volcanohunter

Right.

Both Hoffmann and Dumas call her Marie.

The Penguin edition of Hoffmann's story starts like this: Once Dumas finishes his prologue, his text goes: While in Hoffmann's story Stahlbaum is a doctor and Drosselmeier is a judge, who also happens to be an amateur clock maker, in Dumas' version Silberhaus is a judge and Drosselmayer is a doctor, who also makes mechanical toys.

James Kudelka's production for the National Ballet of Canada includes a female Bee soloist in the Waltz of the Flowers. I'm wary of Ratmansky borrowing ideas from Kudelka, though this would appear to be a male costume. Let's hope, at least, that Ratmansky comes up with better choreography.

For one thing, I think it can have beneficial consequences. Human pride being what it is, one-upsmanship can be exploited to positive ends. Zillionaire X donates a lot of money to get his or her name on a PBS program, a concert hall or an art gallery. Zillionaire Y wants to keep up and does the same or one better. If that's what it takes to persuade someone to donate their private collection of masterpieces to a museum where anyone can see them, I don't think it's a bad thing.

Starting on Saturday, August 21, at 12:00 a.m. ET, Canada's Artv will be dedicating most of its weekend schedule to dance. I can't say that ballet is especially well represented, but there are some balletic connections, such as the Paris Opera Ballet in Pina Bausch's Orphée et Eurydice, Alberta Ballet's The Fiddle and the Drum, two programs about Rudolf Nureyev (L'attraction céleste and Moze Mossanen's more dubious telefilm) and both versions of Uwe Scholz's Le sacre du printemps. There are also several examples of modern choreographers playing with pointe shoes (La chambre blanche, Amélia, Body_remix). http://artv.ca/emiss...d-de-danse.html

Based on that trailer, I don't think I want to go anywhere near this movie.

Those points sound pretty convincing to me, too, and they're the sort of thing that sound great when rallying the troops, but in the light of the fact that government spending on the arts is going to come under intense scrutiny every time the economy goes south, I do think it would be a good idea to be armed with better arguments. Certainly I think of the arts as an essential part of what makes life worth living, but given that hundreds of millions of Americans are managing without any opera, it's not a very good argument. The part about arts actually getting very little in the way of government money could be made more persuasively than it is. Years and years ago I remember that many people attending the Oscars wore lapel pins with stamps painted on them. They were intended to illustrate that the contribution of the average taxpayer to the NEA was equivalent to the price of a postage stamp. That struck me as a good illustration, but I doubt many people remembered it once the award ceremony began. I happen not to be much acquainted with Hollywood flicks, so I remembered the lapel pins and thought it was a pretty good argument. Too bad it was a one-off. But I'm also very wary of this sort of argument because it can end up sounding like: Don't worry. The government actually wastes very little money on the arts. It wastes far more money on other stuff. To which a person could easily responding that the government shouldn't be wasting money, period. I think that arts institutions could do worse than give concrete illustrations of how they contribute to the life of the community, economic and otherwise. I know it's difficult to measure, but my own experience with fundraising tells me that donors respond well to itemized lists of how money is spent and for what it's needed, as well as specific examples of how the organization benefits the community. But I acknowledge that I'm dealing with voluntary donors. In the case of state funding, this is more difficult to do precisely because people don't get much say in how the money is spent, and that's why the arguments have to be that much stronger. North Americans may be operating under a particular disadvantage because I don't think there is any particular sense of national pride associated with the arts, as I suspect there is in other countries. Years ago I was introduced to a retired Soviet general, and when he found out I was a dancer, he immediately said something to the effect of, ah, but our ballet is the best in the world. Can you imagine an American general saying something similar?

Katia et Volodia is now on sale at Berkshire Record Outlet at a reduced price. http://www.berkshire...ext=&filter=all

The DVD is available at a reduced price at Berkshire Record Outlet. http://www.berkshire...ext=&filter=all

Speaking of which, the menu at the Garnier cafeteria looks terrific. I'm so envious.

