Quiggin

Either Danilova or Tallchief mentions in her memoir that before the new ballet season all the ballerinas would lose weight by going on a diet of chocolates. So Tallchief is not distorting the truth here.

This has turned out to be a great and beautifully realized Balanchine triple bill. Divertimento #15 is much stronger than last time around - and who would have thought it could look as radical a restatement of the rules of ballet as The Four Temperaments. In Vito Mazzeo is a great post-Adam Luders Phlegmatic, with an incredible sense of plastic space - competing with the brilliant Sofiane Sylve, Choleric and Taras Domitro, Melancholic. In the three ballets you see all sorts of new things - like the lovely, Nijinska-like thatched hut that the corps constructs, piece by piece, over the two soloists at the end of Scotch Symphony. Eyse Borne, Maria Calegari & Bart Cook were the Trust's repetiteurs.

kfw I would think Apollo would too - one of Diaghilev's stages, the Lyceum in London, is 13 meters wide. Ballets like Symphony in C definitely look much more at home at State Theater than City Center - but I wonder if on the whole Balanchine was going for the longer, lower, wide 50's expansionist look. Here's Allen Hughes' take in May 1964 in the New York Times: also: Helene She was a wonderful dancer to watch - but it will be interesting to see Four Temperaments staged by someone knows it from having been in a production that Bart Cook or someone else from the Trust staged several years ago. It is a bit of a remove. Jack Reed Verdy's apparently the magic key to Balanchine - and to Robbins. But Villella (and Roma Sosenko?) is transmitting something of the overall architecture and animal spirits and spash that seem to be lacking in the other revivals - at least the one I've seen in person and on DVD.

Helene Yes, the size allows double and triple casts - and big productions such as the wonderful Coppelia, co-produced last year with PNB, and Jewels three years ago with an especially good Emeralds. However, sometimes it's just too big, with corps members wandering back and forth in loops in the background and defocussing the main action. SFB's Petroushka was an overstuffed thing - Diaghilev's stage and cast I assume was fairly small, more like the scale of Paul Taylor's version. I always wonder how different Balanchine's works must have looked when they moved from City Center to the voracious stage of State Theater.

sandik Lew Christensen and Jocelyn Vollmar had been Balanchine dancers, Christensen a late 30's Apollo and Vollmar in one of the first casts of The Four Temperaments. In the late nineties under Tomasson the company was doing Balanchine regularity, but there seems to be a change of emphasis as a result perhaps of teaching staff changes. A strong Balanchine coach left, and with Bruce Sansom as ballet master, there's been a move towards a MacMillan, Neumeier, Cranko esthetic. My sense is that the audience is more comfortable with opera-ballet type ballets - San Francisco is a good, if traditionalist, opera town - than modernist fare. Even Chroma seemed to be on probationary status the first year. Regarding transmitting a role at SFB, there is a good Interpreter's Archive video of Helgi Tomasson teaching part of The Fairy's Kiss - the extraordinary solo Balanchine cobbled together for him out of two roles in the original. It doesn't quite take with the same haunted depth on Gonzalo Garcia, a more extroverted dancer, but I would have loved to have seen it performed here. I think PNB revived it last season. Have there been any particularly memorable dancer/performances at Miami that have embodied a signature Villella style or approach - or too many to count?

California The website is handsome but difficult to navigate - you have to go through the tiny media center link at the bottom of the page. Among the new pieces: http://www.sfballet....on_Announcement

ViolinConcerto It does somewhat, at least with the earlier generation of Balanchine dancers. Suzanne Farrell's company seems to have something of an introverted - working out from within - character, if that's her style, which did beautifully for La Sonnambula but not for Union Jack. Edward Villella and his company it seems to me is more outward directed and in the expression and sizzle of counterpoint and the complete realization of the architecture of the choreography. Helgi Tomasson's is about a certain elegance and honesty and beautiful finish of each dancer's entrance and exit, perhaps at the expense the overall effect of the choreography, at least Balanchine's. Croce said Tomasson's "grasp of style has about it an almost moral tenacity." It never seems dangerous or that it's about to break all the rules. But San Francisco is moving away from Balanchine - only two pieces are programmed for next year, a reprise of Scotch Symphony and Symphony in Three Movements - and in the direction of Neumeier and Lifar - sort of bas relief, high drama works. So the continuation of a living Balanchine repertoire would seem to depend on City Ballet and Miami.

