Quiggin

When I was in high school, I liked the original cast recording an awful lot and knew the lyrics well, especially for the lessons about accent and class and the wonderful chewiness of cockney ("lots of cowl mike-ing lwots of 'eat"). I was torn between Eiza Doolittle's rebelliousness and Henry Higgens' suavity. The movie was quite a disappointment, brittle and overproduced, and Audrey Hepburn was fairly underwhelming as Eliza (it was a bit of show biz scandal that she had been cast, just as it was for Roz Russell to play Ethel Merman's part in Gypsy). Perhaps if Minelli, who had done Gigi, had directed My Fair Lady instead of Cukor...

And it was also Rex Harrison's soft-shoe phrasing--he couldn't sing, so had made do with what he had--that was so brilliant and winning. ("Pickering, why can't a woman be more like [great pause]...ME")

But Shaw, both in Pygmalion and over into My Fair Lady, focuses on Alfred Doolittle, Liza's charmingly good-for-nothing father, almost as much as Liza and HH, and on Doolittle's various speeches on work/not working and being respectable or not. (Isn't there something of Renoir's Boudu--remade as Down & Out in Beverly Hills--in him?).

Stanley Holloway was great as Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady, but Wilfred Lawson was interesting too in Pygmalion with his charcoaly face and wheezey voice. Wendy Hiller's transitions from Cockney to upperclass were troubling to me, but I did like Leslie Howard, though yes, he was a completely different Henry Higgins than the fierier Rex Harrison.

It's interesting to watch the Rex Harrison (with Wendy Hiller) in the 1941 Major Barbara and try to imagine him so youthful in Pygmalion.

I think cocaine use was pretty widespread--and very "ok" white collar--in the seventies. It was "safer" than amphetamines, the use of which was on the wane by then. Before this therapists and doctors used to prescribe Dexadrine, dexamil (with miltown to take off the edge) for depression--or as "mood elevators", and that spilled over to all sorts of illegal versions. All of those drugs, cocaine and amphetamines and quaaludes--and even LSD--had a brief period as a tool for doctors and then a long underground afterlife.

In the late forties wasn't benzedrine sold over the counter, like NoDoze, so truckdrivers could drive all night? In my liner notes somewhere, the writer remembers seeing Charlie Parker pouring Bennies from a bottle into a cup of coffee just before a recording session in Los Angeles (which may have led to his "Relaxing at Camarillo").

So dancers weren't alone in this, and as Patrick says sometimes--maybe most of the time--drug use becomes self-limiting. And "promiscuity" too.

I almost went a couple of weeks ago but was shanghaied into seeing the new Brideshead Revisited instead.

And no Brideshead v. Brideshead v. Brideshead off-comment?

Here are the two vying reviews I was thinking of:

Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times:

Ledger’s much-publicised Joker is a party trick that wears a little thin: a whiny, chuckling, jowl-wagging grotesque – Richard Nixon melded with early Richard Widmark – with peeling makeup and an everyday bad hair day. The actor’s short-fuse virtuosity doesn’t match Jack Nicholson’s teased-out teasing in Tim Burton’s Batman, though he is still more fun than the Americans here...

David Denby in the New Yorker:

At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way.

I don't fault Gyllenhaal for wanting to break out of the indie ghetto she's resided in for some time but I'm not sure how much of a career bump she'll get from this

She's done a great recording of Bell Jar. ("It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer that they executed..."

And don't idie films yield some juicy parts?

Good breakdown, miliosr.

I've only seen Batman as a series of 6 or so trailers on the Times website, but they make the movie seem a bit, can you reserve the word lugubrious for it-- or slow and ploddy as Christian Bale's voice. (Josef von Sternberg's voice was also slow and molassassy, and all his characters, at least his men, spoke as slow and woefully as he did.)

I think some of these movies should just get rid of the token woman altogether. It’s a waste of their time and ours to have good actresses playing The Girl and I think it would also improve the films by eliminating unnecessary screen time.

