Quiggin

The present owner: The original owner (sharing a certain hairstyle with Louise Brooks): &

Here´s a section of the recap (I kept looking for a second page of it).

sergelifars entered the mainstream for a while, but as innerwear or outerwear is the question:

Drew: You're right - Ashton definitely would have come closer... And the Balanchine sequence from "One Your Toes" was hardly without gunfire. OT again - there's a whole section in the novel where Pushkin as a character goes to the ballet (Eugene has left and gone home) and a wistful meditation on the beats of ballet dancers' small feet, followed by six stanzas ("the Pedal Digression": Nabokov) on ballroom dancers' feet: "in my sleep they [still] disturb my heart".

Onegin was done here by San Francisco Ballet his past season and as I read the book I was quite amazed at how different it was than Cranko's ballet, especially in tone - it’s really like Jane Austen in its gentle irony while the ballet is straight-on melodrama. Pushkin comments on all of his characters, not knowing really how he feels about them (maybe that’s why Eugene can be read as gay) until he finds he has placed them in awkward situations. Then Pushkin says things like “poor Titania, what have I done to you” and “my Eugene, are you only a parody of a person.” He makes of Lensky a shallow character, an abstactly philosophizing young student who has just returned from studying Kant in Germany. I believe Tatiana’s family is of the same class as Eugene's, though impoverished and Eugene may have been exiled to the country, as Pushkin in real life was. Tatiana loses herself in books as an upper middle class young woman may have gone with Cary Grant movies in the late thirties. She only discovers what Eugene was really like when she spends an afternoon going through Eugene's library after he has permanently has left his estate to wander aimlessly about the countryside. There are many moving parts in the novel which Pushkin gets to through his irony - such as the description of Lensky’s death done in two styles - Lensky’s own conventional one and then Pushkin's: “One moment earlier in this heart had throbbed inspiration enmity, hope and love, life efferversed, blood boiled; now as in a deserted house, all in it is both still and dark, it has become forever silent. The windows are shut. The panes with chalk are whitened over. The chatelaine is gone - But where, God knows. All trace is lost.” * Balanchine strongly disliked the ballet because of the pastiche it made out of Tchaikovsky’s scores. And Macaulay recently said that decades go by and he doesn’t miss seeing Onegin - though he does like finding out what the performers have done with the roles. And regarding the opera version that Bart B mentions: I only saw it once, at the Met in the late eighties or nineties and don’t remember much about it except that I was sitting next to two ex-dancers in a side box, one of whom had been in the original production of “On Your Toes” - about which she could only remember that Lorenz Hart was dreamily in love with a new girl friend (she may have been thinking of Bobby Hart). Afterwards I asked her what she thought of the opera and she said “too much shooting” and put her hands over her ears.


I've gotten used to hearing Loipa Araujo's counts and comments (along with an occasional car beep) in the background of videos of BNC lessons, but here's a recently posted one with Anette Delgado & Javier Torres where Araujo steps into the frame to make corrections (about 5 min 30 sec). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG630smVemc Short interview at 1:10 on the occasion (I think) of a recent documentary "Loipa, existencia en plenitud" by Gloria Arguelles, conveying something perhaps of Araujo's fierceness and charm. http://www.cubatv.ic...nt&view=article

I added the 1946 Mozartiana to the Ann Barzel list above - which is supposed to be close to the 1933 version Eliott Carter thought was one of Balanchine's finest works. I agree with Paul Parish about Mary Ann Moylan based on the clips in Ann Belle's Dancing for Mr B. Perhaps this topic should stay open and added to by anyone who sees any of these rare films and wants to add some commentary and notes for those of us who don't have access or, more luckily, may follow.

The 1946 recording of The Four Temperaments might be something to see. Also some of the Ann Barzel footage of Ballet Russe & early NYCB performances. From the library catalogue - [Keyword: Ann Barzel Collection http://catalog.nypl....rzel%26SORT%3DD ] Some footage of LeClerq and Tallchief in La Valse & Firebird are available at Jacob's Pillow: http://danceinteract...car=/artist/k-l http://danceinteract.../era/1950--1959 Firebird is incredible - as intense (and "interior") as anything Farrell did later on.

