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Thanks, atm711. What an inapt comparison by way of making an interesting point. Is she saying that male choreography for women is essentially about sexual desire, as pornography is? I'm not sure that needs rebuttal. And would that apply to choreography by gay men? That makes no sense period. The article is here, and she makes an assertion I haven't seen before:

Has anyone seen Salvatore Aiello's version of the ballet, which he made for North Carolina Dance Theater? Richmond Ballet will dance it in November (on a program with Serenade and Fancy Free - now there's a wild combination).

Sorry to misunderstand you.

We don’t judge baseball players by the standards of ballet dancers, or ballet dancers by the standards of baseball players. Three out of ten hits is a great average (I guess). But some dancers deliver great performances most of the time, and are capable of great performances in everything they dance. Those are the ones we refer to as ballerinas and judge the others by. What they do or don’t excel in doesn’t bear on what the standard is, which is why I wrote “Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of his judgments of the dancers he mentions”

I think Macaulay is clear when he writes of certain dancers that they are "extraordinary artists in only parts of their repertory" (emphasis mine). The operative word in this regard is "their." He's not saying that to be a ballerina a dancer must excel across the ballet repertory. He's saying that they must excel in their own repertory. Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of his judgments of the dancers he mentions, I think his standard is fair and sensible: an excellent dancer is excellent in every ballet he or she dances. Amen to that!

By comparison, to my mind, the simpler, less formal "ballerina" kinda has an "all-American" ring to it!

. It already has its own specific meaning and history though, and I'd be sorry to see that meaning muddled.Someone else can probably give examples, but balletomanes have often used "ballerina" as Macaulay uses it, as indicating the highest level of artistic achievement.

I intrepreted this to mean a principal who doesn't dance all that often. I don't know Macauley's intent, but that was how I read it. Macaulay's meaning is clear from his full sentence:

Two fortunate occurrences on one day!

Helene's "Big Anniversary Seasons" post in Ballet News & Issues reminded me that this is the 80th anniversary of the day that Lincoln Kirstein met Balanchine.

Thanks, rg!

Repertory in Review seems to indicate that the change occurred then. In regards to the changes when the company moved to the larger stage, Reynolds mentions But "Mary"? The "Little Princess" as a title, not an Act Two designation?

She was still Clara in the 1958 Playhouse 90 broadcast of NYCB's Nutcracker.

Yes, Farrell has had her ups and downs as a stager. There was that near-legendary week in D.C. that left people with their tongues hanging out and for awhile she could do no wrong. If you're referring to her first week there, in '99, when she presented the two bills of Suzanne Farrell Stages the Masters of 20th century Ballet, that's the week when she had Jaffe and Alexopoulos and Calegari and others of that caliber for principals to work with. I don't know how long she'd had to rehearse them, but for what it's worth she didn't even call that company Suzanne Farrell Ballet.

I think a lot of ballet criticism could be disparaged that way. I say could be, not that it should be. What, for example - to pick a passage from the same review that bart noted and that I like as well - does it really mean to say that a dancer has the power to "own their own space and light up the space beyond themselves." And can we prove that one dancer has that power and not another? Not every metaphor will work for every reader, but that one works for me. And for me " "she matches music with movement, she shows how the immense scale of ballet can turn musicality into a vastly three-dimensional form" is a nice way of saying, to reference Balanchine, that we see the music when she dances. Of course you're correct that a good dance critic ought to be able to do all those things you say, but Macaulay's writings does them for me in part through his quibbles and complaints, even when they're unkindly phrased (I'm not defending his unkindness). We can learn from critics by considering why we disagree with them.

In her new book Balanchine and the Lost Muse (Lidia Ivanova), Elizabeth Kendall writes of Olga Preobrazhenskaya that I love that last mental image. I also love the fact that a dancer would have the courage and imagination to personalize a key scene like that.

If I'm not mistaken, the 2010 Kennedy Center performances were the first time that ballet had been danced in 17 years, since Whelan and Martins led it at NYCB's 1993 Balanchine Celebration. So many if not most audience members hadn't yet seen it once. I was grateful to see it again, and to have seen her revivals of Clarinade and Pithoprakta and Concierto de Mozart and Ragtime and Variations for Orchestra and Balanchine's Don Quixote and other works. For her first two programs of Balanchine at the Kennedy Center, Farrell brought in Susan Jaffe, Helene Alexopoulos, Maria Calegari, Nina Ananiasvili, and one or two European dancers whose names I've forgotten. Later on, Peter Boal was a guest for several seasons. Ben Huys did a season or two. I'd rather see dancers on that level dance the great ballets (as they did), with the benefit of her coaching, than see them dance forgotten works. But with a few exceptions her principals in recent years haven't been on that level, and so it's been a great pleasure to see, mixed in with the masterpieces, lesser works that give them context. I think it's worthwhile too to give later generations a chance to consider and rate works that previous ones didn't value highly.

That could be, but how many uncultured (that should be "unhighcultured") people read dance blogs? Harss is great, but she's not exactly a household name.

No, it's not, and of course a good critic has to have very high standards and feel free to be critical when he feels they aren't being met. Theoretically,dancers who read reviews can even benefit from criticism, even if it's just to dismiss it and feel more free to be who they already are on stage. But there are perhaps more tactful ways to say that a dancer is less accomplished in some ballets than in others than to call her a "part-time ballerina."

Thanks, pherank. I hadn't read that in a long time. It's one of the essays collected in By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader. The book is available from Amazon, and as most Ballet Alerter's know, when books are ordered from the Amazon window at the bottom of the page, a small donation is made to this site.

They should move both mother and baby out the front door.

Thanks for posting, fadedhour. I'm going Sunday, and I expect to return at least once. Has anyone here eaten at the Garden Cafe Ballets Russes?

I think critics are too often presumed to be unkind, and in this review I count six compliments and only one criticism of Semionova. Hallberg is complimented as well. Whether Kourlas has good taste or not, as a critic she's paid to be critical as well as to praise. In any case, the Times has fixed the Odette/Odile mix-up now, and posted the following correction:

No it doesn't. But to be fair to Gottlieb, he didn't say it did, or mention her body type at all. He only said that "at the moment, she’s just too heavy," and he said it while paying her a compliment.

According to Thomas Forest Kelly's First Nights: Five Musical Premieres, Nijinksy danced the waltz in Sylphides with Karasavina, and danced with her again in Spectre.