miliosr

And then there's MAUDE!!!

I wouldn't get too excited about future dance coverage at the New York Times: http://gawker.com/5221148/nyt-co-sinks-fur...-into-the-abyss

Last Two: [same old twaddle about the Bottom Two not necessarily being the Bottom Two.] Lawrence/Edyta and Ty/Chelsie with Lawrence and Edyta leaving. No big surprises here -- Lawrence was the worst dancer remaining. Barring a miracle, Ty probably goes next week which sets up a very interesting dynamic for the Final Five. That's when we'll find out just how strong the individual fanbases are.

Judges Scores from Week Seven: 01 29pts Melissa/Tony (Argentine tango) 02 28pts Shawn/Mark (cha cha cha) 03 27pts Chuck/Julianne (samba) 03 27pts Gilles/Cheryl (waltz) 05 26pts Lil'Kim/Derek (rumba) 06 24pts Ty/Chelsie (waltz) 07 21pts Lawrence/Edyta (waltz)

I believe I wrote that the continuing neglect of Antony Tudor's Romeo and Juliet was the negative to this particular story not this particular gift. Here's why: The gift may very well free up funding in ABT's budget but I am doubtful in the extreme that any savings will go toward saving the Tudor Romeo and Juliet. If ABT under Kevin McKenzie couldn't muster the resolve to save Tudor's Romeo and Juliet during the sixteen years for which he has been artistic director (but could find the resolve to stage, say, Within You Without You and The Pied Piper and their gaudy Sleeping Beauty and on and on and on), then I doubt he'll find the resolve to save it now -- savings or no savings. That's why this is a negative story -- because the gift unintentionally reveals that ABT would rather go chasing after every major, minor and played-out trend in the dance world than revel in the greatness of its own past.

Could one of our French correspondents tell us what the current numerical distribution is between etoiles (male/female)/premiere danseuses/premiere danseurs? Thanks!

The negative to this particular story lies in the forlorn and unloved grave of Antony Tudor's Romeo and Juliet, which slowly molders into dust for wont of funds and resolve. Since reviving Tudor's Romeo and Juliet would not fall into either the 'World Premiere' category or the 'Company Premiere' category stipulated in the gift, it would appear that reviving the Tudor Romeo and Juliet via these means is an impossibility.

I'm of two minds, dirac, as to why the level of creative talent behind the cameras disappeared. My first thought is that, with the advent of cable television in the 1980s, more and more opportunites became available to talented writers and producers to work on scripted shows; thereby diluting the talent pool that had existed up to that time. Furthermore, the advent of more channels and scripted shows meant that writers could find work which didn't carry the "stigma" of a "women's genre" (sort of like the "stigma" which applied to the "women's pictures" of the 1950s.) (Curiously, as the major networks move further and further away from scripted shows in favor of reality shows, game shows and variety shows, you would think that enterprising agents in New York and Hollywood would try to find work for unemployed and underemployed writing clients with the soaps. Talk about a win-win situation -- the soaps get new blood and the writers get employment!) My second thought is that writing a soap is -- like making a dance -- a very particular thing and only a handful of people have a gift for it. Unfortunately, the soaps appear to be in the same boat the dance world is in. Just as, say, Balanchine's heirs and successors continue to make inferior and watered-down copies of the master's originals, so too do the current crop of soap writers and producers churn out inferior riffs on prior work done by such masters as Agnes Nixon, Doug Marland and Pam Long.

As the Thibault fans despair . . .