Yes, yes, or else have a continuity person stand to one side and matter of factly read the Girl's lines to Boy.

Off topic: But isn't that how girlfriends fit into a lot of boyfriends' lives these days? We all like to be superior to the fiftes via Mad Men, but I think the fifties had its subversive strategies for everyone and some real, interesting bite to it. (And no one knew of, much less quoted Frank O'Hara then, a poorly appended MM detail. Rather, it was T.S. Eliot who spoke for the "silent" generation.)

Back to Batman: I think one of the reviews (the New Yorker's?) referred to these last two versions as taking the poetry out of Burton's, and another says that Nicholson was the real Joker, there was more depth to his performance.

And when will Christopher Nolan again do a small, somewhat personal movie, like Momento?

The choreography is clean. The dancers often are not.

I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on mel's point.

For me dancers can be as free and idiosyncratic as they like, but the counterpoint has to be right on, at least at certain crucial moments. The hand-off of the choreographic figure between soloist and corps members (for each to develop and finish off) has to be clean and on time. If not, a lot of the Balanchiness of Balanchine evaporates without a trace.

For a nutshell look at variations in dancers styles, look at Merrill Ashley and Jeffrey Edwards in the Balanchine essays. JE varies the time of his moves infinitely and MA's are arrow shots from Sylvia's bow.

The works for which Balanchine is most famous, "Agon", "The Four Temperaments", "Concerto Barocco", and the rest of the "leotard ballets" are really Neo-Classicism, which both subsumes and transcends national identity.

I differ with Mel a bit on this. I would say "Agon" and the "Four Ts" are works of High Modernism, like the corresponding artworks of Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. They do in many ways transcend national identity.

Neoclassicism, on the other hand, was more a local postwar reaction against the excesses of earlier Diaghilev works. Prokofiev reports in his diary that at the end of WWI the French, who had earlier madly cheered him, no longer had any interest in Stravinsky whatsoever. So Stravinsky had to reinvent himself--as a neo-classicist. And as Tim Scholl points out, Balanchine correspondingly turned Nijinsky/Dionysius upside down into Apollo. "Apollo" begins, Scholl says, where "Afternoon" ends. And Picasso went through his own cleansing-the-palatte neoclassical period.

So Balanchine on the whole is the great High Modernist, and Agon is pure on-the-floor, jabbing-into-little corners Russian Constructivism (strangely derived in a roundabout way from Braque via Tatlin).

Or that's how I've mapped it out for myself.

There's a lot more bold bravura than bouncy charm to the choreography when you can see more of it.

"Donizetti" is the loveliest and most satisfying ballet. I saw it twice last year or the year before at City Ballet. It has such a mysterious interweaving middle movement.

Added: Along Bart's line of thought above, maybe the Americaness of Balanchine's ballets is in their "speed" and "cheek." But don't forget the corny Americaness of "Filling Station" and other Lincoln Kirstein Americanist ideas for ballets, which must have made Balanchine cringe inwardly time and again.

I backed into reading the metaphysical poets because I was going through a Barbara Pym phase and wanted to find out what everyone in the novels was quoting to each other. "A glass of blessings" led me to George Herbert. But I soon left the clever but dour Herbert ("who would have thought my shriveled heart could have recovered its greeness") for Andrew Marvell who gives immediate pleasure a looser rein ("He hangs the orange bright, like golden lamps in a green night...he makes the figs our mouths to meet; and throws melons at our feet"). I always get a kick out this last verse of a long Marvell poem (a bit like a Corot painting):

But now the salmon-fisher's moist

Their leathern boats begin to hoist;

And, like Antipodes in shoes,

Have shod their heads in their canoes.

How Tortoise-like, but not so slow,

These rational Amphibii go!

Let's in: for the dark hemisphere

Does like one of them appear.

* * *

There's also the question about a classic that we would have never, never have read and caused us a lot of anxiety (say Thomas Pynchon or the above discussed War and Peace) but did read because someone we were mad about was reading it. The someone is long gone but the book has become a nice part of us.

