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In his review of the Ailey company's performance of Bejart's Firebird, Alastair Macaulay gives this quote from Clement Crisp: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril, or bacon and strawberries.” And speaking of Mr. Crisp's comments about the evanescence of ballet, part of the problem is lack of companies creating filmed documentation, which, however inadequate it may be, is at least something. It is interesting that the NYCB has been more careful about this than most, thanks to the New York Public Library. With the cooperation of the organizations involved, the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library regularly documents theatrical events in the city, and its listing of NYCB films is mind-boggling - well over a thousand of Balanchine ballets in performance, rehearsal and discussion from almost every period of the company's existence. I didn't even dare check the Jerome Robbins collection, which is also immense (well - the dance section is named for him!). As for the Balanchine listings, by about item 500 I was too dizzy to continue, but anyone who has the time and patience can go through the catalog. I don't know that even the Russians have preserved such a record.

I first saw the NYCB's Swan Lake around 1959-60, and I remember the conveyer-belt swans then, though I think in a somewhat different formation than in the 1964 production - my memory is a little too hazy to describe the difference. As I recall, the big wings vanished as did Wilde's variation and the dance of the four little swans (wasn't that because Mr. B got tired of their constantly stopping the show?).

Thanks so much delibes for that wonderful description, and for such a sensitive response to the choreography. I wish I could see this production! It's strange to remember now that the ballet took a while to find its final shape. The scherzo in Diamonds kept disappearing - one night it was there, the next performance it wasn't (of course, that may have had more to do with injuries than creative dithering). The solos in Emeralds kept getting shifted around and didn't settle until Verdy stopped dancing the section. And the magnificent septet that ends Emeralds wasn't added till some ten years later, after Balanchine created it for the filming for Dance in America. There were many other small changes, but that was Balanchine's way. He was rarely ever finished with any of his ballets. And now they're set for good, which seems even stranger.

Thanks bart for that wonderful, detailed report, though it did make me sigh a bit for something of Balanchine that seems to be getting lost. Of course, Villella has to deal with the young dancers he has, and, not to be pretentious about it, a different age. And possibly (I'm in no position to know) he explains too much in an effort to avoid Mr. B's habit of refusing to explain much of anything ("What is this ballet about?" "It's about twenty minutes."). But there was a point to Mr. B's method, however hard it was on the dancers. They had to develop from within themselves, to find their own way to who they were and who they were in the role and the ballet. The results, as I felt them over the years, were a highly developed individuality, and a depth of honest interpretation I see far less often these days. Balanchine's people, possibly because he was so ruthless with them, got further and further into a role the longer they danced it. Explanations reflect only one source, and that not the interpreter's - they may help, but they also limit. I think Balanchine was right. It must come from within the artist (with guidance, to be sure). To answer your specific question about Farrell. Of course her interpretation was unique to her, but others dancing the role found their own way to a similar country so to speak. Mazzo was more fragile, Kent more fugitive and elusive, but the drama in Diamonds remained, however it was inflected. It appears now to be gone, which means, to me, that something at the core of the work may be missing. If there was an irreplaceable interpretation, it was probably McBride's in Rubies. In my experience, she came closer to absolute uniqueness even than Farrell. More recent dancers catch some of her sparkle and wit, but apparently little of the darker qualities that made her so remarkable in The Cage or La Valse. She was always a bundle of unpredictable complexities - now joyous, now bitchy, now a delight, now flat-out wicked. And her musical phrasing was truly unique. I'm going to try to give some links to several photos of Jewels performances from the early 70s. The first two are Kent and Martins, the third Mazzo and Bonnefous, in Diamonds; the last two are McBride and Villella in Rubies. I hope it works. http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa314/p...kentmartins.jpg http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa314/p...entmartins2.jpg http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa314/p...obonnefous2.jpg http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa314/p...idevillella.jpg http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa314/p...devillella3.jpg

Actually, it seem to me that a lot of the Nutcrackers running around in Europe are sans children. The Royal Ballet's has grown-ups pretending to be children, as do the Bolshoi's and the Mariinsky's. Do we want to mention Nureyev's raving Freudian Nutcracker with Drosselmeier as the romantic hero for the POB? They danced it last night, I think - thanks to the strike minus costumes and sets (oops - how's that for Freudian?) and Dorothee Gilbert was named an etoile immediately after. But that's not in New York, and no one's doing Morris's Hard Nut here either. Sorry, that wasn't very helpful was it?

