Quiggin

Yes, there is a way of touching the imaginary in ballet. And I think if you limit ballet to ballet en point, you leave these other balletic ways of moving, more laterally than up – not to mention two or three centuries of ballet history beginning with Louis the XIV, the original Apollo, as well as the Diaghilev ballets, including the 1927 Apollo. Interesting that the initial development of the ballet coincided with the invention of mirrors, at least mirrors in large sizes. According to the Wikipedia entry, the Saint-Gobain works in France, founded in 1665, was able to produce mirrors over 40 inches in length for the first time. So perhaps seeing yourself moving in space – the feedback the mirror provided – had something to do with the progress of ballet. (Of course Balanchine (in Maiorano/Brooks Mozartiana) warned dancers against looking in the mirror so much. The mirror, he said, is like your best friend – it never tells the truth about yourself.)

The discussion on "Possessing a Beautiful Line" makes lots of good points – and interesting to see Gene Kelly's great performance in Singin in the Rain cited as an example. But maybe line is something you never possess and never is in place at one moment, but is continually being defined – or drawn out – by the body and never arrived at. For me ballet is also about "touch" in the way art critics use it about painting. How one touches the floor, the tactile quality of how the dancer touches the inner detail of the choreography. Vision and the sense of touch were divided into two independent systems of perception by Picasso and Braque in classic Cubism (which I've been reading a lot about lately, thus the analogy). Maybe we see and intellectualize ballet, say Balanchine's patterns – but at the same time we independently feel how the body is held and its line and touch. * Added: an example of ballet and what is "balletic" – line, touch, dancing without pointe shoes, possessing the stage, etc. http://commons.wikim...a_nuit_1653.jpg Louis XIV dans Le Ballet de la nuit (1653)

Mr Tsiskaridze may indeed remember his chemistry lessons correctly. In our high school chemistry class we were told to never add water to sulfuric acid. About.com Chemistry says this:

Thanks for posting that, Cristian. The accents – visual as well as musical – are extraordinary. Very direct and seemingly unembellished – and charming. And it looks as though some of the artifacts of photography and film (varying speed of the camera) have been incorporated into the reconstruction

I went to this year's Gala after skipping the last one. The theme was “Moving the Compass” which meant moving through the compass or through world ballet – rather than being about deflecting the direction dance was going. Overall the program seemed more subdued than usual. The two Balanchine pieces – Tarantella with Sasha DeSola and Pascal Molat and Stars and Stripes with Vanessa Zahorian and Davit Karapetyan – were skillfully done but didn´t have the dazzling superficiality and playful exaggeration, and total belief in that superficiality, to bring them off. I liked Flower Festival at Genzano with Gennadi Nedvigin and Clara Blanco, who was lovely and brilliant. Don Quixote grand pas de deux with Frances Chung and Taras Domitro was also very good and finely done, but strangely cool, as if missing the impelling force of its usual context. It seemed to lack certain accents such as Kitri’s flashing head and shoulder movements, laughing or resisting, when Basilio presents her to the audience upside down. [Later: I just remembered those pure and thrilling one arm lifts.] In the Raymonda Hungarian dance, Lorena Feijoo, whom I assocatiate with those flashing Don Q accents, didn’t make the great pop-off-the-ground-into-arabesque steps really “pop.” There was a new piece, In the Passerine’s – songbird’s – Clutch by Myles Thatcher which was elegantly structured. For the Roland Petit L’Arlésienne solo, Pierre-Francois Vilanoba performs an all-out dance of agony before his leap through a beckoning window. I thought of Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, which has a similar set arrangement and about how Robbins might have understated and detailed-out the role. And the child-like simplicity of the big open window reminded me of the Garcia Lorca poem Suicidio that begins, "The young man forgot himself / It was ten o'clock in the morning / his heart was filled with broken / wings and flowers of cloth ... " Suite in Blanc, a sort of kingdom of the shades for mildly happy couples, nicely completed the program, and how wonderful was Sofiane Sylve who really inhabited her part. She was the white silk ribbon that pulled the whole thing together. Anyone else have any thoughts on the overall character or about individual performances?

