Quiggin

But you cannot do real modernism any more.

Renzo Piano may have just done that with his new Art Institute wing--reviewed in today's New Times. Its stairway is borrowed from the same source as those in the New York State Theater, but done in a completely different tone.

There is probably more good quiet modernism taking place, in the visual arts at least, than (bad) post-modernism. Ballet is a little more conservative than the rest of the arts and takes a while to catch up, so there is a still a lot of pastiche / hodge podge choreography being done. There were many, many examples of this in the New Works programs in San Francisco last year.

Incidently, Croce points out, in an interview with Sally Banes, that in 1965 when she began Ballet Review, Balanchine and his fortunes were at a low ebb. He had lost a good part of his audience in the move to Lincoln Center and Sol Hurok's programs--the Bolshoi and Nureyev--were the thing to go to. He had to start over from square one.

And the huge ballets Helene mentions that few companies can do these days were devised to fill that huge stage.

Regarding Sandy McKean's PNB comments, I remember going to ABT at the Met and hearing the man next to me say pointedly, "yes, yes, a story ballet. I just love ballets with stories--I really think Balanchine and the others missed the boat on that across the way a long time ago."

I think Balanchine’s great appeal is while he is an orthodox modernist, within his modernism he has created a world of great breadth and variety of forms that’s as big as Verdi’s, whom he admired, or even Shakespeare’s. What I’m always astonished at is that while everyone talks about the work of the soloists, there is all this brilliant counterpoint that goes under the critical radar. This counterpoint is a mad concerto of talk-back of the minor characters with the major ones--or othertimes there are forms that verge on puns and double entendres like the ones Paul Muldoon plays with in his poems. Nobody else can riff and create variations like Balanchine can, and variation form is life itself. Therefore B's wide appeal. Wheeldon, in comparision, is inventive and good, but his variations aren't interesting and his world is medium sized and a bit astringent and dour (as is Kaufman's).

Anyway there’s a stalled topic on Balanchine’s hierachies and communities started by Kathleen and and nudged on by Dirac somewhere on this board that might be a more appropriate place to develop this out.

Pre-Raphaelite ballet?

How can you go back to narrative ballet when you really don’t have a narrative culture anymore? There is, rather, an atomizing one -- of “tweets” -- bits of knowledge about the world but not a sustaining narrative, not even a shaggy-dog ones anymore (except for Roberto Bolano’s novels). Yes, Wheeldon’s ballets of snippets speak to this.

Where do you find the actors to bring off even “abstract” ballets (as pointed out in a previous post)? We have to draw on countries who haven’t moved so head-strong into the future to find dancers who know how to possess the stage and project character.

Mark Morris seems to be the last of the interesting actors or characters to give birth to some unique work--out of the tradition of Merce Cunningham and Viola Farber and Tudor. And what is said about Balanchine eclipsing other choreographers can be said of Cunningham downtown. The life of art just happens like that.

And per Cargill I couldn't bear to sit through another SF Ibsen ballet either!

As though the reason for the absence of great composers today is orchestras playing too much Beethoven. If only they played more contemporary program music (is there such a thing?), the talented would-be composers out there would feel less inhibited and start composing great music.

I like that...especially in reference to Sarah Kaufman's comment:

Before Balanchine's dominating influence, in the early to middle years of the last century, ballet was more of a lively American folk art -- cavorting to music by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson -- than the highbrow prize of the connoisseur it became after Balanchine swept in, bringing Bach and Stravinsky with him.

Stravinsky and Bach I thought was amusing.

A few other things about the article. Rubies is a complete ballet, not an excerpt. Balanchine was immersed in Russian avant garde influences in Russia, as well as 19th century ballet forms, well before he went to France--SK skips over this. The Bauhaus was not a unilateral school, and indeed had deep humanist traditions. Paul Klee and Johannes Itten both taught there alongside Mies. (Moholy Nagy was the bad guy who telephoned in his paintings to be fabricated offsite and scared everyone by this cold way of making art.)

