Quiggin

The counter argument to that, as has been pointed out many times, is once Balanchine had the men to work with, he created the great existential male solos in The Four Temperaments, Square Dance and Fairy's Kiss. As a composer would – which he was – he worked with forms begetting, and checking, forms, variations, shifting keys, etc as on a musical score. That would be a worthwhile project. Elizabeth Hardwick says somewhere that biography leaves you with "the sense of being trapped on a long trip with the subject in the family car.” And sometimes you don't know where the car is going. Homans did an incredible amount of research on her Mr B biography, interviewing everyone she could, and reading published – and unpublished – memoirs. But she often seems to slip in and out of their voices and judgments, without acknowledging that she is doing so. I liked that she restores Marie-Jeanne to her proper place as an influence on Balanchine's middle period, creating the lead roles in Concerto Barocco (originally danced at a less "lyrical," brisker clip) and Ballet Imperial . (There are many references to Marie-Jeanne in I Remember Balanchine.) There's a curious comment on how Balanchine "destroyed" her, which Homans does not follow up on. Karen von Aroldingen seems to be treated least sympathetically of all the dancers and almost made a comic figure. Homans says she "had an awkward classical technique, worked like a demon over the years to acquire a modicum of Balanchine precision.... Made herself into a Suzanne look-alike, took her place ... Acquisitive and nervous about money, couldn't get enough" etc. Serenade and Agon are analyzed for some pages (too many) while Cotillion, the important first "waltz" ballet, goes unmentioned and Mozartiana skimmed over. Christian Bérard, the refined designer responsible for the look of the first Mozartiana and the look of "the New Look," is treated a bit shabbily (“fat, queer, coarse, Wildean"). But there are long stretches of interesting information – about the Zorina - [Massine] - Balanchine relationship and the early Farrell years where her researches seem to pay off. And about the influences of Black dancers on Balanchine, esp in On Your Toes (Herbert Harper) and Babes in Arms (Nichols Brothers). But biography can be a kind of sieve in which you lose the subject of your (the reader's) affections to a thousand mundane facts. And no artist biography, Richardson's Picasso or Spurling's Matisse or Homans' Balanchine, really adds to what's going on on the canvas or on the stage – in a way they often end up nibbling away like little mice at the metaphors.

Isaac Hernandez had an interesting comment in a recent Pointes of View interview comparing his experience at SFB eight years ago with this past season. He said that Tamara Rojo has spread responsibility among principal dancers more evenly so that they have a chance to recuperate between performances and apportion their time more sensible to various exercises, rehearsals etc – and even have time to take a full day off. Said that SFB is unique in having all its performances clustered together in one tight winter/early spring season. Be interesting to know some of the other behind-the-scenes structural changes.

[Side topic] I'm really looking forward to seeing what Tamara Rojo chooses next year to reshape the repertory but don't expect a Balanchine work to be included. Or if so, bravely, a seldom performed work – which would kind of raise the ante. I never really felt that San Francisco Ballet was a Balanchine company – or as much as I wanted it to be. In the last 15 or so years, SFB's season has been composed of three full length ballets (typically Swan Lake, Giselle, Don Quixote or, more recently, Christopher Wheeldon's Cinderella), and five mixed programs. Sandpiper Ballet or Magrittomania would be recycled, but there was also a commitment to new Ratmansky ballets. There would be one Balanchine program – Violin Concerto, Serenade, Symphony in C or Jewels; Symphony in Three Movements in 2013 was the most adventurous choice. This season there was no Balanchine work performed.

Possokhov is also still working with San Francisco Ballet, for which he did a version of Stravinsky Violin Concerto this season. A curious arrangement, a kind of art-transcends-all approach to a situation that has had his colleagues making great personal sacrifices. He seems to be popular with dancers and comes off as very charming in video interviews and maybe that charm helps him defuse the gravity of his choices in his mind. But perhaps I'm missing something here and don't have the whole picture. And thanks, volcanohunter, for your cite of Pollina Ivanova's FT piece, which may still be directly accessible here – https://www.ft.com/content/4228c0df-4928-4639-a8b0-a22387f48ab2?shareType=nongift https://twitter.com/polinaivanovva

Peter Martins seems to have been a polarizing factor at City Ballet going way back to the beginning. He lost a lot of good will when he refused to let dancers on whom Balanchine set choreography transmit their knowledge to younger dancers being cast in those roles. Arlene Croce and other writers were very critical of Martins' tenure for many reasons, and this is perhaps what Kourlas may be thinking of when she calls for a complete break with that past of which this Sleeping Beauty is a part.

