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Quiggin

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Posts posted by Quiggin

  1. 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.

     

  2. 34 minutes ago, Buddy said:

    Dancing with The Stairs

    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).

  3. 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.

  4. On 1/26/2023 at 4:52 PM, BalanchineFan said:

    I don't find the ending of that Aria problematic at all. Balanchine shows us a relationship with a lot of tension and co-dependance in it.

    On 1/26/2023 at 3:32 PM, nanushka said:

    It doesn't read as potentially violent to me, but it's definitely something.

    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?"

  5. 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.

  6. 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

  7. 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:

    Quote

    Perhaps  surprisingly  to  us,  Legat  was  on  stage  with  Gerdt  (who  performed  his own share of partnering with both women) in a sort of role sharing, which allowed each ballerina  to  simultaneously  be  supported  by  her  own  cavalier.  That  the  audience  tolerated  this  forced  suspension  of  dramatic  continuity  seems  attributable  to  Gerdt’s  ongoing  popularity  with  the ballet-goers  of  St.  Petersburg  and  confirms  the  strength  of  his  seniority  within  the  ranks  of  the  company.

    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.

  8. 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.

  9. 17 hours ago, l'histoire said:

    I think most people would be better served just by reading through the collected articles & interviews in something like Reading Dance or I Remember Balanchine

    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.

  10. 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.

     

  11. 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:

    Quote

    When Degas made this picture in 1871, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable was forty years old and feeling its age—as reflected by the man at center, indifferent to the action and directing his binoculars at the audience. But Degas was fond of the opera, and particularly of the scene depicted here, from the third act, in which nuns arise from the dead and dance seductively amid the ruins of a moonlit monastery.

    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

  12. 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:

    Quote

    ... he had set his own path away from the Marxist materialism of the Bolshevik Revolution, and quietly built, in N.Y.C.B., a village of angels and a music-filled monument to faith and unreason, to body and beauty and spirit. It was his own counter-revolutionary place, an alternative vision of the twentieth century.

    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.

  13. Quote

    One alternative to this sort of thing is the arts, and this is probably where we should focus our attention as much as possible at this Forum ...

    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.

  14. 4 hours ago, dirac said:

    I wonder if O'Hara was the "troubled New York poet" who told Edwin Denby, "I could see it every day, it's so deliciously boring" (of Balanchine's Nutcracker).

    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.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. I remember hearing a man telling his wife at an ABT performance at the MET that he was happy that the next ballet was a story ballet, that they had really"missed the boat" across the way at State Theater by producing so many abstract ballets.

    Maybe ABT could have a BAM week where they try out different things, like Love and Rage excerpts (but retitled and with Rauschenberg costumes?) or smaller cast workshop ballets. Was interesting to read Brian Seibert's review of early Paul Taylor works, wonder if there are strands of interesting earlier ABT experimental works that could be revived?

  18. Yes, I do think Possokhov working in Russia right now is pretty shocking – considering that pretty much everyone one else in the arts in the west is not crossing that strike line. Wonder what Ratmansky thinks of that.

    The 2023 schedule is odd for a transitional year, with indeed no Balanchine, Ratmansky or Robbins, the traditional SFB back list of choreographers. As pherank suggests, a section of Shostakovich Trilogy might have been timely –  even as a last minute substitution on one of the spring 2022 evenings.

    New Works does takes much of the space, but I wonder if Rojo will make changes in some of the later programs, such as #5, to put her own stamp on the season.

  19. The Abi Stafford article was written by general arts staff, not by dance critics, and may come out of a different "space budget." Julia jacobs is also covering the Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial and Zachary Small's bio states he has a bachelor's degree in art and political science and "is a reporter who covers the dynamics of power and privilege in the art world."

    The visual arts reviews also seem to come from different departments, serious reviewers and general arts interest reporters, some at odds with each other. As with dance, I wonder who oversees all of this and how the critical and general arts staffs overlap. In this case Gia Kourlas or Brian Siebert may have written a different article, or have declined altogether.

  20. I liked Maggie Gyllenhaal's dress by Schiaparelli, which looked as if it had been designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a Diaghilev ballet. And the dresses with their gathered and ruffled up trains remind me a little of Bo Peep and her sheep or childless Mother Ginger.

    But what with the here and now of global warming and the tragedy of Ukraine, this Oscar presentation did seem as if it were coming from another planet.

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