volcanohunter

It's unfortunate that DVD is so dark. The Dutch National Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is also dark and grainy. This needn't be the case. Lighting can be adjusted for television cameras, and you'll notice that the Royal Ballet's Swan Lake from the early 1980s is perfectly visible throughout.

Yes, the absence of a Royal Ballet Giselle on the market is pretty glaring, and it's beyond me why Sylvia hasn't been released.

It would be a great pity to keep the Guillem/Jude Cinderella and Maurin/Hilaire Nutcracker unreleased because the POB is planning new telecasts of them. I realize that Dupont's face is more beautiful than Guillem's, but Guillem has the more fabulous physique and, I think, more glamour. The ballet was clearly designed for her particular talents. Since there's so little film of her available on the market, I am still hoping that this telecast will be re-issued someday. The film also captures the fabulous nastiness of Isabelle Guérin's stepsister. Does anyone know who owns the rights to NVC Arts programs? Kultur has been releasing them steadily, and I wonder whether the POB would be in a position to prevent the release of these two telecasts.

An incomplete list: Peter Schaufuss' Dancer series Natalia Makarova's Ballerina series Any and all Balanchine from the Dance in America and Live from Lincoln Center vaults Ashton performed by the Royal Ballet, especially A Month in the Country with Lynn Seymour and Anthony Dowell Tudor performed by ABT Ballets Russes repertoire performed by the Joffrey Ballet, especially The Search for Nijinsky's Rite of Spring Hollywood's The Gay Parisian (Gaîté Parisienne) Cranko performed by the Stuttgart Ballet London Festival Ballet's La Sylphide (Bournonville; w/Eva Evdokimova, Peter Schaufuss, Niels Bjorn Larsen) Paris Dances Diaghilev (Petrushka, Le Spectre de la rose, L'Après-midi d'un faune, Les Noces) National Ballet of Canada's Onegin (Cranko; w/Sabina Allemann, Frank Augustyn, Jeremy Ransom, Cynthia Lucas) Ballet National de Marseille's Les intermittences du coeur (Petit; w/Dominique Khalfouni, Denys Ganio, Jean-Charles Gil, Patrick Dupond, Maya Plisetskaya) Ballet National de Marseille's Coppélia (Petit; w/Altynai Asylmuratova, Cyril Pierre, Roland Petit) Paris Opera Ballet's Cinderella (Nureyev; w/Sylvie Guillem, Charles Jude, Rudolf Nureyev) Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Romeo & Juliet (Dantzig; w/Evelyn Hart, David Peregrine) National Ballet of Canada's Alice (Tetley; w/Kimberly Glasco, Karen Kain, Rex Harrington, Peter Ottmann) Nederlands Dans Theater's Symphony of Psalms and Cathédrale engloutie (Kylián) A really good Swan Lake. I have more recordings of Swan Lake on my shelf than any other ballet, none of them entirely satisfactory.

Hello, stippdmel! I think it's been a good long time since the Kansas City Ballet has been discussed on Ballet Talk, so I'm very much looking forward to reading your impressions of the company's performances. And since you've got so many years of ballet experience under your belt, I'm sure you've got lots to say on all sorts of topics that come up here. It'll be great to have your input.

To some extent reaching the non-Parisian taxpayer is accomplished through the POB's annual broadcasts on state-subsidized television, as is the case in many European states. It's a pity we North Americans can't swing a similar arrangement.

Yes! I don't especially like the ballet, but I think the winter adagio, in which the protagonist dances with four older dancers, is its loveliest and most moving part. In the original cast I believe the four "seniors" were Victoria Bertram, Lorna Geddes, Tomas Schramek and Surmeyan.

