YouOverThere

I went, and really enjoyed the show. Their selections were much more to my liking than the NYCB's. My only gripe would be about the women's costumes for Symphony in C. - it made the dancers look too girlish If it weren't so inconvenient and expensive to get to the Kennedy Center, I'd be tempted to go back tonight. I sat in row CC, which was the last row that was full. Row DD was about half full and row EE was essentially empty.

You got a different discount than I did. Mine is for $39, with a code of "154412".

The best I could manage was the 3rd to the last row in the center orchestra. Should I bring binoculars? On a related note, my date (yes, there are some foolish women) asked how she should dress (for the Saturday matinee). And I'm a little unsure about myself. When I saw the Washington Ballet at the KC, I found that wearing a tie definitely put me in the minority. Most of the women were dressed fairly well but not in the Saturday evening best (I went to a Wednesday evening and a Saturday matinee performance).

I saw Ellis/Jordan in the Saturday matinee after seeing Onuki/Nelson in the opener. I was under the impression that Jared Nelson is the star of this company, so I was disappointed that there wasn't a better solo opportunity for the prince. The jester had a bigger role than the prince. What I still don't get is why the characters included Cinderella's father but not the evil stepmother. Cinderella's father added nothing to the production. I much prefer Martin Fredmann's choreography, which is what the Colorado Ballet uses, but it might not fit on the stage in the Ike. The extremely bright lighting coupled with the white floor and mostly white costumes and wigs in Act 2 may have also played a role, as I am highly light-sensitive and at times the brightness made it almost feel like someone was reflecting a bright light into my eyes.

I did end up going back to see Cinderella again. I still wasn't captivated by it. Something was missing for me. I met someone a couple weeks ago who had been in the NYCB for a few years, and she said that she didn't watch the Washington Ballet because they are "careful dancers" - they hold back to avoid risking mistakes. That might have something to do with it. The performance once again seemed stiff, and the dancers didn't project a lot of emotion.

It makes you wonder if there's a problem with the software in their on-line ticketing system... I'm starting to wonder if this is the case. For the Sunday evening performance, the system is showing 3 seats available in the center section of the next to the last row. One of the tickets costs $65 and the other 2 cost $99. The $65 seat is the closer to the center than the $99 seats. It doesn't make sense that seats closer to the center would cost less.

I don't know the specific practices of WB, but availability of seats can be very unpredictable at most theaters due to several factors. (1) Theaters typically hold back excellent "house seats" for guests of the company, big donors, and critics and only release those near to performance date. (2) If the company allows subscribers to exchange tickets for different performances, excellent seats can open up late in the game. A swing from 30% available to sold out and back does sound a little extreme, though. Your second idea probably played a big role. The theater isn't very big, with only 1100 seats. And I'm thinking that the "all sales are final" is a rule that is meant to be broken. They might not offer refunds, but I would be surprised if they didn't allow upgrades, and maybe even performance exchanges. The Sunday evening performance which for the last couple weeks has been shown as essentially sold out now shows over 180 seats available.

I went, I saw, I, well, I didn't care much for the design of the production. I much prefer the version that the Colorado Ballet has done. [i]Cinderella[/i] without the evil stepmother just didn't seem right. In general, I thought that the story parts of the ballet seemed rushed. If you didn't know the story (OK, nobody doesn't know the story) you might not have figured it out from this version. We never really got to know Cinderella before she was off to the ball. In the 2nd act, the prince acted like he knew that Cinderella was coming and fell in love with her before really even seeing her. And no sooner had Cinderella fled than the jester was showing her shoe to the prince. For my taste, there was too much of the stepsisters and too little of the prince. I wouldn't be surprised if the stepsisters spent more time being featured than the prince did. There was only a VERY brief solo for the prince. I would like to see some of the gratuitous scenes with the stepsisters edited out, with more dancing by the prince and Cinderella. I missed having a big waltz (to Cinderella's Waltz) in act 2, as is always in the CB's production. There was only muted dancing by the ensemble. I didn't care for the ending, which didn't include Cinderella's forgiveness of her stepfamily. Prokofiev intended Cinderella to be a morality play, and this was a noteworthy part. Overall, I think that the production was more child-oriented than what I've seen before As is often the case on opening night, the dancing seemed a little stiff. In the unlikely event that I get to another performance, I'll probably completely change my take.

I don't know the specific practices of WB, but availability of seats can be very unpredictable at most theaters due to several factors. (1) Theaters typically hold back excellent "house seats" for guests of the company, big donors, and critics and only release those near to performance date. (2) If the company allows subscribers to exchange tickets for different performances, excellent seats can open up late in the game. A swing from 30% available to sold out and back does sound a little extreme, though. Your second idea probably played a big role. The theater isn't very big, with only 1100 seats. And I'm thinking that the "all sales are final" is a rule that is meant to be broken. They might not offer refunds, but I would be surprised if they didn't allow upgrades, and maybe even performance exchanges.

