SandyMcKean

This evening, with Kaori Nakamura on one side and Carrie Imler on the other, Chapman took her rightful place between them.

What a test by fire. If the word "perfect" ought ever to be applied to a dancers technique, two that would immediately jump into my mind would be Kaori Nakamura and Carrie Imler (among PNB dancers). That's quite a compliment you just paid to Maria.

P.S. I couldn't go last night due to an "important" meeting I had to attend. Your review makes me realize how poor my judgment was when I made that choice .

OK....good. As I am attempting to answer this question of "What is ballet?" for myself, my current thinking is that Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring" can't be a ballet strictly speaking. That makes me a little uncomfortable, but it does seem logical.

Interesting that nearly all I read about Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring" says things like "revolutionary ballet", or "sensation in the world of ballet", or some such language. I suspect if I asked many knowledgable people to name a ballet of the early 20th century that caused a near revolt due to its break with tradition, most would mention Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring" as they just assume that it qualifies as a ballet.

These distinctions can be carried too far of course. I can live some ambiguity.......so for me I accept the "executive summary" as posed in this thread (and as I'm educating myself since being inspired by this thread), but still be comfortable with me and others calling Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring" a ballet.

I guess I'm just too easy .............

My most honest answer is "all of the above".

Maybe that's what makes me a balletomane.....

[later edit......I neglected to mention the pick I did make; it was: "To see particular non-related dancers, no matter what the work".....probably because there are few ballets I truly dislike, and my fascination with dance is firmly centered on the dancer him or herself.]

Any suggestions for a second look? Do the regulars here find this work consistently interesting? If so, how do you think it succeeds?

I took a little shorter than Helene to love this work.....like 10 seconds!

Seriously, I loved, loved, loved this ballet from the first moments. OTOH, like Helene, it probably took me many years to get there. Altho I've been going to ballet for decades, it has only been in the last 6 or 7 years that I have really paid close attention, and allowed myself to become a bit obsessed with it. I can't know for sure of course, but my guess is that 10 or more years ago I would not have liked this ballet. I wanted excitement and bravura from ballet in those days. Today I am finally in the place where the exquisite beauty and subtly of "Dances at a Gathering" register with me.

Last Friday was my first ever "Dances". My experience of it reflects Helene's comments since for me it totally flows out of the music (no wonder Balanchine liked what Robbins was doing!). I like Chopin so that helps. Indeed, given both my and Helene's experiences past and present, whether you love or dislike this ballet may depend on your relationship to the music. For me I found endless emotions in the music quite independent of the dance. In fact, I think I got nearly all the emotion and feeling from the music: joyful humor one minute, sad reflection the next, followed by tender love the next. I distinctly remember sitting there having these waves of emotion flow over me realizing the those feelings were coming directly from hearing the music with my ears (and Allan Dameron's insightful playing of the piano), and at the same moments seeing incredible beauty with my eyes as I watched the dancers. What made "Dances" one of my most treasured ballet experiences was how the music and the dance were in separate realms, so to speak, but so intimately connected in what I can only call "artistic unity". I would be remiss if I didn't also add to this time-stopping marriage of music and movement, the deeply felt insight into humanity that Robbins always seems to find: be it in "Dances", or "The Concert", or "In the Night". IMO, no American-based choreographer has his dancers reflect the "every day" human being like Robbins. Add to that his impeccable humor for the human condition (which strangely reminds me of the absurdist humor of Beckett or Stoppard).

Last Friday, watching this piece, I felt I was in the presence of genius. I don't feel that very often (except for almost anything Balanchine). I just sat there in awe. It took me 10 seconds or more after the curtain fell to even start to clap. Of course great credit must go to the dancers themselves. It is clear to me that if even 1 or 2 of the required 10 dancers were "not up to par", this work would fall flat. Probably one of the most amazing elements of the performance I saw was the universally high quality of the dance, and perhaps even more important, the high standard of acting. Seeing "Dances" made me very, very proud of this company.

