kfw

Drew, I certainly agree.

It doesn't matter if the poster had ever heard of the Trocks or not, because the association of dancing with effeminacy has little if anything to do with cross-dressing or the sources of the Trocks' humor generally.

I also don't think the FB poster was thinking about the "light" "delicate" and "entrancing" qualities of the players as they lost the game. The point was to insult not to analyze.

I didn’t say he was analyzing or thinking of specific qualities. I think he was referring to a stereotype.

But whether or not I'm right or wrong and whether or not one finds the original comment offensive or not, appropriate or not, amusing or not...I think the Pennsylvania ballet response is still both smart and funny. I certainly wouldn't describe it (to take a phrase from kfw above) as a "political weapon." Clever PR is more like it!

No, I don’t accuse them, or anyone here, of that. But I'm saying it happens a lot.

dirac and sandik, I appreciate your comments. Without denying that you make good points, I would say that while it’s true that male dancers are often considered effeminate, it’s probably not true that the football-fan poster has ever heard of the Trocks. So the comparison was probably between men in a masculine sport to women in a feminine role – between men epitomizing a particular kind of masculinity, to women epitomizing a particular kind of femininity. And neither on the football field or the ballet onstage are the two interchangeable and of equal worth.

It’s also true that football is more highly valued in this culture than ballet, but I think that’s a question of taste rather than of morality or of attitudes toward women.

Also, I suspect the original comment comes from what we might call a football-normative perspective, which is that players are supposed to be tough and bruising and intimidating, not light and delicate and entrancing and other such qualities which tutu-wearing dancers strive to embody on stage (as opposed to the qualities it takes to appear so).

Also, while I'm sure it's hard for the marginalized not to presume offense in many cases, sensitivity can also be used as a political weapon, as a weapon not just for justice and equality, but for score-settling. It's unfair, but real justice and equality require a lot from the historically marginalized too.

Kaysta, if the Eagles played like girls in the sense which seems obvious to me but not anyone else on this thread, they would lose every time. Yes, ballet is considered feminine. And football is considered masculine. Anyone remember powder puff football? Part of the fun is that the women were stepping outside of their usual gender role. And we could all laugh together, players and spectators. At ourselves.

What would offend me, so to speak, is seeing ballet when I was watching football, or football when I was watching ballet (Alma Mater excepted, of course ). It’s just possible this guy actually likes ballet, or at least has a daughter that dances, and that’s why the comparison came to mind. But this is an age in which students take offense at inauthentic sushi and banh mi, so either I’m a Neanderthal or this too will pass and the sooner the better for everyone. Then again, I’d protest too if it would get me a good banh mi sandwich!

I think if you were a women you would feel differently.

It is offensive to women for men to denigrate other men by calling them women or other female gender identifiers.

Sure, but the verb was "played" not "are." Would you find it offensive to say a clunky Sugar Plum Fairy was dancing like a linebacker? I am not trying to "wrangle," but I'm trying to understand.

Am I to understand that the original poster was praising the Philadelphia Eagles for making it look easy while having super-human strength, and not at best, judging that the team chose style over substance or, at worst, was invoking typically and lazily sexist shorthand that the team played like a bunch of girly-men?

I think someone who respected ballet and ballet dancers would only post the former. If that was the poster's intention, then I apologize.

I would love to see football played with limited stoppages and substitutions for an entire game like they do when there's a minute or less on the clock and the team with the ball is trying to score and see how far they get.

Perhaps if I was female I’d feel differently, but I don’t see “girlymen” as sexist in this regard, anymore than it would be sexist to criticize a Sugar Plum Fairy for dancing like a linebacker. Different activities require different qualities, that’s all. In the 21st century, people should know better than to say “He’s playing like a girl,” true. “As a football player he looks like a girl in the Nutcracker” is something else altogether. In my opinion.

kbarber, no irony intended, but thanks anyhow.

you're joking, right?

I hope the KenCen and the local press are making full disclosure so people know what they're buying.

I have to think that the Kennedy Center management has enough political savvy to make available some free appearances that all can enjoy -- perhaps on the millennium stage in the lobby or a school visit or perhaps bringing school kids to a dress rehearsal where they can see her.

She isn't scheduled for Milennium Stage during the ABT run. The only mention of her on the KC site is in the casting, where like the rest of the dancers she is identified by last name alone. To the best of my memory, the Washington Post has so far mentioned neither the production nor Copeland's appearances. The KC performances aren't even listed on Copeland's website calendar. All of which suggests to me that the Center expects balletomanes, and not more more casual fans attracted primarily by Copeland and her celebrity and historic significance, to buy those extra expensive tickets.

