Quiggin

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.

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.

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.

But the early twentieth century was an extremely fertile period in the visual arts that used up a great deal of the “intellectual oxygen”, especially the scenes in Paris and Russia. No one got over it. Twomley, Johns and Rauschenberg spent the 1950’s trying to come to terms with Kurt Schwitters, and in the 1980’s the New York galleries were filled with painters self consciously dealing with the Dadaist Picabia. Roche and Kahn were following Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s severe aesthetic was on the rapidograph tip of every architect ins the 60’s and 70’s. That’s part of what Frederic Jameson, the hapless Marxist, meant about Late Modernism. In many respects the Late Modenists’ work was very good, but there was less genius to it and they had to work twice as hard to find their freedom. Happily Balanchine was part of the first wave. I think what Macaulay means about Beckett is that Balanchine’s dancers pull their ideas out of their guts, like Beckett characters. They pull these monologues (and Balanchine pas de deux are often extended dual monologues) from their inner being and inventory them in front of you. His ballets are Shakespearean in their worldliness. Stravinsky gives great pleasure, but he’s not Mozart in variety, and he’s not Balanchine in depth. Prokofiev was not really a rival of Stravinsky, and he is a delightful eyewitness to the period, much more reliable than Stravinsky, despite his--Prokofiev’s--often unbearable self centeredness. And there does tend to be a general bias, albeit unfairly, towards the Chopin Waltzes and Etudes and Nocturnes at the expense the Sonatas.

And it crystalizes out of certain cultural contexts. Balanchine was in an historically unique position to be able to draw on (and oppose to each other) two great resourses: 1) the still living works of Ivanov and Petipa which essentialized a whole history of ballet and 2) the hotbed of experimentation of the initial Soviet period, from Meyerhold and Tatlin to Vertov and Akhmatova. The Four T's and Agon come out of the latter and Symphony in C from the first. In a way the rest of the twentieth century lived off the capital of the modernisms of the 1920's. Nothing came later that hadn't already been done already. Postwar Late Modernism is really self conscious High Modernism (this is how Frederic Jameson puts it). It was difficult to write a sonata after Beethoven had written the form upwards, sideways and down, and as difficult to write a ballet after Balanchine. Wheeldon is a bit like Stravinsky (about whom Prokofiev said only rented his musical ideas) quoting wildly from here and there, especially in the Golden Hour that ends on a 4 T's note, having moved through Somnabula and Violin Concerto along the way. I agree with Carbro's "mile wide and inch deep" characterization of Wheeldon. Maybe he's also trying to cleanse the palate, doing a restricted twelve toney thing. But the cultural habitat that Wheeldon is working in isn't that great either. Genius comes neither with the mail nor out of the blue. And Macaulay's just fine.

Welles would create his own solipsistic world for Kirstein, and Chaplin would be nicely enigmatic for Balanchine. The place to use Johnny Depp might be for Conrad Ludlow--or even for Leslie Howard.

Bart: The director then would have to be Max Ophuls (Letter from an Unknown Woman and La Ronde) to balance all the stories and keep the elusiveness-of-eros theme rolling along.

Yes, the meticulous setting of Apollo and the Prodigal Son would make the subject of a good film (director between Truffaut of Day for Night and Bresson of a Condemned Man Escaped). Actually Diaghilev would not be that much of a presence--he was a little aloof during that period, maybe because of Igor Markevich ("half Igor"). Kochno was doing much of the work. The Apollo of the mid-twenties would be a shock to us, with the unaltered-for-Suzanne Farrell tempos and accents, the less than noble Lifar with his melty nose, the scene where the muses toss Apollo about on the tips of their feet. Lord and Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova) would have to be characters of course. After dinner she and Balanchine once demonstrated to (the now fashionable again) Maynard Keynes how Firebird was danced. This was in 1947. Keynes noticed how shabby the sets for Ballet Imperial were and thought that if Balanchine's company toured in England, he could have the British stagehands remake them for much smaller sum of money. He was always the economist, according to his biographer, Skidelsky. And the Zorina period would be a good focus. (She became Peter Lieberson the composer's mom.) Yes any movie with an Eve Arden / Melissa Hayden character is a plus.

