Quiggin

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.

Review/overview by Ariane Bavelier in LeFigaro – http://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/2014/07/11/03004-20140711ARTFIG00220-etes-de-la-danse-san-francisco-ballet-l-ecole-du-glamour.php

The earlier Good News is more Paul Whiteman/Bix Biederbecke hot jazz in style and the later version has a big band cool style. June Allyson, whose singing voice is much more natural sounding than her talking voice, has a little of Ella Fitzgerald's phrasing, holding back a note, though her tone sounds like Bibi Osterwald's or early Elaine Stritch's. The 1947 choreography looks heavy handed to me, everything happening-at-once, compared to other MGM and earlier RKO musicals – though Tommy Rail is somewhere among the dancers according to the credits. Is the Native American peace pipe song done in the same spirit as Irving Berlin's "I'm an Indian Too" from Annie Get Your Gun of 1946? (And a strange spirit it is, of appropriating the culture of a displaced people and making quaint sayings out of it. In a law firm I once worked in, in interviews from the fifties and sixties there were references to "being a one-feather Indian", "all braves and no chiefs" and "[she'll] have my scalp"; the Standard Oil partner, when he was going out of town, would tell his assistance to "hold down the fort" until he got back.) And how Technicolor overcooks certain colors and yet the pastel dresses are so subtle and uniquely rendered. Joan McCracken for a moment looked like Mathilde Froustey.

John Martin has somehow gotten a bad rap here for his reviewing, which in actuality was fluent and witty and pleasurable to read – although it sometimes bore the marks of being quickly tossed off for early deadlines (1 am or so then). He reviewed everything in those days and kept a close eye on the changes to individual Balanchine works from year to year and is a valuable resource for that. Robert Garis says his Balanchine reviews were often “beautifully perceptive” though on occasion his judgements could be off. I don’t mind Macaulay’s piques and bad manners, and anyway maybe he’s onto something. Perhaps many of the postmodernist ballet were just holding places, and haven’t aged well and seem thin compared to the new ballets coming down. Right now Macaulay seems to be reevaluating Ratmansky’s Tempest and trying to figure out why it doesn’t all balance out. He does have something of a historical sense of ballet and where everything fits in which I do find helpful.

Re Agrippina Vaganova, I'm always a bit skeptical when a single person codifies the teachings of a whole school and wonder what was left out, what she or he might have been impatient with. For example, with the Bauhaus School you could have a Josef Albers or Paul Klee codification of the foundation course and they would be quite different things. And likewise there must be other versions of Balanchine technique than the one Suki Schorer teaches (who should perhaps should be on this list of influential teachers). At the Soviet Theater School in 1921 Vaganova replaced Olga Preobrazhenskaya who according to Elizabeth Kendall says taught precision in her own softer way and notes the contrast to Vaganova's "penetrating gaze and steely standards." And Valery Panov, taking a fresh look his own Vaganova schooling once he had left the Soviet Union, says that "Vaganova had favored Cecchetti's Italian method of getting up onto pointe by way of a little spring rather than the old French method of rolling up and down… and in large part the lack of graceful feet may be laid squarely at Vaganova's door." And then he cites Nureyev saying that the ideal would be "a dancer with Russian arms and French feet." After she left Russia and settled in Paris, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, according to Horst Koegler "formed several generations of Europe's best dancers." I wonder how much her version of Russian ballet varied from that of Agrippina Vaganova. Anyway she could be noted as important here.

