cubanmiamiboy

Yes...there are many anecdotes related to Le Clerq, as well as Tallchief. As I said, he devotes a lot of writing to his development of Apollo. Actually, I met the man once, here in Miami, where he attended some performance of an organization he patronizes. Extremely gracious and talkative man, he spoke to me about the less than ideal conditions he had when Apollo was filmed-(the little TV studio set). So in the book he describes one time when he and Balanchine were in the wings watching Martins perform the ballet. JD- "Why did you do that, Mr B...? Cut Stravinsky's music, cut out the prologue and change the choreography for the ending..? GB- "You know, audience only want to see stars, and stars only want to make poses, not do my steps, SO I GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT..! Poses. Like for a magazine. Like van Gogh...cut off his own hear!

I just bumped into D'Amboise's autobiography in a thrift store, and grabbed it. Been reading it today and find it very entertaining. Written with a candid, honest style, he's no short of telling the reader about hard self assessments and doubts while in NYCB. He repeatedly declares that he knew he was not in the same league as some of his peers, both from America-(Villella)-or abroad-(Vasiliev, Bruhn). Very interesting to once again get another account on City Ballet's first tour to the Soviet Union-(I had already Kirkland's and Villella's takes)-and how things were handled over there. D'Amboise even shreds lots of light into a allegedly platonic fixation that Balanchine seems to have had on Diana Adams, and how she sort of slipped away from his muse trail. Also, very interesting views on "Apollo". Will finish it tomorrow at the beach.

Batoeva...tell us more about Batoeva...

Yes, I meant the free visits to churches, although as Mashinka notes, some of them DID have a person in the entrance collecting a fee to tourists. On the other side, almost all of them had written instructions for parishioners or just for those who solely wanted to pray, in which case there's no fee. Now, many churches have their best paintings in the sacristy-(as with Tintoretto's "Marriage at Cana" at Santa Maria della Salute)-for which you have to pay a separate fee, even if the church itself is free. Some other works were just there in plain view in hidden churches, almost invisible to tourists, like Bernini's"L'estasi di Santa Teresa" in Santa Maria della Vittoria, which I bumped into almost by chance...

Hello everybody! I'm back, exhausted and working already. Italy was all I imagined to be and so much more. Me and my mother had a great time. We ended up going to Roma, Firenze, Venezia, La Toscana, Pisa and Pompei. We used to set foot on the streets early in the morning and sometimes it was 11 pm and we were still out after many hours of churches and museums visits. In Roma we visited the Capitoline Museums, Villa Borghese. the Vatican Museum, The Da Vinci Museum, Villa Doria Pamphilli and countless churches, including the monumentals Basilica di San Pietro and the Arcibasilica Papale di San Giovanni in Laterano. In Firenze we went to Galleria dell'Accademia, Galleria Uffizi and Palazzo Vecchio, and in Venezia to the Palazzo Ducale. To La Toscana and Pisa I was invited by a neighborhood friend from my childhood days, who was wonderful to us. I was completely overwhelmed by all the richness and opulence of the sacred places, and at one point I felt sort of over saturated with all that amount of beauty. In Venezia we went to La Fenice for the opera. It was Stravisnky's "The Rake's Progress", in a VERY daring production that portrayed a full orgy scene with all the sexual combinations imagined, inflatable flying animals and a bearded woman-(Baba La Turca). It was amazing to just step into churches and watch Tintorettos, Verocchios and Bronzinos right on the walls, without paying fees or making long lines to see them. We really had a great time.

Would love to go to Milano but my tight schedule is full...!

Lorena knows very well the deal. She was particularly neglected during her early years of her career...

Comparing cities, I feel Paris to be like a fairy tale, London like a science fiction film and Rome like an interesting mix of all of the above...

Thank you all for your good wishes! I did churches and piazzas today, the lesser known ones, and I am enjoying some wine right now! Hugs to all, amicci..!!!

Leonid and atm711...you always have great stories! atm711...I very much would like to hear more about Markova,s Giselle, given the veneration her interpretation has always generated in Alonso and all she has always said about her role model. Leonid...your encounter with Beaumont is a fascinating story! I did not know his store was in Charing Cross. I have stayed in Soho when in London, and always stroll up and down that street!

Hello everyone! Time came for my yearly European vacation, which is taking place this year in Italy. I am here with my mom, and after a bumpy vogage with canceled flights and almost 24 hours traveling, here I am in Trastevere, Roma. I will try, as usual, to catch performances, but there is no ballet during the period I am staying. 6 days in Roma, 5 in Firenze, 4 in Venezia and back two more in Roma before flying back. I am very excited! Love: Cristian

Thank you both Leonid and Atm711 for your responses. I still find a bit intriguing the fact of how much-( or how little)-of visual background/direct female coaching in the role these two ballerinas had available by the time they were both rehearsing the role. I know that Markova had at different stages access to oral accounts by different sources-(Kschessinskaya, Astafieva, Vladimirov, Dolin via Sppesivtzeva)-who might had helped her with certain points, but my feeling and original interest in this topic is about the fact that I don't think she ever had a previous great Giselle next to her in the studio teaching her the role. Ulanova might had experienced something similar on her own, although she was the product, unlike Markova, of a structured ballet school with a past. But, from that past I wonder, after the estampede of ballerinas post revolution, if there was a Giselle teaching her verbatim about steps and role development.