Maybe Sokurov ("Russian Arc") could do a small film about Balanchine with unknowns, unknown at least to Western audiences. A meditative film--not "Night & Day" or "Words & Music". Or else a small incident--small incidents make good films--such as the summer before Balanchine and Danilova and their company left Soviet Russia after one of their colleagues was drowned in a boating accident on a lake. It was an accident most likely set up by a KGB agent. Black and white in gorgeous tones and in the style of early Bergman or the neorealist Fellini of "I Vitelloni." Or Antonioni of "Among Women Only." "Accident on the lake" brings to mind Montgomery Clift who would make an interesting Balanchine. It might not have that much to do with his life but he was a wonderful screen presence--and he has something of Balanchine's facial structure. Clift would craft out an interesting character in a way Johnny Depp couldn't.

I think it was Croce who was first said that the technique and spirit was what somehow got lost in the trip between the School of American Ballet and the State Theater. She also wrote that some greater degree of freedom in restaging Balanchine might be worth trying. That's maybe why the Cuban and Spanish dancers (such as Taras Domitro and Gonzalo Garcia and Lorena Freijoo) are more successful, they push the stuffing out of the parts--even the ragged Theme and Variations on You Tube a few weeks ago with Joel Carreno and Vingsay Valdes [?] seemed so fresh. If they drifted apart at some points, they delicately buttoned things together at others. They have the wit and torsioning necessary to bring off the Balanchine constructions which go off in one direction and the other at once. When Time does pick up her skirts and her toys and blindly--and rather blandly today--sets up shop elsewhere, all the little social and cultural cues that built the personalites who once danced are swept away. No new Melissa Haydens or Mary Ann Moylens--dancers instead dance Melissa Hayden dancing Balanchine. (With Cunningham no more Viola Farber and Douglas Dunn and Jeff Slayton and their droll and goofy moves.) Yes, as Macaulay says, the freeze frame of something already in progress (for which you’ll have to catch up) when the curtain opens is essential to Balanchine. It tells whether all the elements are set to be in play. And more Shakespearean than Shakespeare (is Ashton Pinter?). I think Balanchine should also be compared with his modernist near contemporaries: Cezanne and Braque, maybe Le Corbusier, maybe late modernists painters like Guston and Robert Ryman who worked the same few things over and over. Tim Scholl suggests Anna Akmohtava. But still Shakespearean in that Balanchine seemed to contain the whole world in his works.

Regarding Helene on "on line:" the first thing I noticed when I moved from Los Angeles to New York is that people waited on line, not in line. I was very impressed with that. I think the source of "No problem" for "that's alright" was the "Get Smart" television series. It has a vacuous quality--as if the speaker is not there. Recently someone in San Francisco said "no worries" in its place, which is a bit gentler and down home-like. "Literally" happened (as opposed to "metaphoricially"?). At a granular level the apostrophe before the s in the plural (like a decorative flourish) and in the pronoun possessive its. A friend of mine is certain that the gene that determines the sense placement of the apostrophe has been lost or compromised. "Gradient" was the "paradigm" of the 1970s, everybody at CBS news used it whenever he or she could. And where have all the "parameters" everyone used to use gone?

The Maria Tallchief in Montreal CBC telecast characterizes its excepted version as Swan Lake: Act II and Swan Lake: Scenes from Act II. "Balanchine's 'Swan Lake'" makes it a sort of a brand, like "Bram Stoker's Dracula" a bit of a slippery slope. Every artist could become part of her or his titles. And where would that leave Ivanov--or Tschaikovsky? Also the context of two or three other ballets (in this case In the Upper Room and the Four Temperaments) would imply that this is not that whole work.

