Herman Stevens

If you observed those "perfectly matched" bodies of the POB or the Kirov off stage you'd see they are not perfectly matched by nature. They're all different women with different ways of walking and moving &c ad inf. The matching work is part of the technical artistry both of the dancers and the ballet masters. There are no cookie cutter dancers.

It is a desirable goal, sure. But it's not top on my list, or of the companies I can think of. Maintaining the highest technical and artistic standards, both in dancers and in the repertoire are the top priorities. As far as the composition of the audience is concerned I think all companies are concerned and work hard to attract and invite a younger audience, so as to avoid and forestall the blue-rinse syndrom. Like it or not, this is the true challenge of today, much more so than the exact ethnic composition of the audience. As far as I have been able to observe outreach projects towards minorities are very much marketing projects ultimately serving to make the existing audience feel good about themselves, rather than opening up new audiences. As has been hinted at in various posts above, there may just be a insurmountable element of peer pressure and reverse racism that keeps certain minorities from coming to classical ballet in huge numbers. You cannot force people to come. The high arts have to compete with an incredible number of other forms of entertainment. More people, of any race or background, don't than do go to the ballet. You cannot change this. All ballet goers belong to a single minority which can be labeled "ballet fans". Nobody's keeping anyone from joining. And if I'm totally honest I think this "ballet = eurocentric = racism" talk only serves to make ballet less accessible to people who aren't into ballet yet, just like the old "ballet = anorexia" thing, due to its negative slant. You want more people to go to ballet? Tell 'em it's beautiful and sexy. Don't tell 'em it's bad. I have noted before that every top ballet company is totally eager to hire colored dancers of equal ability, for the simple reason that in many cases they wind up being tremendous audience favorites. I mentioned Carlos Acosta of the RB. In Amsterdam there are two dancers who stand out for their (relatively) darker skin and they are very popular. And I suspect this is the way it works in virtually every company. Apart from that we do not just see race when we see dance; it's just one of many things we notice. One looks at the way a dancer is built, his or her specific body language and musicality and the list goes on.

You don't have to ask omshanti in this ominous fashion. This has been adressed many times before in the threads that were linked at the top of this thread. Race and the Arts Why ballet is still so pale . . . What are ballet companies doing ... to encourage diversity? Minorities in Ballet And BTW not every one is on this white guilt trip.

Sorry to be negative, but I think this is a rather depressing topic. How do you know all these things for sure? I'm fairly sure that every single ballet and art dance company would welcome any and every technically capable black dancer in its ranks. Often they turn out to be audience favorites, that's why. In terms of heritage the Royal Ballet is arguably the liliest whitest company in the world. I'm sure you have heard of Carlos Acosta, the Cuban dancer. He's the Royal's single most popular male dancer. So where is the racism? And this is just one example. PS I could choose to be offended by your "Eurocentric = racist," but I think I won't, thank you.

Dancers have to be one of Spain's main export products. In the Dutch National Ballet, too, there are quite a number of very good Spanish dancers: Ainara Garcia Navarro from Zaragoza; Rosi Soto from Barcelona; Juanjo Arques from Murthia and Jaione Zabala, to name a few I like a lot. They're incapable of performing a routine step.

Maybe so. However are you really sure the dancers who have wrked on this piece haven't given all these matters any thought? Right now you make it sound like what they're doing is not the result of artistic consultation and decision-making, but just plain inadequacy. I'd be tempted to give them more credit. This was not necessarily Balanchine's intention. Farrell recounts how she just made a gesture towards the back of her head, and Mr B said "let's keep that.' Should you feel that this is really a case of Raymonda intertextuality, then I'd say you'd have a Big Time Character / Story in Diamonds. The idea that Balanchine ballets are abstract by definition has, fortunately, been put to rest some time during the nineties. On balance I think it's fair to say Letestu & Bart's Diamonds is rather pale compared to the Farrell & Martins. After all it was made on Farrell: not a single jump, lots of off-balance stuff. My guess would be a good 2nd or 3d generation Diamonds pdd would not necessarily aim for the same thing as the Farrell one. That kind of pathos may not be of our times. (I have to confess Farrell's "neither here nor there" expression gets a little on my nerves.) Another thing to keep in mind is that Farrell at first was not a success in this piece either, if we're to believe Arlene Croce. Apparently she needed many years to make the piece work. Maybe the same goes for Letestu (and in that time Bart can get a better hairdo, too.

