Quiggin

papeetepatrick:

Yes, yes, I don't know, but can't we include silents...

A Golden Age without frontiers then ...

Part of the fun of "The Awful Truth" was Leo McCarey's directing -- and that he let the actors improvise scenes of the film -- though I'm never certain which ones. He also directed "Duck Soup." LaClava ("She Married Her Boss") also did some interesting work.

I'm curious as to when the Classic/Golden Age begins and when it ends. "Morocco" to "Casablanca" -- or through "Cleopatra"?

Louise Brooks was like a interesting character in a novel who is available for subsequent interviews -- in her case with James Card, Richard Leacock and Kenneth Tynan. Hanging out with the Algonquin crowd in the twenties didn't hurt.

Apparently it was Henri Langois who brought her image back to life in an 1955 exhibition “Sixty Years of Cinema” where it was displayed prominently ("She embodies in herself all that the cinema rediscovered in its last years of silence: complete naturalness and complete simplicity."). It impressed Jean Luc Godard who based the look of Anna Karina’s character in "Vivre sa vie" on it.

Brooks worked with Wellman and Hawks ("Girl in Every Port") and was imported by Pabst into Germany, where there were few established stars, and appeared there in a film that gets a considerable space in books on Weimar film and culture, well before Berg's version of the Wedekind play.

I don't remember the quote exactly, but far as what she actually did as an actress, Lotte Eisner is sort of in perplexed agreement with dirac.

A perfect Brooks role:

Morel's Invention

Norma Shearer also seemed to be very natural and sympathetic subject for Edward Steichen's less hard-edged (than Hurrell's) style, a little more Ladies Home Journal than Vogue.

What a pill he is. What he says directed to another reviewer -- "you're sitting in the audience taking notes and not choreographing ballet scenarios for a living" --

could be directed back to him and his short career as a novelist. So such is life, what does it matter. His long standing obsession with Details magazine as a measure of not quite male-enoughness probably figures in this too. What does he care so much about any of this, Balanchine not being Jane Austen, the big white room of modernism, what is he protecting us all from?

I think the review was a hybrid that wavered between a review and a journal entry, at least in the last paragraphs, like Apollianaire Scherr's commentaries on her Financial Times reviews at Foot in Mouth. A strong editor might have asked which was it to be.

I do think Claudia La Rocco wanted to set the record straight in a time of easily inflated, over-leveraged reputations and I don't disagree with her observations (I don't remember any of YB's performances -- they just whooshed by me).

Helene:

The public recognition was in the context of a regular season performance, or in the case of Stephanie Saland, who retired with the 1993 Balanchine Celebration, a special solo bow in front of the curtain, a privilege also given to retiring corps members and soloists after regular season performances. Fans of the dancers would show up for those performances.

Ib Andersen, whom Helene, I believe, and I liked a lot, had a nice and modest farewell doing Apollo (Maria Calegari was Terpsichore). The Times review I just looked at talked about Andersen's ups and downs with the company but that he had been doing great work at the end -- and noted the lyre that someone held out to him from off stage, a sort of in-joke. But I think it was a different time -- awkward years but with rewards -- and the company had more awareness of the past and what was slipping away from them.

Alban Lendorf in a handsomely made short documentary, with Susanne Grinder. Some nice glimpses of his work.

Bournonville og Balanchine

Carol Vogel: Degas By Way of Picasso

Everything in the teens and twenties seems to be by way of something else, especially with Picasso who acted as a relay station (in a brilliant and flashing signal) for many other great artists. Anyway the idea that the Degas dancer went on to make an appearance in Demoiselles d’Avignon is intriguing.

Yet another show, opening at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., on June 13, explores Picasso’s relationship with Degas.

Every decade of his career Degas keeps cropping up,” said Richard Kendall, a Degas expert who teamed up with Elizabeth Cowling, a Picasso scholar, to put together “Picasso Looks At Degas.” “It’s not continuous, but he’s there.”