I bought the British edition of the DVD. It's a region 2 PAL disc, so if you don't live in Europe, you need an all-region player. But it sells on British Amazon for £12, so I couldn't resist the price. (I have to admit to ordering several other items to make the shipping costs worth my while.) There are no extras on the DVD other than the trailer, and the subtitles are embedded. Each time I watch the film, I keep thinking of the discussion about casting between Emanuel Gat and Brigitte Lefèvre in which she seems to imply that he shouldn't expect to get any étoiles for his piece. This is very interesting considering that Wayne McGregor got Marie-Agnès Gillot, Benjamin Pech, Agnès Letestu, Mathieu Ganio, Mathias Heymann, Jérémie Bélingard and Dorothée Gilbert for Genus. She also made a comment about the pointlessness of driving race cars at 6 m.p.h. Fast forward to Aurélie Dupont and Hervé Moreau in Sasha Waltz's piece. I also found McGregor's practice of anglicizing his dancers' names quite amusing, particularly in the sequence where he rehearses Ganio and Heymann, both of whom he calls "Matt," which you'd think would make his instructions somewhat difficult to follow. It was interesting to watch Pierre Lacotte drag Letestu over the coals, not that his criticisms weren't justified, particularly his observation about her spoon-like hands. But it was curious that his request that she gradually lower her raised leg in a supported turn was not heeded by Dorothée Gilbert once Paquita got to the stage. Did she not get any coaching from him? It was also interesting to watch Laurent Hilaire coaching Sarah Kora Dayanova and asking for "more generous" couronnes, because what I really wanted was for someone to ask the same of Aurélie Dupont. (Honestly, her ports de bras are my greatest object to her dancing.) I love the film up until about 20 minutes from the end. Once Wiseman shows an extended excerpt from Mats Ek's La casa de Bernarda Alba, he loses me, because I find myself thinking: all that talent, all that work, all those resources for this? After that I find myself deflated as a viewer, and things that would have fascinated me earlier, like the janitor cleaning up the opera house after a performance, no longer speak to me, and the sequence of Yann Bridard rehearsing the Pina Bausch piece just seems like too much of the same, choreographically speaking. It's unfortunate that Wiseman chose to document that particular season. Back then we commented on the repertoire, too. http://ballettalk.in...ason-2007-2008/

But, you know, I wish ballet companies and arts organizations in general would have come up with a better response to these sorts of objections by now. Lord knows these complaints aren't new. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation first televised ballet, there were howls of protest in parliament about taxpayer dollars being spent to put men in tights on TV screens. Ballet disappeared from the CBC a long time ago, so that's a moot point, but more than 50 years on, I get the impression that ballet companies are no better equipped to respond than they were back then. Platitudes about arts being a necessity and not a frill, generalizations about how much they add to the life of a community, or observations that arts funding makes up a tiny fraction of government budgets are too vague to persuade the unpersuaded.

The author of the story was probably unaware that American arts attendance figures were updated by the NEA in 2008. It would have shown even lower attendance at the ballet, so perhaps it's just as well. The 2008 report was discussed on a separate thread: http://ballettalk.in...rt-concertgoers I was grateful, however, for the link to the Princeton study because it included a chart on frequency of attendance, which the most recent NEA report did not. I found it fascinating because although far more people go to see musicals than ballets or operas, they don't actually go that much more frequently. Classical concert attendees may be less numerous than musical lovers, but they're more active. I reiterate my objection to the representation ballet gets on PBS, and I say this as an opera lover: if more Americans attend the ballet than the opera, why do opera broadcasts on PBS so far outnumber dance broadcasts?

Yes. Tzigane, Andante from Divertimento no. 15, The Four Temperaments Ballo della Regina, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Elégie from Tchaikovsky Suite no. 3, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux selections from Jewels, Stravinsky Violin Concerto Chaconne, Prodigal Son I'd like to have the Balanchine Celebration gala on DVD, too, while we're at it. Assuming, of course, the sound is synchronized properly. And everything else sitting in the "Dance in America" vaults.

Like you, I don't recognize the second piece. I dug out my old programs for the ballet (which are in German and French, so it took me a while to skim through them), and the piece isn't identified there either. But you're right that the first pas de deux is set to the "Méditation" from Souvenir d'un lieu cher.