Well, it's wonderful to have the complete Prokofiev score, but happy endings?! God help us. We want happy Swan Lakes, cinema verite Giselles without silly supernatural stuff, Nutrackers minus those inconvenient children - what next? Hamlet becomes king of Denmark? Giselle goes to a psychiatist and gets over men? Lear and Cordelia survive a la Victorian melodrama? James comes home and marries Effie? OK, I'm ranting. I'm going to go into a corner and mutter furiously until Homeland Sercurity takes me away as an obvious menace to the lobotomized society where there are no consequences to anything and we will all dine on treacle and jam forever. Grrrrrrr!!

Thank you bart and leibling for those responses, and for more food for thought. It fascinates me that Balanchine did not add the final pas de sept until he rethought the section for the Dance in America filming. I wonder for how long and in what creative mental cellar that had been percolating for him. The original, sort of standard, finale to Emeralds obviously felt incomplete to him, and I think that addition helped clarify Jewels' themes and bind the three parts together both subtly and powerfully. I agree, the men are characters, perhaps as much and even more than the women. They are never mere partners - they are more the subject of their creator perhaps than their women, who are his objects; they represent him in many aspects, from the Apollonian to the Orphic, that is from classical balance to romantic courting of chaos. I'm not sure what the Emeralds trio is reaching for, but they seem to allow their women to evaporate while they reach out for - what? The wild women of Rubies? The conflicted Odette/Empress of Diamonds? Who knows. What I think is undeniable is Balanchine's - probably religiously based - belief that life, growth, creativity come from longings that can never be fulfilled in the everyday, or in life at all. Or maybe it's a hangover from Romanticism crossed with theology. Perhaps what women may see a little more readily is the cost to the idealized beloveds. But you are surely right that Jewels, and most of Balanchine's masterpieces, support many complex responses, sometimes from one performance to the next, or one dancer to the next.

I haven't seen the Miami City production unfortunately (I'd love to) but some of the discussion here of the ballet itself seems to see it rather differently than I ever have. Perhaps because so many of the discussions are by the gentlemen of the forum, they don't seem to touch on some things that I think, from my female point of view, are basic and important. Ballet may be Woman, but the 'worship' in Balanchine in general and Jewels in particular is decidedly ambiguous. Man may worship but he also, as a stand-in for Balanchine the creator, wants to control, to shape and to manipulate - and his worship is often of woman not as a person but as material both obedient and pliant. Woman is Muse, but worship as an element of control is not the happiest of fates, and Balanchine's women are often in varying states of rebellion and attempted escape. ("They always left me," he said of his real-life women.) There are dark undertones and ironic rifts in all the Jewels relationships, and to at least some extent that is one of its unifying themes - one of the 'stories' so to speak. That the muse will always be elusive, that she cannot ever be captured, never stops these sons of James, both here and in so many Balanchine works, and they can do similar damage in their attempts. In Emeralds, the woman of the walking duet either doesn't see or refuses to see her partner - who is controlling whom? who is real? In the pas de trois as I remember the original dancers, there was drama in John Prinz testing of his control over his two partners. And Balanchine eventually added the logical finale, in which the women desert the men, whether in fact or dream, leaving them alone to their evanescent fanatasies of Woman rather than actual women. The glory of Rubies is the women fighting back - the 'tall' girl taunting the boys who manipulate her, and McBride (no other name should ever be given to this role) refusing to do anything she's told, twisting, collapsing, slithering out of his grasp, grabbing back control at any moment she can, and creating a glorious brawl, a street fight over just who is going to be the boss. If it is the most exhilarating section, I think it is so partly because it is the one place where the 'Muse' takes over and laughs, and the 'worshipper' actually enjoys it. I find Diamonds the most deeply ambiguous of the three sections. Both d'Amboise, who created the role, and Martins, who danced it most frequently, are powerful and domineering men whose superb partnering and courtly respect never completely concealed their will to manipulate. It is an element of performance missing in the recent performances I have seen, especially the POB version. I find the climax of the duet in the ballerina's violent shudder - very clear and powerful on the dvd with Farrell. She may be adored. She is also trapped, and aware of it. If I seem to have overemphasized these undercurrents - and sometimes overcurrents - it is because I don't see them acknowledged much otherwise, and I think they are central to the depth and complexity of Balachine's genius.

