Quiggin

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.

In The Four Temperaments their looks don't have to be stony, but they should be at least contemplative. The themes figures are sort of Janus ones--or Janusaries for what is to come. They face opposite directions and they go off on different sides of the stage. And what is to come is fairly intense. There are Balanchine ballets that can take smiles--and whole movements that are smiles in themselves.

Many San Francisco Ballet dancers are smilers and it sort of destroys the dance, as if they're saying pay attention to my mouth, not what I'm doing. It's really terrible in The Four Temperaments, and in the last round of Liebesleider performances in New York there seemed to be a bit of smiling and it's not such a happy ballet. I think Peter Boal's four walls distinction important. Kyra Nichols in a talk in SF differentiated between in-the-box ballets and ones that were not. I like dancers when they appear to be listening intently ahead for the next phrase of the dance. As if they don't know what it is quite going to be--and they're going to quietly meet it half way.

Scratch the white paint and underneath... Tim Scholl and, as I remember, Danilova point out that the original Symphony in C, Palais de Crystal, was in color--each act in red, blue, green, and white. The original scenario featured "a Ruby Priestress, a Sapphire Spirit, an Emerald Spirit and a Crystal Spirit in a Palace of Diamonds" (Richard Buckle). When it was presented in New York the next year, the costumes were black and white, in part perhaps because the troop was small and the dancers had to appear in more than one part. Vadim Gaevksy in his book "Divertissement," Scholl says, likens the structure of Symphony in C to that of a pas classique: entree, adagio, variation, coda. Also for Scholl it recalls the formula of the Petipa ballet a grand spectacle: exposition, white act and divertissement (though shorter and speedier). The adagio, he says, is the work's ballet blanc, but here With Scholl everything begins with Sleeping Beauty and ends with Jewels, and I find myself ok with that alpha and omega. * * * Footnote: For me Symphony in C was probably the first Balanchine ballet that really knocked me out. The amount of invention was amazing, lines were combing through each other and changing each other's natures, and then all the characters, which had lived unknown to each other in separate stories, suddenly filling the stage and going on about at life at the same time, side by side...Pure madness.

Light as a feather--as above--and generous to a fault. Taras sort of surveys what he is going to do and does it and stands back with time to spare afterwards. He has all sorts of endearing quirks. Maria Kochetokova also has been great this season, in Nutcracker and in Raymonda. She sort of crinkles her nose like Balanchine or Bewitched and crinkles her feet in some delightful equivalent way. She partnered nicely with Pascal Molat in Yuri Possokhov's Lilacs which had some quick and witty choreography to it and made the dancers look great. Lorena Freijoo was open and brilliant and wonderful. The Four Temperaments was good and solid--like all us San Franciscans are--a nice account. It didn't have the existential tension it might, you didn't feel people trying to tear themselves away from their..."context"... and being impelled to pull back. Sarah Van Patten was good in Sanguinic but I don't think Ruben Martin understood the tone--he was trying to be a good and attentive partner. Sofiane Sylvie was a fine Choleric-ess. The background at the end was blue, not yellowy orange as in the PBS tape, and I missed that.

I don't want to sound like an old grouch, but I think something suggested by the George W. S. Trow title "In the Context of No Context" is in effect. No one understands the background of the Civil Rights movement or the Resistance in WWII because there is no context for anything anymore. No wants to characterize things in the way novelists used to (Yiddish, if still around, would fall on deaf ears) because no one wants to be caught being judgmental. This is related to political correctness, I think. Maybe the re-publication of Robert Frank's "The Americans"--being very visual and gritty and all about the 50's--will help to be a corrective.

Laura Jacobs also has a review of the Volynsky book. It's in the current (February/March 2009) Bookforum, seemingly available online in full. It's titled "Barre Code." Here's a snippet: There's also an excellent article by Wendy Lesser on Flannery O'Conner in the same issue.