This one raised about $9,000, including the sale of paintings by Any Hollinger's mother (who is quite good - if I was in better financial shape, I might have bid on one of them).

Tonight will be my first trip to the Kennedy Center. I'm a little nervous about getting there from work, but I did go to the Suitland Metro station to check things out (and didn't realize that I would end up paying $4.50 for parking just to go into the station and buy a SmartCar). Buying a ticket for the WB was a bit of an aggravation because seating sections jumped around from sold out to 30 or 40 percent of the seats available and back to sold out and back to seats available several times a day. A week and a half ago, I had written off this production because all seats except for a handful of very expensive seats for a couple of performances were listed as sold. Then I jumped on today's performance even though I don't like to go in the middle of the week and I don't like to go to opening night because it appeared to be the only one available. Now there are affordable tickets available for most of the performances, except for the matinees (not surprising that for Cinderella the matinees would be the most popular).

After getting to a couple of performances, I've decided that I've been under-rating the men in the CB, maybe because there isn't a true star right now. They did quite well in The Rite of Spring, in what seemed to me to be pretty demanding choreography.

I've made my second trip to the Washington Ballet (should I start a new thread? on Friday (2/22). This one didn't go quite as badly. I was only 15 minutes late. Armed with instructions from mapquest, I went straight from the office in Suitland. The directions would have worked better if I had not written down the wrong way to turn at the first intersection. And if I had remembered that since I was leaving after 6:30, the exit from the parking area that I normally use was closed and I was leaving by an exit on a different street. And if I-395 was actually a freeway rather than a construction zone. I would have preferred not to go on a Friday evening, but that was the only show for which they sold tickets for under $55. They had a different program this weekend. Titled Tour-de-Force, it was basically an exhibition rather than a performance. The first part of the program consisted of individual dances from various ballets, with the (to me) uninspiring Stars and Stripes after the intermission. Some of the dances were quite spectacular. In the Pas de Trois from act 1 of Le Corsaire, the dancer who danced the part of Ali (Brooklyn Mack, I think) nearly hit his head on the ceiling (OK, a bit of an exaggeration, but he could have easily won the NBA slam dunk competition). My favorite, besides this one, was the Pas de Deux from Edwaard Liang's La Offrenda. It was recognizable as one of his works without needing to check the program. The highlight of the first part was supposed to be Nacho Duato's Cor Perdut, but I arrived in time to see only the last minute of it. Stars and Stripes was crisply and energetically danced, but as I said it just doesn't do a whole lot for me. I'm sure that I will eventually fall in love with this company, but right now it isn't as much fun as going to the Colorado Ballet was. At the Colorado Ballet, the people-watching was half the fun, as it was a big dress-up occasion with women of all ages showing off their Sunday, better make that Saturday evening, best. At the 2 WB performances, the audiences have been almost entirely over 50 and pretty casually dressed (the audience for the Baltimore Symphony at the Strathmore was also casually dressed, which surprised me).

Here's the cast for this weekend: In Pieces: 2/22 & 2/23: Valentine-Ellis & Trubchanov; Kuykendall & Marks; Wehner & Ellis 2/24: Sasaki & Still; Mosina & Valdes; Benton & Moulton T&V: 2/22 & 2/23: Mosina & Tyukov 2/24: Wehner & Still Sacre: 2/22 & 2/23: Chosen One: Still; Earth Mother & Father: Mosina and Tyukov 2/24: Chosen One: Marks; Earth Mother & Father: Kuykendall & Trubchanov Interesting that Still is doing T&V and In Pieces 2/24, but Wehner is doing only T&V that day. Thanks! I don't see Slava Buchovsky mentioned. I hope that he hasn't aggravated the injury that caused him to miss Sleeping Beauty/

Did you happen to note who the couples were? I tended to avoid opening nights for 2 reasons: the CB's performances tend to improve as they get more performances (I don't think that they are the only performing arts organizations for which this is true) and they don't usually have "rush" pricing at opening night.

I don't know if that is a set policy, but it seems to be the pattern of the last few years. I think that the full-length ballets are a bigger draw, even though hard-core fans like the repertory shows. Many short works are abstract, which doesn't hold the same appeal to casual fans as full-length, story ballets. There may be some financial considerations involved in the choices for next year. I recall Gil Boggs once stating that when a company purchases the rights to use choreography it get those rights for 3 to 5 years. So they would definitely still have their original rights to Traveling Alone and possibly still have the original rights to Feast of the Gods (they premiered both of these works). I noticed that they have added 2 additional dancers to the corps.

