Quiggin

The Bauhaus ideal and that of the Chicago school was not to make beautiful things but honest and utilitarian ones -- their beauty came in years later. Manet and the Impressionists did not create beauty -- they were juxtaposing things from high and low society, factories and leisure painted in coarse brushwoork -- that had never been shown together before. Mahler was a plumber's bag of odd sizes and harsh tricks. Balanchine's works had some of this coarse, ugly ducking quality.

And even if it were, the adult is the one with the responsibilty to act as an adult, i.e. to act in the interest of the child.

Yes of course, that's what I hope I implied about the asymmetrical balance of power.

Thanks ATM711 and FarrellFan and Jack Reed earlier for your reports. I just got tickets for both performances at Zellerbach in Berkeley for which good seats are still available. Am looking forward to Agon -- I saw Miami do a very refined version here last year -- and to a Divertimento with some bite to it.

That petition is truly going to be box office poison.

I agree that what Whoopi Goldberg said was mindless and coarse, but her comments are a whole different thing than the support of the people signing the petition -- and who knows what they thought they were signing. If we stop going to see the movies they're associated with, we'll not be seeing much in the way of films.

Cristian, I agree with the spirit of what your comeback, agree with most of your points, and I could mischievously quote Karl Kraus, who said the age of consent is the border most tempting to smugglers, but I have to say the age difference was far too great, he took great disadvantage of her from a completely asymmetrical balance of power. Sometimes a young person does seduce a older person, but this was not the case (though just what sort of quid pro quo arrangement was mother thinking about for the magazine pictures?). Quaaludes were a powerful muscle relaxant, so he deliberately knocked her out. This case most certainly does not involve one person wooing another, no matter what age, and both having a mutually rewarding and meaningful or frivolous affair which is perfectly fair.

From another point of view it's interesting that it was Polanski who challenged the status quo, who didn't quietly go on on the lam (not lamb!) but almost challenged the system to arrest him. There are really no borders with him.

One of them had studied with Cleanth Brooks and was a master the close reading of a text

A friend of mine took classes from Cleanth Brooks and goes crazy whenever you mention his name. He says the first breath of clear air, the first teacher to get it right was Northrup Frye -- to whom Harold Bloom owes a great debt, anxiety of influence and all. He also said -- this was the fifties -- that he wanted to do a paper on Wallace Stevens, but was shooed away from this idea. Stevens was interesting but not substantial enough. Like butterfly-wing dust, I guess, as Coleridge said of French lit.

Yes, it seemed to have a particular tone that didn't change key, perhaps it could have been edited differently. I liked the two scenes from Stanley Williams class, one with Balanchine, slightly sad, but with a documentary film truthfulness to them.

at least some of that Depression-era art was created under government sponsorship by way of the 'put people to work' programs.

And in the US and the former Soviet Union and Cuba, the arts -- most especially ballet -- got a second financial wind as a result of the Cold War.

But they are all part of social, cultural, ideological, political movements, they do grow out of all of these, not as esthetic baubles, of course, that exist outside of everything else of life. Yes, they can be 'greater than life' in a sense, but they don't exist without life.

Patrick, I tried to find a juicy Adorno quote to follow your thought but they're difficult to cite intact, and I can only wade out so far. Doesn't Adorno also say something like art is at war with its own materials, what it comes out of, and this gives it its form -- which makes it a little less cozy of an ideal.

I simply do not see how such an act can be forgiven in such a manner.

Leonid & dirac,

I didn't say it should be forgiven, I said in my posts above it was a heartless, unforgivable act that the weaker person carries with him or her the rest of their lives, that the subtleties of rape being discussed were a bit too much, that Polanski should be punished, he should serve real time in a prison cell -- (no mobile phones, no deal making from prison) and he should live to get out and live a chastised afterlife.

But this shouldn't be compared to Pinochet who had thousands of students dropped from airplanes into an estuary and caused lifetime heartbreaks for their families (and Kissinger said he wasn't doing enough!).