Like Bart I read the Alexandria Quartet more than once. The first time was in college where a group of us passed around copies (the shiny Signets with red or gold page edges). We each identified with a character--Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea, Pursewarden (there was also Darley and the hilarious Scobie). We also speculated what character the others of us were like--without them knowing who we had picked. I liked the books a lot, but even for me the overripe adjective--like fruits that grew only in Alexandria--were a bit of a problem, especially during the second reading. Later I was happy to learn that the great cookbook writer Elizabeth David was in Alexandria at the same time as Lawrence Durrell. I imagined that she somehow had an influence on, or a been part of, the Quartet (though her lean prose style certainly wasn’t). Also it seemed to me that Durrell owed a lot of the tone of the book to the real life Constantine Cavafy, the unnamed Old Poet in the book, who lived in Alexandria from 1890 to 1940 or so. Anyway, the parts I liked are pretty the same ones Michael Wood (who could never figure out whether AQ was a patchy masterpiece or simply unreadable) cited in a recent London Review article. This from his review (“Sink or Skim” LRB, 1/1/2009) gives a sense of the goings on:

I agree with sf_herminator's thoughts on the Gala. Raymonda with Maria Kochetkova and Joan Boada was especially lovely, with lots of special inner detail. Taras Domitro and Isaac Hernandez were great presences, even their the's and a's are fascinating. Taras seems to partner well with Vanessa, especially in last month's Nutcracker--where they struck a wonderful jumble of very pure 30 and 60 degree extended angles--as K & Q of the Snow. (Their faces ended up plastered with snowflakes, over her smile and he had a white set of extra eyebrows above his regular ones.) At the Gala Tina LeBlanc somehow reminded me of Kyra Nichols, nuanced in a similar way, and though she was very good in Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, I wished she had picked something been a bit more autumnal, maybe not Liebeslieder, but something more in that direction. Stars and Stripes looked great on the Company. I always forget how full of invention it is.

I didn't like the poem until after "noise and bramble, thorn and din," until it settled down into quiet anti-heroic images of people doing simple, real enough things. A nice antidote to the Reagan through Bush 2d years. Good poets are not necessarily the best readers of their own works. Elizabeth Bishop's poems sound so plain and uninteresting in the recordings she made of them, but on the page... ["On the east steps, the Air Force Band in uniforms of Air Force blue is playing loud and hard..."]

Probably a bit off topic already, but I do like Balanchine's abbreviated version, available on DVD, "Pas de Dix" with Maria Tallchief and Andre Eglevsky. Eglevsky had studied for a year with Nicholai Legat, so some of the original does get handed down through him. Tallchief has done a Balanchine Foundation Intrepreters Archive account of the ballerinas solos. Everyone in the video is great, albeit a little wider than in real life as a result of the Kinoscope process. Perhaps rg or someone else knows who the other four ballerinas are (is Jilliana one of them?). They certainly have a style and immediacy that's of the period in the best way. For a while I was hoping that SF Ballet to do Pas de Dix--this was about the time they recreated a shorter Balanchine Harlequinade--and I thought Gonzalo Garcia would be a natural to do a very witty version of Eglevsky's version. Garcia and Eglevsky do have a similar way of holding out their arms, though Eglevksy's landings are all his own.

It's sort of a stock response with Welles--despite all the riches he's given, despite his "shallow genius." Why don't they say that instead of Spielberg or Lucas where it's far more appropriate. Regarding McGoohan, I never warmed up to The Prisioner; it seemed rather schematic. But I liked Danger Man / Secret Agent a whole lot. There is a great photo from Hell's Drivers (1957) of Patrick McGoohan and Sean Connery and Stanley Baker (of Losey's "Eva, the Devil's Woman") at the Guardian.

I agree that candy wrappers on the floor is a venial sin, and that the unwrapping of candies a major one. What can they be thinking? I always think. I don’t mind the continuous low murmur of people talking besides me, so there seems to be something especially distracting about the candy wrapper sound. It’s like an almost articulate complaint. As far as life and art, there’d simply be no art if artists had to be consistent from one to the other. And a brilliant Apollo on stage always trumps a polite one in life.

And the nicely long odd scene with Doubrovska and Danivola trying to recreate Pavillon d'Armide of Fokine, each with a competing memory. And LeClerq's voice was rather surprising, didn't you think, Helene? Very American and slightly smokey and direct.