In our modern society, access to figures of reference in ballet seems to be at ease. One can just enter a vast world of full lenght videos a click away from our own phones. Coaching is greatly expanded also, and now there are more and more dancers worldwide that are able to share previous knowledge in the classics when changing companies and even countries. However, reading yet another book on Dame Markova-(I feel a very special attraction for her type of dancing, sort of aloof and with a particular sense of center and self control that I find fascinating)-I started ruminating in the way she started developing and molding her Giselle, the differences with our current vast access to points of comparisson and the way her work influenced future generations of Giselles in the western hemisphere. In Maurice Leonard's "Markova: the legend", she talks at lenght about it, and about her scarse points of guidance-(an early performance she saw with Pavlova, which she couldn't remember very well, but mostly the vision of Spessivtzeva in the role, Alicia still a very young teenager dancing already with Diaghilev. Then, during the early 30's comes her breakthrough with the role, in which she had only the even more aloof Nicolas Sergueev as her regisseur, with zero demonstrations and little to say besides the basic choreography. Long story short, it seems to me that what we all know about Giselle in the western side of the world comes from a very strong line via what Markova developed-(Pavlova might had danced it worldwide too, but I don't feel there are remaints of her interpretation). Alonso then was a continuation of Markova's style, and from then on, the imitation continued in Cuba full force. I might add that it has greatly extended to whenever Cuban ballet coaches teach Giselle. Then there is Russia/Soviet Union and Ulanova. I have never read a book on Ulanova, but..could it be that her interpretation was also a work from scratch like Markova's..? She had Vaganova as a teacher, but Agrippina did dance the role only one time and was not a success, according to her biography. Who might had helped Ulanova develop the character...? I'm more inclined to think that she, like Markova, molded it greatly on her own. My final question then would be.. Could the Giselles we watch today be a somewhat derivative product of either one of this two ballerinas...? More often than not I find, when watching a sequence of performances in a course of days, too little to differentiate from ballerina to ballerina-(the Russians being the hardest). Then I saw the Osipova/Acosta video and, for the first time in years, I saw a different Giselle. Any thoughs...?

Wich is why I always show to whomever wants to really see what a perfect sequence of single fouettes look like, the brilliant Rosario Suarez, whom I had the pleaseure of watching doing them countless times... @ 3:19

I think a ballerina decides to give up Swan Lake when she's no longer able to accomplish the fouettes, given that she might manage well the rest of the production-(first appearance by act II and mostly partnering stuff, with the exception of the batteries moment during her Act II's solo. That would be different from, let's say, Don Quijote, where there are at least two iconic difficult bravura segments...the fouettes in Act III and her diagonal of traveling pirouettes with the toreadores in Act I. Giselle would be another tricky ballet for a bravura moment to be thought over when taking or giving up the task, for which there's the famous Spessivtzeva's solo in act I and her demanding adagio in act II.

I wonder what the young post-wall western audience would make of this...I'm not in this category, but to be honest...the thing doesn't appeal to me at all-(obviously in part due to having had my fair share in life of artistic communist propaganda..).

They are prosthetic..!

...and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THEM..!! Oh, the ballet looks SO regal in its full original regalia..I very much would love to see it like that live-(same as with Ballet Imperial)

I took my mom today to the cinema to see this-(she ADORES her 40's and 50's Disneys, and even passed to me her own collection of American children books from those films from her pre-Castro chilhood days). The film, based in the '59 Disney's "Sleeping BEauty" and played by A. Jolie, centers around the evil character, rather than Aurora. Now, i'm definitely NOT a fan of all the overly saturated special effects/computarized stuff sequences, so popular nowadays, and this film has its fair share of them, but I must say they never really became too long nor overwhelming. While the original film portrays Maleficent in an antagonistic light and does not showcase a single redeeming quality of her personality, here comes this retake with an interesting twist. What I like about it is that the idea was to carefully go around the original story WITHOUT changing it, but rather ADDING to it, sort of as if there would be an extra pair of eyes now focusing in the evil fairy's steps and actions right during the moments where she's invisible in all the previous takes-(Perrault, Grimm, Vsevolozhsky). The rest of the story is more or less the same. And then..Jolie really has the look...that almost cartoonish, non real beauty. Oh...and now I might link Maleficent/Carabosse's participation in Aurora's wedding from the Russian ballet libretto with Stromberg's film vision. Digging a bit in the original tale, I also now understand the participation of the Ogress Queen-(the Prince's mother, who takes an active, rather macabre part in the post wedding sequence of events in the Perrault original tale)- during the procession of characters in the Mariinsky reconstruction. [

Dear Leonid...what a GREAT pleasure to have you back! Looking forward to once again enjoy your posts. There were always a highlight on this board. Much love!!

"In ballet...where are all the asian swans....?"

Buddy..I think you had a "bad girl exchange"...("..Seo as Myrta"..) :-)

But then...that is IF there's a ballet being performed. The Black Swan PDD and DQ PDD are strong staples of mixed bills. No way to bail out on those scenarios. It is just a black and white matter of being able to perform the thing or not.

I think the answer is easy. The 32 fouettes have been talked about extensively ever since their insertion, and like it or not, people still expect them. They are still sought after because they show up in just a couple of ballets. It is also widely known that they are sometimes suppressed or poorly done out of inability-(Kirkland herself confess to some of this in her memoirs). Audiences are still curious to see if their favorite ballerinas are still up to the task. We can be condescending when age plays a part in diminishing technique-(just as Helene notes with her opera examples)-but when the dancer is young and apparently fierceless, then we-(I)- don't like to see a travesty of a sequence of steps, of even worse, its suppression, again, due to inability. Then, of course, even if the fouettes are a disaster the rest of the ballet can be completely and sublimely interpreted. Not my cup of tea though...

I wonder when was the last time it was done by ABT...