*

Jack Abbott I believe was the American writer who was released from prison on the recommendation of Norman Mailer and others. A friend of mine came across the body of the man he had just killed early one morning on east 5th or 6th, lying surreally outside a cafe ...

There are many countries in the world including the USA who are pursuing other elderly men and women to bring them to trial.

But we should keep a sense of proportion here. Some of those extraditions involved heads of state and their lieutenants who committed profound crimes -- not just a significant transgression, as is in Polanski's case -- such making a wiping out a whole generation of students, creating a whole class of "disappeareds," as what happened in Chile in the 70's.

Justice is not well-served when a case is spread out into four decades.

Yes, but the LA District Attorney's office is overwhelmed I'm sure with more important current cases, gang violence etc. They have rather limited resources.

What Polanski, artist or man, appears to have done appears is very wrong (there is an investigative report at the Daily Beast) -- not the fleeing part, but taking away something of a young person's regard of herself. There really are no subtleties there, it's unforgivable, more so maybe because the violence is neat and not on the outside but becomes carried away in the weaker person.

Polanski still should serve a sentence, maybe a year or two in a cell, it could be in Switzerland. But at this point trial in the states, the circus of news coverage, and the limited sentencing options would be a bit like reenacting the original transgression with the world as vicarious participants.

Polanski had an obligation to pay for crimes committed here according to standards maintained here.

Unfortunately those standards here in the States and in California have changed greatly over the past 40 years -- in general punishments are more severe than in the old days -- and so Polanski would be sentenced by different set of criteria than originally would have been the case.

Added: I assume that extradition treatries would presume symmetry in punishments. In immigration and asylum cases lawyers often base pleas on the variances in sentencing laws, that is, you wouldn't want to send someone away to a country where they would be in prison forever instead of say, normally five years. It would be informative in this discussion to be able to compare Polanksi's original sentence, his plea-bargained sentence, his sentence today in Switzerland and his sentence today in California -- post-Three Strikes and other controversial laws.

Also "civilized" States, such as the US and Switzerland and others in Europe, should keep an eye on each other regarding punishments -- there's peer review whatever field you're in.

And I curious how happy the the US really is have this case thrown back into our laps.

but there is a reason why charges are brought in the name of the people or the state and not individuals

We've totally lost track of this principle of law -- as trials have become a form of entertainment.

I'm divided about Polanksi's case because our sentencing policies are so out of synch with those of the rest of the world, at least with Europe's.

Bardot also appears briefly in "Masculin-Feminin."

Contempt is a film I go back and forth about, it's that Godard combination of good and awful.

Maybe the great and the awful. I've gone back and forth to it over the years many times since I've first seen it. It's the diamondback snake in Godard's bestiary of films according to Manny Farber, with its long tracking shots and "ping pong" pans, its "snakes and funerals" cinemascope aspect ratio. And it's got Fritz Lang and amarillo-back Casa Malaparte and the red Alfa Romeo well before "the Graduate." It's the source of Barbara Kruger's "approprated" "When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook."

And the Bardot part may be based on some of Moravia's ideas of Elsa Morante, and their relationship. Dirac, you must upgrade your doubts about "Contempt" a notch or two!

Earlier this summer I enjoyed reading Carlos Acosta’s memoir of growing up in the los Pinos district on the margins of Havana, "No Way Home," and now I’m reading "Arturo’s Island" by Elsa Morante (subject of Lily Tuck’s recent biography). Both books are about boys who lived on islands, had free rein of their childhoods, and lived in the shadow of their fathers' troublesome fascinations.

Acosta’s life was shaped by his father Pedro's stolen glimpse of a ballet in a cinema -- of a scene from a silent film where the women "spun around like Japanese parasols, elegant, delicate and light," and the men affected the walk of Charlie Chaplin. When the opportunity for Carlos to attend ballet presented itself, the image of the parasol ladies inexplicably came back to his father in a flash as the solution for Carlos’ future. “Your art is your house” -- go back to the ballet, Pedro says everytime Carlos tries to return home to his family and his old neighborhood.