Now, now, Helene. I will comment later when I have watched the Diamonds part a couple of times in tandem with the Farrell / Martins video. All I've noticed thus far is that her partner's hair is wrong for the role. Speaking of dance intelligence I'll just quote from Marc Haegeman's 2002 Dance View interview with la Letestu: "After all, we aren’t dancers for only eight hours per day. When you leave your dressing-room and the Opera, you don’t forget everything. It’s not like a nine-to-five job. To prepare a role takes all of your time. You have to take initiatives, do some research, think about the role you have to dance, try to identify with the character, the historical surroundings of a certain ballet, a peasant girl doesn’t behave like a princess, and so on. We aren’t just well paid functionaries. There has to be a personal investment." http://www.danceview.org/interviews/letestu.html

I have received the POB Jewels only recently, and am most pleased with Emeralds. For Rubies the beautiful, soft Dupont does indeed seem a strange choice. First thing that struck me in Emeralds (apart from the overall beauty of the performance) was that the funny dizzy pointe-and-plie work by the two girls in the Entr'acte which I mentioned before has lost its Marzipan character. They just do the steps. Second, Pujol dances beautifully, but I have to agree that the open-mouth emoting is a little too much. If you do that every time you're preempting the audience's admiration, as it were. In the documentary I was struck by Pujol saying the arms in her variation are like a girl examining her rings. Well, whatever it takes, but I can't help thinking Verdy talking about a woman discovering the beauty of her arms and her upper body is just a little closer to the Balanchine vision of the sacred. However these comments don't take away this is a beautiful version of Emeralds, and when you compare it with the previously mentioned seventies "Choreography by Balanchine" on Nonesuch it stands up really well, primarily because Pujol seems better suited to the role than Merill Ashley. Plus this is the complete ballet. As to the documentary, I was rather peeved at the large excerpts from the ballets. I'm guessing the documentary is really only 20 minutes long, and I would have loved more footage of the dancers, either talking or rehearsing, rather than those typical French free-floating theories which can be equally applied to virtually ever ballet in the repertoire. I loved Agnes Letestu, both for her the specificity and smartness of her comments and for the way she got audibly moved as she was talking about Balanchine and Farrell's histoire. Frankly if they'd just let Letestu do the talking for the entire documentary I think we'd been much better off.

I feel the same way. If you look at the contemporary responses Emeralds seems to have been "misunderestimated" as a kind of prelude for the big stuff while it is really a wonderful deeply felt piece with great humor too (the dizzy pointe and plié stuff in 2nds by the two girls just before the guy gets his big diag, reminiscent of Marzipan). I like it best, these days, out of Jewels.

Recently I read an article about the POB during the Lifar era*, and I was surprised to learn that Hitler, apparently, was so pleased with what Lifar was doing that he was invited to become the sort of Reich's Balletmaster - an offer which Lifar deftly turned down, saying his neo-classicism would not work well in Berlin. I have always been under the impression that classical ballet was not approved of by the people in charge in the Third Reich; that originally Modern / Expressionist Dance was the big thing as the Nazi movement took off, but frankly I'm kind of unclear what the actual Nazi stand on ballet was from 1933 onwards. Anybody able to fill me in? * users.ox.ac.uk/~jouhs/michaelmas2004/paolacci02.pdf

Embarrassing piece of pseudo-journalism. Particularly the Tsiskaridze quote (more or less saying he'd long been the face of the company and should have gotten Ratmansky's job) should have made a reporter think twice whether the Bolshoi was really going down, or whether one or two dancers had an ego problem.

