kfw

At the climax of a dark and moving ballet, at a moment of great poetry and mystery, an audience member cracks a joke. When did this become acceptable behavior?

Interesting. I've seen a few of their rehearsals at the Kennedy Center, dating back to a Giselle with Amanda McKerrow, and I don't remember multiple casts.

Yes, that's all I meant. Teuscher (I'm pretty sure) in the prologue, then Boylston with a bearded prince I didn't recognize, then Copeland and Cornejo in the pas, then Teuscher and Gomes after intermission.

Well this afternoon's rehearsal was a little odd, but I'll say this: that Isabella Copeland-Teuscher sure can dance!

dirac's memory is correct. In Arlene Croce's Gorey interview entitled The City Ballet Fan Extraordinaire, published in the NY Times in 1973, Croce quotes him as saying that He goes on to mention "the single greatest performance I ever saw:" Adam rehearsing Swan Lake: Writing that after seeing almost every performance for 17 seasons, he can visualize the entire repertory, Croce quotes him as saying Also, in a 1984 Boston Globe piece entitled The Perfect Penman, Richard Dyer mentions Gorey Both articles are found in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey.

Joan Accocella has an article about this book in The New Yorker online entitled simply Balanchine Teaching.

Yes, that's better put.

Would have been funny, yes, but it's one in a list of writers whose stock has not fallen, and whose work he says he himself been reading and absorbing.

Coming from a critic today it might have been. Not coming from a reader of a certain age. LOL. A coupla weeks, I guess. Drew, I agree.

Thanks, choriamb. Peck was the dancer I pictured in the Makarova role.

i doubt the Committee would be put off of rock stars because one of the most famously private and mysterious didn't show up. In any case, his gracious, if not exactly intellectually ambitious, acceptance speech is here.

I'm not sure that's true, pherank. He seemed pretty thrilled to win a Grammy for Time Out of Mind, and he gave a long speech last year when he won the Musicares award. But who knows. Anyhow, the Wall Street Journal quoted a "distant cousin" of his last week who Ill-manned and rude indeed, I'm sorry to say. I can understand him feeling uncomfortable and award as big as the Nobel, but there were other ways of handling his discomfort. Bravo to Patti Smith.

Hah, that's great! And you must still have your program too. I saw the two following performances as well that year, and was knocked out by just about everything (it was my first time seeing NYCB or any Balanchine). Most vividly, I remember Baryshinikov in The Prodigal Son.

I agree. It fits the ballet and the season, and for me it's part of the experience. Mothers on cell phones, not so much.

Thanks, Drew and rg. Speaking of Other Dances, it was the first thing I saw Baryshnikov dance, with Patricia McBride in Chicago in '79. I see it's still listed on NYCB's site, but does anyone remember the last time they actually danced it? I wonder why they don't do it more often.

In the print version the article is titled "A Ballet Reborn in 'Gounod Symphony'," but the photo is of Danses Concertantes. The principal dancers are identified as Magnicaballi and Cook, but in fact, as I peer through my magnifying glass, they appear to be Tellman-Henning and Henning, who were of course first cast, and were probably the ones photographed. Go figure. And the only dancer mentioned in the article is Magnicaballi. Cook and several others, in my opinion, deserved to be named.

Good points, pherank.

Thanks for the link, pherank. I'd never heard that version. Patti Smith has famously sung the song with the man himself. As happy as I am that Dylan won, I’ve always been torn about whether his work should be called poetry. It’s true most of his lyrics aren’t great without music, but on the other hand, he does supply that music. Taken alone, his lyrics aren’t great literature. Taken as they’re meant to be, however, they do have the force of great literature. In the Washington Post, nine poets - Edward Hirsch, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Juan Felipe Herrera, August Kleinzahler, Nick Flynn, Mary Karr, Terrance Hayes, and Yusef Komunyakaa – all explicitly or implicitly defend this year’s choice. Of course that isn’t to say there aren’t many poets who would not.

As someone who's heard him perform many times for nearing 40 years now, I disagree that he sees music as an afterthought. I see his constantly changing and mutating arrangements as of a piece with the restless creativity that's made him write songs in so many musical styles over the years. Certainly the crack musicians he hires to tour with him wouldn't stick around if what they had to play was inconsequential. Casual fans of course like to hear the hits in somewhat recognizable fashion. For obsessive, er, dedicated fans like myself, the height of excitement is, for example, hearing him change the rhythm of an arrangement mid-song, as he did with Mr. Tambourine Man in Maryland in 2000. But you’re right that he sees himself as a writer first. He once called himself “a poet first and a musician second.” Alex Ross weighs in on the Nobel controversy here: Bob Dylan as Richard Wagner The following excerpt concerns the music as such:

The Nobel for literature is supposed to go to "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." Dylan's work, the Nobel committee says, fits the bill "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." I can't think of another contemporary songwriter who can match him, and match him in quantity of output, in that regard.

I expect that most of what's written and said about this year's award will focus on Dylan's groundbreaking 1960s work, plus his 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks, and understandably so. But if some of it draws attention to latter day and lesser known albums like Infidels, Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind (for which he won a Grammy) and Love and Theft, I'll be pleased.

I will greatly miss this little troupe and its annual performances at the Kennedy Center. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/arts/dance/suzanne-farrell-ballet-plans-to-close-after-2017-18-season.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts

Thanks, KarenAG. I love this anecdote:

That's an interesting reaction. I skipped the production in D.C. because from what I'd read and seen online I felt the same way. The clips that have surfaced since have only confirmed I made the right decision for myself. But if what Ratmansky has more or less tried to do is to bring back original details in the steps and bring back the 1921 Bakst designs, or the spirit of them at least, I wonder why so many of us in the 21st century, especially those of us with an interest in ballet history, dislike the result. I suppose there is more than one answer, a couple of which vaguely suggest themselves to me. And I see from BA archives that the Bakst production failed to sell as well as expected, so perhaps a lot of people didn't like it then.

RIP, Giannina. And thank you to the people who've posted remembrances.