Quiggin

I saw this at a large new cinema in San Francisco - built on the site of a recently demolished department store called the Emporium, which was the equivalent of New York Macys for San Franciscans. The long lively and promising line that seemed to be waiting for Nutcracker turned out to be queuing up for a Tinker, Tailor preview and there were only forty or so of us in a huge theater with its temperature cooled down for a full crowd. I liked the First act a lot - it seemed to be filmed in a coherent way - though you never were quite sure where you were sitting or how "deep" into the play your focus of attention was penetrating. I think one of the problems of the Second act was that its mixtures of angles and distances undercut the timing of the dancers. Each type of shot - close, medium, short - seems to suggests a different tempo, so here you have in effect several films going on at the same time. The best distance I thought (and maybe Bart would agree) was from a right front balcony, where there was enough background to give a similar figure-to-ground relation that you would get in a theater. Adrian Danchig-Waring was excellent, as Andre Yew points out - I saw him live a few years ago and I think in a video of Agon, and he has a a similar intense wirey dramatic weight as that of Jeremy Cox. Tiler Peck was like the old days with Balanchine, at least the early nineties, maybe like Melissa Hayden in her wildness. The grand pas solo of Megan Fairchild didn't have the quick back forth change of profiles, and the little cantering throws of feet forward (I don't know the name of that ballet step) didn't come off - in part because there was too much visual information competing in the background. There's a wonderful quiet and dim clip somewhere online of Wendy Whelan's Arabian, which as much as anything captures the magic of NYCB Nutcracker.

This Film Society Lincoln Center annual series begins tomorrow or the next day late next month[!], January - and will hopefully yield a commercial release or two. http://www.filmlinc....dance-on-camera corrected per rg's note

Thanks for posting these links, lmspear - hopefully not too ephemeral. What a treat! I had forgotten how complex the choreography for Square Dance is - I remember Tina LeBlanc being brilliant in it here at San Francisco Ballet, but not that the corps doing steps as difficult as the soloist. Renan Cerdeiro's solo is fantastically well sustained and you see all of Balanchine's ideas developed with such grace and depth. Does the male do a pas de chat here - or is it in Ballet Imperial where the woman does a Sylvia-like fierce series of grand jetes ringing the whole stage? I watched this late last night and the Pep Boys commercials broke up some of the continuity. Anyway I thought of Ballet Imperial as having something of a relation to Allegro Brilliante, but the uncut version.

My list would include Dominique Delouche's Violette et Mr B which for me is so great, and one scene from Rene Clair's Le Million. I second Natalia's choice of Ballerine. I recently watched "Red Shoes" which in odd ways is a great movie, but found the choreography difficult to watch. At the end there seemed to the same simple steps over and over and it had me wishing that Ashton had chereographed it rather than Helpmann. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaCpQzkc1ik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QBUGClG5UM&feature=endscreen&NR=1

The Method and its allied techniques taught by the Strasbergs, Stella Adler, and Sandy Meisner, derived from Stanislavski (with whom Chekhov did have some arguments regarding the staging of his plays) were taught freely in Hollywood and New York in the forties and fifties. Marilyn Monroe might have not found them to be so foreign to her own talents. Though they seem to have acquired a subsequent bad rep, what great talents they nurtured! Wikipedia The British, for complex cultural reasons, did not seems to need these prompts. British acting is so amazing to me - I see someone like Robert Shaw in Pinter and think, where does it come from. And each line seems to come from a slightly different place and hit at a different angle.

I don't know if this has much bearing on how the movie was constructed, but the memoir "My Week With Marilyn" seems to have had little basis in fact. I read some of it at Amazon, and it reads a pure fantasy. The reviewers point out inconsistencies with Colin Clark's earlier diary, "The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me." From Celia, Amazon UK: Amazon US reviews go further: "Even his own brother Alan Clark accused Colin of later fabricating his own diaries." Here's book dialogue from one of the first meetings between Colin and Marilyn: Incidentally the casting for the American production of the stage version, "The Sleeping Prince," which had "vexing casting problems" (Robert Donat and Grace Kelly had been considered for the parts), featured Michael Redgrave, Barbara Bel Gedes, and Catherine Nesbitt, and on tour, Francis Lederer, Shirley McLaine and Hermoine Gingold. But don't the memoir and the movie seem in some way an inversion of the "Prince & the Showgirl" itself, with Colin as Marilyn? And how many "[famous person] and me" books and movies will there finally be?

