Quiggin

Patrick: I too liked "Rayon Vert" and was in the right mood for it at the time I saw it. It was done on a shoestring budget and a shoestring script that was improvised for the most part -- so it never quite knew where it was going to land. Yes, Rohmer's world is bourgeois and land-locked but I think he's enough of an enthnographic filmmaker to realize where it stands in the scheme of things. Yet in his little films, he dares to go against the grain of his narrative and change tone in a way that would be unthinkable in Hollywood. (A recent Rohmer-scaled film, Claire Denis' "Thirty-five Shots of Rum," also challenges the Hollywood vision of life in its quiet way.) Anyway I think it's interesting to let the New Wave films stand together -- that's why I cited the Cahiers event -- which include those of Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard (whose Rohmer film would be "Masculine Feminine"), and Jacques Rivette -- with those of the more formally conservative Rohmer, the best student of the radical Catholic Andre Bazin, a little off to the side.

Between Lew Christensen and Jacques D'Amboise, Igor Yousekevitch did Apollo (and Petrouska!) in the late forties, but it was Andre Eglevsky who generally played the part from 1943 until the late 1950s. John Martin in his Times reviews says at times Eglevsky's Apollo was sometimes a little Hephaistos-like but gave him high marks; also that Balanchine was remodeling the Apollo during this period, making it lighter and simpler. After Andersen's retirement -- this is when I was going a lot and viewing from a fifth ring hang-glider seat -- Lindsay Fisher did it a lot, and I guess Zelensky, though he was at City Ballet, had to wait to do the role with the Kirov a few years ago. Dark haired Gonzalo Garcia did a pretty terrific Apollo with San Francisco Ballet -- he was coached by D'Amboise but it didn't seem like D'Amboise at all -- Gonzalo's solos along the plane behind the three muses were boyish and free, and still nicely introspective where D'Amboise seems (on film) overly anxious. Does Amar Ramasar have the makings of an Apollo? Or Adrian Danchig-Waring? -- Though I wonder if all doing all the Wheeldon pieces might adversely affect the style of dancers -- and the sense of quiet and presence -- for Apollo.

I was sorting old newsclippings and found an interview -- not available online -- between Nigel Andrews and Eric Rohmer from the Financial Times. An excerpt: Nigel Andrews, The Arts Interview: Eric Rohmer, Financial Times, June 22/June 23 2002 It's also interesting to note -- and gives more depth to the story -- that in the early sixties there was a schism at "Cahiers du Cinema" between the younger "group of five," led by Jacques Rivette, and Rohmer, resulting in Rohmer's dismissal from editorship. Here's Emilie Bickerton's account in her "Short History": Rohmer's aloof high classicism had also resulted in the journal's resistance to the New Wave; "Breathless" was given "a measly two stars."

Thanks Leonid for the link and the overview of Lifar's career and Delouche's comments, though it's odd there's no mention of Jacques Rouche' who hired him at the Opera. Now if we could only hear Nijinska's version of Lifar's character and what happened!

Estelle posted a succinct summary of a well researched chapter by Sandrine Grandgambe in "La vie musicale sous Vichy" in this earlier discussion. Is there a good biography on Serge Lifar? I just took a look at the book (via Google translator) and there seemed to be no ambiguity (as there was with most other artists who collaborated at one point or other), no qualms on Lifar's part in his relations with the pro Nazi Vichy government. He seemed to have hit the water swimming. Lifar's mentor Jacques Rouche' (one of two, the other was Diaghilev) was far more kindhearted to the plight of Jewish musicians than Serge. Grandgambe give this picture of the Opera in wartime: As pointed out in the earlier thread, his success was such that his salary was raised eightfold.

