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kfw

Senior Member
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Posts posted by kfw

  1. 11 hours ago, Drew said:

    Martins won and has more than proved his value as a steward of the company's legacy

    It seems to me that even if Balanchine's ballets had always been well danced since his death, no AD concerned about the company's legacy would have ever barred the door to Farrell and other of Balanchine's own principals and all they have to offer, and how much better the ballets might have looked with their help. For that alone, in my opinion, Martins has been a poor steward. 

    dirac wrote:

    Quote

    Farrell may be a splendid coach now but again, in fairness to Martins such was not always the case, apparently.  Her company had its ups and downs, and not only because of the limited resources available to her.

    Having seen every program in the company's history, I'd say far more ups than downs, and downs only because of those limitations. But can you refresh my memory? On whose word had she not always been up to par when Martins let her go? I find that very hard to believe. 

  2. 1 hour ago, sandik said:

    If it's a new director, I want it to be someone who has the potential for a long enough tenure to insure the health of the organization.  I don't think we'd get that with someone from Martins' generation.

    How I wish I disagreed with your second sentence. But whoever takes over, whether it's soon in response to these accusations or some years (please not too many!) down the road, I hope he or she scours the hills for every one of Balanchine's own dancers still living and willing and able to help and finds them someone and something to coach. I'm dreaming I know, and even if that were practical it probably wouldn't be ideal. But all those stagers for the Trust - I wish they'd all be invited to work in New York. Farrell most of all.

     

  3. 2 hours ago, Helene said:

    It's a privilege to be let inside such a raw experience.

    I agree, but I'd expected a different ending, one in which during his enforced time off he'd gained some perspective on his drive for excellence and come to distinguish between David Hallberg the person and David Hallberg the dancer, realizing the second was not absolutely necessary for the first. I fear for him a little if he experiences significant injury again. 

  4. 20 minutes ago, sandik said:

    Dancers are touchy people, and by this I don't mean that they offend easily.  They are accustomed to touching and being touched.  By the time you're a professional, you've come of age in an environment where much of the information you get comes through physical contact.  Behavior that would get you fired in a heartbeat somewhere in the rest of the world is a standard practice in the dance community.  That's what is making this issue so difficult to parse -- "good touch" and "bad touch" cover different territory here. 

    I once saw Peter Martins rehearse Nilas and Kistler in Apollo. At one point in the pas de deux, Peter took Nilas' hands and put them lower on his (Peter's) wife abdomen. It was all in the job. 

     

  5. 33 minutes ago, Helene said:

     A "reporting relationship" is one in which a person "reports to" a boss, and in business, means almost always also means reports to the boss' boss all the way up the line.

    Is that a standard business term? If not it's just bad writing. A subordinate by definition reports to the supervisor, so the company could have omitted the phrase. 

  6. I'd love to see this too, and I've been eagerly awaiting more reviews. I'm surprised the NYT hasn't run one yet (and I'm surprised they didn't review opening night of NYCB's Nutcracker). 

    In regards to the LA Times review, this 

    Quote

    Time, if only we will listen, is on its side.

    seems a little ironic in light of this. 

    Quote

    The audience needs to put it all together, and there is a much to put together, with nearly three hours of music. I attended the premiere Tuesday night and returned for the second performance Friday. That was not enough.

    Would that we could all go back again and again with press tickets.

  7. I'd heard he was in hospice so I'm not surprised, but I'm sad nonetheless. I didn't even know who he was when I first heard him speak, at a seminar when the Cunningham company was at the American Dance Festival in '95 (?). Since then I've loved his Cunningham history both in print and digitally. I had the pleasure of speaking to him briefly a few times - once at my request he named the dances we'd just seen excerpted at an Event - and I envy those who knew him. 

  8. 5 minutes ago, canbelto said:

     

    I also think that any biography of Balanchine, no matter how complete, will always pale to any serious analysis of his work. I think in this case the man's work was more important than the man's personal life. 

     

    Certainly the work was more important if we're talking about ballet, but I don't think the two are in competition. While I wonder how there is to left to discover about the man at this late date (especially now that Elizabeth Kendall has discovered so much about his life in Russia) with so many of his friends and associates gone, there are times when I want the work analyzed, and times I want the life examined, and of course each illuminates the other. 