There's a good interview, six minutes in, with Nikolay Tsiskaridze in part three of the documentary The creation of the Ballet Miséricorde, not unsympathetic - along with an interesting take on Christopher Wheeldon's wavering creative process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgtSo9Q-zYo&feature=related This New York Review piece - which may have been posted elsewhere already - may corroborate some of NT's criticisms. An interchange with the equisitely refined Vladimir Jurowski: http://www.nybooks.c...ois-latest-act/

By online content, I was being overly broad and meant blogs rather than publications like danceviewtimes...And dirac seems to have had more luck than I have. Quora is an interesting model in that it does seem to have strict ongoing peer editorship. The London Revew of Books, New York Review and New Yorker have blogs on the front page, but the material is shorter and more topical - and doesn't have the depth and shape of the texts in the journal proper, which the writer has had considerable time to live with and mull over.

aurora This is a good point. But again the medium is journalism and good journalism - maybe this is my bias - come from an off center point to make the subject more interesting. And I guess it could be compared to the off-balances in Balanchine, especially as discussed earlier in Divertimento N. 15 which is full of unlovely but fascinating stuff - the women look like Rodin sculptures being lifted by Giacometti men. Or the way a singer sings off key then slips into key for a nice contrast. I think the slightly awkward atypicalness allows the viewer of the photo to make the correction themselves.

I would add a major difference between online criticism and that coming out of traditional newsrooms is that there are no editors and editorial supervision or peer review online. What if instead of the Journal of American Medicine, it was left to individual online writers to review protcols? Think how much shaping and revision help great editors have given novelists, etc etc 4mrdncrs points about about the sameness of the reviews is right on too.

But it's important to remember that this is a newspaper - not a program for a ballet - and the idea is to report a truth, so the guidelines are different. No one would like it if a review were subject to the same sort of scrutiny and possible retouching - why is photography different? This picture I've posted of Balanchine before is very awkward and breaks lots of rules (even to the vigetting of the frame) but is considered a classic: http://www.magnumpho...PN=98&CT=Search & an ungolden Apollo: http://www.magnumpho...N=835&CT=Search a poorly composed Nureyev: http://www.magnumpho...N=960&CT=Search * This one also from Magnum has an interesting story with it: http://www.magnumpho...N=484&CT=Search

Degas' takes on dancers were fairly shocking and unattractive in their time - Huysmans characterized some of his ballet drawings as "cruel and subtle," but: "What truth! What life!" Unfortunately, dance companies are not photographed by photojournalists but instead by company or company-approved photographers, so we never get an outsider's view. It's as if newspapers printed press releases instead of reviews. Regarding Balanchine, lots of the interesting awkwardnesses in his works seemed to have become ironed out over the years, "not spoken of." The late 1970's video of "Divertimento No 15" is full of odd, angular, Degas-awkward positions that have vanished (I think I'm following Jack Reed on this). Degas was attracted to working class pretentionlessness - and this working class, no-nonsense directness of interpretation - but full of character - that used to figure in Balanchine performances, seems no longer to be there... So maybe the photos are true to life.

I'll post the dissenting opinion and say that on the contrary the photograph by Oscar Hildago is a good one, and somewhat in the same character as that of Villella by Bill Eppridge on the second page. It shows a good contrast between the soloist and the corps. Most contemporary dance photography tends to be overly romantic, and as photography, less adventurous than the choreography being photographed. It doesn't report. As a something of an antidote, check out the "shockingly banal" photographs that Walker Evans did for Fortune magazine ("The Boom in Ballet") and which were also published in Lincoln Kirstein's dance journal - was it called Dance Index? Also Alexi Brodovitch's photos in his book Ballet have some bite to them. Here are Evans' outakes: http://www.metmuseum...190029001?img=1 Also a bit unvarnished: H Cartier-Bresson at Magnum: http://www.magnumpho...&PN=2&CT=Search http://www.magnumpho...SH=1&SF=1&PPM=0 http://www.magnumpho...PN=19&CT=Search

Natalia: Also the second soloist, is it Constance Garfield?, is delightful. The New York Times December 4, 1955 review notes that Maria Tallchief was returning to the company after a year away and required a new role, that "there is never enought money to make a full-scale ballet with score and production," so Balanchine "went back to one of the ballets of his youth for inspriation." As much as I love to watch Eglevsky, he does seem to have strange expressions of skepticism on his face from time to time. John Martins' comment on his limitations is interesting.

