Herman Stevens

I saw a very satisfying Spectre de la Rose by Putrov and Marquez. Of course that's not the same as Swan Lake in terms of duress and expression. However, maybe you caught them on a bad night?

I love "Seinfeld" to the extent that I could quote phrases from the show, and remember which Jerry girlfriend was which. However people who consider this kind of stuff as "complex narrative" blahdiblah just because the lines are better than "Bonanza" should perhaps take a look at a book. Of course TV commercials have been working towards this kind of hip referentiality, too, so as to hook smart 13-year olds (and those who stay 13 years old, intellectually). This kind of cultural commentary is just a form of narcissicism. ("Look mom, how smart I am!") It does have a long tradition by now, however, if you consider all the exegesis wasted on Beatles lyrics. I've never understood why people can't let silly fun just be silly fun. BTW we ditched our TV long time ago. Life's too short. BTW2 I vastly prefer L'education sentimentale to Mme Bovary.

It is too bad, indeed, it is so hard to get these Fedotov cd's. However the info these people want sounds prohibitive. I would have loved to get hold of this music. Only recently I listened, for the first time in fifteen years, to the Previn / LSO recordings of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. I couldn't believe these were my reference recordings through the seventies and early eighties. The playing is so sloppy and unidiomatic. And the Pletnev is really accurate and beautiful, but it's true the music is rushed quite a bit occasionally.

Amsterdam is a relatively minor work, methinks. (Weird title, too ) Really good McEwan novels are Enduring Love (soon coming to a theatre near you) and the recent Saturday, which 'handles' 9 / 11 in a brilliant, understated way.

I'm completely puzzled by this. "Young people of color are not going to waste their time and money" training for ballet (it's your assumption), and nonetheless companies should hire iffy dancers and just turn up the PR machine a couple notches and people will love it? If so why do ballet anyway? It only gets in the way of the PR...

And Marie-Agnès Gillot, whom we were talking about, was awarded a Benois de la Danse this week.

In the companies I see, this happens all the time. In the Dutch National, for instance, there are Asian dancers in all ranks, there are two fairly prominent Latin-American dancers, straight from the San Francisco Ballet, and a couple of dancers whom you would describe as black. I think it's one thing to say "there aren't that many black dancers." It is however an entirely different thing to say ADs are deliberately keeping them out. As I said before, I suspect companies, expecially US companies would love to have good black dancers in their line-up, for reasons of inclusiveness.

Please, this is a cd by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, conducted by David Garforth. It says so on the label; it says so on Amazon. (It is also a fact.) So what makes you think this is a piano version? This is the orchestra that has been accompanying ballets for many generations. Who Cares? has been on the Monte Carlo repertoire for quite a while, and this is the performing score. I know Europe is a really bewildering place with all those different languages and currencies, but it's not like they are going to record your symphonies and stuff in piano reductions and run with your money.

I have no doubt many companies would love to have black dancers if only for reasons of inclusiveness and giving audiences the feeling that ballet is an open world. Also it's not like there's such an excess of good dancers they're turning them away for silly motives. In addition I would like to point out that in classical music, at the level of serious orchestras let alone soloist level, there are very few black participants either. In writing fiction and poetry however there are (not to mention the rock music business). So perhaps it's not just a matter of the institutions being exclusive, but also a matter of preference on the part of the (non)-participants. I know that would make it harder to blame people... Allow me to say that Eland's remark that a company without black dancers lacks "soul" makes me really uncomfortable. That is really just half a step away from saying black people have this extraordinary sense of rhythm, because they're... black.

The Monte Carlo recording is available thru amazon France. Here are a couple cheap ones, but it would take some time to reachyou (assuming you are in the US). Or here, where they also mention a delivery time of various weeks. Who Cares? (very nice) is coupled with La Valse.

Interesting you should feel this way. I think Coppelia is by far the most brilliant story ballet in that the plot stands up best and in some weird way it's a subversion of Sleeping Beauty before this ballet even existed. The music, too, is stunning. The woodwind textures are beautiful and when I die I want to be the 1st horn in Coppélia. Oh, and to stick to the topic, a couple months ago I saw the Hungarian State Ballet's version from the fifties, in which the 'mechanical music' was performed by a kind of robot dixieland orchestra and Swanhilda dresses up like the Spanish dancer to "seduce" Franz.

I think she's fabulous, too. Her name is Marie-Agnès Gillot, and she's got her own website. Didya notice she returns as Silver in the Precious Stones pas de cinq, which is one of the best segments in the entire production? (It's track 25 on the DVD.) Here Nureyev created some really neat stuff for Mr Gold.

One might also add that the fairies varitations in the Prologue make very little sense. One of the fairies (forget which) has turned into a twin. And the other problem is the Lilac Fairy who's doing the big last variation. She looks like a great dancer, however the next time we see her she's in the Act III pas de quatre, and the Lilac Fairy turns out to be another dancer.

