Amy Reusch

Thanks Ari! I thought the post-time was just kind of wacko and inalterably locked to GMT... so I never noticed any error so slight as daylight savings! Thanks for showing me how to straighten all that out.

I think it's kind of insulting to the audience, let alone the dancers, not to have made the pre-performance announcement. Sounds like someone inept was in charge, or that the usual lines of communication were not functioning. David Parsons may have put the program together artistically, but who was responsible for the administrative side?

Speaking of costumes, there's a fabulously costumed production of Alice in Wonderland being mounted in Wisconsin, May 6 & 7th, funded by the NEA. I know nothing of the choreography or the quality of the dancers but I've seen the masks before they were shipped off (made locally here in CT by Joyce Ritz' Integrity Designworks) and photos of them united with the costumes. Incredible! Now... be warned... the dancers, many (most?) of them pre-professional students, are subsumed by the costumes; these are not costumes to reveal the beautiful lines of the dancers bodies... but instead this looks like a spectacular Alice In Wonderland come to life... I wish I could be in Wisconsin to see the house of cards collapse. I hope this tours the country. It could run the circuit of college theater "family" programming series just on the costume design alone. Website: "Storybook Weekend" Annaluna Karkar'sWausau Dance Theatre Unfortunately the website doesn't have images of the production yet, but I provided it in case we have some Wisconsinites who might attend and tell us about it. (please! I'm dying to hear how the flamenco inspired dancing lobster quadrille came off) I suppose this should be listed in the "announcements" section, but since we were talking about costuming and this seems like costuming to the max... I don't know that I would want to see world class dancers hidden inside Tweedledum & Tweedledee costumes, but as far as seeing a vibrant story ballet for children-- on a small regional company -- that tempts new audiences into the theater... this production looks very promising.

I have more trouble with costumes that obscure or conversely so underline the choreography that there is no longer any subtlety to the physical references... I can't (and won't) say how many times I've thought a work so fascinating in rehearsal and so dull costumed... Not that I want my story ballets done as leotard ballets, but... so often less is much much more.

Thank you, Bart. My curiosity is quelled but I can't say I feel any more enlightened.

If we can't get the NEA, how about the Surgeon General? ... what with the current epidemic of obesity....

OH! NO!! I've always heard that zingy cold freshness of SPRING!!! in the music... oh D__! There's even that sound of the earth awakening... OH NO! Now what am I going to do with my poor limping imagination! ... so... any chance of someone typing in a verse or so of the poem here?Link to photo of Appalacian Spring from Noguchi.org I guess from those sun bonnets I was thinking the piece was set some time in the middle 1800s?(or in a "backward" hamlet at a later time?) I can't quite divorce "pioneer" from "conestoga wagon". Appalachian Spring seems to take place in a settlement. I guess I have this bleak idea of pioneers of people isolated from their neighbors on the desolate prairie. I'll have to watch the whole piece again now.... By the way, it was kind of cool to search Google's image tab for "Martha Graham"... I hadn't realized the web had exploded that far that one would come up with 1,720 results of just images referencing Martha Graham! Even with errors, that's impressive! So I played a little further... Rudolph Nureyev only scored 112 but Rudolf Nureyev scored 1,260... a very photogenic dancer...Balanchine : 2,220

I was amazed reading Jennifer Dunning in the NY Times today... Martha Graham's Masterworks, Updated for Modern Times 4-9-05 American West? Pioneers? I always thought it took place in Appalachia... Is that considered the American West?... Isn't Appalachia in the South East? Very very confused... NPR: '"Appalachian Spring" by Aaron Copland' with Robert Kapilow and John Adams ...okay, not South, but not West, is it? And here: The Appalachian Region Okay, maybe Ohio is the West.... but I can't help but think of that mountain ridge as defining the border between the midwest and the east... I think of "pioneers" as those settling the West... particularly the prairie... Appalachian speaks "mountainous" not "prairie"... How did I go so wrong?

Thanks Carbro & Alexandra! I'm afraid I've kind of given up on searches. For some reason, they don't seem to work for me, even when I know a particular post exists.

If it is a 'real' company and not a 'pick-up' company, shouldn't we have a forum for it? I think this "recent performances" forum is really meant for things likes "stars of..." and pick-up company tours...

Could someone talk about the differences between the Lacotte & Bournonville versions? I think it's difficult for many of us to be able to see both in live performance... Is there a definitive DVD of the Bournonville?

I've always been kind of surprised at how little interest dance students have in performances before their time. And I knew artistic directors who adamantly didn't want their dancers to view videotapes of themselves or others but rather to listen to their coaches/rehearsal directors instead. They were concerned that the dancers would have a different consciousness of their dancing if they were thinking about the video images (we should come up with a word for this, if one doesn't exist, there must be some video equivalent to a "mirror dancer" don't you think?) Maybe it's different at SAB with the library with all those fabulous archives next door. Has the trend changed? Are dancers now studying old dance performance videos?