The show will be organized chronologically, with several themes, including Picasso’s Paris years, the female bather and the ballet, subjects that obsessed both artists. Picasso’s connection to his first wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova — who perhaps led him to draw dancers or paint figures in balletic poses — will also be explored. On display will be a group of objects from Khokhlova’s archive, including never-before-published photographs as well as a letter Jean Cocteau wrote to Olga in the 1920s that mentions Degas in a complex, poetic way.

Visitors to the museum will also encounter new findings from the curators. Most surprising, Mr. Kendall said, is his theory that Degas’s famed sculpture “Little Dancer, Age 14” was not only known to Picasso but influenced him so much that two of the figures in his groundbreaking “Demoiselles d’Avignon” were partly based on it.

“A lot of people are really freaked by this,” Mr. Kendall said. “Because it so goes against the canon which says the ‘Demoiselles’ comes from African sculpture.”

Unhappy families maybe. Cunningham worked with different groups of dancers who went off and started their own companies, I don't know after how long but seemingly fairly quickly in the sixties.

Within Diaghiliev there seem to have been factions, and afterwards there were two Ballet Russes troupes for many years, and ballet companies in Florida have had their recent creative tensions.

Guest choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon and Mark Morris seem to grasp quickly whom they want to work with as they block out their commissioned works. Dancers do leave to work in companies where they can do a greater range of work, or newer work -- but in some cases seem to get less.

Mackrell may be overromanticizing – and I'm probably overgeneralizing based on my outsiders knowledge mostly of a few companies in the US.

Leonid:

the political influence for instance with the Royal Ballet in which pressures from some critics seem not to want to have to watch the same ballets over a period of time and there is a band wagon, to seek the reduction of academic classical by having the company dance so called modern works to attract a so called younger audience.

Yes, their impulses are correct as journalists -- to embrace the new -- but the avant garde that they're shepherding us toward really doesn't exist anymore (for many reasons) ...

Here is a review from el Nuevo Herald by Orlando Taquechel, with some background material on the company and the production – that of Jorge Texeira; also a critical note in the responses regarding terminology used. [This might be better posted elsewhere, but does help continue the discussion above.]

Don Quijote of CCBM

A rough google translation of a portion, giving a sense of the differences between Basilios:

Rolando Sarabia and Lorena Feijoo as Basilio and Kitri, the girl who Don Quixote mistakes for his Dulcinea, offered an impeccable partnership on Saturday.

Sarabia is a consummate performer. His extraordinary technique was evident during their variations with multiple rotations closed off in a lingering rubato, and his capacity as a partner and actor defined his interactions with Kitri, down to his flirtations concealed in a feigned death.

Feijoo was splendid in the two performances (on Sunday with Vitor Luiz as Basilio). Her Kitri is an eloquent and indefatigable artistic achievement from beginning to end and the effect of her diagonals in counterface to the capes of the bullfighters was a showstopper.

For his part, Vitor Luiz reaffirmed his status as a performer capable of drawing up a story with each move of extraordinary candor. It's difficult to describe but wonderful to witness.

There is no forgetting at the end of the pas de deux of Act III, Luiz launching Feijoo into the heavens. By the time she landed firmly back into his arms, the audience had risen to their feet as if impelled by a spring. From that moment, both would get the longest and most enthusiastic ovation of the weekend.

To "Balanchine is not my style," in the Olga Connor article linked to above, Rolando Sarabia does add that "I'm happy to have incorporated [balanchine's work] into my curriculum."

Lorena Feijóo danced with Sarabia on Saturday night and dances with Vitor Luiz this afternoon -- two dancers it would appear with completely different styles, night and day apart. I've only seen Luiz here in San Francisco, who is a very refined, you might say Mozartian dancer. He and Maria Kochetkova danced a beautiful and generously detailed version of Helgi Tomasson's "Haffner Symphony" this past season. Did anyone see the two Basilios in Miami?

