volcanohunter

Day 2 highlights - the boys being coached in their contemporary variations

Day 1 highlights - girls' class taught by Clairemarie Osta and run-through of classical variations

Harss has been working on the book since at least 2019. Back then the working title was Alexei Ratmansky - From Russia to the World. An awful lot has changed since then.

https://balletcenter.nyu.edu/fellows/cba-fellow-marina-harss/

Marina Harss' biography of Alexei Ratmansky is coming in October 2023.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374102616/the-boy-from-kyiv

Amazon provides more of a description.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374102619/

Attilio Labis, who was an étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet from 1961 to 1972, has died at the age of 86. As the posted pictures suggest, he starred in the revival of Serge Lifar's La chute d'Icare. The POB notes that his stage partners included Yvette Chauviré, Claire Motte, Claude Bessy, Noëlla Pontois, Françoise Legrée, Margot Fonteyn, Rosella Hightower, Carla Fracci, Natalia Makarova, Eva Evdokimova and Elisabetta Terabust, and he was married to étoile Christiane Vlassi.

Artem Datsyshyn was among the earliest victims of the invasion. To mark what would have been his birthday, ballerina Elena Filipyeva posted a video of him dancing the Ali variation.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn5GBAjoZqw/ 

Gogidze has also posted a story of herself rehearsing Myrtha. She alternated as Giselle and Myrtha in the Netherlands and London, so it's not strange that she should dance both roles in Washington also.

I am also extremely sorry that she didn't get to play Anita on screen. I never researched the reasons for casting Moreno, but Rivera was the superior dancer and singer. I have also always been sorry that Gwen Verdon didn't get to do Sweet Charity on screen, though I understand that she was too old at that point. In Rivera's case it couldn't have been a question of age since she is a year younger than Moreno.

I cannot let Chita Rivera's 90th birthday pass without expressing my enormous admiration and wishing her many happy returns of the day.

Ratmansky's name has been removed from all his ballets at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky. Most of those works aren't being performed, but Ratmansky expressed his anger about the Bolshoi's most recent run of Flames of Paris. 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid027BJ9svmzjocokBKEAvGTR44Mh5uebFaZrwj8waCoHznjKxWFx35rjZLwp64RmPcvl&id=1377723438&mibextid=Nif5oz

The Bolshoi hasn't performed the Ratmansky production of Giselle since February 2021. On a couple occasions during the past year the company put his Giselle on its schedule, but before tickets went on sale, it was switched to the Grigorovich production. In the case of the most recent run, I even suspected it may have had something to do with the United Ukrainian Ballet's upcoming engagement in Washington, as if to say: but our production has real horses!

In the end the Bolshoi decided otherwise. It would not have made sense to teach debutantes a version for which the Bolshoi's performing rights will expire sooner rather than later. 

Kovalyova has been dancing Myrtha since 2017. I saw her in the part in October 2018.

May she rest in peace.

Ruan Crighton, formerly a dancer with the Slovak National Ballet and the Finnish National Ballet, who was studying to become a physiotherapist, was among the victims of the Yeti Airlines crash in Nepal.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11640879/Brit-feared-dead-Nepal-plane-crash.html

"International art experts say the plundering may be the single biggest collective art heist since the Nazis pillaged Europe in World War II.

"In Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators say the Russians stole more than 15,000 pieces of fine art and one-of-a-kind artifacts. They dragged bronze statues from parks, lifted books from a riverside scientific library, boxed up the crumbling, 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover, and even stole a raccoon from the zoo, leaving behind a trail of vacant cages, empty pedestals and smashed glass."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/world/asia/ukraine-art-russia-steal.html

The little spot for Firebird features dancers and the actual score.

Helimets graduated from ballet school in 1996, so he's had an amazing run. 

The Australian Ballet will perform Kunstkamer, choreographed by Paul Lightfoot, Sol Léon, Crystal Pite and Marco Goecke, at the Royal Opera House on 2-6 August.

Years ago there was an American Express ad to the Rose Adage. It sort of evoked the choreography in that the CGI card would be turned and stretched, as if to suggest its flexibility and myriad uses, plus an upscale glamour. Personally, I thought the allusion was too obscure for the average TV viewer, but it's ironic that the music was considered suitable to advertise a credit card, but isn't used to advertise a run of The Sleeping Beauty. 

59 minutes ago, Kathleen O'Connell said:

Your average Hollywood movie is longer than 80 minutes, no? 

I will acknowledge that audience experiences in cinemas and concert halls are different. Movie audiences are allowed to eat and drink, encouraged, even. No one thinks worse of concert audiences for reading their programs in the dark, provided they don't make any noise, or staring at the ceiling.

1 hour ago, Helene said:

The longest ballet I ever saw was Neumeier's Mahler Symphony No. 3.  It was about a week long.

Yes, The Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler lasts two hours with no intermission. But Mahler symphonies are also performed in concert halls with no break.

Added: The Hamburg Ballet site says 2 hours, but looking back at my own notes, what I saw clocked in at 1 hour and 45 minutes, and I managed it two nights in a row because the protagonist (Alexandre Riabko) was genius. How he managed it is the greater mystery.

Gogidze is posting stories of Giselle rehearsals with Oleksii Kniazkov, so I'm inclined to think the Kennedy Center typos are at play again. Kniazkov is at the UUB base in The Hague, he's rehearsing, he's already danced Albrecht throughout the Netherlands and in London, so why wouldn’t he be dancing in Washington? 

Another weird advertising campaign. You'd think it would at least use the actual music.

But she's the new Zakharova! 

@Mashinka, it's being gutted. The company's finest male character dancer, Vitaly Biktimirov, who could have worked there for another 2-3 decades, did not have his contract renewed when he turned 40. Its most experienced female character dancer, Kristina Karasyova, just danced her final performance. The female mime roles will now fall on Nelli Kobakhidze, a sadly unrealized talent, but if the pattern holds, she will be booted out next year. Maria Alexandrova is no longer listed even among the "under contract" principals. New coaching hires are people who never danced at the Bolshoi. Its institutional memory is being destroyed. 

Fortunately for us, for the foreseeable future we won't have to witness this decline for ourselves.

Rahm Emanuel, the current U.S. ambassador to Japan, went to see MacKay perform with K-Ballet, the company founded by Tetsuya Kumakawa.

I am definitely in the brisé camp.  The speed and directness with which Albrecht moves toward Myrtha underscore how powerless he is to resist her commands.