The original ETA Hoffmann story--actually a warren of stories--could also be a sort of a reverse "Wizard of Oz," with Marie more or less wanting to stay on rather than wanting to get home. (The question then being, of course, how old should Judy Garland/Marie/Clara be played.) In Hoffmann there is no big party, no extraneous children, just a visit from Godfather Drosselmeier, something of a Dr. Coppelius, who brings wonderful mechanical toys and toy tableaus, which perhaps tease out the idea of free will. According to the Dumas version, unlike doctors who make live things dead, Drosselmeyer makes dead things come to life. And Drosselmeier doesn't bring Nutcracker, Marie finds him on the tree--his double in the "live" scenes is Drosselmeier's nephew. Nutcracker gets broken not out of Fritz's jealousy, but by being forced to break more nuts than he can "chew." Anyway it's not all talk and mime and there is indeed in the original Nutcracker "a very pretty ballet" done by shepherds and shepherdesses. Except for the poetry of Balanchine's version--the mysterious tree coming into its own--I would think the pristine Fedorova (/Alonso?) version would do it for me these days...Except if the Nutcracker were too pure, what means would be left for all the students of ballet all over the world make their stage debuts?

I didn't mean to imply that Tschaikovsky was psychologically transparent nor, that with all great artists, that his temperament was anything like his art. In fact it's Chekhov who apologizes to Tschaikovsky for dedicating a book of stories to him "which are dreary and tedious as autumn." Nutcracker has some more depth or complexity to it than may first appear--especially in Mravinsky's recording with the Leningrad Philharmonic where, as always, Mravinsky holds down the big parts and lets all the various voices and colors go their own eccentric ways. (I only started liking Tschaikovsky with Mravinsky--in college it was not permitted, you were afraid of becoming like the Eleanor Bron character in Bedazzled with her Brahms recordings.)

It's one of those movies, like Preston Sturges'. that moves on a succession of wisecracks and its conceits. Rogers kept up and was slightly ahead of the beat, so I thought it worked. But I saw it in an early Tom Luddy film series in the Bay Area, with all the films from Paramount Studios at one time, so it worked in concert. Wilder quoted on TCM from his bio says, agreeing pretty much with you Bart, Wilder also says he originally wrote Ray Milland's role for Cary Grant.

Here's the fuller cite from Jennifer Fisher's Nutcracker Nation- Fisher corrects this by saying that once it grew up on its own in Northern Amercia, like a displaced emigre--it became something the Russians no longer recognized. I notice in my new Penguin copy of the Hoffmann and Dumas Nutcracker, the editor compares the ballet to the original stories and says that- This may be a part of the same can of worms, or a whole new batch.

Such as in the great "The Major and the Minor," where Rogers dresses as a twelve year old in order to buy a half price train ticket, and there is no end to the mischief that ensues. Nakokov and Billy Willy had a sharp outsider's eye for American craziness and just what they could get away with. Regarding Nutcrackers, Fisher in "Nutcracker Nation" talks about how we were infantilizing our versions while the Soviets were making theirs more adult, "in line with the psychogical depth of the score" (Souritz)--referring in part to the Grand Pas de Deux which Tchaikovsky wrote shortly after his sister had died.

Jennifer Fisher's Nutcracker Nation has some interesting background about the various iterations. The first was in 1909, then: 1919 - Alexander Grosky; 1929 - Fedor Lopukhov; 1934 - V. Vainonen (Kirov); 1966 - Y. Grigorovich (Bolshoi). In the States, William Christensen--who had staged excerpts--mounted a full version in 1944 for the San Francisco Ballet, "encouraged by Russians emigres who had settled in the Bay Area." Balanchine and Danilova, who were traveling through SF with the Ballet Russe," helped reconstruct parts of it. Alexandra Fedorova reconstructed an "after Ivanov" Nutcracker in 1940 for the Ballet Russe (see rg's program). This Nutcracker, Fisher says, " made short work of the plot, opening with a brief party scene, moving to the snowflake waltz (eventually eliminationed), and to the second act divertissements and grand pas de deux...the Ballet Russe sets look simple--a standing candelabra for the party scene, a painted backdrop of a snow peaked mountain for the snow flake scene..." Ann Barzel in Ballet Annual comments that when Alonzo and Yousevitch did the Snowflake Waltz around 1956, there were some soviet influences, but they were "tastefully and logically" borrowed. (Barzel also comments on Alonzo's first choreographic composition, Essayo Sinfonico, based on the Brahms Haydn Variations as "sincere but lack[ing] in originality." Elsewhere she is extremely supportive of everything Alonzo was doing in those years and how Alonzo's touch was to be felt everywhere, even on how the corps were dancing.) Thanks to Cristian to the great links to the Cuban preservation of the Nutcraker--and through those of the Lorna Freijo Nutcracker clip--and getting me curious about the "other" Nutcrackers.