I learned the word "cygnet" from the ballet programs of my youth. Now I see that in its Swan Lake programs ABT is spelling the word as "cygnettes," which obviously is intended to mean little female swans but I cannot find "cygnette" in any dictionary.

LOL. Are they the bachelorette swans?

Looks like a lovely production! Thanks, Jack and Helene,

Otherwise they should be honoring Gene Clark & Gram Parsons. But who besides The Eagles remembers those guys?

Emmylou Harris. Good point of course.

There were notably more minority children in the performance than seasons past -- Avery Lin as Marie, for example.

She was the first cast Marie last year.

Thanks, pherank. I made an offer on one of the Orpheus and Eurydice shots, but of course it's mislabeled as for NYCB when it was in fact for the production Balanchine did for the Met.

"What is abstract? They mean story-less. But...could be meaning in it, you see. The people that meet, that one person gives the hand, and the girl embraces, it already has meaning in it, you see. Duet is a love story, almost. So how much story you want?"

A great quote. Thanks.

Kathleen, you make lots of good points. I'm reminded of that famous Balanchine quote - I can't remember it exactly - in which he says his ballets are not abstract, and that once you put a man and a woman on stage together, well, "how much story you want?"

That exchange between Jennings and McGregor turned pretty nasty. I don't agree with McGregor that "a body can be abstract: pure form, pure line, pure kinetic" (emphasis mine). Not a body onstage at least, where we observe the whole body, including the most personal part, the face. It's the face that impresses us most strongly that we're looking at a person, not a pure abstraction. And would we want it any other way? Not me. I go to see people dance, not forms.

The Washington Post's Anne Midgette is an outlier here:

. . . although I didn’t see the opera in San Francisco, I can say that if you didn’t see this Act II, which manages to bring Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ and their contemporaries to musical life without being stilted or preachy or eye-rolling, and which sears across the stage like a firework of light and color and rage and pain and beauty, then you haven’t yet really seen “Appomattox.”

Thanks for the review. After reading Midgette, I was tempted to see this.

A recent Guggenheim Works and Process evening was devoted to the opera.

"As a final piece, Balanchine's Theme and Variations needs no profound construing. Created in 1947, for Baryshnikov

LOL. Wasn't he one of Balanchine's "baby ballerinos"?

In 2003 Suzanne Farrell Ballet closed an all-Tchaikovsky program with Serenade.

Women have been putting up with a lot of fundamental disrespect that's been mislabelled as flirting, or as some kind of validation of their attractiveness, or as a solicitous regard for their presumed frailties for millennia. The fact that some of them might have accepted it doesn't make it less problematic.

Great comments, Jack.

Why does it matter whether a 1940s audience would have found the sailors' behavior offensive? There were a lot of things the audiences of yore didn't find particularly offensive that do trouble us now.

Three men harassing a woman on the street is not an image that warms the heart.

I think it matters for how we interpret the behavior in the ballet itself. Would the audience, and more importantly a woman on the street in real life, have understood it as harassment, as we would if it actually happened today, or would they have understood it as flirtation? Is it a form of flirtation that warms the heart today? No. Is it a form of flirtation that would have existed if not for an underlying sexism then? No. But would it have been perceived and intended as harassing behavior or rather, if you will, as a form of flirtation shaped by male privilege? We don’t have to like the behavior either way, but at least for me that makes difference for how we view it now, and for whether or not it should be cleaned up (since it's supposed to be comedy).

This is an eye of the beholder opinion: I find the purse episode creepy and more telling about Robbins/Bernstein vs. a dramatic element that strengthens the work. I found it distracting when I saw this work at NYCB last year (I think it was last year).

I think Anthony's right. It's telling about the place, the gender, and the age of the characters - and most of all about gender relations of the time. The guys remind me of little boys who don't quite know another way to get the girl's attention. I haven't had any luck locating reviews of the premiere, but presumably that scene would have been harshly criticized if such behavior was censured at the time.

But aren't there two open rehearsals? On Thursday the 29th at 1:30 and on Friday the 30th at 11:00?

They only sold tickets to one, on the 29th. For those of us a couple hours away by car, t's too bad it wasn't for the 30th, when there's also a performance. But as you know, it's been a few years since they've had one at all, and I'll take what I can get!