Quiggin

I been only able to watch the first parts of the posted City Ballet "C" and Paris "Palais" videos, but Palais de Cristal seems so light and open, like a presentation at court, whereas Symphony in C is more like a white scene – lakeside Swan Lake, at least the second movement. Palais seemed laid out in floral patterns, whereas Symphony C is more architectural. There are Maltese cross movements of two couples in Palais that I didn't notice so much in Symphony C. And on the long flight across the stage, the woman's foot penetrates the surface of a circle made of the arms of another couple – ritualized and highly erotic – which doesn't seem to happen in the earlier version. Also the end of the second movement in the later version has a series of tableaus forming and reforming behind the principal couple. You don't know which one will be the final one or if they'll manage to slip in another (as in the long version of Emeralds). It's as if Palais de Cristal is a remake of a classic French ballet that Balanchine remembers from somewhere, and Symphony in C is a remake of Palais. Also Symphony in C begins to reflect Balanchine's high modernist esthetic of the 1950s. I've enjoyed them equally well.

In San Francisco it will be shown on KQED Life (Channel 54.3; XFINITY 189) - Curtain Up: The School of American Ballet Workshop Performances (#3907H) Duration: 1:26:46 KQED Life: Mon, Dec 15, 2014 -- 8:00pm KQED Life: Tue, Dec 16, 2014 -- 2:00am

I liked this ending answer from Roslyn Sulcas's interview with Janzen:

"Every so often I get an anxious feeling and would like to produce that bombed-out effect of modern painting. Maybe my form is too closed. I feel a certain desire for exploding a picture the way some artists do. Can you explode a painting realistically? I dont know." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/arts/jane-freilicher-an-outsider-in-era-of-abstract-expressionism-dies-at-90.html?ref=arts&_r=0 She was married to former dancer Joseph Hazan. http://thevillager.com/2012/11/21/joseph-hazan-96-artist-whose-building-abutted-radicals-blast/

Again it's in usage where it matters and Merriam Webster Online's sole citation of usage of demure is this – You'll see wholesomeness and perfection and role model in Instagram and Facebook comments: "Maria Kochetkova! ... Such a role model for me!" (via Anaheim Ballet) and "Love u so much!!! a perfect ballerina!!!". Also in one 14 year old dancer's q&a Kochetkova and Copeland cited as role models. I am very pessimistic about progress made in this country since Raison in the Sun – and how difficult it is for young African American men to get jobs in San Francisco and to have any visibllty in the burgeoning tech business here. I'll leave it at that and agree that it's another discussion.

I'll just enter on the demure front. Neutral on first glance, but in usage not: Webster's 2d: Oxford English Dictionary: Anyway is a strange discussion to be having in 2014. Sounds almost contemporary with Raisin in the Sun where the father talks about how African-Americans have to work twice as hard at a job to be perceived as non threatening. Added: Regarding nudity, Maria Kochetkova and Mathilde Froustey routinely post photographs of themselves on Instagram and in magazines in states of nakedness much more extreme than Misty Copeland's. And they are considered completely wholesome role models. The boys in the link posted somewhere above are just this side of what used to be called soft porn ...

Thanks too. It's been curated by John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, who also did a show of the wonderfully crazy late paintings, Mosqueteros, at the same gallery, Gagosian. Somewhat changed the way the late work was regarded. Towards the end of the Olga years Picasso mixed surrealism and late cubism in an important scherzo-like painting called The Dance / Three Dancers. It's something of a farewell to the Diaghilev years, and Olga is supposed to be one of the three dancers. I always wondered if the brown and white costume at the right was based on the one in Afternoon Faun in the twenties production - http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/picasso-the-three-dancers-t00729

Actually Ratmansky in his NYPL interview says that he doesn't use Bach, Beethoven or Mozart for his scores because he couldn't compete with that. "Ballet is just dancing," he says. "Music says very important things about the universe. We should not compete with that." Balanchine too didn't try to compete either, for instance using Mozart's divertimenti and his Gluck variations ("Mozartiana"), rather than the big symphonies and concerti – and never Beethoven. Regarding ballet as an art in itself – having the respect of other artists, I think that came with Balanchine's and Robbin's work in the 50's – when painters, poets, writers (Denby, Elaine deKooning, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Bill Bryson, Susan Sontag later, etc) came to see the work at City Center and considered it as a complete thing in itself. Though perhaps you could say the same for Nijinksy's ballets earlier, in the teens. And before that Loie Fuller about whom Yeats and Mallarme and Valery wrote intensively. Not sure if that helps ...