In this case Macaulay is sort of complimenting Tudor on being (a bit of) a choreographer's choreographer. Also Balanchine seemed to have had an especially keen eye for what was true and what was phony. In the overall of dance criticism, look at Croce and Garis and Denby, they wrote about Balanchine most of the time. Balanchine is like Beethoven or Mahler for music critics--how can you not refer to them again and again, albeit a little obsessively so (like a first love). A gaggle of critics?

Catherine Hepburn's "The cala lilies are in bloom again" was much commented on and imitated when I was in college. And there is Celia Johnson's daughter's impenetrable English accent in "Brief Encounter." But the Pandora's box of curious intonations has to have been "Beverly Hills 90210," traces of which you still hear here on the West Coast. It involves a kind of fast talking, hitting consonants hard and bumping solidly into the end of the word. What makes unusal accents sound bad perhaps is that the actor prizes sound over conveying sense. At least this was the case in Beverly Hills 90210, where there was no sense. The most famous Brooklynite who passed for an European may have been Henry James' Madame Merle, whose accent we can only try to imagine.

Anin, what I liked about the Ponomarev/D Quixote was that he was an effective counterpoint to all the divertissements going on in the background, a nice frame, or like a bit of a found object in a cubist painting. Anyway it had a far different effect--more depth--than San Francisco Ballet's version. And of course, the real Don Quixote is Balanchine's, albeit with the tepid Nabokov (Nicolas, that is) music. Pasternak's "horseface"--Pasternak called it that--always reminded me of my grandfather's (he was from Mytilene/Lesbos off the Turkish coast), so perhaps I tend to exagerate its reappearance in the world.

Nioradze and Korsakov were in the cast I was fortunate to see in Berkeley, and after you’d get used to the discrepancies in age and style -- in 1930’s film terms it would be like Dickie Moore partnering Marlene Dietrich – everything went like a dream--the dream that Don Quixote would puncture from time to time with his lance. As Natalia and Paul say, the show is worth it if only for the Don Quixote, V. Ponomarev, who was wonderfully out-of-it, his eyes flaring with various halting schemes. He looked like someone who had strayed from one of Tadseus Cantor’s casts. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him—or Irma Nioradze, whose face, Georgian like Boris Pasternak’s, with high cheekbones and great sculptural modeling, keep changing and weighing its effects. (She could have been Natasha Filipova in “the Idiot.”) The role of Kitri was a comfortable old chair to her. Korsakov’s range is limited to earnestness and a skeptical lift of an eyebrow or corner of lip. But then he draws himself up, gulps up a bit of air, lowers his gaze and suddenly leaps cleanly and brilliantly across stage.

Actually I was once lucky enough to be able to watch a Mark Morris piece in rehearsal at SF Ballet and it was better than the real thing in performance. There were two casts at the same time, with the big black piano in the middle, and the second cast behind was going through the parts in dreamy asides or footnotes to what was happening in front. And there were mirrors all around to further complicate things into which the dancers were losing their gazes. But dancer over the dance comes to the same thing as in acting where people say a performer is so great she or he can read the telephone book and make it sound like Shakespeare. Lots of choreography of our period, especially in San Francisco, is the telephone book--or in the case of Christopher Wheeldon perhaps C++ or Java underscript. Wheeldon is brilliant and loquacious and magpie-ish (:Macaulay), but there are precious few glimpses into the inner lives of his characters. The overwrought Hedda Gabbler of Val Caniparoli unhappily tries to make up for this lack. All art is about transmitting something, Manet passes on Velasquez, Juan Gris brilliantly regives us Cezanne, and Balanchine refigures and refreshes Petipa. (The Mariinsky's recent performance at Zellerbach made La Bayadere look like a soucebook for Symphony in C: beats and whisking of feet in air as a group, 180 degree turns of the corps at the sides--enigmatic reversals of judgment or kinds of petulance or various airs of indifference, etc.) My preference is for dancing that is less brilliant and less technically proficient than the celebrated dancing of the SF men (except Joao Boada whose sense of parcelling out and repackaging time is beyond reproach) and is instead transmitting something story-like (but not a really a story) that in turn has been transmitted dancer to dancer to dancer. Eglevsky (was it Eglevsky?) to D'Amboise to Gonzalo Garcia and Vadim Solomahka in the case of SF Ballet's recent Apollo. Yes, a brittle and rambly rant, of course, I know.