You have chosen to live within a five-minute walk to your favorite venue...

And in New York you rate the ballets--or symphonies--by what streets you cross and you're still talking about them, such as 67th, 70th, or, if it's a great great performance, you're still going on about the ballet when you hit Fairway.

In San Francisco it's on the wonderful aquarium of the 47 or 49 Van Ness bus where a lot of ballet conversations take place. But here no one goes beyond the level of first names. If only.

Despite the horrid mug-shots in the program, you can instantly identify 75% of your "home" company members...

The worse part is being so dense you have conversations with company dancers and don't realize who they were until afterwards. I've done this twice. One of them told me that Balanchine was "the past," and that he was totally uninterested in his work, but I notice he's been dancing very well in two parts of Jewels this year.

There's the rough-and-tumble BBC Legends recording by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's the one I ended up with because I couldn't find the Dorati version, but it seems to do the job. It's 2hours 20minutes--no dances omitted but little cuts here and there.

Its character may have something to do with the fact that the bass trombonist was caught in traffic and was an hour and a half late and Rozhdestvensky "understandably livid," according to the liner notes by Laurie Watt. "He refused to start without the full orchestra: the importance of the bass trombone part would have made it impossible for the hapless player to creep in and join the music at a later point."

A version of this situation was the subject of this Sempe' New Yorker cover of April 14, 2008.

New Yorker achives

I guess I've entered the "green" world pretty completely this week. Emeralds has always been my favorite, for its depth and tragedy. Even its happy movement, the part leading up to the false ending, exudes a sort of underwater, fishy happiness.

Anyway they keep shuffling the deck of roles and tonight, Wednesday, Sofiane Sylve, who was in Diamonds and then Rubies last week, appeared in the second part of Emeralds, while Maria Kochetkova and Taras Domitro were loaned out from Emeralds to Rubies.

What I like about Sofiane Sylve is that her feet, when she is en pointe, have a beautiful knobby outline, like the felty white hammers inside a piano, and in Emeralds they articulate clearly but softly. Also her upper body is balanced with her feet and her limbs represent the all four quadrants equally, like a Leonardo person. She doesn't change tempos as magically as Maria Kochetkova. but there's a sense of just measure to her movements. All the little lacing steps she does in the second solo make you want to intently follow each one intently, "every last word."

What I like about Taras Domitro is the way once he goes into the air he holds his place with a solidity that his slim size wouldn't seem to allow, and when he stretches his arms they make a straight line across his body and you follow them out to the wrists where the line ends in a graceful but firmly articulated splash of fingers. In Rubies he gives his full attention to his partner in a sort of goofy and charming way, and the part where he and Maria Kochetkova. wound and rewound their arms together--like wreaths of stephana--was especially effective and moving.

When you see performances like Sofiane Sylve's and Taras Domitro's and Maria Kochetkova's, they seem like brilliant little Advent calendar window views into soul of the Balanchine productions you're watching.

I took Helene's advice and viewed Diamonds from the upper balcony. (I used to watch it in New York from the fifth ring, straight overhead, just above the orchestra--it was like reading blueprints.) The latter part made more sense this way but the first part was still tedious. Part of the reason perhaps is that the tempos of the Jewels at San Francisco are too languid and overly reverential. They're sappy in Emeralds and Stravinsky would be scandalized about the non-astringency of Rubies.

After Diamonds the usher next to me said, "oh what wonderful schmaltz"...or wonderful (and far too much) marzipan or lemon meringue.

It's a good interview--thanks Dirac. AK writes a lot for the London Review of Books, on Basil Bunting, James Schuyler, and his neighbor Thom Gunn, on San Francisco in his poetry and nice lumpy essays. (Thom Gunn I could never get into--and never forgive for calling Elizabeth Bishop's work "a bit twee.")

