Quiggin

Here's a nice clip that may have been posted before - it has a charming Edgar Degas point of view.

I don't know if this Chrysler Corporation futurist-consumer commerical should have a thread of its own, or be considered as context for PAMTGG. The last 40 seconds might have been directed by Stanley Kubrick based on William Gaddis stage directions. This is its companion piece about "the driving control from the future." As a fetishistic object, it could be a prototype of an iPod or iPhone:

I'd probaby go to any Miami City Ballet casting combination - in my mind they have such a strong company style and the ability to dance Balanchine with the appropriate accents, so that's what I'd go to see them for. San Francisco Ballet seems to be several companies in one with different styles so I definitely look at the casting. Isn't Ballet Talk itself based on the phone tree of last minute casting changes at at City Ballet?

I found this comment of Mahler to Natalie Bauer-Lechner helpful - and not that different from how a good choreographer (or writer) might voice a work. I think it refers to the First symphony with its startling passages for violas: &: & Otto Klemperer: When I lived in New York, I was fortunate to hear Klaus Tennstedt often guest perform with the New York Philharmonic. Mahler become a model for understranding all the discontinuities of New York. Now I listen listen a lot to a recording Bruno Maderna made with the Vienna of the Seventh - which seems to be everybody's least favorite symphony - but Maderna gets all Mahler's little simultaneous flows and counterflows just right.

papeetepatrick: Apologies for trying to string too many vague impressions together. I was thinking of Cioran's "Notes on a Winded Civilization" which I read a long time ago. But leaving that out, I was interested in hearing why opera seems to be on the upswing, with interesting productions of the Makropulous Case, La Grande Macabre and the 19th c repertoire of course, and how opera seems to speak to our time more than ballet does ... It seemed to be a good side topic here. The sort of light wit that informs the variations in Mozartiana, Pas de Dix, the first movement of Symphony in C seems to be in short supply these days. It seems difficult for dancers to draw on examples in their own experiences in order to bring some of these ballets over to the audience with appropriate quick and free brilliance. The Cubans certainly do it, but they're still drawing on sources and lines of teaching and cultural experiences which barely exist elsewhere. A sort self-irony seems to prevail in San Francisco and on the internet (which might be the same place) in choice of avators or on comments pages. It's different that the light self-mockery you used to see in old fashioned correspondence - for example, in Chekhov's or Elizabeth Bishop's letters. It is limiting, and seems to me pre-emptive, self-protective and self-censoring.

Max Goberman was working as conductor for Ballet Theater, Martin Duberman wrote the recent Lincoln Kirstein biography. The Igor Youskevitch cites come from him in "I Remember Balanchine," which seems to me to be to be the single best source book on Balanchine - ending up a very three dimension view - along with Solomon Volkov's "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky" interviews. I cited all that stuff because "Theme & Variations" has somehow become exclusively associated with Alicia Alonso, when it was created for Youskevitch, and interestingly Balanchine did not select the music. Also Nora Kaye and John Kriza were associated with it in the beginning. (I would love to see Sergei Polunin in it.) That said, I would think that Alonso's video would be essential viewing for anyone who is going to perform this - she emphasizes the shifts of tone and the conversational quality that it must in performance.

Helene: Young Ballet would be a great key to Balanchine's subsequent work ... often ascribed solely to American influences, jazz, westerns, etc. JH: That strikes me as false and pessimsitic and darkly religious - rather you might say we make ourselves into what we naturally are. Art reflects the society it comes out of, even ballet. Petipa ballets existed as a sort of odd repression or contradiction to the unrest outside, of the revolution to come. Diaghielev rode the waves of that revolution as manifested in the arts of Acmism, Cubo Futurism, etc. Balanchine was a part of the high modernist that followed - the anxieties of the cold war transmuted into art, such as the Four Temperaments and Agon. We live in very conservative time - without wit (who could imagine making a Mozartiana today?) or gravity - only a sort of preemptive self-irony. And how can new art come of that? The fact that opera has had a revival of interest - as JH mentioned - would be an interesting point of investigation, how it relates to the winded world we live in - and how our time relates to the mid-19th century when they were created.

In "I remember Balanchine," Igor Yousketich says that he and John Kriza ("Lucia Chase thought Johhny would be able to dance it") were practicing, when, in a reflection in a mirror, Balanchine saw a ronde de jambe one of them was doing, and that became the starting point of the revised choreography. Yes, "Theme and Variations" was commissioned from Balanchine as a vehicle for Youskevitch "that would set off his premier-danseur skills to best advantage" (Charles Payne). Youskevitch had replaced Andre Eglevsky and was having trouble with abstract and modern ballets. There were parts of "Apollo" that he said had "no emotional maturation to justify the steps" and that he had a hard time remembering. The idea for the ballet originated with Max Goberman who had been going through the Tchaikovsky score and "was struck with the thought that the fourth movement might serve as the music for a ballet in the Petipa style," as "Princess Aurora" had served for the company before. Alicia Alonso did share the woman's part with Nora Kaye (who was around when it was being constructed) and Maria Tallchief, but only Youskevitch danced the male role for the next ten or so years. According to Duberman, Balanchine had earlier said "he personally felt 'very strongly against Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso,' two of Ballet Theatre's stars, 'dancing my ballets,' characterizing both as 'mythical ballerinas.'" Kirstein was happy for Balanchine's first great success in the US but thought that "Theme and Variations" "'is not at all a first-class work.'" * The Alicia Alonso and Josefina Mendez Balanchine Foundation tutorial of "Theme & Variations" is really worth while to watch, one of the best - Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella are the students. AA teaches them things that are skimped on in performance - certain matters of tone and presentation ("now after a laugh, you're getting serious").

