Amy Reusch

Villella was taped coaching Rubies & Tarantella ... I believe it's still in the pipeline...

http://balanchine.org/balanchine/index.html

Wasn't "Meditation" one of the few, if the only, ballet to which Balanchine willed the rights to Farrell? I don't know whether she turned the rights over to the Balanchine Foundation, as while most people did, not everyone did.

I believe you mean the Trust rather than the Foundation. It gets confusing, but it's the Trust that oversees the rights to ballets while the Foundation.. hmm... their mission statement from the website now looks pretty broad... I thought they were a non-profit to support the quality of the Balanchine legacy, but they don't license the ballets, even if they work to keep the quality up, they don't have a say in who gets and who doesn't get the ballets... I believe...

Here's the Trust's website: http://www.balanchine.com/

Balanchine.org = Foundation

Balanchine.com = Trust

Now that's a tour I'd like to see "Dictators of the Dance"! (oops... sorry, it's not Labor Day yet here in the States, so I imagine it's still Silly Season).

I love the mind in the feet... it's what I think of Nina Ananiashvili's dancing...

If you find out, please post here... I'd love to see her dance live...

Wow! Some awesome photos there...

( look at this one of Cynthia Gregory: http://www.willoughbyphotos.com/gallery2/m...HR_+53.jpg.html )

Add another one who is delighted to Yumelia is dancing for the Joffrey! Bravo Joffrey, Brava Yumelia!

If her repertoire included Aurora, wouldn't that qualify her as a ballerina? (Honest question).

Another Thank You... the photos were fascinating and unlike others I had seen of St. Denis, and I would never have come across them not being in the habit of researching St. Denis. One of the reasons I adore Ballettalk is being exposed to work like yours.

I'm very sorry to hear this... he was kind of a father figure for ballet in Chicago.. continuing Ruth Page's legacy running the huge Chicago Tribune Nutcracker. A great loss for Chicago.

Carriage, deportment and swishing fabric don't make a dancer or dance technique, nor do they make a lasting body of work.

Are we talking about dance or cheap sentiment here?

I think that would depend on the focus. Dance doesn't have to be in a leotard to be a valid piece of art, and yes there is technique involved in fabric manipulation.

One of the oddest surprises for me was to hear that when St. Denis toured the Far East with her dancers was that she was very successful there. I thought that with the real thing available, the public would have shied away from a Western take on it... but have been informed that at the time very few of the general population actually got to see the temple dancers and indian classical dancers, and they were delighted to be entertained by St. Denis.

Have to run before finishing this thought...

However, this specifically could only be in relation to Graham & Humphrey/Weidman who were the only true dance innovators to have studied with Denishawn. Humphrey's aesthetic & body of work is so unrelated to ethnicity specifically eastern ethnicity that one could argue that if anything the only way St Denis influenced Humphrey was to run as far away as possible from St Denis and everything she stood for.

I think St. Denis taught Humphrey a great deal about the manipulation of fabric as an element of the dance... and there are several Humphrey works that show this influence: Air for the G String, Grieg Concerto (which I regularly mix up with With My Red Fires), Valse Caprice?, Quasi Waltz, and of course Soaring... You see no Denishawn influence? Noy orientalism but fabric manipulation. Remember, St. Denis was originally a skirt dancer. Also, I suspect St. Denis taught them a great deal about how to bear themselves elegantly... I think this was what the Hollywood starlets were sent to her to learn... carriage.

I think the director is always leading the audience. When they're good, you don't realize you're being lead... it's usually when they make mistakes that you notice someone is choosing camera shots. Usually the problem is simple ignorance, it's not frequently possible for the director & operators to have a strong knowlege of shooting dance, or if they do a lot of archival dance work to have much practice (with trial & error) of catching a particular piece in a particular theater with several cameras. Budgets do exist after all. There's a degree of improvisation often in the camerawork, and sometimes it's on... and sometimes it's off... just as with all improvisation situations... Also, it's quite possible for a director to notice something and then try too hard to "set it off" for the viewer, just as it is possible for a dancer to do the same thing with a piece of choreography by "over dancing" it.

Another thing is, what looks good on one medium (say a small black & white viewfinder) might not register the same way on a large color screen... I think HD must be tremendously freeing for videographers... both in the possible closeness of the wide shot, and in the level of detail that is retained. (With that detail is often a great deal of nuance.)

I had thought I'd seen a bit of her old dancing on that video, but must not be, because I don't remember her as big blonde woman.

