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Amy Reusch

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Everything posted by Amy Reusch

  1. It pretty much killed any chance of a Chicago ballet company being viable the decades the Tribune's Nut was running... but it did introduce a great many young people to the art form. I'm not sure how much they were touched (the space was cavernous), but some must have been. How many performances of Nutcracker does the Joffrey do in Chicago?
  2. The sets were too big to be used anywhere else save maybe Radio City Music Hall. Glad the students are enjoying the costumes. It was a gorgeous production.
  3. I think only the gun firing became too expensive an insurance item... I believe the rest remains intact.
  4. Ballet West's percussionist no longer fires blanks during the battle scene ...
  5. So looking forward to seeing Royes Fernandez dance something other than that Sylphides with the over-the-top sleeves...
  6. I thought the beehive motif a little strange (though beautiful... and when the set burst into bloom it was quite astonishing) but I believe there was historical precedence... will have to hunt.... here it is... a line from wikipedia's entry on Nutcracker:
  7. Peterson's production had phenomenal costumes & sets... truly splendid. I believe the University of Hartford's Hartt Conservatory got them... they had a joint program with Hartford Ballet and subsumed the school under the company's collapse.
  8. Well, to be fair, Chicago's world fair left a huge imprint on the city... And gosh,the other option of a gangster themed Nutcracker... Not sure where that would go... Rats, sure, but the Party?
  9. Not recent at all, but if we're talking garage sales, what happened to the costumes for Ruth Page's Nutcracker?
  10. So much for those beautiful Waltz of the Flowers costumes... Cannot find a good image, but I remember the articles when they were reconstructing them... http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/29/news/ct-ae-joffrey-nutcracker-20111129-51
  11. That would be more than wonderful!
  12. Kind of you to distill... I'm afraid I stripmined... Was there any discussion of politcal correctness? Some conversation I heard in the room yesterday implied that it still was not welcome to discuss Lifar's situation in France, even after all this time.
  13. I managed to make it in for the Friday afternoon presentation... what a treat.... So wonderful that the very personable Garafola put this together. The room was small and packed cheek-by-jowel with ballet's intelligentsia... it almost seemed like a class reunion for a generation of critics/dance historians/balletomanes.... (I felt a bit like a representative of the perhaps more ignorant general public.) If only my memory were as sharp as the rest of the assembled, I could share more interesting tidbits with you... Best would be for you to have been there... Meanwhlie, I'm afraid I can only offer a stream of consciousness from my notes... (and ipads though handy, virtual keyboards are not easy to type on) Bits I managed to note: Please, those who were there and have sharper memories, please correct the errors I surely include below... I probably have half of it wrong: Kisselgoff mentioned that Anna Sokolow and Pauline Koner had both been to Russia in the early days and come back fascinated and loving ballet... without thinking, as a young interviewer, Kisselgoff asked Sokolow why she hadn't gone into ballet then instead of modern, and then remembered.. there were no ballet companies in America for Sokolow or Koner to join in the late 20s early 30s, only some dancers attached to opera companies. I had never thought it through... had never thought of the environment for those early modern dance troupes in this way. I always thought they were in reaction to "decorative/pretty/empty" ballet, but it never occurred to me that thought they were the ONLY American dance companies... that a whole generations of dancers had grown up without ever seeing a Nutcracker. Kisselgoff also mentioned that the Russians had gone to Pauline Koner as a source for latin american character dances (if I've got this right... maybe I don't). The Red Poppy was interesting in it's evolution... "more or less the same, except the opposite" was the running theme... with a certain craziness.... For instance, it was pointed out that they were using a symbol of imperialist oppression (The Poppy - opium) as a symbol of communist revolutionary spirit... and that there were mistranslations of the main character's name which made things complicated in later productions. Perhaps they were trying to co-op the symbolism and repurpose it for the soviet cause, but mostly it seemed confused... There were other other substitutions of symbolic opposites (British Imperialist Battleship vs. Soviet Steamer). Dancing flowers were not seen as suitable for the new soviet art form... "Fantasy is more dull than Reality..." but the Red Poppy did not seem to manage that with it's familiar fantasy, dreams and exoticism treatment. They were called out for glamorizing opium. One can't have escapism and passing on the revolution at the same time. I have lost track between the early Soviet Ballets ... was the Red Poppy the result of a ballet libretto competition or was that The Golden Age or The Bolt or The Partisans? 3 choreographers, one for each act including the surprise inclusion of the young Yacobson (who only discovered ballet at the age of 17?)... I believe this was The Golden Age... A work could be very popular in the theater with the public, receiving many repeat performances, but Pravda's ideologues (who were soon under considerable stress to give the appropriate interpretation in Stalin's estimation) would officially report it to be a flop. Then it would not be presented again and the official history would record it to have been a flop. It was not long before the creative artists and performers were terrified to make mistakes and ballets had be approved by many different groups.. they would be forced to undergo many revisions in plot and decor... "Dance for Dance's Sake" was deemed so subversive that one had to create a scenario to disguise it, and Yacobson would create a ballet about a ballet class in order to show choreography as "exercises" so that he would not fall afoul of the anti-formalists and be considered to be promoting the aesthetic of the decadent west. We were shown an interesting clip of Ulanova's 1960s reconstruction of something (mentioned above by Natalia as the Sporting Pas de Cinq) she danced in The Golden Age. It was interesting to see the photo of the young Ulanova, with such a supple back. The gymnastics were interesting... the view of the dancers not as much including gymnastics feats as choreography as presenting gymnasts and atheletes as representatives of the ideal human physical form... very creative with swimming imagery, dancers at times supporting other dancers as if they were the water the dancer was swimming above, or creating the bar for another dancer's high jump... more a mix of physical theater with ballet than I would have imagined... "The Bolt" that was the downfall of Shostakovich & Lopukhov, both of whom thought they had a big hit on their hands... (but would Stalin have approved of anything mentioning the idea of a saboteur even if the soviets were eventually triumphant?). The footage of