Quiggin

cubanmiamiboy:

not even it the idea came from Balanchine himself.

But Balanchine has only stripped down - or essentialized - his own ballets (of which the intact Theme and Variations is one, despite Octavio Roca's existential doubts). Many of them - Western Symphony, Scotch Symphony, Somnabula, Stars and Stripes - are heavily costumed. Others were bare boned from the get go, such Agon and Violin Concerto. Concerto Barocco and Apollo costumes were slimmed down, but so was the choreography. My point about Four Temperaments is that the original costumes were a part of the "original draft" and may have shared the same sources as the choreography and may throw some light on its origins. They were at another point - shortly after the first performances - felt to be no longer needed and as dirac suggests only muddled the lines of the movements.

dirac:

I think the costumes look striking in still photographs, but it is hard to see the dancers' bodies.

Yes, the costumes are gone but they are to some degree written into the bodies and into the movements of the bodies – as are the stylish deco ones for Concerto Barocco that PeggyR posted. Remember the Claudia Roth Pierpont comment that at some point Balanchine "becomes his own Kochno, his own Bérard" and "suffuses all the props and the tricks into the surface of the ballet itself."

The problem with Modernism is that as it abstracts and "snip snips", it tosses out its sources, and erases its bibliography as well. It says it's about nothing and from nowhere in particular - but it isn't. Mondrian's pure modernist grids are water surfaces and forests in his earlier sketches.

Bart:

My nomination for Biggest Costume Disaster isn't an original one, but it's very grand:

Kurt Seligman's original designs for the 1946 premiere of Balanchine's The Four Temperaments.

The Seligmann costumes might be interesting things in themselves. His works have a flavor of Salvador Dali and Paul Klee figures (Seligman was Swiss and a friend of Giacometti). These images may give a hint of what Kirstein and Balanchine were thinking at the time.

A Journey Round My Skull (halfway down)

[seligman] was known for his fantastic imagery of medieval troubadors and knights engaged in macabre rituals and inspired in part by the Carnival held annually in his native Basel.

Interesting that Seligman's paintings and graphics were based on Carnival figures - which would make them a little like Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo's, and Watteau's. Maybe the Four Temperament characters could be thought of in this context, as motley Pierrots and Gilleses.

*From short bio at Wikipedia:

Kurt Seligmann

Helene:

And I know which ones I'd trade in a heartbeat

I'd go along with that trade-in list, maybe along with Walpurgisnacht, and part four only of Brahms-Schoenberg, which is always too rich. I usually feel guilty about not liking the first parts of Suite no. 3, but all its gauziness does make T&V even more brilliant.

I'm also always astonished by the "needlepoint work" in Figure in the Carpet whenever I see the Diana Adams clips.

Instead of implying superhuman perfection and accomplishment, performers' technical skills are used to convey imperfection, disconnectedness, and alienation.

Alienation and disconnectedness seem like old fashioned humanist values. I don't think that's what's happening here -- the choices seem more arbitrary.

To me a lot of the new (perhaps really neo-conservative) dance begins to look like dancers flinging themselves out and pivoting on some extreme locus points of their bodies, as if tumbling over a high jump bar. There's little development, only a short back and forth to a home base. At best they're Philip Glass-like arpeggios of glittering ribbons of movement. I always zone out after a while.

About 47 of them. Would trade a dozen or so to have seen the six ballets of Les Ballets 1933, including the first version of Mozartiana -- also Cotillion of 1932.

I always looked forward to his articles in the the London Review. In one of the Guardian links he is characterized as being "equally at home with Shakespeare, Donne, Wallace Stevens and the nouveau roman" and he says:

... one of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things. You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering

One of his last reviews was called "Too Good and Too Silly" on the Cambridge Edition of Jane Austen:

It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event Austen omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book.

My mother used to say of people who prattled ceaselessly – the Miss Bates type – that they talked ‘like a ha’penny book’, and in Sense and Sensibility people talk so bookishly that they deserve to have it said of them that they talk like three-decker novels. This habit Austen had given up by the time of Pride and Prejudice, also thought to have started life as an epistolary novel. The opening pages of Pride and Prejudice are full of brisk and amusing chat...