Thanks for those! You did have to budget some time for the 4th/5th ring stairs – not always as elegantly taken as the ones in the Times compilation. Stairs are interesting – not only for the l'esprit de l'escalier moments going down but the way you focus yourself, change your emotional weather, as you make your way up (thinking of the staired Apollo perhaps).

Looking down from the 4th ring single-file side seats was like reading the dance notations or blueprints – or looking into a doll house. But there was something thrilling about the direct view. The side seats cost $8.00 each in the 1990s, which enabled me to go a couple of times of week. Rows A and B at $18, later $28, were the orchestra seats of the 4th, with more orthodox views of the stage. Good for times when you were taking someone else to see the ballet.

Violin Concerto has always been one of my favorite Balanchine ballets, every part of it, not a weak moment to it. The two arias are musically and dramatically perfect but different in character, the first athletic and circussy, the second a serious conversation – like Matisse's blue backgrounded "The Conversation"? – in which the couple seem to trace out the aspects of how they stand with each other. There's a sort of waltz in the middle (a dance within a dance) in which the two seem to be on equal terms, and then at the end something like forgiveness is asked and protection offered. It was with the Kay Mazzo-Peter Martins casting that the blindfolding seemed to suggest a one-sided vulnerability, especially when Martins kneels behind her and pulls Mazzo's neck back. Robert Garis in the late 1980s contrasted Mazzo's "delicate, almost brittle, wistful and vulnerable fragility" with Martins' "large blonde handsomeness." Jennifer Homans writing today in "Mr B." (whose densely written 770 pages I'm making my way through a chapter a night) keenly senses the danger in the relationship. She says that at the end of the aria, the "enigmatic" Martins "is caring for [Mazzo] and obliterating her at the same time." She then asks, "Is there a more vulnerable moment in all of ballet than this back-bent woman, head dangling behind her on the frail thread of a neck, eyes covered in darkness?"

When Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins were doing the second aria, at least in the taped version, the size difference between the two dancers made the gesture seem potentially violent. It was a late ballet for Balanchine and I wonder if, with feedback, he would have made a change in the ending – or as bellawood suggests it was organically inevitable. In a way it seem like the hinge in the whole ballet, and everything that follows is lighthearted. Insert image from URL

I agree with BalanchineFan's assessment of the differences between Balanchine and Ratmansky. Balanchine was the product of a unique set of historical and sociological circumstances, working at the tail end of the Petipa tradition and at the beginnings of the Soviet avant garde, exercises and figures of whose works continually show up in Balanchine's ballets over the years. Another difference is that Balanchine studied musical composition along with his classmate Yevgeny Mravinsky (Balanchine could easily transcribe complex scores into piano reductions), and so his sense of spatial groupings may have come out of his sense of musical form. You could say Balanchine is more architectural, forms giving birth to forms (Deborah Gans has compared him to Palladio). Ratmansky, who was fascinated with the experimental Taganka theater (NYPL interview), seems to do work that is more theatrical in basis, such as the Shostakovich Trilogy, in the way he contrasts and blocks out movement, and in his play with displacement and substitution of characters and character-movements in Bernstein in a Bubble. Shostakovich, Scarlatti and Bernstein seem to me to have been his strongest musical choices and have made his strongest ballets – but I've only seen those that have been co-produced here with San Francisco Ballet. There's also a bit of a unique earthiness you find with Ratmansky that's not in Balanchine. I wouldn't say Ratmansky is a post-modernist but coming much later not the modernist Balanchine was – the practitioner perhaps of a belated modernism. James, Ratmansky style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMT9sRipOXw

Fascinating. I wonder what cues the audience would have that the two dancers were representing the same character, as when Gorskij was filling in for Gerdt in the Black Swan pas de deux. What were the costume similarities/differences? Was the effect like that of a translation of a speech? (And already in Swan Lake there is the cross-character of Odile/Odette, one dancer for two rather than two for one.) Things become even more complicated in the 1900 revival of La Bayadère: In contemporary avant garde dance, drama or film (Sacha Guitry's Napolean), role-splitting might might used as a Brechtian alienating effect – or a kind of dramatic "depth." Perhaps the passing of the role in the front of the audience and the respect for seniority gave the ballet an extra depth and something of a backstory.