[double post]

I came across this today, what could be Paul Valery's opinion on the matter. From Poems in the Rough, section one of Diamonds:

kfw I liked the same sex partnering in Scarlett's Hummingbird. In the middle movement the two males shadowing the main couple – who were stuck in an endless agument – were very natural and effective, cartwheeling, doing everyday things, "agreeing to disagree" etc. Macaulay in the "Duets of Disconnection" link says that all Wheeldon couples look adolescent and lack depth and understanding – they don't romance each other. (In his SF Chronicle review of Cinderella Allan Ulrich says that the Prince and his friend "roughhouse so elegantly ... you may wonder if this isn't the real love story in this ballet.") But egalitarianism isn't a problem, McGregor creates interesting situations to offset this. What I do think is interesting is how Ratmansky has dealt with the "contemporary" and its limitations by creating different voices to his choreographies – romantic, sarcastic, vernacular, elevated (of course Shostakovich is a great help here) – and how he enriches his ballets by using different sized groups or communities to counterpoint each others' movements.

Very interesting question. There was a discussion on what contemporary art is at e-flux, which might be helpful here. One of the problems is that the avant-garde no longer operates on the outside, in the distance, bringing startlingly new things back with it. Instead it has been incorporated within the contemporary experience – in small comfortable doses – like truffle oil at Whole Foods, or like the hints of once-radical Braun design at the Apple Store. The contemporary still has some of the characteristics of modernism, but no longer promises utopia and transcendence as modernism once did. ("To be sure, 'contemporary' fails to carry even a glimmer of the utopian expectation—of change and possible alternatives—encompassed by 'the new.'": e-flux.) In dance in the 40s to 50s, Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine were importing the big heady ideas of the European and Soviet avant-gardes to the United States. Cunningham at Black Mountain College and afterwards was influenced by Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters (via Robert Rauchenberg), as well as Marcel Duchamp ("found dance") and Erik Satie (acerbic stops and gos and pivots). Balanchine was importing Meyerhold and Eisenstein experiments and borrowing from his own Young Ballet choreography when he constructed his great 1948 ballet The Four Temperaments. That was high modernism. In contrast, contemporary ballet seems fluid, "unstructured" in the way a jacket can be called unstructured, nodal (1+1+1+1) and is egalitarian rather than hierachial. Wayne McGregor (whom I like) is sort of the Frank Gehry of contemporary ballet. Someone says at e-flux that, as with Gehry's buildings,"the contemporary suggests movement but does not itself move." Wheeldon, who I don't really understand, is according to Alastair Macaulay, the Swinburne of choreographers (he makes an exception of The Winter's Tale). Wheeldon, he says, is gifted and loquacious but unmemorable. Which might be something else about the contemporary. But Alexei Ratmansky's works are a different matter. His ballets involve a community, have proportions and modules and remnants, or ruins, of classicism and over-arching architectural structures. He fully develops, rather than just presents, choreographic ideas. So he's a different face of the contemporary. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-is-contemporary-art-issue-two/

Difficult to compare San Francisco to New York. SF has always looked to Asia in the way New York looks to Europe, and of 2010 San Francisco had a 33% Asian demographic. Also SFB a multinational company by nature, with French, Cuban, Brazilian and dancers as well as Asian and it does a diverse range of ballets. NYCB does Balanchine and Robbins, which take a lot of specialized training not readily avaiable outside New York.

I don't really mind them though they don't add a whole lot. Weren't the 32 fouettes originally done by the Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani in Cinderella to show off her skills and the skills of the Cecchetti school (which lacked some of the grace and dignity of the Russian school according to Nikolai Legat). So if they were put into Swan Lake by Petipa as a divertissement for Legnani, could they not be treated somewhat like cadenzas in concerti that have become standard but could be substituted by something else? As Helene says, lots of other things have been dropped from Petipa – and from Balanchine.

