miliosr

13 hours ago, dirac said:

I can see why the British might not see the joke with Union Jack

I'm guessing that the things that outraged Balanchine about  Onegin were probably not cultural in nature, although certainly that aspect may have been part of his disaffection.

Didn't Balanchine bring Union Jack to London shortly after Lord Mountbatten's assassination in 1979? If so, the timing of that would seem to have been unwise.

As for Onegin, I suspect the cultural aspect didn't bother Balanchine nearly as much as the uses to which John Cranko put Tchaikovsky.

19 hours ago, BalanchineFan said:

Who do you think they should be commissioning new works from?

If Bill T Jones had any interest in ballet I'd love to see what he would do. Mark Morris, too, but they are both busy with their own companies. Kyle Abraham has been a huge success, imo, and Wendy brought him to NYCB. Kudos! People pooh-pooed Twyla Tharp when she first choreographed for ballet dancers. She is one of the few who is interested in ballet technique and the ballet idiom, but they'd be lucky to get her now.

Perhaps there is no answer to your question. With the successive deaths of George Balanchine, Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton in the 1980s and Kenneth MacMillan and Jerome Robbins in the 1990s, the classical dance may have entered a creative trough for which no immediate end is in sight. Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck are (or were) the three great hopes of the 21st century and yet I could make a case that the works we're seeing from them (at least in part) are merely variations on prior work: MacMillan (Wheeldon), Marius Petipa/Ashton (Ratmansky) and Robbins (Peck)

As for the modern dance crossovers Morris and Tharp, we'll find out soon enough just how lasting of an impact they have had. Morris has produced 8 ballets for the San Francisco Ballet over 35 years but none of them enjoys widespread dispersion in the national (let alone international) repertory. Will they long survive the changeover once Helgi Tomasson departs? As for Tharp, she had made "ballet-ballets" for an even longer period but her ballet repertory is only marginally more secure than the Morris repertory.

Generally speaking, I'm wary of modern/postmodern/contemporary choreographers crossing over to ballet companies. At its most extreme, the phenomenon results in Wayne McGregor at the Royal Ballet. He brings to mind Arlene Croce's words from early in her career:

"There is always a small but highly vocal portion of the public . . . that greets with enthusiasm the most wanton distortions of a great classical dancer's technique and style, especially if they're accompanied by an electronic score and presented in the name of a progressive choreography."

I think it's telling that the great male classicist and star at the Royal Ballet, Vadim Muntagirov, has never appeared (based on his Royal Ballet bio) in any of McGregor's works. Maybe McGregor doesn't want him. More likely is that Muntagirov doesn't want his classical technique strip-mined by McGregor and has enough power in the organization to say 'no'.

So, I come back to my original thought: There may not be an immediate way out of the current impasse.

11 hours ago, Hogmel said:

Connor Walsh or maybe Jared Matthews? Right now, he is the assistant AD of the Estonian national ballet … i always felt he could come back to Houston eventually…

Jared Matthews would be a contender for sure. But Connor Walsh seems to me to be the face of the organization. He's their biggest star and has been for what seems like forever. As challenging as it is for me to summarize Houston Ballet's repertory, Walsh has appeared in everything and has all the resulting national and international connections.

On 9/21/2021 at 8:01 PM, dirac said:

At the time marriage was often the only way many young women could leave their parents' house. 

That was definitely true in Powell's case. She had an overbearing stage mother so marrying at 20 was a way of gaining some control over life. But getting married so young (and still under the studio's grip) resulted in a whole set of different problems.

Fun fact: Jane Powell and Elizabeth Taylor were bridesmaids at each other's first weddings in, respectively, 1949 and 1950. Given the cloistered nature of M-G-M, it made sense for them to be bridesmaids for each other -- they didn't know many people outside the studio walls.

I've been listening to Powell's contributions to Athena tonight. Such a beautiful score and Powell sings it wonderfully.

Powell and Astaire from Royal Wedding:

[HQ] How Could You Believe Me (Royal Wedding-1951) - YouTube

Powell is the real revelation here. Who knew at the time she could so considerably transform her image and singing style? And keep up so impressively with Astaire during the tap dance portion? (I can picture Judy Garland doing this but for the life of me I can't picture June Allyson doing it.)

7 Greek Dances w/ music by Theodorakis and choreography by Maurice Bejart:

Mikis Theodorakis - Danses Grecques - Maurice Béjart "Ballet of XX century" - YouTube

Micha van Hoecke has died:

Choreographer Micha van Hoecke has died at 77 (gramilano.com)

The Limon company will be performing Doris Humphrey's Air for the G String and a suite from Jose Limon's The Winged tonight at Bryant Park in NYC.