I haven’t seen the DVD of the San Francisco production mentioned in another thread but I wanted to say how important I thought the transformation of the Nutcracker to Prince is to the structure of the live one -- it has a little of the feeling of a Shakespearean recognition scene. It’s the moment when Drosselmeyer takes orange mophead off the stiff-bodied Nutcracker and the spirit of the Prince is decanted and affirms and extends itself in graceful corkscrew turns and a series of smooth jumps. And we have had three beautiful versions of this this past week from Gennadi Nedvigin, Taras Domitro and Vitor Luiz who has just joined the company. (He also made a brilliant guest cameo in Russian one afternoon.) You can mistake Vitor for Taras at first, at first when his bowed, newly hatched head moves up to look out over the audience -- their curliness of hair and their coloring is similar -- but Vitor, with great ease and fullness, develops everything that lies within his Leonardo-like circumference, whereas Taras glances out beyond his sphere of restraint and then floats down on imaginary updrafts. Gennadi’s jumps look like he is slipping over the saddle of a horse, with a pause just beyond the summit. The mime of all three dancers is equally fine. The other great moments in this Nutcracker, perhaps by default -- the last half is so spartan -- are 1) the presentation to and blessing of the King & Queen of the Snow, the loan of the chariot, the beautiful horses pawing the ground, and the obliteration of everything in a white-out of snow. 2) The extended mime narrative and reenactment of everything that has happened so far by the Nutcracker prince to the Sugar Plum Fairy, sword stroke by sword stroke, leap by leap, even the dance of liberation in miniature, some done parts lightly, some parts serious / mock serious. They’re like the scene Watteau painted of the inventory the pictures in his dealer’s shop and his patrons going over them one by one. 3) The Apotheosis with the carousel of the community of Clara’s dream (or delirium) moving around in little skip-steps of concentric circles. This is where the curtain falls in the original. In addition to Maria Kochetkova with her elastic musical line, Sofiane Sylve with her free sculptural inventiveness, Lorena Feijoo with her great contrasts of large and small, and Yuri Possokhov’s mad improvisions, other pleasures of this run have come from Daniel Deivison-Oliveira in Chinese with pure and easy cartwheels over his delicately planted wrist, Lily Rogers in Arabian and Diego Cruz and the delightful Miriam Rowan in Spanish, Julianne Kepley as a Sugar Plum Fairy of great character and personality and the many snowflakes whose names and faces move much too fast to match.

Merry Christmas to everybody too ... it's been a great year here and in the world of dance and in the grey grimey world beyond that. (And perhaps Patrick's dilemma might lead to a cultural New York v. Los Angeles thread ... or even a San Francisco v. Miami one.)

The thing about seeing multiple performances of a production like this one is that it’s like it's like seeing different painters paint the same genre scene and being able to compare them side by side and seeing how they -- painters and dancers -- solve the problems differently. In the Grand Pas Thursday night Sofiane Sylve in held her leg out on a turn that probably made it more difficult but gave it a more zig zaggy figure, and she tucked her foot completely under her like a bird as she did a lateral jump as I hadn’t seen anyone do it before. Lorena Feijoo’s shock of recognition mime coming out of the mirror box was a great little moment -- and she went on to phrase her steps with full stops in a way that you could only liken not to dance but someone playing Bach on the piano, double fingering or something like that. Her partner Vitor Luiz had a lovely and warm, at-ease sense of being on stage, and he filled in his mime of the battle with extended shading and nuances. (This part is always interesting and fun -- Taras, Gennadi, Viktor and Joan Boada have all been memorable in different ways here.) Yuri Possokhov was the first Drosselmeyer I’ve really followed all the way through -- flustered and skittish and coy, a bit cat like. Garen Scribner completely realizes the terribly difficult Chinese, snapping out all quadrants of the figures, and Django Allegretti was another great circus bear, more in the quick parts that the rolling ones that Matthew Stewart draws out. Also on Thursday the guest conductor Donato Cabrera pulled out more voices from the orchestra -- at least it seemed -- and Tchaikovsky is always great when you hear him as a lumpy sum of eccentric parts, Mravinsky style, rather than as swelling waves. Is anyone else going this year?

Tuesday: Maria K flew up onto Gennadi’s shoulder as quickly and as softly as a moth. It was quite uncanny -- more like Ovid than Nutcracker. Gennadi’s phrasing was wonderful to watch, architecturally Palladian in its perfect placement of small details against large ones. I applauded so loudly that the woman next to me asked if I had a daughter in the production.

You still can -- or a good hint of it. I believe there's a clip of Laurette Taylor's screen test -- along with some other fascinating tests -- in a biography that George Stevens, Jr did of his father. George Stevens A Filmaker's Journey I didn't realize that -- or only vaguely did. I worked for a while in a little record store in Los Angeles, a little like the one in "HiFi" but dealing in classical Lps, and my boss, who had studied with Sandy Meisner and taught some classes for him, would use Jessica Tandy as an example of a certain type of acting, brilliant but not vulnerable, or something like that -- Tandy may have even taken some classes with Meisner. My boss had come to Los Angeles with a group of actors, Suzanne Plushette was one, who were part of an method based acting school at 20th Century Fox in the early sixties. Now that I look at Brando again in "Streetcar" I can see how brilliant he was in ways that completely slipped past me when I was younger. Not only are the actors acting the roles, but over the roles there is this exciting give and take going on, and challenging each other and nipping at each other's heels. In our technocratic new world, does that kind of thing still happen in theater?

