volcanohunter

1 hour ago, Helene said:

If Catazaro had been a purely passive recipient, I don't think that NYCB would have gone out on a limb and fired him for receiving photos.  

Yes, of course, I phrased that poorly. Presumably a person who was not interested in nude photos of dancers would not have been participating in the chat. But since no particularly vulgar statements were attributed to Catazaro in the incident that led to the dismissals, I'm not surprised that he didn't become the "face" of the scandal.

3 hours ago, FayBallet said:

The article is about Ramasar and Catazaro being fired, but they chose a photo of Ramasar for the cover image. Yes, there is a photo of Catazaro included later, but it isn't the prominent image of the article; it's only seen after you open and scroll.

 Catazaro was the most passive participant in the chats in question. He was included in the chat group but didn't write anything. Ramasar, on the other hand, made unsavory comments and shared a nude photo of his girlfriend.

Yes, English National Ballet has paid tribute to her memory as well.

https://www.ballet.org.uk/people/dame-beryl-grey-dbe/

The Royal Ballet is reporting that Beryl Grey has died at the age of 95.

Carla Fracci's production of Giselle, performed by the Rome Opera Ballet, is available on the Rai Play site. With Susanna Salvi as Giselle, Michele Satriano as Albrecht, Alessandra Amato as Myrtha and Claudio Cocino as Hilarion.

Sign-in is required, but there doesn't appear to be a geoblock.

https://www.raiplay.it/programmi/giselleteatrodelloperadiroma2022

7 hours ago, maps said:

It's 12/7/22 and the video banner on the KC website for Ballet What's On is still Mariinsky Paquita. 

I think this is simply a generic ballet picture. The Mariinsky was never part of the 2022-23 season, and neither company, nor ballet is identified on the photo.

1 hour ago, California said:

Do you have an Instagram address for her? I'm not seeing this under @liza_on_stage

There seem to be two accounts, with an extra underscore in the one she doesn’t use. She posted it here 7 hours ago.

https://instagram.com/liza_on_stage

I know the company has worked with Jíři Kylián and Paul Lightfoot. But I have no idea about performances.

Today Elizaveta Gogidze posted an Instagram story of the United Ukrainian Ballet in The Hague learning Ratmansky’s Wartime Elegy. She shot the men rehearsing the second section. I think it's perfectly great that PNB is not insisting on exclusivity and is allowing the UUB to perform this piece, which it paid for, after all.

A month after the streams I was curious about the reach the different videos achieved. I was too late to catch the totals for Australian Ballet and the National Ballet of Japan, but unsurprisingly, as of now:

The Royal Ballet is first with 422,000 views
The POB has 161,000
Dutch National Ballet has 85,000
Bavarian State Ballet has 81,000 (actually more, since the livestream took place on its own platform before the archive was posted on YouTube)
Staatsballett Berlin has 54,000
The ABT Studio Company class has 44,000
Dresden Semperoper Ballett has 35,000
National Ballet of China has 33,000
Korean National Ballet and Houston Ballet have 32,000
San Francisco Ballet has 30,000
Queensland Ballet has 28,000
Ballets de Monte-Carlo have 25,000
Between Facebook and YouTube the joint class of Pacific Northwest Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem has 20,400
Hong Kong Ballet has 20,000
Ballet Met is an overachiever at 20,000, given that it wasn't listed on the WBD site

Toward the bottom are the Sofia Opera Ballet and Norwegian National Ballet with a little over 1,000 views. The latter was on Vimeo, so perhaps it lost out on YouTube's suggested links to other streams.

Ballet Arkansas was live for 6.5 hours, while the Royal Swedish Ballet video lasted 17 minutes. Only fair that Ballet Arkansas scored more views.

Company class still seems to be the way to go, comparing the 81,000 who tuned into to watch morning class from Munich, versus the 13,000 who watched Edward Clug rehearse the Stuttgart Ballet in his new Nutcracker.