the Ratmansky recreation (without using the original costume designs) looked interesting at first. I'm afraid that the later Ratmansky footage both of Bolt and of Flames of Paris were disappointing, but perhaps because of the camera. There seemed to be "a lot going on" that the camera tried to catch with close-ups but this disorientation just kept it from coming together. I could not tell if the theater experience were better, but I expect it was. There were many in the room that knew what spoken words of the ballet meant, but English subtitles were not included on the footage, so it was lost on me. The sound speakers for the presentation were not technologically very kind to the musicians. It was interesting to see, but I'm glad I did not make the trip in just for that. A friend who had been to the Mihailovsky "Flames" presentation last Fall here in NYC tells me it was a different version, by a Messerer and very successful. I would like to see both. With Osipova & Vasiliev in both, it was easy to forget there were two different productions of Flames out there. One of the new soviet ballets depicted with it's "portrayal of the loneliness of the decaying bourgeoisie" ... with gloom swept away by the enthusiasm of the triumphant young partisans (perhaps this was "The Partisans"?). There was the humorous account of the ballerina (Anissimova?) so carried away with her presentation of this revolution fervor that she would cry "after me!" to the other dancers in the wings as she dashed on stage... I was touched by the idealism of the era... in the beginning they really thought they were creating a new era of art, and trying to figure out what that should be... I believe there was a parallel idealism/enthusiasm in dance in America as well, with the early modern dance choreographers and the attempts to create an "American" ballet... What was it about the 30s that would have created this idealism? Clinging to idealism in an era of desperation? Idealism after the fashionable decadence of the 20s? There was a lot of pressure for "monumental" in the new art forms... so easily brought to mind by soviet realism in visual art, but perhaps this was exemplified by Yacobson's gymnasts in The Golden Age... ? The Golden Age -- a ballet about a soccer team!... I believe Janice Ross said it was set place in "FasciLandia". I believe that Ross said that although it was "obedient to soviet ideals" as laid out in the libretto competition, there were plenty of ... not sure this is the right phrase... but inside jokes... that could be seen as the opposite of "obedient"... I gather it was humorously poking fun at itself at the same time as it was promoting the cause.... sardonic even as it was altruistic? Tim Scholl's presentation was entertaining too. I have managed to confuse the material he presented with that presented by Christina Ezrahi. He touched on the incongruity of trying to collect folk dance never intended for the proscenium stage and then re-shaping it for theatrical standards for performance by classically trained dancers and musicians to be then shown back to the nations... an interesting mirror to present to them.... some of these cultures where women were never to dance in public! And then, imagine, Stalin wanted this so he could present this theatrical image of your culture to other nations as part of the great brotherhood of nations of the USSR.... Who was it who said in their review "No Folk ever danced like this!"? Was it Kisselgoff talking about John Martin's review? There was talk about how in one region the dances for men were all done in duple meter while the dances for women were all in triple meter, and how the instrucments the music was performed on could not/would not be tuned to western standards... and how this complicated staging things by classically trained musicians... (I wonder how this would parallel Bartok's work) After the complaints that the dances were inaccurate representations of the culture, it got so that the character dances collected and reconstructed would have to be approved by representatives of the cultures depicted... and then after doing all of that for a ballet, some committee might then decide to complete change the scenario on you immediately after the premiere... It was, however, intended for export rather than for the regions it was derived from... a lot of creativity of hte soviet choreographers must have been exhausted trying to keep up with the censors's demands to change scenes and drop sections of the choreography... Several people mentioned wondering what these creative individuals might have presented us with had they had Balanchine's freedom, instead of struggling to produce under soviet censorship, at time afraid not just for their careers but for their lives if they made the "wrong" aesthetic choice... The first Azerbaijani ballerina's father threatened to kill her if she continued her dance studies. In the end, they had to marry her to the company's artistic director to give the appearance of propriety! Was it in Azerbaijani that women watched the first performances of the dance company from behind fabric with holes in it? There was mention of the parallels between Stalin & Peter the Great's importation/imposition of western culture to the caucuses... something about the czar's balls being a way to force the women to socialize in the western norm (I'm guessing this was something like...who could deny the czar's command to appear at a ball?) Someone in the audience asked how patronage defined the direction the new soviet ballet went... and one answer (have I got this wrong?) was that Stalin liked certain Georgian club dancers and so that decided a particular line of ballets. There were such serious constraints on what could be presented on the "Academic stage" (I assume this meant the Bolshoi stage?) that these character dance companies provided a lot of freedom for experimentation choreographically. The women dancing in many of the character dances presented in the muslim regions were not of that ethnic group but rather frequently jewish or western... not sure exactly what was said here, but I'd be interested to hear more. The talk about the Dekades (sp?) the 10 day festivals... and how the companies would be met a the train station by a marching band and children bearing flowers (this reminds of RAtmansky's setting for Bright Stream). and how there would be an awards session and everyone would be given a Medal ... followed by "however..." and a perhaps Simon-Cowell-like commentary would be given about where there was room for improvement... Oil Production was the theme of one ballet... There was mention that of a certain generation of soviet citizens, those who grew up with the early Dekadas, about how much they enjoyed them. But by the childhood of Discussant Irina Klyagin of the Harvard archive collection, these had been perhaps replaced with the International Congresses and the folk presentations seemed dull and the young people rather dreaded them. (I really may be mis-presenting her comments... please correct, Natalia, if you remember more clearly). There seemed to be a lot of effort to refer to the October Revolution as the Coup d'Etat/October Revolution... this must be the current approve consideration of the event? =============== Please forgive my errors, I am not an academic and it has been decades since I needed to take responsible notes on a lecture.