I was going to list Adrian Danchig-Waring too -- but I've only seen him in videos. However I'd like to see a less blond and less solemn Apollo, more in character with the original, which may have had more turns of mood. The Eglevsky clip suggests something different, and Eglevsky seems to have been able to modulate character quickly. Gonzalo Garcia's counterpoint solos were very unusual. A little more interiority to the part, at least here and there, would be an interesting change.

Another problem with Apollo is that it always seems to get lost on a big stage (the Koch/State as opposed to the City Center or the Joyce or Yuerba Buena Center here in San Francisco). The same with Petroushka, both of them originally designed for smaller spaces and more intimate scale.

19th century ballets were based more on the sort of transformations (Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Coppelia) that run through Ovid (certainly not on the “Other”) and on Arabian Nights-like stories, which were very popular then. I don’t think of them as “narrations”, which implies a narrator, trustworthy or not. Plays and operas and ballets present; novels and short stories tell.

The only equivalents we have now are Japanese cartoons and video games.

I would tend to discount gender differences as being a big problem. Men dance differently than women because they weigh more and their bodies have different dynamics. It's like the difference between skateboard and bicycles (which have become everyone’s second body in San Francisco).

It’s not the lack of narration but the lack of the ability to dramatize on stage that’s the problem (if any). And also the lack of an alternate system -- like mythology or even romance -- outside the main "totalizing" one with which to think about our lives.

Garbo made a similar gesture once, after the death of F.W. Murnau under similar gay-scandal circumstances. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, who had two great roles for Murnau with Sunrise, didn't show.

Gaynor and Farrell were probably oblivious to Murnau’s artistic status. Garbo was there in part because of her friendship with Salka Viertel -- who wrote many of Garbo’s screenplays (she also was the pianist Eduard Steuerman’s sister, the mother in law of Deborah Kerr; her husband [berthold] Viertel was the subject of Isherwood’s Prater Violet). Garbo kept Murnau’s death mask.

According to Lotte Eisner, the visitors to the services in Hollywood included the Viertels, William K. Howard, Edgar G. Ulmer, Herman Bing, and five others.

In Berlin Erich Pommer, Emil Jannings, Robert Flaherty, Fritz Lang and a representive from Fox were among those in attendance at the funeral. Lang, “as he said himself, Murnau’s old adversary,” said this about Murnau:

It is clear that the gods, so often jealous wished it to be thus ...

Many centuries hence, eveyone would know that a pioneer had let us in the midst of his career, a man to whom the cinema owes its fundamental character; all his works were like animated “ballads” ...

Regarding Joan Crawford, I remember for years hearing how spontaneous she really was in her early work in the twenties and how she had changed, but in the clips I don’t see that much difference. To my eye her spontaneity looks too studied -- her shoulders though handsome are overly dominant and she does the Charleston in a sort of Paul Taylor or Elizabeth Strebb way.

It's interesting that Jennings lists Michael Clark (in Alston's Soda Lake), whose own choreography hardly gets any mention in the States. His work, though on a very small chamber scale, seems to be some of the most visually arresting post-Balanchine, post-Diaghilev stuff. It's contrapunctal, painterly and works every part of the stage canvas. He's a distant, hyperactive cousin of Apollo.

When I saw this thread, I put together a list of who I was expecting to be on it -- Jennings' list, not mine

This is close to Maynard Keynes' classic Beauty Contest definition of how rational agents work in a market economy! And Jennings list itself is like a multi-temporal economy that mixes Euros, pesetas, and old francs.

Since this is the only extant copy of the pamphlet, the situation seems analogous to someone owning an original painting.

There is a difference. Poems don't exist on a support of paper or canvas and are not fabricated to be sold as unique things. They exist on the support of the voice, to be quoted in small sections by anyone who wants to, and are passed on that way. Once they're memorized they can't be owned or suppressed -- look at Osip Mandelstam's poems that were preserved in Natalia Mandelstam's memory.

papeetepatrick:

God forbid they should let us know their humanity ...