It's funny how sometimes you don't read what you're supposed to but read something else in lieu of the classic.

I didn't finish "Madame Bovary" (I still must) but I did read the short and perfect "A Simple Heart" and "Sentimental Education" instead. Nor did I finish the "Golden Bowl" but did read the easier "Ambassadors" and the incredible "Portrait of a Lady" (version 1). And the short Tolsoi "Family Happiness"--about very slow changes of heart in a perfect relationship--and "Childhood, Boyhood & Youth" will have to do for "War and Peace," at least for a while.

"Remembrance of Things Past" was an avoidance of Joyce.

And like Dale and Patrick I read only part of "Vanity Fair," though there are such great characters. With Thackery it's more that you have to push your way through, rather than be pulled along by its currents--there's a sort of missing booky eros.

Yes, this is a good confessional booth.

Ray, is it this version, which snuck into the States and as quickly out in 2004? I've asked Pacific Film Archive to try to show it--which they probably could without rights problems--but they weren't terribly excited about it.

On October 24 [2004] the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with the cooperation of the George Balanchine Trust and the Cinemathèque de la Danse in Paris, will show A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM in its only existing version, on video, re-mastered and color-corrected by the British Film Institute. For a new generation of ballet lovers, this is an opportunity to see Suzanne Farrell as a nubile Titania, Edward Villella imperious as Oberon, Arthur Mitchell as a delightful Puck, and Allegra Kent and Jacques d'Amboise in a gorgeously danced second act pas de deux that is one of the film's highlights.

But even the divine Arlene Croce has some reservations about Lander Etudes. The following is from a danceview review by Alexander Meinertz, "Etudes & Danish Modernism."

Educated, enlightened, and spoiled by the works of George Balanchine, Americans have become accustomed to appreciate and value choreography and, indeed, the art of ballet by the standards dictated by the Balanchine repertory...Arlene Croce [notes that]:

"The ballet Etudes should have proved once and for all that classical forms have a structural coherence but are no more intrinsically dramatic than the harmonic series in music. The choreographer, Harald Lander, justly equates classroom combinations with Czerny keyboard exercises; the result is a smashing non-ballet."

Anyway, Alastair Macaulay seems to have done a great deal for updance dance in New York in the last two years, giving it an awful lot of thoughtful front page coverage. (Thankfully displacing the inevitable equestrian metaphors of his predecessor, about fillies and dancers feeling their oats and finally getting their spurs.)

Also we seem to live in a very conservative period in dance--there are few new choreographies that possess the stage on fresh ground--and AM's not a conservative.

Is it the total outlandishness and outrageous decadence of such a remark...

I must apologize for my haste in quoting Mr. Macaulay without double fact checking--and making him sound more decadent and outlandish and absolutist than in fact he was. His whole statement was more limited in reach:

Watching this, as so often when watching the Balanchine repertory, I think it is reasonable to suggest that Balanchine and Beckett were the two supreme dramatists of the 20th century.

This was from a review (NYT: 2/9/2008) of Christopher Wheeldon's "Rococo Variations," in which Macaulay was faulting Wheeldon for his slow ear for variation form, and for his lack of a sense of interesting dance theater. The Balanchine pieces he was comparing "Rococo" to were "Divertimento from 'La Baiser'" and "Stars and Stripes," which were on the same program.

"Neither is among Balanchines greatest. Yet either is an object lesson in both dance making and dance theater."

I sort of liked the article. I'd add the myth of Tschaikovsky's homosexual morose suicide to the warhorse stories people like to tell themselves. Eliott Carter--an very early appreciator of Balanchine--at 100 years old is still composing things and kids do like his work. Yes, it's no secret Bernstein did not develop as a composer and "Candide" does get better reviews with every revival. Newspaper boys do not exactly whistle "Pierrot Lunaire"--wasn't this was Shoenberg's prediction of his later twelve tone music (unfortunately there are no newspaper boys left to see if this would come true) but I've find myself warming up to Pierrot and it's one of the first things I've downloaded to my new iPod Touch. (If only I could get it to stop shuffling Beethoven Bagatelles).