Jane Withers has died at the age of 95. She was too young to have been a part of the Pre-Code era and yet she lived long enough to be one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's Golden Age.

The Norma Shearer page I follow on Instagram had a cute photo of Jane and Norma together at a USO event in 1941.

And speaking of Norma, Wikipedia lists August 10th as her birthday. (Her actual birthday may have been the 11th but she celebrated it on the 10th.) Regardless -- happy birthday to Norma Shearer!!!

Some of these ballet companies have problems that extend beyond the events of recent years and reach back to the "glory years" of the Dance Boom of the 60s and 70s. The "boom" could just as easily be described as a "bubble" given how many companies came into being without having a clear reason for being other than someone thought a particular city should have a ballet company.

During the pandemic, I bought old issues of Dance Magazine from the 70s and the 80s. Reading those back issues, it's amazing to see how many companies didn't make it because they had no realistic artistic and business plans (or even a realistic view of the city in which they were performing.) The "boom" is long gone but there are still a lot of companies from that era hanging around and still trying to find the way forward.

In and of itself, the name change may be meaningless. But to the extent that the name change becomes emblematic of the company adopting another identity to the one its had lo these many years, then it might be significant. On the other hand, the company may have already absorbed that hit with the change in artistic directors.

On 7/13/2021 at 12:41 PM, dirac said:

I find Jane Russell unwatchable in anything other than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

But what a part! Ain't there anyone here for love?

On 7/10/2021 at 5:56 PM, pherank said:

I don't disagree with these statements. But I suppose one could argue that any company that's been following the same model exclusively for years is in need of some level of shaking up. No one's artistic vision is that sweeping and original.   😉

Which also suggests that a change in artistic director(s) might not solve the problems some of these companies have.

On 7/7/2021 at 9:33 PM, nanushka said:

I think it sounds, at least generally, less provincial and less regional. As @Californiasuggests, think of the names of prominent US city-named ballet companies, orchestras, opera companies, museums, etc. compared with those named by state.

The danger is that they achieve "negative crossover": people who have been loyal to the entity known as 'Pennsylvania Ballet' for decades are put off by the name change while "Philadelphia Ballet" does not attract a new, numerically significant audience.

I don't think the Julian Mackay hire helped Kelly Tweeddale's cause any. While she was putting out press releases extolling Sab Francisco Ballet's commitment to diversity, the artistic director was moving in a different direction altogether. At best, it looked like one part of the operation didn't know what the other part was doing. At worst, all the press releases from the last year look like nothing more than an  attempt to get the press and the public off the management and board's backs.

Ruben Martin has joined the faculty at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis school:

American Ballet Theatre - Rubén Martín (abt.org)

On 12/4/2020 at 8:39 AM, Hogmel said:

I was wondering of all of the american companies, large or small, which ones are ready for a change of artistic direction? And for what reasons? 
 

i personally think Houston Ballet might be ripe for a change. Its a good company that just seems to fly under the radar a lot. It seems they stage a whole lot of Stanton Welch’s creation which might not be all that great... 

i am really curious to hear what you have to say ?  

Houston Ballet for sure. It's lavishly funded but it has no national profile. I'm hard pressed to even describe its repertory. Perhaps they'll just coast along until Connor Walsh is ready to take over?

I would put the Joffrey Ballet in second place. During his lifetime, the late Robert Joffrey worked ceaselessly to give the company an unique repertory. How wonderful would it be if the Joffrey was still the repository for all those Massine revivals? Instead, it's like a mild San Francisco Ballet.

Los Angeles Ballet would be my third place. What is the point of this company? It slogs along with no discernible purpose and not much funding. (Don't know if you could replace the artistic directors as they and the company may be one and the same.)

I took a look at Pennsylvania Ballet's Form 990 filings at Guide Star. Their last filing was for 2018-19 (pre-COVID):

2016-17:  $1,411,315 (profit)

2017-18: -$251,518 (loss)

2018-19:  $164,705 (profit)

The company's highest earning year was 2018-19 with $16 million. Their highest expense year was also 2018-19 with $15.8 million. From the 990s, it's not apparent that revenue has been disastrous enough to prompt a reboot (the name change).

Whatever Shearer's exact reasons may have been at the time, I have the sense she was a believer in the maxim that, "You want to leave things just a little before they leave you."

7 hours ago, dirac said:

I don’t think Shearer was ready to quit just yet. Her last two pictures did not do well and they were her own bad choices (as she said in response to rumors that Mayer sabotaged her, “on those last two, nobody but me was trying to do me in” – from memory). She might well have retired by 1945 but I doubt she wanted to go out on that note.