Huh? Talk about ballet? There were 3 works in the program, 2 of which were premieres. The featured piece, which they unfortunately opened with so that I missed the first half, was titled Dangerous Laisons and was based on a novel titled Les Laisons Dangereuses, which was written by Pierre Choderlos de Lados in 1782. The choreography was created by the WB's associate artistic director, David Palmer, using music composed by Vivaldi. The novel is about a bored and corrupt aristocrat who likes to humiliate his rivals by seducing their main squeezes. He was lured by a noblewoman to take on a woman who was going to marry the man that the noblewoman had loved. Meanwhile, the noblewoman also sets up her dance instructor to become the dance instructor of her target figuring that he would fall in love with her, which he does. Everyone ends up trying to seduce everyone else, but things end rather badly for the aristocrat when the dance instructor shows a little backbone (and a little swordsmanship). The dance moved along fairly briskly, which would be necessary because Vivaldi didn't use slow temps very much. The choreography was very much in the classical ballet style. During the half that I saw, there weren't any super-flashy solos, but because of the pace it did take quite a bit of precision. The costumes depicted the time period and were quite nice. Since I attended the matinee, I did not get to see the top pair, but everyone did quite well. They seemed a little more fluid than the Colorado Ballet, though that may have been due to the choreography. The work was probably between 60 and 70 minutes long. Neither of the other 2 pieces did anything for me. They were both set to popular music, and though the dancing was highly quality throughout, there didn't seem to be much reason for them to exist. The second of these 2, which was choreographed by the increasing well-known Amy Seiwert, was particularly annoying. She used mostly familiar pop tunes, but used recordings by people other than the performers that made the songs well-known, e.g., Journey's Faithfully was sung by someone (or some group) named Matt the Electrician, who sounded more like an electrician than a singer. I considered going back to see Dangerous Laisons again, but I lost my chance when I tried to figure out how to take the subway rather than drive, though I wasn't excited about paying for the whole show when I had no interest in staying after the intermission.

So you really think that driving a few miles to the Metro station, parking in a free parking lot, taking a 15-minute train ride, and getting dropped off a block from the theater is a better plan than driving on crowded streets with a traffic light every block, circling around for 40 minutes looking for a place to park, spending $15 to park, and walking (or, in my case, limping) a half mile to the theater? Alas, the reason why the parking at the Silver Spring Metro station is listed as costing $0.00 is that there isn't any.

So you really think that driving a few miles to the Metro station, parking in a free parking lot, taking a 15-minute train ride, and getting dropped off a block from the theater is a better plan than driving on crowded streets with a traffic light every block, circling around for 40 minutes looking for a place to park, spending $15 to park, and walking (or, in my case, limping) a half mile to the theater?

Even more incentive to find my way back to Colorado. I can't stand the thought of missing Feast of the Gods! Cinderella is child-oriented? Then why is it that I, a full-grown adult, always have to delve into my kleenex supply during the waltz scene?

Having been banished from Colorado, I ended up in Silver Spring, MD. The good news (relatively) is that I'm only about 8 miles from the Sydney Harman Hall (and 9 miles from the Strathmore). I decided to take in the Saturday (Feb. 16) matinee. The 8 miles took about 35 minutes to traverse. Finding parking took more than 35 minutes. There were parking meters within 5-6 blocks, but it would have taken 5 dollars in quarters to park at one of them (in Denver, all the parking meters accept credit cards). I finally found a parking garage for a mere $15 (I paid $5 in Denver). Despite missing the first third of the performance, I was quite impressed. WB is stronger than the CB on the male side. That being said, I'm not sure that I can endure the stress of going there again. And it's left me wondering whether the reason that they can't sell out a 750-seat theater is because you have to be a hardcore ballet fan to put up with the hassle of attending their performances.

There will be another benefit performance on January 19. This one will include additional dance companies who weren't able to participate in the November 11 performance. I'm looking forward to tonight's performance, since there will be 15 companies participating. Unfortunately, the money that will be raised will just be a drop in the bucket, since the total medical bills will likely be in the quarter of a million dollar range. It was gracious of Ballet Nouveau Colorado to offer to host the performance, since Amy Hollinger has no connections to BNC.

It was a messy departure. I actually went this year, to 1.5 performances (the 0.5 is a long story). I really enjoyed it, and can't figure out why I didn't get into it when I first saw it a few years ago. Kevin Gael Thomas and Sean Omandam were spectacular in the Russian dance. The CB used 3 dancers in the role of Clara w/ 3 dancers as the Nutcracker Prince and 4 dancers as Sugar Plum Fairies with 4 dancers as the Cavalier. Soloist Shelby Dyer shared the Sugar Plum Fairy role with the 3 female principals and she was also the only soloist to dance the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty. I don't know if anything should be read into this.

The missing principal dancer suffered some sort of significant injury and reportedly was just barely able to rehab in time for The Nutcracker.

In this year's Colorado Ballet rendition of The Nutcracker, Mother Ginger shows a few Gangnam Style moves.