I was also interested in this (in a rough Google translation)

The dancer was in Ecuador to train with his father, Rolando Sarabia, who works with the Chamber Ballet in Quito Ecuador. It had been five years since he saw his parents. "At that elevation, the [physical] resistance is more intense, but your training [session] is a better one. He says he's very happy to have been with his family. Partnering with Lorena captivates him. "She's a great dancer, very disciplined. Everything becomes very enjoyable, she brings a mutual security and a great virtuosity to the dance.'' Don Quijote has everything, says, "the virtuous, the lyrical, the romantic, and the action is spectacular.''

Parick:

there was just something about having her still in the world that made one feel a bit better about it.

And sadly fewer and fewer of those eminent presences -- thanks for your PBS story. And Bart for noting her courageous civil rights stands.

I like the print edition, which I can mark up with underlining and circlings, etc. -- but have often wished to have access to the online version for Linking, etc. What did you think about the article?

Bart, I like the TLS too, they cover everything, including lots of stuff not in translation, though they can be a bit condescending, as they were to Saramago ("it is easy to mock Saramago"). I liked the "Contested Will" review, it seemed to be thorough and balanced.

What interests me about the whole thing, as with Tiepolo/Caravaggio, is the reordering of the past by the present's needs. Witgenstein said something like the present reinterprets the present in its own small minded way and Borges says -- in the new Penguin book of his sonnets --

"The past is clay shaped by the present's whim" (El pasado es arcilla que el presente labra a su antojo interminablemente.)

A younger Johnny Depp, perhaps?

While Johnny Depp is playing the lead in the Alfred Cortot Story -- silly idea from these photos at this great web resource:

Gallica - Cortot

Bart, there is way to access TLS by signing up for their weekly alerts and you get access to three articles each week (of their choice). By that route here is the link to the article:

Charles Nicholl on new James Shapiro book, "Contested Will"

It is one of the many weaknesses of the anti-Stratfordian case that not a whisper is heard of any such suspicion until the mid-nineteenth century. In the crowded, intimate, gossipy world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, in the letters and diaries and epigrams of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in the ad personam jibes that were flung about "like hailstones" in the so-called War of the Theatres at the turn of the century, no one makes any allusion to this incredible sleight of hand being perpetrated, year after year, play after play, by the most popular writer of the day.

Interesting that another TLS review, on "Tiepolo Pink, also refers to the heavy-handedness of nineteenth century revisionism:

The nineteenth century, Calasso declares, had "irrevocably lost the knack for dealing with the past" ... Caravaggio not Tiepolo became declared the first modern painter, the precursor of Picasso and Bacon, where half the colour went into the lifestyle.

My Shakespeare is very poor (& unbrushed up) but whenever I read his plays I am always reminded by his references to facts of everyday life -- such as butchers' and bakers' implements, and to the fabrication of ink: "dip your pen in gall" (literally oak gall) -- that some portion of him came from a fairly humble background ... And conversely remember the aristocratic George H W Bush's shock at seeing his first "zebra stripe" scanner.

dirac and Patrick,

but I think the shape of actors' bodies is a different matter than the shape of dancers' -- one registering on film through a certain focal length of lens and the other to be seen live, raw, unprocessed -- it's a different viewing experience.

And, tying into the discussion about how far to go in talking about dancers' bodies, I think you can make a case for saying the most expressive dancers used to have non-ideal, odd ball bodies -- Peter Martins short waisted and Deanna Seay long waisted, Tina LeBlanc tiny, Melissa Hayden with military shoulders, Gonzalo Garcia with arms whose line curves up at the elbow towards the hand in a flourish well before he does anything, etc.

What sort of relationship do the new bodies have to the new choreography, which is very athletic and with very little variation in tempi -- more in the character of anxious gym classes than traditional ballet barre stretching movements with their equivalent of musical full stops?

You're right, dirac, about the cultural pressure on women -- maybe a new and more subtle form of 1950s is the order of the day.