I think the best recovery I've ever seen happened in a 1970 performance of Who Cares? Jacques d'Amboise meant to finish his solo with an air turn to one knee, only to land off balance and tumble over on his side with one hand groping for the floor to audience gasps. He promptly flung himself flat out on his back with a noisy sigh of cheerful exhaustion, then bounded up grinning while the audience went nuts. Of course, you couldn't pull this in Ballet Imperial or Swan Lake - or could you? D'Amboise was something of a law unto himself.

Sure, why not? There's enough otherwordly in Celtic myth to make it acceptable, I think. Anyway, if they can put Pharoah's daughter on pointe, why not the mercurial Grainne?

Several people have suggested the Tristan and Isolde story, but I think that it does have some elements, like the love potion, of the mother-in-law in ballet variety. How about a less set version of the same story in an earlier form - the story of Diarmuid, Grainne and Finn McCool, which has already been turned into an Irish dance drama by Jean Butler and Colin Dunne, so it's doable. It's a terrific drama, with enough room in the legends for effective manipulation of the scenario. It has possibilities for grand love duets, big solos, jealous trios (Finn is a far stronger character than King Mark), warriors and courtiers choruses, and even some classical supernatural bits (the Butler-Dunne version took advantage of this). I have no clue what music could be used, but an original score using Irish music as a source might give it extra interest. We could use some exciting new ballet music. It's a drama that could be classical and modern at the same time, as well as both familiar and new, and hopefully unhacknied. In fact, Irish mythology and legend is a huge unexplored area which strikes me as a wonderful source for dance dramas.

Thank you for the information. It brings up some interesting points, though I'm not sure this thread is the place for them. If you think a Mime and/or Dramatic Gesture in Balanchine thread would be a better place, I'd be delighted to go there and continue the discussion. It seems to me that dramatic gesture in Balanchine's non-narrative ballets is very frequent, from Apollo to Davidsbundlertanze through Liebeslieder down to Scotch Symphony, Serenade and Western Symphony and many ballets in between. But is this mime, in the classical sense, in the sense being discussed on this thread? I don't know, but it's well-worth going into. As for Diamonds, I went back to my 1967 notebooks and checked my various windy scribblings on Jewels (I kept calling it "The Jewels" for some inscrutible reason). Unfortunately, they were no help on this point, but they did remind me of something of which I'm sure you, like most of us at that time, were painfully aware: that Farrell was becoming increasingly frazzled and sometimes just plain discombobulated. At one point I wrote "I wish Balanchine would just leave her alone for a while!" I bring this up, because the moment you note in Diamonds might have been Balanchine, but it might also have been a solicitous d'Amboise (and you remember how solicitous of Farrell he was) trying to get her over rough patches in performance. It's hard to say. There isn't such a moment in the filmed pas de deux with Farrell and Martins, but of course that is many years later.

I think you may be thinking of Ballet Imperial, which did have a mime sequence that Balanchine later removed. But I've seen Jewels since its first season, and there was never a mime sequence in it, unless I dozed off each time at the precise moment it occured - mmm - probably not.

Why do I feel picky today? Or is it picky to point out that there's no mime in Jewels, either? Then there is the mean, intolerant and hopelessly opinionated thought that keeps running through my head like a determined nutcracker mouse that there just may not be a place in heaven for those who find Liebeslieder Walzer boring. Sorry. I will now go back to my mousehole and be quiet.