Lil Buck – Charles Riley – has phenomenal control and in the Swan he's doing something that Fred Astaire, building on John Bubbles, might do. It always seems to me that Cunningham and the dancers of the early fifties – Astaire and Daniel Nagrin – are the place to start thinking again about dance, to help shake off the postmodernist, post-Balanchine doldrums and rebuilding a real vocabulary. Thinking about the floor, how people walk in the streets; also how great dancers possess the stage, etc. So Millepied might have the right idea. Here's his statement in the Times

By the route that Benjamin Millepied took, Sofiane Sylve could also have been in the running. A great surprise, but interesting. Hopefully it won't be another generic international program of Wheedon, Ratmansky, Scarlet, but a very French idea of dance curatorship. LA Dance Project did do Cunningham's Winterbranch ("facts in dancing") which is a promising sign. Some brief voiceover comments by Millepied in this video about his childhood in Senegal and what he looks for to construct a dance: http://www.ladancepr...rtory/framework

Here's one of Lee Miller's recipes from the Times – http://www.nytimes.c...wanted=all&_r=0 That kind of odd cooking was chic in the 50s and 60, so it wasn't as if she had completely withdrawn. And her trauma – and what drew her to the surrealists – was probably way before Dachau, the horror of which she didn't shy away from. http://www.huffingto..._b_1394637.html Yes and it would be interesting how much Tanny and Mary E. knew about her past.

"Not so great being 'a beauty' I would imagine ..." A short documentary with Tony Penrose http://www.guardian....ler?INTCMP=SRCH Sort of a Lee Miller anthology: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lee%20miller

The New York Times consistently gave the Illuminations great reviews over its entire run – but always with the proviso that the original materials of Rimbaud's life were "violent, cruel, sordid," the poetry "of impenetrable obscurity," while the ballet transcended all that, being "of a rare and poetic beauty". The London Times, on the other hand, says the choreography itself was sordid. From a New York Times report dated June 20, 1950 (KIrstein's unsigned one?): So I wonder if the anti-Rimbaud comments in the New York Times are both to deflect from, and at same time obliquely condemn, the homoerotic subtexts as that the Perry photos demonstrate, as well does the scene of Rimbaud at a pissoir – which Clive Barnes in 1967 curiously says was done in "most tactfully and in the best possible taste." John Martin in 1950 characterizes the Rimbaud of the ballet as a

Denby says of Illuminations – and of Picnic at Tintagel – What company could capture that tone or necessary clarity today? Could the Royal? Miami? The Dutch National Ballet? There's a characterization that Arlene Croce makes, and Irene Oppenheim quotes – perhaps it's a clue – about a particular skill of Ashton's: the equivalent of "a master draftsman whose pen never leaves the paper." * The Rimbaud line that is the basis of the ballet: "J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage / I alone hold the key to this savage parade."

[Mostly a digression about Illuminations] Profane Love – Melissa Hayden – got better notices than Tanaquil LeClercq's Sacred Love in the original reviews: "The astonishing Melissa Hayden fairly tears the scene to tatters with the passion of her performance of the evil genius" (NYT). "There are things about it I've never forgotten," says Irene Oppenheim in Threepenney Review, such as It's poor Rimbaud who gets the bad reviews – "the dirt and squalor of his life, the garbage can from which he picked his diamonds" (Clive Barnes 1967 revival), "the sordid and brutal elements of a singularly violent existence" (John Martin 1950). Perhaps this was to deflect from the gay subtext which seems pretty intense in the Perry / LeClercq photo. According to Martin Duberman, Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Illuminations to give Ashton "new excitements," and he generally wanted Ashton to break free and take over Sadler's Wells from "Ninetter de Valore". New exitements included – according to Julie Kavanagh – a full frontal unclothed drawing of Nicolas Magallanes by Tchelitchew which Kirstein sent to Ashton as a possible love interest. Illuminations seems to have been very successful and was regularly performed for over ten years. Anatole Chujoy wrote that it was one of the works that “justified the existence of New York City Ballet.” It was included in the 1968 edition of Balanchine's (& Mason's) Stories of the Great Ballets, then quietly disappeared from the 1977 update.