At some point don't bulked up bodies begin to look like wearable sandwich boards, no longer appropriate for the face, or -- I won't say idealized -- an alien ideal, a marketer's dream, photoshopped onto themselves. It's like bound feet centuries back, a very abstract idea of beauty I think.

The other question is why do male ballet dancers doing classical ballets need to bulk up -- and do they lose a pliancy of line and grace of presentation when they do?

Body Image Dissatisfaction

Thanks for posting the Nabokov review, Ray. I enjoyed it immensely. But it's not as scathing as it surely could have been, and Lifar does not come off as a bad character, just naive. Nabokov fairly cites the values and its limitations of the book and did take the effort to read it in its Russian and English versions. It's interesting his characterization of what he calls the Russian Renaissance, "blending as it does priceless artistic magic with a touch of eerie futility" in the 1890s that lasted until about 1915 when

the utilitarian and didactic tendencies of the sixties and seventies that had retreated for a short time, like a wave that leaves the wet sand aglow with painted pebbles, came rolling back with far greater force.

to which he perhaps gives a more sympathetic image (the painted pebbles of utilitarianism) than he intended.

This is nice:

In later years he developed a mania for book-collecting, which Mr. Lifar deplores, but which seems to have been the most lovable trait in the man's character.

Dirac's right about Hal Wallis -- and Arthur Freed seems to have had a lot to do with MGM's musicals. Maybe musicals are a producer's medium.

I think director's control depends to an extent on size of the production. Jean-Luc Godard and the New Wave directors worked with small crews, and with Godard the look of the film was often a result of his collaboration with his cameraman, Raoul Coutard early or Willy Lubtchansky later on. In the silent days John Ford probably had a small crew -- eventually with talkies he got so good he said he would do only one take to order to control the final content, though he did work with good Saturday Evening Post writers for his scripts. Von Sternberg would tell his class at UCLA not to pay any attention to what his students might see on the credits rolls, that he was responsible for all of it -- and it was somewhat true, at least down to his actors talking in the same slow monotonous tone of voice as he did.

It probably varies from movie to movie whose sensibility shines through the most: director, writer, cameraperson (such as the wonderful Agnes Godard who has worked on many distinguished contemporary films).

"On Your Toes" has as cameraman James Wong Howe (I just came across his great work on Passage to Marseilles). Also the silly lyrics of Lorenz Heart, who compares love sickness to "fallen arches" and "too many starches" and being "on your toes" to reaching for apples and penthouses -- "the higher up the higher rent goes"-- and to air mail and dancing crowds glimpsing rare males.)

Are you saying that it's not mentioned in the Richardson, or that 'Mailer made it up' or Richardson never mentioned it, or what? Don't know what you mean by 'no original scholarship'. 'A blip' in what sense. Are you suggesting Mailer made up this story about Picasso and Apollinaire?

I've enjoyed Norman Mailer in the past, Armies of the Night and earlier Advertisements for Myself were important works, but I wouldn't go to him for art criticism and agree with Michael Kimmelman, the Times art critic when he says,

[Mailer's] Picasso emerges in a familiar guise, as a selfish, superstitious, sometimes cowardly and combative prodigy who moved chameleonlike from one style to another, through one relationship after the next. Mr. Mailer has called his work "an interpretive biography," to distinguish it from a work of original scholarship. This is fair enough, but most of the interpretations are not original.

For instance, Mr. Mailer is not the first to suggest, on the basis of no compelling evidence, that Picasso might have had a homosexual encounter or two as a young man. That dubious honor goes to Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington in her reckless "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer." Who cares one way or another, you might well ask, whether he had such an encounter? But like a dog with a bone, Mr. Mailer takes hold and won't let go.