I was trying to see what the tickets cost at Jorgensen, but now that the event has passed, it doesn't seem to be possible. I would be surprised if they were $30 or more. The ticket I was handed was a student ticket at $7. Here's the blurb the theater had on the ballet: I find this somewhat misleading... wouldn't you think you were going to be shown the 1940 production? Actually, studying the program, I'm curious about some of the parts I missed, such as in Scene 2 with the Nurse: Juliet, was this memorable?And at the ball: Considering Mab's strutting & preening, I'm now curious how these two incidents were fleshed out.

Tresca Weinstein in Albany's Times Union about a performance in Schenectady New life for a classic tragedy and Nathalie Winans in City Pulse Russian dancers mix it up

Here's Chris Pickett's review of the same performance in U-Conn's "The Daily Campus" 'Romeo and Juliet' at the Jorgensen I thought the audio engineer indicated that it was Anastasia Filipcheva who played Queen Mab, but most likely the student reporter got it right. This was one of those programs where the the potential cast is listed rather than the actual cast. Perhaps there was an announcement at curtain time about who was dancing that evening, if so I missed that part. Did I mention there was beaucoup de smoke? Sunny Italy this was not. Okay Shakespeare scholars, here's something else you could enlighten me about... there was a repetitive motif in the balcony scene of wiping one's own skin... what was that about? And in the bedroom scene instead of romance there was a great deal of references to blindness with hands covering the eyes...

Excuse me for answering my own question, but: Fairfield University News Release

How old is your daughter? I don't think I'd recommend it for anyone under 10... or maybe under 12... I'm not sure I'd recommend any Romeo & Juliet to someone under 12, actually. It played the University of Connecticut on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 - here's my review: St. Petersburg Ballet: Petukov's Romeo & Juliet (...like a bad dream...) Programme lists it as: St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, Leonid Yakobson, Artistic Director... this slightly above the CAMI credit. Although Yuri Petukhov is listed as artistic director for Romeo & Juliet (on a seperate line from his choreographer/librettist credit. In Robert Johnson's article for the Star Ledger Troupe puts a new face on Russian ballet, he has Petukhov down as having directed the troupe since 2001. I wonder, was it founded by Yakobson?

Another nice thing about Gottlieb is that he gives anecdote variants... so that you are left to guess which was the truth and which made for a good story... sometimes I appreciated being entertained by the hyperbole, and it made me like Balanchine even more rather than less.

Treefrog, I'm having trouble understanding... isn't Third aligned through the ankles? To me, Third is sort of like Fifth sousus's alignment only flat on the floor. In the car, I was telling my 6 year old daughter about the connection between the five basic positions and fencing. She said she thought it made sense to learn dancing before fencing... because if you got good enough at dancing, you wouldn't need to learn to fence: you could kill them with your pointed foot!

Hmmmm..... errrr......... ..... well........ Let me start by telling you the audience loved it; they gave it a roaring standing ovation. And way above & beyond the rest, they adored Queen Mab. And also let me say.... If you were hoping for some good sword play, you need to understand up front: There's only one sword and Queen Mab's got it. Apropro another popular thread on this forum, there were a lot of men in the audience, all ages, and they seemed to quite enjoy the performance… particularly the femme fatale. Perhaps it would help if I were more familiar with the story or the music or the historical ballet, or if I had arrived in time for the prologue (I wandered in after class)… I came in with the hamster wheels (has someone been telling them about ABT?) for the relatively crowded balcony scene. Instead, I was more like the children in the audience (for some reason this production was listed in all the local children’s events listings). Their faces, when I made eye contact, appeared saturated with bewilderment. IS RUSSIA IN A TIME WARP???? Barbarella could have drifted through this ballet and felt perfectly at home. Maybe Bejart as well. There was something very teenage in it’s point of view… I don’t know… was it the tortured souls? Was it Queen Mab’s costume? Was it the love that never seemed to be consummated? Who were all those bodysuits in the love scenes? Isn’t there enough housing available yet for young couples? I’ve never seen such a populated bedroom. I don’t remember a Greek chorus in Romeo & Juliet. And then there was that Nikolais/Doris Humphrey thing with the sheets. But can I please please please please PLEASE see Alexander Akulov dance again? He was beautiful… such graceful line in his leaps… I’d come see anything he’s in. Bring him back, please!!! And Ilya Zabotin was tremendous as Spiderman (Tybalt). I'd come see anything he's in too. But I get the sense Petukhov doesn’t like women much, because he doesn’t give us much chance to enjoy Anna Borodulina's dancing. She looks like she might be quite pretty, in an Allesandra Ferri sort of way, but it’s hard to tell. And then there's Queen Mab. I don’t quite understand how this can be, but I think this ballet might look really really fascinating on video. Jorgensen is an awful venue, so it’s not really fair to consider the live experience, but I’m not sure the choreography suffers the proscenium well. The Nurse is a boffo part. Ilya Mironov got to pull off quite a few fouettes or were they tours a la seconde… well… at any rate, from what I saw, he had more fun than Mercutio. And Tybalt was so stricken with grief for having killed Mercutio, it was touching. Where the prince or the friar were, I’m not sure. Prokofiev got a little help from Vladimir Artimyev. I thought Queen Mab was some sort Arthurian queen of the Faeries… I’m not sure how she found her way into Italy, but whatever… here she’s some sort of Fossee-esque necrophiliac… though they did seem to tie into her fairy past when she blew her fairy dust on Juliet to wake her up. A lot of her part bore an uncanny resemblence… well… you know that part in Giselle’s mad scene where she drags the sword around? But I should be struck dead; the audience absolutely adored her. Anyway, my being basically illiterate when it comes to classic literature shouldn’t slow the rest of you down, you probably know about Mercutio’s reference to her: http://shakespeare.about.com/blmab.htm It was Anastasia Filipcheva as the Femme, and she is to be commended for taking her part seriously. Oh, and occasionally the dancers shout out. I think experimentation is good and should be encouraged. This is like a learning experience. And it’s kind of fun collecting different productions of Shakespeare. The DVD should be a cult classic. I’m waiting for the commentary. No, really.... go see it... take someone who needs their idea of ballet shaken up a little... sit REALLY CLOSE.

