papeetepatrick

I didn't watch any of this, except NYTimes 'live-blogging' version. But do want to hear the score of 'In the Heights', and see it if possible. I had not been keeping up as with last year, and with all this salsa, I think we've got a score which is probably the best since Urinetown--guy sounds super-talented. I get Cuban Sandwiches in those same literal heights (Washington Heights) all the time, even though it's Dominican enclave mainly. Glad Patti won, though, even though the best musical I saw last year was 'Anne of Green Gables' by Cryer/Ford. It was simple and it was perfect, but it wasn't on The Great White Way.

Thanks for mentioning this, Kathleen, I will listen to this soon, as NYPL has it for an even better bargain price. At this moment I'm listening to Wuorinen's Great Bamboula fr String Orchestra. It's arresting enough, coming after Carter's elegant Variations for Orchestra on Levine's Vol. 2 Documents of the Munich Years CD.

The poor dear, Gawd rest 'er saaaoooouulllll!!!

Yeah, that's interesting, and here it is on DVD, music by Gavin Gordon. Erase if this is an interdit link (It's not an online discussion, but rather you can order it here if you want it. http://www.vaimusic.com/VIDEO/DVD_4379_Che...kesProgress.htm Here's another piece on it, which I found interesting, from June, 2006. Don't think this is a discussion board either, not sure. (delete if necessary.) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100...p;refer=culture That would be either Roxana or Moll, according to whether you want a peaceful retirement or wages-of-sin-is-death ending. Or even Lady Booby, actress become great lady with Joseph discovered to be bastard son at end.

And bravo to you, Cristian, for such a thoughtful, sensitive and courageous post.

I have no idea why 'The Rake's Progress' sounds automatically like a much more likely candidate. But now that you emphasize episodic, Roxana does make sense, and is, in fact, already rather episodic. The Moll Flanders plot is more complex and she ends without tragedy unlike Roxana, but rather in eternal penitence, which seems less theatrical; if you've just read Roxana, you were probably struck as I was by the way Defoe saves the whole unravelling into punishment till the very last paragraph--which is just searing, because you'd been pulling for her. Joseph Andrews has all those matters of adoption an coincidental births and confusions of near-incests, etc., that Wilde may have even lifted from there to come up with the what happens by the end of Importance of Being Earnest. Made me think that Thomas Hardy's novels could also be episodic but not so busily complex. As maybe 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and there's a great tradition of English pastoral music--not just Vaughan Williams either-- that could be drawn from for Wessex unless a new score were commissioned.

I hadn't meant affected, I had meant that even if and when she was using standard diction as a basis for some of her speech, she would automatically make it her own, not garden variety; hence, idiosyncratic, which to me doesn't mean affected. It's actually this standard diction that's so overly pruned and neat that sounds affected to me, esp. with the (often) shallower actors like Lana Turner who have little ear (it works well enough in things like 'Cass Timberlane', much less well in 'Diane'.) The sound is apparent also in a very good actress like Cloris Leachman in her debut as the doomed woman at the beginning of 'Kiss Me Deadly'.

That may be all you thought about from what you read, but that's not all that was said. Something like a 'village idiot' is a kind of character some of us like to think of in theatrical terms only. Carbro said the allergy to psychoanalysis and clinical types might be because labels, etc., might bring about stereotypes, but actually, I think stereotyping is hardly the problem some of us have, as Commedia dell'Arte is full of these characters. I don't think any of us (at least I don't) care that someone wants to think about modern disease terms or Freudian analyses upon looking at works in which it's not made explicit. As far as the Alain was concerned, what Ashton said about the making of the character would be what interested me; is that irrelevant? He might not always tell everything, that's true. I think I've met Village Idiots and I know I've met simpletons. Tons of them, too numerous too contemplate. They are more entertaining onstage, and they are surely always exploited--and this is not nice. But many things in old culture don't seem nice to us now, but we accept some of it as having been considered given in their day--such as admiration for the militant and warlike hero, which is distinctly frowned upon since the Vietnam War, but nobody expects heroes in Wagner or Plutarch's accounts of Alexander to need singling out as Phallic Exception Problems. Of course, this may have nothing to do with what you're talking about, but I think those of us in disagreement may have a difference in our taste for seeing such things in certain places. I don't mind socially exploited buffoons if the works haven't yet been banned as too harsh for our sensitive delicate modern tastes. And some director was some months back talking about getting the racism out of Puccini--I guess if was Madama Butterfly, but don't know nor care; they'll always go back to the basic production. I think Village Idiots have sometimes been revered. Aren't they sometimes considered oracles and consulted on who is to be condemned? Anyway, I'd be interested in the Asperger's Syndrome of Alain if Ashton said something explicitly about it. Otherwise, anything may be fair game for an observer's imagination. Such things take away the magic of the theatrical spell for some of us. I wouldn't ever want to imagine the Mouse King as carrying rabies or Carabosse suffering from AIDS dementia. Apologies if I'm too far off, really not trying to be silly, I just think that theatre exists insulated from much of the literal outside, so not meaning to be offensive. Just not going to do it myself, I guess.