It was in that little town of Los Pinos, surrounded by music, dominoes, rum, the smell of fruit, which impregnated the very fabric of our clothes and cancelled out all other odors, and the hooting of enchanted owls that I spent my childhood.

Arturo (“First of all, I’m proud of my name ... the name of a star ... and of a king”) grows up by himself on the dour island of Procida (“the shops are dark and sinister as robbers dens”) in the sea of Naples. He lives in an old house (“smells of the past owners floated out, mixed with things we’d collected like bits of rusty machinery, underwater plants and starfish that afterwards dried up or rotted in the drawers. Maybe this is why I’ve never been able to discover the smell of our rooms anywhere else ...”)

Arturo’s mother died at his birth and he lives with his father who disappears from Procida for months at a time.

My childhood is like a happy country, of which he is the absolute king... We must have looked like a funny pair to anyone who met us -- he walking resolutely along, like a ship in full sail, with his blond foreign look, his puffy lips and hard eyes that looked no one in the face ; and I tagging along behind, my dark eyes darting proudly right and left ...

“The Andulsian Shawl” is another perfect Elsa Morante account of boyhood, the story of Andrea, the son of a ballet dancer alienated from his mother by the ballet, which takes her away from him every night.

If the subject of the theatre or dancing or opera should come up, his eyes darkened, his brow was furrowed and the family saw a remarkable metamorphosis -- if was as if a dove or a cockerel had suddenly changed into an owl.

I also have Morante’s History on my list of books to read.

Somehow I was moved by Darcey Bussell's Agon, which I saw at the 1993 Balanchine Celebration, thimbleful of vodka and all, because it was not othordox Balanchine but was done in a different idiom -- as was as if DB was thinking out loud these very unusual -- for her -- steps. I thought her Emeralds was a bit too willowy and big boned but her Symphony in C 2nd movement quite good.

I remember not much wanting to watch Heather Watts either, not enough freedom and abandonment or original personality.

Kyra Nichols mid-nineties Mozartiana was superb, every step and inflection was there. Nichols rethought the part completely, so I imagine it was a completely different experience than Farrell's performance was. Except for some unauthorized Cuban version, I can't think of anyone who could do Mozartiana again -- perhaps it's a lost ballet. Maybe Carbro has a current NYCB candidate for the role.

With Kistler I remember her timing being odd and off-putting but recently I saw a DVD of scenes from Le Valse, released by American Film Archives with Balanchine Foundation approval, with Tanaquil Le Clercq and Nicholas Magallanes. LeClercq's performance reminded me a bit of how Kistler would do it (which I must have seen).

Of the men I didn't like Peter Boal as much as everyone else did -- I wanted to -- but I found him a bit jittery and nervous and when he stopped, he disappeared -- whereas say when Peter Martins stopped and stood in place he still had a palpable presence, as if treading water, and Ib Andersen, standing still, still had a puckish curiosity about what was going on elsewhere.

John Martin in the New York Times gave Alonso rave reviews from the time he spotted her in the corps. Of her debut in Giselle in 1943 ("it is deeply to be regretted there is to be no repetition of it") he says,

From a dramatic standpoint which is so important in this quaint old piece, she plays with such simplicity and such honestry that she is completely convincing. Even the inherently incredible mad scene at the end of the first act apparently holds no terrors for her, because she approaches it so unaffectedly...

The only reservations he has are that are “that inuitive spatial precision that manifrests itself both in the completion of the line and motor phrase is still lacking.” but the next year, he says “her technical grasp is prodigious; it is now her miming that trails a bit behind” and “this extraordinary brilliant young ballerina from Cuba will one day become one of the great Giselles if only she is allow to dance the role long enough.” In 1946 he faults her only for skimping on “the rather lush ‘spirituality’ [of that Romanic era] that animates that important [second] movement as a whole.”

