Quiggin

The Bluebird / Princess Florine variations (such as the b&W Yuri Vladimirov one on YouTube) and one or two things from Don Quixote which the Cubans are always doing. I agree with Carbro on going for musically over technique. Being overly technique-conscious is like keeping an eye out for misspellings and missing out on the poetry. Sofronintsky is a messy Chopin player (the Vladimirov of pianists perhaps) but I notice all sorts of things about Chopin I would not with a technically more proficient player.

Also what about our own techniques of seeing and noticing--which may not always be the same night to night--another variable.

what Balanchine could 'shake out of his sleeve'

Here's some of the B.H. Haggin review of PAMTGG (and some of his Chopiniana thoughts) from the Summer 1972 Hudson Review. I generally find Haggin uneven, but here he does give a closer look to the work than the Time or the Barnes NYT accounts do:

I can offer no explanation of Balanchine’s basing a ballet on a Pan Am radio jingle and his using bad music by Roger Kellaway and ugly costumes of Irene Sharaff...[however] it doesn’t deserve the bad treatment it got from Clive Barnes...Harris Green mentioned the costume which made Karin van Aroldingen “look particularly ghastly” but “liked her pas de deux with Ohman”...I discovered that the ensemble of badly costumed airline pilots, stewardesses and ground crews provided a context for three pas de deux of the soloists--the classical pas de deux of Gelsey Kirkland and Earle Sieverling; the powerful night-club-style number, to a blues, of von Aroldingen and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous; and the fast and tricky Latin-American-stye number of Sara Leland and John Clifford; and while the ensembles were a mere competent filling out of time, the pas de deux show the unique Balanchine powers of invention for a girl and boy dancing together to be undiminshed. All three were excellent in their different ways; and the second was outstanding.

Nor--to come to this year’s new productions--do I understand Balanchine’s staging of Fokine’s Chopiniana in the way he did. Ther occurs to me the sttement attributed to Hindemith--that music had a face; and if one didn’t like it one shouldn’t play it; but if one played it one shouldn’t change it...Chopiniana raised such questions: why Masso was assigned to a role which required her to do what she had clearly demonstrated in Diamonds and Don Quixote which she could not do; and why the role not given to the dancer who had repeatedly demonstrated in breathtaking fashion her ability to do the very thing Masso couldn’t do--Violet Verdy...

Time:

Except if it was choreographed by George Balanchine, a genius who can design, with seemingly equal facility, enduring masterpieces or tremendous trifles.

The Time PAMTGG review shows the magazine at its Henry Luce era snippiest. It's a sort of "balanced" reporting (it implies a 50/50 split in Balanchine's production) that has somewhat migrated to the Economist, with its own "silkily arrogant tone" (the novelist Pankaj Mishra's characterization of the Economist).

Thanks, too, Mashinka, for the review by Bidisha at the Guardian--which was a good discussion of the book and brought back many of its great virtues to mind, though I never found the characters unsympathetic. An neighbor of mine in LA ran into Colette once in San Tropez, at a lending library over a fisherman's store. Colette said she wished all her fans were as pretty as L and her friend were--they were teenagers and liked the Cheri books then, the Vagabond later. Colette, according to L, was "a huge thing by then," but what she noticed more was Colette's thick burgundian accent, with its heavy stock of rolling r-r-r-s.

http://images.chapitre.com/ima3/big1/955/6789955.jpg

Here's an image of another Lea, Marcelle Chantal, though it's too bad it wasn't Simone Signoret--& Gerard Philipe?. Signoret would have the appropriate body for the role. I remember the part of the second book--it's the only part I remember--where Lea finally lets her weight and appearance go, and Cheri doesn't recognize her. It seemed nicely liberating.

Do you have a favorite literary cat? I nominate Christopher Smart's Jeoffry.

Dirac, your source skipped these interesting lines--of which there seem to be thousands--from Smart's poem:

...the power of some animal is predominate in every language [and] the spirit of a CAT is in the Greek...

For the sound of a cat is in the most useful proposition KAT' EUXHN...

For the pleasantry of a cat at pranks is in the [Greek] language ten thousand times over...

For the Greek is thrown from heaven and falls upon its feet.

For the Greek when distracted from the lines is sooner restored to rank & rallied into some form than any other...

For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour.

For the Mouse (Mus) prevails in Latin.

For edi-mus, bibi-mus, vivi-mus--ore-mus...