In "Drinking Bourbon in the Zam Zam Room" in the LRB, not free, AK gives this picture of the Haight Ashbury district:

The best bar in San Francisco reopened for business the other day under new management. But it’s no good. They’ve got it all wrong. For one, the place is too bright and cheerful now...

Bruno [the previous owner] was raised on Haight Street. His father first had a tiny restaurant with five stools called the Pall Mall and then, in 1941, opened the Zam Zam. It was a successful bar, open seven days and nights a week, with two bartenders and barmaids on hand. The Haight has always had a carnival or fairground aspect to it. Golden Gate Park begins at the foot of it...Kezar Stadium, where the SF 49ers played their Sunday football games for many years, is only a few blocks west.

According to Bruno, the street changed in 1966. Bruno always blamed it on the Miranda decision, which required police to inform arrestees of their rights, and Chief Justice Earl Warren, on whose death Bruno closed the bar and went off to celebrate. In the mid to late 1960s the city, and the Haight in particular, became a catch-basin for kids from all over the country who, lured by Time and Newsweek, wanted to be part of the hippie adventure. The crush of new visitors can’t have been a very palatable spectacle to those already in middle age who had been raised on Haight Street with its milliner and dry-goods shop, when everyone knew one another and would stop to chat, discuss the weather or gossip about that Italian boy who plays baseball, DiMaggio, who was still hanging around the bank at closing time, trying to get a date with pretty Mary Ann DiMeeko.

I wrote these notes before I read Helene's, so I guess we independently agree that Sunday's was a pretty fine performance.

Jewels notes:

For me Sunday afternoon’s Emeralds was nearly perfect. The corps was more together and more able to sustain their part of the narrative--without smudging figures-- than on Saturday night, and Maria Kochetkova and Nicolas Blanc struck just the right measure and understated tone. Maria would offer these magical changes of tempo or extension that seemed to surprise even her. At least within the context of this production she seemed even more Viola Verdy than Viola Verdy.

The pas de trois was elegantly handled by Dores Andre, Taras Domitro, and Charlene Cohen, though the little wickety-wack, close-to-the-feet jig--a wonderful contrast to all the liquid movement before and after--could have been a little sharpened. Taras miraculously kept all the complicated trains of movement and tunneling on schedule and on the right tracks.

The whole thing seemed expansive and the succession of all the choreograhical ideas had a chance to grow and breathe, all the emptying and filling up, all the balances and checks that are established, dissolved and reestablished. Where Saturday the production seemed “slow”--even a violin solo stalled and fell apart into a sour and old fashioned sliding sound--Sunday it was just right.

A good Emeralds always moves me as much as Apollo does. In Emeralds, in the added ending, there are three Apollos (Isaac Hernadez was the third), and after the corps (the forest) and the ballerinas have gone home, the three men kneel and wait to receive some mysterious and fateful benediction.

*

Rubies was sort of a mess. The last good one I saw was with Gonzalo Garcia who was able to create these great alleyways he could shuttle down and make everything else stand out in relief. In this production I tended to watch Sofiane Sylvie most of all. She is like a rag doll, soft but quick, Petrouska combined with the Siren from Prodigal Son. She did this wonderful sort of nutty stage business I only caught for a moment as she exited stage right while the boys exited stage left huffing and swinging their arms robotlike.

*

Diamonds is too long for one ballerina perhaps, the dancer tires and so does the audience. Vanessa Zahorian and Davit Karapetyan were very good, though I wanted his background leaps to have some passion and be a strong counterpoint to the ballerina’s meditation, less like a softer Peter Martins and more like the brio of the Miami Ballet men... There is a sort of great, out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye corps dancer and for me in Diamonds she and he were Dores Andre, Miriam Rowan, and Quinn Wharton.

Yes, but what about the case of Ann Barzel, who took brought a wind-up 16mm Bell & Howell or Cine Kodak along with her and preserved those great moments of early Balanchine and Ballet Russes performances for us? Those old cameras made a pretty intense droning noise. And there was a wonderful meandering black and white clip of Veronika Part in Swan Lake on You Tube that will be the only opportunity I will have had to have seen her. Will all this have to be disallowed in order create to the perfect audience experience?

