Quiggin

"vulnerability, playfulness, rebellion; characteristics repressed daily by the requirements of her trade." Those characteristics didn't seem terribly repressed when MK danced in Giselle, Emeralds and Rubies.

The image from Bart's link to the Danza Ballet's Phèdre / Psyché entry: Tamara Toumanova et Serge Lifar à la création / photo Lipnitzki

Only a few hours left to hear it - looks as though the link will expire late morning August 29 (Pacific time). http://www.bbc.co.uk...s/player?page=3

Balanchine fashioned his own choreography around a dancer's strengths and weakeness and so perhaps in Apollo and Prodigal Son Serge Lifar was at his best - and most beautiful. And maybe the rest of his career was an attempt to recapture that moment of great beauty – as with those moments of our the pasts that many of us try to restore. So the later ballets are static and make the dancers look "pompous" - as Edwin Denby notes - and are perhaps similar in spirit to fascist productions, such as Albert Speer’s, that want to monumentalize something and freeze it in time. That’s maybe where Lifar’s real collaboratist tendency lies. In 1950 Denby also says that with exception of Suite en Blanc, Lifar’s ballets have an “antimusical and desperate pound” and none would last. He does say earlier that Lifar in Icare has a a kind naturalness "that goes beyond the gestures required," and that his dancing moves him (this is in 1938). Denby also tries to get a handle on the Paris Opera style, and maybe this is a key to Suite en Blanc and some of the others. An Open Letter About the Paris Opera Ballet: And here is an announcement (I don’t know if it’s been posted here before) of another bit of foolishness:

It's funny I don't like violin showoffs, which tend to be syrupy, but I don't mind the piano showing off - like Sviatoslav Richter in his crazy Beethoven Bagatelles or Schumann short pieces. And if you don't go mad and all out in Don Q, when do you do so?

I think it's pretty much black and white in many cases. It was a long war and people did waffle. However artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Samuel Beckett joined the Resistence - Cartier-Bresson escaping from German prisions twice. With Lifar and his invitations to Goering and Hitler, it was much more than what he needed to do just keep the Opera Ballet going - which would have anyway been an attractive tourist destination for German soldiers. It was part naiviety but also Lifar's extreme vanity, which manifested itself rather dramatically on a 1938 tour when he challenged Leonide Massine to a duel in Central Park. Lifar was disgruntled that Massine wouldn't cut the solo part of a well-received dancer in Swan Lake. According to this October 1938 New York Times article with the long spooled title: Lifar off to Paris; Threatens to sue / Reveals That He Challenged Massine, Head of Ballet, to Duel in Central Park / Charges He Was Miscast / He Denies He Was Jealous of the Success Achieved by Alicia Makova: Interestingly in Lifar's second duel, with Marquis de Cuevas in 1958 over changes made in Noir et Blanc, Jean Marie Le Pen was one of the seconds of the Marquis. It was fought out with swords and though Lifar lost and had been "pinked" with a scratch, he was happy enough and cried, “Blood has flowed! Honor is saved.” Perhaps Neumeier missed the boat by building ballet around Nijinsky's life rather than Lifar's! I actually look forward to seeing it, thanks for the correction to Macaulay.

Paul Parish: Serge Lifar's activities during the war don't really look too good - out of sheer naiviety or who knows what. Look at this press release from Lifar in 1940: Jean Babilee, whom Lifar claims to have saved, says of Lifar, “He was a mythomaniac. I admired him enormously as an artist, he was amazing, but he was a rather ordinary human being. He didn’t save me at all.” Alan Riding in "And the Show Went On" says that even though Lifar sought out the Germans, he was not completely safe: Another reason Lifar gets bad notices on Nickwallacesmith is that his dancing technique is not the most sterling. John Martin noted in the NYT in 1933 that "his elevation is good, but in no wise exceptional, and his balance is actually bad" - which you can see here in the Bluebird coda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPIhUFFBZow It will be interesting seeing Suite en Blanc here next season at the San Francisco Ballet, which looks, at least in video clips, like it creates an interesting art deco, bas relief arrangement of space. Reading old reviews in the Times of his works from John Martin to Alastair Macaulay doesn't seem to be too encouraging though. Martin say his Giselle - "which might be called 'Albrecht'" - "is by no means rich in poetry, and needs to be played with the greatest sense of style." High style what it all hinges on.