Thanks, Cristian for the report - would love to see some of this live - from the video it looks as though the dancers really love working with her, Diego Cruz and Joseph Gatti especially.

Bart, I see these dates on the last frame of the video - May Saturday 26th, Sunday 27th & June Saturday 30th, July Sunday 1st at Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. But alas no info at the Center website.

Florida Classical Ballet is also presenting a gala of works this summer, with Adiarys Alemeida and Joan Boada along with dancers associated with San Francisco ballet. Both groups derive from the Cuban National Ballet and I'm wondering if they represent different approaches to Cuban ballet - schools within that school.

Maybe someone can translate this bettter than Google and me - but here are some HK reminiscences of Balanchine-watching from koeglerjournal: Baden-Baden, 17.03.2012:

Long, two-part analysis of the New York Public Library plans, Lions in Winter, in N+1: http://nplusonemag.com/lions-in-winter

dirac: I forgot about Somebody Up There ... I always thought Newman started with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. I somehow never felt he went as deeply into the roles as Clift, Brando and Dean did, nor did he make them seem as personally dangerous. He was more of a professional ... and too nice a guy.

The grouping of these actors implies a method acting kind of authenticity as a consideration. Brando then would be first, and Dean second. Clift is the handsomest rather than prettiest. Newman is too late - and too clean cut. Fotofolio has published an unusual new postcard of Brando, a darkish close-up (not online).

Neryssa: Not only is it overused, it's a sort of an awful idea. I checked John Martin's reviews in the New York Times written about the same time as Ann Barzel's. Here's LeClerq's debut in Swan Lake, November 24, 1952: In March 1956, however, he gives LeClercq a rare unflattering review: On November 25, 1956 Martin sadly writes this: Robert Garis says at first he found LeClercq lacking Maria Tallchief's technique and persistence, that she gave the same part Tallchief had done inThe Nutcracker "only a lick and a promise." Much later he recognized her dance genius and realized that she foreshadowed the direction in which Balanchine would move with Suzanne Farrell.

"Reinventing herself"? This is a very bizarre performance - something Cindy Sherman or Laurie Simmons would do at the Kitchen or PS 122 if they were performance artists, making LeClercq into a manikan or play doll. O'Connor is capitalizing on the sentimentality that has accumulated around LeClercq's image over the years, with little of the original person left. I was going through my books this morning, thinking about Pamela Moberg's new topic about ballet libraries, and came across this interesting, slightly harsh take on LeClercq by Ann Barzel from the 1953-54 edition of The Ballet Annual: [Anyway I hope I haven't contradicted myself too much, but this isn't turning out to be a Penelope Fitzgerald novel on City Ballet - which might have been quite nice - like At Freddies.]

This production is a huge rich pastry of new layers and ancillary materials, as if Don Quixote had been mixed up with Coppelia. It’s quite pleasurable, though I found it difficult to tune out all the chattery and repetitious mime in the background. The dancing between Kitri and Basilio is still the main attraction. And there is a beautiful and very moving dance that has been added - a sort of sultry tango with a guitar, a Balanchine-like constuction where Kitri leans backwards, like the front wheel fork of a bicycle, and leads in tiny steps while Basilio supports and steers from behind. At one point he holds her and a guitar around her at the same time. I found the colors of the new costumes, such as the orange and teal blue combinations of the toreadors, often too bright and restless - overcooked Fauvish combinations that Matisse himself (who visited San Francisco in 1930) might have had to turn his gaze away from. Zahorian and Boada, Kochetkova and Domitro were in the first week’s casts and gave lovely and nicely contrasting performances. Domitro seemed to have fine tuned his approach the second time out on Tuesday: a bit more relaxed and all his steps and “tricks” were tossed off with greater ease and grace - though his round of leaps around the stage were just slightly less brilliant. It would be interesting to hear any comparisons between this, the previous version, and other companies' Don Quixotes.

