miliosr

I would add 'insufferable' to 'offputting' -- insufferably offputting.

I would put his chances at 0.0%. Apart from his numerous eccentricities (as expressed on Instagram), the board could reasonably point to the following as reasons not to hire him: Clifford's Los Angeles Ballet collapsed 33 years ago and he's never run a successful company since. The repertory at the Los Angeles Ballet basically consisted of Clifford's work and Balanchine's. He himself has written that he took no interest in any other dance but Balanchine's while he (Clifford) was a member of City Ballet even though New York was overflowing with dance during that period (1966-73). Clifford gives no indication that he has much, if any, familiarity with 21st century choreographers beyond a few bold-faced names. (Citing Robert La Fosse as someone whose work you would like to program is odd given how La Fosse himself has said he has abandoned making dances.) Whatever truth there may be in Clifford's criticisms of Peter Martins, do we really want someone who will be out there badmouthing the former artistic director?

John Clifford has taken to Instagram to more or less make a case for his candidacy: Alastair Macaulay chimes in and starts asking Clifford questions about how he would run New York City Ballet. (Keep clicking along from Instagram post to Instagram post to get the full measure of the back-and-forth between these two.) Clifford has some interesting responses but the area where he really falls down is in discussing new choreographers. It's clear that he's not very conversant with what's going on outside of a few already established names (Peck, Ratmansky, Wheeldon).

I think the answer is . . . none. Damien Jalet staged the dances and the dance academy in the remake appears to be very heavily modelled on the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Are we all going to see this? This is Luca Guadagnino's "reimagining" of Dario Argento's 1977 classic and features Dakota Johnson (moving up in the world from Fifty Shades of Grey) and Tilda Swinton in the old Joan Bennett part as "Madame Blanc" (or is it "Madame Bausch"?). Will be reporting back on this one for sure!

I peeled off this digression from one of the New York City Ballet threads to create a new thread dedicated to Bejart at the Opera and elsewhere: Posted Thursday at 06:21 PM (edited) Yes, Farrell danced with Bejart's company for four seasons and continued to make appearances with the Bejart company even after she returned to the New York City Ballet. (At one point, when the Bejart Company and City Ballet were performing in New York at the same time, she did double duty with both companies.) It's a very US-centric argument. Love it or hate it, the Bejart company was huge in Europe during the 1970s. Farrell herself has talked about how the company performed in large venues to enormous, enthusiastic audiences. So, being a member of the Bejart troupe at the apex of its success wasn't exactly a "career killer". Now, there's a reasoned argument to be made (and has been made) that Farrell and Maurice Bejart's highly theatrical style were a mismatch and that what was essentially a men's company (with Jorge Donn as the star male dancer) wasn't ideal for Farrell either. But that's a different argument altogether than saying she died a kind of death during her time in Europe. Farrell herself has said that she benefited from Bejart: "We worked together for four years, and many of the things I learned with him I could never have learned anywhere else." "We often performed in huge arenas with the audience surrounding us on all sides. It was great training to learn how to 'play' to them from every angle - this 360-degree awareness both enhanced and broadened how I danced." https://www.kennedy-center.org/sfb/pages/notesarch08#bejart

Yes, Farrell danced with Bejart's company for four seasons and continued to make appearances with the Bejart company even after she returned to the New York City Ballet. (At one point, when the Bejart Company and City Ballet were performing in New York at the same time, she did double duty with both companies.) It's a very US-centric argument. Love it or hate it, the Bejart company was huge in Europe during the 1970s. Farrell herself has talked about how the company performed in large venues to enormous, enthusiastic audiences. So, being a member of the Bejart troupe at the apex of its success wasn't exactly a "career killer". Now, there's a reasoned argument to be made (and has been made) that Farrell and Maurice Bejart's highly theatrical style were a mismatch and that what was essentially a men's company (with Jorge Donn as the star male dancer) wasn't ideal for Farrell either. But that's a different argument altogether than saying she died a kind of death during her time in Europe. Farrell herself has said that she benefited from Bejart: "We worked together for four years, and many of the things I learned with him I could never have learned anywhere else." "We often performed in huge arenas with the audience surrounding us on all sides. It was great training to learn how to 'play' to them from every angle - this 360-degree awareness both enhanced and broadened how I danced." https://www.kennedy-center.org/sfb/pages/notesarch08#bejart

