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emilienne

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Everything posted by emilienne

  1. Stepanenko was asked to repeat her fouettés in a performance of Don Q at the Bolshoi. So, instead of the male pirouettes à la seconde, we had Mme Stepanenko do another set. I think this may have been at a gala for her, so there may have been extenuating circumstances. There was a youtube video of it, but it seems to have been pulled.
  2. From Natalia in the related Mariinsky performances thread: Several possibilities: 1 you may be able to pick up extra tickets from returns at the box office (not guaranteed but possible) - they are considered donations to the KC as the box office is able to re-sell the ticket. 2 you may be able to buy a ticket from a patron who ended up with an extra ticket (KC is federal property - you'd have to do it outside the premises for legal reasons if money is changing hands). 3 A patron may give you a ticket inside the premises, either because they are big of heart or because they need to catch a bus home (though if you're second-acting and end up seeing only Scheherazade...well...) 4 KC may sell some of the box seats on the sides (I forget what they are called) that may have partially obstructed views. Good luck!
  3. From ParaClassics's page on Facebook. ParaClassics seems to be the transmitter of these performances. "Dear Friends, the recording of today's premiere of the wonderful Sleeping Beauty by Nacho Duato is available till 7PM Moscow Time (GMT+4) December 21st at the same address as the live webcast - enjoy and share this Christmas gift with your friends!"
  4. This seems to be the next live broadcast that the Mikhailovsky has planned, but there is no more information about it on the website. http://www.mikhailovsky.ru/en/live/ EDIT: Update 20 December 2011 (from later down on the thread) From ParaClassics's page on Facebook. ParaClassics seems to be the transmitter of these performances. "Dear Friends, the recording of today's premiere of the wonderful Sleeping Beauty by Nacho Duato is available till 7PM Moscow Time (GMT+4) December 21st at the same address as the live webcast - enjoy and share this Christmas gift with your friends!"
  5. (This is a rebroadcast that I caught locally, wrote about, and then completely forgot to post about.) Class Concert/Giselle Double Bill Bolshoi Ballet Ballet in Cinema rebroadcast Champaign Art Theater, Champaign IL 16 October 2011, noon After a while, Class Concert blurs together to leave the singular impression of a body suspended three feet off the ground, its legs contorted in some fantastically (and anatomically) improbable configuration. I do not object to the display of Soviet air superiority (and in fact adore it as I do a Comintern speech in Pravda), but I do feel that any exhibition of this graduation exercise should probably come with a surgeon general’s warning for the attendant risk of elevated blood pressure. As do other pieces – most notably Études – in the genre, the choreographer promises a slightly enhanced look at a class at the Moscow Choreographic Institute. The beginning students pay attention to their placements and occasionally forget their combinations; the advanced students try to convince us that they still remember the basics as their battements come unhinged at the hips and swing uncomfortably close to their ears. Really, I don’t understand the modern Vaganova arabesque, which now exceeds 90 degrees by a wide margin, and in fact I will prefer to call everything penchée until someone can demonstrate a clear difference between the two. Anyway, things progress quickly from barre demonstrations to center and allegro work. The progression reminds me of the Soul Train Line: featured dancers saunter down the diagonal, unleashing their best tricks for the folks at home. The petit and grand allegro steps look great in isolation, but Messerer’s choreography doesn’t leave much time (if any at all) for integrating the steps into a performance for anybody. All in all, the first half of this double bill left me feeling as if I had been pleasantly blindsided by a Mack truck. An exhibition of Grigorovich’s Giselle followed after a very short pause. I had not sat through a full length Giselle in several years (my last was the 1977 Makarova/Baryshinov at the ABT), and I regret the refresher being a Soviet production*. I was tempted to do a stream of consciousness commentary, but that would have required more brainpower than I had at my disposal, and anyway, Act I can be adequately summarized as “Giselle’s best scenes as recounted by someone with nonlinear recollection and can only see in the red and yellow parts of the color spectrum”. Lunkina