Fun piano store Nutcracker: https://www.instagram.com/p/CloQO_psYyX/

In San Francisco we have been fortunate to see "Shostakovich Trilogy" (SFB co-production with ABT) and "Seven Sonatas," one a big boned work and the other a wonderful miniature, both with great casts. I also thought that the ABT broadcast Bernstein/Bubble was great fun, full of witty touches, one which I didn't tire of watching it several times over. My problem sometimes with Ratmansky is that his musical choices, such as with "From Foreign Lands" and even "Four Seasons," seem to me somewhat uninteresting – overly familiar and slightly kitschy straight out of the box. You might say that Shostakovich, Scarlatti, and Bernstein provided stronger and clearer structures on which to build ballets. That said, I would pretty much see any ballet that Ratmansky made.

Thanks for posting the clip. Nicely constructed performance I thought, all of one piece – or mood (a thoughtful but not necessarily melancholy one).

Yes, I Remember Balanchine seemed to me to be the best single place to get an idea of what the choreography is about. I especially liked Elliott Carter's piece. Carter started watching Balanchine in the early 1930s and so was able to observe changes in character of the works over the years; plus being a composer, he had a good eye for the formal structures of the ballets. And thanks for the overview of Homans' book. Maybe someone can recommend a kind of abridgement, some "best of" chapters.

So far I've enjoyed watching the Royal Ballet rehearsal, but I find myself less forgiving of smiles in Balanchine than Drew is. Albeit added with the best intentions, I always feel that they undermine the dramatic structure. Balanchine works best for me when the partners are not quite emotionally in sync. Something like Cubist collages where the parts of the objects don't match up but suggest a whole at a remove. I enjoyed watching the Pam Tanowitz rehearsal (3:40:45) with Anna Rose O'Sullivan and William Bracewell. Interesting to see her thoughts and second thoughts play out creating unusual figures with the two dancers. Interesting walking on pointe steps.

Always enjoyed this little V-V Symphony in C excerpt, with Indiana Woodward. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn6hlnYA7uk/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=invalid&ig_rid=7c791a7a-3bf5-4aed-abf2-1954db36539e

Degas did two paintings of the ballet that give the feeling of seeing it from a forward orchestra seat at the Paris Opera. Of the earlier painting, the Metropolitan Museum notes: Degas made some changes for the second version – the man in the binoculars moves to the left side and Viscount Lepic (whom Degas had painted with his two daughters in the iconic Place de la Concorde) appears in his place. The ballet also has more of the gray, flannel like quality that Degas had noted he originally wanted. Though painted very freely, there are nice details of the ballet in both paintings if you zoom into the central portions. 1871: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436123 1876: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O17815/the-ballet-scene-from-meyerbeers-oil-painting-degas-hilaire-germain/?carousel-image=2006AP5581 Courbet's Robert, 1857: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436015 Vicomte Ludovic Napoléon Lepic: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Edgar_Degas_Place_de_la_Concorde.jpg & Thomas Fulton avec l' orchesthe et choeurs de l'Opera de Paris Rockwell Blake - Samuel Ramey - Walter Donati - June Anderson - Michéle Lagrange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Iw6w9gw76s

Details of the Georgian trip and his family were interesting to me. The after dinner scene with his brother Andrei waiting for Balanchine's approval for his compositions and Balanchine withholding it was pretty brutal. I do question this overarching idea and wonder how it works out in the book: Was NYCB then a reactionary space? Was Balanchine in fact not continuing in the US the ideas he learned from revolutionary Soviet ballet masters like Meyerhold and Goleizovsky in his not so beautiful and non-angelic ballets like The Four Temperaments, Agon and Episodes? It was perhaps not an alternative place but the original place in exile.