Michiko Kakutani's Richardson review also says,

Mr. Richardson’s Picasso is not the destructive, misanthropic egomaniac portrayed in the Merchant-Ivory film “Surviving Picasso” or the heroic hipster artist depicted in Norman Mailer’s “Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.” Rather his Picasso is a mass of contradictions, a savage artist, who was often horribly cruel to his friends like Cocteau but who also “had a very loyal, if sometimes paradoxical heart”

I think a loyal paradoxical heart may be the key term. T J Clark says tenderness and monstrosity co-exist in Picasso. Despite the Louvre incident Richardson cites Braque and Apollinaire as among his closest friends by 1917. A piece of a woman's black veil blows across Picasso's face one afternoon and he knows that Apollinaire is dead and he spends ten years devising a monument to his memory.

Anyway I think we were comparing Picasso and Balanchine for their protean output, not for their personalities which yes are day and night apart.

But the larger point is that dance doesn't have the critics and critical resources -- or critical curiosity -- that the serious art world does. The space that Balanchine uses has complex parallels to Braque and Picasso's cubism through Russian constructivism, to cubist interiority. Elizabeth Cowling says the cubist table top is a stage. And Clement Greenberg uses a charming image that brings painting back to ballet's source,

Cezanne broke up the objects he depicted into multiplicities of planes that were as closely parallel as possible to the canvas surface; and to show recession, the planes were stepped back with comparative abruptness -- even the receding edges of objects keep turning full-face to the spectator like courtiers leaving the presence of royalty.

He denied even knowing Apollinaire to the police in the matter of that Louvre theft.

Patrick, check out Richardson's v.3 Picasso life (Mailer’s Picasso claimed “no original scholarship”), it's as if the Louvre incident didn't happen, a blip.

I also wanted to add that another protean visual artist Giambattista Tiepolo is the subject of a new study, "Tiepolo Pink" (Odette’s favorite colors in Proust) by Roberto Calasso and reviewed in the TLS by Ferdinand Mount.

The Rescue of Tiepolo

Mount says:

The disdainful ease, the sprezzatura, which had been the glory of high art for so long was now written off as trumpery show.

“And so”, Calasso tells us, not without a touch of sprezzatura himself, “painting took its leave of us – at least in the particular, singular, irretrievable sense it had acquired for roughly five centuries in Europe.” Afterwards, we were left merely with artists, with their personalities and idiosyncrasies. No longer were their names written in water, like those of Keats, Mozart and indeed Tiepolo, but rather in blood and biopics. Caravaggio not Tiepolo was declared the first modern painter ... The nineteenth century, Calasso declares, had “irrevocably lost the knack for dealing with the past”.

&

... We must never forget how much Tiepolo had in reserve as his hand moved with amazing speed over the damp plaster. But the speed caught the vision, rather than smothering or coarsening it.

Getting back to the critics, if Balanchine & Ashton are our Picasso and Tiepolo, where are our Sventlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall and Calasso and T J Clark who can discuss dance in a larger way? Macaulay tries -- but maybe dance by its very nature eludes the new critrical tools of art history.

And at the least, the British critics -- though Ismene Brown was very witty (“arabesques held well past their bedtime”) -- could have done with more depth and perspective in the their reviews of the recent Cuban Ballet Nacional performances at the London Coliseum.

Of course, it's possible that some kind of parallel egregiousness existed in Balanchine and was acted on ... it might have been a quote Quiggin put up from someone, but that's just a wild guess.

I think I quoted Christian Berard on Balanchine as related by Lincoln Kirstein, when Kirstein didn’t know if Balanchine was the dance genius he wanted to take back to the States with him or not. Berard was a great artist, but his verbal portrait of Balanchine was a bit of a Berard performance piece though an interesting one -- it cut deep in parts.

I was trying to find a double for Balanchine, someone in the visual arts, who could toss things out quickly and brilliantly. At first I shied away from Michael’s suggestion of Picasso, but then I thought of the late late Picasso Mosqueteros with all the gooey lush paint -- the paintings that were at Gagosian gallery recently and caught Roberta Smith’s eye in the Times (and Holly Solomon’s keener eye 20 years before that).