Those miscellaneous comments aside, the classical audience is ageing in the States and no seems to want to make the stretch for new music--the last time they did it was for Mahler revival, at roughly the same time they made the attempt for the 4 Temperaments and Agon. In Europe I think it's a bit different.

One critic--it may be Alex Ross--thinks that classical music will survive only through Opera, which seems to have revived its subscriber base and delivery system.

[And regarding Nadal and Federer did anyone else think of them as the scampy Apollo versus the aloof and princely Peter Martinsy one?]

I like Joan Accocela at the New Yorker. Her talk at Berkeley "Balanchine and Sex"--actually the original title was racier than that--was nutty and good. Judith Flanders at the TLS has a clear eye for ballet and Alastair Macauley has done more for uptown dance at the New York Times than anyone there in a long time. I like his little overarching comments, such as there were only two great geniuses of the 20th century: George Balanchine and Samuel Beckett, which I don't necessarily agree with but do admire the sentiment of.

For classical music I used to find myself in agreement with Anne Midgette, who has happily moved to from the New York Times to the Washington Post where she is their chief music critic.

[And whatever critics we like, we should all remember to regularly click onto their reviews, so that they get good internet traffic marks with their publishers.]

The "unpleasant episode" over money between Balanchine and Prokofiev (p.112, Taper's Balanchine) is also mentioned in David Nice's Prokofiev: from Russia to the West. Prokofiev denied that the incident happened

I've been reading bits of the delightful Diaries and, yes, Prokofiev was a bit of a pill regarding "Prodigal Son" choreography. The diary entries of those dates have yet to be published but "Prokofiev's Ballet's for Diaghilev" by Stephen Press gives a fair account of the difficulties of producing PS.

Something like this was happening: Balanchine was choreographing two ballets at once; Prokofiev had given B. six pages of music that he didn't know what to do with--until he finally filled it with crawling and the all the business with the staff; and Diaghilev was being distracted by the arrival of Igor Markevich on the scene.

However, Prokofiev did write the great score and did conduct the music. Stravinsky said dryly to Prokofiev, regarding P's reservations about the choreography, something to the effect that perhaps he should avoid bible stories in the future. And "in the future" Stravinsky seems to have cooled on his friendship with Prokofiev and says this about him "I do no wish to criticize Prokofiev, and should be silent if I can say nothing good about him...I used to think that his depths were really engaged in playing chess..." (Memories & Commentaries). Balanchine who could be a bit cutting himself (in a particularly Georgian way according to Danilova) follows Stravinsky's lead on this.

Prokofiev, on the other hand, is so generous to Stravinsky (though not uncritically--his comments always have some bite) and to Diaghilev. "Stravinsky and I had adjoining rooms," P says about a trip to Milan in 1915, "so we unlocked the communicating door and had long conversations in the mornings. When he heard my Second Piano Concerto, Toccata and Second Sonata, Stravinsky was seized by the wildest enthusiasm declaring I was a real Russian composer, the only one to be found in Russia. For my part I was genuinely enthralled by his new Priaboutki which he preformed in a highly amusing style."

The diaries themselves are written in an amusing and touching style; in them P's life has the texture of a Russian novel, like Turgenev or Tolstoy Boyhood. There are the stories of the demanding friendships of his youth with Boris and (dear) Max, his continual flirtations (in the twenties with Stella Adler), his travels (there are descriptions of getting up early to watch snow falling from the backs of trains while troops are moving off to war on the other tracks) and his immersion in his music. Slightly selfish; both worldly and inwardly.

