Estelle

She seems to perform with some Italian companies: the most recent thing I found about her was a comment on a performance of "Swan Lake" in March 2004 in Verona with Jose Manuel Carreno. [Edited to add:] There is the following page about her on the Munich Ballet site. It seems to say (I don't speak German) that from the 2000-2001 season, she became a guest dancer for the company. http://www.staatsorchester.de/c.php/suche_...dom=dom1&id=504

Here's what I have found (in Jacques Baril's "Dictionnaire de danse", published in 1964): Lifar's "Blanche-neige" was a three act ballet premiered in Nov 14, 1951 in Paris. The music was by M. Yvain, the sets by D. Bouchène, and the main dancers of the première were Liane Daydé, Nina Vyroubova, Serge Lifar, Max Bozzoni and Jean-Paul Andréani. Koegler's book also lists a Russian version choreographed by A. Andreiev and B. Fenster as "The princess and the seven knights", based on Pushkin's story, with music by Liadov, for the Maly Theatre, Leningrad, in 1949.

It is indeed related to "delirium", as both words come from the same Latin word "delirium"; it's first meaning is a mental state characterized by confusion and disorientation (e.g. in some cases of fever, or the "delirium tremens" for alcoholics) but by analogy it can also mean a state of great exaltation or excitation.

I'd have to check it, but I think Lifar choreographed a version of "Snow white".

Yes, as far as I know the only version of "Sylvia" in the POB's repertory is Neumeier's (created in 1997), which uses the same music by Delibes as the other versions.

Ed, could you explain what the "glass escalator" means ? I guess it's an analogy to the famous "glass ceiling" metaphor. Does it mean that in female dominated fields, men actually get to the top more easily that females, as though they were on an "escalator", or is it something else ? Another example coming to my mind (at least in France) is for example some academic fields like literature, psychology, history, etc. where a large majority of students are now female, a majority of lecturers too, but only a minority of full professors and even fewer deans of universities. (And also about nurses, I remember how my (female) cousin complained that she had the feeling that in her nursing schools, the few male students generally were treated much better by the direction than the female students, getting excused far more easily when they got bad grades...)

Thanks for sharing this essay with us, Ed. I know very little about sociology but it was interesting to read. I wonder if a comparison of the situations in different countries would have been interesting (but perhaps a bit too long in the context of a class paper) ? E.g. male dancing seems to be more encouraged in countries such as Cuba or Denmark, and there have been a larger number of female female artistic directors in recent years in some countries (e.g. Monica Mason for the RB, Brigitte Lefèvre for the POB...)

It turns out that the gala has been sold out for weeks. A few tickets will be sold on the day of the performance, but there will be only a handful of them, so I'm afraid the queue will be huge... :blush:

http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actuali...u/cournand.html A homage from the minister of Culture to Ms Cournand (repeating basically what was said in the Le Monde article).

The following pages about Tatars or Tartars (both spelling exist- but it seems that Tartar can sound a bit archaic or offensive) might be useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatars http://www.ainurin.net/history/tatarstan.htm http://tatar.yuldash.com/189.html Nureyev was born in a train near Irkutsk in Siberia and was raised in Ufa, but I've read that his father was of Tatar descent. I don't know about the other dancers your mentioned... (as far as I know, Nijinsky's parents were from Poland, but there are Polish tatars too).

If I remember correctly, in the original Perrault tale, the spindle incident has nothing to do with the evil fairy (who has no name, by the way- well, most characters have no name), it's just a matter of chance (one day when her parents are away, the princess visits some rooms of the castle and meets an old lady with a spindle and, as she doesn't know what it is, she touches it). Also the prince doesn't even kiss the princess... And there are a few humorous touches (for example when the prince thinks that his bride has the same old-fashioned clothes as his grandmother, but doesn't dare to tell her). [Edited to add:] I wonder if the spindle might have something to do with the Greek myth of the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos ?

atm, I had a look at imdb.com and it lists one film with Rita Hayworth, Lee Bowman and Marc Platt: Victor Saville's "Tonight and Every Night" (1945). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038178/ http://www.classicmoviemusicals.com/filmst.htm#everynight By the way, following some links I came across the following recent documentary "Ballets Russes": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436095/ which sounds quite interesting...