There are so many wonderful quotes, so this is just one I found interesting. It's from an interview with Manuel Legris by Alessandro Bizzotto in September of last year on the Italian web site Quelliche il Cinema; I believe they were actually speaking Italian rather than French. (http://www.quellicheilcinema.com) "Conosco ballerini migliori di me dal punto di vista tecnico o fisico… ma quando si è in scena ciò che fa la differenza è qui… nella testa! Non solo nel fisico." Forgive my sketchy Italian, but I translated this as: "I know dancers better than me from the point of view of technique or physique, but when one is on stage what makes the difference is here - in your head! It’s not just the physical." His expansion on this indicated that he meant what Nureyev described as guts - sheer will and determination, and the ability not to get thrown by whatever situation turns up - just throwing yourself totally into the performance and not letting anything sidetrack you.

Well, Wuthering Heights was made into a ballet several years ago by POB etoile Kader Belarbi. In French, it's Hurlevent. He commissioned a score from Philippe Hersant, and created a big lead role for Nicolas LeRiche. It's apparently a success, and was danced just this past month at the POB. There's been some discussion of it here and there on this forum too. But no other company seems to have taken it up, which has been a problem with a lot of the more recent full-length story ballets - only their own companies do them. Apart from the older works by Neumeier, Ek (POB will be doing his Maison de Bernarda, based on the Lorca play, this spring with Belarbi and Legris alternating as Bernarda!), Prelocaj et al., modern narrative works haven't carried very well yet.

Well, not being a dancer, I'm not sure I have any very useful advice to give about performance, but it seems to me that Puck and Ariel are not ideal models for the Spirit. He exists in the girl's dream - the dream of a young woman after a ball, a happy social occasion filled with intimations of courtship and growing up. Certainly a partner to whom she is attracted gave her that rose she's wearing when she comes in. So the Spirit, while not human, is not completely genderless - he probably should have at least a whiff of masculinity, a sense that he/it is also inviting her to a sensual awakening. Not sexual, but very delicately and suggestively romantic. The entire role is a balancing act of androgyny at the edge of a whole new world of the masculine for the dreaming girl. After all, she sees them as waltzing - the most daring of 19th century ballroom dances - men and women in each other's arms, with him leading. That balance and suggestiveness are the role's greatest difficulty I think, and letting Fokine's choreography express that. Baryshnikov erred too far on the side of the masculine, Malakhov perhaps a little too far on the side of the androgynous. I'm also reminded of an irate French critic who saw Nicholas Leriche in the role and snapped that the part did not need Burt Lancaster in Trapeze. It's a mine field of a part.

May I suggest some other factors. There seem to be a reasonable number of dramatic dancers outside of the US - I can mention the recently retired, such as Elizabeth Maurin, Alessandra Ferri and Laurent Hilaire, or current dancers such as Carlos Acosta, Johan Kobborg, Mara Galeazzi, Maria Eichwald, Nicholas Leriche - and so forth. Manuel Legris recently had one of his greatest successes doing a largely dramatic turn as Charlus in the POB's production of Proust. If there are few dramatic dancers here of the kind MacAulay misses, maybe his list of ballets is a clue. They are all a half-century or more old. Our critics, our more sophisticated audiences, and possibly our ballet academies, treat dramatic ballets as outdated, second-rate, unnecessary. ABT does them, but usually with an eye to the box office, not to engaging a major choreographer, with predictably unfortunate results. Surely Balanchine didn't want his influence to go quite this far. Choreographers here simply have little real passion for creating important dramatic ballets. What incentive is there? And dancers learn from working with creative people. If dramatic works are looked down on - and they are - if dancing them brings little or no respect, then there is no reason dancers are going to value them or learn the skills to do them well. The vitriol that attends performances here of dramatic ballets created abroad can be truly startling. Kylian, Neumier, Cranko, Macmillan, Ek, Petit - never mind Bejart - are dismissed as Eurotrash without a second thought on the assumption that no person of taste could conceivably disagree; a thread on this board spends many messages trashing Macmillan's Mayerling at the same time it is having a triumphant revival in Britain, danced by just the kind of dramatic dancers Macaulay is lamenting we don't have. Of course we don't. The Hamburg Ballet, Neumeier's company, dances Jewels, but in the entire Sylvia-revival orgy it occurred to no one to even look at Neumeier's version as a possibility. The POB may do far too many modern works at the expense of the classics, but by God, it does have wonderful dramatic as well as classical dancers. We seem to have gotten overbalanced here. Chaipuris may have an excellent point about the culture, but I suspect it begs the question of critical/fan aversion to dramatic ballets. Or maybe it doesn't at that.