papeetepatrick: Yes, very much so, the tone and everything. Corrine Luchaire reminded me of Barbara Stanwyck just when she first came in. I think the movie works between the three actors - Visconti admired it - but it's very thirties French and the rooms seem the same rooms in all the movies, with a movie set quality to them. That most thankfully changed when Robert Bresson, and then the New Wave, came on the scene. The open scenes of "Ossessione" are great - they take in the whole world, and much of its social makeup at that time. The lens is wide-ish, like the early pictures Cartier-Bresson did in Spain. And when I looked at the scenes with the umbrella seller, I was reminded of "La Strada" [corrected from Nights of Cabiria] and the Richard Basehart character. Yes, these are different movies and the American one does seem, in the parts I've caught here and there, to really give the trapped mood best - the lighting, the tighter lens angles help. The Lana Turner is a bit too flat or too predictable for me - I don't see any place where she expands or relaxes her character outside a strict outline. Girotti is indeed excellent ... and does get more interesting in the later scenes along the beach.

There's an even earlier version than Visconti's, that of Pierre Chernal, "Le dernier tournant," with Corrine Luchaire and Fernand Gravey - and Michel Simon! The first meeting scene: And below is a clip from the very Jean Renoir-influenced - with great tracking shots and counterpoint of landscape - "Ossessione." Mira Liehm says Renoir gave Visconti a translation of the book. Visconti had worked for Renoir, and Guiseppe deSantis, the lead writer, was also a great fan of Renoir. Moravia worked on a version of the script, which was broadened over that of the book and influenced by the ideas of Italian novelists Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini (in the character of the Spaniard according to Liehm). Some of the scenes, especially the Po River scenes, lead to early Antonioni, especially "Il Grido"(as I remember it). The meeting scene is about 3:30 minutes in - but the first shots, one handheld, one that tracks sideways and up over the truck, are pretty thrilling. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcCoK7qnjyo

I saw "Bugaku" several times in the early 1990s and was always a little troubled by it. Heather Watts always seemed too wirey for the role and perhaps by then, as Allegra Kent suggests, it had strayed too far from the original. The Miami clip intrigues me now. To me the metaphor would be the strange combinations of natural and artificial materials in Japanese flower arrangements. The sustained drawing out of line seems unsual for Balanchine, especially the long lateral stances of men and the inner - and intricate, almost endlessly inner - hand gestures. I wonder if Balanchine was seeing some Kurosawa and Mizoguchi films at that time which were always being shown in small New York cinemas.

It really holds up. We were shown “Bonnie and Clyde” (and “Mickey One”) in our sleepy film school before it was released to see what we thought of it. I thought it was ok, but nowhere as good as “Breathless” - “Bonnie and Clyde” was Hollywood trying to catch up. A friend of mine remembers being upset by the ending - also he said none of us knew in our youthful ernestness how to deal with the tonal shifts - funny to bloody - how to assess the style. He remembers Pauline Kael or someone calling it balletic - or a ballet of death. It was interesting how “Bonnie and Clyde” became the film that students said made them want to be filmmakers - as “Breathless” had been before and “Days of Heaven” would be later.

I just realized that this is the same Eduardova who figures in a short sequence of Kafka's 1910 diary entries. A footnote in the American schocken books edition states that she was "a member of the Russian Ballet during its guest appearances at the German theater in Prague."

Bart, I apologize if I've encouraged you to dive first into the deep end - the last books are slow going, I haven't finished with them yet. ""Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" and "A Heart So White" (all the titles are from Shakespeare) are much more focused. "A Man of Feeling," about an opera singer, has a line I appreciate, "Dealing with a married couple is like dealing with one very contradictory and forgetful person" But who are your picks for the Nobel?

Adonis, the Syrian poet, is listed and Ngugi wa Thiong'o the Kenyan writer is also a favorite. Alice Munro of Canada might get it quietly - but also there's Javier Marias, Spain, who just finished a long three-part novel, "Your Face Tomorrow," on the world of British intelligence (for whom the narrator is a translator) and the intricate involvements of the characters in POUM and the Spanish Civil War.

Charles Boyer would be great I agree and would play well with Garbo. But he would make Vronsky a more sympathetic character than Tolstoy intended - who was, as I remember, fairly limited and vain.