I did think of her while I was writing my vague post, but thought she was mostly a little too expressive for the pure form of what I think I'm talking about. It's kind of like what you'd here in very pedestrian lines like 'He'll be right with you, Mr. Stanford', with the name pronounced neatly 'Mistah Stan-fahd'. Or those classic cliches like "You-uh huh-ting me" or ''We'll get the money and go away togethuh..." Bette may talk like that too when she's calmed down (somewhat rare occurrence), but when she does, she makes even the standard sounds idiosyncratic, since incapable of not doing so. I bet dirac can help us on this Hollywood Elocution Fugue State I'm suffering.

That reminds me of something I may have made up (but don't think it's entirely so), but has to do with a lot of Hollywood diction from esp. the late 30s into the 50s. I thought there was some phrase about 'Hollywood elocution', but no google found it. Anyway, the carefully tight accents from everybody from Joan Blondell to some of Cary Grant to Lana Turner to Betty Grable to Loretta Young to Gracie Allen--anyway, it's this very 'neat-sounding' thing that might be related to standard English diction. Anybody know what I'm talking about? I don't recall any of the European stars thinking they needed to bother with it, and anybody with a slouch or low-slung nonchalance managed to never use it, althogh Barbara Stanwyck sometimes seemed to fall into it, speaking as if without opening her mouth sometimes, and Angie Dickinson sometimes used this speech--more in women than men, I think. But not in smoky-sexy types like Kim Novak who spoke more expansively, etc. I could probably think of a lot more, but secretaries in movis especially all had this neat kind of sound. I don't think you ever hear this any more, but Nicole Kidman may be close to it when she uses her American accent (I concede I'm also always surprised when I then hear speaking in Australian accent.) Janet Leigh used it occasionally, many others. I think it is a specific, taught form of speech for film actors in the Golden Age Hollywood period, not sure.

~ Ed Siegel in The Boston GlobeOkay, I'm willing to concede placing the composer's name after the title but before the choreographer's name in the program, following the conceit that the music probably came before the choreography... but... "changing the name of the production from "Tchiakovsky's Swan Lake"...! If you want to go to a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, go to a Symphony concert... if it's a ballet production, don't presume shock at the choreographer being credited! Or am I over-reacting, and the Matthew Bourne production was originally titled "Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake"? I'd never seen this old thread. I certainly think it ought to be called 'Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake' and not 'Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake', because even if it uses the Tchaikovsky music, it's not a real Swan Lake to me. Maybe it would be if I saw any beauty in it, which I don't personally. I remember threads on Racism in the ballet world or something like that, and how white ballets of the past were no longer feasible, but I can easily see a Black Swan Lake, including mixups about the Odette/Odile reversal easier than I can a Gay Swan Lake--I mean as Real Swan Lake, that is. Some people obviously like these things, I just don't get them. Even the Mats Eck totally-crackers 'Sleeping Beauty' is amusing once, but I never confuse if with being Sleeping Beauty. It seems like the unorthodox productions of things, modernizing, turning films into operas that will translate with some strain, etc,. are popping up in a lot of threads here right now. I'd concede that Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is ballet, since I don't care too much what it's called.