I agree completely with your assessment of the Met. In addition to being hideous, it's gargantuan. 3,800 seats is much too large for an opera house. It makes for less than splendid acoustics, leading many a freaked-out singer to push way too hard, and leaves much of the audience very far from the action. The stage is designed to hold massive opera sets and is too big for certain ballets. I remember watching La Sylphide from the balcony of few years ago, and although ABT's corps of sylphs strove mighily to stretch the floor patterns out as much as they could, the rear quarter of the stage remained completely unused for the duration of the ballet. I wondered why the designer hadn't positioned the sets further down the stage to "shrink" it a little. My mother and her sister began their opera-going days in the early 1960s, and they both still mourn the Old Met. They're quick to tell you how good the acoustics were, how easy it was to get tickets, and so on and so forth. As for me, I tolerate the new Met best when the lights go down and I don't have to look at all that gold paint anymore.

I really detest the portrayal of the grandparents in many productions of The Nutcracker. There's usually a bit where they totter and stumble about trying to keep up with a quick dance, which is an offensive way of fishing for a laugh. I don't know whether this fits your bill, bart, but in Neumeier's Illusions like Swan Lake the King's Mother and his Uncle, while not exactly aged, seem to be engaged in politicking, at least from the King's paranoid point of view. While these roles are usually danced by dancers in their mid-late thirties, they're not character roles in the usual sense and require "full-out" dancing.

Yesterday Alberta Ballet held an official presentation in Edmonton of its 2007/08 season. September: The National Ballet of Canada tours with Peter Wright's production of Giselle. October/November: Kirk Peterson's new Othello December: Mikko Nissinen's The Nutcracker February: a revival of Jean Grand-Maître's Dangerous Liaisons April: Jean Grand-Maître's new ballet to Mozart's Requiem. I am sorry that there are no mixed bills. Presumably this is a response to box-office pressures. I would like to have seen a revival of Balanchine's Prodigal Son. I'm also surprised that apart from the Nutcracker, there is no kid-friendly programming. I rather expected the company to bring back Edmund Stripe's charming Alice in Wonderland. I'm also sorry that the season doesn't include a tour by Ballet BC. It's been several years since they've performed here, and I half expected a reciprocal visit after Alberta Ballet's run of Romeo & Juliet in Vancouver last September. I am glad that this will be the last run of Nissinen's Nutcracker because the production is very tired, and I will be curious to see how Dangerous Liaisons works on the large stage of the Jubilee Auditorium, as the company had previously performed it in much smaller venues.

I can only hope that this season will be Lefèvre's last, and that once Manuel Legris' mandatory retirement rolls around, he'll come in as her replacement. (On the other hand, making Sylvie Guillem directrice would probably be a disaster since she's clearly lost interest in classical ballet and this sort of season would probably become typical.)

It would appear that some are either injured or ill. As for Samodurov, shame on the ABT press department for not knowing that Tallinn is in Estonia.

Sasha Waltz, Angelin Preljocaj, Wayne McGregor, Pina Bausch, Mats Ek, Carolyn Carlson... This is a ballet company? There is one reconstructed classic, a quasi-classic to a classic score and a divertissement from a bona fide classic. (Why not stage a complete Raymonda?) I wonder, was the company ordered to cut back on its pointe shoe budget for next season? There has been a lot of consternation about this season on French discussion boards already, and now I can really understand those people who've been wanting to see Brigitte Lefèvre tarred and feathered for the past few years. Wouldn't now be a good time for the Opéra's dancers to participate in that time-honoured French tradition of striking in protest against this season?

I've heard (BUT I'M NOT SURE) that Violente also is authority or power (energy) since her pointing of the fingers should symbolize electricity. That bit of trivia is mentioned on the Royal Ballet web site: "[Petipa's] choreography embraced many new developments of the day. In the fifth fairy variation (Violante, who brings the gift of temperament), Petipa wanted to show the sparkling power and darting nature of electricity, then a new innovation that greatly impressed him." http://info.royaloperahouse.org/ballet/ind...cs=1009&cs=2698

For what it's worth, Clement Crisp in the Financial Times wrote that the production is worth crossing the Channel for ("A memorable event. Vaut le voyage."), and Pia Catton in the New York Sun wrote, "Seeing his work in this theater, with these dancers, made me wonder why we don't get more of his work in America...But the reality is that the Petit sensibility is so direct and sometimes so piercing that it can make Americans squirm." Somehow I doubt that Joel Lobenthal would have been so complimentary. So yeah, it would depend on how you react to expressionistic choreography.