     

    Jack wrote:

    Quote

    Many of his recorded remarks were "in the moment", so that we would benefit from knowing their context, which I can't provide this time, having forgotten, but this one seems to be general in its very expression.  And consistent in its mysterious content with his commonly "evasive" reply, when asked what something in one of his ballets means, "What did you see?" or words to that effect.  I put evasive in quotes because I think Mr. B. was not being evasive at all, but coaxing his questioners to find their own way to their own answer. 

     

    I don't remember reading those replies, so thanks. They're also consistent with what a lot of other creative people say when asked about their work, refusing to shrink it down to a definition, insisting its meaning is up to each viewer/reader/listener. That said, I do like to understand as much as possible what it means or might mean to the artist - so bring on the bio!

  9. Was anyone at the rehearsal this afternoon? I haven't followed the company for years and didn't hear the dancers announced during the commentary before I turned it off. The closest I can come to matching faces onstage to official portraits is Makhalina for Nikiya, but she looks 10 years older in the portrait than whoever was onstage!

  10. 1 hour ago, canbelto said:

    This is neither here nor there but ironically ex-addicts often feed into this misconception because so much of therapy is often based on religion. As much as I admire Darryl Strawberry I cringe when he makes it seem like all he needed was a call from the man upstairs to get his act together,

     

    I don't follow baseball and maybe Strawberry leaves a mistaken impression, but the 12-step programs which have helped untold number of addicts have, as most participants have "understood" them, a religious or, if you prefer, spiritual aspect. It's also interesting that while susceptibility to addiction is not a moral fault, and there but for the grace of God or whatever go those of us who don't struggle with it, recovery through these programs does have a strong moral component. 

     

    Here's wishing all the best to Talicia and her family, and that they'll emerge from this stronger and closer.

  11. True West was the first Shepard I ever encountered - the original, Steppenwolf Theater production with Malkovich and Sinise, but on a little black and white TV. It's on YouTube now and it's still my favorite, but Fool for Love and Paris, Texas aren't far behind. Shepard lived (and drank) around here for quite awhile and I saw him a couple of times, but I've never been one to approach celebrities and he didn't exactly exude approachability, LOL.

     

    RIP. I hope he's found it.  

     

  12. 38 minutes ago, FauxPas said:

    She was Terpsichore in "Apollo" and I believe also danced the Second Movement in "Symphony in C". 

     

    Checking my programs, I see she was in Serenade on the first night of the Balanchine program, and danced Terpsichore and the second movement of Symphony in C the next night. 

  13. 45 minutes ago, Helene said:

    :"Fake news" is neither biased coverage or incorrect news prematurely or erroneously released by legitimate news organizations who have established processes, like fact checking, copy editing, etc.  It is specifically what Jayne described, which is click-bait designed entirely to generate revenue.  It was created and proliferated in Eastern Europe, and while there are copycats everywhere, it does not apply to the mainstream media's arts coverage. It does not apply to mainstream media that you don't agree with, at least here.

     

    Right, and that shouldn't need explaining. Further, "fake news" has become a propaganda term, which is to say one which obscures the truth. Calling something fake suggests it was made to look like the real thing. It’s to imply not just that something is false, but that there was intention to falsify. Everyone makes mistakes, critics included. Making a mistake and falsifying are two very different things.

  14. 7 hours ago, sandik said:

    The fact that we keep hashing this out, over and over again, says a great deal about the presence of bias in the culture, here and at large.

     

    As a point of logic, what it shows is that people disagree about that bias, and whether there was or might have been bias in this case in particular - not who is correct about it. 

  15. 3 hours ago, vipa said:

    I agree Abatt, and that clearly is her perspective. If there were more black dancers and one of them was chosen over her, she would have to think differently. 

     

    There weren't even other black dancers eligible for those roles. Every single dancer she was competing against was non-black, isn't that right? She was outnumbered, but she still sees the outcome as racial. Pity the other dancers who didn't get the role Copeland wanted either, who lacked her convenient scapegoat. 

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