Quiggin

I remember hearing a man telling his wife at an ABT performance at the MET that he was happy that the next ballet was a story ballet, that they had really"missed the boat" across the way at State Theater by producing so many abstract ballets.

Maybe ABT could have a BAM week where they try out different things, like Love and Rage excerpts (but retitled and with Rauschenberg costumes?) or smaller cast workshop ballets. Was interesting to read Brian Seibert's review of early Paul Taylor works, wonder if there are strands of interesting earlier ABT experimental works that could be revived?

Yes, I do think Possokhov working in Russia right now is pretty shocking – considering that pretty much everyone one else in the arts in the west is not crossing that strike line. Wonder what Ratmansky thinks of that.

The 2023 schedule is odd for a transitional year, with indeed no Balanchine, Ratmansky or Robbins, the traditional SFB back list of choreographers. As pherank suggests, a section of Shostakovich Trilogy might have been timely –  even as a last minute substitution on one of the spring 2022 evenings.

New Works does takes much of the space, but I wonder if Rojo will make changes in some of the later programs, such as #5, to put her own stamp on the season.

The Abi Stafford article was written by general arts staff, not by dance critics, and may come out of a different "space budget." Julia jacobs is also covering the Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial and Zachary Small's bio states he has a bachelor's degree in art and political science and "is a reporter who covers the dynamics of power and privilege in the art world."

The visual arts reviews also seem to come from different departments, serious reviewers and general arts interest reporters, some at odds with each other. As with dance, I wonder who oversees all of this and how the critical and general arts staffs overlap. In this case Gia Kourlas or Brian Siebert may have written a different article, or have declined altogether.

I liked Maggie Gyllenhaal's dress by Schiaparelli, which looked as if it had been designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a Diaghilev ballet. And the dresses with their gathered and ruffled up trains remind me a little of Bo Peep and her sheep or childless Mother Ginger.

But what with the here and now of global warming and the tragedy of Ukraine, this Oscar presentation did seem as if it were coming from another planet.

No, I'm not going this year, Pherank. The prices of seats are double those of the regular season and there's no more standing room. Hopefully someone else will report.

The SF Ballet Gala is tonight, March 24, with works by Alexei Ratmansky, Justin Peck (Bloom from last year at Vale) and a new Yuri Possokhov piece. It begins rather early, at 6pm.

https://www.sfballet.org/tickets/casting/

I don't think it's been reported here but the dancer Artyom Datsishin has died of wounds incurred in fighting in Ukraine, as well as have several other Ukrainian cultural figures.

I tend to be more sympathetic to Ratmansky's argument than Baryshnikov's, though perhaps not quite so literally and not all of it. A country's art is backed by its whole culture and politics and is not in some pure category set aside. As the Ukrainian poet Serhly Zhadan is quoted a recent LRB Blog entry on Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, ‘Russia’s “great humanist” culture is going to the bottom like the invincible Titanic. Sorry, I mean like a Russian warship.’

So it's hard to be neutral or draw up the protective shield of the arts, as it was difficult to do so during the sixties in the US when Americans everywhere were asked, "why are you in Vietnam?" And Russians during Soviet times knew subtle ways of showing dissent.

Re returning the arts collections to Russian is an interesting problem. Putin signed off on the important Morozov collection, full of early Matisses and Cezannes. Wonder if it will become a hostage in negotiations. I think of the traveling Sarah and Michael Stein collection of Matisses that never came back from Germany after World War I.

Dispensable Traditions –

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/march/dispensable-traditions

La Sylphide was a very traditional production – dense sets that would have been at home in the 19 century. I would have liked to have seen a lighter, contemporary solution to the visuals. Sorry I missed Birkkjaer and Van Patten – and perhaps Bournonville (which is probably hard to pull off without regularly practicing the style).

What was most wonderful about Wednesday night was seeing Frances Chung again – in The Seasons. I had forgotten what a lovely and unique dancer she is, the way she stretches her phrases out so nicely. Her section, the Summer/Spirit of the Corn, seemed to anchor the ballet and make it retroactively come to life. Also enjoyed seeing Daniel Deivison-Oliveira again, dancing with such grace and lightness. Very happy ending with all the dancers in their colorful costumes in a brilliant, layered tableau. Would have loved to have gazed on it a little longer before the curtain came down and fixed it more securely in memory. (Maybe in the same file as Balanchine Coppelia).

