soubrette_fan Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 (edited) Hello I was watching my "ABT at the Met" video the other day, and I was wondering, at the end of the "Sylvia" pas de deux, Martine Van Hamel does these turns where she keeps her front leg in what looks like attitude, and then she just keeps turning on her other leg - What are these called? They look like fouettes, except instead of whipping her leg out to the side and back, it just stays in the front. Edited December 17, 2004 by soubrette_fan Link to comment
Mme. Hermine Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 Pirouette in attitude? Link to comment
tempusfugit Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 Pirouette in attitude? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Pirouettes relevees en attitude en avant? Link to comment
rg Posted December 17, 2004 Share Posted December 17, 2004 or in the franglaise sort of terminology my ballet teacher used to coin: releve turns in attitude/front. or, the moment might even fall under the category of answers mr. b. was known to give to similar queries: 'is not school; is choreography.' Link to comment
soubrette_fan Posted December 18, 2004 Author Share Posted December 18, 2004 Thanks everyone. I figured it had to be something long! Link to comment
MJ Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 I saw Sylvia at SFB this spring, I love the score. Why don't more companies do Sylvia? Mike Link to comment
Mel Johnson Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 Sylvia is rather difficult to classify. Its original production values are formed from the Neo-Roman (not Graeco-Roman, she is the nymph of Diana, not Artemis) Revivalism that accompanied the Beaux-Arts period of French art. It has a rough parallel in the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Cot, as "The Storm" and other revivalist works. It was the popular thing to do in the 1950s and 60s to brand that whole aesthetic as mawkish and sentimental, yet art scholars today go to the above-named painting as a way to understand painterly virtue in the ways of using the brush, much as Ingres was and is admired. If it were architecture, it might be one of the "pleasure domes with a temple on top" of McKim, Mead, and White, with Corinthian order de rigeur, and acanthus leaves hanging off of everything. Yet, now, Beaux-Arts is good business in historic preservation. They used to knock Tchaikovsky for "just being loud", but now the argument has progressed far beyond the "Tortured Artistic Genius? or was he just an Old Pouf who Wrote Tunes?" stage. The time for seeing Sylvia in a new light may finally have come, except that in the original libretto, there's not a lot of dedicated work for men. Still, a skilled and sensitive choreographer could do a lot with the score. Ashton certainly did; perhaps now is a better time for viewing it than when his version was premiered. Link to comment
Joseph Posted December 23, 2004 Share Posted December 23, 2004 ABT is doing it this year at the MET Link to comment
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