volcanohunter
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Posts posted by volcanohunter
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Fingers crossed that Renavand's proper farewell will take place on Sunday as planned.
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Judging by his bio on the Paris Opera site, Dudamel conducted only one ballet gala. Otherwise he conducted a handful of operas and a concert of symphonic music in each of his two seasons. This is not unusual. Antonio Pappano does not conduct the Royal Ballet, and Riccardo Chailly does not conduct La Scala's ballet company. There are specialists for that.
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Philippe Jordan held the post for 12 years and had his contract extended twice, so it can be done. However, if, like Benjamin Millepied, someone goes in there with an intent to overhaul the institution, they're likely to get slammed hard by the rebounding door on the way out.
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Dudamel is leaving Paris tout suite.
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2 hours ago, abatt said:
Kimin Kim is still dancing with the Mariinsky, I believe. He is one of the few non-Russian artists who continues to perform with the company. Is that correct
Partly that depends on how you define foreign. Skorik was born in Ukraine, Askerov comes from Azerbaijan and Ivanchenko was born in Turkmenistan. May Nagahisa is from Japan, Even Capitaine is a French dancer who before this season had been working in Belarus, Camilla Mazzi is Italian, Bíborka Lendvai is from Hungary. There are a handful in the corps, but on balance not many.
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Smirnova appeared with ABT in La Bayadère in 2014 opposite Vadim Muntagirov, but her next scheduled appearance was canceled because of injury.
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It's usually a question of partnering. MacMillan's choreography is highly acrobatic, and it's simply easier to execute when Juliet is smaller. Though Darcey Bussell, who is about 5'7", danced the role in her day.
An interesting case is Neumeier's A Midsummer Night's Dream, because in the play Helena is explicitly tall, and Hermia is explicitly short. But because the choreography involves Demetrius and Lysander fighting over Helena and literally tossing her back and forth between them, Helena is always played by a short dancer, and Hermia, whose duets with Lysander are kind of gooey and lyrical, is usually the tall one.
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According to the online archive of the Royal Opera House, which is nowhere near complete, Ballet Imperial has not been performed there recently.
https://rohcollections.org.uk/work.aspx?work=620
The video came from a gala performance to mark the reopening of the theater after a lengthy renovation and only an excerpt was performed. (I remember there was also an excerpt from a Forsythe ballet that someone booed loudly.)
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Yes, this video is awful to watch in retrospect.
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7 minutes ago, attitudebalance said:
Also very curious as to why Bell and Hurlin aren't cast together more often - would be so easy to market as young, attractive, upcoming and a couple in real life!!
This sort of marketing seems to be a one-shot deal. I remember how after their promotion to principal, Dvorovenko and Beloserkovsky appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine and got a feature in People, but after that it ceased to be a marketing tool. In her reviews Anna Kisselgoff routinely mentioned that they were real-life spouses, but that was about it.
34 minutes ago, FauxPas said:However, Max and Irina left ABT with a sour taste in their mouths about the company.
I don't know what kind of relationship Max and Irina have with Susan Jaffe but their professional relationship with Kevin McKenzie was over. I didn't get a sense Irina wanted to go back to work for him or ABT.
It would be wonderful for everyone if money could be found and the spirit of cooperation to bring Max and Irina in as official coaches with the company so no dancer had to pay to get the help and training they need.
Dvorovenko did attend the send-off for McKenzie.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf1z23tLgrx/
Post-retirement they appeared in a few videos for ABT.
But yes, since so many ABT dancers are going to them for coaching on the side, it would only seem fair to hire them officially. Unless, of course, the extracurricular coaching is more lucrative than full-time positions at ABT would be.
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Given the conservative reputation of ABT audiences, I'm guessing there will be classical tutus and tiaras.
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Only until June 5th, Glyndebourne has posted a complete performance of Rusalka, starring Sally Matthews and Evan LeRoy Johnson, and conducted by Robin Ticciati.
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4 hours ago, California said:
The absence of the Russian companies for the indefinite future is going to be felt for many of these dance series - Kennedy Center, Segerstrom.
I don't see why. It was only the Mariinsky that was touring the US regularly, and ballet series need a lot more than one company. The Bolshoi last visited Los Angeles in 2012 and Washington in 2014. Besides, these days the Royal Ballet does a much better job of La Bayadère than the Bolshoi.
If proximity is an issue, the National Ballet of Japan or Korean National Ballet would be very fine choices.
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On 5/21/2023 at 5:03 PM, Drew said:
Why build a new great gate if not partly in hopes of building the connection between Hartmann’s Russian imperial present and the Medieval past? Hartmann also is a figure associated with Slavic and specifically Russian cultural revival.
Ironically, if Hartmann had actually succeeded in building his Russian Revival-style gate, it would have looked alien in its setting and made his argument appear tenuous.
I will hazard a guess that when Ratmansky listens to that music he doesn't see Hartmann's nonexistent gate. He may see something more like Kyiv's Golden Gate, which he has probably passed hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and he may hear the city's Baroque bell towers. I am not remotely surprised that in late March 2022 he felt that he needed to adjust the ballet’s imagery to show what Kyiv is to him, because the stakes had changed. The city withstands frequent bombardment but hasn't fallen. The opera house where he began his career can no longer present seven shows a week, but it continues to present three weekend shows with early start times. These are sometimes interrupted by air-raid sirens, but once they stop, the show goes on. Somehow, this new reality had to be acknowledged. Not Kyiv as "Mother of all Rus cities," but Kyiv as capital of Ukraine.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbj2icIgt93/
On 5/21/2023 at 5:03 PM, Drew said:I have not forgotten Bright Stream: though not without irony, it is a delightful farce set in the era of a horrendous, Stalin-stoked famine in Ukraine. He would not make that ballet again today—at least I think not.
