Quiggin

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.

There were two dancers out of Brahms/Schoenberg last night, Simone Messmer and Sarah Van Patten, which meant that Sofiane Syve had to dance in all three works. Taras Domitro, also out of the running, was to be Pascal Molat’s alternative in Agon. All three of these things might have resulted in the cancellation of Agon on Wednesday. But the performances of Agon have been off the mark this past week. Perhaps it’s that San Francisco Ballet, on their website, characterizes Agon as a Post-Modernist ballet, which is hardly possible considering that it was made in 1957 and that Balanchine was a High Modernist choreographer, never a pasticheur. And it's also that the San Francisco Examiner critic refers to the “barely hidden whimsical subtext” of this production. All of which hints that we’re not seeing the same ballet that Balanchine made. Agon is a series of algebraic equations quickly charted out on a black board (the dancers' socks are their chalk). It’s full of quick twists and arcs drawn by the hand and kicks to the end points of those arcs. There are jumps, pas de chats, flutters of feet, zig zags of legs and crossed ankles, sudden plunges forward. Agon is a chain of causes and effects where every effect becomes a new cause. And it’s a kind of clockwork where two dancers have to be off by just a half a beat or half a unit for it to work – just like the violin and viola in Concerto Barocco. The dancers on Program 8 put on a great effort but they seemed to be dancing as independent agents and you didn’t see the visual overtones. Did no one look at the Balanchine Celebration tape of the straight-forward, no-nonsense performances of Peter Boal and Arch Higgins? Or even the recent Dutch Ballet clips? Or try to borrow back some of the Agon rigor they had in Shostakovich Trilogy? Brahms/Schoenberg was on the other hand quite lovely. It had less of the strangeness and eerieness that the City Ballet production of 2004 had, but was nonetheless a very satisfying end-of-season work to see. I liked the third movement best. I think it’s the four colors of costumes – pinks for the corps and pink and red for the demis, red for the ballerina and a contrasting petro blue for the ballerino – that do it for me. Dores Andre and Joan Boada were in great form, and brought off nicely the odd recto/verso figures the ballerina makes as she’s lifted overhead.

There was a thread here on Symphony in C and its origins as Palais de Crystal in the (sometimes bad) old days of extended discussions – http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/15681-symphony-in-c/?hl=sapphire rg pointed out that – Also the first part of Dominique Delouche's 2011 documentary Balanchine in Paris has a tutorial on Palais de Crystal.

Thanks for Suite en Blanc comments, Josette and Terez – especially about the Chicago performances. Looks as if there are lots of small casting changes this week. Taras Domitro seems to be out at least until Tuesday. I've looked forward to seeing his performance in Agon, in the Daniel Duell/Jeremy Cox role. He was a great Melancholic in the 4Ts and seems to be able to slip into those blank-face Balanchine & Tomasson roles very easily and erase himself completely. Maria Kochetkova is still in Suite en Blanc and Brahms/Schoenberg, second movement with Vitor Luiz – but no "Hummingbird" so far. Sofiane Sylve is doing a bit of everything, including the 4th Movement mood-changing, gypsy dance of Brahms/Schoenberg – which was televised on PBS eight years ago with Wendy Whelan and Damean Woetzl for some sort of Balanchine Celebration.

I guess it was a sort of an Al Hirschfeld image – a body in profile with lower arms at 90 degree angles to upper arms and at 45 degrees to the floor, as if with two cigarette holders at once. My background is design and photography, so I began to think of Shostakovich Trilogy mostly in typographical terms. The sad couple Sarah Van Patten and Carlos Quenedit were a SS, flipping back and forth at once, the spinning dancer a double scallop shape: two C's, one above, the bottom one in reverse – and many movements ending in sudden criss-cross XX 's of hands or lower thighs and toes ... And Ж's Я's И's etc. Enjoy Friday, and report! Matching the cast list to the sequence below, It looks as though Simone Messmer will be doing Pas de cinq, Mathilde Froustey La Cigarette – and Maria Kochetkova La Flûte. La Sieste Thème Varié Sérénade Pas de cinq La Cigarette (à le fin de sa variation la danseuse fait mine d'écraser une cigarette du bout de sa pointe !) Mazurka Adage La Flûte... which comes from here: http://fresques.ina.fr/en-scenes/fiche-media/Scenes00960/repetition-de-suite-en-blanc-avec-lifar.html Lifar's notations Pinterested by SFB: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/21884748161117185/ [This has jumped over into Program 7 territory – apologies]