I agree with you that Shearer would have wanted to go out on a better note than Her Cardboard Lover. But she was savvy about life on the Metro lot and she knew it was her time. Thalberg had been dead for 6 years and her days as 'The First Lady of the M-G-M Lot' had already ended. Her contract with the studio was up in 1942 and she would have known that the only way Mayer would have kept her was as a character actress. For someone like Shearer, who had been an above-the-title star since the 1920s, death itself would have been preferable to playing mother or even grandmother parts. Shearer was set for life financially and, at 40, probably didn't want to drag herself out of bed any more to get to the studio at a ridiculously early hour. So, she left on her terms rather than having the studio impose terms on her.

4 hours ago, dirac said:

I don't remember MGM as being big on film noir generally although it did produce some.

They weren't because Mayer hated it. The Postman Always Rings Twice was a big critical and commercial success for the studio and featured what was perhaps Lana Turner's greatest performance. But it went against everything Mayer held dear in the 1940s -- star-spangled "support the troops" musicals, Esther Williams 'aquacals', the Andy Hardy series, Ann Sothern's Maisie series . . . 

15 hours ago, dirac said:

They were all approaching, or past, the female star's danger age of 35 (depending on whether you believe Crawford about her birthdate).  With Garbo, like Haines, there were other factors - specifically, the war cut off the European market that made her expensive vehicles financially viable, and her departure was meant to be temporary. Shearer turned down Mrs. Miniver, which might have been a game changer for her, because she did not want to play a mother -- once you got cast as desexualized Mom, it was very hard to get out of such parts.

Specific circumstances aside (the War in Garbo's case and Irving Thalberg's death in Shearer's), I think Garbo and Shearer intuited -- correctly -- that life as a glamorous Metro star would only get harder with each passing year. To sustain the illusion of eternal youth, they would have to rise earlier and earlier in the morning to get to the studio and spend ever increasing time in the makeup chair. This is the exact thing Grace Kelly told Gore Vidal in 1956 when he asked her why she was giving up being a queen of the Metro lot to become a princess of an obscure Mediterranean city-state. She replied that, at age 26, she could still get to the studio at a reasonable hour and not have to spend an eternity in the makeup chair. But Kelly saw the older female stars every morning and knew they had already been there for a considerable amount of time before she got to the studio. (Whatever the movie Mommie Dearest may or may not be, the opening with Joan Crawford getting up at 4:00AM in the morning to get to the studio for hair, makeup and wardrobe is brutally accurate.)

Put me in the camp of those who are mystified by this change. I'm not sure what "problem" they are solving by changing the company's historic name, which has an element of "statewideness" to it even if the company doesn't ever tour the state of Pennsylvania.

On 6/24/2021 at 1:10 PM, dirac said:

A Free Soul was Clark Gable's breakout picture, although intended as a vehicle for Shearer. As discussed earlier in the thread, Gable is supposed to be a villain, but Depression economics and the sexual mores of the time made his gangster character unexpectedly sympathetic to audiences, and it's the most interesting aspect of the picture to modern eyes, apart from Shearer's slinky evening frocks. (And I love the way she undresses Gable with her eyes.)

1931 was a big year for Gable. In addition to A Free Soul, he also appeared with Joan Crawford in Dance, Fools, Dance, Laughing Sinners and Possessed - all of which were big, big hits for Metro. He also appeared in Night Nurse (w/ Barbara Stanwyck) and Susan Lenox (w/ Greta Garbo).

I always think of 1931 as representing a big change in the type of leading men Metro employed. The ascendance of Gable dealt the final blow to the waning popularity of the formerly big silent/early talkie stars John Gilbert, William Haines and Ramon Novarro. They would all leave in succession: Haines in 1932, Gilbert in 1933 and Novarro in 1934. (I realize there were other factors in play, particularly in regard to Haines.)

Interestingly, the Big Three female stars of the 1920s -- Crawford, Garbo and Shearer -- all carried on for quite a bit longer at the studio. Garbo was done in 1941 (although technically under contract until 1943), Shearer left in 1942 and Crawford was forced out in 1943. Respectively, their tenures were 16 years (Garbo), 18 years (Shearer) and 18 years (Crawford).  (Shearer's tenure was actually longer if you give her credit for being under contract to Louis B. Mayer's Metro Productions prior to its becoming part of the cobbled together Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924.)

Norma Shearer's A Free Soul premiered 90 years ago on this day. Shearer was Oscar nominated for Best Actress but lost to fellow M-G-M contract star Marie Dressler for Min and Bill.