I don't agree that it's bad piece -- actually it's not really an article and such things are often about the author -- but I do agree that "dull and stingy" is stingy of him and a cliche, a bit of paint splashed on his idol. "Distance is the soul of beauty" Simone Weil said, maybe about history and bigger things, but there are figures who appear in people's lives they've never gotten over and who become romantic images of inaccessibly, but having this happen time and again is probably not a good thing. And I agree that there's already lots of intriguing silence and "heathy unattainability" in adult relationships. The Brantley part about the beloved first speaking is comic and patronizing -- it's falling in love with the person and leaving the person out.

But the thing with Garbo that places her above all others -- whether by design or accident -- is that she didn't "sell out" her aura or our good faith in her talent when every formerly elegant star was doing some little postwar homespun television series set in the suburbs (real movies were urban) -- though Ninotchka did come close.

miliosr:

The direction (like the movie itself) is horribly static and made this viewer feel like he was watching a filmed version of a stage performance.

Clarence Brown was a fairly dull director but add to that the radical change of technology, a slide definite backwards of a decade or so. Camera movements that had been so free and fluid -- think of Murnau or Fritz Lang "M" with its famous tracking shots -- were suddenly grounded with huge blimps to muffle the sound. Sound technology itself was very primitive with probably a very narrow range -- like AM radio -- in the first years, deep voices were probably more effective, like Tugboat Annie Marie Dressler's. European films were always dubbed in afterwards perhaps because of this. Rene Clair was able to maintain moving camera shots well into the sound era, paving the way for Ruben Mamoulian's experiments.

As an example, microphones were hidden in flower arrangements in the first talkies until Dorothy Azner fabricated the traveling boom for Clara Bow.

No, this is the painting I was thinking of

I originally thought it might be Nude Descending a Staircase which has a staccato drive ...

The Prodigal's turning away in shame, his crawling on his knees into his father's arms--

I absolutely agree about the theatrical power of this image -- being made stronger by the father's reluctance to meet him halfway. Cosmo Campoli, the Chicago sculptor who I took a class from, did a strong version of this scene which I've never forgotten. (It's in "New Images of Man" -- he may have seen the 1950 revival.) The father sits upright in a chair, his hands on the arms of the chair, his head a mass of images (the son's travels?) and the son lays his head on his father's lap.

The Duchamp glass may have been drawing from the same stock pot of ideas as Balanchine and Diaghilew were. I always thought of corps parts of Prodigal like a ballet mechanique or Pas d'Acier, with all the staccato movements and the sorts of ballet movement experiments being done in Russia when Balanchine left.

I think the problem with Baryshnikov is that he was the wrong body type -- and character -- for the part, and maybe the costume is part of the problem, the way the midline hikes up and shortens the waist and makes him look less lean and sinewy than he should be. Following Bart saying he looks like he's in a another ballet, you might add that he looks as if he's resisting the whole ballet, trying to fight his way out its confines.

There are some 1928-1929 Ballets Russes photos of Lydia Sokolova in a bonnet/hat with zig zag details that looks a lot like the model for the Siren's.

Thanks innopac for starting this topic and for the links. The description of claquers being better behaved in France than England cited a very interesting point of difference! Here's a portrait of the type by Balzac from an old copy of Cousin Bette (Cousin Betty) translated by Ellen Marriage.

She got to know a claqueur, madame, saving your presence, a man paid to clap, you know, the grand-nephew of an old mattress-picker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This good-for-nought, as all your good-looking fellows are, paid to make a piece go, is the cock-of-the walk out on the Boulevard du Temple, where he worked up the new plays, and takes care that the actresses get a reception, as he calls it. First, he has a good breakfast in the morning; then before the play, he dines, to be ‘up to the mark,’ as he says; in short, he is a born lover of billiards and brandy ... He was very near being nabbed by the police in a tavern where thieves meet. Monsieur Braulard, the leader of the claque, got him out of that. He wears gold earrings, and lives by doing nothing, hanging on to women, who are fools for good-looking scamps ... Cousin Betty translated by Ellen Marriage

I should have loved to have seen Doubrovska as I do not think anyone could reproduce her intensely sophisticated appeal.

