cubanmiamiboy

Edited: double post.

On 12/20/2017 at 3:51 PM, Kathleen O'Connell said:

 

Raymonda? I don't think we need that one and I'm on the fence about La Bayadere.

We need both.  I saw them by the Mariinsky, and yes.  we need them.

Merry Christmas, y'all!!!!

I was able to catch a performance of the company's Nutcracker during my recent visit to London. To be honest, by now I don't have too many recollections of the performance, although there are some points that stuck to my mind.  One thing I remember thinking was how lucky are we who have Balanchine's production at home.  The Nutcracker is, to me, one of the most difficult ballets to stage, for which is a fine and dangerous line that needs to be defined in order to separate a mere "kid's Christmas show" from yet another XIX Century Petipa/Ivanov/Tchaikovsky masterpiece.

So let's revisit some points. 

The ballet has a lovely intro, with a showing of the outside of the Silberhaus house and people ice skating. Clara is here not a little girl like Balanchine's, nor an adult ballerina like in Vainonen or Grigorovitch.  She dances throughout the party in demi pointe-(I would love to get a final answer on the issue of the original Clara, S. Belinskaya, dancing on full pointe or demi pointe).

Anyhow, the party doesn't look as well organized and structured as Balanchine's.  The minuet is not as organic-(it looked rather like a fantasy dancing instead of a real salon piece), and the toys section was, frankly, quite boring...with many stories and sub stories going on that i had a hard time trying to follow. Here, again, the simplicity and beauty of Balanchine's toys section came to mind.

The battle section.

It is worthy to note than the Nutcracker character shifts between a young guy and a professional dancer.  The end result of the battle is, surprisingly, the defeat of the toy soldiers, who end up being carried away in a cage by the mice, and a wounded Nutcracker on the floor. From there the Nutcracker morphs into the dancer and the young Clara into Clara-ballerina and they dance a very unimaginative long adagio to the Transformation scene music.  Lots of dragging by the armpits...lots of lifts, lots of stage running...the works-(you know what I'm talking about).

The Snow Kingdom.

The snow scene heavily borrows from Vainonen's.  I don't know how many snow scenes I have seen with the obiquitous circling of grand pirouettes for the corps. Here they show them too.  I seem to remember that the mice make yet more showings here. They keep trying to chase Clara and the Nutcracker throughout the ballet. 

Act II

The second act is more or less as every other Nutcracker.  For every divertissement there is a distinctive backdrop with the given country landscape. The waltz of the flowers is done in its original form, with couples.

At the end, young Clara awakes on her bed.

Again and again, the more experiments I see trying to introduce a professional couple in the Nutcracker from beginning to end, the more I realize there's no point in doing so.  The Nutcracker is definitely a troubled ballet in which the main pdd, and its dancers don't make it to the stage until the very end.  Balanchine doesn't seem to lose sleep over it, and instead of all that Soviet mess of morphing Clara into Sugarplum to make her a dancing role for the entirety of the two acts, he wonderfully creates a highly stylized work with children in act I and great dancing in act II.  More importantly, he REALLY permeates the ballet with magic, as Herr Drosselmayer does. His main balletic backbones here are his Sow Scene and his Waltz of the Flowers, and with only those too there is enough balletic beauty to go and watch the performance.  No need to fill out Clara and the Nutcracker with a million steps all along the ballet.  

Why did I started with the ENB and end up with Balanchine..? Well, who knows.  I guess I have grown to love his production.

3 hours ago, canbelto said:

I took a look at his instagram page:

https://www.instagram.com/marcelua/

And it's really sad to look at now. It's almost a picture history of ABT. The farewells, the debuts, the new works, the old works, and so on. It seemed as if the company was really his life. 

It is painful to look at that page full of great mementos from his professional life. He would had had a Grand finale at ABT.

6 hours ago, canbelto said:

Actually I found this picture from the new production. It does seem to have a pineapple tree in the center!

Yes. The canopy descends over the throne as Sugarplum takes the kids up there. It is indeed a pineapple, and those pieces on top are slices of the fruit. Act II had no projections. It was pretty much as we know it.

41 minutes ago, canbelto said:

I saw Kleber Rebello when he was in NY. Such a tiny but powerful dynamo, as was Natalie Arja. 

I had kind of wished that MCB's new production in the second act would have more of a South Florida tropic decor. That would have set it apart and given the well-known Balanchine production a local flavor.