Thanks for reporting the last minute cast changes, Josette... Simone Messmer did dance in Chamber Symphony one night, substituting for Lorena Feijoo, though I preferred Mathilde Froustey. I think that's the role in purple – which is based on Shostakovich's wife Nina. (Who in real life may have been the basis of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, according to Solomon Volkov, and that would make you think it would fit Messmer better). Froustey/Nina's death and absence – the body chalked on the sidewalk – was the more moving I thought. I don't think they've found a place or persona for Messmer in the company. I asked one of the ushers who sees everything what she thought of her and she said, "she still new." She's quite dramatic, does a lot with her hands which she presents in a W shape (Froustey's are a cursive u). I'd like to see Messmer in Agon, hopefully she'll be in the second week cast. So far she has been in Who Cares and Giselle and Trilogy – then Suite en Blanc, and maybe a Brahms/Schoenberg to come.

Pascal Molat and Sofiane Sylve said something similar in a before-performance talk in San Francisco. That it was very difficult to switch from one to the other, especially in the course of an evening. Sylve distinguished between choreographers who build on dancers' bodies like Balanchine and those who work from a concept first. Also Forsythe composing with negative space. http://podcast.sfballet.org/pov_s_sylve_p_molat_2011.mp3 [edited]

I saw the film yesterday at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, shown in a tiny screening room where it seems to be enjoying a long run. I liked seeing it on the whole, saw lots of footage I would never have seen otherwise, and I think having it projected on a screen at some distance seems to make for a more engaging experience than watching it at home. Tanaquil Le Clercq, however, was not the only person to have gotten polio, many children and young adults did in the fifties (including two friends of mine) – and, just as Kafka's art is not solely defined by the fact that he died so young from TB, Le Clercq's should not be so always so linked to the pathos of that fact. Illness is not the only means of accounting for a life. I found the most effective parts of the film were just of Tanny dancing (in B&W especially) and the lovely films and photographs (the picture with her hair over her face) in the country at ease with friends. There could have be a lot more of that, without voice-over ... Also the letter writing – and lack of it – between Le Clercq and Jerome Robbins was very moving and had a nice hypnotic back and forth to it, that's when you lost yourself in the film. I did have to fill in the blanks about Robbins' character, his fickleness and acts of bad faith, which were much more explicitly dealt with in the recent PBS biography. And Barbara Horgan aside, I do object to the use of so many talking heads in documentaries. They're supposed to replace the "voice of god" invisible narrator of the old days, but they're just as bad. They're like troublesome docents in an art museum getting between you and the art – or it's as if all the busts of noble Greeks and Romans in the Metropolitan Museum begin talking out loud to you as you passed by, pleading their cases. Jacques d'Amboise's part could have been cut substantially (and reserved for another documentary). Whenever he'd appear, I felt the center of gravity of the film shifting from Le Clercq to him. The real bombshell for me was the revelation by LeClercq's long time friend (not in any list of credits I can find) that in the end she really didn't care for any of Robbins' ballets (the friend said he hoped she never told him that) and that Le Clercq thought Balanchine's work was supreme. A little more on the working relationship between Balanchine and Le Clercq would have nicely filled out the portrait.

That was me, and I should have been more specific than "traditional": Here's what the description at that link says: Sorry kfw,I was reading the thread upside down down while trying to post. The Oct 16, 1946 NYT review characterizes the grave scene like this - Interesting that John Martin thought that Stravinsky should be called in to spruce up the music. "The orchestra played quite badly, no doubt embarrassed by the inappropriateness of the late Mr. Adam's music," he says.

