volcanohunter

She probably believed she needed to speak because Bolshoi dancers are prohibited from talking to reporters without the theater's permission, and if they were to say anything critical, they would risk being slapped with a formal reprimand à la Tsiskaridze. I'm sure she didn't do it lightly. She has family members within the company to consider. You know, I can understand why they feel threatened. Since Sergei Filin took over in March 2011, the Bolshoi has lost an excessively large number of principal dancers: Vladimir Neporozhny, Yuri Klevtsov, Andrei Uvarov, Natalia Osipova, Ivan Vasiliev, Dmitry Belogolovtsev, Svetlana Lunkina (de facto), Galina Stepanenko and Nikolai Tsiskaridze. If the departures of Neporozhny, Klevtsov, Uvarov, Belogolovtsev, Stepanenko and even Tsiskaridze can be attributed to age, the others cannot. To lose one or two principals may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose that many looks like something quite different. I couldn't really blame the "native" Bolshoi dancers for feeling like they're under siege, their own being hounded out of their home theater and ready to be replaced by outsiders.

There's a good chance that the dancer "blackmailed" by Filin could be Marianna Ryzhkina, whose son Klim Yefimov dances in the Bolshoi's corps. The Bolshoi Theater site does not give any background on Dilyara Timergazina, but apparently she was not a dancer. Rather, she holds an MBA from NYU and previously worked for Ernst & Young. So I can understand why dancers would take umbrage at her expressing opinions about the quality of their dancing. I thought the newfangled artistic council was supposed to be Filin's eyes and ears. No, the interview does not give a specific reason for dropping Alexandrova from Sleeping Beauty, but she was for some reason. It's not as though she's technically incapable of dancing Princess Aurora or that she would be a drag on the box office. However, Alexandrova, along with Denis Savin, Elena Andrienko and a couple of others, are official dancer representatives in the union that elected Dmitrichenko to replace Filin and then selected Filin's ex-buddy Ruslan Pronin to fill in for Dmitrichenko. The union is not exactly pro-Filin, and that's why I'm suspicious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdp5zXcX3-M Although the interview appears in tomorrow's edition of "Izvestia," its contents are not that new. Lunkina speaks of learning about Alexandrova's casting changes a few days earlier, when in fact they were announced several weeks ago. I'm sure lots of stuff has happened since then. But I agree that Lunkina would probably especially careful about saying things that could make life more difficult for her sister or her sister's mate. Incidentally, Skvortsov is not exactly a weak Prince Désiré either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spdsaZZDlJo As for business practices, if Filin resorts to abusive language, I think that crosses the line. Among recent information leaked from police interrogations of Pavel Dmitrichenko is a description of how Filin drove Svetlana Adyrkhaeva to tears by screaming at her. http://izvestia.ru/news/552018

In this case it may be more sinister than that. It is possible that Ruslan Skvortsov in particular is being victimized because of his familial connections to Svetlana Lunkina, just as Maria Alexandrova may have been relieved of her Beauties for her trade unionism, and Maria Allash appears to have been scratched from the tour entirely for signing the letter in support of Pavel Dmitrichenko. http://balletalert.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/36700-is-svetlana-lunkina-moving-to-toronto/?p=322491

Svetlana Lunkina unleashes on Sergei Filin. It's a quick and dirty translation, so my apologies. http://izvestia.ru/news/552486

They're not second-string infielders. They're Bolshoi principals. Real Bolshoi principals.

Not the same ones.

Will other dancers now be bumped to make room for him in Swan Lake, La Bayadère and "Diamonds"? I realize it's not Hallberg's fault that he was injured for a long time, but it's not fair to those who have been toiling away in his absence. Every day they've been dealing with the hell that's embroiled the Bolshoi for the last five months, and he swoops in for the glamour job.

I recall when last November she failed to win promotion or even rank in the top six among the sujets she expressed crushing disappointment on her Twitter feed. Scroll down and you'll find FoFs trying hard to console her. https://twitter.com/MFroustey Despite her early success on the competition circuit, for whatever reason she seemed to hit a wall at the POB promotion exam.

Here come the Bolshoi cast changes. Merde.

Thank you, silvermash. You've reassured me that the system works as advertised and that my chances of success are quite good.

I wonder whether anyone could give me some advice about this. I've never dealt with ticket returns or exchanges at the Royal Opera House. This is what the ROH web site tells me, but I would appreciate insight from people with first-hand experience with returns and exchanges.

No, she was among the dancers who remained in Paris to dance in Ashton's La Fille mal gardée.

The Bolshoi is filming a lot of stuff, but it has been slow to reach DVD. Since 2010 they have filmed 15 ballets in HD, but thus far only four have been released commercially, and they're not necessarily the ones I would most like to have. Of the ones still sitting in the vault there are a half dozen I would buy in a heartbeat. The Bolshoi will give Jewels the HD treatment in January. Just as long as they don't give us Svetlana Zakharova in "Diamonds." Oy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDXGcfjy_O0

It could be an issue if ABT decides to program Swan Lake and/or Don Quixote. Then, for fear that audiences may opt for the Bolshoi production rather than ABT's, the non-compete clause may come into play. But, frankly, I think there would be a risk of audience defection regardless of casting.

