Quiggin

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.

Good points about Macaulay's framing of the problem – I get we're left with the observation that the programming was unadverturous. California, I have seen "The Bolt" on the Medici TV and while the setting is conventional compared to Shostakovich Triology, it has some amazing dance numbers – the pas de trio in the second part and the "Denis" role Ratmanksy set on Denis Savin in the first. Savin is really an original dancer, half ballet dancer, half hoofer – maybe he should be on ABT's list of potential guest artists? Some clips of Bolshoi productions circa 2011 in this interview – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMoyAypB13U

What's most interesting is what Macaulay goes onto say – despite the rather shaky start – that the Bolshoi has returned to late cold war ballet programming, or rather to a pre-glosnost, pro-Grigorovich sort: "New York has been given a non-Filin season." He gives this portrait of Sergei Filin in the audience: He might add "The Bolt" to that, though that might be an earlier production. Anyway it's a loss for us.

With Symphony #9 if one person is out you might have to swich the entire cast since it's such an ensemble piece. The first cast might be composed of smaller dancers and the second larger dancers which also might affect substitutions.

MFroustey on the program change: http://instagram.com/p/q7PLOLHrQz/?modal=true Earlier is the week Cappelle said, "SFBallet in Paris has been addictive - last-minute ticket in the bag to see Agon & Ratmansky's Symphony #9" and used the tag #ratmanskyness. And in the conversation Helene linked to above, Marina Harss also says of Symphony #9, "The ballets become something else when they are done together—like a whole worldview." The two parts presented must have seemed to be quite a contrast to "Psche et Amour" which Ratmansky did for POB. The engagement ended with Hummingbird, another aspect of the San Francisco Ballet worldview, and the whole two weeks – from reading between various comments posted online – seems to have been a great success. Quite a different sort of engagement from the shorter, less leisurely New York trip last year, and I think the programming was sharper. Agon and The Four Temperaments and 2/3 of the Trilogy helped establish a basis for the other ballets to be seen against.

I guess that's why most of the reviews have come from the British press – only one in LeMonde (behind a paywall) – members of which were also at the Festival D'Avignon. Regarding self-promotion in the media, you could say there's a precedent in Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself of 1960. Mailer was then critized for being distracted by doing occasional pieces and not working on his next novel – in the way we're all, posters and readers, distracted by the social media from doing more important things (and what were they?). In dirac's link to the Financial Times yesterday, Laura Cappelle gives five stars (of five) to San Francisco Ballet second weekend performances and notes how strong and versatile a company they are. But then she touches briefly on the pas de deux problem and how many of heterosexual duos there were one after another, and how deadening the effect could be especially in the Tomasson-Scarlett-Liang program. (Though I do remember a nicely drawn male-male duet in the background of the second movement of Hummingbird.) Cappelle says that only Ratmansky is exempted from the duo form – and you can see he seems to be a little bored by couples (Wendy Lesser has pointed this out in Threepenny Review) and excels in the pas de trois and larger figures. The passages for the sad couple and the "bluebird" in the first section of the Trilogy and for a family of three in The Bolt (video at Medici) are really thrilling – and a welcome relief from the pdd. A topic for another thread perhaps, but the more open ballets like the Trilogy and the Four Temperaments seem to have served the company well in Paris.

Yes to miliosr's and Helene's points – but reporters are taught to always dig for a new angle. And Sofine Syvle went from France to New York City Ballet to San Francisco which is a good hop, skip and jump of a story. As far as stinging or being a rebuke, maybe with all the changes going on at POB Mathilde Froustey's departure wasn't as much as an event in Paris as it was in San Francisco. Sylve is also more identified with the types of contemporary works being presented in Paris. She's a more architectural, outward dancer, whereas Froustey delights in inner detail. It would be difficult to imagine her in Sanguinic.

Thanks so much for reporting – and making one of those wonderfully impetuous trips of faith one must make occasionally. The evening of Symphony #9, Within the Golden Hour, and the Four Temperaments sound as if it was a high point of many high points of the engagement. Also the question has been asked a couple of times: why is the press so intent on interviewing Mathilde Froustey, who is indeed a "star in the making," rather than Sofiane Sylve, also French, who is at the height of her powers. I am happy to see the Ratmansky pieces being presented and so well received. Until I saw the Trilogy and its great choreographic architecture, I felt I was always looking to the past, to the Four Temperaments, and to reimagined ballets like Parade, and so it's nice to be living in the present again! In addition to being a great success, the extended stay in Paris might also have the effect of solidifying the repertory and showing what works and what doesn't and give way to a little different focus on programming at home.

I haven't seen the movie but looked at the trailer and it does look like an ironed-out Hollywood film, not without good Hollywood acting and cinematic values. Perhaps Clooney and the others wanted to retroactively cast themselves in a WWII high art film like "The Longest Day," remembered from childhood. I was surprised to see on the long list of real-life Monument Men the names of Bernard Taper and Douglas Cooper, the Cubist art patron and historian. Cooper's bio includes this, with an interesting wrinkle at the end: http://www.monumentsmen.com/the-monuments-men/monuments-men-roster Clooney is now promoting the return of the Pantheon (sorry, wrong address!) marbles. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/11/george-clooney-bill-murray-matt-damon-elgin-marbles

Mathilde K: This is true, but even more so it banalizes the art. To be alone with the equivalent of the blank page and not multitasking is important. The dancers I'm most interested in don't post and I'm sort of relieved of knowing too much about them. On the other hand I do enjoy the glimpses it gives into a traditional 19th world. I wonder how Balzac ... or even Stendhal ... would have treated the Instragram proscenium. Added: At first I thought Froustey's picture was of bags of coffee in a stack, then I realized what they were. How fascinating ... the titles Agon Bows, Ghosts Bows ... and slightly different notation systems: All Forward & Back / All Down & Back etc. ... And I know we're not supposed to post from other discussion groups, but I'll just say that at dansomanie, of the three programs so far, Four Temperaments has gotten the highest marks, with "dazzling" performances of Sylve and Domitro noted, along with Messmer's in Symphony in C fourth & finale ( dynamique et musical! ).

Thanks silvermash, I always come up against a stone wall with idioms when I try to read French. "A nest of superstars" is what Noisette says SFB is not, while Bavelier says Meanwhile in Instagram land Maria Kochetkova has posted a photo of herself in pink pleated skirt collapsed in a chair after dancing Allegro Brilliante (which we won't get to see here in San Francisco) and Tiit Helimets shows a table with five empty cupholders and five dancers at the back of the bus on the way to dinner. (Which looks similar to a scene from a Bernardo Bertolucci film called Partner and only lacks music by Ennio Morricone.)

pherank: I think Bing is better for French, though Google has pull-down alternatives. But I wonder what the phrase "indigestion to plum pudding" covers. Or how to translate "nid de superstars un poil capricieuses" in Philippe Noisette's overview in Les Echos, which Google has as a "nest of a capricious superstars' hair." Anyway I thought both background articles were accurate, and nicely a different perspective than we normally hear. Le San Francisco Ballet enchante les Etés de la Danse http://www.lesechos.fr/week-end/culture/0203617114246-le-san-francisco-ballet-enchante-les-etes-de-la-danse-1023524.php I find Instragram posts as fascinating as I think you do, though they often seem rather unreal, or else the real of travel or – or life – or working out a problem in a part never comes through, only obliquely, or in the silences of the days without posts.