I agree with Jack Reed about Balanchine being of different minds about a subject – like most artists he seemed to be throwing people off the track, or reposition the past to meet present needs. In a documentary somewhere he winkingly says this is the step we do when we do Giselle, when of course they didn't do Giselle at the time (except perhaps for Serenade). The NY Times review of the production of Giselle that abatt cites doesn't credit Balanchine with the actual choreography but instead says: Balanchine did a short Sleeping Beauty for Ballet Theatre which was triple billed with Giselle (Nana Gollner, Igor Yoskevich, and Diana Adams) and Jerome Robbins' Interplay: But Tim Scholl writes a complicated argument in From Petipa to Balanchine that Balanchine was always doing Sleeping Beauty, that the precious stones of SB also figure in colored costumed original Symphony in C and in Jewels. Which is how painters and writers work – anxiety of influence or whatever. As Cezanne was redone by Matisse and Picasso, so was Petipa by Balanchine.

Reading about Shostakovich & Stalin and Pasternak & Stalin's famous phone call and reading about what various artists - Picasso, Matisse, Beckett, Bove - did during the Resistance, it seems that when you "speak out" is not so rational. One day it all becomes too much and you act on some little thing – as Picasso did at great risk when he attended Chaim Soutine's and Max Jacob's funerals, along with only a few other souls. Also of course the Ukraine and Venezuelan situations are not at all parallel. The United States' activities in South America long have been pretty much in our own self interest (and beyond: Kissinger giving Pinochet the thumbs up) - and about which the Times on its front page, let alone Arts section, frequently seems to get confused and befuddled about ... And is "free speech" in the US that "free" anymore? It seems to involve a lot of careful low level self-censorship.

Thanks for the report, sandik. The original 1966 film by Dan Eriksen was in color and in widescreen, according to the Cinematheque de la Danse whose holdings include a restored print. It appears that their version is that one that was reformatted for television - and in which "Suzanne Farrell has the mystery, candid and perverse beauty of the young heroine of the famous novel by Nabokov ... " http://www.lacinemathequedeladanse.com/catalogue/fiche/28

William Christie and Les Arts Florissants brought this opera production of Atys to BAM twice, in 1989 and 1982. I saw it on one of those dates, and it was indeed magnificent. I remember the set being triangular-shaped, with a jury of spectators perched on the second level and commenting on the action to each other. When Atys realizes he has been tricked by the goddess Cybele and has killed his love, he flails about and presses his body against the set and stabs at the walls as he spins about the entire stage, passionately but with perfect regularity. The choreographer was Francine Lancelot and the dance group was Ris et Danceries. Edward Rothstein, in a 1992 review, remarks that

What a long day, I was wondering why they hadn't split casts or programs. I've noticed the audiences have been so quiet and so focused on what's going on in the ballet that there have been none of the usual rustlings of programs and little papers, and no coughs, except for one or two towards the end of the last Concerto Pdd. I've been able to hear dancers' footsteps onstage - and even a dancer one night running backstage to catch up with the corps just before they entered stage left - a la Serenade. Are you still going to see the second cast?

Yes, I thought they worked perfectly. Originally I was apprehensive because the heft of some of George Typsin's designs I had seen online seemed as though they might overwhelm the ballet. But they had just the right amount of visual weight. I kept trying to make out who the masks might represent – at times one or two of them looked like Yevgeny Mravinsky, Balanchine's classmate at music school, who conducted the premieres of some of Shostakovich's symphonies. And for a moment Putin. And the Chamber Symphony came off as well as the other pieces. I think that's the ballet (I'm trying to sort out all the pieces this morning) where one of the wives (Mathilde Froustey) of the DS character (Davit Karpetyan) is tossed to back to him by the corps, like Maria Tallchief in Scotch Symphony, but this is even more effective, more mysterious.