Mark Morris did Sandpiper Ballet in 1999 for SFB and Cunningham did a Beach Birds in 1991, which according to Alaistair M “evoke, a range of birdlife from penguins to gannets,” and many of his ballet have bird-like movements - in their own particular “state of controlled panic." Also Ashton did a version of Two Pigeons. On predator side of things, Diaghiliev produced a ballet about a cat who has been transformed into a girlfriend for Serge Lifar. She betrays her true self by still wanting to dine on mice.

Liebeslieder, with its intense Brahms songs, may work better for a serious opera audience or opera-ballet audience - as would Davidsbundlertanze. Ravel wrote La Valse, full of caesuras and moments of paralysis, to celebrate the destruction of the waltz and 19th century Vienna, and the Balanchine's version is just as dark. Anyway none of these pieces are not really general ballet crowd pleasers. San Francisco did Liebeslieder in the 1990s but now does McMillan and Onegin as its dark modernist pieces - and as a Balanchine company is only doing one program of his works this year. So I'd like to see Miami keep its sunny Balanchine reportoire in regular rotation and not become another New Works company. The problem with New Works for me is that they never seem to stake a place in the world from which to develop secondary ideas and return again - no symmetries of form established which would make the assymetries more bizarre. Everything is tenuous and unstable from the beginning. They're enjoyable but I tend never to remember them from season to season, and second viewings are never more interesting than the first. I don't find this true of contemporary architecture - which has entered a new period of classical modernism - or completely of contemporary painting (such as Robert Ryman's works).

Helene I think this is an important question because as ballet companies drift away from the classics - Petipa, Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor - they have difficulty restarting them once they come back to them. Or at least that seems to be the case at San Francisco Ballet where Raymonda this year - after several comtemporary programs - appeared to be a little stiff, to lack the sense of the dancers being at home in the classical idiom. (The production also seemed to struggle under all the visual weight of the too much goodness of overly-detailed, very tradtional costumes and sets). I know dancers are excited to have new dances done on them, for their bodies and particular off-balances, but few of these specifically tailored or bespoke choreographies survive from decade to decade, and it would seem to be difficult to build a core of new classics from these. Diaghilev's was a smallish company and they did revive things every couple of years, they had an identitiy and continuity yet they could surprise and challenge their audience each season. The Cuban Ballet is not a good business model because they have exclusive rights to their audience and few labor costs and probably couldn't survive very well the transition into a free market economy. San Francisco is well supported by a well heeled audience - money still regularly comes down to it from industries established in post gold rush days - but this seems to come with the proviso that they'll be somewhat cushioned from anything too adventurous. I wish Miami all the best luck in striking a good balance between its current reportoire - with its wonderful freshness of intrepretation and attack - and - just enough - new works.

Anthony_NYC And as much as Amazon has changed things not always for the better, the reviews are frequently valuable for sorting through editions and translations. I do see the problem in that the knowledge of librarians is being lost as they retire - things they knew such as the differences between Webster's Second and Third International and they compliment each other rather one superceding the other - or between various editions of musical scores, say Tchaikovsky without Drigo's revisions. Or between Nabokov's 1964 and 1975 translation of Eugene Onegin - though there is an extensive Wikipedia entry on this. The Suda online has an interesting catalog format, representing thousands of years of notes and overnotes - an entry of which I've abbreviated here - In the notes field of the entry on Adam is this comment: The great bulk of this entry -- 104 lines out of 117 in the printed edition -- is a tour de force of polemic by an unidentifiable scholar quite outside the type of neutral reticence which characterises most of the contributors to the Suda.