To answer your question directly......I loved this piece and consider it a true masterpiece among hundreds of ballets I have seen in over 40 years of watching. Why? It has more to do with my heart than my brain. It is that marriage of music and movement. It is the humanity of the ballet -- that I suspect would be as fresh 200 years from now as it is today. It is the sheer beauty of movement coupled with the ubiquitous feeling of remembrance with which Robbins infused the work. It is because Robbins elevated my appreciation for Chopin in just one hour. It is the opportunity to see incredibly skilled and seasoned dancers work together in an ensemble with full mutual respect that I just don't remember any other piece of ballet demanding as "Dances" does. That's it for me: the piece allows the dancers to dance at the peak of their ability while at the same time to be in such strong relationship with each other that only artists of this caliber have a hope of pulling it off. This piece creates a "team" of mutual respect on a very human level that I don't think I've ever seen before in ballet.

P.S. I do understand the reaction of "Dances" being too long. I will say that it was not too long for me. Perhaps it could be if it didn't change so often (well, it's really the mood of the music that changes so often). I did occasionally start to get a little bored in the 2nd half, but almost as soon as that started to occur, the music would go into a minor key, or in some other way, transform the basic human emotion of the music/dance. This mood change would often be coupled with Robbins changing the dancers on stage, and I was right back into the piece -- excited and moved once again at a very high level. That Robbins could have found so many ways to create interest and variety was amazing to me (of course he had Chopin's ever changing music to inspire him).

That is the VHS tape, not the DVD.

OOPS......sorry

I don't know if this is a good source or not, but their website says they have it ($35 I think). I put in a shopping cart and processed it all the way until the last step, but of course I didn't actually buy it. I presume I might get a subsequent email saying "Sorry, it's out of stock", but you could try.

http://directcinema.com/dcl/title.php?id=165

Double argh......no Korbes in Wheeldon in week 2. I will have to miss that altogther.

I simply rented it from Netflix. No problems.

For anyone who saw this, you might want to take a look at this clip from the Paris Opera Ballet in Sacre with Marie-Claude Pietragalla as the Chosen One. I think she's more convincing in the part (the journey from terror at her selection to frenzy and death) but I also think the camera work supports the choreography much better than the Maryinsky version.

No kidding! Thanks for pointing out this POB clip. I completely agree with you on both counts. In fact, I am taken aback by how "lifeless" the Mariinsky maiden is compared to how the POB did it. Marie-Claude Pietragalla's movement is so much more free, creative, dramatic, and "into" the power of the situation.

It's ballet if it uses the danse d'ecole (the school vocabulary of ballet).........

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Absence of turnout makes it not ballet.

Leigh, I've started doing my homework, but I've run into a snag already. I recently saw the Ballet Russes film being screened here in Seattle as discussed in the BT thread "Mariinsky's Firebird, Rite of Spring, Les Noces, screenings at cinemas".

I am having trouble reconciling your "executive summary" with Nijinsky's "Rite of Spring". My initial reaction is to call this piece "a ballet", and I feel that it is. But doesn't it pretty strongly violate the 2 principles quoted above?

At the talk held at Elliot Bay Book last Sunday featuring Peter Boal and Miranda Weese -- where they discussed their personal experiences with Jerome Robbins (fabulous opportunity!!) -- a mention was made that Dances at a Gathering will have 2 1/2 casts (with a sort of muffled laugh on the 1/2 part). So I expect that there will be a few changes in week two casts given the 2 distinct casts see here for week one.

Leigh and Helene, great stuff.......thanks for the insight.

Leigh, I have saved your definition including amplifications (and with Helene's addition). I also get your point very clearly about "quality" -- my instincts feel this loud and clear. This interchange has inspired me to "mine" BT for old threads on this so basic of topics ("What is ballet?"). My education continues.

Leigh, I appreciate the "executive summary" (and an excellent one at that I suspect). Beyond that I will definitiely do some BT searchs for old threads on this subject.