Today the Russian Ministry of Propaganda Culture published a list of priority topics for filmmakers who hope to receive state funding. These Include:

1. The preservation, creation and propagation of traditional values
4. Countering historical revisionism, Russia's peace keeping mission, Russia's historical victories, especially the 80th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War and the liberation mission of the Soviet soldier [The rape of Berlin]
5. Russia as a modern, stable and safe state with opportunities for development and self-realization
8. Russia's regions: the development of the Far East and Arctic, small-town and village life in the provinces, Little Russia [those parts of Ukraine subsumed by the Russian Empire] as a historical region of Russia [i.e., colonialism]
9. Screen adaptations of Russian literature, in particular as animated films [Personally, I'm waiting for the animated version of The House of the Dead.]
11. Popularization of the heroism and self-sacrifice of Russian soldiers during the "special military operation" [that is, the invasion of Ukraine: "Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers are using sexual violence to terrorise Ukraine" Warning: 18+]
12. Popularization of service in the Russian Armed Forces
13. The spiritual, moral and patriotic formation of Russian citizens
14. The neo-colonial policies of Anglo-Saxon countries [Yes, the rulers of Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex and East Anglia are real fiends.], the degradation of Europe, the formation of a multi-polar world
16. About teenagers: the formation of life values, information overload, learning to think for themselves []
17. Moral and ethical choices, civic duty, social cohesion

Other professions to be popularlized and made more prestigious include teachers (point 6), laborers and engineers (point 7) and doctors (point 10)

https://culture.gov.ru/press/news/minkultury_rossii_opredelilo_prioritetnye_temy_gospodderzhki_kinoproizvodstva_v_2023_godu/

I watched the film on Monday, after three days of seeing Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM, and the comparison did McGregor no favors. His ballet looked vacuous and silly in comparison.

Pite's piece is extraordinary, dealing in existential questions in a completely unpretentious way. Her theme is lofty but quintessentially rooted in dance, which is literally corporeal but simultaneously ephemeral. It may offer an inkling of the eternal (perhaps even a glimpse at the glorified body of the world to come), but is doomed to disappear. We are keenly aware of our mortality while desperately wishing for permanence. This tension is further present in the two choral pieces that frame the ballet: Tchaikovsky's Cherubic Hymn, which ends with the text "now lay aside all cares of life," in complete contrast to the highly agitated choreography for the soloist, a sort of desperate, high-speed mourning, as though she were trying to breathe life back into her partner's body; and Lauridsen's setting of the Christmas chant "O Magnum Mysterium," which accompanies choreography with a closer resemblance to paintings of the descent from the cross. (The foreshadowing of the burial shroud in the swaddling clothes of the Nativity is an ancient idea.)

But viewers don't need to be familiar with the texts, and as I recall they weren't printed in the programs. And if the lighting loses its magical three-dimensional quality on film, there's nevertheless an indication of its appearance. 

What I didn’t like was the jerky camera work of the "documentary" section of the film. If that's what makes the film "groundbreaking," then I'd rather do without that innovation. 

Crystal Pite: Angels' Atlas is available free of charge on the CBC Gem streaming service. It is part documentary, but mostly a complete performance of Pite's Angels' Atlas filmed in November 2021, as the National Ballet of Canada returned to the stage after a year and a half of Covid-19 restrictions. 

(All behind-the-scenes documentaries should include a complete performance of the work being created/rehearsed!)

Presumably, the program is available only in Canada, but a VPN might do the trick from abroad.

https://gem.cbc.ca/media/crystal-pite-angels-atlas/s01e01

A video report on Laura Fernandez in Tbilisi from Canada's CTV News, including rehearsal footage and tiny performance clips of Giselle.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2572415

The projected text in Act 2 identified the characters in the Extinctathon, plus the year being depicted. But these were not in chronological order, and if you aren't familiar with the role each character plays in the story, these names are meaningless anyway. Except perhaps for the killing of Jimmy's mother, which tells you he's an orphan.