Thanks, dirac, for posting that. I liked watching the cartoon of the process of the descent of Curiosity, and trying to figure out what would finally be left after all its separations. At some point I misread the text as saying that Sky Crane was the Unconscious, where it really said it had become "unconscious" as it had detached itself. How do I land on Mars? http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/interactives/edlcuriosity/index-2.html

Thanks for the links to discussions past, Bart. I liked this contrast that Alexandra gave: I thought I'd add Beth Genné's critique of Haskell's claim. It seemed that in order for the de Valois company establish its place history (since it wasn't to be a modernist group), it was important for establish the "Sleeping Beauty" as a landmark for its own basis of legitimacy. So it's interesting that Russian classicism and modernism developed almost simultaneously.

Thanks for the reference, kbarber. Our library has access to Jstor and so I’ll cite a small section of Beth Genné’s extensive reasearch in which she traces the “canonization of a classic” to a very humble start. However I would tend to go with Benois on the first wave of its history, though less specific than Haskell, for having the eye for Sleeping Beauty’s importance. Also there still is some difference between classical and “the classics.” Baudelaire is not classical, yet he is included on lists of the classics (Genné begins her essay with a reference to Bloom’s canon of the classics).

Bart, you're right about bringing it back to what constitutes classical, though there may be overlapping characteristics with complete-work. Scholl in Petipa to Balanchine says "The revival of classical aesthetics in Russian modernism is Sleeping Beauty's legacy". The whole ballet may be a metaphor for the revival of classicism after the 100 year sleep of the court - Benois was was impressed by the "special poetical charm' of this bridge. But who said it - or did it sort of say itself - or only become apparent in retrospect?

It was most likely Alexandre Benois, at the very beginning. In "Petersburg: A Cultural History", Solomon Volkov says this about Benois' rediscovery of ballet through "Sleeping Beauty": Benois in his "Reflections on the Ballet" says that he began to recognize "Sleeping Beauty" as a complete work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk. He credits its success to Ivan Vsevolonzhsky, as the head of the production - and not so much Petipa, that nice old man.

Keeping it just to economic rights: I think the difference between Ricky Ricardo stereotyping and blackface is that Desi Arnaz was able to become quite wealthy from his self-parody, and any humiliation was quickly mitigated by all the cash - laughing all the way to the bank, to cite the great American apothegm. In vaudeville, jazz, r&b, and rock n roll in the US there is a long history of black artists having their intellectual material robbed and reused without remuneration, and their lives ending in poverty. So whites in blackface are a pretty potent graphic symbol of this ongoing robbery - and not just a sort of wimpy PC complaint. But also: Whoopi Goldberg can bring all the Aunt Jemima dolls to the set or can use the term niggah as much as she’d like - that’s a sort of gallows humor allowed to the condemned, and shouldn't be read as a signal that everything is all right now. And the Native Americans were not only treated "insultingly," they were pretty much eradicated. Henri Matisse on his way to San Francisco in 1930:

S. L. Grigoriev in 1953 remembers Apollo this way - with swaddling instead of diapers and with Leto on a rock: Here are some stills of the 1928 production from Gallica.fr. In the first Lifar is turning away from Terpsichore, in contrast to Jacques d'Amboise in the 1960 Radio-Canada film. Danilova is perfection. http://gallica.bnf.f...32119.r=.langEN http://gallica.bnf.f...3200h.r=.langEN http://gallica.bnf.f...3208t.r=.langEN & an unusual photo from the Apollo program of Balanchine on a rooftop - E.T.A. Hoffmannish - in Germany? Added: I just came across another still from the same photo shoot - it's from Triumph of Neptune. http://gallica.bnf.f...usses%22.langEN

In his 1928 Ballets Russes program notes Stravinsky calls the un/wrappers déesses, goddesses. What's interesting as you read reviews of Apollo is how the tone changes decade by decade - 1928 is acrobatic, the 1937 version with Lew Christensen is serious, but the next production in 1943 is lighter. New York Times : Here are the Stravinksy notes whole (probably in English translation somewhere):

I always had salad nicoise in Los Angeles made with Belgian endive and thought that was the way it was done until I made a trip to Aix en Provence one year (on People Express, $99) and had it served with radicchio, which I misguidedly thought was a neat variation of the original ... Anyway it’s a charming idea that Balanchine was present at the creation of salad nicoise, perhaps alongside Auguste Escoffier, whose recipe Elizabeth David in French Provincial Cooking quotes. The divine Elizabeth says: She also mentions Pan Banis Unfortunately the idea of what is simple and what's in season doesn't hold anymore. Here's Salade Nicoise (2): So maybe the question should be: which of Balanchine’s ballets most closest approches his method of making salad nicoise. Perhaps Jewels is could be thought of as three versions: mache, radicchio, and belgian endive (or, more respectfully, witloof). Is Balanchine's version in the New York City Ballet cookbook that Tanaquil Le Clercq wrote?

