papeetepatrick

Reminded me of Ann Reinking's 2003 B'way show 'The Look of Love', which was all dances to Burt Bacharach songs--and should have been something special, but apparently was a huge nowhere. So that's the first 'dancical' I've heard of. This sounds a little more ga-ga still.

Suzanne Farrell and Alla Sizova (alphabetical order) are the two that put the word 'BALLERINA' on the Big Board for me. They are the most dazzling bodies--I give up on 'perfect proportions' and settle for long limbs and healthy animals--and I can live with conventional prettiness, since they both have suffered from it. Both used those faces expertly, too, in my opinion, although in different ways, Farrell more the crepuscular tones and expression, and Sizova beaming sunlight. I like some other ballerinas as well from time to time, though, but I like these two for 'beautiful proportions' when they dance, even if I'm off the straight and narrow with this.

Probably not, but it is quite possible not to be at all pretty in the conventional sense--this goes for both sexes.

If even so, it was definitely in Far from Denmark that Peter Martins was made to understand that he was the ideal partner for Suzanne Farrell, who may have the 'perfect female physique' to my mind, but may possibly not be of 'ideal female proportion...' , given that I am always made to think of my favourite Tintorettos, which the Baroque rode in to dispute as not occurring in nature quite frequently enough...In any case, both Suzanne and Peter tended to agree a little bit more with everything Balanchine said than some of the other more religiously individualistic ones we've been talking about today...who were glorious but had shorter tenures in some companies than others.

Well, my question ended up being superbly answered, very specifically by rq and Alexandra about how Nureyev used his art to enhance certain proportions so they would then be the ones that seem perfect, and that he felt were the most correct in terms of ballet proportion. But now scores of new 'perfect physiques' and even 'ideal male proportions' have appeared under as many names, and so I can fully admit to always thinking Nureyev had one of the 'perfect physiques', but that this was not quite the same as 'perfect male physique proportions for ballet', about which I technically knew nothing. And yet the net result has been about the same, with the 'ideal body' and the 'perfect physique' become nearly one and the same. In that case, I ought to add Nikolaj Hubbe, who, according to Alexandra, also speaks with a great richness of images--and he certainly has a 'perfect physique'. All the other ones I named, and most likely everybody else's too, have perfect physiques--so it ends up being a lot more the 'ones you like best' than I would have thought. In short, there really is no 'golden ideal', because I am now even free to say that Peter Martins has 'the perfect physique' even if this isn't all that popular here, because, for one thing--he did have it, and it was more obviously masculine than some of the others, and that was in a literal sense the criterion of 'male proportion', while not being so obviously lush-looking as Marcelo Gomes, who is nevertheless masculine. This has turned out almost as an interesting experiment, although I certainly had no idea beforehand that there would be so many different ideas of what 'ideal' is--such that there does end up being nothing that conclusive except qualities of dynamism, energy and brilliant imagination mixed in with--perfect physiques. Should we now turn to the ladies, or has that been done?

In case you missed the ones on WQED tonight, ngitanjali, that I posted, just look at the pbs website, put in your zip code (or your mother's) and search for 'Nureyev the Russian Years'. Probably get it tonight.

There was that other documentary about Nureyev for television that has that 1979 footage, doesn't it? Doesn't 'I am a Dancer' have the 'M & A' footage of the development of it, and when they first performed it? Unless the 1979 clip is from a Fonteyn documentary, I saw them all about a year ago, and now they've run together.

Great Performances Nureyev: The Russian Years A profile of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Sunday, September 02, 12:40 AM WNET - Channel 13 Here's another broadcast, at least for Channel 13 watchers. There was a New York Times article about Nureyev sometime in the 80s--early or mid--in which he said he no longer missed Russia at all, although that's not the exact quote. One can leave one's homeland and feel that way occasionally--glad to get out of it--and go back into a mood of having deep reverence for it, and he definitely had a love of the lighthearted, parties and carousing, socialites, etc., this is all fine. I'm actually glad he'd not keep missing Russia all the time. I certainly don't miss my 'homeland' nearly all the time, and it's in the U.S.! Anyway, in terms of the narrative, documentaries do like to get all solemn and a little heavy about some things, because they are actually creating something that is at least partly a new fiction. Here are a bunch of WQED broadcasts: Great Performances Nureyev: The Russian Years A profile of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Friday, August 31, 2:00 AM WQED - Channel 13 Great Performances Nureyev: The Russian Years A profile of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Friday, August 31, 2:00 AM WQED-DT2 [D] Great Performances Nureyev: The Russian Years A profile of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Friday, August 31, 4:00 AM WQED - Channel 13 Great Performances Nureyev: The Russian Years A profile of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Friday, August 31, 4:00 AM WQED-DT2 [D]

I love it, too, and the Prokofiev score is probably one of the great reasons why--a masterpiece. I do find 'Cinderella' very boring though, and the Prokofiev score is not nearly so great for that either. I didn't even like the video of Sylvie Guillem doing it with POB much. But the MacMillan R & J is one of the greats for me. Saw very little in that short version by Sean Lavery, and haven't seen Peter Martins's version, nor care to that much.