John Martin’s review of Apollo with Alonso and Eglevsky also shows off Martin’s wit and snippiness (he later recanted about Apollo when he was bowled over by Agon, and saw the two ballets along with Orpheus). It, too, looks everyday of 1945, but has a nice line about Alonso:

[Apollo] is a prime example of the late Diaghileff era of ballet, when novelty, ingenuity and deliberate perversity ranked especially high. It is now seventeen years old and looks every day of it, for, truth to tell, we have come a long mile since those naively sophisticated days. Its style is “moderne,” its technique appallingly difficult and its choreography frighteningly clever.

Last night’s performance was an especially brilliant one, especially by Alicia Alonso, who suspensions and general precision were little short of fabulous. Nora Kaye and Barbara Fallis also danced beautifully in the other major feminine roles.

Andre Eglevsky in the demanding title role came off with honors though in appearance he suggested Apollo perhaps less than Hepahaistos.

I don't know if this is the place to post them but here are flickr links to two lovely photographs of Cotillon, the parent ballet of the three “glove ballets” of Balanchine: "La Sonnambula," "Liebeslieder Walzer," but especially so of "La Valse."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92527244@N00/3821923504/

Cotillon: scherzo-valse: Baronova, Lichine and Morosova

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92527244@N00/3821923956/

Cotillon: menuet pompeux: Baronova and Morosova

"Cotillon" was designed by Christian Bérard, who also suggested some of its scenes, in which “the ballet’s props--satin swags, paper hats, fans, tambourines and guitars -- seem to have become instruments of magic,” according to Boris Kochno, who wrote the storyline of the ballet--which he based on “illustrations from etiquette manuals, parlor games and drawing room dances of the late 19c."

“One such inspiration [of Bérard’s] had Toumanova, a dancer, reveal in the middle of a waltz that she was really a fortune teller then had her read the palms of the guests at the ball all of whom were wearing gloves. She conjured up images of their futures, including a young girl turning into a chimera with bat’s wings and a lovers’ meeting that ended in a duel.”

Karinska executed the "Cotillon" costumes for Bérard and later designed those of "La Valse." Bérard mentored Christian Dior and may be the spiritual father of Dior’s New Look that in turn (re)informed "La Valse." He also designed the costumes and sets for the first "Mozartiana."

Bérard was the son of the architect of the city of Paris, attended the top knotch Lycee Janson de Sailly (at the same time as Julien Green and Michel Leiris) and lived his life in a sort of squalorous reverse luxury. According to Cecil Beaton,

With his fine beak-like nose, his untidy red bard and lank wisps of silken hair...he would walk down the Quais in his dirty, cigarette-ash covered shirt, his soiled coat and unbuttoned trousers, with his dirty little dog Jacinthe hooked underneath his arm, the quintessence of French taste and elegance...

Picture by Cartier Bresson of Bérard Theatre Arts, 1949:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92527244@N00/3821925682/ C B by C-B

Christian Bérard, France’s great scenic artist, fell dead last February 12 on the stage of a Paris theatre. Painter, decorator, enigma, romantic, he was inspirational source of such diverse arts as Cocteau’s film fantasies, Dior’s couture, Fokine’s ballet, his sets for “The Madwoman of Chaillot” are a delight of this New York season. Many saw an ironic fitness in the dramatic coincidence of Christian Bérard’s death during the rehearsal of a Moliere play--for in 1673 Moliere, too, died on the stage of a Paris theartre.

There are also tantalizing clips of both ballets on the Balanchine bio DVD. "Cotillon" appears to have be photographed on lovely old Kodachrome.

Claudia Roth Pierpont in Ballet Review, Summer 1990 discusses the glove ballets, "Liebeslieder" being "the richest of 'Cotillon’s' successors" where Balanchine "becomes his own Kochno, his own Bérard" and suffuses all the props and the tricks into the surface of the ballet itself.