The Picasso of the sculpture/costumes for Parade and Mercure may also work. Definitely not the interior nightmarish painter/model stuff that led up to Guernica, when real life broke into Picasso's studio -- the subject of T J Clark’s Mellon lectures last year (“let’s play at hurting each other” Clark cites). But then there's Balanchine's no less intense Bugaku and Agon and even the 4Ts ...

... I thought Apollinaire and Picasso were close, at least according to the ongoing and exhaustive John Richardson biography of Picasso. Richardson says Picasso also had the same sort of closeness to Satie and felt his death in the same way that he felt Apollinaire's. It was Cocteau Picasso was ambivalent about.

I'm sorry to say I really, really hated her in Kiss Me Kate.

Though the film of Kiss Me Kate is a delight -- especially seeing James Whitmore, who would forever ever after play real gangsters, in light mode -- I think this clip of the two original leads is an especially good example of the myriad little things that are lost in the move from Broadway to Hollywood. "Stage to Screen" in a nutshell:

Patricia Morison & Howard Drake in KMK

(There's also a link to Julie Wilson doing "Always True to You (Darling) in My Fashion")

The 3-D gimmick in Kiss Me Kate is very dated and distracting

I liked the effect for being able to look deeply into the stage sets and seeing little things I would normally miss, it was sort of uncanny. It might be fun to see Scorsese work in the "third dimension" now that it's fashionable again.

"Tea House of the August Moon" was a big break for him -- afterwards every little theater group used to do a version of Teahouse and Mr Roberts.

And don't forget the very successful "Bachelor Father" series in the late fifties and early sixties which initially alternated with the Jack Benny show. "Dynasty" was sort of a comeback, but not quite as classy as his earlier work. In early clips he looks like William Holden.

Also the first part of the film up to the shower scene -- really another little movie -- is filmed in such a tight naturalistic style. Some of the shots reminded me of Bergman. It might also have been influenced by the shooting style and schedules of Hitchcock's concurrent televisions series, and done on a similarly tight budget. Yes, it was radical to have killed off the best character early on, but then Hitchcock didn't know what to do with it, as if he had shocked even himself.

The shower scene without the soundtrack works differently, and the effect may depend more on the music than the brilliant montage. Don DeLillo's new book "Point Omega" opens with a long meditation on that scene.

I focused on a slightly different reading of Benjamin in "Work of Art" than Patrick where Bejanmin talks about the difference between live theater and film and the new estrangement between the actor and the audience.

The market [where the film actor] offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During shooting he has as little contact with it as any article in a factory ...

The film responds to the shriveling up of the aura [of live acting] with an artificial buildup of the "personality" outside the studio.

In a way, too much hum-drum knowledge about the live actor or dancer dilutes his or her presence on stage, which, following Jack and Cristian, is very mysterious and direct and varies from performance to performance, audience to audience, as they try to find or sense out each other -- some nights in different places in the work. And maybe tweeting is more appropriate to film actors who don't have this immediate contact with the audience and need to reconstruct it somehow.

The Balanchine Beckett pairing may go back to Edwin Denby in "For a Foreign Tour" -- which I just came across -- where he is talking about Balanchine's "condensed energy of ... a counter-classic classicism." "In his 'Agon' it looks ebullient," Denby says. "In the Webern 'Episodes' ... the lucid abnormality has a wit like Beckett's."

It's always a problem with artists you admire, you want to link them with someone. These days I might link Beckett (who is problematically both loquacious and laconic) with Mies van der Rohe or with the painter Robert Ryman. I no longer can pair up Balancine so easily -- Matisse? Cezanne? Wallace Stevens? Horace? All boundlessly inventive with form.

As far as critics go, Macaulay does see and report on a lot of different dance companies that I am interested in (Acocella less and less), and so once you factor in his mild but consistent biases -- like Roberta Smith's in the art section or Nicolai Oursoussoff's in architecture -- his comparisons are valuable.