Brando is supposed to have done his performances from scratch every night -- at great emotional cost, according to a review of the recent biography, whereas Jessica Tandy was reputed to be the most technically steadfast -- "core of steel" -- of the Method actors. In the movie Brando and Vivien Leigh are brilliant as Dirac reminds us -- but they seem to be working in two different acting styles, hers much less naturalistic and bigger and theatrical and angular, his with beautiful small round-edged earthy details. Kim Hunter, from the original play and who always seems to get forgotten, seems to be far more in tune with Brando's style than Leigh is. "Streetcar" is a powerful work and actors for the last twenty years tend play it up, they bulk-up on it, or for it -- whereas the play should be held down, as Bart suggests from the flat readings he heard. Williams should be like doing Ashton or Bournonville -- understatement with just the right amount of piquancy ... the model should be Laurette Taylor in "Glass Menagerie."

I haven't seen "Bright Star" but have read some of the reviews -- the the London Times has it as one of the worst films of the year (probably for all the wrong reasons). Stuart Klawans at the Nation, who is usually fairly sensitive, reviewed it favorably along with "25 Shots of Rum," which I liked a lot. But Christopher Ricks in the New York Review ("Undermining Keats") says something like -- Andre Bazin would have said the same thing in a shorter space -- you can't illustrate words with images. In this case, with Keats's words, you will simply destroy them. Bazin or Rudolf Arnheim would go farther and say that words and sounds should always counterpoint the pictures. There is probably an analogous law governing good choreography. OT: There is a new history and prehistory of the Cahiers du Cinema, which Bazin founded in 1951, written by Emilie Bickerton -- I just picked up a copy and it reads very quickly. Cahiers, according to Peter Wollen, was "the last of a series of twentieth-century critical revolutions in the name of 'modernism'." It was a group of "stubborn orphans and adopted families," including Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, who were quite different in outlook (Rohmer was a socially radical Catholic, along with Bazin). The Cahiers rehabilitated the reputations of Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty, and published mug shots of the others, especially the practitioners of the heavy cream Cinema of Quality. Also by the early sixties: I thought that was an interesting footnote to our previous Ripley films discussion.

Saturday night's performance of the Nutcracker seemed subdued but lovely. The production appears to have become simpler, and as if a divertissement or two were missing. (Candy Canes?) Madame du Cirque and company seemed best of all, maybe because a group of children were giggling away near me, and the bear (Benjamin Stewart?) had a nice way of lopsidedly rolling about. Alexandra Meyer-Lorey did a very fine dancing doll, and of all the mime, which is a bit overmuch and too heavy of a layer of it for me, Quinn Wharton seemed to be the most natural and inventive. Clara and Fritz were also very good -- but why does Fritz become contrite for having broken the Nutcracker? He's to be a little mean-spirited and jealous. There should be at least something unsettling, and uncomfortable, and not just all upper middle class good cheer, in a production of the Nutcracker! But I do love the farewells on the chariot and white horses and their little half circle they make in the Waltz -- K&Q finely done by Hansuke Yamamoto and Frances Chung. And in the Grand Pas Vanessa Zahorian and Taras Domitro seemed better individually than together -- whereas last year as King & Queen they were quite brilliant, all acute angles, like a draftman's quiver full of 30 60 90 triangles. Vanessa's account of her solos was lovely and full of interesting corners, and Taras is always all surprises -- like Gennadi Nedvigin, he's a very generous dancer -- he always gives more than you expect but you never know where the extra parts are going to be -- the little extra spring and extention where you think there can't possible be any more. His mime earlier, after his transformation into a prince, was light and very not too serious. It would be truly great and liven things up this season to see Taras and Maria Kochetkova and Sofiane Sylve in the alternate casts of Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Maria in the second aria and Sofiane in either, and Taras -- who had great ear for the psychology and astringency of the Bart Cook part in the Melancholic of the Ts-- in the first.

