nice in that their prompting draws your attention to something special you might otherwise have missed or it lets you look through others' eyes when you’re feeling a bit jaded. It was interesting to see the difference between Joseph Walsh and Taras Domitro in the Brown part (Helgi Tomasson’s old role). With Walsh you notice his upper body which is so quick and articulate – it’s as if he’s listening to, concentrating on what his hands are doing, if his fingers are ruffling out with the right accent (Tomasson’s sometimes would flutter around his waist as if they were birds). Whereas with Domitro it’s his feet he’s listening for or thinking with – it’s the snip-snap of his calves and ankles (or beats, like a trill), and their perfect angles, that completes his thought. With Sofiane Sylve you feel you have an index of City Ballet style, the way dancers in New York stretch a phrase, are continuing revising a movement so you never quite know how it’s going to end. I agree with Josette that Steven Morse looked more mature, that he looked serious and was dancing in character. Though all the dancers were fine (but I would have been happier with a six o’clock extension from Maria Kochetkova for the seven o’clock one which unnecessarily complicated the silhouette of a couple of lifts). I saw lots of Balanchine in Dances at a Gathering: skimming lifts from Sanguinic, groupings from Apollo, and Liebeslieder Waltzes overall of course. (And a little of deMille, too.) Violette Verdy who originated parts in Dances and Liebeslieder, said, not without a bit of sharpness within the sweet, that Robbins absorbed Balanchine’s ideas and made them more accessible to audiences. As Dances gets older I’m not sure how well touching the ground and collectively watching the clouds (from Our Town?) works. The full effect seems to have faded. (Ratmansky does some similar things but they’re so quick they’re like throwaways.) Hummingbird is athletic and demanding, looks sometimes like Glass Pieces (naturally), sometimes like Company B; like Streetcar Named Desire or the Honeymooners in the second part, like a jitterbugging contest in the third. The set, which was greeted by a sigh from the audience, could be a Gerhard Richter painting in gray and green and almost a sharp blue – a huge tubular sky stained with moss, lit coldly from within. It rolls slowly, shortens and lengthens throughout the ballet. The dancers work in half shadow beneath the grim light. There is a raked stage which culminates in an embankment off which corps members now and then drop or tiptoe down. At one point six or eight dancers lie completely flattened on the upper portion, evenly spaced out – as if they had been drugged by opium poppies or suddenly asphyxiated.

This was a full and rewarding program to see. On opening night almost all of the choreographers bounded out onto stage: William Forsythe's presence seemed to catch Sofiane Sylve completely off guard - there was a spirited interchange between them; next was bright young Myles Thatcher catching up with his colleagues, and then, if not Petipa, lovely Natalia Makarova in red crocheted Chanelish jacket, in great contrast to all the white Shades around her. Of the program proper I liked the waltz-ish latter part of the van Manen Variations better than the first. And after a pause came the breakneck Vertinginous Thrill which seemed to be taken at much faster tempos than at the Gala. Never had I seen Sylve dance with such fire and speed - usually she seems to take all the time in the world to have her say. Carlo Di Lanno, among his other charms, is interesting in the way his arms describe solid and articulate Leonardo-like arcs of movement. Kingdom of the Shades with Froustey, Tan and Domitro was a pleasure to watch, though the entrance of the Shades was a bit rickety and the ramps looked like leftovers from Suite in Blanc. Perhaps Manifesto should have been shorter, less ambitious, more brightly lit and merely a set of variations of basic movements set on five or so dancers - less a manifesto than a few interesting axioms. Just as the Golberg Variations which figured in the piece are embellishments of a simple banal tune. And the dances you see from Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck seem to be going in another direction from the well appointed San Francisco school of dark voluptuous velvetness. They're bright, bare boned, all structure, full of wit and a nice shock to the system. It might not be such a bad sort of trendiness to be accused of.