I am glad that Nuremberg stayed as Nuremberg. Transpositions are rarely successful.

33 minutes ago, canbelto said:

I wish Marcelo would put out a statement to his fans. He doesn't have to say exactly what happened, but as he has one of the most loyal fanbases in ballet a simple statement of appreciation/explanation would be appreciated.

I was just thinking about the same thing.

58 minutes ago, canbelto said:

Cristian how were the performances of the leads? I know MCB's roster has undergone some reshuffling in the past few years.

I saw two different casts. I had bought tickets for three, but one last minute substitution wiped off Simone Messmer from the Land of Sweets. So I got Tricia Albertson/Reyneris Reyes and Katia Karranza/Renato Penteado. The four of them are MCB veterans, Albertson, Penteado and Reyes probably in their 40's. They are not spitfires, but the quality of their artistry is wonderful. I truly enjoyed the performances. Also, there is this guy, Kleber Rebello, who is the BEST Candy Cane I have ever seen-(even compared to Ulbricht). I read a review by rg somewhere in which he agrees with me. The guy is weightless! 

As I said...I missed Messmer in the Sugarplum role, but I have never cared too much for her dancing.

You have really resumed much of my feelings, Jack. This art form has more or less stayed the same for centuries now. Live music, painted backdrops, dancing. This simple trilogy has really worked, and it doesn't require much "updates". I was just thinking last night...what would happen if right before a performance all this high tech computerized stuff shuts down...? No performance..? It really shouldn't come to such dependency on technology to present ballet. Sad indeed.

One thing certainly comes to-(at least my)- mind. There is a looming, grotesque, huge , and more importantly, DISGUSTING cloud of double standards in this particular purge. I am very reminded of a certainly biblical passage.

I really wish Gomes well. He was probably the main reason for my ABT trips in the last years.

56 minutes ago, ABT Fan said:

 

will need to build some positive excitement for the Met season, 

 

This upcoming season looks terribly uninspiring.

2 minutes ago, nanushka said:

And in many of the situations we've been discussing, physical force would not likely be the primary or best response, and we don't know any details of what Marcelo is alleged to have done, so there's no particular reason to think that physical force would likely have been the primary or best response to it.

What I am trying to say is that I am totally not buying many of the allegations out there. There are true cases, but there is hysteria too, and there's is also the glooming well known ghost of "when in doubt, sue". We don't know the details of Gomes ordeal, but we might suspect very well it could be a guy, given that he is gay. And pardon my French, but this sounds fishy. 

12 minutes ago, nanushka said:

Whether or not that's thinkable, many of the situations we have been discussing have involved no physical force, and we don't know any details of what Marcelo is alleged to have done, so there's no particular reason to think that it involved physical force.

I mentioned physical force in relationship with a potential RESPONSE from men being threatened. In other words....we are more likely to fight in better, more equal terms than women.

1 minute ago, nanushka said:

Whether or not that's thinkable, many of the situations we have been discussing have involved no physical force, and we don't know any details of what Marcelo is alleged to have done, so there's no particular reason to think that it involved physical force.

I mentioned physical force in relationship with a potential RESPONSE from men being threatened. In other words....we are more likely to fight in better terms than women.

7 hours ago, dirac said:

 

As for the suggestion made elsewhere on this thread that youths and young men are somehow less vulnerable in the face of such misconduct............I really don't know what to say.

That we men are likely less vulnerable than women in such situations...less likely to surrender right away, more likely to meet the offender with a counteracting physical force....is that really unthinkable ....?

1 hour ago, nanushka said:

 

Any man...who finds that getting sex or a date is impossible without aggressively pursuing someone's behind needs to take a deep, hard look at himself, his attributes, his behaviors, and his preferred objects of desire, and consider whether there might be something wrong there.

Anybody who think that male-male pairing can be detached from agressive sexual persuing hasn't gotten around the gay "dating" scene of 2017.

Edited to add: "dating", with intentional quote marks. 

6 hours ago, nanushka said:

Two simple points:

(1)  "Sexual misconduct" (what Gomes has been accused of) does not necessarily entail a physical threat.

(2)  There are plenty of male-male pairings that, if they involved the threat or occurrence of physical violence, would also involve "an imbalanced set of forces."