is a limpid ballerina and perpetuates a quiet madness – what Joan Fontaine in Suspicion would have called a Born Victim (BV): methinks any intense concentration and then dispersion of strong emotion would have done her in, eventually**. Gudanov, the cavalier, alternated between lunkheaded ardor and (microseconds of) genuine tenderness. Hilarion (casting unknown) was yet another BV: he existed to glower ineffectually until he is tossed off a cliff by a bunch of ghostly brides. The White Act fared better, if only because there were fewer rearrangements and cuts. Allash was a stern but utterly ineffectual Myrthe. She had no power in her jetés and any sense of command came through primarily as indifference. Perhaps I am spoiled by the expectation of the Bolshoi ballon (see: Alexandrova), but this Myrthe seemed too earthbound and petty to pose a threat. And while a Vaganova-trained corp is always a pleasure to behold, the classical posture clashed mightily with ghostly afterimages of the Romantic choreography, and the ‘plonks’ of their rock-like pointe shoes in traveling forward arabesques sounded like the Wilis were putting down horseshoes***. When not strangled by prop trees when dropping lilies at Albrecht or wobbling in adagio, Lunkina was a wisp of a spirit, perpetually a little out of focus to Albrecht and the audience. Even when prompted by love to save her lunkhead lover, this was a Giselle who was done with life and finally at peace with it. Gudanov improves in the second act: his line is gorgeous and he dances the hell out of the choreography. In fact his acting improves, possibly because of it. I wonder if the choreography takes his attention away from the need to sell everything to the audience (thus appropriately centers his acting within the dancing)…or perhaps I just really love his acceleratingbrisé volées as he pleads his case. The second act rescues my reaction back to a respectable ‘meh’, but merciful Zeus, I’ll not seek out this production willingly anytime soon. This was my first time watching a Ballet in Cinema production. The sound quality was good but was occasionally overmiked, something that was particularly noticeable when a whole corp de ballet lands at once. The video quality was variable. Class Concert was adequately photographed, by which I mean the whole body was satisfactorily filmed and feet and heads were not lopped off. While the cameramen correctly anticipate the entrances, occasionally they miscalculate the speed at which the choreography moves and have trouble transitioning between dancers. Giselle was filmed like a Lifetime drama, and the less said about that, the better. And in the final score: Class Concert 1, Giselle 0, your Critic 13.75 USD. *In fairness, my friend C tells me that the Vasiliev ‘yellow tutu’ version is worse, but I haven’t had the happy privilege of viewing it, thus far. Here I request that the reader desist from offering it to me…unless they also have the travesty that is the Vasiliev Swan Lake for my full enjoyment. **Probably a good thing that she hasn’t had much to disturb her life until now! ***Michael Somes uses this expression when he rehearses the ABT in Symphonic Variations (see: Frederick Wisemen's documentary Ballet). I found this expression so succinctly apt that I have stolen it for my very own.
  6. Samples from a quick search: Makhalina/Vanagas Osipova/Kostomarov Perren/Tchernichev
  7. There's also a 2008 televised production with Alexandra Ansanelli as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Valeri Hristov as her Cavalier. It looks to be the same production as the later Yoshida broadcast. Clara in this broadcast is also Iohna Loots.
  8. There's a difference between a 'region-free' DVD player and one that is able to display PAL video on an NTSC screen. Most generic brand DVD players sold in the US in fact have a secret mode in their menus that allows for the playing foreign DVDs (US is '1', UK is '2'). However, if that DVD is encoded in PAL format, then you need a DVD player that has been 'modified' with an additional conversion chip so that the DVD then become viewable on our NTSC televisions.
  9. I can tell you from experience that summaries and even conference abstracts can be highly misleading, as authors can (and often will) change details at the last minute. We haven't seen this paper, so what is there to speculate on? Following the received wisdom that we graduate students love it when people ask to see our works of genius*, I'm now trying to get in contact with the author. Will update if I can obtain a copy of the paper. *I haven't produced anything of value yet**, and no, I don't know when I'll be done with my dissertation. (hides) **This first assertion may change after November ends.