The Joffrey did the reconstructed original Square Dance with Caller in 2005. John Rockwell liked it more than San Francisco's abstract version he saw on the same trip around the country: "The original's juxtaposition of country-and-western accents, Baroque violin concertos and academic ballet made Balanchine's jokey premise more pungent." I remember Helgi Tomasson saying in a pre-performance talk that they had tried to do it with the Caller, but they couldn't get it all the elements to mesh.

I liked the Nakokov version of Eugene Onegin and the notes, at least the shorter "Structure & Genesis of Eugene Onegin", were very helpful. Nabokov's translation is more relaxed and accurate than other, rhymed versions. I also read the James Falon Oxford Classics translation alongside it, more sparkling but you may miss some important details due to formal contraints. The novel is different from the ballet, which was a very controversial abridgement. Its tone is different – more like Jane Austen, and it's generally more complex. Pushkin himself is a character (maybe three times over). Tatiana's letter has a different fate and Tatiana's dream is much more wide ranging than that in the ballet. Nabokov's long notes are also interesting if you can get beyond the petty score settling. (And that Nabokov is almost erasing Pushkin as he's rescuing him.) But they're invaluable for some of the nuances – as when he discusses all the Russian words for silence, for different sounds of water moving in rivers, rivulets etc, and the Russian words for langorousness. I think there may be another discussion somewhere else about this.

They should also put the "c" back in Franz Schubert's name. This is the second program on which it has been missing.

Parma, yes it absolutely does look like Fred Astaire is doing a Gene Kelly routine in Silk Stockings. And there's a sly reference to English ballet. I do like the Ritz Roll & Rock number best, the space, the use of the men and women who keep popping up. And Peter Lorre in Sweet Siberia is great, upstages the whole number – you just want to keep watching what he'll do next with his hands. I originally saw this movie in a film school summer class with Albert Johnson and Rouben Mamoulian who was very keen on technical details in the film. I keep remembering a tilting stage but can't find the clips. Yes, the Cover Girl Alter Ego goes beyond the conceit ... and creates something abstract. It's been pointed out that the Kelly persona is more comfortable with Comden and Green as writers (Singin in the Rain) than Lerner. Someone on Imdb says that one of the intentions of American in Paris was to get Kelly in a role closer to his early Pal Joey character, but if so, it doesn't seemed to have happened. (I can't find an in print source confirming ths.) Don't (bad) dream ballets go back to Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark with Ginger Rogers in the Gertrude Lawrence role?

Leslie Caron in her memoir says that it was difficult to dance on hard cement floors and she had to sand down the points of her shoes to keep from slipping on the slick surfaces. (Also that in an act of rebellion she cut her hair short and the film had to be postponed for three weeks while everyone waited for it to grow out.) As you say, the answer to what Balanchine might think is in the scene he did for the Goldwyn Follies of 1938, which like American in Paris was also directed by Vincent Minnelli and in Technicolor. A complex set but the dancing is clean and clear. He probably would immediately begin trimming away the excesses of the dream scene if he were called in as a script doctor. The problem with the Minnelli ballet is that it has no problem nothing to solve other than how many famous paintings can Minnelli and the MGM art department duplicate. The "upmarket" sets fight with Kelly's "low brow" dancing, especially the sculptures in the fountain scene where Raoul Dufy-style flat paper cutouts may have been better. Anyway isnt Kelly at his best with only a few humble props, like the umbrella in Singin in the Rain and the newspaper in Summer Stock? Corrected per dirac's comment below. Added: Gregg Toland who did Citizen Kane was the cameraman on Goldwyn Follies. Also Technicolor gets a bad rap but is capable of subtle and accurate hues like the blue-gray and green-gray jackets at the beginning of the dream sequence. Minnelli tends to load the palette with reds.

