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Quiggin

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Posts posted by Quiggin

  1. 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.

  2. At five or six, she should not be expected to grasp the context that made Mrs. Parks' defiance into an historical moment, but I hope that as she grows, she will get it.

    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.

  3. 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:

    The collection is full of surprises, such as the reference to the “triple turns” performed by Mathilda Kshesinskaya. Even today, a triple pirouette is risky, and I had no idea that back then female dancers were technically capable of them. It’s also interesting to learn that Pavlova, whom Volynsky elevated above all other ballerinas, performed pirouettes “with a frightened-looking face.” Some of the greatest classical dancers—poets of the art form—have not been great turners. We see this still, though with the heightened technical expectations of our extreme-sports era it goes unforgiven, the poetic being less valued, because less understood, than the athletic.

    There's also an excellent article by Wendy Lesser on Flannery O'Conner in the same issue.

  4. 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:

    Among the considerable achievements of the Quartet are the large set-pieces: the duck shoot on Lake Mareotis at the end of Justine; the carnival at the end of Balthazar; the ecstatic Coptic wake at the end of Mountolive. All of these scenes are patiently, lovingly described, for their own sake rather than for any symbolism they may deliver – the prose is rich but not richer than the material. And yet each of these scenes contains a twist or a mystery. In the first a body is discovered and identified – wrongly. In the second the wrong person gets killed. In the third the wrong person is killed too, but not by mistake.
  5. 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.

  6. 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..."]

  7. 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.

  8. All sorts of other people talk about how Orson Welles didn't fully realize his potential.

    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.

  9. 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.

  10. The film would have been worth just the short excerpt of Doubrovska at the barre, demonstrating developpe to second, and then port de bras back from tendu front.)

    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.

  11. In my opinion, a good Nutcracker has a lot in common with E.T. The Extraterrestial.

    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.

    "Forgive me, said the Nutcracker, dearest Demoiselle Stahlbaum, for doing such a miserable dance. You see the dancers all came from our marionette ballet, which is controlled by wires, and which can only do the same things over and over again. There are also good reasons why the hunters were so drowsy and feeble in their blowing..."

    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?

  12. 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.)

  13. Casting Rogers in "The Major and the Minor" strikes me as being both wierd and slightly cringe-making. She's never credible, and I'm not sure why.

    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,

    It wasn't too difficult for Ginger to imitate a girl of twelve, especially in those days. Now it seems a little foolish. To think a thirty-year-old could play a twelve-year-old girl and be believable! Well, she couldn't, but it didn't matter. The audiences were very generous in those days. They had come to have a good time and they went along with you."

    Wilder also says he originally wrote Ray Milland's role for Cary Grant.

  14. Is that what the Soviets did?

    Here's the fuller cite from Jennifer Fisher's Nutcracker Nation-

    According to Elizabeth Souritz dance scholar Russian choreographers have spent considerable energy trying to overcome the perceived faults of The Nutrcracker's child-centered libretto and to bring the ballet into line with "the psychological depth of the score," whereas in the United States, The Nutcracker answers a different purpose--mainly as "a favorite Christmas entertainment for children".

    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-

    gone [in the ballet] are the more serious issues of [Hoffmann's] artwork, such as the conflict between the philistine method of raising children that curbs the imagination and Hoffmann's innovative use of a double anti-fairy tale that enables young Marie to discover the miracles of life an realize her dreams. The ballet is more about the coziness of home and the taming of the imagination..

    This may be a part of the same can of worms, or a whole new batch.

  15. Ginger Rogers used regularly to impersonate children in comic and serious settings.

    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.

  16. 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.

  17. Sandy McKean:

    If I only saw a performance once, I would be very relunctant to spend much time looking thru the binos for fear of missing the very essence of ballet. There is no question that looking thru binos greatly restricts one's ability to "get" what's happening on stage

    Carbro:

    I agree. I try to resist the temptation to use my binocs the first time I see something, to restrict their use to quick peeks.

    ...Unfortunately, of late I find myself putting my binocs to my eyes to confirm that a dancer's feet are indeed less than fully pointed.

    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.

  18. 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.

  19. I'd rather see a Balanchine movie of his early years. I'd love to see what a good writer could do with Diaghilev, Danilova, Lifar, Spessivtseva, etc.
    ...how do you convince the audience that Apollo actually has all that much significance?

    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.

  20. Given time and habit, objects of gentle ridicule often become old, irreplaceable friends.

    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."

  21. Travertine / Bordello

    The entire project has received horrible deservedly horrible reviews since it was completed. All this is understandable when you look at who was given the commissions for these projects. Beware of corporate architects and their huge egos.

    The use of travertine is completely inappropriate in NYC and it has not weathered well at all and the arches of the Met Opera look like the effort of a child with a compass.