"Dressed in my new suit, which gave me a uniquely elegant 'English' air, I went to Pavlovsk...The conductor was Glazunov, and my God how boring, how featureless and amateurishly contrived his Third Symphony appeared after the new things I had been listening to in London. Basically Diaghilev's tastes and the outrageous liberties Stravinsky had taken in his "Nightingale" had already left their mark on me, and I no longer had patience with the bland and predictable flavor of Glazunov's neatly logical progressions. By comparison with my earlier compositions I intend my ballet to be a great modernistic leap forward; I have begun to cool towards the lyricism of my Violin Concerto, which I loved so tenderly before my departure for London. What I need to do now is create a ballet that will make people gasp and stretch their eyes, and after that I can settle back to the benign peace of my Violin Concerto." 15 July 1914

The critical consensus is that Leigh was better on film than on the stage.

dirac, I've only seen a bit of her on youtube recently, but I could say the opposite. Vivien Leigh, I think, was one of those astonishing beauties in the British Vogue / John Deakin style of the late forties early fifties--but I do find her too fussy on the screen: her gestures undermine her presence. I do remember her vaguely (unVoguely)--through the mists of childhood--on the stage with Mary Ure. One of them played Mary, Queen of Scots, and each of them took turns floating forward, delivering a paragraph of monologue and withdrawing. VL was quite impressive.

I think for Shaw (Anthony and Cleopatra mentioned above) you need Shaw actors who worked together for years for anything to work. Uta Hagen used to do Mrs Warren's Profession with a rag tag group and it seemed more Albee, at least on her part, than Shaw.

Underrated, under-the-radar movies:

Fabalas, Jacques Becker 1945. The first New Wave film I think, with shots of Paris opening and closing the film that could have come out of Four Hundred Blows or some Raoul Coutard / Traffaut collaboration. It's about a fashion house, light and tragic, obsessive in a Mizoguchi or Hitchcock way. Beautifully detailed. (The other great fashion house film--other than the Kay Thompson musical--is Tra Donne Sole of Pavese and Antonioni. It opens with an attempted suicide and has lots of hard-bitten, fifties existentialist lines. (from the book: "Febo told her that hunger wasn't enough to make you succeed: you had to know your trade like the starving know hunger and practice it like gentlemen."/"Maurizio always says you get what you want, but only after you have no more need for it."'/"The old are born old.")

(Ma Vie Sexuelle) and Kings and Queen by Arnaud Desplechin, with the charming but a bit overwhelming Mathieu Amalric. In tradition of Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustace. The examined life reexamined and cat scanned.

La Rayon Verte. Eric Rohmer. The French Vacation examined. Happy ending. Tears.

In the Street. American. Helen Levitt and James Agee documentary. Privileged shots (cameras hidden in briefcases of JA and HL) of children in Spanish Harlem playing mysterious chalk games. Women sitting at windows looking out. Haunting.

ATM711 or Bart or...

Did anyone see Yousekevitch's Apollo--and how was it different than Eglevsky's or Jacques D'Amboise's later on? I'm sort of interested in how the four parts were transmitted and modified over the years. Christensen's (a tiny bit) and that of D'Amboise are on film but I think the other's exist only in the memories of the audiences.

I like the description "as if listening to a far off voice." That listening is what pulls great performances out of dancers.

I'm going simplify madly and say that, in my version, I don't think Suzanne Farrell was very interested in Balanchine romantically--except as being a romantic figure in his world. She was in love with him through that figure (and perhaps a bit in love with herself--who would not be under those confusing circumstances, at least for a while).

According to Maria Tallchief--as I recall from her book and the Anne Belle film--Balanchine married his muses--or instruments for musing about ballet--out of practicality. He had one lung, a limited amount of energy, and so it was logical they would go home together and work together and cook together. He may not have been the most passionate lover.

Balanchine was also perhaps simpler as a person than most of us would like him to have been--there is rather a big schism between the artist and the person who is merely struggling to get throught life. We are shocked if by some miracle we sit next to one of these gods at dinner and find they have nothing interesting to say.

Christian Berard--who did the sets for Mozartiana in 1933 (Balanchine's greatest year according to Eliott Carter)--characterized Balanchine to Lincoln Kirstein in the following way. And this is what everyone--wives, patrons, students--was to be up against.