The sinking boat the soap operas find themselves in 2009 didn't happen overnight and happened in successive stages (or waves, to stick w/ the nautical analogy.) The first great dent in the audience was the entry of more and more women into the non-homebound workforce during the 1970s and the 1980s. Since the soaps then and now are geared primarily toward women (and female heterosexual romantic fantasy), the gradual transition of women from working in the home during the day to working outside the home during the day dented the size of the audience. The dent wasn't fatal and, actually, even though the erosion was occurring, most soap fans remember the 1970s and the 1980s as the 'Golden Age'. The second great blow was the OJ Simpson trial because all three networks more or less suspended their soaps while the trial was happening in real time on TV. What happened during the Simpson interruption is that a lot of people who were reasonably hardcore viewers (either live or through VCR) found that they could live without the soaps and never returned once the Simpson trial concluded and the soaps resumed. Once again, the audience dropped. The third great hit on the industry occurred during the late-1990s and 00s. With the advent of alternative viewing technologies like YouTube, people no longer needed to watch a show in its entirety. You could watch clips of your favorites on the Internet and never have to bother with the stories and characters you didn't like. Great for fans of individual characters but bad for the shows as a whole because the financial underpinning of the soap industry -- people watching the entire show and, hopefully, watching the commercials that made the show possible -- collapsed. (I freely admit to doing this. I watch As the World Turns for the gay supercouple Luke and Noah. But I only watch the Luke and Noah clips that a dedicated fan posts on YouTube every time they appear. Unfortunately, As the World Turns makes no money off of people like me because the YouTube clips have no commercials.) The first three blows were unavoidable but the fourth and final blow was self-induced. As the great masters and innovators of the soap genre retired or died (Agnes Nixon, the Bells, Doug Marland), the industry couldn't find comparable new talents and, worse still, endlessly recycled the same mediocre talents between shows rather than keep searching for innovative new talent. The last ten years or so have been a sad story of marginally talented writers and producers running the shows into the ground (Example A being The Guiding Light.) I'm to the point now that I think the soaps will go one by one. Even the mighty The Young and the Restless will most likely become financially unfeasible at a certain point. Sad but true . . .

The interesting thing about the character of Iris was that none of her relationships with her four husbands was particularly interesting. What WAS interesting were her relationships with her father (Mac Cory) and her son (Dennis Carrington). Her strange, incestuous love for her father made life miserable for her stepmother Rachel on Another World and her strange, incestuous love for her son made life miserable for her daughter-in-law Paige on the Another World spinoff Texas.

Last Two: [Tom Bergeron very specifically said that the Bottom Two wasn't necessarily a true Bottom Two.] Steve-O/Lacey and Ty/Chelsie with Steve-O and Lacey leaving. It was definitely Steve-O's time to go but I must say that he was a great contestant in terms of embracing the concept of the show and he did his public image a world of good in so doing.

Judges Scores from Week Six: 01 28pts Lil' Kim/Derek (jive) 02 27pts Melissa/Tony (rumba) 03 26pts Gilles/Cheryl (jive) 03 26pts Shawn/Mark (rumba) 05 23pts Chuck/Julianne (rumba) 06 22pts Lawrence/Edyta (jive) 07 18pts Ty/Chelsie (jive) 08 16pts Steve-O/Lacey (rumba)

OK, I've watched the non-Limon parts from beginning to end several times now and, apart from the Bolshoi duo, my reaction was a great, big "Eh!" Most of this just wasn't my thing. Alexandrova and Filin were great in their little excerpts, though. (I know we're supposed to be highminded on this board but Filin's legs are/were insane in high definition.)

Oh Dale -- I loved India von Halkien too! The scenes between her and her stepmother the Baroness von Halkein (a.k.a. Alexandra Spaulding, played by the late, great Beverlee McKinsey) could peel paint. My all-time favorite Alexandra/India scene occurred moments after a jury erroneously found Alexandra's son Lujack guilty of murder (in part because of a frame job by India and Phillip Spaulding.) Alexandra turns to India and (in that quietly deadly way which only Beverlee McKinsey could do) said: "It's too bad someone didn't kill you. That would have been a case of justifiable homicide!" Several great actresses played the part of Alexandra -- Beverlee McKinsey, Marj Dusay (who replaced McKinsey and specialized in replacing other grand soap actresses -- she replaced the late, great Carolyn Jones as Myrna Clegg on Capitol) and (gasp!) Joan Collins. But Beverlee McKinsey was the best Alexandra (as one would expect from the actress who brought the character of Iris Cory Carrington Delaney Bancroft Wheeler on Another World and its spinoff Texas to such memorable life.)

Bottom Two: David/Kym and Lawrence/Edyta with David and Kym leaving. It wasn't David's time to go but, truthfully, he and Kym weren't connecting with each other or the audience so it was only a matter of time before he left. As for Lawrence, all those Giants fans out there saved him so he could dance another day!