Jack, I'm sorry, I could only read the quoted blurb. It's been a while now since I read the Teachout, but I didn't feel that the book was disrespectfully trashing Balanchine's character in the "politically correct light of our times"... rather, I remember Teachout being in awe of Balanchine, and that he went to some effort to humanize the deity. I can't say I remember Balanchine suffering as a result of Teachout's lens. The blurb seems to imply that Aloff felt Balanchine didn't have character flaws. I'm sure that there were contemporaries to Balanchine who would have considered his romantic life something of a character flaw. I even think perhaps that we in 2005 are less likely to consider a character flaw his need to marry his muse no matter what her age than people in the 1950s/60s. Perhaps that's not the part of the article you were referring to?

Perhaps they could just map the face of the actress... that wouldn't be so bad, perhaps... but still, what was famous about Fonteyn's dancing was very very subtle... I'm not sure, is there a dancer out there today that could do justice to Fonteyn's quality? It's not a technique/physique thing... it's a different kind of grace... but then again, perhaps that's not what the directors really care about here... the biography isn't about the quality of her dancing so much as her emotional life, right?

I don't understand... are they going to map someone else's face & features over old films of her dancing? Frankly, I'm not convinced digital animators could reproduce her dancing... probably less likely than an actual dancer.

That Ray Schorr photo on page 146... Okay, I've had to return the book to the library, but I can't get that photo out of my mind. Anyone have a copy handy who could list the people? From memory: Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine, Maria Tallchief, Diana Adams, Frederick Ashton, Melissa Hayden?, Jerome Robbins, Nora Kaye, Antony Tudor. It has so much the look of a fashion shot, was it for the Vanity Fair piece? (and if so, why is Le Clercq the focus?). Am I off on this? It seems to me very unusual to have all these people in the same photo... perhaps not so much Robbins, Balanchine & Tudor as they were all part of NYCB, but Ashton as well? Are there many photos of Balanchine & Tudor together even?

I agree with EvilNinjaX... men are still generally more concerned with their financial future than women are (although I believe there are more women these days in medical school than men). Isn't there some overused joke about liberal arts graduates "do you want fries with that?" The financial return on a Liberal Arts degree or a teaching degree is less enticing than the MBA... although I thought Liberal Arts were what you were supposed to take for entering Law School? Is that a mistaken impression? As far as engineering is concerned, it seems there are still few women in that field...although to talk to the professors around here, there are also very few native born Americans filling the engineering schools. I grew up in Bell Labs' backyard in the '60s & '70s and neither I nor my older sister heard any of this "girls aren't naturally good in math" stuff until we were in our 30s... frankly, I think it's a con game... the more it's said, the more it seems true and the less likely a girl is to think she can do math easily the less likely she will. (Of course the con game works the other way too... in that men think they won't like ballet because they've been led to believe that men don't like ballet). People like what they are familiar with. It gives them a way to compare, contrast and judge. If ballet is unfamiliar, it's much harder to notice things in it. Fendrock, perhaps you should contrive to have your husband take your daughter to professional ballet performances by himself (you may need to sneak in a schedule conflict for yourself so that you can't go with.) "On his own" he may begin to see more in it.