The only thing I really mind are candy wrappers and coughing during slow movements--everything else is a little ok. Actually I sort of like those videos from Cuba that show everyone madly clicking away bathing the dancers in the light of approval.

And the sad thing about the flash is it really doesn't do much good--the camera is too far away--but it's almost impossible to override the default settings, as it is to forego the auto rewind feature mentioned in earlier posts.

Murray in the OED cites Burney, History of Music 1789 who says choreography (choreia, dance and graphia, writing) is "an art developed two hundred years ago to delineate the figures and steps of dances." The sense of a designer or arranger of ballet may come through modern French, choregraphe', but I don't have a good French dictionary handy.

My shabby Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon abridged says that choreia is "a dancing: a choral dance," but it's not yet affixed to graphia--the authorship of dance probably and alien concept to them.

~

Violet Verdy, in an interview, she Balanchine wanted to be called a craftsman.

I agree that Macaulay got overly personal and was a little out of sorts, however his overall point about a tendency to cuteness was well taken. I remember another critic, in Washington or London, point out in a review that we had officially entered the age of cute. Young dancers tend to soak these things up, like drawls or accents of favorite movie stars, so it's ok Macaulay's trying to point this out.

Regarding Darci Kistler, her dancing in the 1990s was sometimes so pure and other times coy and incomprehensible. One Swan Lake was danced with such strange rhythmic emphasis, it seemed as if she were doing the Charleston. And it was sad that Nilas Martins virtually owned Apollo for a decade. He looked so uncomfortable in Apollo, as if it were spinach--while being so at ease when he danced Who Cares.

I haven't seen the company for two years, but the last time I was in New York, I saw great Donizettis, Somnabulas, Brahms-Schoenbergs--while Concerto B was a bit shabby, and there was a so-so Symphony in C, except for Antonio Carmena who blazed across the stage. When NYCB is on target, there's nothing better. Miami's pretty good, a solid second. I've only seen them twice, but they seem more small scaled, more finished and more delicate.

I agree with Rachel Howard in the Chron about it being a Jane Austen Swan Lake and having problems with that.

I agree too with Rachel Howard's reservations, about the little red riding hood prelude and the slimmed down choreography, but for me this Swan Lake didn't seem invite comparison Jane Austen as much as to Stendahl. The A-line dresses are empire dresses and the set of the opening scene is out of a Jacques-Louis David or Ingres painting--or maybe the recent film Duchess of Langeais--but neutered of all political nuances. No hint of Revolution or Restoration (my history is a bit rocky in this period). Usually when an opera or ballet is reset so drastically, there is some sort of dialogue with the period. Even Jane Austen has a keen awareness of what's going on offstage. Here the peasants (the set designer refers to them as being working class) are on rollicking good terms with the aristocrats. The sets are very handsome (though the Doric order is used on tall slender columns that perhaps should be ionic). The opening scene also has a bit of the feeling, the spatial disposition and the milling about, of the annual Nutcracker first act that shares the same stage. This and the ball and its bright divertissements seemed to sort of made Swan Lake a jovial sibling of Nutcracker or Don Quixote, rather than Giselle.

I saw it on Tuesday with Tina LeBlanc and Joan Boada, and Tina danced it with great clarity--she was in great form, everthing was there, and Frances Chung who was quite a standout in the pas de trois. But the part where Tina and Joan were brilliant and really dancing with fire was the black swan pas de deux, but it was perhaps more the fire of Don Quioxte.

The moon was too big. (A petri dish, one person said, but it also looked like the fat moon of Melies 1902 Voyage to the Moon.)

(Off topic - I browsed through Isherwood's diaries when they first came out and I was almost sorry I did. I didn't think he came across too well.)