That's marvelous, almost Brokeback Mountain meets Les Enfants du Paradis, although Carne. Indeed we are, which is why you never knew which of Wagner's characters he actually sympathized with, because he might have just been upset that Wotan couldn't get over the tedium of Fricka and save the real estate, i.e., he may have felt his distaste for the eternal, impersonal gods was not unalloyed with lust, so could have balanced it out with all that constant harping on love for the Volsung but making sure that Brunnhilde had to suffer even though her insolent betrayal failed to save Siegmund from one of those classically 'inevitable deaths' due to something suppoedly understood as ignoble, but not necessarily done....

That's just what I was thinking, without having the expertise to have said so (and I wouldn't have in this case). How nice to find one's instincts confirmed by someone within the field. Before I got to Alexandra's remark, I had McBride in mind as what the 'in-house comparison' might be, as well as the plushness (although I tend to use related words for it, more often voluptuous or luxurious even, although plush is perfect) and expansiveness for Farrell.

Yes, I can see from this discussion that I am distinctly allergic to almost all psychoanalysis, although I've gotten some interesting things from reading Jung, far more than Freud or Lacan. Being as well one of those who totally resists any kind of psychotherapist (having spend a minimum amount of time--about 8 sessions between 2 doctors that was reducible to grief counseling) I'd much rather read the Norse mythologies about the Ring Cycle, and I can read Sophocles or Euripides or Racine without any reference to what somebody later on started proving in between accounts of Dora and the Rat Man, which always sound a lot more like Kafka than they do anything Greek. As for the ballets, I'm a thousand times more interested in Mme. D'Aulnoy and Charles Perrault.

I meant that they possibly could if the other things like the Asperger's could be inferred; in other words, I never do any of this. The 'no-Freud rule' is not always observed anyway, even it's Marx instead. Marxist's don't apply the no-Freud rule to Marx ever, and often even say, more or less, people should have known better than to be ruling class., and that past social developments and evolutions are quite as inexcusable in hindsight as existing terrible conditions are. Just so long as you don't want to deprive me of enjoyment, except that I begin to think I can't write comprehensibly, because my whole drift was that none of it gives me any enjoyment at all, and often doesn't respect history. I don't want brainwashed and sterilizied 'Le Bayaderes', if I have to have one. I am not balletomane enough to care for it even tainted properly with period racism. Am I now clear, or have I only misunderstood you in that you had not misunderstood me the first time? In any case, Asperger's Syndrome Analysis decidedly will never enhance my 'Fille mal Gardee' experience, and I think James may be more to blame than the Sylph anyway, so gets punishment instead of therapy. In other words, I don't think it works either, but bully for you is good.

Thanks for the information--I'll take your word for it, and these kinds of things are usually flash-in-the-pan one-semester affairs. People want to see the real Valhalla after they get their 'creative' avant-garde jollies out of the way. There used to be a lot of criticism of Wieland Wagner sets at Bayreuth, all sleek and sharp, but there wasn't much question that it was going to be German. My first thought for at least one of the sisters was Tyne Daly dubbed, then maybe Jodi Foster as another (also dubbed) and Sharon Stone dubbed as Brunnhilde--if they can keep it up till 'Walkure'. Make a movie into an opera (even if it was known by a select few in story form first--I haven't read the Proulx story and doubt I'll get to it; maybe most of the people who want to see this as opera will have, though), why not make an opera into a movie? It's hard enough to imagine the actual Holderlin Rhine not already having been polluted by industry in the 19th century (even if the Twilight pre-dates the composition), all that talk of the 'eternal unchanging motions of the Rhine'--even if the Krupps weren't working their steel cannon factories for the Franco-Prussian War yet (Essen may not be near the Rhine, of course).