I believe that St. Denis sported snowy white hair when she was older... perhaps you are misreading "white" as "blonde"? The costume moves beautifully, it seems she was always very careful with the way her costumes moved... (I'm not really on a costume kick, though it's beginning to sound like it...)

However, Horst had a deep aversion to modern music, especially Stravinsky, and he held the belief that dance and music were inextricably linked - he was highly censorious of the moderns who sprang up in the 50s of modernism in general. To claim rather breezily and whistfully that his influence is seen througout the current dance world is stretching it a bit - because one thing that modern dance had to do to grow up is get beyond the belief that a step of dance equals a beat of music.

Okay... I guess what I'm trying to say is my understanding was that Horst started out our mothers of modern dance on a path of analyzing choreography as if it were simple music theory; started them down the pathway of considering the underlying structure of choreography. That Cunningham, etc. totally rejected tying steps to music doesn't mean he totally rejected structure. I believe he actually had to involve a lot of structure to support his chance operations. To say that because someone took the theory several steps further or even in a different direction is not to say that artist was on a totally different non-intersecting path...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Horst

The internet still makes my jaw drop... thanks for the lovely link. Reminds me of how St. Denis tried to leave her costumes to UCLA (I think I have this story right, but my memory is always suspect... I heard it from Karoun Tootikian, but again my memory is like that old party game "telephone")... she left her costumes to the dance department at UCLA, but years later Karoun came in and discovered them thrown all over the floor of the girl's locker room and felt they were not being respected (as is possibly imaginable, UCLA having gone past St. Denis in the direction of world dance) ... and perhaps pulled the archive? Not sure where it now resides, but surely the fibers must be beginning to fail? Silk is strong, but... ? If moderators have to delete this as not official press release info, please leave in my question: Where are the St. Denis costumes now?

I wish someone knowledgeable here would talk more about the influence St. Denis' school, and in particular, Louis Horst's influence. I do see traces of St. Denis in Graham & Humphrey, though I believe they took elements of her decorative style and used it almost as costuming on a movement vocabulary imbued with deeper meaning and motivation. Interestingly enough the next generation revolted against that deeper meaning but went on to explore choreographic structure further... so, if St. Denis and her music visualization exercises with her music director Louis Horst teaching dance composition could be seen as a catalyst, you could trace this approach to dance down through to today's choreographers... even contemporary ballet choreographers.... not that they use her choreographic style by any means (and I do think she was best at creating vehicles for her personal performance mystique than at creating choreographic works that survived her retirement), but by employing Horst she started the first serious study of dance composition in this country... the vestiges of which are probably still taught in university dance departments around the world.

4mrdncr, we must all obey our muse, but I disagree about the diagonal shots... I find they distort the choreography (unless the choreographer tends not to think proscenium, which is indeed sometimes the case) and use them only when I want to use a wide shot but it's too wide... or would like to show the relationship between two dancers splitting the stage. They're nice for shooting counterpoint. (I must however offer the disclaimer that having retired before the advent of HDTV I don't know what works best on the wide aspect ratio.) I usually prefer a single central camera using mobile framing to direct attention to the disorientation of side angle cameras point-of-view jumping the audience to different seats in the theater. BUT, if we're talking shooting dance designed for filming rather than for the stage, then yes... please... diagonal shots, with close-up in foreground and full view in background. My biggest complaint about most dance filming is that the directors rarely to look at the choreography, but only at the dancers. If one looks at the choreography, sometimes a close-up is called for, sometimes a wide shot, sometimes a medium close-up, etc... shooting blind to the choreographic intent gets boring to watch after a certain number of minutes...

For me, the Septet imagery was evocative of Matisse's Dance @ MoMA.... I remember as a young bunhead seeing a photo of Septet in Dance Magazine and thinking perhaps modern dance had something to it after all... (young idiot!)... how we pry the brain out of it's habits...

'

dance is movement in time and space,'

Perhaps tellingly, the other Prodigal Son with the exact same costumes and exact same music and perhaps the same dancers (?) did not do as well.... ?

Your are correct to say that David Lichine's version of The Prodigal Son " did not do so well" as the Balanchine version, but that does not mean that it was not a successful work.

It was well received by critics on three continents. I would absolutely concede that he did not have the talent of Balanchine, but then, he didn't have that group of highly influential good old Harvard boys behind him as Balanchine did to cushion his journey.

You are absolutely right... I spoke without having seen the piece and based my judgement on the survival of Balanchine's. I stand corrected.

Myrtha in Prodigal Son with one of Madge's scarves?

... and, ahem.. it's nowhere near warm enough to be August yet.