Don't know if it's quite the emphasis on Balanchine – "aptly melodramatic" – that I was looking forward to. Seems more along the line of Picasso "mistress" biographies than say Hilary Spurling's solid and slightly dull Matisse ones. Hope to be surprised.

Nice opening night clips here, including Limón and Mejia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldmWU8LIJec&t=168s

I'm always curious about the arts being characterized as a neutral sublime space without political dynamics bearing down somewhere – someplace to escape to. But are they really? "Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty" were written and performed during a period in which Russia was realigning itself with France and the dances of nations in both seem to be about Russia's place within the international scene and there were questions about whether the "Le Marseillaise" would be included or not. In our time Cold War anxieties figure throughout Alexei Ratmansky's "Shostakovich Trilogy." In the visual arts, at the beginning of the Modernist period, there are Manet's radical-to-this-day paintings about class anxieties ("Olympia," "Luncheon on the Grass" etc) and his proto-feminism (in all his portraits of women and of couples), there are Picasso's Blue Period paintings of displaced persons, his "Guernica" and other anti-war paintings, there is Barbara Kruger's recent work, David Hammon's etc.

Funny comment about the "boring" Nutcracker, though I wonder if it could have come from someone like John Ashbery, whose poetry for me seems to always begin on a lyrical note and then slide into melancholy self-correction. O'Hara seems so upbeat all the time, perhaps too much of the time. When Larry Rivers refers to O'Hara's "glorious self-pity" in his poems, O'Hara says, That's odd / I think of myself / as a cheerful type / who pretends to / be hurt to get / a little depth into / things that interest me. Joe LeSeur talks about Denby's disposition, sweet but somewhat passive-aggressive (they gather to talk after City Ballet performances at Denby's nearby apt). One night out of the blue, Denby cryptically tells LeSeur that he never should have left his former boyfriend for O'Hara, leaving LeSeur to puzzle out what he meant. Interesting podcast on the Yanks O'Hara and Ashbery at the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-frank-o-hara-and-john-ashbery Such nice lines on Le Clercq.

Just read an exceptionally good novel by Aleksandar Tišma called "Uses of Man,” set in Yugoslavia during and after the second world war, with resonances perhaps with Ukraine today. We follow three attractive students of a German language teacher referred to only as “Fraulein,” whose diary figures in the story. The students’ lives, in awful but fascinating ways, get intertwined with events of the war. "Vera had the feeling that the diary contained a whole human being – someone unknown to her til now ... Was it possible for the content of a whole life to vanish so easily, so completely?" Also read the beginning of the perplexing memoir by Ada Calhoun about her discovery of research materials for a book on Frank O'Hara that her father failed to complete and that she comes to rescue. Led me to O’Hara directly – and to Marjorie Perloff who says that O'Hara took his voice, the voice that lands so lightly from this direction and then that, from Vladimir Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky’s ”Cloud in Trousers,” which George Balanchine liked to cite, goes: No gray hair in my soul, no doddering tenderness. / I rock the world with the thunder of my voice, strolling, look good – twenty two. (O’Hara: I embrace a cloud / but when I soared / it rained.) Many references to City Ballet circulate throughout the poems: Poisson Pas de Dix style Patricia, ten steps of Patricia Wilde, the clouds imitating Diana Adams, watching Maria Tallchief while the swan boats slumbered, Liebeslieder Walzer over and we’ll have that regret too to hold us and cheer us. A kind of binding that binds together lovers, friends, and experiences but only momentarily.

There was also "The Easy Life," in which the quiet character of Jean-Louis Trintignant was played against the brash Vittorio Gassman. It had a good run here in the United States. "My Night at Maud's," one of a set of early Eric Rohmer films, was very much watched and discussed here in the days in which films were taken so seriously. Trintignant was a unique presence on film, very detailed and natural, no equivalent really among American film actors – more like the choice a stage writer / director would have for rounding out her or his cast. You might say Chekhovian but unique to the directness and flatness of film medium in the 60s.