The other link: New Work Clips

I saw the "Within the Golden Hour" at the New Works festival last spring in San Francisco, and as usual with Wheeldon's things I initially liked it a lots, but then something in me always puts the brakes on. In Golden Hour there's lots of great dancing for twos, and twos & twos, fresh and vinegary with crisp lines, with lots of striking silhouettes of women in frozen X shapes being lifted and carried horizontally off stage. (A bit like lawn furniture being put away for the winter.) But it seemed to be disconcertingly and distractingly packed with quotes from Balanchine. In one place there was Apollo and Orpheus, in another a quote from Somnabula with the ballerina fluttered back out on point as she would in Somnabula, while the man was rolling on all fours quoting Bart Cook in Stravinksy Violin Concerto. The ending seemed to be a reference to the 4 Ts tomato red ending except the group was smaller--they were planted at the center of the stage and their movement was limited to a back and forth of upper bodies. I found it all brilliant--like a jabbery whiz-kid with a cigar out of Gaddis or somewhere--but in doing this, it preempts or masks the dancers vulnerability to each other and the music (which is already pretty prickly). As far as the real Four Temperaments and San Francisco's Balanchines in general, I find Alastair Macaulay's comment about SFB lack of "attack and momentum" and their "demureness and containment" to be key. They need a Stanley Williams spiritual advisor somewhere in the background. In case they haven't been posted lately, here are some links to clips and short documentaries on New Yorks, and interviews with Wheeldon and Mark Morris. KQED Spark documentaries (part 2 & 3 are still working)

I like the little Sanguinic clip in Anne Belle's Six Ballerinas with Mary Ann Moylan (or is it Maria Tallchief?). It's quite perfect, especially the lateral push and resistance, exact and determining, in the woman's arms during the lifts. Interestingly, San Francisco Ballet, City Ballet and Miami are all doing the 4T's this fall and winter. And both Miami and New York are doing La Valse.

I got a little curious about this "documentary" The Man who Dances that everyone refers to and Patrick describes as if it were a short story, so I did a little digging. The film didn't come out of nowhere, it was made by Robert Drew who made the film Primary about JFK and Hubert Humphrey and gave documentary film making in America a new life. Leacock and Pennebaker came out of Drew Associates and they made A Stravinsky Portrait (more Leacock than Pennebaker I think) with the great single shot of a fascinatingly intimate but self-conscious throwaway glance between Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell. Albert Mayseles who did Grey Gardens comes out of Drew Associates, too. This was American cinema vertite' and it paralleled the work of Jean Rouch (Chronicle of a Summer and a film about lion hunting where there is an apology given to the lion before killing it) and very early Godard (All Boys are Named Patrick and Le Petit Soldat) that were so influential to young filmmakers at one time (disclaimer, etc.). All of this came out of the of the Dzigza Vertov ("truth at 24 frames per second": Godard) with whom Balanchine probably would have had a lot in common. Sorry for the long digression, but it may explain some of the deeper esthetic behind the film, which may at first glance seem perfectly casual and found-object like. My second bit of digging was at IMDB where there is a nice Villella bio that lists his Toast of the Town performances. And the Museum of Television (now passing as the Paley Center for the Media) lists intriguing Villella projects from the Armstrong Circle Theatre era (Armstrong made floor tiles) such as Carousel, for which Villella did the choreography, and Brigadoon (with Peter Falk) which was choreographed by Peter Gennaro.