Ah yes, Carbro, the audience laughter could have been topped off with phony recycled laughs. I think one of the unusual qualities of the Ernie Kovacs show is that it had no laugh track and was eerily silent. Canned laughter made the audience even more passive.

Bart, I saw Private Secretary on Nic at Night or some cable show not recently/recently but five or ten years ago. I think we had a short discussion here on Ballet Talk about Ann Southern.

Bart:

Did My Little Margie have a laugh track? I don't recall.

I think it did and it was "canned," whereas the Lucys would have been live since they were filmed before an studio audience. The director of photography for I Love Lucy was Murnau's cameraman for the Last Laugh, Karl Freund -- sort of an Emil Jannings-like let down for him from the days of high German Expressionist filmmaking.

Did Margie have a sidekick--other than her father's girlfriend?...The theme of all those shows seems to be that Father (Jim Backus, Desi Arnaz, the tennis playing Charles Farrell) doesn't know best, and, as Bart says, are outwitted by the string-pulling children. Meanwhile the Father is eaten up with anxiety about pleasing the boss and pretty much distracted by that battlefront. The whole genre may have culminated in "Bewitched," though "Our Miss Brooks," which Paul refers to I think, seems to have been pretty subversive.

There is an amazing moment in an episode of "Private Secretary" I recently saw on tv, in which Susie MacNamera (Ann Southern) turns to the audience and says very dryly --this is regarding a black cat they don't seem to be able to get rid of and which keeps reappearing in Mr. Sands office: "And where are Charles Baudelaire and Felix Vallotton when you really need them?"

The Financial Times (which is very inexpensive in the San Francisco and has good Iran coverage by Roula Khalaf and an editorial page light years apart from its US counterpart) had a review last week from Sarah Hemming on this production titled "A Queen without Command." She compared it slightly less favorably to the "superb" all-French production of Andromaque at the Barbican earlier in the year.

Nicholas Hytner tackles Phèdre in a lean and beautifully sculpted production that relishes the awful inexorability of the disaster, and again finds psychological truth in the play's remorseless gaze. Ted Hughes' 1998 translation does not opt for Alexandrine couplets, but renders the text in a sinewy, visceral verse of his own. It's not pure Racine, but it works in its way...

One of the strengths of Hytner's staging is the subtle contrast between the men, who stride, and the women, who scurry. Dominic Cooper's Hippolytus has a proud, aloof beauty and when Stanley Townsend's commanding, burly Theseus walks in, everybody quakes...

Mirren's Phèdre blows about this space like a leaf...the full scale of the role eludes her: she hasn't yet found the immense presence required to hold the stage, and keep holding it, with the horror of her predicament or to convince you that she cannot escape her demented state...

There are some tremendous performances in the supporting roles, particularly Margaret Tyzack as Phèdre's wily old nurse and John Shrapnel as Hippolytus's counsellor, who excels in the difficult task of reporting the young man's gruesome death...

I would not be surprised if such a statement [boal's] came from Helgi Tomasson...

Helgi did have Symphonic Variations done for two years running at San Francisco--and Thais pas de deux and Monotones I and II. I have the sense his taste is fairly catholic.

Re: Ashton style, it appears to me that Ashton is similar to Bournonville in two ways: the importance of the upper body (port de bras, épaulement, expressive face) and petit allegro. Few dancers today can do both competently, much less well.

Yes--in a nutshell.

San Francisco Ballet did a handsome Symphonic Variations several years ago, Anthony Dowell directed it, and you could see its architectural strengths quite clearly. I don't know Ashton very well, but SF's production seemed superior to the one currently on YouTube with the Royal Ballet in 2007, which seems overly mannered and a little slack. You can see why so much of SV depended on dancers like Margot Fonteyn. But no one holds themselves like that anymore, no one operates out of that lovely reserve. The manner of being in the world of her generation no longer exists. Ashton may be more fragile in that way much more than Balanchine or even Tudor.

On the other hand the YouTube clip Cristian posted of Alejandro Virelles doing a bit of La Fille mal gardee is a delight. Maybe Ashton will come back to life through Havana!

Cunningham has had a keen interest in video collaborations for years. James Atlas was the person he worked with for years states--on PBS--states,

I first met Merce Cunningham in 1971 and in 1974 began collaborating with him over a period of ten years making “media/dances”, works combining dance with film and video, pieces made for the camera.

So maybe the idea of his works being in a different form, being archived and licensed, and as video records, the body of them going through a true "sea change" is not such a recent one. Or maybe he doesn't quite know, and is moving towards some resolution, but nonetheless is in sly control, as people who set up trusts--at least in novels--often are.