I am very sad at Bellow's passing away. I have loved his work since my teens, when I first read Herzog, I intensily admire his fiction from Humboldt on. That was a tough time for Bellow and he came through magnificently, with the Dean and those marvellous novellas in With His Foot in His Mouth. I had the extraordinary privilige of spending a couple of hours with Bellow in his Brookline home, meeting his wife and their cat called Moose back in Febr 1995 when the there were these tremendous blizzrds on the East Coast. Last night when I was talking about Bellow I realized this cat must have died a couple years ago and I broke down. The first thing that struck me was how beautiful his diction was. This was a kind of American English I had not heard often. He was tremendously courtly - in fact like only dancers are; writers are generally not that polite. He clearly loved music. There was a turntable in the living room. He used to play the violin. He showed me his hat collection. I have always felt that Bellow was something like the Dickens of our times - this extraordinary humanity and exuberance. I think we have all been immensily privileged to read his work as it came out, new and fresh. Generations after us will have to blow at least a smidgen of dust off these wonderful books.

With all respect to Solor, who I'm sure has nothing but the best at heart, but this is rather the classic way to start a rumor on the internet. "Larissa Lezhnina? Didn't I read somewhere she's a case of Parkinson's?" I know it isn't intended this way, but people on the internet often don't read very closely, and I think one cannot be too careful in these matters, especially where it concerns people who are so dedicated to their work and make such huge sacrifices to stay in the best shape, as I know Lezhnina does. I think it's a great idea to discuss LL's technique and what she does with her arms and hands. I think it's a very bad idea to start speculating about her health, which - I'll repeat - is really to die for. I wish I was in as good shape as she is.

Solor, Lezhnina is just fine.

That's young alright. Teenagers either go with their parents or because they're in ballet school themselves. People in their twenties however spend their own hard-earned and if they like what they're seeing they'll keep going to the ballet for the rest of their lives. They'll have kids and take those to theater, too. And so the show goes on. I didn't study any papers on this but I'm pretty sure this is the dwindling age group in ballet audiences, especially the men, of course. Companies in Yurp and the US are gagging for more of those twenty- and thirtysomethings.

This reminds me of when I moved to the US and switched on the tv in my new place. (I had never even owned a tv.) It was Saturday and there was a football game. They were talking about the fourth quarter, so I thought I might as well give this incomprehensible running and bashing a shot, since it was going to be over in ten minutes or so. Little did I know… I have never managed to get the hang of sports, even though successive girlfriends were only too pleased to give me (à la Alexandra) a sense of what was going on. What is of course surprising about Alexandra's lumberjack men is, they had been going to the ballet with their wives for many years, but apparently these wives never shared what they enjoyed about the ballet with their husbands in the intervals or on the ride back home. That would give them some grip on what they had been watching, wouldn't it? You don't really have to be an expert, and collect the equiv of baseball cards to enjoy ballet. Perhaps we do, but most people enjoy ballet as much as we do (maybe even more) without being able to name any of the steps. I don't think talking about techinique will unlock ballet for a lot of people. No one gets as much out of a ballet show as pre-teen girls, and they don't have any technical bagagge either. But they do have tons of imagination, and ultimately that's what enjoying the ballet is about, whether you're watching Sleeping Beauty, Symphony in C or Van Manen. If it's just steps, you're lost. You need the imagination to connect the dots. You need to be able to say to yourself, "something wonderful is going to happen now." And yes, in most cases you have to be able to interest yourself in an event where the girls are more important than the boys. Personally I think that shouldn't be too hard for a straight man, but I know the stats prove me wrong. I think Bart's sketch of what happened to gender roles in America is pretty much spot on. The US is even blessed with a prez now who prides himself on his lunkitude and walks with his arms out like he's got a pair of invisible sixshooters strapped to his hips. And unfortunately TV and movies are spreading these attitudes fast. The funny thing however is these he - she roles are all well embedded in the romantic ballets. The Swan Lake and Beauty princes aren't exactly geniuses either, not mention Coppélia's Franz.

The larger part of the audience for virtually any kind of art is female. If I give a book talk eight out of ten people in the audience are women. This goes for most forms of art. When I get letters it's usually from women. I was talking this over with a colleague, and he said it's like it's genetically imprinted in women to be interested in the arts. Up till recently women were tied to the home; they didn't have careers and if they wanted to know something about the world (not all people do) they had to order books and music and magazines with stories and pictures. Women are not embarrassed about this. A lot of men are. (Market research shows that men predominately purchase non-fiction books: history, biographies of men of action etc) We all know the jokes about men refusing to ask for directions when lost. This goes for the arts too. The problem is, I'm not sure if it's genetically imprinted. My colleague and I started talking about this because I can't help but notice that the women in the audience are usually at least 45 years old. If you go down in age there are not as many more women than men. And there are not a lot of 'em anyway. Writers and publishers are really concerned about this. The era from the Thirties through the Seventies have shown an enormous, unprecedented arts boom, as people regarded a familiarity with the arts and literature as a way to enrich their lives and become part of the professional classes. The Reagan - Thatcher era pretty much put an end to that notion. Perhaps we're back to normal. (The history of mass arts participation is really too short to be able to tell what's "normal".) In terms of sheer numbers this is very unfortuante. On the other hand I do think it's good that a larger proportion of a concert / ballet etc audience consists of people who are really into it, rather than that they're just keeping up with the Joneses. I'm just very worried about the current crop of twentysomething women, who not only smoke more avidly than men do, pursue business and law degrees just as numerously as men do, but their cultural consumption habits have changed, too. Chicklit is just a joke; and just like the men they seem to need decades to find their way to the concert and theatre halls - not 'till they've hit age forty. If they do. If they don't, there's going to be a lot of empty seats out there. It also means the old male fantasy of the museum as the sure spot to meet nubile women in a receptive mood is fast evaporating. Sorry, had to get that joke in. It was a question "for and about men" after all.