"Choroegraphy by George Balanchine" (1984) notes that the credit "'Pas de Dix' by George Balanchine, after Marius Petipa" was used in later stagings. John Martin in the New York Times says: "a grand divertissement a la Petipa" "refashioned in his own style until it actually becomes his own" (1955 & 1956). Clive Barnes in a 1967 review of the Joffrey revival says a bit acidly, "Although the choreography is ascribed to Mr. Balanchine, in fact much of it is an adaptation of Marius Petipa's 19c classic 'Raymonda.' (Nowadays Mr. Balanchine even attibutes all of 'Swan Lake, Act II' to himself, a curious conceit probably permissable to genius.)" But earlier he had written that it was a "lustrous realization of a Petipa work." I find "Pas de Dix" to be something akin to a piano reduction of an orchestra score, stripped down in a modernist style. It's also broader and more of a burlesque than the original, especially in some of Eglevsky's moves, such as the in-turned knees. "Choreography" also mentions that for San Francisco Ballet's 1960 "Variations de Ballet" parts of "Pas de Dix" were combined with Lew Christensen's choreography to Glazounov's suite "Scenes de Ballet," Op. 52 (revised 1981). Also that Balanchine had staged the Petipa choreography for Diaghilev in 1925. The 1955 cast included Barbara Tallis, Constance Garfield (solos), Jane Mason, Barbara Walczak, Shaun O'Brien, Roy Tobias, Roland Vazquez, Johnathan Watts. There was also "foursome for the boys" (Martin) that is not in the Canadian film/video. Alternate casts included Erik Bruhn with Maria Tallchief and Patricia Wilde with Eglevsky. In one of Frank O'Hara's books a 1961 menu dejeuner for Bill Berkson features a dish called "Poisson Pas de Dix au style Patricia [Wilde]."

Thanks, Helene. It does look sharper and easier to read - every pixel does help.

The only difficulty for me is that the typeface, though larger, is a little more difficult to read than the older version. It's as if the pixel count is the same as a smaller face, or else it's not black and contrasty enough. Tech Crunch also has a sans serif type but it seems darker and crisper. I seem to have to resort to my reading glasses more often than I did with the old Ballet Alert. Also light grey type on home page and "posted today"s is a bit faint.

I didn't mean to swing the discussion so much in one direction, only wanted to point out that the softening of terms usually works to the advantage of the person who originally did not play fairly – and that splitting everything 50-50 after a 95-05 split works to the advantage of the person who benefited the most in the past. And as far as moving towards the middle, being kind and a moderate about things is concerned, look how much success Obama has had with Congress in trying to do just that. My larger point was that ADs have to jump past the audience and lead them to new combinations of music & choreography ... no more Martins/McCartney/Stroman. No more dry as dust athletic neo-modernism. There were lots of interesting experiments in dance at Judson in the fifties based on interesting venacular "found" movements. These and early Merce & odd Balanchines & twenties Ballet Russes like Socrates (actually MMorris is just doing this) & Parade that could be build upon, and could easily accomodate a mix of body types, and still be based on classical principles, variation form, etc. Don Quixote could surely be opened up and refurbished, much as the Mozart operas have been.

To use euphonisms for racism is really a form of retrospective racism. Rufus Wainwright talks about battles with low level or subclinical homophobia and you might say a kind of low level racism persists in ballet, which is very conservative and not terribly creative these days (and depends on infusions of talent from South America to keep going on – as it did from Russia in the sixties). The ADs have dropped the ball by not jumping ahead of the audience – as Balanchine jumped ahead, giving them some sweet things and then some choreographical spinach. One night here last year the San Francisco Ballet did a ballet called "Haffner," which is a sort of restatement of "Divertimento No 15," and during the slow movement where there are three men and one woman doing odd classical pairings and combinations, I realized halfway through that two of the men were dark skinned. It was not a statement, but the AD did not hold back on the casting. Simon has suggested by letting everyone be who they are – he gave an example of not putting inappropriate wigs and making fools of some of the dancers – and opening up the choreography a bit, you can reinfuse the moribund form of ballet with some real life. I always cite Michael Clark's 1980's work as example, when he was working with Leigh Bowery and The Fall, and with dancers of various body types, as the way to the future no one took. It was very open and heterogeneous, a bit nasty but all embracing. It's done on a very small scale but, in counterpoint and small groups of action, he's much closer to Balanchine than Wheeldon and Ratmansky are. And in use of costumes and bits of sets, the successor to the Ballets Russes of the mid twenties. * This has been a very depressing thread for me – not that I was ever a great activist, but it seems to want to go against the gains of the late sixties. Incidentally, the folk revival which was mentioned above was very white, well intentioned, but sometimes a bit much; and coy and humorless. Its focus was on groups like Holy Modal Rounders, not Robert Johnson who recorded in the thirties. The black audience at the time was listening to Smoky Robinson and the Four Tops or John Coltrance and Johnny Griffin.