The pre-1925 part of Balanchine's life would be a good read, especially with new archival research. But I don't think Balanchine was "abandoned", maybe that's just the blurb writer. Wasn't he supposed to go to military school but there wasn't a spot that year for him, so when his sister didn't get into St Petersburg Imperial Ballet school, he took her place. Balanchine's account of the boat accident where Liida Ivanova disappeared sounded as if it happened to someone he knew but wasn't that close to – although "Cotillion" is supposed to reflect something of this loss. Maybe all Balanchine's inner life (as is everyone's according to Proust) takes place three steps removed from its original stimulus. Anyway it be be interesting to see how this all gets put together.

I agree with much of what Drew and Helene have posted above. I saw the Mariinsky do Jewels about 10 years ago on tour in Berkeley and I thought they did an excellent account. Diamonds was especially fine because of the great partnership of Daria Pavlenko and Danila Korsutnev. They danced it neutrally, you might say agnostically, and it was very lovely. The video of the recent of Mariinsky performance seems much less good, more mannered. The overly loving and too-knowing Paris Opera Ballet account might have influenced them. It isn't so much speed with Balanchine as it is a certain directness and wit – and underlying melancholy. And without the right tone, there's no Balanchine, just the brand. (Ashton is another problematic choreographer where the right tone is very important to catch.) Balanchine comes down to us as a small, alternative stream of Russian Imperial School style – antithetical to Vaganova – that joined up with the topsy turvy acrobatics of early twenties avant garde in Russia (of which Diaghilev's La Chatte is an example). So for Vaganova-trained dancers to do Balanchine might be difficult from the start due to contradictory styles and philosophies. And undulating arms in Balanchine (and everywhere outside Swan Lake) are like too much vibrato in a violin or an opera singer.

Thanks for posting that. Looks like a good comparison to Wheedon's version. It has a David Hockney Los Angeles period look, with hard edged objects that won't harmonize. in the ballroom scene everyone is dressed in sharp black and white patterns except for the step-sisters in violet purple and forest green. There's also a clip for Leipziger Ballett's Jim Morrison – their Nijinski?

Not quite a documentary, not quite an infomercial, it does have some great, all-too-brief clips. There's a glimpse of Ballet Caravan Charade (Christensen?) near 18:03, and Ballet Theatre Petrushka at 24:38. The Theme & Variations clip (Ann Barzel's?) appears at 26:58, where the dancing looks more relaxed than it's presented today, more lived in. There's also a feeling of theater space on Ballet Caravan and Ballet Theatre stages that's smaller and more intimate and that highlights the essemble work nicely. There is a fun introduction to "This Is Your Life"at 30:20 – an early tv series that had more of its share of awkward and embarrassing moments – and a second clip, of Sophie Fedorova, at 12:38.

Alonso's and Markova's Giselles are also quite different, at least according to the clips posted in another thread where Markova seems so spontaneous, as if she's making it up as she goes along. And very different too according to the reviews of Edwin Denby and John Martin, who saw them dance live in the forties. Denby says: Perhaps Kochetkova's Giselle is closer Markova's, in that they are light and small boned – though Kochetkova sometimes does have some distractions and mannerisms that take away from the character she's portraying. But anyone who quotes Anna Ahkmatova in her Twitter feed has to be a pretty good Giselle: He loved three things: Evening songs, white peacocks And worn maps of America ... No crying of children, nor raspberry tea or neurotic acts. And ... I was his wife. [tweet of 9/29/2012, via Google translator]

Stevens worked for Hartford as a lawyer and dealt with surety and fiduciary bonds. One of his aphorisms is "money is a kind of poetry," and his wife Elsie is supposed to have been the model for the Mercury dime, so there is a bankerly connection. And he once wrote to his wife, from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, "the way the wind rolled in the grass was better than the Russian ballet, although not unlike it." My favorite category was Best nervous wreck. Bolaño madly categorizes everything. "That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing." could the mainspring of all of his novels.

