Quiggin
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Posts posted by Quiggin
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It's kind of exciting in a way and might mean a good update for the repertory, but I can understand the worries about the history of personnel issues at ENB.
Patricia Neary was a finalist with Helgi Tomasson for the artistic directorship in 1985 and was ultimately was offered the second-in-command position. The company of 43 dancers voted to retain Michael Smuin with 27 votes, for Neary with 14, and 2 for Tomasson, according to Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. So things don't always start out in the best way.
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Shortly before he died, Peter Bogdanovich wrote a review of Robert Gottlieb's new Garbo book at Air Mail (December 4, 2021). He ends with a story Orson Welles once told him (according to Margalit Fox's obituary in the Times, Welles lived at Bogdonavich's house during one of his down and out periods):
QuoteGarbo’s only true competition ever came with the arrival in 1930 of Marlene Dietrich, via Germany and Josef von Sternberg; she, too, was sometimes pictured as the Sphinx.
Yet Orson Welles would tell me that Dietrich herself was an abject admirer of Garbo’s, indeed very anxious to meet her, and so she jumped at the chance when Orson invited her to join him at a party that actor Clifton Webb was throwing for Garbo in the early 40s. Orson said that Garbo was fairly late to arrive, and that when the two were introduced, Dietrich anxiously gushed out a few exceedingly warm and complimentary remarks. Garbo did not in any way reciprocate, but only nodded and moved on.
Dietrich looked crestfallen, Orson told me. On the drive back from the party, for a very long time she said not a word. Finally, rather softly, she made just one remark: “Her feet are not soo big …"
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43 minutes ago, abatt said:
The only consolation is that they are adding the one act Balanchine SL to the winter season.
When was the last time the Balanchine (/Ivanov) Swan Lake was performed by City Ballet? Has it be danced since Martins' version was added to the repertory?
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Quote
Despite being boosted, being scrupulous about masking / hand hygiene, limiting my indoor activities to brief forays to the grocery store / pharmacy once omicron made its way here
Thanks for the alert, Kathleen. and hope you've shaken this off soon. Here in San Francisco omicron has not yet really hit, though our R number has doubled in a month to 2.1. We're pretty well vacinated – 80-90% – and most everyone in my neighborhood seems to wear a mask on the street. So that's a little reassuring, though the fact that omicron is just a notch behind measles in its transmittability is not.
Bob Wachter at University of California, San Francisco, while concerned, says, "Omicron may turn out to be a 6-8 week hurricane, doing a lot of damage but moving through quickly." That's based on numbers from South Africa. More here of his level-headed commentary:
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Gia Kourlas makes some good points: that the dances are more about the camerawork than the choreography, and that the sharks don't move differently from the Jets. And while the choreography is good, it's not part and parcel of the whole work – which was the whole idea of the musical after "Oklahoma," where everything, including the songs and dances, were there to advance the story. She also wishes that they had included the dream ballet – and the nightmare that turns into – to provide more dramatic heft.
Maybe too many people – Spiellberg and his cameraman, Kushner, and Peck – working in different directions?
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7 hours ago, dirac said:
One hazard of watching the movie is that several of the songs are among the most insistent earworms ever written. Damned if I could get “My Favorite Things” ... out of my head all week.
That's why John Coltrane's version exists – as an exorcism of sorts.
I'm reading a book of Adalbert Stifter's short stories, just reissued by NYRB, which may in a way be a Christmas movie / TSOM substitute. They take place in the mountains or unpopulated countryside, there's snow and significant weather, they move slowly and describe the landscapes they move through in meticulous detail. "Limestone," about a surveyor taking the measure of the geology of a poor and remote part of the country, was an influence on Kafka as he was describing the adventures of the surveryor K in "The Castle." I just finished Anuk Arudpragasam's finely crafted, Stifter-paced "A Passage North" and have started up "Gravel Heart" by Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnash, which seems to have been rushed back into publication on paper stock just this side of newsprint. Both are about childhood homes and homecomings which I guess Christmas narratives are about.
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Sylvère Lotringer's obituary was recently published in the Times.