When ABT performed the extract, didn't they present it in a stripped down ways in terms of a set? Since the Tudor version is reduced to a one act anyway, why not (as you suggest) present it in a new, semi-abstracted way? I wonder too if there's a fear that Lady MacMillan would take a dim view of a rival production of Romeo and Juliet even though one could be done at the Met and one could be done at the State.

Posters have commented for years about how sluggish attendance is during the first few weeks of the Met season and how things don't really kick into high gear until mid-June (when the city begins to be flush with summer tourists.) So, starting the season in mid-June may well be the bright side. The not-so-bright side is that New York will no longer have that crazy, impossible and impractical 8 week ballet season, which was pure New York bravado at its finest. New York will also no longer have the spectacle of two of the world's finest ballet companies performing a few hundred yards from one another for several weeks every year. Or, thinking outside the box, ABT could emulate the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1958 and decamp permanently to southern California!!! (ducks)

The hour is growing late for Tudor's Romeo and Juliet. From the 70s casts, Carla Fracci, Natalia Makarova and John Prinz are still with us. But Fernando Bujones and Ivan Nagy are now gone. And it's not just big budget bombs like The Pied Piper. Since ABT last revived Tudor's Romeo and Juliet in 1976, the company has blown through four productions of Sleeping Beauty across three directorships.

It's depressing to think that we'll likely never see the full Tudor Romeo and Juliet again. Maybe Ratmansky can take it on as one of his historical reconstruction projects! (Kidding . . . but kind of not.)

Please do!

I thought Gottlieb was referring to the relative absence of Taylor works in European ballet and contemporary companies rather than to the Taylor company's popularity as a touring phenomenon. Just looking at France, I feel like Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs are more "go to" choreographers than Taylor is. The real challenge for the Taylor company begins now. It will become more of an uphill task to secure bookings with the charismatic founder and sole creative force gone. This is the same problem that continues to confront the successor companies to Martha Graham and Jose Limon. Former big names like Erick Hawkins, Alwin Nikolais and Anna Sokolow no longer have companies acting in their names or the successor companies are small and inconsequential. (Merce Cunningham himself famously decided that the struggle to preserve a company's "life after death" wasn't worth it.) I do think it's telling that Taylor decided to turn his namesake company into a modern dance repertory company. Even with six decades of dances under his belt, he may have felt that relying solely on his own dances wouldn't be enough after his death.

Clifford has made a new entry to his blog titled 'The Eye of the Storm' where he ruminates some more on this topic: http://johnclifford26.blogspot.com/

Exactly, which is why a fair number of people thought the results of the board's investigation of Peter Martins would inevitably lead to the board exonerating itself.

Robert Gottlieb's remembrance of Paul Taylor: https://observer.com/2018/08/remembering-paul-taylor-dance-genius/ Interesting quote: "Most tellingly, perhaps, he was American—which may be why he has been less appreciated in Europe and England than he has been back home. He wasn’t experimental enough for the French or comfy enough for the Brits—neither avant-garde nor traditional." I guess I never thought about it before but Gottlieb's right: Paul Taylor doesn't have much of a presence in Europe. Laurent Hilaire programmed Aureole at the Stanislavsky not long ago but, other than that, I'm hard-pressed to name another Taylor work that has appeared on European stages in recent seasons. Maybe Taylor and Mark Morris are the same in that regard -- not having a work that's a fixture of the international repertory?

If true, talk about bad advice! The negative publicity from this is "costlier" than any settlement would have been.

The board was asleep at the wheel for years. If anything good came out of the accusations against Martins, it was that the board woke up from its slumber. There's a lot at stake stylistically for the New York City Ballet in terms of getting the right person in place vs. the wrong one. Ross Stretton's tenure at the Royal Ballet should be a cautionary tale for the board in this regard.