Oh that Tchaikovsky! ... I wonder where the original original is from. Thanks for the cite, Cristian. Arrau is interesting, he gets certain lines in sideways, almost on top of each other, with strange changes of rhythm; maybe he's the Borges – or more properly the Huidobro – of the piano. I once heard Arrau at UCLA's Royce Hall, but I don't remember much as if his playing effaced memory it was creating, or maybe he was for consideration later in life. Here's Sviatoslav Richter for comparison. Richter studied to conduct opera before piano, so maybe the architecture of vocal massing shows through. His contrasts between big and small, rough and smooth are quite amazing. The quote in question is at 12:20 –

Here's a good review from Laura Cappelle at the Financial Times – And there's also this note about a dancer missing from the San Francisco Ballet lineup this year: My only quibble with the review would be about San Francisco Ballet's straitened times, what with its ambitious program in the past two years of lush ballet-opera works. There are also reviews in the Amsterdam newspapers de Volkskrant and Trouv – the latter exuberantly headlined "Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon proves he’s the best in the business with his version of the enchanted love story". http://www.ft.com/in...l#axzz2FecR4fvo

I didn't know where to post this link – a lot seems to have changed since the Marketing Dancers thread was started and I couldn't find a general Polunin heading. This Dior ad is by Bruce Weber and is set on Sergei Polunin. It features an odd combination of Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Toscanini, Nijinsky, and some icily handsome young musicians. Bruce Weber is a fine still photography but I don't know if all the riches he sets together here add up to a film – or a record of the dancer's art. It was mentioned in the Guardian article dirac cited in today's links: http://www.guardian....yal-ballet-star

I am reading Woes of the True Policeman, Roberto Bolaño’s last book, about a fifty year old widower and college professor, Amalfitano, and his daughter Rosa who accompanies him on his travels. It written in short chapters which “oscillate” in tone between the comic and the strange and enigmatic. It is dedicated to the memory of Manuel Puig and Philip K Dick. Amalfitano and his friends wander through the various quarters of the small Mexican town of Santa Teresa where he lives in a kind of academic exile. During their walks they discuss art (one of them forges Larry Rivers paintings for a client in Texas) and literature (another belongs to the Barbaric writers movement). In one chapter Amalfitano compiles his Notes from a Class in Contemporary Literature: The Role of the Poet, some of which goes – Happiest: García Lorca Most handsome: Rene Crevel Fattest: Neruda and Lezama Lima Banker of the Soul: T. S. Eliot Whitest, the alabaster banker: Wallace Stevens Worst house guest: Allen Ginsberg Best movie companion: Elizabeth Bishop Most fun: Borges and Nicanor Parra Least desirable as a literature professor: Charles Olsen Best Hollywood gangster: Antonin Artaud Best Hong Kong gangster: Robert Lowell Best Miami gangster: Vicente Huidobro Best nervous wreck: Roque Dalton. Also Diane di Prima ... Another chapter begins – Oh and in the book all poets are gay (except for a few Russians). “According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual” is the opening line. * I have Roberto Calasso’s new Baudelaire book on order at the library, rather harshly reviewed by John Simon in the Times, who probably should not have been the person chosen to review it. The part I quickly looked at followed Degas tottering around Paris, old and almost blind, visiting old sites like the empty lot where his house had recently stood. In his new apartment all the paintings lean against the walls as if it were just a temporary abode. Also am interested in Per Petterson’s books just reviewed in the New Yorker, very plain but lovely descriptions of things and situations of everyday life, no frillings. And I liked the stories in Don Delilo’s The Angel Esmeralda – from late last year – especially the one about an accountant in minimum security prison, who each evening watches his two teen daughters recite surrealist rap versions of news headlines on a cable tv network.

HIs Goldbergs were good, he played them at Symphony Space once. He did an interesting but somewhat dry, oddly flavored recording of the middle Beethoven sonatas. And there's a very good, vinyl only, performance of three Haydn sonatas on Vanguard.

Sandik, if you have time, please report any interesting findings – especially anything characterizing elements of the Ashton style or approach.

Thanks for posting the notice, Helene. I liked this part of the Times obituary – Here is a section I find pencil marked in my old copy of Sonata Forms (I wonder how much these parallel developments in ballet) – Elliott Carter, who Charles Rosen wrote about earlier this year, also died recently. With the loss of Carter (who acknowledged Balanchine as an influence), Rosen, and Oscar Niemeyer, we're losing important links to the cultural past, with nothing of quite that magnitude to take their place. We're a bit at sea. An appreciation of Charles Rosen by Alastair Macaulay – http://www.nybooks.c...-charles-rosen/