Balanchine was a mystery, Berard maintained, he seemed to have no exterior, visible identity. Masterful in manipulating his craft, he had no interest in society, and while charming and agreeable enough (out of financial necessity), he gave Kochno [berard's lover: Wikipedia] no help in raising cash. However, Madame Chanel adored him. He was, Berard continued, under the thumb of Vladimir Dimitriev, a demon manager, who had supervised his escape from the Soviet Union...According to Berard, Dimitriev was straight out of Dostoevsky and played Balanchine like a puppet...Balanchine had only one lung, was drastically in love with Tamara Toumanova--half his age. Lengthily [berard] delivered himself of the opinion that Balanchine was a depthless enigma, and I was hardly encouraged to make any further attempt to meet him. Enfin, Bernard said, il est un peu fou, cared about nothing--even the ballet--except for music, and was spending all his spare time taking piano lessons from an old Russian lady, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov.

Bebe Berard by Henri Cartier-Bresson

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx...=T&DT=Image

And the later Balanchine (familiar, but uncropped) by Henri Cartier-Bresson

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx...=T&DT=Image

This a sort of heads up on Violette et Mr B and other films of Dominique Delouche who also fixed his lens and intelligence on Markova, Serge Peretti & Yvette Chavire. They will be shown at Walter Reade theater (if construction hopefully allows) July 23 through the 27th. VV will be in attendance on one of the nights, as will the director, possibly the more interesting draw:

Dominique Delouche is truly a Renaissance figure, steeped in classical music, fine arts and the ballet. He has devoted much of his working life to filming the great dancers who illuminated his youth, to preserve the tradition as well as the memory of the dance from one generation to the other; as he wrote in his memoir, Corps Glorieux (Glorious Bodies), “The Church has stashed away our angels in the cupboard but what we have left is the dancers.”

Early on, Delouche assisted Fellini and directed a feature film himself. His point of reference was Max Ophüls and when he started filming dancers he lent a choreographic note to his subjects, later favoring a simpler documentary style. This is the first American retrospective of the filmmaker, whose devotional tone, always sparked with humor, gave his career as a dance filmmaker (as well as a costume and set designer) its special place.

[above from WW/Film Society notes]

http://filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/dominiquede...he/program.html

why not make an opera into a movie?

And a short story about the opera/movie. Or, in a Rene Clair "Le Million" version, Ennis and Jake as stagehands in a lover's quarrel caught behind the backsides of the sets of the opera, as artificial autumn leaves fall down over them.

It's hard enough to imagine the actual Holderlin Rhine not already having been polluted by industry in the 19th century (even if the Twilight pre-dates the composition), all that talk of the 'eternal unchanging motions of the Rhine'

Most of the substantial mercury pollution of the San Francisco Bay comes--and still comes with the winter rains--from the mercury used to process the gold in the gold rush. And the money from the gold still "tumbles down" to finance the opera (and Tuesday nights of the ballet) in San Francisco. We're all implicated in this crazy mess.

I like opera and cowboys both a great deal, but I don't think they usually have that much in common.

The San Francisco Opera is perhaps moving in this direction with its new Das Reingold set in part in gold rush California with gold panning Alberich and overalled Rhinemaidens (see recent Fin Times and LA Times reviews).

Regarding Tadzio and Ennis, I'll second that both "Death in Venice" and "Brokeback Mountain" are small, beautifully made things. To expand them distorts them and shows their flaws. And with all respect to Visconti and Britten and Jeff Edwards, Tadzio should really only be seen through Aschenbach's eyes. There's that interesting scene when one of Tadzio's friends pins him down on the beach, a little story in itself--how can you translate that? Perhaps the Straubs or Robert Bresson would have made some interesting thing of D in V, but short.

At the New Works festival here in SF there was a Sleeping Beauty set upon the sleepy Goldberg Variations, Tchaikovsky standing on Bach's delicate shoulders. Mann's and Annie Prioux's bones are delicate too.