Oh dear, one of those Cinderellas. Pardon me for my bad taste, but for me those hilarious stepsisters are the modern equivalent of the Swan Lake Jester.

Thanks for your great report on Lake o' Swan, Michelle! I'm pretty sure HNB's male dancers have been lighting thank-you-dear candles for you, if not sending you bouquets straight away. You have seen two Swan Lakes and it looks like you've only been paying attention to the guys. It's true Rudy van Dantzig gives some additional depth to the Siegfried character in the slow variation in Act I, and the image at the end when Benno (or Alexander, what's the diff?) carries the drowned prince downstage is striking. However as far as I'm concerned this is a really classical, traditional version of Swan Lake, and I admire Van Dantzig for doing just that, back in the eighties. In other words, there's plenty of Odette / Odile action. The reason why Odette and Odile are performed by one single dancer is that it's more challenging that way, and in classical ballet it's all about meetingthose challenges. Every dancer I have ever spoken to about Lake o' Swan has mentioned this. Unfortunately I was unable to see Ruta Jezerskyte's / Altin Kaftira's Swan Lake. I love both dancers. Ruta is a true classical ballerina, and the wonderful thing about her is she's also one of the company's top contemporary dancers getting plum roles from Krystof Pastor and David Dawson. (The other wonderful thing about her is she's really a sweetheart.) Sight unseen I could imagine Altin seemed a little over the top in Act I, because the only other Siegfried you had ever seen before was Tamas Nagy, who is very noble and restrained, usually. Like everybody else I'm really curious about the masterclass you sat in on.

Hi Mimi, please by all means do. I have been terribly busy writing a book, which is why I hadn't spotted your posts before. Unlike previous times I have only been at one Swan Lake night, with Sofiane Sylve and guest soloist Inaki Urlezaga. I have to say I was not quite bowled over on that particular night. It was interesting to see that Sofiane's interpretation had softened and become more idiomatic compared to the previous round of DNB Lakes. (It was also interesting to notice that S.S. has returned as a full member of the Dutch company, in addition to being a NYCB principal.) As I'm writing I distinctly recall being overwhelmed by the fierce beauty of Swan Lake as the orchestra was revving up in the Overture - incredible: you're two minutes in and everything outside the musical drama is wiped out. It took till the Black Swan adagio variation to get close to this degree of involvement again, I have to confess. It may just have been me. However I spent all night wondering about the reason why either S.S. or the company invited Urlezaga over as Sofiane's partner. Their chemistry was well below zero. All by himself, in Act I, I.U. was dead in the water, too, as far as I could tell. Admittedly the partners Sofiane used to have in previous Lake runs have moved to other companies, but I could name one or two men within the company who would have done better than I.U. on the night I saw. Corps work wasn't too hoppin' either. I'm quite ready to call it an off-night, but anyway it kept me from going to another show / cast this time around. I would have loved to see Anu Viherianta's debut as Odette / Odile in the Rudy van Dantzig version (her Nutcracker & Mouse King was fabulous, as I mentioned on the previous page), but her only outing is at an impossibly remote stop of the Lac tour (thanks a buncha, guys!). So please tell us about the night you saw Swan Lake, Mimi.

I'd say Romola's biography is the one that's aiming to be "respectable" and revisionist, Romola obviously being a party to the events in Nijinsky's life, and his break with Diaghilev, and having a lot of stuff to justify afterwards. Buckle on the other hand in some ways is quite scandalous, speculating about Nijinsky's sexual life for instance. Kraskovkaya's book is very interesting for its many pictures and for its rather different slant on how things went wrong in Nijinky's life. I'd also recommend Karsavina and Sokolova for side glances at Nijinksy.