Unless a person who was a principal elsewhere has a better chance at faster ascension to ABT solosit and then ABT principal, it wouldn't very generally seem like a good trade-off for "big fish-little pond to little fish-big pond" because of the limitations that age can impose on a person. If a person has to make his or her way through the ABT ranks like normal, by the time he or she has made principal a second time (if ever), a number of years will have been utilized.

Yes, when it happens, I always wonder what has been said to entice the move... not to mention that it must be hard to get back into the corps mindset... It would make more sense to move to a different company of the same level, wouldn't it? Perhaps ballet is such a small world that it is difficult to move to another company? Perhaps it is easier to go to another country?

When I looked up Ilyin's bio, I noticed that he had once been a principal at the Miami City Ballet. Ilyin joined ABT as a corps member in 2008. I wondered to myself why a former principal would join another company (even the ABT) as a corps member? I wonder if there is some background on that.

It's not the first time this has happened, that a principal elsewhere joins ABT's corps. I think the hope is that they will rise up through ABT and get to perform beyond their old regional area. Also, I don't know if this plays into it much, but principals don't get to dance as much....

I don't know if this is noted elsewhere, but there's a nice slideshow of the Australian Ballet's tribute (Les Sylphides, Petrushka & a new Firebird) http://www.australianballet.com.au/main.taf?p=4,1,1,1,12

I'm willing to say that Fokine had more influence on the first half of the 20th century, but surely Balanchine had more influence on the 2nd half. Would we have had Forsythe without Balanchine? Now whether his influence will be significant in the 21st century, I'm not sure ballet is still moving in the same direction. Who are Ashton's descendents? Wheeldon? Moving Pictures?

You say, "The ballets he composed for were the results of many artists collaborating under the direction of Diaghilev. Who knows....another composer may have done as well!" Balanchine choreographed nine ballets for Diaghlev and to music by seven different composers. Of those ballets, as far as I know, only Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete and Prokofiev's Le Fils Prodigue have survived.

Perhaps tellingly, the other Prodigal Son with the exact same costumes and exact same music and perhaps the same dancers (?) did not do as well.... ?

Thank you Ilya, I was truly at a loss at the walking-without-wings point... I was not seated close and was off on the side, which may have interfered with my understanding of what was happening. I guess fluttering the hands would be like an attempt to fly. Also, the lighting probably looked very different from where I sat, certainly Airs was not too dim... but I know from times of watching the same producton (not this one) from several different seats in the house, that light bounces back at the audience very differently depending on the angle one sits from the stage, so won't disagree with those who perhaps sat in better seats.

When Effie arrives, "Gurn greets the bride first.... Gurn can hardly control himself, he is so moved by her loveliness, meekly he presents her with a rare bird he killed yesterday while hunting. Effie accepts the gift...." Did this happen in the ABT production?

I have a poor memory, but, I remember thinking Gurn was doing a much better job as suitor of Effie, and wondered why James didn't even notice she had entered the room... it didn't seem like he was being drawn away from his preoccupying thoughts of the sylph, but that he was simply unaware, which was weird considering the commotion of her entrance.

Also, the mother seemed such a bit part, I didn't understand why she was given such a large distinction in the bows... perhaps the part is made more of in other productions?

One other thing I remember being different... the placement of the chair by the fire and the disappearing under the scarf... I remember the lighting singling out James & the fire more in the opening, and almost that the chair was more center.. not necesarily center stage, but not so far to stage right (perhaps this perception was influenced by my obscured view from hosue left?). The way Cornejo tautly stretched the shawl over the chair was very suspicious. I remember it being much more surprising that the sylph wasn't there when the shawl was snatched away... that we fully expected her to be revealed at that moment (and I don't think this was just because I was a child at the time). I notice Effie make something of there being the scarf on the chair under the shawl, but it didn't really make strong theatrical sense. I'm wondering if in the earlier production, one "saw" a body under the folds of the shawl, which when the shawl was snatched away was revealed to be the scarf James had presented Effie earlier?

Also, one moment amongst the sylphs struck me as awkward... where the two are dancing with the corps, but perhaps each principal on quarter mark, when it finishes, they come together again, but there's this kind of awkward moment when she sort of scoots back over to him so they both can be center... it was like the choreographer had two images mind and never quite figured out how to make the transition between the two... felt very disjunct and sheepish.

A question for anyone who remembers the 1970s ABT setting... were there huge spiderwebs stretched across the stage? There was a nice dark spiderweb hard set in this current production, but I remember something white and silk-ish... (or am I remembering some other production?). My childhood memories were that Madge's world was much more haunting ...

Thank you. Jared Matthews and Gemma Bond are certainly names worth remembering.