[longish]

For me it was a conservative and flat year in San Francisco, temperamentally on my part perhaps as much as what I saw--with the San Francisco Ballet at Civic Center and Miami at Zellerbach.

My thoughts were rebellious on the night I saw the Miami. I liked Sinatra Songs but focused on how much Guerra looked looked so young and like the subject of a Julio Galan painting. And Deanna Seay with her long waist looked like a figure from a Paula Rega painting (in turn out of Balthus). She always possesses the stage in a quiet and intense way; I never can look away from her. “In the Upper Room” was cruel and relentless, and “Agon” didn’t quite gel for me though Jeremy Cox and later a dancer who looked like Richard Widmark were very magnetic; you couldn’t quite figure Jeremy Cox’s game. “Agon” needs to look like a jumble of Fernand Leger elements, all cylinders and cones, with everything depending on the upper thigh, as if everything were being done from just there. So "Agon" didn't happen as sharply as it could have been, the dancers didn’t make all of it they could have or have done so on other nights, but it was very good.

Sarah Van Patten’s retelling of “Diamonds” was a highlight of the SF Ballet season but the setting by the rest of the company was a bit bland. It made an odd and samey pairing with the difficult Divertimento #15 as the only Balanchines of the season. (I always want the mid section of Divertimento to look more vulgar and burlesquey, as if Rodin’s Iris figures were being carried forward by stiff archaic Greek figures; the old PBS tape was more like that.)

Joan Boada’s sense of timing is always miraculous even when the sleeve of his jacket doesn’t come off as it almost didn’t in Nutcracker.

The New Works seemed somewhat conservative to me, as if they were trying to reaffirm and consolidate the thin post-modernist and neo modernism gains of the last 25 years. “Hedda Gabler” was a something of a hit despite its overcooked Masterpiece Theater existentialism, with a touch of Liebeslieder, simply because you could to see a couple at a time on stage. Other pieces, such as Margaret Jenkins potentially modest work, were smoothered in production value. I liked the Paul Taylor work because it was a simple conceit, full of Petrushka dolls from the sixties, each with her or his own pecularly rubbery movement.

The Wheeldon piece was snippy and vinegary, with lots of quick movements in twos and twos and twos against fours The men carried the women, frozen in X shapes, offstage overhead, like lawn furniture or barcelona chairs. There were cut and paste flashbacks to “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” which I found witty and slightly disconcerting. At one moment the woman was fluttering back on pointe as she would in “Sonnabula” while the man was on all fours doing a round of Bart Cook Violin Concerto barrel rolls. It ended against a 4 Ts tomato red backgound.

* * *

There was a heavy sense of loss of several very important dancers this year--a question to this effect was put to Helgi Tomasson at a Q & A session--that the company hasn’t really adjusted to. Without them, there seems to be a shift to a more willowy and supple company style, brilliantly acrobatic and well finished, hands held perfectly when leaving the stage; but less astringent, articulate and cubistic and interpretatively less chance-taking than it seemed before.

As a regular attender at the last years of City Center and at the State Theater up to the mid-80s, the changing nature of the audience was one of the things that struck me most.

It's interesting about the changes of audiences, and of ballet styles, and golden eras. Here are some things I've penciled little check marks by in my recent readings which (hopefully) tie into what has been said above.

Kocho, "The last season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, in 1929, attracted a new audience--unfashionable but young and enthusiastic. During previous seasons, everyone in the boxes and orchestra knew each other, and people chatted among themselves as if they were in a private drawing room. This year the theater was invaded by a nameless crowd for whom the dance seemed to be a discovery, and they applauded the dancers warmly..."