MacGregor had already introduced Jimmy, Oryx and Crake. In typical fashion, the women are besieged and the men who look like Mad Max wannabes are their tormentors. Although it seems to me that Crake and Oryx are the really baddies for, you know, engineering the eradication of the human race.

After watching Maddaddam three times, I decided I'd be happier pretending I was watching three plotless works.

I think the second cast is stronger. Spencer Hack (Jimmy) and Svetlana Lunkina (Oryx) always give layered performances that suggest complex personalities underneath. As Toby, Alexandra MacDonald is stylistically more McGregorian, but Heather Ogden in the first cast comes across as a real person. Without Harrison James, who is Crake in Every. Single. Performance., the run would collapse.

I think the videos and projections dwarf and overwhelm the dancers. I was happier sitting closer, where I could ignore the video show altogether and get a better view of the scenes that take place behind a front scrim.

The program includes no synopsis, and I have to admit I haven't read any Margaret Atwood since my Canadian literature course at university. Several excerpts from the novels are recorded--the program says by Tilda Swinton and Josh Davidson, presumably combined, digitally altered and made to sound like a corrupted recording of a child, not especially easy to understand. But why is this voice speaking Estuary English? Again, I haven't read the novels, and I don't know whether there are any geographical references, but I suppose I assumed the setting was Canadian or generally North American. (And the diction of children in Toronto is a lot clearer than the diction of children in London.)

On second viewing I think the work is quite weak. The first act is a little confusing on first viewing, and the slow motion opening, depicting the cataclysm of the Great Rearrangement, is hokey. The third act is treacly, especially the overly long and not particularly inventive puppet show depicting some sort of ancestor worship. I agree with Xiaoyi that Crake's second-act solo is a terrific piece of dancing by James.

Canadian critics basically never write bad things, and Canadian audiences always give standing ovations, but I have a feeling that London dance writers may savage it.

I also came away thinking that ballet lighting, meaning: obscure, may have to be reconsidered. Siphesihle November has dark skin, plus the basic Jimmy costume includes a black t-shirt, and the back of the stage is also black. The standard dark and murky lighting does him no favors. (In short, Hack is a lot easier to see.) Same goes for Harrison James' Crake, who is dressed entirely in black during the first act and the end of the second, meaning that only his head, hands and, fleetingly, his waist are visible. Maybe lighting designers have to consider that not all dancers are pasty white and sort of glow in the dark. Or if choreographers are married to dark and murky lighting, don't dress dancers in black!

I think the ballet's biggest liability is the music. It's frequently meandering, sometimes bordering on muzaky. The exception is the retro electronica in the middle section of the second act. (Between the orchestra and the recorded parts, it's very loud. I recommend earplugs. I know I pulled mine out of my bag in a hurry.) By the time it got to the futuristic, utopian third act, the music became very sappy. At one point the violins repeated a passage again and again, while the rest of the orchestra grew progressively louder, and I wanted to cry: enough already! Historically some composers perfected this technique to an art, but Max Richter is not among them, and a crescendo rossiniano or even John Adams this was not.

Do I think the ballet is a masterpiece? No. Would I venture out to see revivals of it every few seasons? Probably not.

P.S. The New Age-y music at the beginning of the second act is positively nauseating. 

Aterballetto performs Norge Sedeño Raffo's Stabat Mater, to the setting by Arvo Pärt, and Danièle Desnoyers' With Drooping Wings, to music by Federico Gon and Ben Shemie.

I've read lots of crazy stuff coming out of Russia, but this made my head spin. Speeches at a round table called "The consolidation of culture for our victory. Topical issues in the creation of a united cultural front in Russia." Welcome to North Korea Lite.

Film director Andrei Konchalovsky: "I think Russia has been called to preserve and not allow European culture to perish. Russia is not only the heir to the great European culture, today it is perhaps its only and chief defender... Russia will carry the banner of European civilization in the world."