But even if he had seen one and was imitating him, he would have just been inspired by characteristics he saw, not creating a character with Asperger's unless he specified it. If it is farce comedy, you don't have a character with Asperger's per se, do you? Toby in 'The Medium' is a Gypsy mute, but we also do know that his tongue was cut out. Don't they because Ashton is relatively recent, so contemporary observations must seem relevant that wouldn't for the 19th century, not too stretched for 'legitimate revisionist history'. Most 19th century characters, like Giselle or La Sylphide, may seem as if without a hardened enough ego or just defeatist and suicidal, even stripped of fairy status when applicable, couldn't they? I don't even tend to get very involved with Freudian talk about Siegfried and his mother, but wonder if that occurs as well because Freud goes back far enough for it to resonate somehow; Freud applied to Antigone doesn't even if it appears to. We all know that Chaplin's Little Tramp imitators don't get sympathy in real life. I do recall that Boulez heard a disturbed person playing the flute in a Scottish castle and thought it was the most extraordinary sound, but if he then 'used it', I'm sure he didn't say anywhere 'here's the part where I made the classical version of the changeling's flute-playing--it's a little birdlike thing' or here's the 'little phrase' as the Vinteuil Odette and Swann used to hear...and the clownish types in 'Slaughter on 10th Avenue' are just menacing low pimps when they leave the show. Or something like that. Others that come to mind are Marxist analyses of Mammy in 'Gone with the Wind': She appears to be loved and revered, but she is given no will of her own by the 'corrupt society'. I'm never convinced by such analyses. And Peter Pan definitely suffered from the Peter Pan Complex.

I don't know if I'd call Roxana's liaisons with the Prince and all the previous husbands and lovers dark, except that none of them, of which there are many, are much beyond 2-dimensional. But the novel is wonderful primarily for the writing style. But it's mainly about her constant upbraiding of herself for giving in to temptation and gold and ambition and feeling guilty about it. She is a courtesan, but refers to herself as a whore, but the problem is she has little range of character. She has her sidekick Amy and then tries to reform herself somewhat by helping out her abandoned children from a distance, but there are all sorts of messes that occur with those, and it's all in the written plotting. She's not quite a sympathetic character just because she says she isn't either--she is very repetitious and it's really only Defoe who's interesting. I can't well envision any of those 18th century novels as story ballets, although something abstract and shorter could be made about Roxana, perhaps more than Moll Flanders, Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews. I just see some big pageant of too many plot twists, too much scenery and costumes otherwise. POB did 'Wuthering Heights', but that doesn't seen quite the same. A one-act ballet of Roxana sounds possible, but not all that promising to my mind. None of the characters have any real romantic texture to them, although many of them are comic. Just a one-act piece with only the Roxana Name Dance focussed on with no moralizing could be dazzling, though, now I think of it: Just ignore the inevitable tragic ending and redo it completely, with just the whore-heroine at her social peak. This would be a totally unpunished whore (at least within what is shown onstage) and that would be something refreshing, but even though it's probably been done without pointing it out too strongly before, the world is probably as yet still not interested in something like that. So a 'Roxana's Dance' still sounds more promising than the Fielding, and Moll is too comic. How had you envisioned these, Ray? With all the complicated plot lines spelled out? For some reason, it reminds of a combo of what I read about POB Caligula and the awful Mayerling--on the heavy as lead side somehow. Maybe something primarily decorative is possible for these rococo things and loosely adapted. Actually begins to sound like 'La Valse', though.

Edward Villella in his prime live. I saw the old 'Nutcracker' broadcast, but otherwise only Watermill at the end of his career. Jacques d'Amboise in the 60s. Alla Sizova. Maria Tallchief. Nijinsky. Antoinette Sibley. Michal Denard. Martha Graham. Balanchine when young. Galina Mezentseva. Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn live in Giselle instead of just in the movie. Alicia Alonso when young. Marie Taglioni. Louis XIV. .

Perfection!