While I'm doing that, I would like to ask you to do a couple of other things to round out his sub-thread:

1. Given your definition is Malliot's R&J ballet or not?

2. If one of the existential fundamentals of ballet is use of "danse d'ecole (the school vocabulary of ballet)", then how could a choreographer ever be considered to use a limited ballet vocabulary (as Helene suggests above) since I presume that the "danse d'ecole" vocabulary is by definition fixed. I assume for example that I could get a relatively small book that would list and graphically demonstrate the entire "danse d'ecole" vocabulary. Would limited be that, say, if only 50% of the steps dancers take in a dance are from the "danse d'ecole" vocabulary? Or alternatively perhaps that only 30% of the "danse d'ecole" vocabulary is used as steps in the entire ballet even tho all the steps are from that vocabulary?

OK, I'll bite. What is it that makes ballet??

Bourne isn't the only one whose narrative and theatrical ability out paces his choreography: I'd say the same of Maillot's "Romeo et Juliette", which PNB will revive this coming Fall in the season opener.

I can't dispute Helene's comment on Maillot's R&J; however, I found this ballet one of the most moving artisitic experiences I've ever had (at least as PNB did it).

We may be looking at a definitional problem here. What exactly is ballet? What is the essence of ballet? I surely don't know the answers to such questions, but I do believe ballet is more than the choreography alone (dance vocabulary), and more than any other single aspect of ballet. Likely I'd put more emphasis on the emotional impact of a ballet on the audience than Helene would. It is in this area that Maillot's R&J shines I think. I've never been so driven to see multiple performances of a ballet; nor have I ever dragged multiple friends to a ballet like I did for Maillot's R&J. The production was a huge box office success, and I heard one cultured elderly gentleman claim after a performance that altho he had seen dozens of R&J's in his time (the play etc), no performance affected him so deeply as this one. I tended to agree.

If I were to venture to say what I do think ballet is all about, I'd have to say something banal along the lines of: the magic that happens when the creator of the work and the performers of the work reach something inside of audience members such that an audience member experiences something meaningful to them, something personal, something universal. This simplistic view naturally applies to all the arts.....and that's as it should be in my mind. So perhaps Maillot's R&J does have a limited dance vocabulary, but it has so much else that is magnificent that most in the audience come away having experienced that magical union of work, performer, audience.

So what distingishes ballet from a play, or a musical, or a poetry reading under my crude definition? Hard to say I guess. However, ballet is like pornography for me: I know it when I see it.

papeetepatrick, I actually agree with you for the most part in your post #18 (and no offense taken BTW).

I should have chosen my words more carefully. I certainly didn't mean to imply that these composers were somehow better or greater that the others of their eras. OTOH, I do think that some creative people (Balanchine, Mozart, Wagner, and others) are more transformative than others who lived in those eras and who also had great talent (or even greater talent in the judgement of some). I picked my list off the top of my head, not as a well considered statement, but just to name a few to make the point of their rarity. As leonid said: I meant my comment as "a very normal conversational example".

.....when you add up the works based on some connection to City Ballet (Tomasson, Balanchine, Robbins, Wheeldon and Ratmansky), you get near 60%

I'm sorry. Statistical generalizations like this are highly misleading in any field of study. Correlations are not cause and effect.

For example, what if I were to ask what percent of the SFB programming had "some connection" to the United States? If one were to include those choreographers who lived here briefly, or perhaps staged a work here, I suspect the percentage would be very high indeed, perhaps even 100%. So what conclusions could you draw? How about.........it is impossible today to be a major choreographer without being dominated by American culture. I don't think so.

miliosr, I really appreciate seeing the raw numbers for SFB. Gives me some perspective. OTOH, I, for one, can see only one conclusion to be drawn from this data that is relevant to this discussion: Balanchine ballets make up 18% (6/34) of SFB's programming (and even that is probably misleading since this statistical analysis would artificially give more weight to choreographers who do shorter ballets).

I voted for "once a century" not only because that's how I "feel" about it, but also that geniuses (genii?? ) of Balanchine's calibre come along at something like that rate in essentially every field I can think of. I mentioned Newton and Einstein for physics in another thread. Kant or Hegel come to mind for philosophy. Perhaps even a Henry Ford in industry. We think nothing of looking back on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner as somehow a head or two above the other incredibly talented composers of their eras......what's different about dance?

miliosr, very provocative. You've given me a lot to think about (tho I somehow doubt I will find myself in agreement). And frankly, I think you said more in that short post that SK did in her entire article.