The article struck me as rather weird, too. I kept wondering "what is the raison d'etre of this piece, which is not really tied to any kind of event or happenstance?" It looks fair and balanced but, as Helene said, it is really a piece defending Martins, subtly mangling Martins detractors. The reason why Bass's departure is described as 'noisy' is because this piece is really a very very late response to the Bass piece in the New York Observer, and Gottlieb's (occasionally rather stale) criticism in the same mag. Rockwell is saying: "don't read those guys; they're weird, old and they don't have our kind of money. Same goes for the Balanchine disciples out in... well, I don't know where, but they're not in New York, and they don't have NYCB's kind of money." Rockwell's twist-and-turn defense of Martins' Swan Lake is very funny. It's not very good, but "some of its corps works is very striking." In other words, why care anyway?

The current Perm Swan Lake is by Natalia Makarova. It's fairly traditional, except that it's firmly in No Mime Country. The Perm dvd Swan Lake with Ananiashvili is a different version by Nikolai Boyarchikov, a seventies / eighties choreographer who at some point made a Romeo and Juliet with three or more Juliets on stage just to show us This Could Happen To You Too. His Swan Lake is not nearly as weird, but it is too bad Ananiashvili wasn't filmed in a better production. My response to the big question is, by now, NONE. I'd be tempted to vote for the Kirov, because that was the best Swan Lake dancing I have ever seen, three nights in a row. But the Jester drives me crazy. There are too many Swan Lakes (as compared to Raymonda, for instance) and there are too many choreographers with solutions to non-existent problems in Swan Lake. Maybe it would be a good idea, as Balanchine suggested, to call every single ballet Swan Lake no matter what it really is. That way companies would be absolved of the need to put together lousy Swan Lakes.

In the realm of theory this is indeed possible. However in reality it doesn't seem to be the case, and I did check a couple ranking lists before responding. My criticism of Kelso's paper did not have anything to do with East Coast chauvinism as you seem to imply. I'm fully aware that Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan-Ann Arbor are at the top of the Social Sciences field (besides my US abode used to be right in that area). More to the point, I have a hard time believing any top sociology program would accept a paper such as the one we've been discussing. The ideas are pretty jaded, and more importantly the work done with these ideas is far from rigorous. I would consider it acceptable at college level; not beyond. I have no problem with academic work on ballet, on the contrary. Some of the most interesting and fundamental books on ballet are the result of academic research. Also the Balanchine conference in Ann Arbor (again) was a great example of how a good university can bring together brains, passion and... money.

Thank you, Jorgen. I checked again, and indeed, you are right. I have changed my previous post accordingly, so as not to perpetuate inaccuracies. So the first girl in the pas-de-trois is indeed Tatiana Bessmertnova; the other girl is Maria Bilova, who, in the Bolshoi Sleeping Beauty dvd from the same era, is Bluebird's Princess Florine. I guess I didn't quite see the Bessmertnova resemblance at first, Natalia being more the unsmiling, serene (and probably terribly overworked) dancer, compared to the exuberant pas-de-trois appearance of Tatiana.

Hi Roach, in the video you're referring to the pas de trois is indeed the sequence where two girls in (very) yellow tutus dance with the prince. And let me edit to add: neither of the dancers in the pas-de-trois returns in the (equaly exuberant) Spanish dance you referred to. That's Maria Zubkova. Do you have one or two other Swan Lakes you're watching apart from this one? Lots of people prefer their Swan Lake sans Jester.

But chances are he would have been the same had he been straight. Just look at the kind of subject matter he was most interested in (Hermann in Queen of Spades falling in love with a girl the moment she got engaged; Onegin falling madly in love with Tatiana as soon as he's discovers she doesn't need him anymore) and you'll see it's the old desire-meets-unattainability crunch, which is just as accessible to straight as gay folk. A major thing with Tchaikovsky and his supposed unhappiness is quite simply this: He had this habit of using his diaries and letters as a distress vent. Had he burned those diaries the picture would have looked quite different. However he did not and this way he left plenty of ammo to scholars who want to prove that Tchaikovsky = gay = insecure = hysterical. I'd say someone who has been as stunningly productive as Tchaikovsky was - composing and scoring Sleeping Beauty in three months as I recall, or Iolantha and Nutcraker for a double bill program - may have had his little tics and obsessions, but they sure didn't keep him from doing what he wanted to do.