Cristian: Actually I was looking at old New York Times reviews of La Fille and at Koegler's entry in Concise Oxford Ballet, and it seems that the lineage is not so pure. Some background: Nijinska, according to Lucia Chase, was unfamiliar with the ballet "and had to be taught it step by step from the Mordkin version by Miss Chase and Mr. Romanoff." Mordkin had previously added his own choreography to his company's 1938 production. [Footnotes on La Fille NYT Jan 17. 1960] And the Ashton version comes chiefly from the 1828 score of Louis Hérold, whereas Petipa / Ivanov uses the 1858 Berlin score of Peter Ludwig Hertel. Koegler notes that "the ballet was given its present title when Dauberval produced it at the London Pantheon Theater in 1791" (it was La Ballet de la Paille... before) and "not until 1803 was it seen in Paris." Interestingly in the version Pavlowa brought to the United States in 1914, Enrico Cecchetti played "the low comedy role of Lise’s mother and did some very amusing burlesque dancing”. [NYT] In the Times John Martin was delighted with the Nijinska version in 1940 and says, "Nijinska has staged her version of the work with a fine sparkle, and an attempt to suggest the flavor of another period’s art in terms of her own." But Ashton's in 1960 he ultimately likes more: "Short versions of the old ballet have been seen in the repertories of several other companies, and have been not without value, but for the first time it emerges as a masterpiece." But now double-checking Koegler, I see that Alonso's version is based on Alexandra Balashova's version done in 1946 for Cuervos. Clement Crisp in a sketch in the Financial Times in 2003: And this I thought was interesting because the score here is the older 1828 (but not oldest) one - but maybe it was an error. Jack Andersen, NYT, Jan 24, 1989: And I want to repost this wonderful clip that Cristian once put up of Alejandro Virelles doing a La Fille variation:

Thanks, Kathleen, for the great list! I've seen bits of Monica Bill Barnes on internet videos. The only adventurous non-mainstream thing I have managed to get myself out to has been - last night - to Shana Moulton and Nick Hallet's Whispering Pines 10, part of SFMoma's summer Stage Presence series - but closer to opera than to dance.

MoMa did lag a bit by the mid eighties but curators like Robert Storr helped bring them up to speed again. Along with their affiliated museum PS 1 - they do continue to acquire and show new stuff. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega begins with a meditation on a 2006 MoMa Project, Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho. As a big-tent institution they’re better than the current New Museum but less so than the Drawing Center in honing in on interesting new work - or so it seems from California and after a fifteen year lapse in art going in Manhattan. You could say Dia is more the fly in amber, but a fly of a significant period. What was good about Miami under Villella is that it represented another period of Balanchine, more the City Center period, fast and clean with clear accents, or what my idea of that period was like. It seemed to mix well with Tharp and other new works better than the sometimes overly reverential Balanchine productions of other companies do. Interesting about the new works outside ballet companies. Do you have a short list of lo-fi works that we, and MCB, should keep an eye on?

I too was surprised by the use of the word museum, the implication being that the vibrant repertoire of MCB had become just that. Could one say of the Museum of Modern Art or the Tate - that they have become irrelevant? Anyway the twentieth century in the arts is upside down and out of order. In painting you could say everything is a footnote to Picabia/Duchamp on one hand and Picasso/Braque/Gris on the other. Jackson Pollock famously threw a Picasso book across the room, saying this guy’s already done everything. As far as dance, many 1920’s era avant garde works are probably as interesting as those of the present after-modernism period - which under the flash and all the negative-space off balances seem oddly conservative and even reactionary. OT As to one of Helene’s comments - many of the others regarding the relation of art and business I fully agree with - I can’t go along with the assessment of Balanchine’s work as a function of his “Muses.” TJ Clark and Rosalind Krauss have done a great job in the last twenty years divesting Picasso studies of the Olga, Marie Therese, etc periods. (If you went that route, the Massine period of Picasso would be just as significant. And you could have a Bart Cook period of Balanchine.) Some alternative ways of dividing up Balanchine (atemporal) periods or interests, sometimes discussed in small circulation journals: The Waltzes - Cotillon/LeValse/Liebeslieder Petipa anxiety. With & against Stravinsky The fertile Russian period of the twenties into The Four Temperaments & Agon. (“At Zheverzheyev’s living room [ca 1920], I saw the works of many left artists, including Malevich. I liked the pictures though I didn’t understand them.” changes our idea of Balanchine being naive about the visual arts until he met Diaghilev.) Les Ballets 1933: Cotillon, Mozartiana, etc Ballet Imperial & Square Dance, which MCB recently did so brillaintly, at least in the Paris tapes, as worlds in themselves.