It was a longish evening, almost three hours in all.

LitHub Open Source has a good podcast overview on the situation, bringing in George Kennan's assessment of the Cold War and Gorbachev's point of view. The title is misleading.

https://lithub.com/putin-doesnt-understand-the-first-thing-about-ukraine-masha-gessen-on-the-week-old-war/

I used to look forward to what Clement Crisp had to say and see who he had spared from his critical eye and found it sometimes quite refreshing.  Looking back at "the best of" that the Financial Times has cited, I'm not sure it dates that well. He seemed to have liked McMillan a lot and Balanchine but without quite understanding him ("asserts the rule of clarity over murk") and rather snobbishly chose Haydn ("so much greater") over Mozart. Not sure if Attila the Hun, invading hordes, and napalm are the best metaphors for one's dislikes, or if one production can set "the art of ballet back by 100 years."

https://www.ft.com/content/fe9f556f-4cab-46db-9cd2-9ce7b9169b4c

Is Gergiev indeed "one of the greatest conductors of all time"?  Yes, thanks for keeping us up on this, dirac.

I remember Balanchine's Swan Lake when I saw it in the 1990s as a strange, chilly production – all shadows and forest – but with some graphically effective sections. The Duberman Kirstein biography implies that it was done reluctantly to attract a larger audience despite the fact that NYCB's "mission precluded doing 'old hat' revivals,'" instead of clear, new (modernist) things. Kirstein thought the second act was the only part worth working with. The Balanchine catalogue of works lists significant revisions over the years (1956, 59, 64, 80). Cecil Beaton did the original City Center sets, which, though expensive, were to be part of the draw.

I always liked this odd empty stage moment:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_3r-VbpWUa/

Added: This detailed schedule of changes in NYCB's Swan Lake might show some of Balanchine's thinking, also be interesting in light of Ratmansky's SL in Miami that Cristian has been reporting on. From Balanchine Catalogue of Works. Hopefully no remaining typos

Quote

1956, traditional ending of pas de deux placed by coda for corps de ballet (to Tschaikovsky’s original score rather than the traditional Drigo interpolation); 1959, Pas de trios omitted and new Prince’s solo added to that music (Grand Waltz from Act II) replacing original Prince’s solo to fourth variation of pas de six (Act III), and traditional entrance of  Swan Queen in coda rechoreographed; 1964, traditional  Swan Queen solo replaced by new choreography (to Un Poco di Chopin, Op 72, no. 15, 1893, orchestrated by Drigo) and subsequently changed several times, Prince’s solo rechoreographed (to music from Act I pas de trois) and subsequently changed several times and often omitted, pas de quatre (Dance of the Four Cygnets) replaced by Waltz Bluette for 12 Swans (to orchestrated version of a composition for  piano in E-flat), role of Benno omitted; 1980: traditional Swan Queen solo and entrance in coda restored.

Her sister was Pat Passlof who did some pretty good work as an ab ex painter. Studied at Black Mountain and with deKooning. She and her husband Milton Resnick lived and and worked each in her/his own former synagogue on the Lower East side. Bio and paintings here:

https://www.ericfirestonegallery.com/artists/pat-passlof?view=slider#3

3 hours ago, dirac said:

It was Lea Massari who played Anna, who vanishes halfway through the movie and the mystery of whose disappearance is never solved. At least one critic complained that we lost the wrong actress.

You're right – it's been so long since I've seen L'Avventura while the other two I've revisited several times since. They're more cinematically interesting to me – the tracking shots in La Notte and the montage of city scenes at the end of Eclipse. I remember the afternoon I saw Eclipse, cutting classes, at a small cinema on the lakefront in Chicago on a day that seemed like an exension of the end of the film. There was a bare-boned mindset to the arts those days (Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, the Cahiers du Cinéma directors), "a mind of winter," that seemed to want to strip away everything false and hokey and get to a pure and essential style.  

 Asghar Farhadi recently made a film titled About Elly whose main character, like Anna, disappears midway through the film. 

Monica Vitti, "the queen of Italian cinema," died this past week in Rome. She was indeed the existential queen of four of Michelangelo Antonioni's movies – must see "events" of the the sixties, along with Antonioni's English language Blow Up, Godard's Breathless, Bergman's Persona, and Truffaut's Four Hundred Blows – and Balanchine's and Cunningham's works. (My own favorites were Eclipse with Alain Delon, and La Notte, but more for Jean Moreau's performance.) Afterwards she amazingly remade her career in light comedy films.