    I did a bit of a background search on the endless controversial genesis of Lincoln center--and here’s what came up:

    The travertine idea most likely came from Mies van der Rohe. Mies had used it in the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion and in the lobby and plaza the great Seagram Building in 1959 (the plaza travertine has been replaced due to its tendency to stess up under ice). After that its use become something of an architectural fad in New York.

    Johnson was borrowing a lot from Mies at the time and the purist lobby of the Seagram Building is probably an inspiration for the State Theater prominade. The staircases (like the one the piano is often parked under) are from Mies’ Crown Hall in Chicago. Johnson borrowed superficially and widely and forgot all about structural integrity of the elements he took, for which Ada Louise Huxtable called him the “Peck’s bad boy of architecture”--“he just doesn’t give a hoot about structure.”

    Johnson later said more bluntly that he was an architectural whore--hoping that someone would correct him (nobody did)--and that he was just a holding place in the history of architecture (Charlottesville Tapes).

    Huxtable reviewed the State Theater in the New York Times (Balancing Up: 10/28/1962) as being most likely “tastefully chi chi.” The overall Lincoln Center project, she thought, had started out as a “highbrow dream” and ended up a “middlebrow monument,” the result of committee design that inevitably works by “compromise and fatigue decision.”

    Some of the compromises had been over a symmetrical beaux arts plan versus a modernist asymetrical one and over Rockefeller’s desire for “vaulted gothic arches, fluted columns and classical carvings” for the Met, according to Wallace K Harrison. Harrison’s earlier design is a little more interesting that what turned out--it had Corbusier barrel arches traveling back into a slightly wavy Frank Gehry building. (picture at NYT: New Opera House Will Be Imposing: 10/25/1958)

    Huxtable’s later review commended Johnson’s building as being “sumptuously elegant” and “sensuously beautiful” and said all of Johnson’s architectural taste “might be naughtly but it’s nice.” (NYT: Glass-Fronted Room: 10/23/1964).

    It must be remembered of course that hundreds of families of a lively neighborhood were displaced as a result of the “slum clearance” for Lincoln Center. And that Avery Fisher’s name (he was the manufacurer of wonderful vacuum tube hi fi equipment) has far pleasanter associations than that of Koch Industries (for which, see Wikipedia).

  22. Does anyone have that between-the-World-Wars kind of glamour that these 3 ballerinas had?

    Irma Nioradze might do well as Zorina. Katina Paxinou as the later Danilova and Akim Tamarif as an older version of Lifar or Massine, if Welles is still directing. Maybe Patrick has a Fritz Lang cast.

    Zorina married Goddard Lieberson and was Peter Lieberson's, the composer, mom. She had another son, a friend of which I met on a train to Oregon a few years ago in a dimly lit, old Santa Fe club car that Amtrak still used (you had to step up a bit to enter it). The friend was an insomniac and took long train trips when he couldn't sleep. He said that in the old days Zorina used to drive him and Peter Lieberson's brother to school and was so expressive that he was afraid they might drive off the road as she spoke and smoked and drove on.

  23. Wikipedia has a fair overview of Koch Industries, tallgrass prairie restoration and benzine spills and all. It's always good to know a little about what sort of financial portico one enters the temple of art through. In my case I wouldn't mind a few more years' familiarity with the silver grey gaffers tape on the stairways.

    As far as the scarcity of Balanchine pieces on the Gala program, look at it this way: There will be fewer of Peter Martins' stories about Mr B., in which Balanchine shrinks and shrinks and almost vanishes into nothing in the telling.

  24. The Matt Damon version is way over produced--almost an opera--for such a small scaled original, though his performance is small scaled.

    "Purple Noon" does depend on whether you do like Dirac's least favorite, "the ice cold angel" as someone on You Tube has posted about Alain Delon.

    It has a good director, Rene Clement, who also did the haunting "Forbidden Games." The music is by Nino Rota and the photography by Henri Decae who was the cameraman on "400 Blows", and "Elevator to the Gallows."

    "Purple Noon" comes off as a well made whole thing, with a very existential grip on its subject. The last part is a little like Antonioni's "Passenger" in the way it goes on and on. I haven't seen it since film school where it was a favorite where movies like this seemed to sting to the quick and we couldn't see enough of them. This was probably also the case for Martin Scorsese, who re-released it.

    Delon did a lot of interesting work with Jean Pierre Melville in the 1960s, also Antonioni "Eclipse," later a Godard film that he produced, "Nouvelle Vague," and earliest of all the great "Rocco e Suoi Fratelli." His artistic heart seems to have been in the right place.

    The other great Patricia Highsmith film of course is "Strangers on a Train" and the Robert Walker Bruno character is closer to the Highsmith type.

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