The only thing that doesn't compute for me is the use of the word "monotony". I can't even imagine that. I suspect one's relationship to that feeling must have to do with how long one has been immersed. (Fish, I imagine, find water monotonous.) I've been going to ballet for 40 years, but it's only been in the last 10 years that I have gone "over the edge". It's still all too new to me to find monotony anywhere. (Perhaps monotony can only strike in a place like NYC where one can get exposed so frequently.)

I am very much in bart's camp as he expresses it above. I like structure in art. My natural tendencies are toward math, science, and philosophy -- hard to imagine any of those without structure. Much modern dance seems to lack that sense of structure -- often all that freedom turns to mush in my eyes.

During this season just concluding at PNB I had a powerful example for how this worked for myself. Peter Boal took the remarkable step (IMHO) of bring back Forsythe's One Flat Thing, Reproduced after introducing it to his audience just last year (the 2 performances were just 7 months apart). In Q&A sessions he explained he knew it was bad for box office, but he thought that on a 2nd showing some in the audience might see something they missed the 1st time around. I say "remarkable step" because last year I distinctly remember an unbelievable number of people walking out. They were everywhere, in all sections, leaving from the middle of the rows, stepping over people. The overheard comments during intermission were often along the lines of "that's not ballet". There was even one guy who said to Boal during a Q&A session that he didn't pay all that money to see something like THAT.

Well, I too didn't particularly like OFT,R the first time I saw it last year. I saw it a second time and my notes say "I liked it better this time". None the less I felt some sort of power there, and I am wise enough () to know that the problem was me not the ballet. This year I made it a point to see OFT,R 3 more times. On time 4 it started to click. On the 5th and final time I truly loved it. Blown away by it. Was taken to a new level by it.

WHY? I willing to say: structure. The structure eluded me at first. Eventually I started to see the equivalent of a PdD here and a PdT there. I started to see themes come, go, and then repeat. I had been lost without perceiving structure, but once I saw structure that gave me a key to the entire ballet. I now quite easily see the Balanchine in OFT,R. Before I only saw randomness. It is rare that I get this sense of "cohere as a whole" (as bart termed it) from modern dance. Maybe I'm just missing it, but maybe too much modern is missing this ingredient that for my personality at least seems indispensable.

I have sympathy with SandyMcKean’s point of view but I feel it is financially difficult for a lot of people to go to every cast change of a particular ballet and I would add that a balletomane knows which performance to go to and those to avoid.

I could let this go, and I am definitely not feeling defensive, but this distinction may be an important point in attempting to identify oneself as being afflicted with "balletomania", so I will amplify:

My words were:

"obsessed with seeing multiple casts"

And that's exactly what I meant. I see it just as you do leonid, a true balletomane likely avoids some casts just as well as insists on seeing multiple casts. But the essense is the need to see multiple casts -- the feeling that if you don't, the entire experience lacks dimension. There is the cost issue, but beyond someone who is living a true low income lifestyle, cost is usually handled by the quality of the seat and by avoiding other expenses (PNB has some $25 seats open to every goer for every performance).

I'll just speak for me......it is seeing different dancers in the some production that adds the extra dimensions to the work. I am reminded of Picasso's "need" to paint a woman from multiple angles all at once or resign himself to not capturing her at all (well, capturing her alright, but only with a misleading representation since so much would be left out). True, I know all my dancers, and I love to see them all dance, but my real motivation is to see multiple artists interpret the same piece, the same role. It is from all those angles that I get insight into the piece (I could even say learn to love the piece). There is another benefit I didn't expect. When I know I am going to see a production 2 or 3 times, I can relax and pay attention to details, emotions, corps work, the orchestra, etc -- a freedom I never felt before I regularly started going to each production more than once. I no longer worry about "getting it", or missing something. If I want to watch a corps dancer for 5 minutes with my binoculars (following him/her around the stage), I do it since I know I will get a chance later to see what I missed. Sometimes I just watch all the feet, other times all the arms. I find my "dance education" goes up exponentially by seeing multiple casts because these other avenues (angles) open up that are impossible to explore with just one performance.

