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Bart, the first names that come to mind are a real life couple who retired not too many years ago from your current home company, MCB: Franklin Gamero and Illiana Lopez! I'm sure you know how wide their range was; I only remember them in Diamonds and Stars and Stripes.

At any rate, there's not much we can do but keep our eyes and ears open for further showings, right?

Oh, and pray!

Heck, I think this calls for a prayer chain. Seriously, given Farrell's association with the Kennedy Center, we can hope this will be shown there again, and on a weekend for Pete's sake. The Center never puts on seminars and conferences, do they? Hint hint, marketing people, Millennium Stage people.

Many thanks for your faithful reports, Jack.

25, 30 years ago, NYCB at Saratoga was a hot ticket. New Yorkers, I'm told, would go there for their summer vacation, and it was cool for the town to have the company because it had such buzz. (And because they wanted to see great dance, of course!) But it's a different time, and perhaps that audience has moved on, and the new audience wants to have fun.

That's sad. Stars and Stripes is fun but Agon is something else altogether, and combined they're as exhilarating as any musical. (I know I'm preaching to the converted here). The NYC audience, at least in substantial, season supporting numbers, never moved on, but concentrated, and in so doing reaped the dividends -- I guess we're once again down to the dearth of great living choreographers choreographing and overseeing their old choreography so that season after season it has the force of something new and living.

Pardon the interpolation from another thread:

I will say that the Fokine program did do well here, a few seasons ago.[ . .] most of the comments I heard as I prowled the lobby at intermissions were quite favorable.

Prowling, eh? And you look so innocent!

The touring calendar also shows for Berkeley 4 performances of the new Millepied piece, 4 performances of the new Elo piece, 4 Baker's Dozen, 4 Sinatra Suites, 2 Ballo de Regina, 2 Fancy Frees and some un-named PdD.

Well, Berkeley wouldn't be Berkeley if they didn't support an adventurous program like that, no? But ideally America's Home Company would dare/ would have the financial wherewithal to present at least a couple of these pieces in America's capital as well.

Is there a book that actually puts Sand in a normal and not a "femme fatale" perspective?

Ates Orga's "Chopin: his life and times" treats her sympathetically, and then there is her own "Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand."

When it comes to fiction I like to concentrate on the classics, so at the moment I'm rereading "Moby Dick," and reading "To the Lighthouse" aloud with my wife, which we'll discuss in a book group. For non-fiction I just reread Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America," and am now beginning British philosopher Roger Scruton's "The Meaning of Conservatism." Very slowly and sporadically I've been working my way though "Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland," by Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favorite poets. In the same fashion I've been rereading and rereading Alan Jacobs' "What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry." And for a few minutes before bedtime at night I usually dip into Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations."

Earlier this summer I loved Martin Duberman's "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" and Carolyn Brown's memoir, "Chance and Circumstance." Oh, and I just devoured "Straight Life," the remarkably frank autobiography of the great bebop saxophonist Art Pepper.

I thought the film a little shapeless and drawn out. And the splicing back and forth on some of the dance clips was horrid.

But I thought the footage filmed by Teja(sp?) was mesmerizing, truly a treasure .

I thought the whole thing was visually mesmerizing: not just the dance footage, but the Russian countryside, the Russian architecture inside and out, the graveside drills, the interiors of the homes of Nureyev's old friends, plus the closeups of their faces and his, so full of character and feeling . . . what a feast!

e'smom, thank you for letting us know. By and large other reviews were pretty brutal too. You can find the reactions of many Ballet Talkers in this now closed thread, and there is another review in danceviewtimes. We've also had a number of discussions about what is good dance criticism and what is fair. You might enjoy reading Who's Your Favorite Dance Critic? or Alastair MacCauley @ NY Times.

National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" with Terri Gross will air a short "remembrance" of Paley today. It's available online now. There are links to other interviews there too, as well as readings by the author.

Yes, the H.T. Lowe-Porter translations are shockingly bad--dispells any illusions about the past being the "good old days" of literature!

Rereading Mann in an improved translation is a great idea, but first I have to finish Moby Dick again. Just last week I reread King Lear alongside two alternating productions on video. Two favorite novelists from way back are Saul Bellow and Walker Percy, both known for lovably half-cocked, existentially searching protagonists. I went back to Bellow's "Herzog" last year and found the character tiresome, but I can reread Percy year after year. The opening half-dozen pages of "Love in the Ruins" always make me laugh out loud.

Checking my copies of Mann's books to confirm that they are H.T. Lowe-Porter translations, I found a ticket stub for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood -- a honeymoon souvenir!

I had no complaints about the costumes for the final section, every dancer in a unique, white outfit -- once I got beyond my memory (prompted by the men's shirts) of the Seinfeld "Puffy Shirt" episode.

I like them as well, and I like the fact that they allude back to the costumes for "Eleven" -- the bare midriffs, the dresses instead of negligees over underwear again, and the black succeeded by, transformed into, as it were, white. This makes me not mind Eleven's outfits quite as much.

I began to feel frustrated, though, by the absence of relationships in these works. The same has been said of Balanchine, I know, but even in Balanchine's most depersonalized ballets, there is always a suggestion of who these dancers are to each other. The most I get from Morris is a general sense of congeniality.

Are there any Balanchine ballets where male and female members of the corps don't partner with each other? The pretty strict "gender" neutrality is interesting, but over the course of the dance it constricts for me the emotional impact of the work. Human beings simply don't relate to each other that way all the time.

frill58, you can find a substantial excerpt of Tarantella as danced by Villella and McBride on "Man Who Dances," the 1968 TV show about Villella. It's available on VHS, but the last I looked it was a very expensive purchase for individuals as opposed to institutions.