They're a bit petty, but they do have the smell of the smog of the fifties in them, and are interestingly gossipy. Living in Los Angeles and being an emigre helps you to lose your sense of proportion--like the juxtaposition of scratched bicycle paint and translating for Brecht, as if they were of the same order of importance.

But the German presence is in LA at that time pretty amazing--Dialectic of Enlightenment and Dr Faustus are pretty major (and a bit of a reach for me other than in intriguing samples), and then there was also Renoir and Stravinksy, and Balanchine and Maria Tallchief passing through...

(a back corner of the balcony)

The balcony of Carnegie Hall had a very nice balance of sound, especially near the walls. Balcony seats, though small, were a great bargain. But Alice Tully Hall was always supposed to have relatively good sound--it's only an 1,100 seat recital hall, and over 2,000 seats is where things get acoustically iffy. The original Pietro Belluschi building, at least seen way in the background, is really not that bad and the new little architectural touches by Diller, Scofidio--sliding the windows over the travertine, like misapplied lipstick--are a bit coy and about 20 years out of date. The addition of the big lobby and social space is an enormous plus (though again the sharp angles, like the raked stem of a ship, have been done to death since the early 1980's).

I'm wondering if the positive critical response to the new Alice Tully is a little bit of a reaction to the remodeling of the lollipop building on Columbus Circle, where the nice tapering curve and the reactionary modernist argument of a building have been shrouded under a piano cover with wormy peepholes. Paul Goldberger gave Two Columbus Circle something of a pass and Nikolai Ouroussoff was very disappointed with the changes--we were left with a image of New York scrubbed on any meaning, he said.

There’s a fairly accessible essay about Mann, Adorno and Schoenberg called "Mephistopheles in Hollywood", by James Schmidt in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno. He sets the stage with:

It is difficult to think of a less likely spot from which to contemplate the collapse of European culture...As if by magic [albeit the blackest of magics] a steady stream of the Weimar intelligensia found itself transplanted along a line running from the oceanside community of Pacific Palisades through Brentwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills to Hollywood.

“Adorno in America” by David Jenemann gives up a scene of Adorno advising William Dieterle on "ein B-film...absolut harmlos" that would have a climatic scene in a record store where six jazz records are being played at the same time in a sort of "utopian jazz symphony".

Schmidt cites Brecht:

I feel here as if I were in Tahiti, surrounded by Palm trees and artists, it makes me nervous, but there you are...Custom here demands that you try to 'sell' everything from a shrug to an idea, and so you're always a buyer or a seller.

Isherwood's early diary gives an excellent sense of the atmosphere of Hollywood in the 1940's. There are no big ideas but lots of interesting granular detail:

Met the Huxleys at Farmers Market. They love it there, despite crowds, the jostling, discomfort and noise. I suppose, after the quietness of the desert, it seems gay and exciting. A perfect stranger admired my bicycle, but scolded me quite severely for scratching some of the varnish off against a metal post...Brecht wants me to translate his version of The Circle of Chalk.

There’s also Susan Sontag’s account of her youthful visit to Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, and elsewhere a visit to a Hollywood record store, like that in Adorno's utopia movie, but here to contemplate Arthur Schnabel Beethoven recordings.

For me it divides up between glamour and charm. Glamour is a bit idle and entitled and charm is always inventing.

Leslie Caron I would not think of glamourous, but of having a certain charm, at least in Daddy Long Legs, American in Paris and Lilli. I agree with Patrick that Rita Hayworth had some vulnerability that checked her glamour. In "Lady from Shanghai" Welles seems to want to make turn it up full blast and then selfishly deromanticize it.

At New York City Ballet Roma Sosenko was always all out charm, and Irma Nioradze in Don Quixote in Berkeley last fall seemed 3/5 glamour and 2/5 charm, each element using the other for some of its effect. Suzanne Farrell I would think of as having a cool and sly charm.

I appreciate seeing them and hearing from them firsthand, even if not all of them are saying much that’s new.