At San Francisco Ballet the Trilogy (co-produced with ABT) is being brought back for a second year – "due to critical and audience acclaim." It wasn't originally scheduled when the 2015 season was announced, only Concerto #1, so everything was reshuffled to make way for it. Here's a reheasal clip (with 10 lovely seconds of Simone Messmer at :52). https://www.sfballet.org/tickets/production/overview/program-5-2014

This has been posted before in daily links by dirac but I thought I'd add it here too. Laura Jacobs in the London Review of Books makes a strong case supporting Kendall's thesis in Balanchine & the Lost Muse. She says that "Kendall’s portrait of Balanchine’s first twenty years will now be the standard reference for this period"– "free of [Taper's] mythical guidance (‘soft focus’ might be a better way to put it) and revised." Most of the review is behind a pay wall but worth getting an issue (or a subscription) or looking at in the library. Some of the section on Serenade: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/laura-jacobs/the-girl-who-waltzes

Was interested in different styles and how they cross-fertilize. Some similarities between Agon and Cunningham (whether ballets or not) – and Cunningham and Ratmansky. Septet (Cunningham/Satie,1953) looks like a version of Apollo. Crises was livestreamed last week from NYU. Variations V is available online from Cunningham trust.

I don't know if this is a desert island list or what. Most of the ballets involve use of the whole stage, the corps as well as leads, and describe space in a unsual way. 1.Basis Bournonville ballets: Sylphide Napoli? Giselle Tschaikovsky ballets La Bayadere 2. Afternoon of a Faun - Nijinksy/Debussy 3.[Picasso sets, costumes and curtain for Parade; Satie music] 4. Triadisches Ballett - Oskar Schlemmer 5. Prodigal Son - Balanchine/Prokofiev - remnants of 20s Soviet style choreography 6. The Bolt - Ratmansky/Shostakovich - somethng of 1930s Soviet style 7. Serenade - Balanchine/Tchaikovsky 8. Green Table - Joos/Cohen 9. Facade - Ashton/Walton Paris Opera Ballet: 10. Suite in Blanc - Lifar/Lalo 11. Le Palais de Cristal Symphony in C (both) - Balanchine/Bizet 12. The Four Temperaments - Balanchine/Hindemith - Phlegmatic or Melancholic variation 13. Symphony in 3 Movements - Balanchine/ Stravinsky 14. Cinderella - Ashton/Prokofiev 15/16. Liebeslieder & Donizetti Variations (same year) - Balanchine, Balanchine’s Bournonville 17. Square Dance (long) - Balanchine/Corelli 18. Crises (1960) & Variations V (1966) - Cunningham/Rauchenberg/Nancarrow/Cage 19. Stravinsky Violin Concerto - Balanchine 20. Shostakovich Trilogy - Ratmansky Could add Onegin duel scene only, also needs a Soviet 50's ballet like Spartacus, but not Spartacus. Balanchines could be reduced. Cunninghams are more important than they look on this scroll.

There's a good 15 sec clip of Wendy Whelan in Pictures of an Exhibition in the new AOL Ratmansky episode. It begins at 4:18 - http://on.aol.ca/show/517887470.471-city-ballet/518489124

Thanks Anne for your report. It would be terrible for ballet if the traditional RDP version were lost However I do agree with Sandik that the white room set looks very intriguing. Big clean stage settings - like those of Symphonic Variations or McGregor/Pawson's Chroma - are often thrilling to see after all the fuss of 19th stage sets ( esp in opera). More plastic, easier for the director to shift focus - as in film. Liked your description of James's head on his mother's shoulder in the white room scene.

I agree about the tweets – there seemed to be fewer for the Royal, or they were read by the hosts from printouts, and I don't remember any, in my sleepiness, for the Bolshoi. Bolshoi also had the least distracting classroom, sort of an all-over ochre. Nice class with charming charming Boris Akimov. Rehearsal with steely Grigorovich who refused to be interviewed – pushed the microphone away. Actually two rehearsals with G, one of a pas de deux from Legend of Love and one of a group scene from the same (which I thought was more interesting, the pas a bit odd with the imprint of the toeshoe of the woman awkwardly made on the man's forehead). Yuri Possokhov of SFB & formerly Bolshoi made an appearance (prerecorded?) in conversation with Filin and set designer over the viability of a water scene on stage. What I saw of Royal was nice – the rehearsal with the moving ping pong tables and then Wheeldon's Aeternum with attractive cast including James Hay as the odd person out.