These points seem so evident to me that I wonder if I've misread the above-quoted post. My apologies if I have.

Oh, I agree with you. "Sexual missconduct" can be applied now in every situation where a sexual advance is met with a negative response.  When the first agressive move is not met with reciprocation, it goes to "sexual missconduct".  If said first, unnanounced move is met with pleasure, then it is a happy story, and Nanushka...let me tell you.  The gay world is, as we might imagine, full of males, and men persue, and if men don't persue, men don't mate. Row..? Maybe. Truth..? DEFINITELY.

Now, if every single person who has had an agressive persuing male on his/her behind, even without any rape/non consensual sex/repeatedly unwanted approaches etc etc will use the mere approach as the basis to jump into the "sexual missconduct" wagon, then God protect us all males.  

This situation is getting to a totally ridiculous point. The "me too" wagon seems to be bottomless now. I wish I could really express what I really think goes on with this new allegations on Marcelo. Let me hint that the level of vulnerability... PHYSICAL vulnerability from a woman to a man is not the same as with two men. Child predation -(as with Corey Fieldman)- is a totally different animal, but I have too much of a street knowledge to simply grasp the idea of an imbalanced set of forces in a male to male allegation.

I hope I am not "discussing the discussion" though...

With Bolle dancing less and less-(and aging)- now ABT's line of princely men is extremely thin.

For all the accounts I have read about Balanchine and all his wives, muses  and female dancers, my general impression was that women were not particularly afraid of him in the sexual advancement field, for which most of the writing is about all this women really wanting to get closer to the coreographer rather than the man. And at the pinnacle of the idea there goes the infamously annulled marriage with Tallchief, which according to her was never physically consummated.

This is just the beginning. As I said... Pandora's Box has just been opened. We'll see many many more names to come.

I am very sad that he didn't have a proper farewell after all this years of wonderful dancing.

This Pandora's Box is just in its baby steps. Let's keep watching the parade of names to come.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-caribbean-flavored-nutcracker-1513787984

I think our dear rg agrees with my previous assessment of the lackluster, uninspired tree transformation scene.

I attended last night the much anticipated new production of the company's Nutcracker.  Balanchine's backbone stays, but the sets and costumes are redesigned, the company engaging this time the work of NYC based Cuban Americans Ruben and Isabel Toledo , with mix emotions from this ballet aficionado.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/arts/dance/isabel-ruben-toledo-nutcracker-miami-city-ballet.html

Much fanfarre has been done by Lopez about this new production.  Apparently this is a well known couple, and among the two they envisioned the inclusion of digitized visual media for their creation. So let's talk about it.

The bulk of the digital addition comes during the ballet's overture.  Instead of a painted screen we're offered an elegant 3-D vintage perspective of Nuremberg with moving sequences of the snowing town and a flying angel, all very resembling of early XX Century cartoons.  That certainly work, as the Da Capo overture sometimes get's on peoples nerves.  

The Silberhaus interior looks less elaborated than the previous one, but still the whole thing looks pretty much the same as what we had before. Historical time is not changed, thank God. First noticeable change come with the dancing toys costumes. Columbine is stripped from her previous mask and her skirt is now a pancake tutu with colorful patterns reminders of her character. Harlequin is given a beautiful costume with puffy crispy sleeves. It all looks good, although Columbine now looks less toy and more human sans mask.

Advancing to the most problematic issue of the new production, here comes the Battle and Transformation scenes.  And here's where the whole digitized mess start.

Cutting thru the cheese.  The issue with the growing Christmas  tree.  What a mess...what a complete, total, inexplicable mess.  What happens is that the Toledos decide to go away with the physical growing tree, and instead the whole transformation scene and tree growing is replaced with a phantasmagorical, Disney-like, Fantasia-inspired mess of digital debauchery. The previous real tree disappears and a projection takes its place instead, growing but not showing the whole length, as the top part  completely goes off the viewers vision field, instead leaving visible only the growing of the tree's base.  At the end of the unfortunate sequence we're left with yet a rather lame view of the lower foliage of the tree during the whole battle.  Very disappointing and cheap looking.  I can't even imagine why, oh why Lourdes Lopez would allow such disrespect to Balanchine's legacy, knowing that he was extremely particular about the tree, famously declaring that he would not do without the very mammoth tree he envisioned, as his ultimate homage to the Imperial production he so cherished and was inspired by.

More to come .