I agree with Bart about the inappropriateness of any part of In Search of Lost Time for a ballet. It's a dense forest of a text, not a soap opera. Charlus is a man of 40 when he first appears -- at Balbec -- and is rather stout. He and the Grandmother are very important characters -- open windows, a friend called them -- because they're the only ones who see the truth, especially about Marcel. Morel is of a different magnitude and his character serves to show Verdurins and their superficial but dangerous "little clan" at work. They reject the regal and eccentric Charlus who has substance for Morel who has none. It would seem that this ballet should be more appropriately called Morel, or the world according to Morel.

Yes this is fascinating. I was really interested in all this quirky American early technology at one time and and even thought of writing a musical on Technicolor called the Natalie Kalmus story (maybe better as a subplot for a Don Dellilo novel). Redheaded Natalie Kalmus, the estranged wife of the Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus (they lived in the same house but in different wings), was the Technicolor color consultant on all the films to make sure the colors used would meld with the quirky process. Technicolor was filmed actually on two strips of black at white film, one of the strips was a bi-pack with a filter, then the three masters were dipped in pure dyes and printed on a very flammable nitrate, later safety acetate, base. (One smells like gunpowder as it decays, the other vinegar.) Kodachrome, the beautiful film Ann Barzel used to film the Ballets Russes and other companies, was a somewhat similar process invented by two itinerant string quartet members, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, working as freelancers at Eastman Kodak in some leftover basement space. It too uses black and white film which is dipped in very stable color dyes during processing. Early TV programs were recorded as Kinoscopes, filmed directly off a live monitor, faithfully capturing all the fishbowl distortions of the early television display tubes. In part that's why everyone is so short and voluptuous and the movements variable in Pas de Dix with Andre Eglevsky and Maria Tallchief. 4mrdncr's descriptions of the problems of flare (and footcandles) are intriguing because I remember watching for those big black somewhat beautiful (and dangerous) flares of light. You see them in Kinoscopes of Cape Canaveral launchings and in the tragic events of Dallas 1963. There seemed to be a change in monitor tubes -- less distortions -- as early videotape was developed to keep records of live shows so they could be repeated in the summer months. The early videotape process seemed to have a strange low contrast, powdery, mothwing-like quality to it. It's interesting having to correct the choreography for the technology used. The technology of our own time probably is just as distorting -- probably worse -- but we don't see it yet.

I’d have to reverse engineer the first ballerina question because, sort of like Helene and SanderO early on in this thread, I stumbled into ballet through bits glimpsed and there on television. A solo Villella did on a black and white tv (an ancient Hoffmann or a Dumont) skirting all the cardinal points of the stage was so clean and clear that it really changed he way I thought about ballet, but unhappily I didn’t follow up on this insight until years afterward. That ballet was an wondrous articulation machine, Shakespearean in its compass, compacted with sweets, I learned from Balanchine (in cheap 5th ring seats at NY State Theater) and Balanchine led to Petipa. I probably could have been led in the ballet door by Melissa Hayden in Stars & Stripes or Maria Tallchief in Pas de Dix or even in her crisp Chopiania, but not Swan Lake -- or Diana Adams, more than Allegra Kent, in the dangerous Agon. (Agon would have changed everything for me.) Margot Fonteyn would have been too slow and devout (except for Facade) and I would have fixed on how much she look like Princess Margaret. A first hand studio class experience though, like chiapuris's with Éthéry Pagava, might have done the trick.

Off Topic John Martin begin liking Balanchine in the late forties, but it was the premiere of Agon in 1957 that changed his critical life. He was then able to see the co-billed Apollo -- which he had picked away at for years -- in a totally new way. Such is human nature and its messy U-turns. But I think Martin was just following the other critics, and it seemed fairly fashionable to be dismissive of Balanchine in the thirties. Anatole Chujoy, Arnold Haskell ("Balanchine's ballets were ingenious and intensely personal distortions of classicism that promptly dated as none of the earlier Diaghileff ballets had done") and Adrian Stokes had great reservations about Balanchine. (Stokes loved Cotillon and wrote at length about it and its intriguing to and fro tennis court movements but said, "if the majority of the pieces in the repertoire belonged to the Cotillon type ... modern ballet would die".) What Caryl Brahms said in 1936 seems to echo the sentiments of the other critics:

I hunted through Brodovitch too -- even his ballet proof sheet outtakes -- and thought it might be Septieme Symphonie because of the laurel leaves in one of the dancers hair, but I couldn't match the ribboning on the dress and SS seems too robust a ballet. Could it be the Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda? The photo itself is indeed very well thought out and more sensitive to the choreography than most and does have a touch of the Brodovitch style to it. And Irving Penn's style too -- his Bacchus and Ariadne.