I agree, dirac, that the talking heads were for the most part well worth including--it was the best Peter Martins interview I've seen, with the complain complain story and the comment that with Balanchine it was an intellectual delight and bodily hell whereas with Robbins it was the opposite (or some equivalent, I'm badly paraphrasing this I know). But the historical apologist took up time that could have been better used for extended clips of original performances.

About the video clips. I was astonished, yesterday, when actually timing a few of them, at how very, very brief they are.

I'm also surprised how little of the real stuff, the primary materials--as opposed to talking heads--documentary filmakers will give us, as if they're afraid of offending the audience by including something intense and sustained. I wanted to see more of Fancy Free, with the original bodies and gauge how much has worn away and how much infill--good and bad--has occured over the years.

Overall though it was pretty balanced. I liked seeing Harold Lang (the Pal Joey one) singing and dancing and the footage of Ethel Merman rehearsing in Gypsy (and I realized that Gypsy has a fairly substantial conceptual debt to Pal Joey). Seeing what Joe Duell was like performing and the clip of Imogene Coca winking and smirking in the broadest manner were also highpoints. And I agree with dirac and printcess that finking and naming names of friends and associates on Jerome Robbins part was an optional course, not one of necessity--even given all of the pressures of the time. He would lost out on Hollywood, had Broadway (maybe slightly fewer shows) and had his heart's desire, New York City Ballet. Lincoln Kirstein would have vouched for him there. And what a scoundrel, to use Lillian Hellman's term, the seemingly benign Ed Sullivan was. I had forgotten that.

Addressing Leonid's note:

I have never witnessed in London a real antipathy to Balanchine choreography

It may have been earlier than that, but I keep coming up against broad statements such as the following. The first is from Arnold Haskell in his Penguin Ballet book first written in 1938 and revised in 1948:

[balanchine's] ballets for Diaghileff came during a bad period, and, though they caused a sensation, the public had dwindled down to a small and rather precious clique. The best know were La Chatte, the Gods Go a-begging, Batabau, Apollo Musagetes, and Le Fils Prodigue, not one of which survives. They were ingenious and intensely personal distortions of classicism that promptly dated as none of the earlier Diaghileff ballets had done.

At the end of Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Balanchine (1987), Moira Shearer's says this,

And Balanchine himself--how is his reputation today, both professionally and personally?...Clive Barnes, though conceding Balanchine's importance, thinks he was 'greatly over-rated'...But most of all the British ballet world give, first, faint praise and then start to pick away at the fabric of Balanchine's work until there is precious little left. I find the American adoration overblown but understandable, particularly with those who worked with him, but I deplore--and will never understand--the British attitude. It is not only ungenerous, it is blind."

Anyway all of the background of Balanchine's (and NYCB's) standing in the world is very complicated. In the early days Balanchine was choreographing for both Ballet Theater and Ballet Society (the predecessor of City Ballet). He choreographed Theme and Variations for Alicia Alonso, and she took Apollo on tour with her Alicia Alonso Ballet to Havana and South America in 1948. The two companies (ABT & BS) may almost have merged, dancers went back and forth. Balanchine took over for Lifar as a guest choreographer at Paris Opera Ballet in 1947 when Lifar had been dismissed for being a collaborator. (Shearer has a good account of this and how Lifar was eventually reinstated because "Opera dancers, accustomed to the flattery of Lifar, thought Balanchine a cold fish...any praise given was perfuntory to the point of curtness." She calls Lifar's long standing betrayals typical 'Lifaresqiana.')

It's a messy kettle of fish of influences--and Balanchine the cold fish in the kettle. And I've gone astray.

Clement Crisp opened his review last March like a dancer--or a lion--bouncing on stage.

It must be said: At last! It is 25 years since New York City Ballet last visited the UK and, for local devotees of classic ballet, that is vastly too long. Balanchine's company - for that is what it remains two decades after his death - is an ensemble shaped by the greatest dance-maker of the past century. What he sought during his 50 years in the US was a way of classical dancing that moved on from the academism and aristocratic means of his St Petersburg education to explore (and inspire) a new world, with its young bodies and brighter energies, even its democratic ideals. (No one knowing how to bow. No one knowing the rituals of a court.)...