[Good luck with that when nobody out there in the big, bad world sees your work.]

Conductor Valery Gergiev: "Only by uniting can we, cultural figures, resist the aggressive onslaught of an alien and diabolical anti-culture."

[Would that "diabolical anti-culture" also happen to be European? He didn't seem to have a problem with it a year ago.]

Actor Dmitri Pevtsov: "We need prohibitive measures, we need censorship, and, excuse me, we need expert advice." [I shudder to think who those "experts" would be.]

"But the most important thing is to nurture, to find those very new seeds and new shoots of modern Russian culture and art that already exist, which have already, here and there, broken through the concrete of these 30 years."

Concrete!

https://teatral-online.ru/news/32532/

Also, the anti "gay propaganda" law of 2013, which prohibited the promotion of all things LGTB to minors, is being expanded to cover adults as well. Supposedly it will protect the country from LGBT values, which is the "darkness" spread by the West. It remains to be seen what sort of effect this might have on art in Russia.

However: "It categorises any positive depictions of same-sex relationships in mass media or advertising under the same umbrella as distributing pornography, the promotion of violence, or stoking racial, ethnic and religious tensions.

"Advertising, books and films with positive presentations of LGBT people will be banned - raising concerns from publishers who have warned that it could affect classics of Russian literature."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63747732

1 hour ago, pherank said:

The VOD has ended. Really a shame that SFB and/or Dutch National didn't film and stream their original versions (it was a co-production).

The Dutch production was filmed and is available on disc, though I recall that initially, at least, it wasn't sold on the American market. It may have had something to do with the SFB tour to New York, which took place shortly after the DVD's release. (In any case, I thought the ban was stupid in the extreme. So what if it's a different company dancing? SFB should have sold the discs to anyone who wanted to take the ballet home.)

https://www.opusarte.com/details/OA1114D

Unfortunately, I didn’t see this performance in the cinema. The Royal Ballet is nowhere to be found in the multiplexes of these parts. But in this 2-minute clip Marianela Nuñez's Diamond looks mostly melancholy. She does smile briefly at Reece Clarke, but we end up seeing mostly him smiling back at her.

Here is Clemence.

Well, that didn't last long. François Alu has left the POB.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, @doug. Is the entire variation notated? I suppose I'm wondering why producers are inclined to alter the middle section.

English National Ballet posted another performance of the Henriette variation. It is somewhat different from the versions familiar to me, so I'm assuming this was staged on the basis of notations. (?)

The National Ballet of Canada has posted detailed casting for Wayne McGregor's MADDADDAM, which is a co-production with the Royal Ballet. As I think is usual for McGregor, there are only two casts, and it will be a marathon for the first cast: 5 shows in the first four days, particularly demanding for Siphesihle November as Jimmy, but also for Harrison James, who is scheduled to dance Crake in all performances.

With only a few days to go before opening night, the program is far from sold out, and thus far the top ring has been opened only for the Saturday evening performance on November 26. For the final performances the top two rings are closed for now. Audiences have been informed that the show is unsuitable for children, which is probably putting a bit of a dent in ticket sales. And perhaps some are afraid of something resembling two and a half hours of Chroma, though in reality McGregor's full-length works aren't like that.

Jimmy
Siphesihle November (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Spencer Hack (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

Oryx
Koto Ishihara (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Svetlana Lunkina (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

Crake
Harrison James

Toby
Heather Ogden (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Alexandra MacDonald (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

Ren
Tanya Howard (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Tina Pereira (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

Amanda
Jenna Savella (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Jordana Daumec (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

Blanco
Piotr Stanczyk (Nov 23, 24, 25, 26 eve, 30)
Donald Thom (Nov 26 mat, 27, 29)

and many others

Those who choose to sit in the back rows of the top ring on Saturday night are being warned that they will get a partial view, presumably because of the designs. If it's an issue in Toronto, I suspect it will be an issue in the upper amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House as well.