There is a wonderful scene of Doubrovska in her living room acting out the Siren part in Virginia Brooks' film "Felia Doubrosvska Remembered" (available at Amazon). First Doubrovska is sitting demurely on the sofa, with pillows neatly set up on point behind her as she tells stories about Diaghilew. Then suddenly, in the flash of a jump cut, she is kneeling on the floor showing how the part is done, touching the coffee table with her knees (her legs are too long for the alloted space) and grandly bending backwards as her little dog watches from the sofa.

It's unfortunate that Shepard Fairey is the big case in that he pretty blatantly borrows original material from lots of artists and adds little more. The Obama Hope poster not only borrows the photograph, but also the concept, layout and typeface from a 1988 John Carpenter sci-fi film "They Live" -- as pointed out by A S Hamrah at N+1 magazine.

Thank you TenduTV for your responses. I agree that the duration of copyright is excessive and stifles free exchange of ideas -- and also that wholesale posting of large chunks of commercially available original material -- beyond quick quotes -- is unfair.

Regarding the Balanchine Foundation, their statement is that

Master tapes are housed in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and copies are made available to non-circulating research repositories around the world.

Perhaps this is not administratively possible, but still it would be great if some of the tapes were actually available for viewing at member libraries. The individuals who participated in these modest productions may have done so believing the videos would be available on a broader basis than has been the case.

My question about You Tube broadcasts is more to the question as to when extraneous elements -- the shaky photography, extremely oblique angles, the occlusionary shadows -- add a value and signature, albeit unintended, that creates a new original. Juan Gris repainted several of Cezanne's paintings, faithfully following the original compositions, but his own style flattens some aspects of the original and gives an very un-Cezannean elegance to others and creates a new work of art. Ann Barzel's films certainly bear her signature. It seems that at some point that such "degraded" videos are no threat to the owner or trustee of the original choreography.

You've perhaps answered this in your example about removing the scratches (though here it's the equivalent of generating them).

There's also the problem of how videotape distorts or re-torts the choreography. An 90mm lens would make it look different by flattening it, while a 35mm or 28mm would make it appear more sculptured but with unnaturally large negative spaces. Repeatedly looking at the same version of a performance does deaden it -- and probably limits the imaginative possibilities, as Helene points out is the case with vocal recordings. I think someone has says in the Ken Burns jazz documentary that before Woody Guthrie recorded a song like Goodnight Irene, there had been hundreds of regional versions and overnight everyone was singing it with the same phrasing and intonation.

Helene:

Do you copy Suzanne Farrell?

Danilova has commented on how different her version of Terpsichore was in Apollo than Farrell's, the tone and the accents, and Verdy in Garis points out how Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux was set on a short body -- hers -- and how different and difficult it was for Farrell to bring it off. Also Kyra Nichols pointed out how she had to strip the ornamentation from the roles she inherited and completely rethink them. Farrell does seem to be an important point of reference in discussions on interpretation (a 35mm lens version of Balanchine roles?).

As it stands the Balanchine organization that handles the Interpreters' Archive has not been too helpful in distributing study tapes to its member libraries, although I believe that is a part of their mission policy. I live near San Francisco Performing Arts Library and it seemed impossible to arrange an inter-library loan of a tape done with SF Ballet dancers.

Regarding originally generated recordings of performances posted on You Tube, I was wondering how much of a threat of dilution to something like the Balanchine brand do they constitute.

The sort of tapes I'm thinking of are very techicially primitive -- Wendy Whelen at Spleto doing Other Dances, Part and Gomes in Swan Lake, & a Don Quixote-ish in spirit Swan Lake excerpt with Valdes and Frometa.

Bits of head and strands of hair, clapping hands, extraneous voices of children figure as large as the dancers on stage. They're the sort of tapes Degas or Cartier Bresson might do today and capture the spirit and experience of live performance far better than deadly official versions (more like Russian Ark than Paris Opera Jewels).

Would Ann Barzel’s bootlegged Kodachrome films of Ballet Russes performances & early Balanchine be off limits?