Oh, Hans van Manen is 100% ballet, no doubt about it. Even when he worked with the NDT. You are aware BTW he moved back from NDT to the Dutch National Ballet? Last Friday night HvM's new piece (set to Britten's Frank Bridge Variations) was premiered, and it was gorgeous, with two really tough male solos, great duets and everything you'll ever want from a ballet.

The Kourlas piece you linked is at least a review, with some specifics, whereas the Rockwell piece is yet another strangely flee-floating piece of pontification fro which the writer doesn't even need to go see the show, since the main beef is this strange obsessing whether maybe snobs who don't care how popular a show is are perhaps fatally wrong - or even worse, not with it.

In light of the discussion about Rockwell's manifesto on taking the top dance critic job at the NYT I thought this review, or rather essay, on Irish step dancing might be interesting. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/arts/dance/17blar.html? "It's easy to be sniffy about the "Riverdance" experience. I've been sniffy myself. But it is what it is, and what it is is Las Vegas-style entertainment. As such it's far more popular than most dance. Which makes people scornful and envious. They even go so far as to deny that this is dance at all, which is silly. "Riverdance" goes out of its way to demonstrate connections between other forms of heel-and-toe-tapping folk dance, like flamenco and tap. And some of the dancing is pretty spectacular. […] The popularity of these productions suggests parallels to music, which has seen amplified popular music challenge the commercial and even artistic hegemony of European art music. In music, pop has effectively seceded from classical. Hugely popular commercial dance is still a relatively new phenomenon, so mainstream dance intellectuals can still try to brush it aside. These commercial shows are the tip of an enormous participatory iceberg. Yes, they appeal to the Irish diaspora. But they also appeal to anyone who enjoys step dancing, and that's a lot of people: Irish dance schools and competitions have proliferated, even beyond the English-speaking world, and most professional Irish dancers seem to have won "world championships," a title distributed rather freely."

I think one of the biggest problems US companies are facing contrasted to European companies is the size of their halls. As I recently ran into some of the Joffrey crew (on the Groningen Market of all places) I asked how many their home theater seated. The answer was four thousand. No company I know of in Europe has a 4000 seat dilemma strung around its neck. In any area, whether it's New York, Amsterdam or St Petersburg, 1500 seats a night is the best you can do. 1500 means everybody can see what you're doing withut the dancers having to stretch their stuff. If you have a bigger hall, you will never get a full house - i.e. you're always reprenhinsible for not being good enough, and thus you can be forced into doing more popular stuff, which is not goig to sell 4000 either. But at least you're trying.

I think that was J.A.'s point. Ninety degrees and a little tutu is arguably more sexy than the six o'oclock position. I wouldn't call the Ashton clip "disturbing;" rather the reverse, kind of dated. But I haven't seen the entire piece. The funny thing is, when you look at the next clip (forgot the names) and turn down the loud punk rock music, what you see is beautiful slow hushed gliding pdd. As J.A. suggests, people were strange in the eighties.

I think Ms Citron just didn't want to see les Sylphides that night. Calling it a "warhorse" is a little funny. I believe there was some discussion about this a year ago, how rare performances of this piece actually are. I checked Ms Citron's bio, and I'm sure she's a very nice person, but looking at the concetanation of jobs (a daily; a radio gig, a monthly and a weekly) I can't help thinking it's probably very hard to do anything in the Toronto area without having to pass Ms Citron's approval. Such a monopoly of critical power often makes for these weird snap judgements. Who after all is going to say you're not making any sense? I was rather amused to see she says "she also has a lively career as a guest lecturer, particularly on the role of the critic/reviewer." And to answer your question, one of the wonderful things of Les Sylphides is it looks backward to the Romantic age - but of course not to make fun of - but it's also, arguably, the first Modernist ballet, looking forward to Balanchine. Fokine, for instance, was one of the first choreographers (if not the first one) who insisted he wanted no applause before the curtain came down. Maybe in some weird way Ms Citron was associating Les Sylphides with its comic sister, Robbins's The Concert, which is a parody using the same Chopin music in some cases.