Sandy McKean: Carbro: I just bought a pair of Nikon 7x35 wide angle binoculars--9.3 degrees, 489 ft at 1,000 yards--and watched the San Francisco Nutcracker this year through them. I intended take sips only--as Carbro states above, use them for quick peeks--but had them glued to my eyes for almost the entire performance. Dancers' performances that might have looked only so-so from a distance looked very refined close up. It was really a whole new world. But you do lose the overall choreography, and so I will refrain from using them for Balanchine or for intricate Petipa settings. Also I noticed time was slightly different, the tempos seemed faster through binoculars and there was slightly less dramatic gravity to the dancers' work. There are really no entrances and exits in the world of binoculars. What is good about the Nikons that the lenses are 5" apart, rather than the 2 1/2 to 3" of more compact binoculars and that helps preserve a very natural 3-dimensional quality. They're a bit large and totally unchic and the glass is not as contrasty and fine hued as Zeiss or Leica's, but they're sharp and take in a big chunk of the stage at once. Also they're only $55.00. A new drug I'm afraid.

I guess I'll begin the Nutcracker discussion this year. It started on December 11 and goes on as far as the eye can see until the 28th. On Saturday afternoon I followed a father, or uncle, carrying an obstinately-still, oversized child--carrying her in much of the same manner as the doll (Dores Andre) is carried off the stage second part of the first act--up the steps of the War Memorial House and into the house of the Tomasson Nutcracker. It's a strange Nutcracker in that it's so unhealthily healthy and normal. Drosselmeyer hangs out--probably to Mel Johnson's disapproval--for almost the entire thing. He continuous points out this and that. In fact everyone points out this or that to everybody else and everybody else nods. The mime/acting by the dancers is really good--you feel as if a tradition is really being passed down, it's just that the writing lacks variety or surprise. The SF Nutcracker also seemed smaller this year, as if some of the variations in the second act had been dropped out, more war pony than war horse. The flowers in the Waltz of the Flowers are egalitarian Zinnias, and it's nice to see hot July flowers in the middle of cold December. I was disappointed to miss Taras Demitro as King of the Snow, inexplicably absent--probably shuffled up to an evening performance. (One usher told me that in the future I should check online for casting, while the other very dismissively said never, never pay attention to what's online, while unhelpfully offering no alternative source of info.) Kristin Long and Joan Boada were very good (I always forget that she only appears at the end, like dessert-only guests at dinner parties) in the grand pas de deux. Nothing brilliant, but how completely refined and finished were each of JB's gestures. My eyes moved to Anthony Spaudling in Spanish, Erin McNulty--something Jane Russelly or Jilliana-amused about her--in French and Martyn Garside in Russian. In Chinese Garen Scribner described a miraculous bas relief carwheel that looked like a fan being snapped shut or a double needle scan on a radar clockface that you see in 1960's movies, for lack of anything else to liken it to.

The American Friend (doesn't the "American Friend" always come up short in the end) is more Wenders than Highsmith. It had a wonderful helicopter tracking shot of a train, the filmic equivalent of the long lifts in the second movement of Symphony in C, as I remember. It's a good film.

An early years movie appeals to me a lot, too. I think doing it with Balanchine as an equal, or even minor, character, like an Altman cast, might work. Balanchine caused mischief but he wasn't a drama queen and did seem to vanish into the background at social functions. The lives of Lifar and Kochno and Alice Marks and the others could be out front and Balanchine could be the observer. A small movie would make the four character Apollo seem larger--though between 1925 and 1929 Balanchine did about 40 ballets, so Apollo was just one of many. By the thirties it was considered dated. A movie with the tone of one by Rene Clair (Le Million) or Jean Renoir (Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion) or Jacques Becker (Furbellows, Casque d'Or) might serve that period--and Apollo--well. Maybe with a little flavor of Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvey too.

The Nadelmans were put in by Lincoln Kirstein to warm up the space. They're a bit bizarre, pseudo-Nadelmans: "blow ups" from small originals that Kirstein owned...Kirstein was always wary of Johnson, way back to his Gray Shirt fascist activities. Places do get warmed up by age and associations. The problem with the big space of the State Theater lobbies is that there are no happy corners where people tend to gravitate. The balcony and fountain are friendlier. I remember Avery Fisher being better in this regard--Huxtable says there are inadvertant niceties about the building which she terms "daringly derivative."