MIami Herald: I sensed the tours would be read a sign of over-reaching on the part of Villella when they were announced - yet they were brilliant success for MCB, Miami and Florida. Is a $1.5m or $2m dollar deficit for an international reputation so much to pay - especially in comparison to billions of bank money that regularly appear and disappear - and movies that lose tens of millions of dollars? A comparison to Edward Villella's situation might be Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's firing as campus architect at Illinois Institute of Technology. Following something like Balanchine's path, Mies came to the United States in the late thirties to teach at IIT, where he constructed a brilliant series of buildings which became a source and style book of modernist architecture. In the late fifties he was "let go," because in part, like Villella, he had neglected his patrons and because his buildings were thought to be too expensive (they were not). Skidmore, Owings and Merrill - sometimes referred to as "the three blind Mies" - were hired to finish the campus and they did so with less distinguished buildings. They a looked a little like Mies' but cost twice as much and really didn't make anyone happy. And there are many other sad examples we all know of founders who are tossed aside by money men, angel investors, etc - who often seem to have even have more delicate egos than artists' - for not fitting in with the program.

miliosr I think it's a real place, it has a gritty look - possibly Union Station in Los Angeles. There's a tiny bit of decorative iron ornament at the end of the shot that doesn't look like a Penn Station motif - and the Santa Fe trains ran only between Los Angeles and Chicago The cars on the back lot that Astaire walks by look different - no stainless steel and they are in New York Central dress. (enormous) photo of Penn Station: [http://www.shorpy.co...riginal#caption

According to Albert Johnson at a Pacific Film Archive or UCLA screening, Buchanan was very ill when he did the movie, everyone thought he would be dead the next day - but then he went on to live a few years more.

Thanks for the account of That's Entertainment, which I haven't seen for years. I don't think though that Bandwagon is unbalanced or blowsy. Nanette Fabray wears what could be a Simplicity pattern dress in the title song number, but maybe "Dancing in the Dark" is by comparison the en blanc scene. Anyway Bandwagon might be one of the most perfect of the MGM musicals. In "I'll go my way by myself" you get a nice glimpse of Pennsylvannia Station ten years before it was torn down (though what could a shiny Santa Fe train - complete with a General Grant car - could have possibly be doing in New York? (How did she get there? Where was she going?)). Regarding the condition of the Metro back lot, apparently the front office just kept buying more and more property in Culver City when land was cheap. They built and moved on, occasionally repainting old sets for new movies, occasionally burning them (King Kong for Gone With the Wind), or sometimes they would burn (Lot 3 in the sixties) on their own. Twentieth sold a great portion of its back lots where Century City now stands. In Hollywood itself the studios were much smaller, their sets wall neatly stacked along one side, like surrounding forests. One of the last small studios, Samuel Goldwyn, on Poinsettia Place and Santa Monica Boulevard, is apparently in danger of being torn down. I once painted sets for someone who worked at MGM and on the Wizard of Oz. The cyclone, which had frightened me so much as a five year old, was only ten or fifteen or so feet high, had been made out of cheesecloth and filled with carbon soot which fans below kept up in the air.

Kathleen: Also the Butoh theater reference is pretty long in the tooth by now. I tend to agree with Jack Reed but without using Balanchine as the standard. Contemporary choreography seems stuck with a vocabulary they don't know quite what to do with. Some of it seems to come from Michael Jackson, some of it from Merce, a lot of it is just athletic virtuousity. For example there's a sort of plane a dancer makes with the flat of one hand and then dips and passes under it. And a lot of zig zaggy neck moves. There's little partnering but lots of group activity, herding and splintering off. The choice of music may be the problem. With the Bacchae (which thankfully seems to have no connection to Euripides) the music by Paolo Aralla is not as rich and playful as that of his teacher Franco Donatoni, who I think can do no wrong. Raiding the Arditti String Quartet catalogue might be a good place for a choreographer to do as a start - for structure, warmth, and wit.