Cuts in Canada Council grants like those described in the article are not an especially recent phenomenon. One well-known case of a what happens to a company when the government money disappears is that of Robert Desrosiers (best known, at this point, for his appearance in Robert Altman's The Company). http://thecanadianen...s=A1ARTA0002253 I don't think that artists who have received government funding for years necessarily deserve to continue getting it indefinitely, but cutting back on funding can have disastrous artistic consequences. (You'll forgive me for veering back into the ballet world.) When the Canada Council decided to cut back funding for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in order to give more funding to Alberta Ballet and Ballet B.C., the RWB went commercial to survive. They've been producing appalling full-length drivel ever since because ballets titled Moulin Rouge and Dracula attract audiences. But the stuff is nauseatingly horrible, and I don't know how long it's been since I haven't walked out in the middle of one of their shows. You're right, experimental modern dance is never going to have a large audience in no small part because it is experimental, and there are only so many people willing to watch a creative laboratory. I don't see how it can survive without government funding, but, frankly, I'm not entirely sure some of it deserves the funding in the first place. I say this as a former modern dancer who admits to spending lots of time in self-indulgence that I expected other people to subsidize. Did I really have a right to expect it?

Take the VHS set. The lack of synchonization on the DVDs is likely to drive you crazy. It drives me crazy. The sound on The Four Temperaments makes me particularly batty. The dancers do appear to be dancing on the beat. They're just dancing on the wrong beat.

Then I suspect that like the original release, this is a "region-free" PAL disc. Most performing arts DVDs these days are region-free NTSC discs so that they can be viewed readily in North America and Japan, as well as Europe. But in this case, I guess you need an all-region player or TV, a computer monitor, or a portable DVD player. which would have a really small screen! It's a pity this release hasn't been properly adapted to the international market.

It's not yet listed on the Arthaus Musik site, but British and German Amazon have listed a forthcoming DVD of John Neumeier's Matthäus-Passion filmed five years ago in Baden-Baden with the Hamburg Ballet. The version that aired on German television was abridged to about two hours in length, but this set runs three and a half hours, so it may be a complete performance. http://www.amazon.co.../dp/B003X8596Q/

I believe that after studying at the Conservatoire Platel did her final year at the POB school and went straight into the POB corps at age of 17. Top Conservatoire grads Isabelle Guérin, Clairemarie Osta and Isabelle Ciaravola had similar stories.

I would recommend skipping Yoshida altogether and going to the first filming with Lesley Collier and Anthony Dowell. That was before Peter Wright began messing around with the production and inserting Clara and the Nephew into all the second-act dances. I think that Collier has no equal as the Sugar Plum Fairy, and she and Dowell show amazing unity of style. The You Tube clip of the variation doesn't have properly synchronized sound, so it may actually be better to watch it without the audio, because, needless to say, Collier was actually right on the music. I did enjoy the dancing of Cojocaru and Putrov very much, but Yoshida and Cope were horribly mismatched physically. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=ArbEIvkZFg4 (Full disclosure: I have never been a Yoshida fan. I have always found her to be a cold fish, so bear that in mind.)

I see that Putrov is once again scheduled to dance Lensky in Onegin, including the opening and closing nights of the run. Is this a matter of the ROH site being out or date, or are these going to be some manner of farewell performances for him? He's not cast in anything else.

I'm posting this belatedly, but I, too, had a great time meeting fellow Ballet Talkers, and I'm only sorry I didn't have more time to talk with them. I took along my aunt with whom I was staying, and our consensus was the same as everyone else's: Philip Neal doesn't look his age, and he certainly looked like he could have kept right on dancing. Like Colleen says, he's a class act. Even when faced with an avalanche of adoration from the audience, he kept it together and found it nearly impossible to take a solo bow. Lord knows Wendy Whelan did her best to give him the spotlight, but he's too much of a cavalier to step in front of his ballerina. It's almost as though it would cause him physical discomfort to upstage her. I don't have many opportunities to see City Ballet live these days, but I've always sought out Neal's performances, and I'll miss him.

Oh, yes indeed. If you haven't seen those Raymonda videos, do seek them out. In them Taranda is just about the sexiest thing I've ever seen. He's like Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolf Valentino rolled into one, only a lot bigger and taller. I remember seeing him in Ivan the Terrible during the Bolshoi's visit to New York in 1990, and while I hated the ballet, I was completely transfixed by Taranda's Prince Kurbsky. I'm pretty sure that after the show I ran to the Lincoln Center gift shop, bought all the Bolshoi videos that featured him and went straight home to watch them. (Gosh, is it obvious that he set my female heart aflutter?)