Thanks, Cristian, for the topic and the clips, especially the Markova and Valdes performances. Here's an additonal, very charming, one - Alexandra Davilova, Jacob's Pillow 1952; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo version after Lev Ivanov: http://danceinteract...car=/artist/i-j

The Hubbe performance seems warmer - and the Baryshnikov precise and full of inner detail, but very taut and dry. The SF Ballet production of couple of years ago left Apollo some languorous moments and private unstructured time for his solo. Regarding the staircase, Balanchine may have been thinking of the Liubov Popova set for Vsevolod Meyerhold's Magnanimous Cuckold. http://www.glopad.org/pi/en/image/902 According to Marilyn Hunt's Prodigal Son's Russian Roots (Dance Chronicle 1982), Meyerhold's "theory of of the importance of distinct 'planes of action'" were an influence Balanchine - and perhaps on Apollo. Hunt also says:

Samuel Beckett liked the ballet. In his Letters he says he saw a performance of Petrouchka by the Woizikovski ballet at the London Coliseum, probably on September 19, 1935. Beckett says that he did not care for Les Sylphides at all, that Tarakanova danced the Widow (in L'amour Sorcier) and the Doll extremely well, and that ... Nina Tarakanova obituary http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-nina-tarakanova-1423155.html Previous BA discussion on the Beckett Ietters http://balletalert.i...__fromsearch__1

I was apprehensive about reading about Novalis through an English voice, and so I didn’t pick up The Blue Flower until only this year but then I was so happy I did. There’s a great scene where the young philosophers run into Goethe on one of his walks in the woods and break up into small groups because they know Goethe doesn’t like to run into too many people at once. It’s one of mixes of the grand and the everyday which Fitzgerald brings off again and again in the book. It’s as if she is allowing the great ideas of idealism their earthly body and analog - a gentler, kinder Dr. Johnson. Though it’s not exactly about a real person, Javier Marías has a scene in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me about a Spanish prince who watches a video of Chimes at Midnight late one night when he cannot sleep, and in describing it to his speech writer, he comes to identify with the Orson Welles Falstaff character. A nice meeting of history and artifice.

Cristian One never sees a ballet being performed twice the same way, even it it is the same ballet with the same performer. Very true – your eye seems to respond in its own different tempo of notice each time. Bart Scotch Symphony is also a joy! Yes, especially the last ten minutes which are full of add ons and second thoughts. It’s like Giselle in reverse – and at one point the corps surrounds the two soloist in the shapes of crosses in a cemetery. I saw SS with a couple of casts. Joan Boada captured the Eglevsky grand silhouette, overlaid with Boada’s own wonderful sense of timing and retard. Maria Kochetkova was light and spritely whereas Vanessa Zahorian was more reserved and contemplative, perhaps like Emma, or Miss Brooke with Will Ladislaw. Taras Domitro had nice, light shadings of character, and his beats in the finale were quick and rolling as a Scottish burr. His Melancholic was slightly less pungent than that of three years ago, with seemingly fewer full stops and ruptures in the fabric of the dance, but nonetheless quite compelling. Again Vito Mazzeo’s Phlegmatic – is he a surveyer in a small village? – was fascinating to watch as he measured off and recomputed space, and as he folded his long arms and legs to fit into a tiny part of the bird's nest he and his partners had made. But over the week the dancing seemed to grow more tenuous, or else my eye received it as such. There were also too many smiles and knowing smiles, most unforgivable in the andante of Divertimento and in the prelude of the Four Temperaments. They look like an apology for the seriousness of the dancer’s craft.

Kathleen O'Connell But Fitzgerald is so discreet and meticulous and uses Novalis' journals and notes to structure the novel. And Novalis sort of gives the writer permission in a fragment that Fitzgerald quotes at the beginning of The Blue Flower: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history." (And elsewhere Novalis writes something like: where philososphy ends poetry must begin.)

Beth Genné, visiting scholar at San Francisco Ballet, showed an image she had gotten from a conference in Russia in 2004 that demonstrated a striking similarity between figure in one of the opening parts of the 4Ts to one in a dance Balanchine composed for Young Ballet in St Petersburg. It's where the woman reclines on the man's back at a 60 degree angle. She said this fertile part of Balanchine's apprenticeship and early career is just being taken account of in the United States - though there are some good references to it in Elizabeth Souritz' book Soviet Choreography in the 1920s. It puzzled me too but then I looked at examples of sculptures and Hephaistus has long strong flexible arms that look as if they could have a wide arc of travel. Thanks for the report!