I haven't read/seen the Julie/Julia book/movie, but I'm curious about what happened to Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. It's my impression that Julia was the great technician and teacher, and they were the real French chefs and knew the tradition inside out. (Julie Child's own personal recipe book did not seem that exciting when it came out.) Jane Grigson cleared the way for Alice Waters with her fruit and vegetable books, but MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David seem to have been originals. Please, movie gods, no biopics about them!

miilosr:

It would be really interesting to see City Ballet in this exact same programming.

It is good programming, but not really for New York City Ballet. Serenade is done everywhere in the States and has become the Fur Elise of the Balanchine repertoire, and Five Brahms Dances isn't the most intriguing Ashton, at least as staged in San Francisco (where the lighting was very dim, so perhaps it is). For all the "ballet is a woman" at City Ballet, Hubbe did quite well there, at least in the Apollo and La Sonnambula and myriad other pieces I saw him in. Since Balanchine did found the company, it would be sensible for it to do a good amount of varied examples of his 400 or so ballets each year; to not yet kick him upstairs--the implication is that there might be less this year. San Francisco is doing only one program--Serenade, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, which they haven't quite translated yet, and Theme and Variations, which they do splendidly. So it'd be nice if NYCB carried the ball for a while more.

Perhaps creating a whole program from 1953 or 1959 at City Ballet might be interesting, with FirstChairOboe's suggestion of Roma or Bourree Fantasque as the centerpiece. It may be marketable--Bill Cunningham could photograph people stepping off curbs in clothes of the same period and Johnny Depp could guest in Cotillon (Charbrier twice!) or Die Fledermaus. Pas de Dix has nice footwork for men, sublime to wonderfully knock-kneed.

Thanks, Old Fashioned, I’ve listened to Roy Hargrove, Joe Locke, Christian McBride, online--and I'll try to listen more of them--and I went to hear Josh Redman in San Francisco at Herbst Hall in a “Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Revisited” concert a year or two ago. This music is different than generic Lincoln Center/Columbus Circle jazz. But it seems like a whole different sort of music than the pre-1959 stuff--it’s more technically brilliant and shimmering, with complicated feathering out and long mail-coats of intricate notes, at least that’s how I visualize it. What I miss from the earlier stuff is the stance and the sarcasm and wit; a whole different way of musically being in the world.

When John Coltrane comes in the room on his first phrase, it’s as if nothing existed before, his footing in so assured, it’s in the perfect “wrong” place, somewhat the manner of--if I don’t romanticize too much--Suzanne Farrell or Allegra Kent.

The old school jazz was made in a time when artists were still outsiders--and art was outside and a bit threatening to the normal--which is impossible today. There is no "wrong place" available anymore.

I like jazz well enough although I'm no great fan, but my impression is that the music began fading in mass popularity beginning with the rise of bebop

But beboop was when jazz became great, with Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker (with Miles Davis), and early Thelonius Monk. "Ruby My Dear", "Caroina Moon," "April in Paris" are wonderfully danceable.

For me it's after John Coltrane ("My Favorite Things"), when jazz no longer was based on popular songs, Rogers & Hart and Cole Porter, etc--playing every note except the one you were supposed to play--that it became less interesting. Eric Dolphy is probably the end of that road, though Cecil Taylor still plays...

Jazz no longer comments on the world from the standpoint of an astute outsider, which was its old role--it's now part of Lincoln Center and Whole Foods.

Tallchief says Balanchine had only one lung, had to reserve his energy and focus for his work. It sounds as though their domestic life was fairly uncomplicated, and maybe a little boring for biographers. Artists' works are usually more interesting than their personal lives--though Picasso is sort of a type apart (T J Clark in this year's Mellon lectures--online at the National Gallery of Art--has promised little or no biography in his discussions of Picasso's post cubist paintings, where structure and substance and space have their own domestic arguments with each other).

Anyway Leclerq's taped interview that was posted here earlier seems to back up Tallchief's comments. That said, Joan Acocella's talk at UC Berkeley in 2005 (online as a podcast), "Balanchine & Sex," did have some provocative insights.