QuoteSylvère Lotringer, who popularized French critical theory in the United States, helped inspire the “Matrix” movie series, hosted conferences for counterculture celebrities, lent his name to a character in an acclaimed novel and a television series based on it, provoked rants on Fox News and founded an influential publishing house — all while trying to outrun memories of a childhood spent on the precipice of disaster — died on Nov. 8 at his home outside Ensenada, Mexico, in Baja California. He was 83.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/books/sylvere-lotringer-dead.html
In a 2006 interview in the Brooklyn Rail he talks about how middling works of art and general cultural infill increasingly obscure our view of the genuine.
QuoteAmong all the works that are produced everyday and simultaneously exhibited in all the art venues available worldwide, it could even be that there is better art than ever existed before. But this is not the point. It is impossible any more to evaluate art independently of the new environment that has been created. And this environment makes it impossible to consider anything as a privileged object. Of course, you can always stop dead and focus on a particular work for a while, and I do it occasionally, as one suddenly focuses on a piece of information on the evening news, but it is immediately replaced by some other news, other works already claiming attention, or the same space in the gallery. From the point of view of the gallery wall, there isn’t much of a difference between one kind of art and another. The same goes for the art system as a whole, which doesn’t allow for anything to stand out for too long. Art is not in the era of mechanical reproduction any more, but in the era of mass consumption. In a consumer society art is being consumed like any other product, and the mass circulation and consumption of art changes entirely its status and reception. Art isn’t exactly a commodity, but it assumes all its characteristics, and it is more and more difficult for anything to retain any kind of singularity for too long.
https://brooklynrail.org/2006/09/art/a-life-in-theory
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Some strong comments in a Times piece, The 'West Side Story' Remake We Didn't Need, about how the producers were super-conscientious about getting all the details right, while on the whole perpetuating many of the same old problems.
QuoteThe over-accented Spanish, coaxed out of U.S.-born actors by dialect coaches, ultimately becomes a kind of linguistic brownface, providing little more than a facade of authenticity as thick and corny as the brown makeup worn by the actors in the original version. Was the point to make a film that speaks more authentically to a Latino public? Or one that non-Latinos would feel less guilty producing and consuming?
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If Mr. Spielberg and his team are truly committed to authentic Latino stories, they would do well to move away from trying to make old representations more palatable to a contemporary public. Instead, they should focus on nurturing and supporting not only emerging Latino actors but also directors, screenwriters, choreographers and cinematographers so that we may find the resources to tell our own stories, whether or not they fit Hollywood definitions of authenticity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/opinion/west-side-story-remake.html
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9 hours ago, canbelto said:20 hours ago, Quiggin said:
With all due respect, I suggest giving this new movie a chance when it comes out streaming on HBO Max.
I probably should say that I'm not an ideal audience person for this type of musical. In general I prefer the pre-improved, pre-Sondheim/Hammerstein works of Rodgers & Hart ("I was reading Schopenhauer last night/and I think that Schopenhauer was right"), and among movie musicals, "Singing in the Rain" is probably my favorite Hollywood concoction. It is what it is, nothing more. I was curious though why critics like A O Scott jumped on the new West Side Story bandwagon. (And The Bandwagon is another fave.)
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Thanks, On Pointe, for your corrective review. Seemed hard to match up the effusive review by A O Scott in the Times and the online trailer with its heavy-handed camera work. Perhaps it's time to retire tracking shots for a couple of years, even a decade. And yes it is odd that Elgort towers over Zegler. In life or even on stage that may be fine, but in films every mismatch becomes exaggerated by a couple of magnitudes.
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I apologize if I've given the wrong impression of Jennings's whole article which does cite sources. Unfortunately for many readers (but fortunately for the writers), it's behind a paywall.
Of Scarlett's abstract ballets, which Jennings admires:
QuoteFrankenstein was followed, in 2017, by Symphonic Dances, an abstract work set to Rachmaninov. Lyrical and tender, shot through with melancholy, it was everything that Asphodel Meadows had promised. (These pieces, among the finest ballets created so far this century, have been removed from the company’s repertoire.)
