Amy Reusch

... must... not... say ... it... must not...

Sure that was Aeschylus? We're talking the bald incident, no?

I was at the Wadsworth today to meet some friends and watch the movie Ballets Russes again. I enjoyed it just as much as the first time, but for different parts (must have been lost in thought first time around, I guess). They did a wonderful job on the exhibit this time. I went the last two times they've had some of their archive out, and it's really nicely done this year. They've gone to the trouble of projecting reconstructions of the ballets on the walls of the galleries showing costumes & designs... it makes the experience more accessible to the general public, I think (if you have no clue of the Ballets Russes oevre, you're not as in awe perhaps of seeing the original designs). I was surprised not to see their original Bakst of Nijinski as the Faun... perhaps this is on loan to Boston?? Still very worth coming to see. The designs are just so sumptuous. I wonder if the lessor role costumes were more likely to survive as perhaps the dancers wearing them sweated less? Some of the costumes look so hot, it's hard to imagine wearing them under stage lights... perhaps lighting was less intense in the old days?

an art developed two hundred years ago to delineate the figures and steps of dances

... sounds more like a notator than what we now think of as a choreographer...

Thanks, rg, that's very enlightening... And in answer to the much valued photographer: various & sundry...

It's interesting how a ballet becomes sort of a living entity on it's own... here is Paquita.. no longer much attached to it's creator and yet attached to it's earlier selves all the same... ballet as virus.... ideas morphing through generations... surviving almost by morphing... At what point do they just give up and die off? When no one remembers the good ones? Do they shed their original choreography like old skin? Or did they die long ago and we now value the ghost more than we would have the original?

I only recently noticed how early in Petipa's career he staged Paquita. Whenever I see Paquita, I find myself thinking it looks like so much fun to dance, but very much like classroom exercises... (perhaps teachers just like to incorporate them and the music into class?).. so I'm not surprised that he would have made this while his own performing career was still current or not far gone... it seems like something a dancer would enjoy making... perhaps I'm wrong in this, but I sense that it's is perhaps more fun for less experienced dancers to tackle than say the Sleeping Beauty choreography...

From Wikipedia, it seems that Paquita is the earliest of his work that is still performed... but is it is a re-staging of Mazillier? Or is what we think of as Paquita nothing to do with Mazillier but rather the new version with new music Petipa made in 1881?

I'd like to mentally tie the choreography to Petipa's youth... but I can't, right?

Just wondering...

I'm not so sure this is PA Ballet's first Forsythe... I saw archival footage years ago of Lisa Sundstrom dancing Step Text before 1990... I'm pretty sure she was performing it for PA Ballet, but I'm not positive... I really don't remember hearing it was for another company though....

Didn't he start with Kansas City Ballet? Or was it Missouri State Ballet then? I thought he started with somewhat smaller companies... and Ailey wasn't so big when he saved it as it is now... artistically, perhaps, but budget wise, surely not...

The money situation with the New York State Theater being renamed is understandable, but so are the feelings of being sold out... "state theater" sounds much more populist; named after a person who after all didn't found it but seems to have "bought" it, well... I don't know... shouldn't we all have known of Mr. Koch for years & years & years before the theater was named in his honor? If he goes broke too, perhaps they can change the name back some day...like the Mariinski/Kirov situation.... For how long was "in perpetuity" defined this time?

Thanks so much for posting this info... a little digging on the Wadsworth site produced this:

In addition the museum will present programs of related films and music plus special lectures by a leading Ballets Russes scholar, Lynn Garafola, and the dance critic of the New York Times, Alastair Macauley. For the 2009 Centennial, the Boston Festival will produce a lavish volume of reproductions and essays, including one by Atheneum curator, Eric Zafran, on the Russian Ballet in Hartford, which will be available in the museum shop.

Diaghilev and Style - Alistair Macaulay, Chief Dance Critic for the New York Times

Wednesday Apr 15, 09

Serge Diaghilev and the Adventure of Ballet Modernism - Public Talk

Sunday May 17, 09 - noon

Also, it seems that this week , February 18-20, there are free “discovery” events from 1:30-3:00 for kids aged 7-12 (with adult):

Join the museum teachers for a morning or afternoon of galley explorations, interactive games, and art projects. This month, explore the special exhibition The Ballets Russes: Celebrating the Centennial

And there's something being done by Full Force dance theater, but as I try to find it again, I can't... perhaps someone else will.

Very very sad news. The world is lucky that she took so many wonderful photographs in addition to dancing, teaching, raising a family and supporting her husband in his many endeavors.