According to the Wikipedia -- their film articles don't seem bad -- MGM cut production from fifty films a year to twenty five in the early forties. They also had a B movie unit which may have increased output sometime to provide their theaters (Loew's) with films. I don't know if the Andy Hardy films were on B budgets, but they did reflect the common touch taste of Louis B Mayer who took over production after Thalberg died. Another factor might be that films of the late thirties took longer to make than earlier ones, with better sound and more complicated lighting. The Technicolor ones demanded several times more light over black and white, and their cameras were bulky and clumsy to handle.

Claudette Cobert had a fair amount of freedom to appear in movies of other studios -- and get three (extra?) days off a month to Selznick's chagrin; "tell her there's a war going on" -- and she and Gable were of course were loaned out for "It Happened One Night."

Anyway because of continuing changes in the studio system, it may be difficult to compare some elements of production from one five year period to another.

Dishonored is very entertaining. I have fond memories of Dietrich adjusting her lipstick before the firing squad shoots her full of holes.

I had forgotten about that. Yes, it's a very strange and laconic scene -- Sternberg based some of those moments on little things he saw Dietrich do in real life, not in front of a firing squad of course ...

Leonid makes a good point about how references to the Nazi Youth look are different and are much more specific in England than in the US -- but I was also thinking maybe Macaulay had in mind the early 90s NYT feature article about Stiefel’s hyper-normality and boy scoutishness and his great love of Harley Davidsons.

I don't find the terms “wretched” offensive than ineffective -- like its opposite “lusciousness incarnate." And maybe he doesn't describe some dancers fully because the descriptions don't naturally materialize for him.

But today’s review piece, despite the bending-backwards to balance Ashton against Balanchine, does make its good point about lack of coaching at City Ballet by original principals. I think he does try to remain as positive as possible, though you have the feeling he is witnessing the inevitable watering down -- or at best revalencing or reaccenting -- of much of the stuff he saw done fairly brilliantly thirty or so years ago.

ballet_n00b:

I don't think Fred ever improved on his RKO flicks and I have a general dislike for those garish MGM musicals

The RKO musicals were in black and white which gave them a tonal coherence that color can't. Also black and white makes form abstract, whereas color -- especially MGM's saturated Technicolor -- draws your attention to the thingy-ness of things: door hinges, chair knobs, tassels, which compete for attention with the nuances of the actor's manner and acting style.

(The Bandwagon of course is wonderful, especially the scenes from old Penn Station, but it's a comparatively "introspective" musical.)

All the studios had different looks and even the black and white differed from studio to studio -- MGM ran their own lab at least through the seventies as did Fox/Western -- and you could to tell the studio the film came from by the high keyed lighting or a long grey scale, almost as you could recognize a melody from a few notes. They had specific art directors and costume designers (Sirk worked with two set designers at Universal who had a big impact on the look of his films, mirrors and shadows on walls, and there were Adrian at MGM, Edith Head at Paramount and even Karinska). Each studio also had a small group of character actors who would amusingly reappear over and over in the background -- think of the great band of minor Preston Sturges characters.

RKO and Columbia were supposed to be more experimental and a lot of the early screwball comedies came from them -- from Hawks, McCarey, LaCava, Stevens...

On the whole MGM made less interesting films than RKO, Columbia, Paramount and Warners, so Garbo may not have had the choice she could have elsewhere. I agree that Garbo was a better actress and presence than Dietrich but with Dietrich it's the Sternberg/Dietrich combination you get. Sternberg, imitating Flaubert, somewhere says: Miss Dietrich is me. They made six or sevens films in a row ending with Devil is a Woman (which influenced Bunuel and Guy Maddin).

Looking at James Wong Howe's bio I see this: "In 1949 he was hired for shooting tests for a never made comeback film starring Greta Garbo (La Duchesse de Langeais)."

A version of La Duchesse de Langeais was directed by Jacques Rivette in 2007 with Jeanne Balibar & Guilliame Depardieu & filmed by the late (5/2010) William Lubtchansky.

One can only dream what the Garbo tests were like.