When the great Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died, his company did a final tour, then disbanded, leaving memories of his work cleanly intact.

Could you say specific works with particular dancers? Or specific works, except with a couple of particular dancers? Or particular works you will not see even with your favorites in them--dances that blur or suppress the charm and integrity of the dancers.

If a choreographer has any duty whatsoever it's to create art and dances which reflect his society and are for his society - be relevant and then perhaps you'll have great choreography.

But what is there left to reflect, if I may be so bold to state a depressing thought? Masterpieces don’t come out of thin air, and what they used to come out of was keen intellectual curiosity and a wealth of venacular forms of expression. These seem greatly diminished, even in the last ten years.

Susan Sontag was discovering masterpieces each week, but many of these had been written years before. She was introducing them to U.S. audiences and this made them seem new and exciting. And she was still going to Carnegie Hall every week and listening to pianists like Maurizio Pollini play Beethoven.

Yet there were many great great things: Beckett plays in little rooms and the Polish theater and Godard films, but these happened out of sight, along the margins, out of the watchful eye of the mainstream press. When it was announced that the Joseph Patelson Music House would close, a friend said with all these nurturing out of the way places disappearing, why would a young person want to come to live in New York now.

The last things for me to happen in the protected margins are Cuban ballet, and Roberto Bolano and Javier Marias novels.

But classic ballet is a sort of Latin in a good way, a fixed form with complicated rules that we can enjoy again and again intact. (And in ballet-Latin Petipa would be Ovid, Wheeldon Catullus, and Balanchine Horace, the adjectives several beats behind the nouns.)

Alice Toklas, who got by quite well herself in Vichy France, says in a letter dated February 12, 1947: "[serge] Lifar is dancing again in London and Monaco--not Paris yet--he has his lovely green color but looks too heavy for good dancing."

Clement Crisp in "Icare: Remembering Serge Lifar" (Dance Research, Winter 2002) admits reluctantly that "Le Beau Serge""had consorted with the German administration--inevitable if unwisely so in certain matters." That Lifar did help save a Jewish dancer, Italian-born Serge Peretti, from Mussolini's "labor camps." That French parachutists had at one time called their uniforms "des Sergelifars." He also says that the in the late forties "the bloom of youthful presence had faded and the bravura technique was gone but he performed by a kind of divine right."

Here is a good photo of Lifar by Henri Cartier-Bresson -- who took the great hand-outstretched Balanchine image -- a friend and sort of portege, at least in the States, of Lincoln Kirstein.

Magum - CartierBresson - Serge 1

And here is a Cartier-Bresson photo of Sacha Guitry being questioned about his relations with the Germans. His name was often listed with Lifar's, who probably went through the same interrogation process. Cartier-Bresson himself worked for the Resistance and was captured, and escaped, twice.

Magnum - CartierBresson - Sacha Guitry 2

Thanks for those lines.

It was dirac who suggested the connection--from The Idea of Order at Key West. Sometimes Wallace Stevens would dress up his northern realities with trimmings from Florida and the south ("Florida...The state with the prettiest name / the state that floats on brackish water,": Elizabeth Bishop).

Stevens, in one of his letters to Jose' Rodriguez Feo in Cuba (who called Stevens "Wallachio"), characterized the North/South divide this way, "The moon which moves over Havana these nights like a waitress serving drinks moves around Connecticut like someone poisoning her husband."

Elsewhere he wrote "the moon follows the sun like a French translation of a Russian poet".

Yes, of course!

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a play by which she walked to sing...

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there along,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang, and, singing, made.

:The opening of Chaconne, with Farrell or Kent?

Suffice it to say I have never seen CB discussed in the same breath as flowering orchids, James Agee, Billie Holliday and visiting insects.

The James Agee part would be definitely too much!

But B's ballets are full of fertility images (another theme for the communities and hierarchies thread perhaps). And sometimes you need overripe ideas and metaphors to draw something interesting out of a subject. How would Wallace Stevens write about B? Or Mandelstam--or Tsypkin, of the "Summer in Baden Baden" Dostoyevksy swimming lessons? And is Ballet Review supposed to be a scholarly journal? (I've only seen the first ten or so issues, with their nakedly Olympian tone)

That does not sound right at all. The long version is the original version with Leto, the birth of Apollo and the ascendency up Mount Parnassus which premiered in Paris in 1928.