Croce, "I didn't miss the following season [after 1956] which was the season of Agon and the revival of Apollo, the great life-changing season. But the New York Ballet was known to people in general as a place to go. My friends went there...The New York City Ballet was part of the intellectual life of the city, and if you were serious intellectually, you went...I went [to ABT] because I was interested in ballet. It was not au courant, they hadn't done anything interesting in years. It had all happened. You wanted to go back and maybe catch up on things that had already happened..." [in "Reinventing Dance in the 1960's," interview with Banes & Acocella]

Elliott Carter, " I saw all the 1933 Balanchine ballets that were done at the Theater des Champs-Elysees when I was a student in Paris. It was the most remarkable occasion: in my opinion, I never saw anything as interesting as that again from Balanchine. It seemed to me to be one of his highest moments...As time went on he began to lose some of that very novel character that was striking at the beginning of his career. It occasionally showed up again, as in the case of the Webern ballet, Episodes, and in some of the Stravinsky ballets, but mostly his whole point of view began to change."

Croce, "People don't register what was going on at the New York City Ballet in the sixties, that there was a crisis that had reared up between Balanchine and his dancers over what was to be the style of the company. I think what took place in those years is still being felt today in the way the company dances..."

Danilova, "Today Apollo is a different ballet. What I danced was lighter, smaller, quicker. I did fifth, arabesque, fifth arabesque, nobody does that anymore. And then I did sissonnes--my version was jumpier than the one they dance today...The adagio I did was the same as every Terpsichore's, but lately I notice the dancers tend to emphasize the angular aspects and accelerate everything in between...I tried to do one movement like the next, always light, always in harmony, so that the positions didn't jump out at the audience."

I just took another peek at it online--I read the whole thing 10 years ago. Though it's about Villella and his craft and his narrative about his struggles with his craft, the book also provides incidental documentary glimpses at the interpersonal relationships backstage. You get to understand a little more about the dynamics about who was cast in what. There are very interesting, not-your-standard portraits of Violet Verdy, Jacques D'Amboise, and Melissa Hayden--and Stanley Williams. There is a sort of dated look at a party Villella is tricked to going to, Otto Preminger/Advise & Consentish, but everything else is fine.

I've never understood Jed Perl's project or taste. At one time he didn't like Jasper Johns, but now he says the Rauschenberg is less important than Johns. He doesn't like Pollock and Kline, but champions far less interesting artists like Jean Helion and Kitaj. He seems to want set up a topsy turvy, artistically old-fashioned, Huntington Hartfordy version of the Museum of Modern art, without walls. John Updike, of all people, takes Perl to task for his conservative taste and fuzzy critical vocabulary: "The words 'existential' and 'empirical' remain hazy, as much as Perl loves and uses them. And I can't find 'existentialize"' in my dictionary."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/books/re...perl&st=nyt

And Kimmelman's obituary does, as dirac says, seem a bit bland and cozy. He characterizes the great period of the 1950's, when Rauschenberg's best work was done, thusly "[he began] by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan..." Hardly. It was a brave and passionate and nutty period in which Rauschenberg erased a deKooning painting and signed the erasure as his own, and did these annoyingly interesting all black paintings on a support of woven of newspaper.

Way before he met Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg brought Cy Twombly to Black Mountain College where they studied with watchful Charles Olson and sweet but cranky Joseph Albers. Albers had been at the Bauhaus with Rauschenberg's seemingly greatest influence, Kurt Schwitters.

Here is a bit of a 1953 review by "N.N." of a show in Italy from "Writings on Twombly" as a example of a rare positive review.

"The two artists demonstrate a quality of outrage. To leave behind such a clamorously dynamic and standardized world as North America so as to engage with cutting-edge European sensibility by making signs and magical objects that echo mysterious and disconcerting ancestral cultures, as Rauschenberg evokes and expresses them through his haunted gaze, and through Moroccan tapestries aimed, according to Twombly, at soliciting an esthetic response of a penetrating and subtle kind, is evidence of an imaginative sensibility verging on distressed oddity."

Another, but on Twombly alone, by Copeland C. Burg in 1951 goes: "The most curious and worst exhibition of paintings I ever saw in Chicago is hanging in the handsome new Seven Stairs Gallery at 670 N. Michigan av...The paintings are revolting--nothing else describes them. They are strong in the sense that they repel, as a rattlesnake in the hot sand. It is truly shocking to confront them...." Perhaps this takes us full circle.