Please read Poznansky. It's a good biography. However don't expect any info on the ballets or music. Poznansky doesn't shed much light on Tchaikovsky's work. This sounds like the standard British take on Tchaikovsky, making him into the Russian equiv of Oscar Wilde, with those "secret traumas" etc. So if Mazeppa was "really" about the composer's homosexuality, what about all those other passionate cri de coeur operas by straight composers - where did they get their "secret" material from?

Unintentionally this Kelso paper is quite hilarious, in the way it is expressive of the very tightly controlled world of graduate school. I grew up in my early teens in a ballet school (my mom's). Later I spent a number of years at a US campus, and most of my acquaintance were either graduate students or asistent professors. Why am I telling you this? Well, I can assure you the mental aneroxia at that campus exceeded the physical control problems in the ballet world by factor yowza. I cannot recall a single person between ages 21 and 35 ever laughing in all those years on campus. Never ever. They were too scared to step out of line. Poor Ms Kelso's paper is not very good. Of course the subject is pretty stale, and she doesn't further it one bit as far as I can tell. The exclusive way she relies on Gordon 1983 would be fine for a sophomore. It is however really problematic for a graduate student, and the paper should have been returned to Ms Kelso. Gordon's vintage is not the problem; the problem is there are whole paragraphs that are supported exclusively by this one source. You can't do that. Kelso's clearly read the Gordon book first and has built her case around it. Obviously Southern Ill Edwardsville is not Yale or Princeton, but there are standards. To return to my original comparison, if universities are ballet companies, too, I doubt Ms Kelso would even make it to the corps if this is her level. And if it's about corps dancers being unable to express their personality and talent - they're required to express to choreographer's feelings - I cannot help but quote my mother saying "you're supposed to express yourself by executing the steps perfectly in line. That's something to be proud of." I know quite a bunch of corps dancers who are perfectly happy to do what they're doing, and doing it well. Contrary to what Kelso is saying not every dancer in the company wants to be Aurora or the Swan Queen. Also, for those who want to dance but find ballet's aesthetic too confining there are about a gazillion other dance options - ballet is really a tiny niche today. And lastly, I don't know where Kelso gets this idea that American dancers are skinnier than European dancers (not from personal observation, perhaps). However what I saw from US companies other than NYCB, ABT and SFB, I was often struck by the "healthiness" of the girls jumping about. These days, if you want skinny you go to St Petersburg, Russia.

There's a lot of good stuff in this piece, particularly in the reported quotes. However perhaps I am the only one who thinks the author's presence is a leetle overbearing? I mean, do we really need to know Whelan's & Michalek's cat is "unobtrusive"? If it is unobtrusive, why mention it? That's just fussy writing. The thing is this need of Brown's to put his stamp on even the tiniest detail makes me wonder if all this stuff about the soul and death and God is authentically Whelan, or whether this is how he feels about her. I like to hear dancers talk about what they do. The God stuff can wait. I love those comments WW makes watching the old Sym in C tape. That's a dancer talking. Otherwise it's remarkable that the best material does not come from the person interviewed but from people who worked with her. Perhaps this is another indication that the writer wanted something from Whelan she wasn't really giving. The "deep" question I missed is this: WW is introduced as a "post-Balanchine virtuoso". She spotted Mr. B only once. And yet she thinks about him "almost every day." This is where a reporter / wroter is supposed to ask "Tell me more" rather than ask "Is your cat unobtrusive by any chance?"

Obviously the same Gri. production is available on dvd with the ubiquitous Bessmertnova as Raymonda, and Taranda in the same rôle. The camera work is better; Bessmertnova's foot- and legwork is tremendously beautiful; there just seems to be a consensus that Semenyaka's more supple arms and back are a plus for Raymonda. Speaking of entirely other productions of Raymonda; there is Anne-Marie Holmes' production which has been staged at various places recently, such as the ABT and the Finnish National Ballet, and I'm very much suspecting this production had been acquired by the Dutch National, too, for 2007. So if anybody's seen it I'd be interested to hear what it's like.