What would be interesting to hear would for Tallchief to fill in more of Dirac's "(vast) spaces between the lines". For me this would be what was really happening behind stage in the late forties and early fifties when the company was just coming together as an institution--how the dancers interacted and who thought of certain parts as only theirs and how Balanchine the psychologist pulled the everything together (the old Mike Leigh Balanchine movie idea).

I agree with Leonid about the lines and tempi being changed by the height and mass of the dancer--at some point physics does enter into the picture. Small birds have different dynamics than large ones, and smaller dancers, such as Joaquin de Luz and Antoinio Carmena are very effective in the fast movements of Symphony in C, darting in and out, in ways that might be less exciting with tall dancers.

But other things change the tempos and lines and overall look of the ballet. Dancers with sharp inner contours to their legs, along their thighs and heels (they always look like pinking shears to me) like Lindsay Fisher and Conrad Ludlow could look like the were doing more, or better beats, than other dancers.

Dancers built with arms that curve up at the elbow like Gonzalo Garcia and one of the Rubies dancers at SFB this year (?)--as if they were attached the wrong way, like cubist dolls--give good emphasis to the multiple planes of Symphony in C, Rubies and Apollo.

Bart:

Stravinsky seems to me to be a supremely danceable composer... Personally, I've always preferred to "see" Stravinsky than sitting in a concert hall and merely listening.

The pianist Stephen Hough makes an interesting reverse connection between Stravinsky's music and Balanchine's dance in an interview the Financial Times did with him in the July 18 / July 19 2009 issue:

If [your] house were a piece of music, which piece would that be?

That's difficult. A Stravinsky, a middle-period Stravinsky: clean edges, white and quiet. Something like Agon perhaps, his ballet based on Balanchine's choreography. That would be the closest--though this house is more comfortable than Agon.

Hough is playing not Stravinsky but Tchaikovsky on one of the programs the BBC Proms are doing this year of all the Stravinsky ballet music (Rubies/Capriccio not in the running, of course). A rather fresh account of "Petrushka" (Prom 15) is accessible online for a few more days. The conductor is Jiří Bělohlávek, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Some background on the differences between the original and the later version, according to Wikipedia:

In 1947, Stravinsky penned a revised version of Petrushka for a smaller orchestra, in part because the original version was not covered by copyright and Stravinsky wanted to profit from the work's popularity. The drumrolls linking each scene, optional in the 1911 original, are compulsory in the 1947 edition. The ballerina's tune is assigned to a trumpet in the 1947 version instead of a cornet as in the original. The 1947 version provides an optional fff (fortissimo) near the piano conclusion of the original. Stravinsky also removed some of the difficult metric modulations in the original version of the first tableau from the 1947 revision.

The Stravinsky programs can be found through this link:

BBC Proms: What's on

Thanks, Lynette, for the link to the Stravinsky database. Who knew there had been that many Apollos and Agons. I was especially intrigued by Yvonne Rainer's Agon version at Dance Theater Workshop in 2006--which sounds like wonderful Judson nonsense.

A re-vision of Balanchine's Agon, using his choreography with Rainer interventions. Three of the performers were modern dancers, Coates ex-New York City Ballet. The final Pas-de-quatre was danced to Henry Mancini's 'Pink Panther.'

A bit of whitelight's review from here on Ballet talk:

What's amazing is that shining through all the distortion, there's a whole lot of Agon still there. The pas de deux, in which ballerina Emily Coates is partnered by the three older, downtown, female choreographers, really is recognizably Balanchine the whole way. Her distortions were so witty! For example, instead of having the partner drop dramatically from a lunge to the floor, Coates just switches partners (one was lunging, the other takes her hand only after she is on her back). It's much less difficult technically, but the spirit of suspense and virtuosity is still there-- Perhaps after her legacy of being anti-virtuosity, Rainer is now making her commentary from the other side: even easy movement is virtuosity! Either way, it nudges the audience to consider "ordinary" movement and "dance" movement from a new perspective. And it's a tight little piece.