kfw

just to say that i looked on AMAZON, and cannot see the book, there - so presumably it is not released in america yet -

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 hate to be cynical, but if some tough-looking guys gain respect for dance and start watching the backs of the younger "dancer dudes," and make harassing them a dangerous choice, we can go to the next educational step, which is exposing dance to their peers.

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.

Though I agree generally about their different styles, I'd say there's more kinship between Wheeldon's choreography and Martins than people think, particularly in works like Shambards - or the two men's Swan Lakes.

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.

at Sadlers Wells I'm told they have an 'inclusivity' policy that allows people with severe mental problems into performances. All highly laudable, but the reality is that performances suffer from frequent disturbances from the audience. There were a number of shouts and cries during a BRB performance there on Tuesday night and on another occasion I heard someone howl like an animal throughout the entire show.

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

The rehearsals at NYCB are working rehearsals with just piano accompaniment and attendees are not allowed to sit on the orchestra level

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.

steps which literally bore no resemblance to what Mazzo did (or for that matter Ashley or Kistler even a few years ago).

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'm revisiting Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" currently, and dipping into a book on heraldry.

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.

I would say: Big, certainly. Strong, definitely. A real presence. But the large head and impassive eyes and face may have encouraged those of us who found him -- rather than "bland" -- to be something of an emotional vacume.

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,"

a market phenomenon akin to an Andy Warhol silk-screen or a John Galliano fashion show

that comes with a set of ten do's and don't's, such as speak lovingly of the score but

don't feel you need to bring the same respect to the lineaments of classical dance. Awkward, reductive, even obnoxious poses and positions will show that ballet’s idealization of the human body is elitist and unnatural.

She compares his "Sylvia" to Ashton's:

Sylvia’s subject matter is love, and we all know that sensuality, sex, and lust are implicit in love. That Morris is interested in tipping the balance, bringing sex into parity with love, and going at it raw and randy where Ashton was sublimated, is a choice Morris is within his rights to make. But love of classical ballet is also a subject of Ashton’s Sylvia—an ardor that ennobles the story—and love of classical ballet is not a subject of Morris’s. He can profess it, but he cannot produce it. As with so many modern dance choreographers who think they have something to say “in ballet,” toe shoes—the deep spring of this language, the soul of this art—defy him. Morris’s pointe work asks for little roll through the foot, has no fascination with the floor, no connection to the clouds or to daily class (quite often a dark cloud in which one’s flaws are flayed). His pointes are tight and stilty. From the first moment of Sylvia, when the dryads bourrée in from the wings, they look boxed-in—and they are. They’re in sixth position, which is turned-in. And these are supposed to be wild things!

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!

I read articles excoriating classical ballet for its flitty, flighty oh-so-irrelevant view of life so often (and I know this isn't what bart meant, but it's what a lot of people do mean!) that I wanted to offer this clarification. If you want to see theater that deals with real life DON'T GO TO THE BALLET! Robert Greskovic wrote something in Ballet 101 that is particularly apt here: "Ballet is not a realistic art form; it’s a lyrical poetic one."

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

Obviously she was familiar with his work, but she needed to be familiar with that work. She was even making a point that I essentially agree with, but I can only guess she thought not seeing it and writing about it (or around it, whatever it is that she considers the piece to be doing) was a legitimate response to the way the piece excluded, dare I say 'victimized,' her. That comes across as not journalistic enough, too emotional--not unlike something of what I think she didn't care for in his work. I think she abandoned that 'coolness' herself in refusing to see a work that she nevertheless enshrined by not seeing.

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

A parallel question: are these commissions always exclusive, or can they be performed elsewhere? In other words, is the NYCB a dead end for new choreographic work -- or a springboard to other companies?

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

Parenthetically, in my experience not all the young folks are as broadminded as one might expect.

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").

Twice she danced Act Three’s Terpsichore, and twice she lifted the ballet to a higher altitude, her sissonnes so lofted, so cumulous calm, they seemed to push off from a cloud. Yes she’s tall, but so is Wiles (and so is Darcey Bussell, who danced the Royal Ballet premiere in 2004). And Part does tell the story through line. Her Swan Lake this season was symphonic—plangent lines in radial space—completely different from her fantasy Odettes of last year, more technically meticulous, architectonic, and even bigger than before, as if her wingspan arabesques were catching air and drawing her off the ground. And she does conceive a role completely. Her Terpsichore in Balanchine’s Apollo was an almost bel canto display, musically huge but tonally sensitive, full of rises and waves and rippling finishes (“Balanchine would have loved her,” said the writer Holly Brubach after Part’s brilliant Saturday matinee). Part has pull, and the most sculptural beauty of any woman dancing today. As Myrtha she was so glamorous, so aristocratic just standing there, glowing darkly of memory and regret, you could hardly look at Giselle. “She’s Empress Eugénie,” said the actor and dancer Vadim Strukov, “creating a world. Not decreeing by law but simply by her presence. She’s so much there she shuts everything and everybody out.”

I'm aware of that, thanks. I'm talking about how they look on the tape.

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.

The Dance in America excerpts have cheesy sets

All this time I thought those were the original sets.

As far as Emeralds was concerned, there was a generally tepid response--and Pujol's "emoting" bothered many: most expected to see more sang froid and less joyeux.

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.

I do believe the problem is not a lack of talent but a failure of the schools in helping the young men realize their potential.

So what has changed at the schools?