A letter to the editor somewhat substantiates his findings:
QuoteWhat Luke Jennings writes about abuse at the Royal Ballet is true of every ballet company I know. I currently work for a national ballet company in Europe. Here, as in every company for which I’ve performed, trading sexual favours for better roles and positions is the norm. As Jennings rightly says, it is a learned behaviour and nothing is being done to change it. Fear reigns, the competition is stiff, and if you want to succeed, you keep your mouth shut, or your short career will be made even shorter.
... I know girls who have been humiliated daily, beaten by teachers for getting a combination wrong, and encouraged to smoke or take stimulants to keep their weight down. I have known teachers and directors who think nothing of sexually grooming dancers no older than sixteen.
It would seem that Scarlett was following what he thought was given the ok, but didn't quite learn all the rules, or was clumsy at it, and got caught.
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Luke Jennings did a good background piece on Liam Scarlett and the Royal Ballet that helped reset my thinking on this subject. More complex than it first appears.
QuoteScarlett didn’t have an easy time at first. The technical standard of the company is sky-high and he found himself at full stretch. One corps de ballet colleague remembers him ‘really struggling, really suffering’ in Frederick Ashton’s Les Rendezvous and told me he was picked on in rehearsals by a senior member of the company, a man with an established reputation for bullying younger dancers. Still worse, according to the corps de ballet member, Scarlett was ‘passed around like Manon’. ‘Everyone knew about it. Everything Liam was later accused of was done to him. It was learned behaviour.’
Scarlett was an inspired creator of abstract dance, but he wasn’t a storyteller. His first major narrative work, Sweet Violets (2012), was a Grand Guignol ballet about Jack the Ripper and his victims. There were too many ill-defined characters and the plot was chaotic. ... O’Hare may have been keen to resurrect the Royal Ballet’s narrative tradition ... but Scarlett at the very least he should have been encouraged to take outside advice: the choreographers both men most admired, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, sought help throughout their careers. Scarlett seems to have been encouraged to think of himself as a choreographic auteur.
It is unclear whether either institution [the Royal Ballet or White Lodge] is examining its practices in the light of the allegations against Scarlett or his death. His behaviour appears to have been egregious and exploitative, but his is not an isolated case. It is symptomatic of a culture that I have seen up close over many years, a culture that shaped and enabled him, that allowed for his own exploitation as a young man. It isn’t enough for the Royal Ballet merely to go through the motions of change in the hope that everything can stay the same.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n18/luke-jennings/learned-behaviour
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Tom Daley in a Guardian interview says he became very aware of his weight:
QuoteYou wrote about this in your book. Is it fair to say you developed an eating disorder? Would you call it that?
I used to make myself throw up, in 2012. I weigh myself every day. I’ve had a very strange relationship with food and my body image. I guess it is a mild form of that. Men always seem to not have eating disorders, and it’s hard to talk about it. But I would consider myself to be someone that has very much struggled with body image, and eating, and feeling guilty and shameful of the things that I eat.Which links to another Guardian article about eating disorders in men:
QuoteRhik Samadder, whose memoir I Never Said I Loved You is bruisingly honest about his own experiences with eating disorders, mental health and self-harm, adds that it is important to look at the reasons why men still struggle to admit to a problematic relationship with body image.
“The dark side of social media is that it democratises everything,” he says. “So you see men increasingly struggling with self-image with gym culture and orthorexia [a preoccupation with eating healthy food] and becoming hyper-conscious about how they look on screen.
Part of this may be the 24 hour public relations age we live in. I've noticed people preemptively apologizing for all sorts of imaginary offenses. Thinness may be a form of self-apology.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/22/male-anorexia-shame-still-stops-men-getting-help
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Will Heinrich in the Times has a good analysis of the paintings of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), now at the Barnes in Philadelphia. In some ways Valadon seems to be throwing the ball of who's looking at who back to Manet and Matisse quite forcefully. You could perhaps say that her painting career might have some parallels with Colette's as a writer. Interesting how her reputation as a painter was eclipsed for a while by that of her son, Maurice Utrillo.
