whetherwax

This book doesnt exist in Melbourne!. And with the exchange rate now 87 cents in the dollar I am loath to visit Amazon - the UK exchange rate is even more crippling. However all is not lost!! I am so grateful to youtube and Ballet Talk. These sites can work brilliantly for us lonely antipodeans. I was looking at Diane and Acteon PDD on youtube and found Katherine Healy and M. Guerra(sp) !!!! I was so impressed I looked her up here on BT and found out about the skating(!) but was also led to a lecture she had given on being coached by Frederick Ashton in Romeo and Juliet and so added a little more to my knowlege. Electronic world I bless you. Thanks Leigh W. for your recommendation.

I've been enjoying my new DVD of Bessmertnova and Taranda ( and marvelling at the size of the Bolshoi stage - my first Bolshoi DVD) and I thought that it looked to be THE most physically demanding ballet. Bessmertnova is hardly ever off stage. Previously Kitri would have got the guernsey for the most demanding from me, or perhaps Sleeping Beauty. I imagine that Giselle would be the most emtionally demanding but what do dancers think? Is Raymonda exceptionally demanding? What is the most demanding role?

Just reading J.K.'s Secret Muses - Biography of Frederick Ashton. Just want to say how grateful I am for her detailed descriptions of the ballets he choreographed. I am a newbie and in fact have only seen a few ballets live - although my DVD collection is costing the equivalent of a small nation's GNP. So to have someone talk me through the rationale and intention of various ballets is a great gift. I have wallowed in rg's Ballet 101 descriptions and really just want more and more written works where I am led through an understanding of the steps and their import. So much ballet criticism seems trivial to me particularly News items ( I comb old reviews). I would love to see someone write more scholarly evaluations than are available to me. Why doesnt someone write pedagogical short pamplets on individual ballets?I have the Cambridge companion but I want MORE and more! Just bye the bye the biography gives great background detail about the first half of 20th century too.

Thanks garybruce, I'll try to find the 1977 version. Can anyone give me some perspective on the relative worth of the two choreographers work in this ballet. Which one is considered the most emotionally sound and the most creative.

I have DVDs of both of these versions.One by the Australian ballet with Pavane , Heathcote and Horsman, and the other by the Bolshoi with Moukhamedov and Bessmertnova. Whilst there is great dancing in both versions - I really disliked the ballet itself - depressing and brutal. The Bolshoi version gloomy and the Seregi version episodic. Can anyone tell me what i should look for to make me understand both versions better.

This dancer was in the Australian ballet DVDs of Giselle, La Fille Mal Guardee, Merry Widow(Pritschitsch). I cannot find any reference to him on Australian sites - except one photograph with Christine Walsh in Onegin. He had a lively presence and good acting skills ( he and Geon Van der Weiss are really good fun in the Merry Widow) and I wondered if he had gone overseas and how he is doing.

I've just got a CD of Peer Gynt. I know that somewhere there is a ballet BUT i would like a big 'over the top- trolls etc etc.', affair. The music is so evocative.

Well , it could have been a disaster! Shows how intelligent they are.

I'm definitely with you on this one . I read this last year after finding it in a second hand Bookshop and remembering her name from Ballet Russe film. She was indeed a great character. Also the times are so richly revealed - the history of the first half of the 20th century - made clearer by being seen through her eyes.

I think that ballet moustaches are an intelligent life form. They follow Mazurkas and Czardas around and adapt to the culture that they find their hosts in.I have just purchased the Merry Widow of the Australaian Ballet and I see that the flight of moustaches has settled on the cast. Stephan Heathcote's moustache, and those of the (male) corps are definitely Pontrevedrian, however David Mcallister's moustache is definitely French.

I hope everyone gets a chance to look at this on Youtube. - Where the Hell is Matt ( 2008) A celebration of life and dance.

Wow! what a fantastic offer. I certainly couldnt do it. old age etc but if i had my 5 years up and was quite a few years younger I'd be there in a flash. It is remarkably inexpensive too.

Innopac, Thanks for this info re coming publication. It nice to see some stuff from Australia. One feels a bit isolated away from the European and American centres.

