Quiggin

I always liked that comment – in the video she says Tallchief told her, "Why did you let George do that to you!" Alonso also talks about the complexity of the beats – how the last was the first of the next set. Here's some snippets from the original review from John Martin in the New York Times, Nov 27, 1947 to give an idea of the way in which it was initially received, and how Balanchine had turned a corner with the reviewers: And along the lines of what Bart was saying elsewhere about neoclassicism and classicism, John Martin goes on in longer piece in the Times, A Balanchine Masterpiece for Ballet Theatre, Dec 17, 1947 to say – & some qualifications – On one side of the review is a wonderful full figure picture of Merce Cunningham sort of ready to pounce. and on the other, Agnes Moorehead in "Sorry, Wrong Number".

I wanted to add this comment by Mary Ellen Moylan from I Remember Balanchine about the demands of the role in Ballet Imperial. She was also doing Balanchine's Rosalinda in which José Limón was her partner. "After the performance of Ballet Imperial I put on my cloak, left my makeup on, and tore down in a taxi to Forty-fourth Street Theater to appear in the second act of Rosalinda." Moylan followed Marie-Jean in the role. "She was spectacular. I thought she was just it – perfect. I adored her. Talk about role models – to me she was the perfect ideal of Balanchine."

Yes, I found it in I Remember Balanchine. Mary Ann Ellen Moylan – Youskevitch in the same anthology talks about the arguments he and Balanchine would have over the interpretation, whether it would be romantic, as Youskevitch was pressing for, or "abstract," as he says Balanchine wanted.

From what I remember of the Theme & Variations tutorial video – with Alicia Alonso as coach, Angel Corella and Paloma Herrera as pupils and significant input from Josefina Mendez – Alonso doesn't as much emphasize speed as differences in tone, in particular between bravado, for-the-audience parts and quiet and private moments ("like a bird splashing through water, Paloma"). Maintaining these contrasts would seem to be important to bring off the ballet. Anyway it's a great video, with nice anecdotes by Alonso, and I think it would be a great resource for anyone who is going to coach or perform in the ballet. I don't think I've seen gargouillades done in San Francisco, or at least memorably, except by Tina LeBlanc in Square Dance. They must be hellishly difficult. Regarding the Sugar Plum Fairy diagonal that Cristian refers to, my 1953 Dictionary of Ballet Terms, which acknowledges help from Fonteyn, Danilova et al, notes that – And here's an interesting note on the origins of Theme and Variations from Alex C. Ewing in Bravura: Lucia Chase & American Ballet Theatre – Balanchine completed the first movement in seven hours, just before the company left on tour. He did not dedicate it to Alicia Alonso with whom, according to Duberman, he was cross and who he characterized as a "mythical ballerina." It was however, thanks to the combination of choreography and Alonso's and Youkevitch's technical and interpretive skills, a brilliant success. According to Kirstein it was Balanchine's great breakthrough after fifteen years in the United States wandering from job to job.

The Miami Paris video, photographed from an upper tier, really shows off the brilliant structure of this ballet – as opposed to Apollo, Rubies and Concerto Barocco, whose triple layering is better seen straight on. Yes, much of the ballet is lost in 19c costumes of Seligmannesque heft. In the Miami/Paris Ballet Imperial there are two extraordinary solos for women which are set to agitated piano passages and which wouldn't work in tutus. There's a brilliant cadenza beginning at 4:45 which ends in a series of hard grand jetes around the stage, usually done by men (or maybe by Muriel Maffre or Tina LeBlanc in Sylvia). And there's another beginning at 10:00 with the woman running around half on-point, half off-point, while the man stands in place watching. These are mad person Maria Callas scenes. Balanchine, like the one-shoe-off, one-shoe-on soloist – or the Helgi Tomasson/Gonzalo Garcia part in Baiser de la fee – is always doing two things at once. He is deconstructing and modernizing – and fleeing from – the old St Petersburg school and at the same time demonstrating its charms.

pherank: But the second is not Balanchine's – he would be rather embarrassed. It looks like a parody, a scene from a Rene Clair film, perhaps Entr'acte. It has no propulsion, no wit. Balanchine was always deconstructing formalist ballet, adding strange steps and accents and reversals, little jokes, doing what was least expected – look at the first three acts of Brahms-Schoenberg. This puts back in all the mannerisms Balanchine took out.