Based on these famous photos by Jack Mitchell, I would say that Taylor was the last of the modern greats to go (Rainer and Tharp being postmodern): https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/cunningham-graham-hawkins-limon-taylor?phrase=cunningham graham hawkins limon taylor&sort=best#license Anna Sokolow was invited but refused to participate because the photo was taken in the garden at the Graham company headquarters. Foolish! (Interestingly, I had never seen the color photo until tonight. It's less severe than the black and white version and humanizes all of them more.)

I've been meaning to post Suzanne Farrell's audio remembrance of Maurice Bejart: http://www.kennedy-center.org/video/index/74291 And the written version: https://www.kennedy-center.org/sfb/pages/notesarch08#bejart

Both things can be true. Certainly, there were company directors (especially in the United States) who didn't want to antagonize Balanchine and jeopardize their access to his works by hiring Farrell. And no doubt there were company directors in Europe who saw her as a question mark in terms of how she would adapt to alien repertories and styles and didn't want to take the chance. (Or a third option: Many of the European companies just didn't need her.) As much as I admire Bejart to this very day for hiring Farrell, I don't know that she was ever a great fit for his style. Someone wrote (maybe Joan Acocella?) that Farrell looked beautiful in Bejart's repertory but it wasn't what she was born to be doing. In any event, if Chase Finlay does stick with dancing and wants to work in Europe, he can plausibly say that he has danced the classics thanks to the Peter Martins productions.

The number is somewhat inflated in that Angle the Elder appears to be dialing back a bit, Danchig-Waring and Garcia have labored with injuries, and Veyette has lost a lot in recent seasons. Given the resignation of Finlay, the suspensions of Catazaro and Ramasar and the reduced state of the soloists, there's not a lot of room for error (or injury). The skill set (Balanchine, primarily) for a New York City Ballet dancer isn't necessarily an advantage in finding work elsewhere, at least outside of the United States. Suzanne Farrell learned that when she left the company and then barely worked for a year. It was only when Maurice Bejart invited her to join his troupe in Belgium that she found steady work. (And going from Balanchinian neo-classicism to Bejartian theatricality was quite a leap stylistically.) Alexandra Ansanelli left City Ballet mid-career to join the Royal Ballet but I don't know that it was so easy to transition from Balanchine to Ashton and MacMillan (or that the experiment was particularly successful.) Things are probably better now in that the Peter Martins productions -- love 'em or loathe 'em -- of Romeo and Juliet, Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake would give a dancer a City Ballet a kind of calling card to European companies. But a dancer attempting to make the transition to Euro dance would still face a fairly big hurdle in terms of different styles and productions.

John Clifford's Instagram posts can be entertaining/informative. But sometimes, Clifford's repetitive posts about how close he was to Balanchine, how he was the heir apparent, how successful his ballets were at City Ballet, etc., etc., make me think that Clifford has cast himself as the lead in a movie only he is watching. Ultimately, I think Clifford's most significant action (and the one for which he will be remembered) will have been to take in and promote the teenaged Damian Woetzel at Clifford's Los Angeles Ballet. (Not the same Los Angeles Ballet Colleen Neary now heads.)

Funny you should mention him. The summer 2018 issue of Ballet Review has a long (9 pages) interview with him. It's only available in the print edition, though. The interview is very wide-ranging. Among many topics, La Fosse talks about giving up on choreography because he didn't think he was good enough.

One of my favorite Aretha Franklin tracks from the 1960s is her cover version of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song, "I Say a Little Prayer": Franklin's version was actually a B-side to the song "The House That Jack Built" but became a chart hit in its own right; peaking at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #3 on the Billboard R&B chart. For a point of comparison, here is the original version by Dionne Warwick, recorded in Spring 1966 but not released until Fall 1967: Warwick's version is lovely but Franklin digs that little bit deeper on her version. Warwick's version went to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #8 on the Billboard R&B chart. (Trivia: What was the B-side to Warwick's version of "I Say a Little Prayer"? The theme song from the greatest movie ever made -- Valley of the Dolls!!!)