Thanks for posting that Jordan Levin / Miami Herald link, Cristian. Lots of information about personnel changes – Ricardo Montealeagre, administrative director and responsible for the program that brought Renan Cerdeiro, Kleber Rebello and Nathalia Arja into the company is gone, as is Philip Neal. And as to stylistic changes:

Here's an hour fifteen of the nine hours of the Royal Ballet 2012 livestream. There was something fascinating about watching big stretches of it unfold. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EVMjnHFg-w

Thanks, I didn't know they did a lot of Weiss's works. My experience with most Beethoven is that it's awfully full already – saturated with meaning, hammering and argumentative – before you add choreography. Though the Bagatelles would make lovley short pieces (Helgi Tomasson may have already have set some). Also I'd wonder how the big Beethoven peice would play next to Stravinsky.

The October 16th program 1 is significantly different in tone with an (overly?) ambitious Beethoven 9th Symphony (with live chorus) replaced by two smaller pieces, Wheeldon's Liturgy and another to be arranged. The event is titled "Press Play: The Directorial Debut of Ángel Corella". Though the program is more modest and intimate than before, the title seems rather ambitious. In the July 25 pilly.com interview, which is interesting to reread in light of the recent news, Corella says he plans to have a Balanchine ballet in each program "to have the understanding that it is a Balanchine-based company." He also says that there are lots of dancers in the company that are being overlooked and that it was important to promote from within. And he implied that there wouldn't be staff changes right away – "I think that before anything changes, the people and the environment have to feel secure" – so maybe in the interim, he found things as they were wouldn't work out. http://articles.philly.com/2014-07-25/news/51956568_1_pennsylvania-ballet-artistic-director-dancers

Sandik, I guess all was not "luxe and calme" with Matisse who uttered the comment. The London Review anyhow does tend to use quick, enigmatic headings like: "Nothing to do With Me", "Go Back to Palo Alto" [James Franco], "I Haven't Yet Been Nearly Mad Enough", "Better Off in A Stocking". And Clark is half -mad though he does touch on good points – the rustle of language, the shudder of motifs through Matisse. The show is coming to the Museum of Modern Art in September and that was the first notice I've seen on it. The cut-outs have always been treated in a easy-going, soft-glove, soft-shoe way, but now it turns out they're as radical as anything Matisse did. Dominique Fourcade, whom Clark cites for bravely calling them failures, says, What choreographers can you think of unleashing such kinds of whiteness or negative space on stage? Wayne MacGregor a little, mayble Balanchine in Bugaku? And I wonder what Balanchine – or Ashton of Symphonic Variations – would have thought of this painting of 1917, Bathers By a River? It was to hang along the earlier idyllic Dance and Music paintings in the house of a collector in Russia. But it was postponed and by then it was the middle of World War I and Matisse had seen and studied Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon. Bathers By a River in turn hung for a long time in a gallery in New York in the late forties where it was closely studied by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/79307?search_no=1&index=0 But back to summer reading & Kawabata's Izu Dancer ...

The New Yorker has a list of requirements for a good summer read – I like a summer read to be only as complex as a white cashmere sweater with a whiskey stain on it ... http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/pick-good-summer-read My white whiskey-stained read so far has been Cesar Aira's new book "The Conversations" concerning an argument between two friends who meet regularly at a cafe. Their conversations usually have a high philosophical tone but one day they decide to settle another sort of question. Why, in the movie both of them have just seen, does a rustic Ukrainian shepherd, played by a famous movie star (Brad Pitt?), appear wearing an expensive Rolex watch? Was this a continuity error – a long interlude on how Hollywood films are made follows – or was it a part of an intricate subtext? The narration slips, like a fugue, between this discussion, the discussion of the discussion, the movie itself with all sorts of crazy characters running around the mountaintops, and the narrator recounting all of this to himself at night. And since there's a big Matisse paper cut-outs show making the rounds and Matisse is always something of a summer pleasure, I have been reading different critiques about his work, about how it all works and when it doesn't. Unlike the Cubists who wanted to objectify the space between objects, make space as physical as objects, Matisse wanted to make the spaces between things as ambiguous as possible... Which made me think of the spaces in Ratmansky's Trilogy, how he loosens his reins on space, how he tightens them up; his "arabesquing" patterns and Matisse's. (One critic, Marcelin Pleynet, breaks Matisse's name open, Ma – Tisse, to become My Weaving-together.) Another interesting difference is that with the Cubists, Picasso especially, is that it was all about touch – the touch of the hand and the guitar to be touched – whereas with Matisse it's about the eye, how the eye runs over things: and the goldfish bowls in the paintings are surrogates for the incessant activity of the eye. (Are there ballets with a scruntizing goldfish-bowl subgroup in them?) In TJ Clark's delightful review of the cut-out show there is this quote from Matisse – http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n11/tj-clark/the-urge-to-strangle