QuoteHer bohemian lifestyle, with its artist lovers and second marriage to a man two decades her junior, could have resulted as much from circumstance as from inclination. As Martha Lucy, an art historian, put it in her catalog essay, speaking of Valadon’s modeling, “working-class status meant that there were fewer moral impediments to pursuing such disreputable employment.”
A comment from one of the readers tries to set the record straight about when Valadon began painting:
QuoteIf speaking quite literally, that “she didn’t pick up a paintbrush herself till 1909, at 44,” this is incorrect. Some beautiful early oils include “Jeune fille faisant du crochet” (1892) and “Portrait d’Erik Satie” (1892-3). There are others from this period, solid paintings done as she found her voice and vision... Her pastel self-portrait from 1883 shows an important and precocious attempt at self-expression, her only formal training at that point being critique from the artists for whom she was modeling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/arts/design/valadon-painter-barnes-philadelphia.html
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4 hours ago, BalanchineFan said:
Women's size, shape, and condition is often criticized by men to exert control over women ... Men have a long history of telling women how to look, how to dress and what women can and cannot do with their bodies
: James Stewart to Kim Novak in Vertigo
Men's bodies have also gone through a change in the past 20 years – though men are not particularly criticized or held down on this basis – and you see it in male dancers' builds. From swimmers' bodies and lightly toned bodies, the ideal has gone to bulked-up and surrealistically defined gym bodies. Muscle Beach, "Charles Atlas" bodies which used to be considered coarse are a model for men to aspire to. Perhaps they're kind of an analogue to the SUVs everyone drives now.
In a way both of these things – womens' thin bodies and mens' overly muscular bodies – are a function of the hyper visuality of our time – of how well they photograph to be posted on Instagram, how one's efforts to bulk up or stay thin can be visually quantified.
I wonder if Justin Peck's choreography lends itself to a greater range of body types.
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I remember Silas Marner being read in high school and Emily Dickinson much discussed in third year English. My community college English teacher admonished us for not all having read Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding – Mrs. Baker lived nearby and her daughters "Cassandra" and "Judith" had been our high school classmates.
My favorite Austens are the "autumnal" Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, which is a big novel, almost like one of Henry James. I liked how the narrative switches towards the end to an exchange of letters and you follow it thirdhand, through a kind of telescope. The Crawfords are not particularly "nice" or "good" people, and the father may be a bit compromised by owning a plantation in the Bahamas, but both he and Fanny Price seem to be pretty clear-sighted.
After you ran out of Jane Austen books to read, you were supposed to go on to Barbara Pym as a kind of dessert.
Recently I came across Charlotte Brontë's impressions of Jane Austen in her friend Elizabeth Gaskell's biography that Brontë's father commissioned. Brontë writes to G. E. Lewes, George Eliot's partner, on January 11, 1848 and says:
Quote. . . Why do you like Miss Austen so much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would have written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones than any of the Waverley novels?I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fence, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will irritate you, but I shall run the risk.Now I can understand admiration of George Sand: for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even Consuelo, which is the best, or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; – Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant . . . -
14 hours ago, BalanchineFan said:
I just had to stop. It's not about him. His voice is not what has been missing from the conversation. He really doesn't understand.
I read the whole thing and have highlighted some of it below. I think he makes the whole matter worse. Macaulay should simply say he was trying to be witty in a way that no longer has much standing and that he's learned to move on.
QuoteI learnt my critical style from such exemplars as Clement Crisp, Arlene Croce, and Pauline Kael, all of whom were in their prime when I began in 1978. Crisp: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril, or bacon and strawberries.” Croce: “On a grim evening in Stockholm you can throw yourself in a canal or go to the Royal Swedish Ballet.” My own use of sarcasm has varied in quantity more than a few times over the years: I remember paring it away in the early 1990s only to find it burst out not long afterwards...
There have been also several times when I’ve written a review with the deliberate intention of causing a furor. A critic is useful when she or he provokes debate ...
I ... meant merely that her weight looked a single sugar plum beyond some ideal. How big is one sugar plum?