Canbelto said Villella said in Prodigal Son that d'Amboise played some tricks on him--they may have been tests and puckish jokes of sorts, but Villilla took them quite seriously. d'Amboise may have wanted to be the only man at NYCB, in the same way Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy wanted to be the only women among men. I like Patrick's call (at least I take it as such) for a period of abstinence from stories about Mr. B's stories. For Balanchine the story materials may have been protective devices in a some way, so that the real Balanchine could really be thinking about the choreography and the next steps to himself. Thanks Paul for the clip, it's a great performance of the Glinka overture--is it Barenboim? but he seems so vivacious. I don't think Glinka is the Pushkin of Russian music, maybe, not a bad thing, the bubbly Tatiana Tolstoya. Glinka doesn't develop as much as Tchaikovsky does I think. I do agree though that the music is champagne-like in the best sense. Thanks too for the Russian Ark clip--it's a great film--the great one reeler of life (it's all done in one shot). I had forgotten how delightful and at the same time profoundly moving it is. Gergiev by the way is doing four Prokofiev symphonies here in San Francisco with the London Symphony Orchestra in March--single tickets just went on sale. Gergiev also did the full, three hour version of Sleeping Beauty with LSO for the Proms--temporarily on line at BBC Proms What's On portal. Both performances got raves in the Financial Times. Back to Villella... Edited 8/26. Poster's remorse--too long.

Phaedra: That, too, was my first exposure to Villella and to ballet--on tv--Villella leaping in a full circle around a studio in stark and distorted black and white. I thought now this is really dazzling, I could really watch a lot of this sort of thing. But then I seem to have dropped the ball on that project for many years. That's perhaps why I feel compelled to go to so many performances now, to correct for that loss, but with somewhat less intense balletic experiences. I like Patrick's take on the film, which I haven't yet seen. Villella may not have mentioned Mr B so much because he was avoiding him and working intensively with Stanley Williams, or so it seems from what I recall from "Prodigal Son." Incidentally, there is a lovely picture of Nureyev and Stanley Williams for sale now on ebay. It's not inexpensive.

I imagine Chamberlain as a sort of a Phlegmatic version of Henry Higgins. How sweet though that the Alfred Doolittle role was passed down to Holloway's son. I would have liked to have seen that. (But not Noel Harrison's HH...) Regarding Audrey Hepburn, she did get tepid, so-what reviews when My Fair Lady came out. In a way Julie Andrews' career was built on the loss of that part. I think if someone had equaled her stage performance (Andrews may now have not been able to translate it to film) she may have had fewer vacillating regrets. As far as Cinemascope and Carsousel were concerned, Carousel was filmed in an experimental version called Cinemascope 55, which was devised to compete with VistaVision. (In VistaVision, the film ran sideways, as in a still camera, and the scratches ran sideways as well--an affect that iMovie and Final Cut Pro has yet too offer.) I assume Sinatra wasn't afraid of a second take (it would seem impossible to make any film without at least a second, protection take), as much as the big bad new cameras and the possibilites of technical glitches. Or maybe he was in a bad mood that day. Carousel link Old Cinemascope Boys site Maggie Gyllenhaal for Eliza? Or any of a dozen of fine actresses from one of many British acting companies--and some do Shaw on a regular basis. You could probably chose a great Eliza blindfolded. Perhaps a young Diana Rigg?

Yes, Rex Harrison would have been too young and callow, and is too practiced later. Even the first original cast album is preferable to the second, redone a year later in a stereo version. And sadly Rex Harrison went onto play Henry Higgins on stage well into the 80's, 17 years after the movie. What a personal life, half noble, half heartbreakery, the noble part the subject of a Terrence Rattigan play. There is a fun amateur clip of RH accompanying Vivien Leigh (their's would be an interesting conversation to imagine overhearing) to the movie premier of My Fair Lady on YT. Unfaithfully Yours is the one Preston Sturges movie I could laugh at/with, with heart (if one laughs with their heart) and mind.