  10. From the article: "Many designers lend me dresses, but I don’t own that many." Spaced out judiciously, as what fashion magazines like to call "investment pieces", Hermes is a very good and even (cough) cost-effective purchase.
  11. In the style of the above... 1. The recording of Western Symphony was oddly mixed and sounded like the orchestra was playing at the deep end of a cave. 2. The music for Square Dance fared much better. I really enjoyed the tautness of the Badinerie...most CD recordings of it tend to go for lot of echo to make it sound more heavenly (or something). Jeanette Delgado danced divinely - her dancing reminds me of the little that I've seen of Verdy: the same sense of 'chicness' in the phrasing (also the way she holds herself) and the sheer joy to be dancing. Unfortunately my attention occasionally wandered away to count "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-AND new camera angle!" to myself. 3. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch The Golden Section.
  12. John Cliffords of the Los Angeles Ballet posted many of his extensively commented videos to Youtube. They include excerpts from Coppelia, as staged by Danilova (including an Act III collaboration), and many pieces of his own choreography, including several for Allegra Kent (Summertime, Song of the Wayfarer, etc) Link here: http://www.youtube.com/user/jcliff26/
  13. The writing simply says that it had trouble downloading the content from the server. It may be that downloads are restricted by country, or that something in your browser (such as extensions blocking ads) may be interfering with streaming. Thanks to mumwang for uploading some of the content to Youtube.
  14. From today's article on Hallberg joining Bolshoi:
  15. The WDTV and some of the Roku devices support component video.
  16. Just to clarify: isn't an iBook an obsolete Apple product?
  17. I've had good luck with Western Digital's WDTV, which is a series of network media players, some of which come with hard drives. It allows for playing of computer movie files via USB disks and connected hard drives. The device also streams from Youtube and Netflix &tc. Best of all, it connects to the network via your home internet connection (and does wireless if you buy the optional adapter). It offers the gamut of connection options (HDMI, SPDIF, component, etc). A basic WDTV without a hard drive (and remember, you can connect external HDs to it) runs to less than 90 dollars on Amazon. *HDMI port is version 1.3. It is not the most current version, but unless you want to share a network connection between two HDMI devices, have a quad HD setup or want to play stereoscopic 3D pictures, it's not a necessary feature.
  18. Despite my campaign efforts, Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana is again hosting the Moscow Festival Ballet, directed by Sergei Radchenko, in both Swan Lake and the Sleeping Beauty. The prospect of 'enjoying' this company ad infinitum in the future has become a driving force in finishing my dissertation and escaping the area. I wish I were kidding.
  19. My chaotic systems seminar at the Santa Fe Institute today talked about chaotic variations on movement sequences. That is to say, we have some sequence of movements and then these individual movements are encoded in symbols and then are mapped onto some arbitrarily defined chaotic trajectory (defined using a chaotic ordinary differential equation). The idea here is that with a chaotic trajectory, the variations that are created from the original movements "resemble one another in both aesthetic and mathematical senses" (Bradley and Stuart, Chaos 8:800). We can quibble about what a "variation" is and whether that variation is in fact similar to the original in aesthetic. Mostly it was presented as a pretty interesting computational problem, particularly as programmers had to take into account the difficulty of simulating combinations of steps while taking into account the biological limitations of the human body (it's an NP-hard computation problem and can kill computers). Anyway! The seminar ended with a discussion of Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) as encoded in computational notation. It's worth a look! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with this website) Link here: Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced
  20. Also the German video of Symphony of C, fourth movement (and possibly La Valse in that same series). Also the Rubies 'tall girl' in the truncated Rubies presented on a 70s video of ballet (title to be determined when I find my list) with text written by Arlene Croce.