So the 25 year lapse might be part of the problem, but before that there seemed to be a genuine antipathy to the Balanchine style in the UK--Balanchine's quip about loving the smell of green lawns being an oblique reference to this.

And do people in New York still refer to the two companies as Ballet Theater and City Ballet? It made them seem more real and three dimensional than do the initials ABT and NYCB.

The original short story by Leskov is pretty brilliant--sort of like a Mizoguchi film--worth reading on its own. Chekhov says, "...my favorite author...he resembles an exquisite Frenchman and, at the same time, an unfrocked priest."

Balanchine in his Tchaikovsky interviews says

Fokine invented curved lines in ballet. He also invented the ensemble in ballet. Forkine took a small ensemble and made up interesting strange things for it...But he was mean, always cursing.

Danilova says that Fokine had been a god in Russia, "the most original, the most modern choreographer. But for those of us who had worked with Balanchine, Fokine seemed old fashioned."

The Four Temperaments has gotten better over the week. It’s done in a delicate hard-lead pencil line and parts of it are only sketched-in, but that’s ok--by the end it’s rather moving.

For me this ballet is about four personality types trying to locate themselves, piece by piece, body part by body part, arc by arc. That is why the hand in Phlegmatic should look so strange and foreign to its owner when he first sees it, which Ivan Popov does not quite do. He rather looks beyond it. And the dance in San Francisco’s Phlegmatic is not quite the elegant and sarcastic, Mahler-like thing that the performers should instead be giving themselves over to.

Sofiane Sylve is consistent, nicely buoyant and sort of brilliant in Choleric, and Ruben Martin does a wonderful spiral twist in Sanguinic, but best of all, quietly so, is the Melancholic person.

Taras Domitro does this part. Earlier in the evening he does some Don Quixote-ish stunningly articulate greyhound leaps around the stage in Helgi Tomasson’s “Prism,” but as Melancholic he leaps in onto stage and as quickly sinks the leap in half. He then begins his philosophical investigations. His arm flailing is much gentler than Bart Cook’s, but the little twitches, foot to thigh, are perfectly struck and then there are jumps and beats, like sudden trills or rills or twists of water, and then a kick as high as his forehead that describes a perfect arc. Arlene Croce says there is some Apollo within Melancholic and here there is, especially in the soft edged interchange (he’s the younger Apollo) with the six women who haunt or amplify Melancholic's thoughts. Another difference from Bart Cook is that when Taras bends backwards, he is hinged at the bottom of his ribcage rather than elastically at the waist and it gives the effect of him completely turning himself inside out--or almost breaking himself in two.

Something else about the SF Ballet The Four Temperaments is that--except for the end, again very moving---it has a rather tenative relation to the space it inhabits--rather than possessing and repossessing it as it should, especially the spiral of Sanguinic. Take a look at the first Sanguinic dancers, Mary Ann Moylan and Todd Bolender, in the little black and white clip included in Six Ballerinas/Mr B. Their arc tightens and tightens and is completely controlled by the steering of the ballerina bringing her hands together and overcoming (and shorting out) all sorts of free floating existential tension in doing so.

Regarding the fourth wall and breaking character, a friend recently told a group of us at dinner of a performance of a play she had seen in Boston with Jeremy Irons. There was an instense storm going on outside the theater and the audience heard this huge clap of thunder outside which took them out of the play a bit and broke their concentration. Jeremy Irons, without in the least breaking the rhythm of the character he was playing, walked up to the window and looked out and walked back to his chair or whatever. It was like one of those dreams (someone else at dinner said)where the dream works the intrusive stimulus into the texture of rest of the dream story.

I pretty much think dancers should always be in character even when the character approximates who they "really" are.