kfw

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That was the point where my daughter leaned over and said with amusement, "Balanchine hates women."

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? 

55 minutes ago, abatt said:

ABT always runs dress rehearsals with mutliple casts appearing in different acts.  They do that in New York all the time.

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. 

3 hours ago, its the mom said:

Was it odd because they were just rehearsing different 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

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currently, Patty McBride is surely the greatest dancer in the world. Of course my favorite dancer of all time is Diana Adams; she was miraculous. She was crystal clear, absolutely without mannerisms, and she had one of the most beautiful bodies I ever saw in a ballet dancer--flawless proportions, those ravishing legs. Technically, well, she could make anything look effortless, like the Siren in Prodigal Son. And the Second Movement in Symphony in C is consecrated to her as far as I'm concerned--the way she could make it one long, seamless legato line.

He goes on to mention "the single greatest performance I ever saw:" Adam rehearsing Swan Lake:

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She had no make-up on and a ratty old whatever dancers rehearse in, and she was chewing gum, and she walked through half of it, but it suddenly had all the qualities . . . She was the kind of person who could extend herself on stage: her dancing made everyone else's look great.

Writing that after seeing almost every performance for 17 seasons, he can visualize the entire repertory, Croce quotes him as saying

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I can see everyone doing everything now. I have now reached the point where I can see Patty McBride doing every ballet, even those she hasn't danced.

Also, in a 1984 Boston Globe piece entitled The Perfect Penman, Richard Dyer mentions Gorey

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praising his favorite ballerinas, who include Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride, Maria Calegari, and especially Diana Adams. to whom he dedicated The Gilded Bat.

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. 

16 minutes ago, dirac said:

 

I'd say one of a list of writers of unarguable quality and canonic status. (Kipling's "stock" has gone up and down and up a bit over time.)

Yes, that's better put.

33 minutes ago, dirac said:

 

A lot of readers of a certain age raised eyebrows at that prize, I understand. I may have been giving him too much credit, but I don't think so. If it was a bit of a needle, it was rather funny.

 

 

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. 

8 hours ago, dirac said:

"Pearl Buck." Now that's just mean, Bob.

Coming from a critic today it might have been. Not coming from a reader of a certain age. 

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I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. 

LOL. A coupla weeks, I guess.

Drew, I agree. 

7 hours ago, choriamb said:

 

NYCB performed it a few times in 2013-14:  Bouder/De Luz and Peck/Garcia were the pairings.  Bouder/De Luz have taken it on the road to galas a few times since then:  I wish I'd been able to catch them, as I imagine they were marvelous.

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.

18 hours ago, pherank said:

but it's been pretty clear that awards don't mean a great deal to him.

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

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remembered Mr. Dylan behaving similarly during a Thanksgiving dinner he shared with Mr. Dylan's family [in Duluth] in the 1950s. "I don't believe he came out of the basement."  

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.

5 hours ago, California said:

Small world! I was in that audience -- Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, April 19, 1979. The rest of the program: Ballo, Agon, Vienna Waltzes. There was only one other performance of Other Dances during that 2-week engagement, the Sunday (mat), April 22. I also saw them do Coppelia at the Kennedy Center that October, but he was injured a few days later (cancelling Dances at a Gathering) and I think that was the end of his performing career with NYCB. Of course, they might have done OD at a gala or special event later.

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.

On 12/2/2016 at 8:47 PM, canbelto said:

I might be nuts (pun intended) but I like kiddie chatter during the Nutcracker. This year there was a girl behind me who was fixated on the "candy canes." Every time she'd ask her mom when the candy canes came out. Her mom would shush her and she'd ask again. Finally when they came out she shrieked and started counting each jump with the hoop before finishing with one last ecstatic yelp as Devin Alberda finished the double hoop jump.

 

I think that's the charm of the Nutcracker experience is the chattery kids. They're SO EXCITED and its' cute.

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.

14 hours ago, Jack Reed said:

I hope to have some more to say, having now seen the run - of just four performances - but I don't want to delay correcting the mistaken caption under the picture in Sarah Kaufman's review in the Washington Post.  That's not Stars and Stripes; that's a picture of Gounod Symphony, for heaven's sake, and the principal couple aren't Allyne Noelle and Thomas Garrett but Natalia Magnicaballi and Michael Cook!  (Somebody at the Washington Post incorrectly identified the ballets, and consequently the casting too.)  

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.

5 hours ago, diane said:

I think many of us were surprised, but, I think, Dylan has always seen himself more as a poet than a songwriter. The few times I have seen him in concert he has -somewhat reluctantly, it seemed - played some of the old favorites, but only the text remained similar; the music was - or seemed to be - inconsequential and replaceable. For him, the words seem to be the most important. 

 

-d-

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:

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 the musical component of Dylan’s genius has been consistently undervalued: the songs have an unshakable structure, an old-as-the-hills presence. Furthermore, Dylan’s habit of constantly fiddling with his work in performance, however much it may irritate his longtime fans, gives the songs mobility in time: they are saved from becoming fixed objects, cultural bric-a-brac. You could compare Dylan’s fluidity to the often bewildering metamorphoses that stage directors impose on Wagner operas—variations that the composer may not have explicitly desired but that the works themselves seem to demand, not least because of their dreamlike sense of time and space.

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. 

1 hour ago, Drew said:

At last the work will finally get people's attention... Dylan has been ignored for too long outside his own tiny country or, at best, only known to a small coterie of aficionados ...

 

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:

"One year, there were a few nights that were so cold that Mr. Balanchine" — that would be George, founder and director of City Ballet — "purchased blankets for every single person in the company," to keep them warm when they were offstage, McBride recalled in a recent interview. "He had nicknames for each of us, and the wardrobe mistress sewed our names on the blankets."

To respond to Stuben's question about the Act III characters, for me the entire production was so over the top [ . . . ]

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.