France 2 evening news included a brief segment on Proust today, March 9. Skip ahead to the second last report in broadcast ("Le pari ambitieux de Roland Petit"). It includes comments from Eleonora Abbagnato and Petit in between perfomance footage. http://jt.france2.fr/20h The report will be available under Les éditions précédents for the next week. Since I will not have the opportunity to see this run live, I'm glad that the ballet is being recorded, though I can't help wishing that the film would feature Isabelle Ciaravola as Albertine. I know that Petit has admired Abbagnato since her student days, but Ciaravola has those long, stretchy legs which remind me of Petit muses such as Dominique Khalfouni and Lucia Lacarra, and which I'm sure would serve the Prisonnière pas de deux beautifully.

According to revised casting, Stéphane Bullion will replace Benjamin Pech as Morel in the performances scheduled to be filmed. Poor Pech can't seem to stay injury-free for long. He survived Coppélia only to be injured during Giselle, and recovered in time for Agon and a gala in New York, only to be knocked out of Proust.

From a preview of ABT's Swan Lake in Miami: A bird, a prince, a love affair

Here's a quote from a 1998 article on Jewels in the New Criterion that may be relevant to the discussion. Balanchine’s castle

What bothers me about Zakharova's legs is that in hoisting them up so high, she can't seem to control her supporting leg. I don't think a dancer gains anything from such high développés if she's not able to roll down smoothly off her pointe, or if she can't keep from wobbling once she's got her heel back on the ground. In this respect she fares badly in comparison with Isabelle Guérin's wobble-free Nikiya, who uses her technical assurance to link the steps together into long, long phrases of movement. I don't see much phrasing in Zakharova's performance. I'm also not overly amazed by Roberto Bolle. He's a fine technician, to be sure, but he doesn't seem especially responsive to music, and while I have no complaints about his legs, his port de bras aren't equally magnificent. In Makarova's Ballerina series, there is a brief film of Fernando Bujones performing Solor's entrance and the subsequent pas de deux from the Kingdom of the Shades, with Cecilia Kerche as Nikiya. The legs, jumps and turns are marvellous, of course, but what really makes his dancing god-like is the majestic carriage and port de bras, the long phrases of movement (again) with their subtle changes of dynamics and, most of all, the unmistakable impression that for him, classicism is a native "language." If Bolle could bring some of that to his own dancing, he could be really terrific.

Surely, some dancers are better suited to one style or the other. For example, Eva Evdokimova, with her ultra long neck and arms, sloping shoulders and feather-light jump, was naturally "endowed" for the Romantic repertoire, whereas Darci Kistler, as was pointed out in another thread, wouldn't be naturally suited to it.

In Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets he mentions the Sapphires. (p. 324 in the 1977 edition) I guess Balanchine didn't consider the two stories mutually exclusive.

Be sure to report on your trip when you get back!

I suspect that La Scala's ballet company got this distribution deal on the strength of its opera company's prestige. To be fair, the first three La Scala ballet productions released through TDK--Excelsior, Romeo & Juliet and La Chauve-Souris--did not feature Zakharova. But the fact that the subsequent three releases star the same dancers does suggest that the company is not deep in strength. If I were its AD, I'd be afraid of giving the impression that the company is merely a rent-a-corps for a famous guest ballerina. I wonder which of La Scala's ballet productions will be filmed this year, as we can probably expect to see it on DVD also. Perhaps it will be Sleeping Beauty starring... Svetlana Zakharova .