At the end of the Times obituary, Ms Vitti throws a little light on what was once the subject of many late night discussions, the mystery of her character's disappearance midway through L'Avventura:

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“That’s the one question the audience isn’t supposed to ask,” she explained. “It isn’t important. What is important is that Anna was carrying two books before she disappeared — the Bible and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night.’ One suggests our concern with morality; the other was a literary experiment in which the heroine disappears halfway through the book and is replaced by another protagonist.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/movies/monica-vitti-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

I thought the rule for smiles – Kyra Nichols once suggested this – was that there are outward facing ballets for the audience where you could smile and there are ballets that are introspective and for the dancers. "Liebeslieder" would be an introspective ballet and the only smile would be one for a partner or a smile about a fleeting memory. I imagine Balanchine saying you should smile with your body, dear – or with something like the hand gestures in the last movement of "Violin Concerto."

1 hour ago, Drew said:

The Ashton repertory, which presumably channels some of Nijinska's influence, but there may be other examples. 

Russian Seasons?

3 hours ago, Helene said:

To me, "poaching" is when an AD, themself or through a proxy, contacts a dancer in another company about joining that company, and I don't remember reading that Martins approached Garcia.

I should adjust my comment then. I remember that characterization among audience members at the time but also there were other scenarios that I realize now didn't square. In general there may be subtle, under the radar ways of letting dancers know they "would always" be welcome at another company.

The first Mozartiana and the Seven Deadly Sins came out of Ballets 1933, and who knows what else from Balanchine's choreography for Schubert Wanderer and Beethoven waltzes.

Ballets Suédois, with its dazzling visual design, was a company that left its mark on the scene. (There's a beautiful, not too expensive Abrams book on their work – costumes, sets, still from productions available at through ABE.). And at the same time Picabia was doing Ballets Suédois sets, 1924, Picasso designed Mercure for Soirées de Paris, whose nightmarish starry effects show up again in Stedelijk's Still Live with a Mandolin.

Gonzalo Garcia, who trained at San Francisco Ballet and became a leading principal, /// left suddenly for City Ballet at the end of the 2007 season. It was the first time I heard the term "poached" associated with a dancer. Leaving suddenly for another company like that made an awkward situation when Garcia came back to dance at Tina LeBlanc's farewell and shared the stage with Helgi Tomasson to whom he seemed invisible– or so it looked from the audience. 

[Modify to reflect Helene's comment]

None of the online Los Angeles telephone directories at the Los Angeles public library website seem to have a Balanchine or Kopeikine listing, but the reference desk might be able to help you by some other means.

And the Margaret Herrick library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may have some specialist directories. They do have an intriguing listing in their Lady in the Dark file that could possibly yield an address:

Quote

Carbon of a letter from William Dozier to Jacob Karp outlining the deal with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, August 24, 1942; outline of deal with George Balanchine, December 9, 1942

A friend in the Stravinsky circle (her husband was a Russian ex-patriot who left during the Revolution) said Balanchine and Maria Tallchief would regularly visit (and stay at?) the Stravinskys' house on North Wetherly in the later forties and fifties. I begged her for information but she hadn't been interested in Balanchine's work, so she didn't notice much. Said he was fairly quiet.

https://collections.new.oscars.org/Details/Archive/71458940

Please let us know what you find out.

Added: would the NYPL Robbins Dance Division have 1940s letters to or from GB in Hollywood?

Many of Tomasson's commissions were parts of festivals which are done in relatively large batches and would have less sticking power than say a single ballet by a well known choreographer during a season. 

Loipa Araujo was a member of Roland Petit's company (Wikipedia says she was an "important muse" for him). so she presumably knew his aethetic well and how to stage "Le Jeune Homme et la Mort," which might have been a factor in it being kept in ENB's repertory.

17 hours ago, vipa said:

Forgive me if it's already been posted here but here is alastair Macaulay's very interesting take on Rojo's Raymonda.

Some of it seems to overlap with Cappelle's comments – though Macaulay gets demerits in the comment section for using Hollywood films of the 1930s as a negative example of the art form.