I saw Ballet 422 last night and liked it very much – it seemed very much its own thing. I would have liked less of the costume designing process, and seeing more of Peck working on some small scale choreographic figures. But I didn't miss seeing the whole filmed ballet – which would have looked flat, or not quite fit with the fragmentary nature of the rest of the film. The world of City Ballet it portrayed seemed almost monastic – the film was like an ethnographical observation of the social structures of a monastery. Justin Peck, from the lowest rung of the ballet, the corps – as the opening title informs us – is selected to choreograph a ballet, does just that, and then immediately after the premiere sheds his suit and tie, returns to being a corps member and joins the cast of the third ballet on the same bill. The scene where Cameron Grant takes Peck aside and suggests he take time out to talk to the orchestras is good. And also Albert Evans having to be an advocate for the dancers. Curious that the name of the piece was not mentioned until the end – only that it had been written in 1935 (at first I thought it might be RodeO). The addition of music of the adagio movement of Symphony in C was technically ok, but perhaps too rich for the images, like a last minute spoonful of Devonshire cream, and ran against the the dry tone of the film. It might have worked with no sound – the short excerpt of the Ratmansky ballet that Peck has rejoined, then the high shots of Lincoln Center fountains, all in silence or the natural sounds of the plaza.

Thanks so much Natalia, please keep reporting. Interesting to hear how much Soviet/Russian training Lifar had – Kirstein says not much. And Kendall on the emigrees ...

DanielBenton, I think it may have been in a 1933 Vogue magazine article Lincoln Kirstein wrote quoting Balanchine. There's a summary of the conversation in Kirstein's Mosaic: "Old ballets could seem laughingly démodé as, for instance, Scheherazade, now shabbily presented by the Monte Carlo company. Balanchine said he believed the criteria of style change from season to season, like the shifting waistlines of women's desses. The vernacular of one decade faded for the next ... " & "Ballets existed as a breath, a mere memory ... " I'll look for the Vogue article, but I think I remember the quote being something along the lines that people would laugh if they saw now what we were doing in the late twenties, Apollo etc. Anyway Apolloseemed to end up as a continuous work in progress; with Balanchine continuously trying to get it right. NYTimes 1943: "The present revival ... presents an interesting new color which suggests almost that Balanchine has decided to turn the whole thing slightly in the direction of kidding"; 1951: "It is much lighter in mood than it used to be, much simpler and more straightforward in style." * Regarding the 422 number, I guess it could consist of 200 or so post-1947 ballets for Balanchine, 100 for Robbins and the balance for Martins and guests.

Technically Apollo and Prodigal Son wouldn't be a part of the 422 roll call (Balanchine referred to Apollo as a sort of period piece). Theme and Variations was created for ABT, Ballet Imperial and Concerto Barocco for American Ballet Caravan. Le Palais de Cristal/Symphony in C done especially for Paris Opera Ballet. And many Balanchine ballets were stitched together from pieces done many years before City Ballet was formed.

I saw several Serenades and didn’t think that any of them quite gelled. Very beautiful, but I wanted it to be more rough-edged and each section needed more variation in texture and tempos to set it off from the other ones. And now and then very startling, like a loom that suddenly reverses the arrangement of strings and something shuttles through ... Also the orchestra to play less silkily, with more contrasts between instruments, the strings to cackle and strain a bit, the voices more idiosyncratic and separate. Maria Kochetkova was cool and business-like and Frances Chung, as accomplished a technician as she is, didn't make her part look much different from the one she did in Lambarena. Mathilde Froustey tried to sell the Russian Girl part to the audience, smiling and trying to catch their eyes with hers which really went against the tone of the piece. And the beautiful play within a play, the arrival of the blind poet – sort of a variation on Orpheus – didn’t seem to stand out as a special thing as it did a couple of years ago. Sofiane Sylve and Carlo Di Lanno, however, were wonderful together, subtle and low-keyed. * Will this be the last year of RAkU? Yes, Yuan Yuan Tan put in an incredibly intense, almost painfully so, performance first night – but the part is not an ennobling one at all; the rape, blankly against a wall, completely gratuitous. And the orientalizing makeup that poor Carlos Quenedit had to wear made him look like just stepped out of the Mikado – or A Majority of One in Cedric Hardwicke's role.