Thanks for your reply, cygneblanc ! I also remember finding a few things at the Librairie Théâtrale near the Opéra Comique, but their main focus definitely is theater and they only have a few shelved of dance-related things. And sometimes one can be lucky with the bouquinistes, but it depends... Did you go to Ms Cournand's bookstore when it was open ? From what I've read, she also organized some conferences about ballet from time to time.

I think that her bookstore closed even before the beginning of online selling (I don't know the exact date, but think it might have been before 1995- perhaps some people from Paris know more about it ? cygneblanc ?) and don't know the reasons for its closure. (It might also have been that she already was quite elderly). Anyway, now there is no dance bookstore in Paris (and in the rest of France) and it is sad indeed.

Thanks for the news, Paquita ! Jean-Sébastien Colau used to dance with the POB and had left it a few years ago. Will Lise-Marie Jourdain stay with the NBOC ? Both had left the POB at the same time, and often were stage partners (and if I remember correctly, they had won an medal together in the Paris competition).

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0,14-0,...7789@7-54,0.htm The French dance critic Gilberte Cournand passed away two days ago near Paris, aged 91. She was born in 1913 and had created a dance bookstore called "La Danse" in Paris, which had been active for more than 40 years (unfortunately, it doesn't exist any longer). The article in "Le Monde" mentions that she was a dance critic for "Le Parisien libéré", but she also wrote for the dance magazine "Les Saisons de la Danse" for decades (until it ceased existing in the late 1990s- actually I believe she was among its founding members). She also was a publisher and collected dance-related items. Last year she had donated her collections to the new Centre National de la Danse and also the Library-Museum of the Paris Opera. I remember seeing her at some ballet performances or ballet films in Paris a few years ago, an elderly lady with big dark glasses and a "bandeau" on her head. Anecdotically, the first book which stirred my interest for ballet was one of her books, "Beauté de la danse", an anthology of dance-related texts. It had been given to me when I was 9 by an elderly friend of my mother who had come for dinner; at that moment I knew nothing about dance but had read part of it nonetheless (even though there were quite a lot of words that I didn't understand), but I found it far more interesting when I read it again when I was about 15 and that was the beginning of a great passion. So thank you again Mrs Cournand.

Thanks for your reply, jorgen- and heartful thanks too the the people who emailed me or sent me PMs (I'll reply later) ! Pity it's sold out- but not so surprising alas... I'll try to contact the ticket office when it reopens on Aug 1st.

My husband and I will be spending a week-end in Copenhagen on Aug 19-22. I've seen on the RDB web site that a gala was planned on Aug 21, however there is no information on its content; also some tickets princes appear on the Billet Net site but no tickets are available. I was wondering if some people here know more information about this gala- and especially whether the lack of available tickets mean that it's sold out, or if it is for another reason (e.g. no tickets sold online). Also any advice of ballet-related tourism in Copenhagen would be welcome (and also tourism advice in general, but preferably by PM or e-mail because it'd be off-topic).

The Teatro alla Scale of Milan has announced its next season (actually from December 2005 to October 2006). http://www.teatroallascala.org/public/LaSc...etto/index.html The ballet season will include Lacotte's "La Sylphide", a double bill with "The Cage" (Robbins) and "La Strada" (Pistoni), Nureyev's production of "Cinderella", Makarova's production of "La Bayadère", a Mozart quadruple bill (with Uwe Scholz' "Concerto JeuneHomme", Jiri Kylian's "Petite mort" and "Sëchs Tanze" and a new work by Christopher Wheeldon), Roland Petit's "The bat" (I think it's an operetta ?), and Nureyev's production of "The Sleeping Beauty". Also MacMillan's "Manon" will be performed in October 2005.