Bottom line....I agree: it's multiple casts, certainly not all casts (except sometimes )

.......given the ever-decreasing marginal utility of the Balanchine-style abstract/plotless ballet.

This takes me back to my initial comments (perhaps overly simplistic) on the Kaufman article. In spite of all the interesting and insightful comments made in this worthwhile discussion, doesn't it all boil down to personal taste? If any of the arguments in this thread uncovered some fundamental "Truth", I certainly remain unconvinced. Isn't this issue nothing more than "I like this type of ballet" whereas someone else "I like that type of ballet"?

miliosr, I may be oversimplifying your view above, but I take from your comment that you prefer ballets with a narrative rather than "abstract/plotless ballet" without a narravite. Terrific. You know what you like. In contrast, I happen to like plotless ballet (that's not to say such ballet has no meaning beyond just a series of steps). That's terrific too. I know what I like.

I bother to post this simple proposition because it hits home for me as I've watched what Peter Boal has done in the 5 years he's led Pacific Northwest Ballet. Full length story ballets have never been my favorites (even the greats such as Swan Lake). That's not to say I don't love story ballets, because I do, but I just prefer a ballet like Agon or In the Middle Somewhat Elevated. Like everyone (I presume) I want a season that includes both, but I prefer a season that emphasizes the plotless over the story ballets. So when it became clear that Boal was moving seasonal programming toward more "modern" ballets as opposed to the Stowell/Russell choices I was used to, I was ecstatic. I found myself more excited by ballet than ever before.

Now here comes the point for me personally. I pretty much go to every post-performance Q&A session when I go to see PNB. I often make comments at these sessions as, of course, do many others. My comments often express my pleasure that such and such a ballet was presented (let's say something like State of Darkness, or perhaps a Dove ballet), but invariably at these Q&A sessions someone else makes a comment to Boal that they are bothered because PNB is not presenting enough story ballets these days. Each time I hear that, I cringe because an irrational fear comes over me that Boal might actually be persuaded by such comments to cut back on the non-traditional stuff. So I want to go in one direction, but someone else wants to go in another direction. Neither of us, of course, is right or wrong.

Perhaps much of this debate reduces down to nothing more than personal taste. (I say....perhaps.)

Helene made a typo. Obviously the dates are:

January 14-17, 2010

I mentioned my background is in science. There is a famous occurence in the world of technology which has entered the popular lexicon:

In 1899, then Patent Commissioner, Charles H. Duell reportedly announced that "everything that can be invented has been invented."

It's stunning to think how wrong Mister Duell was, but at the same time it's relatively easy to imagine that at the time his statement seemed reasonable. Predicting the future is tricky business.

But I don't 'require that I cry' for judging the merit of something.......

Crying is a funny thing.

As a male, I've always felt at odds because I cry so much. I enjoy crying. It's a sort of release while feeling overwhelmed by beauty. I don't accept the premise that crying equates with being sad (as you implied elsewhere in your post). Surely sometimes it does. I cried when a friend died not too long ago -- that was sad, but far more often I cry because I am moved by something that "feels" universal. Sometimes it's about awe, sometimes about love, sometimes it's about truth, sometimes about exquiste beauty. I can tell you one thing, it's always about emotion. I'm a bit of an emotion junkie. I enjoy feeling it. It makes me feel alive. So for me crying in a ballet (which I do often) is a tribute to the power of what I'm seeing. The ballet, be it the choreography, the dancer's performance, or the story, has moved me in some profoundly human way. For that I am grateful. Perhaps I am not your "typical" guy, but for me one common way I acknowledge being moved and feeling emotion is to cry. And if I cry, you can be pretty sure the observed has merit......that particular reaction has been a pretty reliable barometer for me over the years.