Re: associate artistic directors – interesting oral history of Loipa Araujo conducted by Sarah Crompton about Araujo's travels from Cuba to different companies in Europe before ending up at the English National Ballet just as she was ready to retire – and what she took away from her various experiences here and there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RU295huqrQ

On ENB Raymonda:

https://www.ballet.org.uk/people/loipa-araujo/

And Teri McCollum's 2012 tribute to Lola de Avila as she was leaving her San Francisco Ballet directorship:

https://odettesordeal.com/2012/03/17/after-brilliant-career-as-san-francisco-ballet-schools-associate-director-lola-de-avila-steps-down-patrick-armand-steps-up/

14 hours ago, Helene said:

If Rojo brings reconstructed stagings of the classics to San Francisco, the company might be working with Doug Fullington: he was at ENB for Raymonda

According to Laura Cappelle's review of "Raymonda" in today's Times, his influence was limited: "Rojo asked a notation specialist, Doug Fullington, to help, but has kept little beyond the women’s variations." All in all, she finds that Rojo's choreography borrows indiscriminately and results in "a messy 'Raymonda'":

Quote

The urge to tie the plot to Britain and to fix its Orientalist aspects is understandable, but Rojo’s “Raymonda” pulls in too many directions at once to cohere. One minute, it is a 20th-century romantic drama; the next, it goes back to the 1898 original, with reconstructed set pieces. It also nods to Soviet-era alterations and to other Petipa ballets, while including reimagined character dances by Vadim Sirotin. It is impossible to keep track, and worse, the constant tonal changes are treated as unimportant, as if style made no difference to the audience ...

Total reimaginings can work, as Akram Khan’s “Giselle,” one of Rojo’s commissioning successes, showed, but a serious art form should set higher standards of coherence for the versions it presents of classics.

Regarding changes of Tomasson's San Francisco company, before 2012 it seemed that many of San Francisco Ballet's dancers were coming from Spain or Cuba – Diego Cruz, Dores Andre, Clara Blanco, Gonzalo Garcia, Sergio Torrado, Ruben Martin, Moise Martin, Jaime Garcia Castilla, Katita Waldo / Spain – & Taras Domitro, Joan Boada, Lorena Feijoo, Jorge Esquivel (character actor and coach) / Cuba.  Lola de Avila was then assistant director of the school (Patrick Armand's current position) and helped with SFB's production of "Giselle." SFB is different company now but I would have a hard time characterizing it. Interesting how gradual changes of dancers on the roster affect the aesthetic of the company,

4 minutes ago, Drew said:

I think being close to New York is a double edged sword for ballet companies that aspire to be (or are) "world class"....San Francisco and Pacific Northwest Ballet perhaps have some advantages...

You are right. Distance has given San Francisco, a city of only 800,000 or so, a greater national influence than it might have otherwise.

Sergei Prokofiev, Jan 18, 1926:

Quote

Packed my things, rehearsed the Third Concerto in Schmidt’s room and wrote postcards. San Francisco is one place from  which it is essential to send postcards to Europe as everyone there knows that San Francisco is somewhere at the ends of the earth.

Don't think the cost of living in San Francisco is as high as London. It's a lower profile city and you can somehow live in less expensively. You don't have to spend much to appear stylish since you can wear the same things here for years and there's a tech-led dress down aesthetic. In general you can get  by on little without anyone noticing much.

But it is worth pondering, as pherank suggests, why Tamara Rojo chose San Francisco, rather than somewhere like ABT which might have been a possiblity. Perhaps she feels she'd have a freer hand, they'd be fewer groups she'd have to please, less politics. That SFB would be a blank slate for her to remake.

San Francisco was at one time considered the most European of American cities but it is a bit distant from things and as a result not that influential in the arts (at least in the visual arts). It's not a two hour trip away from say New York as Philadelphia or Chicago are, making it easy to check out what's going on in the rival city (like the second of the Jasper Johns shows Kathleen O'Connell recommended). It doesn't tour to the east coast very often. And within the city there's not an ABT vs NYCB-like creative tension. As Joan Didion has remarked, it can be a bit sleepy here.

Interesting circle Isaac Hernandez has made, leaving San Francisco Ballet with Victoria Ananyan for Netherlands Ballet, then rather shortly after being made principal moving onto English National Ballet and now back to San Francisco.