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Spotify, which is of course an audio-only service, has recently started doing the same thing, with ads saying things like "People who listen to Wayne Shorter are also listening to Bud Powell," plus big, attractive photos and a Play icon. That works with me. Previously, when you launched the program you'd see ads, but they weren't targeted. As someone who mostly listens to jazz, classical and opera, I found it a little irritating to be shown ads for current pop stars.

Meanwhile, the Cunningham people have found it feasible and worthwhile to put out three separate - and in the first two cases multi-disc - releases since Merce's death. I can't imagine those are big moneymakers, but I'm grateful.

You could be dreaming, but they did do a live Nutcracker broadcast in 2011.

Clearly NYCB thinks it makes more money by forcing people to buy higher priced seats or not buy seats at all than by letting them choose lower-priced seats. I don't like their closing of the upper rings either, but their doing so doesn't mean Brown wouldn't sincerely love to broaden the audience. It just means she's looking at the bottom line.

Thanks for sharing such a warm memory! Yes, thanks. Robert Pinsky said on National Public Radio that while great writers are "often not very nice people," Heaney was a "mensch."

Driving past the Kennedy Center today was a happy reminder of the wedding, Here's wishing them all the best.

I should have known you'd know the answer, but I had fun searching through my old DanceViews.

Yes. She taught it to NYCB's Joaquin De Luz and Ana Sophia Scheller in 2005. Leigh Witchel wrote about it in the Spring 2005 issue of DanceView (which as you know, but some others reading may not is edited by - a plug here - Ballet Alert founder Alexandra Tomalonis).

I was disgusted by the affair as well, but I guess I don't see what good boycotting would do anyone. Not to rant or change the subject, but the film industry isn't exactly filled with moral paragons in the sex and marriage department anyhow. Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993 - I'm glad I didn't miss that one.

I'm grateful to him for his wonderful recording of that translation, because I never much cared for Beowulf before. Does anyone know The Burial at Thebes, his translation of Antigone? I saw it performed in Dublin in 2004. I guess now would be the time for me to finally read it.

They can't just hit a Like button? Oy vey!

Yes, I do that all the time. I just got up from reading a Czeslaw Milosz poem that mentions Daphnis and Chloe to reacquaint myself with that myth via the good old Internet. But that proceeding through at my own pace - stopping to think over a scene, or even watch it again before procceding - is also something I find myself doing when I watch movies online, for example when I watched a handful of Bergman films on Hulu awhile back. Of course good filmmaking rewards this, but it's hardly what directors have in mind.

Just curious: at the public presentation, did Freedman himself say anything about what he's doing next? (I'm not asking for gossip or speculation - just whether he himself said anything to the public audience at this event.) No, not a word.

There have been several free performances on the mezzanine level of the museum In conjunction with the exhibition. That flat space open to any passersby, and in front of large, only partially blocked windows that let the sun shine into the audiences' eyes, is absolutely the most uncongenial space I've ever seen dance in, but the two performances of two ballets by Kirov Academy students (most of them just summer students at that) were a treat well worth a long drive anyhow. Artistic Director Martin Fredman, who told us this was his last day on the job, was a gracious and funny and slightly naughty host. Here is Afternoon of a Faun with, naturally, a slightly toned down ending. And here is the Firebird PDD. For anyone not familiar with these dances, the background noise is not part of the scores!

Fantastic find, pherank. Thank you! How interesting to read that Le Clerq could appear both plain and beautiful. She looks as beautiful in that top photo as in any I've seen.

I think the astringent (great word for it) stuff has more immediate appeal to a lot of young listeners and viewers than "stuffy old" classical music and tutus do. They'd have to work back to those.

Pipe dream: that Suzanne Farrell will bring Rose to D.C. in November when her company presents Episodes again. I've only seen it three times, but it's my favorite over Agon (which they're also dancing again) as well.

Farrell, for example, or Janie Taylor today, to cite just a couple of NYCB women, are often spoken of as having a certain mystery and remove that I think of as akin to many old-school European "ballerinas." But are there old-fashioned "ballerina" equivalents to, say, Patricia McBride and Tiler Peck?

What about the things Mark Morris has done for San Francisco Ballet? I've only seen Sandpiper Ballet, but if it had a narrative, I don't remember it.

And then also Cunningham's Summerspace.

I bought it at the Diaghilev exhibition in D.C. a month ago and am only two thirds of the way through it because, as with most dance books I read, I'm only reading a few pages of the time, the better to savor it. But from what I've read so far, La Rocca's praise and criticism are right on target. Kendall frequently makes way too much of little evidence. She forces theories. On the other hand, her evident love for the material, and her deep research, make the book a joy to read.

That makes sense to me, and there is also Charles M. Joseph's contention, in Stravinsky & Balanchine: A Journey of Invention, that Joseph bases that on Balanchine's telling John Gruen in Dance Magazine that

I’m not arguing that point, just her way of making it. A change would make a positive difference, but it wouldn’t be a change away from an abusive norm and a hostile perspective, because those don’t exist in Petipa, Balanchine, Ashton, et. al., so “like in porn” is a bad simile. Welcome idea, terrible way of stating, it in my opinion, and potentially misleading to anyone who doesn’t know ballet. Also, in regard to Bugaku (which is a very atypical example anyhow), I don’t think an explicit work of art deserves likening in any way to a performance staged for the purpose of arousal and without regard for artistic merit. What I did find intriguing in Rojo's remarks that (quoting the writer, not Rojo directly)

True, but in pornography the perspective is skewed because women are used and abused. Not so in ballet. The male perspective of women in porn is pernicious. Not so in ballet. Granted, as you say, Rojo isn’t really saying that male choreography has an unfortunate view of women, but that makes her choice of comparison a poor one.

Men have dominated many fields and catered their own gender in so doing, but that doesn’t make that domination pornographic. The use or even abuse of power alone isn’t enough to make something pornographic - the erotic element is needed for that. Balanchine, for one, may have created ballets that were to one degree or another erotic, but I’ve never heard anyone say they go see his ballets to be turned on. Those works aren’t primarily erotic; their primary function isn’t to stimulate desire. Balanchine also made Serenade and Symphony in C and on and on, and even Agon and the like were very much to the taste of women, whom I understand are – or at least used to be - generally repelled, not stimulated, by pornography of the kind driven by power trips. Perhaps Rojo was trying to titillate. Anyhow, the metaphor is in my opinion tasteless and greatly overblown.