As it happens, I’m not keen on the super-thin kind of ballerina; it’s well known that, when I came to ballet in the 1970s, I was wild about Lynn Seymour, whose weight was surely greater than Ringer’s. Nonetheless my “one sugar plum too many” words have led many to assume I’m on the side of anorexia. I’m not, but that’s how many now will always see me.
As it happens, my close friends included some women who’ve had anorexia and other women who’ve tried to deal with obesity, in some cases consulting doctors. I’m sure I often said the wrong thing, but, in the case of one anorexic friend, over thirty years ago, I visited the doctor we both shared to ask advice on what I should or should not say to help matters if I could. It’s a long story, but that friend recovered from anorexia, and our friendship grew closer. As for obesity, I shared a house for five years with one large lady who ran a group of other women addressing the weight issue; I often opened the door or answered the phone to other women who were dealing with the problem.
I’m aware that some male dancers suffer from weight problems and eating disorders too. Nonetheless, ... To be specific, I’ve criticized Mark Morris’s weight in both 1992 (in The New Yorker) and 2001 (in the Times Literary Supplement), on one occasion using the word “obese”. In the New York Times, I singled out New York City Ballet’s Nilas Martins (son of Peter) as “portly”.
For many readers, it’s clear that there are rights and wrongs in this story. But are there? Nobody has ever complained that I had written that Nilas Martins was “portly”. Nobody has been outraged retrospectively that one Russian critic in 1892 described the original Sugarplum fairy as “pudgy”. While I remained at the New York Times ... several readers would write to me when they wanted me to criticize a dancer’s weight. Others told me to do so in person, though under their breaths.
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How the spoken name sounds with "Ballet" matters too. Chicago sounds better than Illinois, Cleveland than Ohio, Houston than Texas. Philadephia and Pennsylvania, on the other hand. are equally appealing – and in my California imagination equally exotic. At one time I associated them with "The Philadelphia Story" and "PEnnsyvania 6-500" from "The Glenn Miller Story". Or with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.
At least ballet companies don't complicate matters by pulling up stakes and moving as sports teams sometimes do, like the once Los Angeles Rams or the Minnesota Lakers.
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2 hours ago, Drew said:
Louise Fishman (1939-2021) is an interesting figure to me--also linked to abstract expressionism and an explicitly feminist painter as well:
Both Louise Fishman and Joan Mitchell were represented by Robert Miller Gallery and later followed John Cheim to Cheim & Read. Some very nice catalogues on their works are available to page through online here –
https://www.cheimread.com/publications
6 hours ago, dirac said:Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan
There’s no holly, but there is
the glass and granite towers
and the white stone lions
and the pale violet clouds. And
the great tree of balls in
Rockefeller Plaza is public.
Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's
I hope there will be more
more drives to Bear mountain and searches for hamburgers,
more evenings avoiding the latest Japanese movies and watching
Helen Vinson and Warner Baxter in Vogues of 1938 instead,
more discussions in lobbies of the respective greatnesses of
Diana Adams and Allegra Kent,
more sunburns and more half-mile swims in which Joe beats me
as Jane [Freilicher] watches, lotion-covered and sleepy, more arguments over
Faulkner's inferiority to Tolstoy while sand gets into my bathing
trunks ...
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Another cohort that might be of interest are the "women of Ninth Street" – Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning (who also wrote about ballet), Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan – all of whom held their own at the "Club" of Abstract-Expressionists of the 1950s. Frankenthaler's complex woodcuts are currently on view at the Dulwich gallery in London and a large (underlit) Joan Mitchell show is on display here in San Francisco, after which it will move onto Baltimore and Paris.