The Bolshoi Theater unveiled its plans for next season today. On the ballet front there will be new productions of Pierre Lacotte's Marco Spada in November, John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camellias in March and the world premiere Jean-Christophe Maillot's The Taming of the Shrew in July. There will also be a revival of Yuri Grigorovich's The Golden Age in January, though it hasn't exactly been absent from the repertoire. The company last performed the complete ballet in 2009, and in January 2012 a large chunk was performed at a gala celebrating Grigorovich's 85th birthday. Planned tours include Swan Lake in Singapore on November 17-26, Lost Illusions in Paris on January 4-10, a gala concert in Tromsø on February 1-2, Giselle in Washington, DC, on May 18-25, and Swan Lake, Don Quixote and Spartacus (as well as a concert performance of The Tsar's Bride) in New York on July 12-28. There is also mention of a Japanese tour of Swan Lake, Don Quixote and La Bayadère in November and December, presumably of 2014. In Moscow, in the meantime, the Paris Opera Ballet will perform Paquita in September, and the Royal Ballet will visit with Manon, Raven Girl and DGV while the Bolshoi is in New York. The press release in Russian: http://www.bolshoi.ru/r/6D5270C4-3317-476D-99FD-954604FE7251/plans-238.pdf P.S. For interested opera fans, the Bolshoi Opera's new productions will include Der fliegende Holländer directed by Peter Konwitschny, Don Carlo directed by Adrian Noble, a double bill of Iolanta and Mavra directed by Irina Brown, a revival of The Tsar's Bride, and Così fan tutte directed by Floris Visser.

Yes, it's funny that the Bolshoi should have tried to dismiss or diminish the pro-Tsiskaridze protesters for being overwhelmingly female precisely because ballet's audience is predominantly female. We also know from official surveys that women constitute the majority of the audience for all performing arts forms in the United States. Even in the case of jazz music, which proportionally speaking has the largest male audience, women still make up the majority of its patrons. So it's unfortunate that the Bolshoi should have employed a sort of fallacious logic here: Tsiskaridze's fans are women; women are hysterical; Tsiskaridze's fans are merely hysterical. Nothing to see here...

What a splendid Lescaut he was too.

How terribly sad. May he rest in peace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDDcsYPyg3w

The other man on the scale is the Bolshoi's general director Anatoly Iksanov. http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/persons/management/1643/ Can't say anything about the flower. Incidentally, for some reason the Bolshoi press office thought it necessary to point out today in its daily dispatch of news that most of the pro-Tsiskaridze picketers were women. I have no idea what they were trying to imply.

As of yesterday, the Bolshoi Theater press office is publishing a daily English-language newsletter in PDF format. You can sign up by sending a request to newsletters@bolshoi.ru. Today's newsletter includes a quote from Sergei Filin, who says that he has no vision in his right eye and about 10% vision in his left eye. The information comes from a statement he made to the ITAR-TASS agency. http://www.itar-tass.com/c9/772823.html

The POB was releasing a lot of stuff until relatively recently, which makes it all the more mysterious.

Unfortunately I'm totally ignorant of the economics, but I don't understand why the broadcasts are not available as downloads. You Tube pirates are uploading the stuff anyway, and ballet companies won't make a cent off that. Why not try to control the process instead? Still, if a broadcast is not shown in certain--or most--countries, and the performance is not made available in any recorded medium, I can understand why YouTube users on both ends of the data stream do what they do.

The POB routinely films three productions each season for television broadcast. This year, in addition to Don Quixote and The Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler, which were also shown in cinemas, the company filmed the Gillot/Cunningham bill, which probably wasn't considered commercially viable for a cinema broadcast. I understand why companies believe that movie audiences would rather see a full-evening narrative ballet than a triple bill of plotless works. The obvious problem is that their number is limited. There is a reluctance to repeat repertoire, probably because of an assumption that duplicate performances would be unlikely to sell on the DVD market. So thus far the POB has been slow to re-film anything already out on DVD. I did film a new Don Q this season, and it will film a new Sleeping Beauty next season, but they haven't yet reached the Royal Ballet's willingness to repeat popular repertoire even if there is almost no likelihood of subsequent DVD release. Next season the Royal Ballet will film its fourth Nutcracker, third Sleeping Beauty and third Giselle in less than a decade. Mind you, POB DVDs traditionally came out on TDK and Opus Arte, and since Arthaus Musik swallowed up TDK and the Royal Opera House bought Opus Arte, there have been practically no new POB releases. The current backlog of unreleased telecasts goes back some five years. This is an extremely frustrating state of affairs.

Rumor has it that this will not be a new film of La Sylphide at all, but rather a screening of the existing film with Aurélie Dupont and Mathieu Ganio. The distributor's web site does not come right out and say this, but the conductor named is Ermanno Florio, who conducted the previously filmed performance, whereas this year's run is being conducted by Philippe Hui. http://www.fraprod.fr/offre_cinema.php?id=10

The article states that Lunkina has permanent residence in Canada by virtue of her husband's Canadian citizenship. She requires no visa to live and work in the country and is eligible for virtually any job she likes. (As it stands two-thirds of the company's principals are immigrants to Canada.) As for the ballerinas who have "paid their dues," I won't name names but they include a dancer whose entrechats don't clear the floor and another who has the flimsiest fouettés I've seen from a principal dancer. Karen Kain is nuts.