Is there anyplace to post photos here? I have a couple of beautful shots of this 'swoon' with McBride and Ludlow, which also give some idea of why the lift is no longer around without a partner of Ludlow's ability. I posted on another thread what I think most of us oldtimers probably remember - that the Scotch Symphony throw was eliminated after a performance in which Anthony Blum tripped and fell over backwards with Tallchief on top of him. As for Allegra Kent, EG certainly adored her (so did I), even though she came and went unpredictably and her dancing got (technically speaking) vaguer and vaguer. But what an presence she was! She came as close to replacing Diana Adams in his affections as any ballerina. She imprinted herself so completely on the Symphony in C adagio, it became almost unthinkable without her, and only Adams could be preferable in the Agon pas de deux. And in the Midsummer Night's Dream divertissment in act 2, I remember that the choreography - even the presence of the piece - made no sense to me until the night she danced it, and suddenly it became the heart of the ballet's vision of love. If EG and the rest of us adored her, she more than gave us cause.

Oh God! to have a dvd of the McBride-Skelton Spectre! I tried to find it via Amazon, but there are too many RS dvds with too little description of what's on them. Does anyone happen to know where this might be lurking? I loved Edward Villella - a wonderful, wonderful dancer - but letting him at the Rose Spirit strikes me as getting a pit bull to play a dove. As for Legris, Paul Parish said it perfectly. What I wouldn't give to have seen him on stage! (A lot of frustration in this post...) The more I see him just on film, the more remarkable he seems. Not only the musicality, but the ability to use dance as a language, to fulfill Balanchine's remark to Villella that "we are poets of gesture." He can convey more depth of emotion, more richness and complexity of feeling, in the turn of a hand than most dancers seem to in full dramatic spate. A great artist, and from what I have been able to read from fans and critics who have been fortunate enough to see him live (which sometimes requires translation), the films do not give a false impression.

From Macaulay's 7/15/07 Times article on ABT and the Black Swan coda : "What's both bizarre and fascinating is that the music's rhythmic emphasis changes entirely after her first 16 turns. Yet despite the suddenly jarring disparity between what we see and hear, she just goes on turning." He's right - the music does change, yet the dancer keeps doing the same thing with the same rhythm. Audiences may or may not find this bothersome, but there is a definite and unmusical disparity. As for dancers not being allowed to choose what they will do in a big classical role, I think stars often have options they would not have in dancing, say, Balanchine or Kylian. Solos and codas in the grand display pieces tend to vary from dancer to dancer, and this is often the choice of the dancer involved rather than the will of the company. Baryshnikov does not do the same solo for Albrecht in the second act of Giselle as Nureyev, neither of them did what Bruhn did, and today Legris is not dancing the same steps as Malakhov. Makarova's Odette/Odile differed considerably from Fonteyn's - and so forth. The fouettes remain because they're expected and a challenge rather than because they ideally belong there.