It wasn't as if there weren't precedents for making Simone Messmer a principal. Pascal Molat was promoted after only one year as a soloist and Luke Ingham was fast-tracked too – probably to fill in for Damian Smith. Messmer's career at San Francisco Ballet was bookended by two "Who Cares," one at the Gala and one at the farewell performance, and in between a Myrta and then excellent work in Shostakovich Trilogy and the penultimate Hummingbird. Maybe it was a Jill Abramson "problem" and she was too strong, and the Ballet has its protocols that need to be most diplomatically handled. Or maybe she didn't have someone to champion her in the mid-ranks of the artistic staff. I once saw her at a rehearsal that I was most fortunately invited to by a friend. She was just three feet away coaching another dancer. I averted my gaze she was so close and I felt I was invading her space, and anyway I didn't really know until afterwards that it was her – she looked so different than on stage. But she seemed so open and free. It was probably after the decision – hers? theirs? – had been made.

jsmu, I liked Sylve in this production of Agon – she was excellent; it’s always interesting to see just where she’ll break a phrase in two or suture two phrases together. She seemed a little less cooly vulnerable or walking on a the edge of a precipice than Darcey Bussell, a non-Balanchine dancer, did at City Ballet in 2004. I also liked the Miami production I saw in Berkeley not too long ago with Jeremy Cox and Deanna Seay and Jennifer Kronenberg – it was smaller in scale and had softer contours than City Ballet’s, but Cox in the coda of the first pas was intensely locked into his character, very memorably staring straight out into the empty darkness all the time. And way back were Peter Boal, Wendy Whelan, Arch Higgins and Nicolai Hubbe in the Agon that I saw in 1993. The recent Dutch National Ballet clips on YouTube (now gone) of the two men in the bransle simple were a good example of well-done layered patterns and off-time timings (so I will have to disagree with you, pherank, about the 95% number). Frances Chung on Tuesday was also very good (she was also fine in Raymonda iii last year), though I sometimes feel she leaves the stage just a little too soon and I haven’t had time to completely take in everthing she’s done. Tiit Helimets improved between the dress rehearsal Thursday and Tuesday night, less tenuous, less blank, and he did hit some parts towards the end right on – the little off-side stomping dance steps almost onto the invisible fourth wall between the audience and the stage. I felt Pascal Molat was trying to intrepret but couldn't find his character or the tone of the part, and I didn’t get to see the other cast, as Wednesday night’s performance was cancelled. In general I guess I was also not able to give passes I might otherwise for the once a year Balanchine event from a company that has a reputation for doing Balanchine well (and often). I was not a great fan of Heather Watts either, especially in Bagaku which she seemed to own. The 1990’s were supposed to be an off-period at City Ballet, but I always did look forward to seeing Maria Calegari, Roma Sosenko, Wendy Whelan, Kyra Nichols, Jeffrey Edwards, Damian Woetzel, Boal, Hubbe, Higgins, wonderful Symphonys in C, Emeralds, Liebeslieders, etc.

Actually I did care that Agon would come off well as a whole ballet, with all its interlocking parts and “visual overtones” intact – rather than being a series of good performances for company members. There are many other ballets for that. Agon is the one major Balanchine work done in a year at San Francisco Ballet and for the year to come, until Four Temperaments at end of next season. Last spring Symphony in Three Movements – with both its casts, Yuan Yuan Tan & Vito Mazzeo; Sarah van Patten & Carlos Quenedit – was a brilliant success. It too had very difficult counts – as did Shostakovich Trilogy... Some ballets like Agon are important to keep alive for their idea content, the dancers almost invisible within them. I know this is a minor quibble within the San Francisco Ballet Company topic heading and the comings and going of dancers (of which I'm as much interested as anyone), but the condition of the Balanchine ballets themselves might be of broader interest – somewhere.

I agree that the second pas of Hummingbird – I saw it with Feijoo and Luiz – didn't really develop choreographically or emotionally. They seemed to reach some sort of impasse with each other and couldn’t go further but would start up at it again and again. Curiously, the more effective couple were the two corps members, Myles Thatcher and Wei Wang, dancing just behind them in a counterpointing conversation. Their relationship seemed to go through gentler and more natural vicissitudes. And regarding Simone Messmer – which goes with what Josette says – she danced all out in the third part, almost as if she were in Stars and Stripes as Liberty Bell, rather than Hummingbird.