Aurora makes a good point and this seems reflected in the fact that there are fewer substantial discussions at Ballet Allert than in previous years. Regarding Helene's comment, it's difficult to bypass a lot of comments which, while they may be charming, don't move the thread along the important discussion points as they are coming to the fore. Also I think we've gotten a bit stuck in issues such as Balanchine's revision of his early Apollo (what writer or artist has not done that), while ignoring radical aspects of seemingly old fashioned ballets like Ballet Imperial. More discussions about where ballet should be going from here – than about the restoration of the imperial glories of pre-Diaghilev times.

JMcN: Another dancer, formerly with the Royal, told me something similar, that the big classics bore the corps, they have to wait around to be in a small divertissement if they're lucky, and the whole thing is often built around guest soloists. There's little chance for you to grow or develop. Cristian: This implies that Suzanne Farrell regreted dancing for Balanchine, which I don't believe is the case. Didn't she complete her career at City Ballet and teach there for while afterwards? And what is all this anxiety about City Ballet in the early fifties and suppositions about what Eglevsky and Kaye thought and regetted - and general disparaging remarks about the company's achievements? Everyone loves the Cuban National Ballet - at least I do - rough spots and all. Isn't there room enough for everyone? Lourdes Lopez, in a recent video interview, says that you never thought about going anywhere else when you were at City Ballet in the seventies, because ballet history was being made there and then, that great dances were being set on you, etc. Why does Miami City Ballet have to be remade to fit Rolando Sarabia, who should be dancing with a larger, more classically based company such as the Royal, as Carlos Acosta did, or with Boston or San Francisco? Anyway this thread is roughly about Miami going forward - and ballet going forward. MCB was founded by an ex-Balanchine dancer with Balanchine as its basis - not Petipa nor Ivanov [ ... ] How should Miami navigate forward from this Balanchine basis and beyond Wheeldon, Ratsmansky & Tharp is the question. What sorts of dance idioms should they be building new pieces on? The fairly conservative critic Clement Crisp today reviewed Rambert Dance Company in the Financial Times. I have no idea what the program was like but it seems like the kind of review that would fit MCB nicely:

Farrell, McBride and Verdy are sort of national treasures (even Verdy because she did some of her best work here) and for Villella to have brought them to coach Miami City Ballet was considered a great stroke of genius and has been acknowledged in the ballet press - not just here at BA - as a very postive thing. I do enjoy watching Viengsay Valdes a lot, but should she have been brought to the US instead of one of them (if that could have been arranged)? On the other hand should Magaly Suarez be a member of the MCB teaching staff? Yes, that would be a very good choice, just as Stanley Williams was when he was invited to teach at School of American Ballet. The current Cuban government supports the ballet - relative to the GNP - in a very substantial way, with a school, a broad recruitment plan, performing facilities and regular tours to Paris, Canada, the US, etc, far beyond what Batista government ever gave. There might not be a BNC at all without Castro. Some of its success is the result of international good will and a bumper crop of great teachers, such as Josefina Mendez, whose death according to one former BNC dancer has resulted in significant changes in the company. Likewise ballet in the United States got a huge boost as a result of our cultural inferiority complex during the 1950s, the US "seeing the Soviets’ cultural wealth as a threat," according to one commentator. Nureyev's leap to independence - as he would rephrase it - did for ballet something like what the launch of Sputnik did for physics and the sciences. There is nothing wrong with producing the dozen or so great Petipa and Ivanov ballets over and over (and I did see the current traveling and much discussed Mariinsky Swan Lake, which seemed a bit threadbare and less thrilling than Don Q or Sleeping Beauty of a few years ago). But that shouldn't be at the expense of new works and the development of truly new and honest idioms and forms of expressions. MCB is a small regional company that has done brilliant Balanchine, better than City Ballet even, which is a very rare thing. It has limited resources and can't suddenly fill a void that doesn't really exist with complicated 19th century productions. It took San Francisco Ballet fifteen or so years after its financial crises and firing of its AD in the eighties to stabilize and move forward again - and even now is doing so very cautiously. It may take several years for Miami to find itself again. Also Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine were great choreographers here in the States, just as Marius Petipa was abroad. There is no need really to set them against each other.