Thank you!

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?img...l%3Den%26sa%3DN

Does anyone recognize this dancer? There are several photos of her on Life's collection of photos on Google. She faintly resembles a teacher of mine, but only faintly... still, I'm wondering...

I don't know if it would be helpful to you or not, but there's a blog for animated dance:

GreatDance.Com

Please excuse my ignorance, but why are they called "herald" skirts?

The stage froze??? No way!! (That must rank up there in performance from hell stories).... Love the rehearsal & class footage!

I'm not sure why, but there seem to be two threads on this... So I'm putting a link here (even though the other thread is not so very long)

http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=21135

Saw it last night down at Quad something on 13th street in NYC...

Some of the footage I had seen before on youtube... but it was interesting all the same. I didn't quite buy the toe shoe store bit... wondered what that was all about. Alina Samova looked better here than in the recent photographs. Made me want to see Obraztsova dance live, though... Interesting to see them in some Balanchine Rep... the Rubies looked mushy but Diamonds looked more like it... Lopatkina looks like good Balanchine raw material, after perhaps spending a year at NYCB to absorb more of the coaching. There was a blink of footage of one of them in Tchaikovsky pas de deux (no more than a run, I think), and I'm thinking it was Obraztsova... but we weren't shown her dancing in it. Felt cheated as she looked like she was going to do it justice.

Also, watching 3 people simultaneously nit-picking at Samova after her Swan made one feel for her... seems like one coach at a time should be enough for anyone to process.

Watching them auditioning the 9-year-olds, I wondered what screening they go through before they get tried out. This passel of hopefuls were all off-the-normal-charts flexible... does no one normal even attempt the audition?

Can anyone explain to me why anyone would want to do a jeté like this? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...hpid=artsliving

Is it just an example of the "more must be better" school? Or could some poet here illuminate the aesthetic value of it enough for me to appreciate the line?

Is there anyone out there who kept visualizing Gorey style illustrations while reading A Series Of Unfortunate Events? (children's literature)

Miliosr, do you know, is the structure of the dance related to a traditional Pavane or is it Limon's invention? I can't quite remember what I heard about topic, and Wikipedia's entry on Pavanes isn't terribly enlightening...

I bring it up a little from time to time if I can relate it to a technique... say bouree and Taglioni... but in my experience most dance students seem totally bored by dance history (I don't mean my version of it, but when I've watched in other classes).. I know in my class that if I mention the name of a famous dancer, (like say "Baryshnikov" or "Nureyev"), they tend to give blank looks. Beyond Nutcracker, they've little clue. Perhaps it's because I teach in a backwater and most of them have never been to a ballet. However, I do bring them pictures I've cut from magazines/articles and hand these out and they've begun to collect them... organizing them by ballet or choreographer when they get quite a few... it's not history, but it's a start, something for them to build off of. They now have read the name Balanchine enough to figure out he's a choreographer (at first one or two thought it was a ballerina's name, or some ballet's name). A parent who has seen ballet is equally rare... I choreographed some little thing to Les Sylphides last year, and a friend told that he overheard one parent proudly saying to another, that this was from a real ballet, Swan Lake.

I really really really wish some of our wonderful dance photographers would get together (or even individually) and make available decks of collector cards (perhaps like the old cartes de visite) mentioning dancers names, company, choreography... that we teachers could hand out as rewards for steps well done... the students would begin to connect with ballet outside their own studio (and also see what an arabesque, etc. really look like). Honestly, I think most of their ideas about dance stem from Barbie.

There are some comments about ballet partnering vs. Broadway partnering in this Robert Johnson article on NJ Ballet about a piece Patti Columbo is working on with them

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index..._guarantee.html

"In New Jersey Ballet, the men are such good partners," Colombo says. "Their partnering techniques are way better than most Broadway people, because they're used to dead-pressing girls. But for a guy to let a girl flip out of his hands is not a natural feeling for anybody in the ballet world. You're thinking, 'Oh, my God I'm going to drop the girl.' So that's been really interesting for them."

The ballerinas, too, felt their interest spike as they went catapulting over their partners' heads. "They just scream, basically," Colombo says. But that's OK, she says, because they're still in character for the scene. "Screaming is encouraged," Colombo says.

Yikes... I never knew realized anything happened to the male partner... miscommunication is a terrible thing... though I had been under the impression it was some sort of running leap was involved.... perhaps he was caught unawares and attempted too late to pull it off...