It's an assymetrical problem, a one-way street of the dominant culture taking their creative goods from the minority. The aftrican american musical community has long been the content provider for the caucasian community – Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, and Bill Haley all did white versions of the music of Arthur Crudup, Fats Domino and Ivory Joe Hunter; Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell were doing the steps of John Bubbles (which they all acknowledged). The Rolling Stones' first two albums were mostly black american songs and came from the black experience, Under the Boardwalk, Carol, Walking the Dog, etc. So after the 95% - 5% split/robbery, you can't go back and say let's go even-steven, 50-50 from here on out. In the greater Americas, Alejo Carpentier addressed the hypocracy of the denial of black sourcres of the contradanza, the habanera - in Music in Cuba and Concierto Barocco and again and again. "The tango is Afro-Montevidean, the tango has black blood" says admits the ususally Borges against the revisionists. Carptentier: Henri Matisse on a trip to San Francisco in 1931: And look what anxiety about not having white-enough skin caused Michael Jackson.

Financial Times gives it two stars out of five possible: Regarding Gershwin's significance as a composer, Arnold Schoenberg gives a touching eulogy on this clip via Terry Teachout's blog.

That glorious Douglas Fairbanks Jr. cape sold for $1,280 The Versace beaded evening jacket might be something to replace it as an object of curiosity. Highlights

There is a very spirited tutorial on Emeralds in "Violette & Mr B," directed by Dominique Delouche – in a different format than the Interpreter's Archive - focusing perhaps more on the tone and flavor of the originals over technical details. Alonso's "Theme and Variations" Interpreter's Archive video, done with Josefina Mendez, is very entertaining – an event in itself, but it also gives important clues on which parts of T&V are to be presented brilliantly to the audience, and which parts are a private conversation between the two soloists. Tomasson's demonstration of the Baiser gypsy dance to Gonzalo Garcia seems to capture the eeriness of the original, and Bolender's 4T's is very fine – at one point he suggests, "here it's almost as if you're being unctuous". What's interesting about the videos and the value over the written accounts – at least in the five or six I've seen – is to see just how much of the original tone of the choreography can be transmitted to the younger dancer and how much can't. It's as if you're somewhere watching the zeitgeists of two decades having a conversation with each other. VV & Robbins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaCpQzkc1ik Link to Leigh's Dance View reports: Balanchine Archive

Bart: For me "I Remember Balanchine" is really the essential Balanchine book – or Balanchines, because all dancers who are interviewed have different points of view. The Elliott Carter discussion is also included. What I found most valuable about "Balanchine Then and Now" was the "Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fee: Ghost Stories" chapter about how Helgi Tomasson's solo was built with pieces of the pas de deux out of older versions. Violette Verdy's interview was also good but that may be in Mason. By the way, Artbook also lists forthcoming titles on Michael Clark (Violette) and Merce Cunningham (DAP). (And since Artbook done the curating in this case, it might be more appropriate to order these two from Artbook rather than Amazon, which acts more as a general store / clearinghouse.) Artbook

Thanks for the link - I ended up going through the whole catalogue. There's another Hurrell photo of Crawford in Lot 276 and a book in 277 which she inscribes to "Dodo" "in memory of our first year together," from "your boy." Also a George Bernard Shaw photo autographed "To Douglas Fairbanks the Second from One Who Remembers the First" (196) and a picture of Rex Harrison in a beard looking like Shaw. Lots of other great stuff - an eight day clock, a personalized note from Anthony Eden; suits, jackets, day clothes (from Stovel and Mason and H Huntsman & Sons), all with red carnations in the buttonholes; shoes, shoes, shoes, and very nice scarves, including a black and white that belonged to John Barrymore (273) - "the loosely tied scarf was often identified with Barrymore's idiosyncratic style of dress." A fine opera cape at 412: for the upcoming season.