Thanks for that clarification, Kathleen. I think Disney was able roll the dates both ways on the rights to Pinocchio and of course Ub Iwerks who pretty much created Mickey Mouse is lost somewhere in all that. Before 1989 when everyone began respecting internation copyrights you may have been able to get away with a little clip of Shostakovitch. But the music to Symphony in C arouses so many specific expections when you hear even just a few bars – of dancers doing sewing machine-like steps and men blowing onto stage as if shot out of a canon... What about Fountains of Rome (!) or some other less saturated piece. My other minor quibble was with the title (which I at first associated with the classic 442 Oldsmobile muscle car) ... Didn't Balanchine do about 400 of those? Why not start another set – your own – of opus numbers?

I saw last Tuesday's with Zahorian/Domitro/Molat/Stahl ... great cast all over. Mime was especially good, Molat's on target, great presence on stage, Domitro's so clear and clean and bright, really a standard. Katita Waldo's acting was very fine grained; she looked just as a Dutch period painting of Berthe would. And Clara Blanco's dancing in the first act was perfection – so light and articulate!

DanielBenton: It is difficult to make cuts in film and music at the same time – the eye needs little buffers and gaps make sense of the leap to the next shot. In newsfilms in the old days the image and soundtrack were locked in 15 frames apart so when you made a direct cut, the new talking head would be finishing up speaking the former talking head's lines. However, using one soundtrack for a bunch of clips – SFB uses Serenade music with images of Don Quixote and Four Ts in this year's preview – seems to have become a convention. I would think that there are recordings of Shostakovich's Concerto No. 2 in the public domain especially from before 1989 when copyrights were not strictly enforced between Russia and the US. It sounds like an esthetic choice – though I haven't seen the film yet, only the trailer in which the choreography looks like a distillation of New York City style – Eau de NYCB? ... Shouldn't Rode,O be Rode/O in the deconstructivist style? Also strange is the Wisemen is the winner of the Cinema Verite crown when there were so many other (more) interesting inventors and practitioners of the form. One of the hallmarks of early Cinema Verite was the use of natural sounds that acted as harsh counterpoint to the images – like the windshield wiper sounds do in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne ("The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took ..." :Bazin.) ... Originally with Cinema Verite (now called Verite on a kind of first name basis) you made a new truth from raw materials. Now truth seems to come as a luxury model.

Hey pherank, I saw Mathilde Froustey in Giselle last year, not the first one where she ripped through a skirt with the sword, but the second time out which a friend who saw both said was even better. It was very, very good, warmer and more nuanced than Kochetkova's I thought. Froustey seemed to take her time nicely with everything – not rush anything forward. Do check out Allan Ulrich's review in the Chronicle of a week ago, he saw the same cast you'll see ... Let us know what you think.

Gottlieb also stirs up some live coals when he says: Which Danilova in her bio says was the case with her group of young dancers in the twenties. And this about In the Night originally looking like outtakes from Dances (and crediting Ben Huys for the excellent staging).

I don't remember if black but definitely formal and part of the whole pristine effect. Yes, it would have been lovely if they had gone directly into the program directly after that and had the speech somewhere else (maybe in the lobby beforehand). Some of it was about a capital fund.

I’ll just add to PeggyR’s report that I enjoyed the contrast between the opening and closing sections – the Déflé that culminates in a brilliant and neurotically symmetrical bas relief of the whole company – and the informal gathering of dancers at the end, some in costume and some in street clothes, cheerily toasting Helgi Tomasson on his 30th anniversary as director of the company. I liked the Ratmansky piece Souvenir d’un Lieu Cher best, but it seemed subdued as a second act opener and hard to make out in the dim lighting. It was about two couples (who could be phases of one’s couple’s relationship), and, as in many of Ratmansky’s pieces, the characters alternate between being actors and between being commentators – or complementers – on other characters’ actions. Suddenly they’ll be a moment were everyone does the same thing at once, maybe a downward lunge in sync and everything will start up anew. Very interesting little right angle movements of hands and feet (it’s as if Ratmansky is still using a sort of serifed choreographic typeface when everyone else has gone over to sans serif). I’d love to see Souvenir again and it’s definitely worthy of a place somewhere in the company’s presentations this season or next. Froustey, Van Patten, Di Lanno, and Ingham were all wonderful to watch. Interesting afterwards to see black-tie and sequined audience members flood across Van Ness Avenue in the dark, moving towards the City Hall party and crossing over the median through a secret gateway I had never seen opened before.