Simon,

My sense is that it was in constant rehab--and the Graham version may have been different than one done for the Ballet Russes. In an early review there is a description of Apollo being tossed on the feet of the muses just before a curtain falls--which may have been a parallel to the swimming lesson and even more difficult to bring off.

Apollo could have possibly have a been retuned when it was presented along with the first performances of Agon. That's when the New York Times critic, John Martin, who had for years thrown verbal darts at Apollo, finally saw all sorts of wonderfulness in it.

Helene:

Dutiful is the last word I would describe for their recent performances of "Jewels".

The corps work did firm up considerably over the course of the week or 10 days, especially in Diamonds. Rubies never did--the heavy red costumes may have been a dulling factor. As a result of all the in-performance development of Diamonds, Theme & Variations for Tina LeBlanc’s farewell was all you’d want it to be.

There was very fine soloist work--not at all dutiful--during the week or so: Maria Kochetkova and Tara Domitro in Emeralds and Rubies, Isaac Hernandez (of the smooth Sean Lavery walk), Sofiane Sylve or Sarah van Patten in Diamonds, depending on what style you like, languid with a slight retard, or crisp and very high.

In contrast, Stravinsky Violin Concerto a few weeks back seemed dutiful; the lines and counterpoint never really sharpened up.

...seeing Natalia Magnicaballi last week week in Balanchine's "Violin Concerto," I thought -- "Martha Graham should see this!" Ms. Magnicaballi's contractions were worthy of Graham Company dancers.

Lynn Garafola told a story here in San Francisco--I hope I am getting it right--she got from a dancer she interviewed. The dancer was doing some Graham technique exercises when Balanchine walked in. Balanchine was curious about them and asked where she had learned them. The dancer said in a Graham class. They apparently became the basis--at least in part--of the birthing movements done by Leto in the long version of Apollo.

Balanchine is a hot property right now. It's just like Barbra Streisand. She SELLS.

I don't think there's really a Balanchine cult, but that Balanchine may be a sort of dancer's dancer, like Robert Frank is a photographer's photographer, or the pianist-writer Felisberto Hernandez is a writer's writer. Their work appeals to an audience who's hip to what they're elaborating on and what they're leaving out.

Balanchine doesn't really sell in San Francisco, with a supposedly Balanchine company. People go dutifully to see his work, but really loosen up to the big Scott Joplin MacMillan and Jerome Robbins pieces. Romeo and Juliet and Tomasson's Sleeping Beauty and the Little Mermaid sell tickets and fill the house. There is only one Balanchine program next year.

*

miliosr, perhaps small some movement and dance workshops could be established, like Judson in New York in the sixties, where people could try out different ways of being on the stage. There could be demonstrations on how simple movements are handled in the Ashton, Bournonville, Mariinsky, Gorsky and purist Petipa modes. Dancers or choreographers could be asked to do their own version of an Agon-like primer of basic steps and some developments of those.

the last paragraph of Alastair Macaulay's review sums up the present situation nicely.

miliosr, say if by a miraculous fiat the Balanchine influence were totally rolled back, what sorts of ballets would there be ideally, what sort of ballet vocabulary would persist, what sort of dance would show off our time? (Forgive me if I've missed out along the way, we're in the middle of a long, long thread.)

Patrick may have been referring to a Nietszche aphorism which I goes something like "a nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men--Yes and then to get around them."

Balanchine seems to have been a fortuitous and inadvertant product (he would be the first to say this) of two great cultures, that of the late dreamy late 19th century, and that of the great fertile period of zig-zaggy artistic revolt in the the teens and twenties.

Our own period is fairly anaesthesized, in a sort of shell shocked withdrawal. The chances of us producing anything interesting seems to be fairly iffy.

On the other hand, there is a Nietszche aphorism that goes "Great men are necessary; the age in which they appear is accidental...they are stronger...the age is relatively much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more childish".

It's interesting that Marcello Mastroianni / Guido character who first appears in the lovely late-neorealist film, "I Vitelloni," ends up in this bloated mess. The production looks like the bloated and beached fish at the end of La Dolce Vita. What a downfall!

..but why the concept of the never ending comparison?..."the One" and "the Next"

Yes--and the anxiety of the wait. Nobody is holding her/his breath for the next great novelist, and no one in the visual arts wants another Picasso or Matisse for a while. There's enough already to look at for a long time.

It'd be nice to have a great filmmaker, though, to hold a mirror up to the madness of the time and show us our faces in it.