Many interesting posts, and now I'll add my own biased view to the off-topic. One of the problems with City Ballet is that its heritage is not really American but Russian and French imported by Balanchine – just as the beginnings of American abstract expressionism were brought to the States by Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning and modernist architecture in Mies van der Rohe's suitcase. It – NYCB – could be called something else – Ballet Franco-Russe-Amerique, something like that. What gives the works of Balanchine and Ratmansky part of their impact above other choeographers is that they are products of great historical moments (just as Shakespeare was) – Ratmansky of Glasnost and Balanchine of the Russian Revolution 0f 1917. Prodigal Son & Rubies come out of Soviet ideas of the twenties and many of Balanchine's other ballets out of Petipa's ideas. All of City Ballet's Waltz/glove ballets come out of a long chain of developments going back to the early thirties, when they were given their initial impetus by Christian Berard and Boris Kochno, as much as by Balanchine. It's far more interesting I think to look at ballet in these art history overlays than just saying Balanchine was a genius and created ballets out of nothing and now we're all waiting for a new genius from nowhere. They come out of schisms in history and often don't seek the role. And yes to this (except for the omission of Ratmansky): I don't think I agree with your assessment of NYCB at this time, but your general comment here (dances/dancers) puts a finger on an important point. Without bringing up the chicken/egg discussion, it's very true that we tend to vascilate between periods where great innovations are being made choreographically, and periods where dancers are deeply engaged in revealing the nuances of a role or a work. (which is what kfw says below) In some ways, the performer of an extant work is like the commentator in the literary world -- they aren't creating the work so much as they are showing us what the work can do. Thanks for sending me down this road with your observation.

Thanks for posting those movies and the Eddie Mannix numbers. I think the problem was as much that audiences by 1953 were no longer interested in all-out Hollywood musical – which was a form associated with second world war, big bands, troop shows, etc. At MGM things were moving towards movies like Butterfield Eight, Two Weeks in Another Town, Some Came Running, light comedies and biblical epics. Perhaps it also seemed that Singin in the Rain and Bandwagon and Kiss Me Kate (in 3D), with backstage and onstage scenes, had deconstructed the MGM musical and it had nowhere to go. After that you could say it resurfaced in France (via Kelly's influence?) in Jacques Demy's Umbrellas of Cherboug, Jean Luc Godard's A Woman is a Woman, Chantal Ackerman's A Nos Amours and Jacques Rivette's The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque. Fellini's 8 1/2 (Rota) was like a musical without songs, as was Bertolucci's Partner (cinemascope and Morricone) ... (At least that's how I followed it post-Singin in the Rain.)

Yes. Fairchild has a longer mid-section which throws the center of gravity off and so the waist has less importance, Overall it's more stylized than Gene Kelly and lacks a little of Kelly's sense of the vernacular. It's more like a tribute to Bob Fosse.

Do you think a Ratmansky revival at ABT would work with U.S. audiences? Would it sell as well as the Grigorovich pieces if the Bolshoi brought it on a future tour? The seriously obsessed ballet lovers would appreciate it, but I think it might be too "culture-specific" for general audiences ... The Ratmansky ballets probably appeal to a smaller audience, perhaps the same special audience that followed Balanchine in the fifties. I don't know how economcially viable that is in big theaters. In San Francisco the Trilogy seemed to be watched very closely – no lapses in attention, no drooping heads, rustling programs as far as I could tell. It's a different audience from that of Wheeldon's Cinderella which depends on luxurious and liquid materials and movements, cute puppets but really doesn't say anything. The Ratmanksys have a text somewhere that we can't quite read but can feel – and seem part of our time.