Wednesday's cast list and an update on Tuesday's Dark Angel. Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 8pm – Opening Night SERENADE – Balanchine / Tchaikovsky Waltz Couple: Maria Kochetkova, Joseph Walsh* Russian Girl: Mathilde Froustey Angel: Frances Chung Dark Angel: Vitor Luiz RAkU – Possokhov / Eshima Yuan Yuan Tan, Carlos Quenedit* Pascal Molat LAMBARENA – Caniparoli / Bach, Lorena Feijoo Kimberly Braylock*, Ellen Rose Hummel* Joseph Walsh,* Daniel Deivison-Oliveira*, Wei Wang* Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 7:30pm SERENADE – Balanchine / Tchaikovsky Waltz Couple: Sofiane Sylve, Carlo Di Lanno* Russian Girl: Vanessa Zahorian Angel: Kristina Lind Dark Angel: Tiit Helimets RAkU – Possokhov / Eshima Yuan Yuan Tan, Carlos Quenedit Pascal Molat LAMBARENA – Caniparoli / Bach, Frances Chung Grace Shibley*, Dores Andre* Steven Morse*, Pascal Molat, Hansuke Yamamoto*

I look forward to the Ratmansky "Souvenir" which was done for the Dutch National Ballet in 2012 – a set of variations for two couples. Also seeing Carlo di Lanno who just joined the company from La Scala. But it's hard to get a feeling for the overall effect – with two Wheeldons, three Tomassons, a new Poskohov and a new Caniparoli, a Forsythe and Corsaire – and how the pieces will get along with each other. Galas are like old pressed-flower scrapbooks, fat and lumpy with gross and delicate specimens following each other, and the page edges never matching. Rehearsal of Concerto Grosso here at 10:05: https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=AwrTcdPJOb9UqsgAGD4lnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTB0MzkwOG5yBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2dxMQR2dGlkA1lIUzAwNF8x?p=sf+ballet+video+world+ballet+day&tnr=21&vid=9FEA30DFC3A84A1F309B9FEA30DFC3A84A1F309B&l=944&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DUN.607994935194945257%26pid%3D15.1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtST3-ivV_Ro&sigr=11bu2v6e0&tt=b&tit=SF+Ballet+World+Ballet+Day+2014+Highlights&sigt=11afgltp8&back=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dsf%2Bballet%2Bvideo%2Bworld%2Bballet%2Bday%26ei%3DUTF-8%26hsimp%3Dyhs-001%26hspart%3Dmozilla&sigb=13cg5ks3t&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001

I too enjoy Arlene Croce's work, but, like Pauline Kael, she seemed to have championed a certain kind of full blooded American vitality. Her negative pole was always “narcissism” and “self-absorption”. (Kael disliked "Blow Up" for Croce-like reasons.) There is something of this in her review of The Four Temperaments, where she seems to favor the angry goddess Choleric who “enters in a burst of fanfares and flourishes” and Sanguinic, whose vistas are wide open, and who “rides at the top of the world” over narrow vista-ed Melancholic whose " personal weather is always ceiling zero" and Phlegmatic who is indolent, "given to detached contemplation and to pretentious vices." She likes Mark Morris despite the sort of Michelangelo David androgynous handsomeness that he shares with other dancers of the time - "it's a look I can do without". Morris is about more than just "dime store narcissism." And Bill T. Jones in 1982 is “marching the New Narcissism into the fever swamps.” In Afternoon of the Faun, she likes the moment the woman turns away from the mirror and yields to the boy’s hands – and becomes real. Staunch politics aside, her asides reminded me of the strict American reading of Freud that was prevalent for a time (a dark time).