Of course, one sees a pattern beginning to emerge, and the repetition sets in. That's why I appreciate Mel's remarks; but also Gelsey's remarks, and never did till you typed them up today: Without them, there is a sense of Royal Kremlinology, cest-a-dire, much like what Mel has already said about the Gnostic secrecy and mystique. Balanchine was a great genius, but there is definitely a sense of cult, just as there is with Graham. It could also claim it is not a cult, but I have noticed that the most loftily-structured cults always refuse to see themselves as such. That gives them added appeal and a sense of exclusivity. It probably has a lot to do with a religiosity springing from the practised religions themselves, because in atheist composers and other artists the demands are more material and specifically demanding, as with Pierre Boulez--who simply demands overtly that you accede to his musical wishes or split. Anecdotes such as the one above are frequent among explicitly spiritual gurus as well--when there is a playful turn that goes against all the holiness and deep seriousness before it returns again. But what Mel said in his paragraph a couple of pages back, as well as some of what he said on a thread about Suzanne Farrell is much the way I see this kind of artistic religiosity. It is necessary, this religiosity, but that's also what I meant about how I take it seriously but not literally: There is a strongly hypnotic element involved, and therefore Gelsey's resisting statements are also half-true, to be taken seriously and not literally. But there were all sorts of other examples of dancers not being fully absorbed into the Balanchine mystique: Peter Schaufuss was there for awhile, I believe, but went elsewhere; he's very showy and is very good at it. Primarily, Mikhail Baryshnikov was there for a year, and he was certainly not fired. And then there's ABT, which is not part of any of this, even though they dance Balanchine works. I like Mel's use of "Gnostic" in regard to all this. Balanchine;s persona is powerful in many good ways, but you have to decide exactly where you are in relation to it--and that could be to be absorbed in it, or to see it as one of many valuable contexts, and be more detached. I love it, but I'm sure I'm in the latter category myself, not immersed in it. The way I see it, in regard to Gelsey and Balanchine, there were two people involved. I do recall when Suzanne Farrell's autobiography came out a few years after Gelsey's, the title seemed to have been derived from the title of Gelsey's book: One gets 'Dancing on My Grave' and then one gets 'Holding on to the Air'. Now that you've supplied some extra passages about Balanchine I didn't read when I skimmed Gelsey's book, the connection is even more obviously there even if nobody will say it means anything more than 'nothing', and/or is purely coincidental. I think that's normal in all ways and in all cases, given the 3 personalities involved. I skimmed Suzanne's book too.

Of course, I can imagine I would have been glad when she left NYCB and I've never followed her closely. On the other hand, this kiind of resistance, even if it is someone with very real identifiable problems, is a valuable and revealing kind of dissonance. It would not be so if it happened all the time, but if it did happen with an extremely gifted dancer like Kirkland, then that brought something to the whole world of NYCB that was also important. If NYCB hadn't been spacious enough to accommodate it (temporarily), it wouldn't have meant anything, but detractors will reveal something about the art quite as much as the closest and most cherished disciples. Or rather, they will to those of us who lose interest after a time in only the more closed and secret aspects of these things, while others may see them as merely troublemakers (of course, they are at least that too, that goes without saying, and it's well-known that she could be impossible. I'll admit that I only read the book in snippets, and it's slightly perverse of me to find some of her personal things amusing, because I remember primarily being annoyed at some of the 'I'm such a jazzy gal' loudness of it.)

I love it when she refers to her trysts with Peter Martins, after giving some detail, as 'Modern Romance'. That's the name of an old American pulp magazine that perished in the 60s.(unless it was Modern Romances.)

The things you've noted are not eligible during performance--worrying about scales and doing theory analysis--but 'beyond thinking' does not mean you are not using your mind. You're using it more than ever in an inspired performance. That's why "You have to be very careful when you use your mind, or you will get into trouble" can go either way; but it's phrased in such a way as to make it seem at least a bit suspect to 'use your mind', or it possibly indicates you should use it or not according to the one stating it--and for this, the only solution is to make up your mind, since listening to Balanchine reverently is definitely for some and not for all. Therefore, the remark is a bit suspect and Gelsey's suspicions also have some truth. Obviously Balanchine ruled. And technical considerations are not totally ruled out on stage, of course; it's just that they become second nature, rather than anything obsessive. I like some of Gelsey's remarks, even if they're exaggerated. It's good to question, and nobody doesn't get questioned.

Oh yes! Heavens, what a sound! going along with dirac's Higgins history. I didn't know Grant had been offered the role, and I am so glad he didn't do it, because Rex Harrison's speech is one of the greatest pleasures in theater and film--in "Blithe Spirit", I never even care what's going on, it's his movie and he was just great.