They should film this Live from Branson, Missouri in this case, shouldn't they?

I just looked in IMDb and Wiki, which don't mention it. I've always found her a banal and uninteresting actress.

I can't stand this piece either, nor the music.

There's a Sylvie Guillem 'Cinderella' VHS from POB with Nureyev from the 80s. I imagine this is on DVD too. NYPL lists 2 more VHS's with Guillem: 7 Ballets, from POB, with Guillem in something with music by Auber, I was hurrying. Also a VHS from 1988 all about Guillem, called 'Sylvie Guillem at Work'. These ought to be available on eBay, if not now then later, if not somewhere else and not yet on DVD (I'd think they were.)

Maybe this emphasis on theatre is why 'Nijinsky Clown de Dieu' worked so well at the Palais des Sports--which I recall as rather barn-like, but was only there the one time. At any rate, I consider myself extremely lucky to have seen it, and I had a poster of Farrell in it on the wall of my Paris apartment the entire time I lived there. My friend who accompanied me kept saying 'si souple! si souple!'

Can you (and/or anyone else who may feel the same way) be specific why this would be so? perhaps as compared to some other names I'd recognize like Peter Martins, Baryshnikov, Soloviev, Patrick Bissell, Marcelo Gomes, Peter Schaufuss, and some of the ones already discussed. I don't doubt it, but my amateur eye would have thought he had the most charismatic body I'd seen in some sensual sense (including the dancing), but you must mean something technical along the lines of much else that is being discussed here when you talk about the 'beautiful proportions'. Againk I have no reason to doubt it's true, but it's not something that would have automatically occurred to me (nor necessarily should have, of course). To take one of the more extreme examples, there's that old video of 'Swan Lake' in which he and everybody else is rather tarted up, so that sometimes costuming could make him look peasant-ish, which is all right, but not usually a matter of perfect proportion. His voluptousness has a feminine component that is very attractive, but that I wouldn't have thought would make him the candidate for most beautifully proportioned body. I would have thought several other types, but with Nureyev the most unique and exciting in other ways--so please, do tell and explain.

I know others who don't like her so much, but I thought 'Beloved' one of the most moving novels I ever read. She even used a phrase 'dappled treelight' that I had used in a published work and thought was original with me, but she had written it first! I mean, gimme a break, that was a pretty rarefied term. I thought the movie was truly excellent too, and I rarely find a screen adaptation of a novel I've loved very impressive, although two have actually improved a book IMHO.

I don't know, because there are always exceptions. If you read Aristotle's Poetics and take it literally, you'll never seen anything at all of much of what you like. Things always slip away from these art-rule books, although they might get some of the general things right. Thanks for the link, I just read some more of what you quoted. Things like this usually have more to do with their era than anything else. I didn't read anything there I didn't think was already outmoded, but very little of what we see in ballet now was extant in 1831, so certainly 'Faust interdit' is sort of like reading old Victorian texts, including some of the political ones in which all aspects of white imperialism are taken for granted as being God-given. Peculiar to see 'terror' as opposed to 'horror', though, since the word 'terror' is on everybody's lips these days, and no one is in touch with what difference Blasis might make between the two. It's doubtful few care, and in any case, modern dance has already dealt with tons of terror and horror, so maybe ballet will have to keep up. At a first glance, I can't see anything in the Blasis beyond a curio.

This just occurred to me regarding e-books. I think it very likely that a computer, a sort of iBook, in the shape of a book, but that will get rid of all the harshness to the eyes, will be developed, and hundreds of thousands of downloadable books will be on it. It will be a luxury item for awhile, but it could easily even be made to have the tactile sensation of a book. I wouldn't be surprised to see it come out within the next 2 or 3 years, considering that it sounds relatively simple. It could, of course, even have a leather binding. It occurred to me because the wireless laptops are already the size of some books, and it sounds as though it will be a small feat. People's sentimentalities about these things won't last if there are buttons to push to turn the page, instead of scrolling and using cursors. This is somewhat but we've been talking about media and content. I've often in the last year seen the phrase 'the youth culture is media-driven', and I've noticed this becoming more obvious with each passing year. If you think back to a year as ancient as 1999, you can see the exponential rise in cellphone use alone, and even then there was already plenty of it, just not 75% of the people on the street as it sometimes is now.

No matter what Marshall does, though, this is not primarily a dance musical, so it has at least a chance of turning into something besides silly razzle-dazzle. I'm frankly a bit amazed they're making it--it's never been a loud advertisement for itself like 'Hairspray' or 'Dreamgirls', not to mention 'The Lion King' and 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Les Miserables'. Even 'Sweeney Todd' is more of a household word than 'Nine'.

I would have loved that--especially if the orchestra sounded so good. The Overture alone is worth the price of admission if it's played stunningly.