Guiding Light's production model (which the show adopted in a last ditch attempt to cut costs and avoid cancellation) was very polarizing among the show's fans. The combination of hand-held cameras, high school theater production-level sets and location shoots in Peapack, NJ divided the fans -- some loved it as the direction soaps needed to go in if they wanted to survive and some hated it because they saw it as a betrayal of all that was special about the soap genre.

Judges Scores from Week Five: 01 29pts Gilles/Cheryl (Paso Doble) 02 26pts Lil' Kim/Derek (Viennese Waltz) 02 26pts Shawn/Mark (Viennese Waltz) 04 25pts Melissa/Tony (Paso Doble) 05 23pts Chuck/Julianne (Viennese Waltz) 06 22pts David/Kym (Viennese Waltz) 07 21pts Ty/Chelsie (Paso Doble) 08 20pts Lawrence/Edyta (Paso Doble) 09 18pts Steve-O/Lacey (Viennese Waltz) Thoughts: 1) Gilles and Cheryl were ON FIRE w/ their paso doble (and Gilles starting out w/ no shirt on certainly didn't cost them any votes.) 2) I never would have thought of Heart's "Barracuda" as paso doble music until I heard it tonight on this show. Oddly enough, it worked! 3) Tomorrow should be an interesting test of fan base strength. From here on in, pretty much everyone has some kind of fan following so I'm curious to see who winds up in the Bottom Two.

Coming very late to this party as I only found out about this DVD recently . . . I'll confine my remarks to Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane, which is where my true interest lies. I was hoping that this version of The Moor's Pavane would function in much the same way that the Paris Opera Ballet's recorded version of George Balanchine's Jewels functions -- as a fascinating alternative to the established "text". On those (perhaps unreasonable) terms, I would say that the "Prague" Moor's Pavane falls short. (Some of the fault lies with the performance and some of the fault [as others have noted] lies with the filming.) In the event, Sarah Stackhouse, who danced with Limon's company while he was alive and who is now a principal stager of Limon's works (if not the principal stager), set the work on the four dancers -- Charles Jude, Jean Jacques Herment, Stephanie Roublout and Viviana Franciosi. So, to the extent there are deficiencies with the performance, it cannot be said that they stem from a false or inaccurate source (like the various Soviet versions floating around the Internet.) To my eyes, the filming flaws are more severe than the performance flaws but the performance flaws are still very real. The problem I see with this Moor's Pavane is that there is no technical or dramatic unity among the performers. In terms of mastering the technique (or at least faking it with confidence), the dancers are all over the map -- from the very good (Desdemona -- Roublout?) to the not-at-all (Iago -- Herment). (Although, to Herment's credit, he busts out a marvelous suspension at one point before plunging to the floor.) So, the end result is a real mish-mash of Limon technique and ballet technique. The differing dramatic approaches of the four dancers compound this problem. Herment, Roublout and Franciosi affect a more naturalistic, post-Method "acting" style while Jude unveils a style which would be right at home in a silent movie from the 1920s. (The overabundance of mascara around his eyes doesn't make the situation any better.) But, as another poster noted, what looks more than a little ridiculous in close-up, may have worked like a charm in the vast space of the hall. In other words, Jude's postmodern Theda Bara theatrics may have been more suitable on the night and may have registered better with the audience than those of his more restrained colleagues. All that being said, I found the filming (especially the editing) to be a more significant problem. The filming of the pavane starts out well enough (the Pauline Lawrence costumes look fantastic in digital) but then the editing starts to work against the performance in terms of focusing on the wrong things during the pavane. This results in an absolute scandal when it comes time for Emilia's solo. This is one of the best parts of The Moor's Pavane, as the mentally fragile Emilia character celebrates her "triumph" of stealing the handkerchief from Desdemona. But what we end up seeing for most of Emilia's dance are close-ups of the other three characters and, so, the importance of Emilia's actions to the forward flow of the storyline is lost. There are other blunders in this vein; the most egregious being the manner in which the film crew presents Othello's strangulation of his wife. This is a marvelous conceit of Limon's as the strangulation remains unseen to many in the audience because Iago and his wife move in front of the other two and hide the murder with the enormous folds of Emilia's dress. (Limon rightly realized that what you think is happening is often more horrific than what you actually see.) They then separate and there is a stunning "curtain-like" effect which reveals the tragedy for all to see. Unfortunately, the footage used captures Iago and Emilia from a side angle so that the murder is obvious all along and the curtain-like effect is completely lost. All in all, I would give this Moor's Pavane a mild thumbs up. (I actually liked it more than I'm conveying but right now the flaws are overwhelming the considerable merits.) Still, the definitive ballet version of The Moor's Pavane is still waiting to be filmed . . .