  14. It is sort of different when the music existed long before the choreography and when the music was specifically written for certain choreography. Nutcracker gets re-worked constantly... But they usually keep to the libretto more or less...
  15. I wonder how people felt watching the alternate version of Prodigal Son... it must have been worse what with having same setting and costumes!
  16. I cannot erase the images of De Mille's Rodeo as I try to absorb the Peck piece... it gets in the way of my appreciating it. I would have a much easier time seeing the Peck work on it's own terms if I had never seen DeMille's.... my mind did keep interrupting with 'but.. but... but..." and it is distracting.
  17. I meant your repertory listing, not my index, but thanks! A budget filter certainly helps and I'm glad to see Dance/USA providing this service.
  18. I know a little of what you are up against... having started the first index of Dance websites [performed not social] as a service to the community at a time when most of us discussing ballet on the internet had not yet seen a webpage... By the time Google was invented, keeping up was already out of reach... But if it could be done, how exciting!!! Even if it were only put up once, it would be fascinating!
  19. Whiteside seems a good choice!
  20. Looks like Alabama Ballet did it 2014. http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/04/cowhands_wranglers_and_a_hoe-d.html and it sounds like it ws well recieved but I imagine the music would not have been live. I can see San Franciso Ballet making a good job of it. Looks like 2005/6 was the last time they did it? I'm happy to see it is on ABT rep this Spring. I can't use the Ballet Alert quote feature on my older iPad but here is the blurb: Xiomara Reyes and David Hallberg will lead the season's first performance of Agnes de Mille's Rodeo on Tuesday, May 12. Rodeo, featuring music by Aaron Copland and scenery by Oliver Smith, was first presented by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 16, 1942, with Agnes de Mille as the Cowgirl, Frederic Franklin as the Champion Roper and Casimir Kokitch as the Head Wrangler. Rodeo was first performed by Ballet Theatre in Wiesbaden, Germany on August 14, 1950. A new production, featuring sets by Oliver Smith and costumes by Santo Loquasto, was given its Revival Premiere in 1989 in St. Louis, Missouri. Rodeo will be staged for ABT by Paul Sutherland. There is this interview with the ever charming Frederic Franklin on ABT's site anout the creation of the work: http://www.abt.org/contactus/enews/rodeo.asp Maybe companies are waiting for the 75th birthday of the piece in 2017 when there would likely be a helpful wave of PR. Perhaps the score alone will ensure interest in the choreography will survive at least another hundred years... Music has an easier longevity than choreography. Had the choreography been great and the music mediocre, survival would be more difficult.
  21. I'm not sure ABT has the wherewithal talent-wise to stage this anymore... It almost might it better on the Graham or Ailey company! I wonder if Ratmansky could stage Americana... Could Joffrey pull it off? Not the Royal, not the POB,... Russians? Georgians? The Het? Maybe a Latin American company?-- but why would they? I guess we think nothing of staging Petrushka or Firebird, but the opposite, a Russian company staging cowboys? It is a cunnundrum....
  22. Would you post that data once youmwebcrawled it together? I'd be interested to see it!
  23. My wondering about the DeMille legacy was less about copyright and more about whether her oeuvre was still being encouraged... It is not enough to prserve a work by enforcing copyright...if the work is not performed regularly it ceases to be on the dance world's radar and slowly is done less & less... Until no one bothers to do it because they just don't think of it... I thought Baryshnikov was spot on to attempt to preserve works by performing them...(am thinking of Judson).
  24. I believe the recording of Rodeo on film/bideo and filing it with the Library of Congress counted towards copyrighting... Had it not been recorded, there would have een more trouble. There are works of Oris Humphrey's that were recorded fter her death that are copyrighted to her son, I believe...
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