California Expanding on this, the thing is that Westlaw and Lexis gathered and published content created by the state as part of a sort of reciprocal agreement. West & Lexis used to charge nominal fees for access to print copies of case law, but now the online fees are exorbitant. In order to really research a court opinion you need to skip back though years and years of precedent cases to make full sense of the court's reasoning. Likewise the costs of using treatises on various disciplines of the law have increased several fold in the last decade or so, as hundreds of medium-sized and mom and pop law publishers have been consolidated into two or three giants. Paywalls are great and necessary to encourage new research and pay for investigative journalism, as you do with New York Times, WSJ and Financial Times subscription support. But it's unfair to have to pay more than modest fees, say $1 to $3 a hit, for content created long ago for virtually nothing. Regarding the NYPL, what would be great is if a foundation were to set up a project to inventory and describe their valuable Slavic and Asian and other holdings - sort of as the Suda was to Byzantine scholarship.

More and more of it is behind expensive pay walls. Small cites of law texts come through Westlaw & Lexis at $50 a gulp, and much of periodical storage is in Jstor and good luck in paying for that. And none of the original content providers seem to share in any of the royalties for their work. What's happening here has already happened in other fields: http://www.propublic...ehind-pay-walls

A librarian I talked to said that when things are in offsite storage it means they've in some way been already been culled or weeded. Part of the problem are the lack finding guides to get to the interesting stuff. Nicholson Baker poined out that when card catalogues were tossed, valuable informal notes fields - years of pencilled in comments - disappeared too. If new notes fields could be added to electonic catalogues where librarians and serious readers, such as those who contribute to Wikipedia - could leave comments about the particular value of an edition or variant or translation, this would be a great help in calling books out of storage. The migration of print to electronic is very spotty and will continue to be so. Getting in-depth material for serious research is quite difficult, much of it now behind very pricey pay walls. The problem with microfilmed materials is that the quality was very poor, and libraries tossed out the originals before they could be electroncially scanned. Some of the historical New York Times looks as though it came from previous selected clippings, from what used to be called newspaper morgues.

In San Francisco the libraries are supported almost passionately by the community and all the branches are very active - the Chinatown and Richmond libraries are especially busy with a fairly big social cross section of society. This may have been as a reaction to the events of a decade or so ago when the Main library moved to a new building which turned out to be too small to house the collection - and so large numbers of books and other materials unceremoniously went into dumpsters. Nicholson Baker did an article about the folly of this - of assuming everyone else had kept the full original, when no one had. At the New York Public Library this seems like a double scandal. An architectural one - of far greater significance than the controversial change of elevator orientation in Gordon Bunschaft's Manufacturers Hanover Trust Building - but also about Fifth/Astor/Lennox's gradual abandonment of its role as a research library. Wasn't that building renovated just 15 years ago with stacks added going into or under Bryant Park? What is so curious is that we're awash in angel investor money seeking new out new blockbuster Apps - which are really utilities for content - and no money to preserve and generate actual content. It's a world where content means "content curatorship," posting something someone has posted before, and in which no one will pay for newspaper stories thinking they'll always somehow be there, magically generated.

Here's a documentary innopac posted elsewhere and I just came across at Kristin Sloan's company website. It's about rehabilitating old costumes at City Ballet, in this case those for Theme and Variations. Interesting comments about the types of stresses - fading, oil from partners' hands - that costumes are subject to over the years. Maybe Symphony in C came up for its ten year rebuild and they decided to go for all new tutus - or else they wanted to make it conform to and look more like the later ballets that pay homage to it - like a Wheeldon, Martins, Possokov, etc! http://see.jaegerslo...-and-Variations

The simplicity of the men's black leotards is important too. By the eighties they were all black so you that could see pure silhouettes of jumps and the crispness of beats. But earlier pictures show white spats. Any impressions on the differences in performance by anyone who has seen both?