BTW I hated the way they filmed it for PBS--all those cutaways to the musicians, as if the movements of their playing were as important to see as the movements/formations of the dancers!

Ray, I can identify with your frustration, as a dance lover. But I can also imagine the producers thinking of this as a joint music/dance production, and realizing that a certain percentage of the audience might be there for Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki. After all, it's "Mozart Dances" (ambiguosly phrased) rather than "Dancing to Mozart."

I can see your point, but if that was their concern, I wish they would have billed the program so as to clarify what it was -- or else billed it as "Mark Morris' "Mozart Dances, interrupted by shots of Emmanuel Ax." He's fun to watch, and I especially enjoyed the sonata footage, but Morris put him in the pit, where ticketholders in many of the best seats can't see him even if they want to, and I wish Live from Lincoln Center would have given us the work he conceived and not tried to make it all things to all people.

I'd seen little of Morris' work before last night and I'm still sorting out my feelings about this piece, but I was moved in many places, by the camaraderie in "Double," for example, and by the dignified opening of the adagio for "Eleven," where the dancers stride on stage one by one and stop at various places, all facing the same direction.

It took me awhile to get past the black and filmy outfits in "Eleven," which struck me as some sort of dreary bedroom-wear. The color black itself seemed at first a strange choice for Mozart, but it grew on me: he himself supplies enough color, so to speak, so that Lauren Grant's simple black dress seemed fitting. And I much prefer it to the sort of pastel prettiness I can imagine from a ballet company.

SanderO, if you haven't already read it, you might find the previous Ballet Alert thread about "Mozart Dances" helpful.

Thanks for posting, Old-Fashioned. He was my favorite jazz drummer, and seemed to be a real gentleman too. For the last few years as he's been out off the scene I've often wondered how he was doing.

One springs right to mind: Violette Verdy. I wasn't even interviewing her, merely attending a coaching session and I had page after page of quotable material.

Robert Garis, in his memoir "Following Balanchine," describes her as "brilliantly intelligent, articulate, and self-aware as an artist and as a woman, and as charming, chic, open, and warm as her stage persona."

. . . the Lopez/Gomero partnership and just what made them so moving . . .

I find it poignant when art imitates life inasmuch as ballet partnerships are formed of real life partners: McBride-Bonnefous, Lopez-Gomero, Cojocaru-Kobborg . . . my most moving memories of this sort are of Jenifer Ringer and James Fayette in the second movement of Brahms-Schoenberg.

As for knowing and understanding the past. It is inexcusable NOT to know our heritage.

Hi ngitanjali. I think it's tragic not to know one's heritage: "the unexamined" [among other things, uncontextualized] "life is not worth living." But each generation learns from its elders, and if your generation doesn't know and understand, and doesn't want to know and understand, it's primarily our fault.

Recently I conversed with a college educated acquaintance regarding the cultural opportunities in Vienna. He thought Vienna was located in the Netherlands! Two of his teenage children (including his daughter who is preparing to attend college this term) also believed Vienna was located in the Netherlands. I very politely informed them that Vienna is located in Austria.

Is geography outdated in our education system? What ever happened to identifying international cities on the globe in grade school?

And more than that, how small their conception must be of each place's history, culture, cuisine, terrain, etc. Then again, they may have forgotten more than I'll ever know about rain forests.

but at the same time, form, line and shape in choreography are meaning.

Thanks for stating so succinctly something I'm sure we all agree on. Meaning and "the perfect line" change over time in an organic process, I suppose. Balanchine absorbing America meant something else in Agon than he had in Symphonie Concertante. A young person new to ballet at the Vail Festival would find a somewhat dissimilar meaning in Wheeldon's Polyphonia (itself influenced by "Agon," of course) than an experienced viewer, and if Wheeldon succeeds in his vision, he may change the ideal of perfect line as he pours his own experience into it.

Ideals of beauty do shift to some degree over time and according to place, but every culture and sub-culture has ideals, so I don't fault the critic for referencing a current one. To my mind, that's his job: ballet is in large part about achieving ideal beauty. And speaking of a particular ideal, I'm excited about Christopher Wheeldon's new company, but I don't like the ideal image offered on his website. Maybe it should be, Morphoses: The Shape-Shifting Company.

I bristle when critics use terms like "perfect" and "pure" or "purity," especially in an excluding way, as the above example seems to. How small is too small? What's the correct proportion, exactly, of one body part to another? Sometimes it's such a vague "I-know-it-when-I-see-it" definition--which is strange for something that seems to have such a precise geometrical basis!--other times these descriptions are so arbitrarily exact it sounds no more enlightened than dog breeders talking about the "proper" height of the haunches.

Interesting thoughts, thanks. What you call excluding, I call setting standards, i.e. recognizing ideals, which as Bart points out, has long been done. In this case, if I read scherzo correctly, while noting that Cuthbertson lacked the physical proportions necessary for perfection, the critic otherwise praised her performance, not excluding, but ranking.

Les Noces.

I'm not wild about that one, but the Robbins ballet based on folk traditions that really bored me the one time I saw it is "Dybbuk." Perhaps it would grow on me with further viewings.

Some people find Balanchine's "Don Quixote" dull, at least in parts, but I find it moving. The Don Q that bores me is the traditional version based on Petipa. I'm not a folk-dancing fan.

Glad I'm not the only one who hates Balanchine's bed!

Alright, folks, what's wrong with the bed? Not posturepedic?