kfw

I just ran across an advertisement for this very enticing book in The New York Review of Books. It's been published here by University Press of Florida, and is now available on Amazon.

I wonder if shows like "American Idol" and the like are doing anything to make dancing more acceptable for boys. I can't stand shows like that, so I don't really know, but don't they have male dancing contestants sometimes? Not ballet dancers, probably, but perhaps would-be Broadway dancers.

Thank you very much for posting, miliosr. And we're in luck! Here's a link to the article on OpinionJournal.

Browsing the small dance section of my local bookstore looking for something new is usually dull and futile, but this afternoon, as if in a dream, I found a big fat (688 pages) new volume entitled "Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins," by one Amanda Vail. The photographs include 3 sequence shots of Robbins and Janet Reed rehearsing "Fancy Free," poignant shots of Tanaquil LeClerq taken by Robbins after her paralysis, and an earlier, likewise poignant head shot he took where her face is half in shadow. The book is currently on sale for one third off on Amazon.com. Use of the link above helps this site.

The Autumn 2006 DanceView is now in print. This issue includes: Robert Greskovic's reviews of new DVD releases including Paris Opera Ballet's "Jewels/Joyaux," "Jacques D'Amboise: Portrait of a Great American Dancer," and Leonide Massine's Gaite Parisienne: A Film By Victor Jensen." Gay Morris reviewing Mark Morris' "Sylvia" and "Mozart Dances" in NYC this past summer. Sandra Kurtz reviewing Pacific Northwest Ballet's 2005-2006 season. Leigh Witchel interviewing San Francisco Ballet's Yuri Possokhov. Dale Brauner interviewing San Francisco Ballet's Muriel Maffre. Dale Brauner interviewing San Francisco Ballet's Elizabeth Miner . New York, London and San Francisco reports by, respectively, Gay Morris, Jane Simpson, and Rita Felciano. DanceView is the print sister -- the big sister -- of danceviewtimes, both of which are published by "Ballet talk" founder Alexandra Tomalonis. For more information, go here.

Leigh, how much of this do you see this in the way they use the classical vocabulary, and how much do you see in tone? How much do you see this kinship as, for example, a reflection of contemporary sexual relations? I realize one can't entirely separate the two, that the second will be reflected in the first. But what Martins seems to lack (admittedly I've spent more time reading about his ballets than watching them) is the chivalry that so infused Balanchine's work. And for my money, that high view of human and erotic relations is one thing that lifts Balanchine's work over Martins' as I think of it.

That sounds like something from Saturday Night Live (a satiric American television comedy show).

Yes, but First Ring ain't too shabby! I don't know if I've ever learned much from rehearsals, but I enjoy watching the dancers perform in leotards and whatnot, I enjoy watching them polishing particular sections or steps, I enjoy noting how these then look in performance, and I like seeing the camraderie among the dancers.

This was originally released on video.

tempusfugit, that's a strong statement. Are you really saying she changed Balanchine's text? I know that Balanchine often did that himself to suit one dancer or another, and if I'm not mistaken it's not uncommon for dancers to substitute one "trick" for another, but this is something else again.

I'll have to try "Housekeeping" someday. I loved "Gilead" at first, with its ever so wise and humble and affable first person protagonist, but after awhile as he just went on being So wise and So humble and So . . . I put it down for awhile and had to force myself to finish. I admire her creation of the character more than I enjoyed much of the book, and a friend felt the same way. I did enjoy the several essays I've read from her collection, "The Death of Adam." As for my father's novel, it begins on Saturday, April 8, 1775 and ends on Tuesday, June 6, 1775.

Very nicely put, Bart. It seems sometimes there's a fine line between noble and inert -- hah! I only saw Martins as James in La Sylphide, but as I've watched him dance Balanchine on video in recent years, I've been losing interest. As Apollo, D'Amboise is, in contrast, refreshingly dynamic.

I have a wonderful oversized book published in 1975 and edited by Walter Terry and Jack Rennert entitled "100 Years of Dance Posters." The book includes long paragraphs of notes on each poster. Amazon shows copies available.

Writing in the October 2006 edition of The New Criterion, Laura Jacobs is no fan of Mark Morris' "Sylvia," or of "Mark Morris Ballet," that comes with a set of ten do's and don't's, such as speak lovingly of the score but She compares his "Sylvia" to Ashton's:

I've been reading Czeslaw Milosz's little book "The Witness of Poetry," reading poems by Jane Kenyon in "Otherwise," plus dipping into Antonia Fraser's "Marie Antoinette: The Journey" and redipping into Lincoln Kirstein's Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet." My father recently gave me "Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance," but first I have to read the manuscript he's just sent me of his Revolutionary War novel. Oh, and my wife and I are reading aloud G.K. Chesterton's "Everlasting Man." Yikes!

Which of course (and I'm sure I'm not contradicting you) means that it deals with reality at it's deepest.

I think that's a strong argument. But I can also imagine her simply not wanting to be manipulated. So should she not have written about the work at all then? As The New Yorker's dance critic, she was expected to deliver an opinion, and as a lover of dance and the future of dance, she would have wanted to express her opinion of what she felt was Jones' strategy. And express herself she did!

Thanks, Helene. From the company's site, here are the dates of those ballets: The Waltz Project, 1988 Fearful Symmetries, 1988 The Magic Flute, 1982 Valse Triste, 1985 Beethoven Romance, 1989 Barber Violin Concerto, 1988 Ecstatic Orange, 1987

That is a great question. I sure don't remember reading much about other companies staging Martins ballets, or non-Martins Diamond Project works.

In my experience, broadminded people, given their different backgrounds, different ideological baselines/principles, and different experiences, don't all agree. What I look for is not agreement, but the willingness to respect in spite of disagreement. To my mind, that's true broadmindedness.

My favorite dance critic is Laura Jacobs, who as far as I know writes only for the New Criterion, and who deserves a much larger audience. Francis Mason, no less, in his blurb for her new collection of her dance essays, "Landscape with Moving Figures: A Decade of Dance," calls her "our best dance critic." Here she is in TNC this month on one of her favorite subjects, Veronika Part (in Ashton's "Sylvia").

I thought I was aware of it myself until you posted, and then I thought that perhaps I'd been mistaken. I prefer LaCroix's as well, but for my taste cheesy (and cloying and overwrought) describes what NYCB currently uses for Emeralds and Diamonds.

All this time I thought those were the original sets.

More sang froid fits the music, I think. How did Verdy do it? Among the several photos in B.H. Haggin's "Discovering Balanchine" of Verdy in Emeralds there is one on page 100 where she's smiling.

So what has changed at the schools?