Hollywood is tricky indeed. When I lived there I would sometimes see stars at grocery stores and newsstands but not realize it until friends would tell me afterwards. They're smaller and plainer, often oddly proportioned and interestingly shabbier in real life than in the movies, and as Connie Wald mentions, The "unexpected qualities" are what we happily get on screen ... Also what was interesting about the Wald interview was how little time off from long days at the studios actors had for parties or for mischief, only Saturday nights (like dancers, whose Saturday nights are Sunday). And the sort of the flatness of Hollywood life Wald suggests shares something of the tone Joan Didion conveys in "Slouching" and other books. Even the discrete same-sex affairs on weekday afternoons have a sort of smoggy, Jacaranda tree-shaded mutedness to them.

I thought this interview with Connie Wald was interesting in that it ties in with many of the Hollywood discussions we've had here, and with the Oscars. It gives a low-keyed portrait of Hollywood & it jives with Joan Didion's essays on Hollywood - and perhaps part of the souce of her background materials, since she was one of the Walds' group of friends. A Hollywood Insider and a Map of the Stars: http://www.nytimes.c...-her-table.html

Towards the end Ghislaine Thesmar seemed to go into some detail about the origins of the ballet and one movement being in jet black, emeralds, diamonds, rubies, running out of money, Stravinsky and Balanchine "as thick as thieves" etc - much of which didn't seem to be translated. Did anyone catch the whole commentary in French? Really a lovely, very special master class.

The color range for dress seemed to be black or white or soft gold lame' - in sculpted statuette forms. I saw a lot of the ceremonies through the online backstage cameras at oscars.com, through the Thank You Cam, Host camera or the one on Winners Walk. The press room interviews were interesting. Christopher Plummer was both humble and contentious - and very articulate. He said that it wasn’t true he was the oldest winner, Chaplin had been - unless you consider that not a real Oscar which he hoped wasn’t the case. He also said he hoped to act for ten more years and then die on stage or in front of a camera; that he had been rescued from his life as “a very naughty boy” by a recent marriage; and that, as a young Canadian, his greatest influences had been Louis Jouvet and Pierre Brasseur - both of whom starred in Children of Paradise. I missed a short interview somewhere with Gore Vidal. There seemed to be some disappointment in the backstage halls when the best actor went to Jean Dujardin rather than George Clooney - that seemed to be the real moment of suspense. The onstage moments I saw seemed fairly staid except for the clip with Chris Rock. Billy Crystal was more like an august Claude Rains presence than a Bob Hope one, probably a reassuring touch. The Artist looks a lot like Singin in the Rain. It seemed like a very subdued year.

Actually LA is fairly conservative in its dress - refined Italian fabrics, subtle patterns, understated colors, beautiful cuts of clothes. Part of it is the soft light which rules out the dramatic primary colors that look so good in steely New York - and part of it is uncertainty about taboos and going overboard (for which see Joan Didion and Scott Fitzgerald). Plus with the Oscars you have to compete with the red carpet as background, and who could paint on a red canvas - except perhaps for Matisse? That's why black does well, the tuxedoed men especially. The effect of this upper east side group, who go back to Holly Go-lightly, is totally unimaginable in LA: "Fashion is commerce but ..." http://video.nytimes...100000001350071 * But Sturges, who after all invented kiss-proof lipstick, would be good with the contradictions and reversals, such as the wrong watches worn.

There may have been a comedy there for Robert Altman or Preston Sturges.

Interesting sidelight on red carpet wear: Hollywood's Pay List, Lucie Greene, Financial Times, February 24, 2012 http://www.ft.com/in...l#axzz1nQ8ZpRKI

He was originally Gianciotto, "lame john," instead of plain Giovanni. And here he looked as if he were out of Milton rather than Dante: the juicy role of Milton's Satan. Gianciotto gets hauled off to the seventh circle, Caina, whereas Paolo and Francisca, who sail lightly in the wind, are only in the second circle as a consequence of their "gentle thoughts" compounded with "a deep longing" - for which Dante sheds tears. The ropes this Giovanni/Satan gets nicely hauled off stage with - the size of those for a ship - are perhaps appropriate to the magnitude of his sin...The pas seemed as though it had slipped in from Romeo and Juliet, which Kochetkova and Boada did last year and may do again later this season.