CBS has cancelled The Guiding Light after 72 years on the air (radio, then television.) Sad to see it go (as it was wonderful during the Pam Long-era during the 1980s and early 1990s) but not surprised. The show has been on a creative decline since the early 1990s when the producers/writers killed off the tentpole character Maureen Bauer. The show barely captures 2 million viewers now. Only seven daytime soaps remain -- three on CBS (The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, As the World Turns), three on ABC (All My Children, One Life To Live, General Hospital) and one on NBC (Days Of Our Lives). My suspicion is that the rest of the shows will go one-by-one in the next decade until none are left. Farewell Reva Shayne -- I'll miss you!

And speaking of the homogenization of the international repertory: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/dan...1&ref=dance http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/arts/dan...1&ref=dance (Although, in Hubbe's defense, he is bringing in out-of-left-field choices like Ashton's Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan + Limon's The Unsung + new commissions in 2009-10.)

Bottom Three: Holly/Dmitry, Steve-O/Lacey and Steve/Karina w/ Holly/Dmitry and Steve/Karina leaving. Steve absolutely deserved to go. Regarding Holly vs. Steve-O, either one would have been a justified boot so I can't say Holly's elimination was a travesty. It was her time.

What I was objecting to was the snooty tone -- "Oh, those poor unfortunates stuck in their nostalgia and unable to recognize the way forward!" Accusing past audiences of nostalgia makes me grit my teeth when here he is writing about a work that's 59 years old. Is there really nothing more current for him to write about in his column? If the answer is no, then I have to ask myself whether the classical ballet has a creative future if all it can do is endlessly recycle the warhorses from the 19th century and the Balanchine repertory from the 20th century. (I'm overexaggerating to make a point but the point remains.) And as for the notion that Balanchine's version "speaks" to modern audiences more than other versions, that would probably come as "news" to a lot of people around the world.

I freely admit, carbro, that Season Eight is turning into a pleasant surprise. After several subpar seasons (Six and Seven), I was at a low ebb with the show and the casting for this season didn't fill me with hope. But I am glad I tuned in out of habit the first few weeks because I'm really enjoying many of the celebrities -- Gilles, Melissa, Shawn, Lil' Kim, Ty and others. This is definitely shaping up to be the best season since Mel B's season.

Judges Scores from Week 4: 01 30pts Gilles/Cheryl (Argentine Tango) 02 29pts Melissa/Tony (Lindy Hop) 03 27pts Lil' Kim/Derek (Argentine Tango) 04 25pts Shawn/Mark (Lindy Hop) 04 25pts Ty/Chelsie (Lindy Hop) 06 22pts David/Kym (Lindy Hop) 06 22pts Chuck/Julianne (Lindy Hop) 08 19pts Lawrence/Edyta (Argentine Tango) 09 16pts Holly/Dmitry (Argentine Tango) 10 15pts Steve-O/Lacey (Lindy Hop) 11 12pts Steve/Karina (Argentine Tango) Thoughts: Gilles and Cheryl's Argentine Tango killed (and it was danced to the tango from Mr. and Mrs. Smith!) Agreed w/ the judges about Shawn and Mark's Lindy Hop. Too many tricks and at times it looked more like a cheerleading routine than a Lindy Hop. I know what Carrie Ann was trying to say when she said Shawn's dancing was "heavy" but I wish she had used a word other than "heavy". Double elimination tomorrow night!