In Melbourne I recently saw Australian Ballet do Ballet Imperial and a fabulous selection of PDDS from Petipa Ballets in the first half of the program. These delighted me and i would love to see some comments from others who saw them. However the point I want to think about is how choices such as this rather austere collection are thought through. I was at a saturday matinee ( in the gods) and all around me were 6 - 12 year olds and their mums and grannies. What they saw was a sucession of dancers on a bare stage who did similar things one after another, after the 4th set of variations and codas the little girl beside me started reading her program - looking at the pretty pictures rather than the actual dancers -and all around there were various responses of boredom and mixed pleasure. Now I think children cannot cope with dance unless it sits inside a narrative. Perhaps a special handout where the pdds etc are explained as part of a story would help, but overall I thought some kids who didnt have mums who could explain the dances would be turned Off.

In my Glory of the Bolshoi DVD, the clip ofMusa Gottlieb and Vajtang Chaboukiani from Flames is SO fast that i could almost suspect the soviets of speeding it up!

What do people think about reworkings of the Nutcracker?I'm thinking of Graham Murphy's Nutcracker. I found it moving in that it paid homage to those Dancers who came to Australia before the war and gave us a ballet tradition which had not existed. I also liked some of the reworking of the actual dances particularly the snow sequence although the flashbacks to the red army as rats was pretty horrible.

I guess this is an aesthetic question. I was recently watching my Australian Ballet Sleeping Beauty with the sweetly delicate Christine Walsh and I noticed that in the last act all the males dancing in the Mazurka had moustaches. I remembered noticing the same thing - I think - in the ABT Swan Lake saw on the tv recently in the dances of the the princesses' entourages. The Hungarians (?) had moustaches too. Is it de riguer to apply a moustache to all male corps dancers when doing such national stomps?

I just put a comment in writings about ballet forum . Eleanor Teele's comment seems very good - so far for me it seems very much a contrast between two human styles of being.

I sometimes work in a bookshop and this book has just come in ($65 - phew) I've glanced at it and it certainly seems extremely interesting in the sense of a response to working with Nureyev and forming a friendship with him. The difficulties for choreographers working with him and the feverish pace of his working life are all elucidated. As I say, it is very expensive and i have had only brief looks. I'm surprised that I can find no discussion of this book on this site.

Thank you all, how wonderful it is to be able to access all your experiences via this site!!. After a good rummage in the recommended sites listed by Helene I have ordered the Bessmertnova. But it seems in time I may have to model myself on Helene and buy all three!

Could people give me some advice about the three DVDs of Raymonda on offer via Amazon? Kolpakova, Bessmertnova and Semmenyaka. I have never seen this ballet so I would like one that gives pleasure as well as being a learning exercise. I have looked on you tube of course but it is often rather dim and one cant tell if everything is included.

This is a hard one Bart, I guess that is why there are few replies. I think what is probably very obvious that young dancers need all the cultural input they can acquire in order to enrich their own everyday lives and also especially to place thenselves in the vast web ( in the old metaphorical sense) of life and learning that is their history. They can get by without it, but oh dear, how thin classical ballets would be without an understanding of the 19th century - just the gender stuff round the wilis for example. As far as their putative lack of understanding goes. I'm a bit conflicted on this. They need to understand more in their everyday lives than I ever did, and in fact do know a great deal about the modern world. Yet when I was teaching it was hard to get them to be able to analyse an advertisement because they didnt have background knowlege. For example an ad for perfume with a woman holding an apple and posing like a tree, could lose them because they didnt have any real understanding of bible stories or the whole historical load re vanity that women carry. I guess we have to say that all cultural knowlege is of value and must enrich a dancer's take on their roles.

Thank you all. Helene thanks for the long careful explanation. I guess GhislaineThesmar ( Havent got my spelling primer here) was doing the mentoring for Isabelle Guerin in The Dancers dream of La Bayadere.

For some reason I take pleasure in listening to the sound of point shoes on both DVD and the stage. The sound reminds me of the dancers need to engage with the material world. They are working - and the sound reminds me of how hard they are working. When the Shades run to the wings I am pleased to hear them. I know it seems weird but the sound earths the ballet for me in a good way.

Thank you. So how does a ballet company learn the steps of a ballet that is new to them or being re done.?