I can't answer for Mozartiana because health issues had more or less put an end to regular attendance for me by the mid 70s, but I do remember that Gorey did sit out more and more ballets as time went on, and eventually stopped coming to every performance. He had very distinct likes and dislikes, not all of them predictable, and sometimes, like the rest of us, he was just in a bad mood. He tended to skip the non-Balanchine stuff, of which there was more than you would think (a recent going over of Nancy Reynolds' Repertory in Review was an eye-opening reminder of just how many second-rate ballets made it into the repertory even then) - if we were in for a Taras, Tanner, etc. work he'd usually sit it out unless there was someone he really liked in the cast. He wasn't mad about Robbins either, and quickly had enough of Dances at a Gathering, In the Night and the others - he really disliked Robbins' musical sense as I remember. There were certainly Balanchine works he disliked, and it could take him a season or so to decide if he liked a new ballet, but aside from obvious horrors like PAMTGG and Electronics, I don't remember which particular Balanchine ballets he didn't care for. As for Western Symphony and such, it was less dislike than being very tired of them. We all were. It took a spectacular cast to get a number of fans to watch the umpteenth Western, Stars, etc. And Balanchine tinkered constantly, which could be annoying enough to cause some colorful Ted-bursts. Firebird was one of the worst - Mr. B couldn't leave it alone, although I thought the production with Von Aroldingen decked out in big white wings was pretty hilarious. She looked like a prehistoric flying dinosauer out for prey. Gorey was not amused. He was fussy about casting, but usually watched unless it was someone he truly couldn't stand, like Mimi Paul. To change the subject - Helene, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you thought Mr. B enjoyed people falling and getting hurt. But I think it was something he was more cautious about than you may believe. Melinda Roy's story on the Balanchine Celebration tape is perhaps the only one I remember in which he praised a dancer for actually falling. If you know others, it would be nice to know the story and the dancer involved. My impression, both at the time, and from what I've read since, is that Balanchine was of two minds. He would change choreography (like SS) that had proved dangerous, or that a dancer had real trouble doing, but that he wanted a full, all-out expenditure of energy and commitment. And while he may not have been effusive he did have ways of letting dancers know that they had done well. If books are a source, then Mazo's Dance Is a Contact Sport is pretty clear both that his dancers loved Balanchine and that they got injured at a terrible rate. It was Robbins who was the company bete-noire, apparently.

Has anyone caught a fascinating series from China called Dance With Me? It's been being broadcast on a small Asian-american cable channel called ImaginAsian TV for the past couple of months. In China there is apparently an annual competition of young professional dancers that is televised with a set-up not unlike American Idol. It includes folk dance, ballet, traditional Chinese dance, and contemporary dance (everything else). There are panels of judges for each type of dance as well as over-all judges and voting by the tv audience. Dancers perform a piece of five minutes or so, answer a brief sort of trivia question and are assigned a theme for a very short improvisation. The pieces can be one dancer, two dancers or groups of various sizes. The physical abilities of these young people are quite amazing, and the entire structure very different than anything with which we are familiar in the West. One amazing feature is the participation of the military - apparently there is a large, important and highly trained dance unit in the Chinese army, and there are not only soldiers in the audience, but several of the judges are army officers. The dancers, of all kinds, are expected to have a reasonable education, and when someone misses an answer in the 'trivia' questions, which often have to do with poetry and the arts, they are likely to be scolded for their ignorance. And to be expected to improvise a dance on the spot! There is apparently a genuinely broad dance culture in China, and I would love to know if anyone else has seen this show, or is familiar with the dance situation in China today.

Ted Gorey never stopped lamenting the loss of Diana Adams, whom he adored - Prodigal Son was ruined for him forever when she stopped dancing the Siren - and he never took to Farrell. He considered her affected, and so she was pre-Bejart. (Farrell was at her greatest in the post 1975 period, a matter Arlene Croce covers definitively.) The little gang that met on the first ring during intermissions in those days would often find Gorey already there, having walked out annoyed with the ballet or the casting. Along with McBride, I remember that he admired Kent, even though one never quite knew what she would do next, or if she would make it at all, and he also liked Helgi Tomasson. What he considered Verdy's fussiness drove him nuts and caused some of his most explosive complaints. He used to say that the 'Sands of the Desert' section of Figure in the Carpet was a beige bore that went on forever. He was one person who was not sorry to see that little work die. Re Balanchine 'liking' people to fall. Believe me, no one, Balanchine or otherwise, liked seeing people fall. They got injured and caused casting problems. It also unsettled the audience and distracted their attention. What Balanchine liked was dancers going all-out and giving everything they had, with full energy and commitment. "What are you saving it for?" was his response to over-caution and low energy.

Good God! Talk about torturing a score! They might as well have stuck to the original substitution. (And if I remember the Kavanagh's Nureyev bio correctly - I'm too lazy to go check - Margot was not at all happy about it.)