I agree with you, PeggyR, about the publicity value, but for that group it sets up a predisposition to boredom if the real thing isn't like that. It also becomes a public record and reference of the dancers' artistry and there is little left -- you would have not idea that Joan Boada has a wonderfully sense of time -- and dance is all about time and stretching it out and compacting it again. I'm a great fan of the jump cut and could watch J-L Godard and Dziga Vertov until the cows come home (as a college professor always used to say), but this jumble of nervous jump cuts -- as if they're afraid something real would happen otherwise -- begins to creep into the choreography itself.

I wouldn't mind flying around in Santa's sleigh and seeing Cuban Classical Ballet version, the very English-style looking Nutcracker of the Royal Ballet and Balanchine's of Miami City Ballet and New York. In real life I shall see San Francisco Ballet's steadfast Nutcracker, probably a couple of times, the magic being in changing casts of dancers. Our version has a curious sort of Waltz of the Zinnias all in summer colors but nothing as wondrous as the raising of the Christmas tree of NYCB's. Peter Wright Royal Ballet Nutcracker

They're a great publicity tool, but, by cutting the performances into snippets -- into M&Ms -- the little films don't make a good case for the dancers' best qualities of phrasing and musicality. The men look beefier than they appear on stage and more mechanical and samey. Tiit Helimets and Sofiane Sylve seem to come off the best. I think using slower tempoed and unshredded & intact pieces, with the music that was written directly for them, maybe less contrasty lighting, more pastel colors would help a lot. Informal rehearsal videos captured in a limited compass of space might be good way to highlight a particular dancer's style, integrity, and subtlety of phrasing. Compare Het Nationale Ballet:

Alexandra, I'm sorry for being obscure, which I can frequently be -- it's just when I going to college in film school there was still a lot of interest in Existentialism and making a leap of faith about something, anything. The concept of thinking outside the box is maybe the closest we have to it now. To be able to link it to the leap of a ballet dancer at this late date is a nice image for me. I tend to like everything in life somewhere to have nice "points of attachment" to everything else I'm curious about. I guess I was interested in Napoli thread because it got me to link Kierkegaard, Bournonville and Hans Christrian Andersen more closely together, even leading me to read Andersen's description to Bournonville of K's funeral with the ladies in red hats and blue hats and the argument about the handful of earth tossed on his casket. Also because of Hubbe's integrity as a dancer -- who everyone admired so much -- that I sort of wanted a case to be made for the integrity of his new production of Napoli.

I was going to say that following good archeological practices, the sutures between the old and new parts of Act II should be left evident, but it seems as if there have been so many changes that that would not be practical. From the Bournonville.com site, by Erik Aschengreen: At least there seem to be stretches of Napoli intact, unlike the Swan Lakes that Mel mentioned, which are have any only a shaky outline left -- "acceptable ideas", and would seem to be exercises in some weird sort of historical amnesia. (The forgetting of Petipa, Ivanov, Ashton, & Balanchine.) Leonid, are there any translations of the reviews you posted? Alexandra, so a grand jete en avance or two was all that would have made the existentialists of thirty years ago happy?!! Interesting that Hans Christian Andersen wanted to be a ballet dancer at his friend Bournonville's company before he found his vocation as a writer.

The always problematic second act -- that everyone is supposed to have skipped out on -- seems to be the one that is new and has most of Hubbe's choreography. The FT reviewer gave the production five stars which is not given lightly -- Did this new choreography sway him? Other questions: Is the second act based on the Agnes and the Merman story, of which both Andersen and Kierkegaard wrote versions and which may have been pagan in origin? And Alexandra, OT a bit, I'm intrigued to know more -- from your Bournonville notes elsewhere -- about the balletic leap (not a motorcycle's!) that inspired Kierkegaard's -- who also apparently had a discussion with Bournonville on irony? From On Repetition:

Maybe some of the performances would have gained charm and depth in some other ways -- like paintings in frames not of the same period. It would be a heroic task but a compilation of clips might be interesting, especially to see the remaining regional differences in classical styles. I'd like to see bits of Airs et Danses Anciens from Belgium, Rossiniana from Austria, and Piccasiada from Czechoslovakia.