McBride and Farrell attended classes given by Balanchine, Danilova, Felia Doubrovska and Pierre Vladimirov, all of whom trained and danced with the Imperial Ballet in Russia before 1920 in the classics and in their newly revised forms. Eglevsky trained with Lagat. Many of the Cunningham dancers had in-depth classical training. Picasso could paint like Ingres, but he chose to paint in the manner of the period in which he lived - as was the case with Cunningham and his contemporaries. If Picasso and Matisse hadn't developed their own idioms, there would have been none of the great (non-Duchamp) New York school works of the 1950s and 1960s. Ballet's fascination with, and distraction by, its Ingres period, and not finding new idioms and a philosophy in which to base them, is resulting in the few, often stilted, contemporary productions it does manage to come up with. The fact that classical ballet has survived at all is in part a result of the Cold War competition between the USSR and the US (and Cuba) and the Ford Foundation grants that helped keep it going. All that's fine. But MCB cannot possibly afford to maintain a school and production facilities for productions of brilliant and expensive shows that reflected ideas of Empire in the 19th century - as carried over through the Cold War.

I'd add the following (mostly longshots) to Adonis & Djebar: Peter Nádas Don DeLillo Anne Carson Juan Goytisolo Karl Ove Knausgard Alice Munro Peter Stamm Cesar Aira (whom I believe is popular in Japan with Murakami readers) Here's Nicerodd's list of odds: http://www.nicerodds...e-in-literature Added: A friend suggests that Elias Khoury, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Amin Maalouf might be good bets, although they write in French which might count against them. * samples, from Nádas's Parallel Stories: & Cesar Aira: Alice Munro, Amundsen:

Lilac Garden was done by San Francisco Ballet a couple of years ago and it was fine, but it seemed very much of the time when it was choreographed, when Freud was popular and everyone was keen on inventorying the repressive matter of their subconsciouses. For me it would be difficult to sit through a ballet based on Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which is so fully realized it needs no visual commentary, no matter how fine the choreography, or to watch ballets in which characters are called The Man from Next Door or the Woman He Once Loved. Added: though you could say Orpheus and The Four Temperaments bear some of the marks of the same period.

Moonlily: What it seems like is that the ideals of masculinity and partnering being presented here are being so truncated that dancers like Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Ib Andersen would no longer make the grade. Again, you dance with your whole self and you don't have to work harder. If you're authentic, no one cares about your delivery. Look at the huge appeal of Nureyev in a less enlightened time than ours. (Or was it?) Good actors throw themselves so completely into their work, doing all sorts bits of fine tuning as they go along, that this self-consciousness of am I straight acting enough isn't even a tiny consideration. The act of performing onstage is itself the erotic thing. Anyway, it seems implied here that for a gay male dancer to dance with female partner is no fun and rather like having to brace up and each one's spinach.

cubanmiamiboy Perhaps Gomes is too discreet for his own good. If you put Nureyev and Gomes in two theaters side by side, Gomes would sell five tickets to tens of thousand for Nureyev. Nureyev danced with his whole being - whatever you think of his technique - and thrilled everybody. He was the one who broke the mold. And again this straight-acting advocacy, at least in outline, reads like an entry in a 1950's magazine column addressed to African Americans on how to behave if they want to get ahead - that they will have to work twice as hard, etc -

Yes, this is rather bizarre - in that they've had a great reputation for the last 15 years. Do they want ignore their legacy and start from scratch? I really was wondering about the influence of the new donors - from Palm Beach or wherever - and if the position of artistic director has been weakened. (In New York terms, is Palm Beach the equivalent of the Upper East Side and Miami Beach Soho or Chelsea?) I don't know how you build up ballet audiences. In San Francisco the ballet seems to be financially secure and an important old money meeting spot, but as a result the content is not terribly adventurous. In the old days in New York there was great interest from the visual arts and literary communities - painters and poets - in City Ballet, a sort of association which continued to the end with Cunningham. Now there's an attempt at a fashion crossover at City Ballet - which might not be bad thing - Diaghilev had Chanel and Christian Berard, who mentored Dior and inspired the New Look, did the sets and costumes for the 1933 Mozartiana. Martins tried to involve painters in designing sets, but unfortunately picked the wrong artists - bombastic painters whose careers peaked in the 1980s.

From Palm Beach Daily News - http://www.palmbeach...-powerho/nSMp9/ These comments seem a bit mysterious, at least to someone who has never been on a board: Building the ballet's reputation rather than selling tickets; more attention paid to Palm Beach; and more board members' input on what activities would be meaningful. Is the artistic leadership shifting to the board level?

Actually the whole discussion on what shocks is interesting. Anthony Tommasini points out that Schoenberg and Debussy were probably writing more radical music at the time Stravinsky was composing Rite of Spring. Also that Jeux is much more difficult than Rite of Spring for an orchestra to get right and is seldom played today. He also mentions that the original story for Jeux is a tryst between three men in a park rather than a man and two women - perhaps something of Diaghilev's original idea still showed through.