I haven't seen this film since I was eight when I sat down to watch it on television at my aunt and uncle's - for what turned out to be the last reel - and saw Greta Garbo, so beautiful, wandering alongside a wonderful old train engine and lots of steam in the air. Well that ending changed the mood of the afternoon quite a bit. I was quiet as a mouse the rest of the day ... Regarding who should play Vronsky, isn't he a fairly weak character worried mostly about the appearance of his uniform and impending appearance of a bald spot? Frederick March - if weak, weak in the wrong way - sounds like a bad choice - it might as well be Gene Kelly. Leslie Howard would be too sensitive and self aware. Farley Granger?

This thread started me looking at some old references. My only exposure to Baroque performance, except through Chaconne and Agon as with Bart, was the William Christie and Les Arts Florisaants production of "Atys" with its quick wonderful dancing in a continuous flow. Anyway I found this cite which I thought was interesting because of the confluence of the actors of court and dancers of the Opera. From Rebecca Harris-Warrick on "La Mariee" in "Jean-Baptiste Lully and the music of the French Baroque." I may have quoted this before but Mme de Sevigne usually has an interesting side view. To her daughter: The Due de Saint-Simon goes in great detail of the dance season of 1700, the types of dances, the formations and rooms they took place in - only a small part of which has been translated: But yes, ballet depends almost entirely on dance of the Baroque era it would seem.

Paul Parish: Nichols was great - and I thought the productions of Diamonds at City Ballet in the early nineties, the dark years, were quite amazing. Diamonds depends on great and dazzling counterpoint between the two leads - the 2007 Miami Herald rehearsal video of Deanna Seay, with Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez incisively sweeping across behind, showed this - it was much different than the larghissimo Farrell/Martins one, which is baroque but still interesting. Also brilliant counterpoint between leads and the corps and within the corps - at City Ballet everything came tumbling on the heels of everything else. It has to be done without much preparation - Octavio Roca points this out as the virtue of the Cuban approach to Balanchine, the last step or beat being the beginning of the first of the next phrase - or else the ballet loses its meaning.

Update to the New Yorker article. Note that Chevron, who has a refinery in the SF Bay Area, is staying out of this. California Braces for Showdown on Emissions

I agree with Bart's characterization of this watery Diamonds: it's not Diamonds at all. 80% of her gestures are in italics - "emphasis mine" she's saying. It's ok to be elastic with time with Balanchine, but not with rubbery and rococo gestures. And what must her Giselle be like! Oh, yes Cygnet, Daria Pavlenko was great in Diamonds here in the SF Bay Area several years ago - with Danila Korsuntsev - very measured and classical.

Roberto Bolle and Peter Martins are the Bruce Weber mild & noble Apollos (albeit with lovely presence even when they were doing nothing) whereas the scampish Apollos are Andersen, Garcia Portero and maybe Lifar (because of his slightness), and Eglevsky had his devilish side. (William Klein would be their official photographer.) I always vote for the scamps. Delos itself where Apollo was born is uninhabited (the lake drained "for sanitary reasons") but the men of Mykonos, the next island over, tend to be rascals. The original set: Where Apollo was born

cubanmiamiboy: Sad ones, of differing lengths (perhaps snipped-snipped). Here are the images the Getty has of the costumes: Getty: Balanchine/Apollon Chanel was asked in 1929 to replace the originals which had been done by the difficult Andre Bauchant. According to Lincoln Kirstein in Four Centuries of Ballet: But it was perhaps a different ballet, lighter in tone. Apollo was tossed about on the tips of the toes of the Muses in that version.

Here's the link to the Wall Street Journal Eileen mentioned: Ballet Gets Personal I agree that the photos are no different in character or quality than those that have been published in Vogue and Harper's especially in the fifties and seventies - such as Irving Penn's and David Bailey's. The intent is a bit disturbing: "to humanize" and make a bit too cozy and mundane. To apologize for ballet being art and the dancers artists.

In some of Balanchine’s works the costumes are part of the choreographical architecture - in La Valse, Liebeslieder, Emeralds and Theme and Variations especially - and the women touch and shape the skirting materials and the costumes frame their movements and direct your eyes to this part or that of the legs or arms. The man is instructed in the Theme & Variations video tutorial to bring his hands gently over the skirt after a lift to stabilize it. But part of the madness and wonderful effect of Symphony in C - which was changed only a year or so after its premiere - is that everyone is in the same black or white costume and when they all pile onto the stage at once at the end you’re not at first aware that the four separate stories, or the four ring circus, have become one entity. The ballet enrichens itself in a way that the four color indentities wouldn’t allow it to. That effect would be more like Union Jack, that sort of salad. They're also things of their time and are difficult to wrench apart from it. Ballet Imperial - at least the version I saw at ABT in 2005 with Michelle Wyles and Veronika Part - seemed very 1941, almost MGMsih. Isn't that where there's a single male and two women and a small corps of women and all sorts of inventive solutions? It may have been that production but seemed overall a little on the sluggish side. I think I would like all the Apollos - the 1927 one I imagine as being very athletic and angular and less serious than the later ones.