Ninth Street Women –
Frankenthaler at Dulwich –
https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Nice talk on Mitchell's work at SF MOMA by Stanley Whitney –
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Natalia Goncharova is indeed a major artist – you can see traces of her influence in New York gallery painting today. We mustn't forget that the Soviet Union of the 1920s was a very encouraging climate for women artists – for Lyubov Popova and Alexandra Exter (who also did sets and costumes for ballet), as well as Goncharova. From the Tate show The short life of the equal woman –
QuoteIn the early 1920s, along with the Bolshevik campaign for the emancipation of women under socialism, the constructivist refusal of conventional notions of artistic genius – traditionally associated with masculinity – and its rejection of the hierarchy between fine and utilitarian arts – women were more often linked with the latter – facilitated the unusual, widespread participation of women artists in the young Soviet art world.
https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-15-spring-2009/short-life-equal-women
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15 minutes ago, Helene said:
I only got to see Nadon in the snippet NYCB posted to Anatomy of a Dance, but she was terrific there.
It's a rather effective episode of Anatomy of a Dance –
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Good discussion. I think Balanchine may have had trouble with Onegin based on the distortions to, and sentimentalization of, Pushkin's story. (And what Balanchine himself could have done with Tatiana's dream!). Also the British were a little cool on Balanchine in general in the 50s, complaining that his choreography of ballets like Symphony in C was cold and mathematical.
I find Peck and Ratmansky works inventive and witty enough to fit into the City Ballet repertoire and hold up their end of the evening programs. Russian Seasons can be very affecting and Ratmansky's recent Bernstein Bubble for ABT was full of wonderful variations. What's nice about Pam Tanowitz's work is how it cleanses the palate of postmodernist empty gestured, live-fish-in-a-basket choreography such as Wayne McGregor's and treats the parts of dance as simple set of materials to be assembled and incrementally varied.
Well, Balanchine was a unique phenomenon and it's difficult to hold him a kind of norm. He brought the inheritance of the traditional Russian ballet, the radical Soviet avant garde of the early twenties (out of whose style book The Four Temperaments comes) and ideas he had worked on in Diaghilev's company. Only Ratmansky has some of that depth of experience, with the Bolshoi and via the Taganka Theater productions he watched closely. In the art world the parallels would be with the Black Mountain College where young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly were exposed to the Bauhaus teachings of Kurt Schwitters and Josef Albers. Now it's Matisse who often seems to be a point of reference in the art world, not only with his color sense but with the way he pushes the dynamics of the painting right to the edges of the canvas. I wonder if there's a point of reference in the past that young choreographers could open and and have a dialogue with – Ballets suédois, Kurt Jooss – that would enrichen their work and help them use the space of the "canvas" in a different way. Some place outside the closed loop of the usual influences.
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23 hours ago, dirac said:
Neither man is known for his lightness of touch ...
I left out "these days" to reflect my own thinking on Spielberg. I imagine Justin Peck's choreography getting lost in all the restless production values – hot colors, big sets, camera movements, etc. Translating the stage musical and choreography to the screen is always problematic in that film basically a realistic medium. Its tendency is to document everything, major and minor, with a ruthless eye that gives every element an equivalent value, whereas on stage you only notice the magic, not the clunkiness of the sets and furniture and the awkwardness of physical space.
Directors who might have been interesing choices: 1) small scale - someone like the Chantal Ackerman or Jacques Demy who in different ways would have separated the everday actions from the songs and dance, foregrounded Peck's choreography against simple backgrounds, thus making them discrete elements – two films checkerboarded or running in parallel. Or 2) big scale - Martin Scorsese, who has a subtler sense of the craft and better understanding of cinematic values than Speilberg. Even Julian Schnabel would have been a more sober choice and would have cooled everything down a couple of notches.
Tamara Rojo named new Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet
in San Francisco Ballet
Posted · Edited by Quiggin
Yes, I agree that there will be no more sunny Balanchine years for us here, with Divertimento #15 and Scotch Symphony and Symphony in C listed on the same season's programs. Or the brash American-school works of Jerome Robbins or Justin Peck.
Tomasson maintained a nice balance between witty NYCB ballets and heavier fare like Frankenstein and Ethan Frome. Possokhov will likely still work with the company, as he did with ENB, but the Morris works may fade away (farewell Sandpiper Ballet!).
ENB trailer for Possokhov's Senseless Kindness, based on V Grossmann's novel of World War II, Life & Fate:
https://ondemand.ballet.org.uk/production/senseless-kindness/