In his interview for the London Ballet Circle Ratmansky seemed to suggest that it's time for The Bright Stream to die. He also said he was done with Shostakovich, not in a cancelation sense, but because he had exhausted his exploration and had choreographed all the ballets he had wanted to make to Shostakovich's music.
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3 hours ago, FauxPas said:
I find it sad that Stella Abrera, Marcelo and David Hallberg did not get retirement performances.
Gomes left under a cloud, but he hasn't retired. I know that ABT has held farewell performances for dancers who continued performing elsewhere, but it is a somewhat peculiar practice.
Hallberg's dancing days were undone by very long stretches of injury and lockdowns. The last 10 years of his performing career were a rocky series of fits and starts, and I understand why at some point he just had to move on.
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3 hours ago, Rosie2 said:
I wonder if Svetlana Lunkina is injured and that's why Sara Mearns came in to guest
That seems unlikely given that Mearns has never danced the ballet and cannot be present in Toronto right now to learn it. In the event of an injury, it would make sense to teach the role to another member of the company, as rehearsals are taking place.
Emma Hawes did return from London to dance Cinderella when the roster of available dancers grew thin, but she had danced the role in the past, and that was the point of inviting her. Or when a couple of ABT dancers came to the rescue of a run of Manon when the male ranks were awash in injuries: they stepped in because they danced those roles at ABT.
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11 hours ago, Drew said:
When Mussorgsky celebrates an image of the great gate of Kiev, surely the reference is to Kievan Rus
Actually, it isn't. Mussorgsky was referring to a proposed design by Viktor Hartmann (Gartman), which was never built. Thankfully, because it was an ugly design, complete with double-headed eagle, which might have fit in stylistically on Red Square, but which would have stuck out like a sore thumb among Kyiv's buildings. Also, the design never struck me as appearing especially "Great" or grand.
(The ruins of Kyiv's Golden Gate that led into the upper city survived into modern times, and in 1982 a reconstruction of the original gate was built in order to protect its surviving walls from further erosion. Today it stands about halfway between the opera house and the St. Sophia Cathedral complex along the same street.)
As far as I can gather, the change in the projection was made when the ballet premiered in Munich in the spring of 2022, which was interesting, because subsequently it turned out that AD Igor Zelensky was secretly Putin’s son-in-law and soon after he resigned his position for "family reasons" and returned to Russia. His former wife is still on staff at the Bavarian State Ballet.
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1 hour ago, Helene said:
Jaffe was an important part of ABT as an institution, which is very different from Corella at PA Ballet.
Jaffe also went through the fraught process of deciding when to retire after a very long tenure as principal, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she were very sensitive to the dancers facing the same issue.
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1 hour ago, nysusan said:
The current dancers may be happy that ABT no longer hires international stars but the ABT audience is not. I base this on my feelings & those of my many ballet going friends as well as the rows and rows of empty seats at the Met. Attendance was down last year and in the last couple of pre-pandemic years. Sales are very sluggish so far for this season not just for LWFC but for all of their programs.
This is true for many performing arts organizations and venues. How often does New York City Ballet close off not just the fourth ring, but also the third? There have been press stories about how poor Metropolitan Opera ticket sales have been this season. It was offering rush seats for the premiere of a new production on New Year's Eve. I have seen this in others cities as well. Audiences have been shrinking for years, and many people who had been attending haven't come back post-lockdowns. For some the cancellation of 2020-21 seasons was a "nightmare." Others discovered they could get by in life without theater outings.
Personally, the last time I encountered sold-out houses was with the National Ballet of Canada's new production of Swan Lake, whose premiere had been delayed by two years. And it had nothing to do with casting, which was, as always, announced very late, after most tickets had already been sold.
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Val Caniparoli's Jekyll & Hyde, set to music by five Polish composers, performed by the Finnish National Ballet and available on demand until 24 October 2023.
https://oopperabaletti.fi/en/stage24/video/jekyll-hyde-recording/
Since it's the most obvious question about the adaptation, Jekyll and Hyde are performed by different dancers.
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So this is an expanded version of Broken Wings? Annabelle Lopez Ochoa just expanded her one-act GaBotero into a two-act Botero.
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The Ambiguous Dance Company performing Boram Kim's Body Concert
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Thank you starting a thread. California had posted the release elsewhere.
Is this similar to what happened with ABT tickets? Is there now a policy to open up areas only once the one below is well sold?
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Daniil Simkin is leaving the Staatsballett Berlin. The company had been under interim leadership since 2020, but as of autumn 2023 its artistic director will be Christian Spuck.
https://www.staatsballett-berlin.de/en/blog/onegin-abschiedsvorstellungen/181
The English translation is a little less clear, but of Evelina Godunova, Simkin and Yevgeniy Khissamutdinov the German version reads "die alle drei ihre letzte Vorstellung geben und das Ensemble zum Saisonende verlassen werden."
Sarah Lane
in Dancers
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Yay! I hope you have a great trip!