Juliet, no problem : I added a link to the thread opened by PetipaFan and closed the one you had opened, in order to prevent having two threads discussing the same topic. Here's a link to the thread "Alexandra Ansanelli departs": http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=20242

I used to work in a math research lab and indeed the subscription prices of some journals was quite outrageous (and there was no real link with the journal's quality, some rather obscure ones were awfully expensive while some very famous and respected ones were rather cheap- the main difference for the cost was whether it was a commercial publisher like Springer, Elsevier, etc. or an academic publisher like say, the American Mathematical Society, Cambrige University Press, etc.) and sometimes forces math libraries to stop some subscription because their budget isn't big enough. A math researcher of Berkeley University, Rob Kirby, had compiled some information about journal prices on his web site: http://math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/journals.html and asked mathematicians not to submit articles to high prices journals (but unfortunately, very often people are not conscious of such cost problems). What I find most shocking is that in fact academic institutions pay three times for the articles: once by paying the researchers who write it (for free), one by paying those who referee the articles (for free- and it can take a very long time when it's a long and complicated article), and once by paying the high priced journal subscriptions. And sometimes they pay even a fourth time, as in some fields (fortunately not in math), researchers have to pay to get their articles published. Also, when articles were submitted as manuscripts, there was more typing to do, but now most articles are submitted electronically with a given format and there's almost not editing to do. Also there are copyright issues with the availability of research articles, cf the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml Also some electronic journals have developed recently: they are freely accessible online for individuals, but libraries have to pay an electronic subscription or a print subscription (at a price far lower than that for many journals); so it's a good compromise (and I think that keeping a printed version is essential). See for example the following journal (one of its creators happen to be the PhD supervisor of my PhD supervisor, so something like my "grandfather" in math genealogy ): http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/ http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/gtp-subscription.html Sorry if it's a bit off-topic, but it's a sensitive issue for me (and after all, in a country like France where most research is done by state-funded institutions, all that is paid on taxpayer's money so everybody should be concerned...)

No problem Hans ! The Grisi family was so rich in artists that it is easy to get confused about it !

Hans, Giulia Grisi was Carlotta's cousin, not her sister. But Carlotta's elder sister, Ernesta Grisi, also was an opera singer (and also was Giulia's elder sister, Giuditta). http://www.istrianet.org/istria/illustri/grisi/ Théophile Gautier was in love with Carlotta but eventually married Ernesta, and one of their daughters, Judith, was a writer: http://www.istrianet.org/istria/illustri/g...tier/judith.htm

George Balanchine's father Meliton and brother Andria both were composers: I wonder if it is possible to find some recordings of their music ? Here's an article about the Balanchivadze family: http://www.opentext.org.ge/art/BALANCH.HTM There were many theater and cinema people in Agnes De Mille's family: her famous uncle the film director Cecil B. De Mille, but also her father William Churchill De Mille (playwright and film director), her grandfather Henry Churchill De Mille (playwright), her grandmother Beatrice DeMille born Matilda Beatrice Samuel (playwright); also her maternal grandfather was the economist Henry George. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0210352/ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0218486/ Maurice Béjart's father was the philosopher Gaston Berger (1896-1960), here are some biographies of him (in French, I couldn't find one in English): http://www2.ac-lille.fr/gberger/FLycee/l2_vieGB.htm Roland Petit's mother, Rose Repetto, created the shoe company Repetto in 1947 (at first to help his son). François Guizerix, the brother of the former POB principal Jean Guizerix, is known as a puppeteer and also acted in a few movies: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0347621/

If you're talking about the Berliner Philarmoniker, the list of its members is here: http://www.berlin-philharmonic.com/de/orchester/ and first names like "Madeleine", "Aline", "Cornelia", "Bettina" or "Rachel" don't sound very masculine to me. (But perhaps I have misunderstood your post.) And wasn't the Vienna orchestra famous for its policy excluding women until the late 1990s ? It is not really surprising that even now there are not many women there. [Edited to add that Cygnet edited his/her post while I was posting mine].