Yes, there's no question but that there's a great deal of this, but not nearly just books--literally everything. Publicity is very powerful, and hacks can often use it much more effectively than geniuses, due to being willing to put much, and maybe nearly all, of their effort into that and that alone. I know I'm not anywhere nearly fully immune to it, and I'm a good bit more careful to choose than most. But this is not nearly always a negative--without publicity, Don DeLillo's Falling Man would surely not have been read by many people, and part of the publicity was that he already has such a big reputation.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa40..._n9169528/pg_18 Here's an example of one literary form, poetry, which is enjoying a different kind of relationship with the digital age. There were several other articles I saw which discussed poetry and cyber-writing, so that one is led to believe that 'cybermonde' will affect some literary forms positively and others adversely. Pretty complex, I'd say.

http://www.graywolfpress.org/Related_Conte...sappearing_Ink/ In the meantime, this is good for those interested in such things.

And it affects writing style too. Jean Baudrillard wrote a lot on this, exaggerating sometimes, but I have found out from experimenting how much of it is true. He made the difference between writing on a typewriter and writing on a word-processing program, and how much the computer actually does for you. This is definitely true, because it allows you to speed, easily correct and then think that the same 'content' came out anyway. When I'm trying to write something that's going to last instead of evaporate, I even write it all out in handwriting, which is even less mechanically mediated than an old kind of typewriter. I only write first on the computer if I am sure it doesn't radically alter what I'm working toward, i.e., the removal of aspects of labour from something can affect the tempo and tone of something. I think it's premature in the sense that the predictions are probably off, but not wrong. And I definitely think we already see much fiction, yes, even between hard book covers, that reflects the influence of cyberspace and a certain hyped-up sensation that goes with it. You can even find it in fine writers like Salman Rushdie. The difference in P.L.U. (People Like Us...that is, at Ballet Talk) as opposed to cyber-sites that are not steeped deeply in tradition, is that there is much less continuity, threads are rarely renewed, and there is a greater interest in the cyber-aspect of the discussion much of the time than there is in sites which are extensions from arts like ballet, opera, classical music, theater and even film by comparison. The contributors become much more like characters of some kind of cyber-punk fiction in the younger type of site than they ever do here. It's impossible to do that here, which is wonderful relief, but this is an example that is the same as Carbro reading 'Great Expectations' in whatever format. First, we are talking about someone, and many others here, who are familiar not only with fabulous live performances of all kinds, but also books that are not only physical, but even have illustrations on their old pages sometimes. That this kind of touch gets you closer to the original is indisputable, I think. But that person who is steeped in the tradition is not going to get infected with an addiction to e-books the way a teenager who spends hours a day 'friending' on MySpace, so that it would be according to the person whether 'Great Expectations' really stays 'Great Expectations' or is just another piece of screen flotsam. The real issue in the future of e-books is very simple, being purely economic. If it becomes prohibitive to continue to afford books, and free to read them online, that plus the fact that sales of print publications is down and when a publisher is sold now, they are considered incredibly lucky. I'll look this up to get the exact facts. At any rate, it will be something to do with economic factors that determines whether the changeover into many online things affects some things more than others. If it is a radical change, no matter when, I would think it would definitely be an evolution into something as singular as dirac's example of moving from the oral tradition and other aspects of the pre-printing press world. Many people still choose to read a physical newspaper, but they don't have to. At this point, they still cannot choose to eat off a screen, which may explain why restaurants and cuisine are at least one of the arts which seem to be at their highest degree of refinement right now, and other arts seem to be floundering--reproductions will do for many people. Edited to add: still searching about that big publisher sale in the last 2 years, but there's a lot on the web about the decline of print culture. Actually, Conde Nast appears to be doing well, I'm still searching....

That made me think of something else that is not exactly on this re-reading topic--or rather, it is not only on that, but also--but is not far off and does include. I read several of the Little House books, but started with 'On the Banks of Plum Creek'. I had no idea these were celebrated children's books. And although 'On the Banks of Plum Creek' is the only one I didn't finish, it's also the only one that transported me into a singular world which exists nowhere else. And this leads to not wanting to re-read things or re-see certain things if you can't get that same exact feeling again. This by no means always applies, but sometimes I feel that if I re-experience a work a second time, it will ruin my memory of it, because that has indeed happened. It's just like going back to some places that transformed your whole worldview, and when you return they aren't the same place, and you're disappointed. Other oddities are having read 'kidnapped' and 'treasure island' when I was 7, but just reading them straight through and paying no attention to what they were about, just to show off I could read 'hard books' for my age (I found out later this was no great feat.) These I think I will reread to see if I remember even a single image from them. Another phenomenon was trying to read 'Vanity Fair' several times and never finishing it as a teen-ager. I still haven't finished it. I got rid of all this feebleness as an adult and took 3 1/2 years to get through 'Tristram Shandy', which I found maddening, but thrilling.