Though I've never seen Marcel Gomes in person, he looks as though he's a great partner. But should a gay male have to turn off his personal sexuality when he's on stage? Doesn't dancing comes out of one's love of life with one's whole self, and isn't dancing supposed to be about truth not self-censorship. Sorry for being sensitive about this, but the drift of this thread seems to be about giving MG an honorary "straight male" membership.

According to D'Amboise, Balanchine says "Like Van Gogh – cut off his own ear," both justifying it and chalking it up to madness. And yes it's the eliminated steps without something else as telling or witty added. It's like Gore Vidal's example of the classic American cake recipe that every year or so has one expensive ingredient left out. Mozart Divertimento #15 now (perhaps it always did) seems too long - this was a criticism in London of San Francisco Ballet performance - in part because the slow movement is not delivered with the gravity and deep seriousness - and sense of its oddness - that it needs, and the contrasting light parts don't have quite the type of witty delivery you see in film clips of ballets such as Pas de Dix, or in the recent Miami Paris video of Square Dance.

pherank: Does anyone know if the Royal Danish Ballet stages the 1931 version of Apollo today? [more OT] My sense from reading historical reviews is that there are not two versions of Apollo but many versions over the years. According to a London reviewer, the 1928 version had a scene where Apollo is balanced on the feet of the muses. Alexandra Danivola (1986) says "Today it's a different ballet... . What I danced was lighter, smaller, quicker. I did fifth, arabesque, fifth, arabesque – nobody does that anymore." The birth scene was reportedly modified after Balanchine saw a dancer do some Martha Graham warm-up exercises which he included – so the current original is not the same as the '28 or '31 originals. Apollo seems to have changed tone again when it was revived alongside the premiere of Agon, after which it was taken (and danced?) far more seriously. NYT 1943 Stravinsky Leads his Apollo - The work was first produced in Balanchine’s version in 1928 and it bears strong impress of that period of artiness and affectation... It is “moderne” in the late Diaghileff manner NYT 1961 The New Apollo - As Mr. Ludlow plays him, Apollo is essentially the half divine lad whose birth by a human mother we have just witnessed, and the line of his progress toward godhood develops with winning transparency before our eyes. Indeed it has never before been so clear that this is the “plot” of the ballet.

And how freely Robert Barnett dances... In inventiveness this version of Western Symphony seems more like one of the Warner Brothers cartoons of the same time rather than contemporary musicals. The scherzo develops fewer ideas than the other sections, so maybe that's why it was dropped. And every now and then there seem to be odd structural remnants of Swan Lake or Giselle or some other sad Petipa work, but here they laugh.

I thought so too. And he's pretty good in Tomasson's Trio, a clip of which is included in Domitro's Artist Spotlight video at the SFB website. The part was probably made with some of his dancing characteristics in mind. And hard to imagine Nine without Isaac Hernandez, still in some of the publicity stills, who's now dancing at Het Nationale Ballet.

I don't mind the loss of intricacies, it's the layer of schmaltz that's applied - knowing smiles (which I've seen even in the 4Ts) and over-reverentiality, the feeling that the dancer is doing it for her or his resume (but of course everything has that stamp on it today). I thought Farrell Ballet was most successful with slow ballets like Somnabula, which they did quite movingly, rather than allegro works like Union Jack. Villella seems to error on the side of crispness, sharp hand movements, snazzy finish but I think that's a better bias for restaging, at least for fifties/sixties Balanchine. Kyra Nichols said that when she inherited old Balanchine roles, she stripped them - like an art restorer - of their previous interpretations, back to their bare bones and worked out from there. That might be a good way for a restaging to start.

That's the thing with this performance and the Paris Opera Ballet's record of "Jewels" that always drives me a bit crazy - it's Balanchine leaving all the prickly Balanchine business out. Both companies present the dances smiling and beaming and slightly apologetically, as if what they were doing were a little joke between the them and the audience. Rather than a dance that unfolds behind the proscenium of its own inevitable internal logic. Alicia Alonso in her "Theme & Variations" tutorial video makes an important distinction that holds for even that very extroverted ballet: now this part is presented for the audience and this other part is just before you two, very private.

There's also an interview with Helgi Tomasson in the Financial Times. It focuses on San Francisco Ballet being a leading model of a post-Balanchine company in the States. Tomasson says that the curatorial choices that Robert Joffrey made were a great influence on him. Steps in the right direction: http://www.ft.com/in...l#axzz26I1u1enq