  21. One source of information is Worldcat (worldcat.org) for a location of where dance materials can be found (and consequently requested from your local library). Much of the material, however, does not circulate. If you are interested in Balanchine coaching materials, I'd suggest checking the Balanchine Foundation website for their list of tape repositories. Be warned, however, that appearance of a name does not guarantee that they will have all of the tapes. Here at the University of Illinois, they have everything up to about 2003 (or so), but then I think someone forgot about the existence of the collection as nothing new have been acquired.
  22. Ballet Chicago Studio Company Serenade/Rubies/Who Cares? 15 May 2011, 3 PM Athenaeum Theater Orchestra Row K Seat 9 I think I like watching Serenade with students, or at least young dancers, best of all. When the curtain first opens, one can spot the little gestures of nervousness, small disagreements about where to arrive in the beat, heads in disharmony, etc etc. What I love about this work is that in the most satisfying performances, we can observe the dancers lose their self-consciousness and their nervousness in the escalating music and choreography until they are wholly absorbed in movement. The "Russian" couple (an always impressive Hamilton Nieh and Ellen Green, BC alumna) partnered well, but it wasn't always clear whether Ellen Green was dancing for her partner or for the audience. That outward projection of self was jarring after the mesmeric rush of corp bodies before it. I couldn't take my eyes off of Rachel Seeholzer's beautifully expansive dancing but was struck by her determinedly neutral (and sometimes almost pained) expression. She has a delightful smile in Who Cares?, performed later, and I wonder if there could be some acceptable medium between the two, particularly as expression (even in a Balanchine work) is an integral part of one's performance. I think there was too much artifice in the lighting design in Serenade (and really throughout the performance). At times it was uncomfortably murky and at others it deflated the theatrical tension by calling our attention to particular dancers. Who matters? Why not let the audience determine that through the dancing on stage? This was unnecessarily heavy-handed stagecraft. Rubies started off rather slowly, and I was actually concerned that the corp had run out of energy since Serenade. Jane Morgan is a coltish demi-soloist and shows promise in the role, but dances small without encouragement. Fortunately everyone got a shot of adrenaline from Matthew Renko in the Villella role. Unlike Villella, who rules with charisma and attack, this guy rules because his kung fu reigns supreme. Woe betide the man who tries to challenge him in a dance-off, because he'll never keep up. Rachel Jambois in the soloist role danced with wit and humor, does not quite hold her own when standing still. I've always read McBride's pose as compelling the audience to pay attention to _her_ even when Villella is dancing, Jambois tells us to look at Renko. After seeing Who Cares?, I can honestly say that I've now met the nicest bunch of New Yorker corp girls. This was a gentle performance, but one danced with dedication and humor. Ellen Green was more effective here than in Serenade, though she does not yet smoulder in stillness as the role has potential for. Seeholzer was delighted in the jumping girl solo and Morgan danced clearly but has room to project more effectively. Ballet Chicago wisely united the cavalier roles for one danseuse (an ardent Ted Seymour, in the role as was originally performed at NYCB), and in the process magnified the Apollon imagery for at least this one observer. [Cleaned up my post and named Seymour as the danseuse in Who Cares?]
  23. The NYPL has their catalogue online here, but the system (I find) is idiosyncratic in the keywords offered for different videos. I often have to do 2-3 different searches before being satisfied with the coverage offered. The record for the Vienna Waltzes broadcast on WNET is here and seems to be available for viewing on videotape.
  24. I enjoy listening to the Tchaikovsky occasionally, but I think it too impressionistic and *short* to sustain a narrative scenario. The Radchenko presentation may have traumatized me for Eternity (I take bets on how long that will be), but it did a brilliant job of illustrating the ills of making the audience rely entirely on the printed libretto (which was, incidentally, wrong) to understand the dance action (what there was of it) on stage. At that point they should have thrown out the scenario and present excerpts, or make the piece plotless, so that I could have played Choreographic Mad Libs while watching young people throw themselves at each other.
  25. It is entirely Radchenko. I posted a "review" here.
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