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Balanchine's Ballets -- Has Performance Quality Dropped?


Guest nycdog

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Just to add (because my last post sounded so curt - apologies, kfw!) my point here isn't contradiction; simply that the issue is complicated. People complained about Balanchine's conservation of his own works while he was alive, and his career spanned 60 years and he contradicted himself often. According to his dancers from the 50s, he insisted on counts. Pat Neary, from the late 60s, says he never counted, and would beat out a rhythm and say that was what mattered. It's like the story of the four blind men with the elephant. One grabs the trunk and says, "The elephant is long and thin, like a snake." Another touches the foot and says the elephant is like a tree. And so on.

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People complained about Balanchine's conservation of his own works while he was aliv.

Boy, did they ever! And they complained about casting, and about how the dancers weren't being mentored properly, and about deformations of company style, about the level of dancing in the corps, and on and on and on ... I did some of that complaining myself. (I never could get used to Merrill Ashley and Karin von Aroldingen in Emeralds, no matter how hard I tried.)

I hope I'm not shocking anyone when I point out that there were in fact some pretty lousy evenings in State Theater when Balanchine was alive.

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Gee. Now EVERYBODY is referring to bad dancing -- then and now. Can ANYONE discuss using specific details why they think NYCB remains one of the great companies in the world today and a worthy descendent of those who created it.

P.S.: I like kfw's phrase: "relative lack of abandon to be seen on the current company." This meets my own feeling.

(Incidentally, lest you think I am some old grouch always yearning for the good old days, I -- like many of your posters -- are still capable of being moved greatly by a variety of current dancers, companies and styles. High regard for the past -- even a little bit of protectiveness -- does not mean one has lost the ability to respond enthusiastically to the present or to look forward to the future.)

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I've only seen NYCB once or twice a season over the last decade, in addition to broadcasts. I've been just as floored by Wendy Whelan and Ashley Bouder, for example, as I was by anyone I saw dancing in Balanchine's later years and the decade following his death. However, I don't get see the same focus of purpose that I did in performances in the 80's, even if, on the whole, the corps has cleaned up since then.

I am happily satisfied seeing Balanchine performed on the West Coast by Pacific Northwest Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, and Arizona Ballet, as well as by Suzanne Farrell Ballet on tour, for the very reason that I feel I am seeing committed performances by the entire Companies, from principals to corps. I see corps members and soloists dance the small, featured demi and soloists roles as if they are career gifts, and, in particular, see energized corps, especially those that are supplemented by company and apprentices and high-level students.

One of the advantages for the audience is that these companies have a small number of performances -- one to two weekends of any program -- and focus on one or two programs, or a maximum of six ballets at most. This may not be ideal for dancers, although from reviews of NYCB in NY and DC, it sounded like the Company was suffering from exhaustion by the end of the Winter season, but it's been my experience that they seize the day in the few performances they have.

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Guest nycdog

Leigh thinks:

"if you take my quote and say it shows that the dancers from the 1960s lack sophistication, than I have not at all made my point...When Arthur Mitchell coached his own dancers in Agon at another taping, the one thing the dancers could not achieve was his placement"

Oh dear, I forgot about Arthur! No one ever accused Arthur Mitchell of being sophisticated! :thanks:

But do you suppose that the dancers of today have NOT spent countless hours reviewing the performances from the past? Their technique has evolved from what went before.

How could it be otherwise?

charlieloki wrote:

"there is an almost mystical proprietary feeling about nycb -- sort of, "what are they doing to my company?" does anyone else out there feel that way?"

The miscasting is 'the dinosaurs' 'casting a pall' over NYCB by saying they have no spirit. The truth is NYCB has remained true to art while the culture around them has declined even the buildings at Lincoln Center are falling apart!

kfw says:

"And wouldn't this distinction also explain the relative lack of abandon to be seen in the current company?"

There's a lack of abandon? You mean the dancers dedicated their lives to the ballet and spent hours every day rehearsing often in great pain, to go onstage and remain emotionally uninvolved in their performance? Like they don’t care about what they’re doing, they aren’t living their dream?

Leigh sez:

"The 1982 tape of Agon is admittedly late, but it's dancers that he chose and had been doing it a while, especially Watts"

Are you are opining that you don't like Watts in the ’82 Agon? You wouldn’t be the first one to say negative things about her! I’ll have to go check her out at the Library to see just how ‘bad’ she really was. :rolleyes: I have been there before on the 3rd floor.

Leigh again:

"According to his dancers from the 50s, he insisted on counts. Pat Neary, from the late 60s, says he never counted, and would beat out a rhythm and say that was what mattered."

Dancers don't have to count beats 'cause the ballet is so natural to them? To me it’s incomprehensible that a person remembers all the steps but I'm not a dancer they have been doing this stuff for hours every day from childhood. It’s just like a pianist that plays every single note of a concerto perfectly from memory whereas an ordinary person could take a month to learn 1 measure.

Bart:

"P.S.: I like kfw's phrase: "relative lack of abandon to be seen on the current company." This meets my own feeling."

I frankly have NO idea why you feel this way. :)

Edited by nycdog
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This is not the kind of subject that admits of a definitive answer. The pleasure has got to be in the discussion -- which supposes that we will patiently listen to what other people have to say. When it is reduced to people vehemently contradicting what other people say and little more, there is little pleasure in it. And little to be gained by reading it.

That's not to say that thoughtful points aren't occasionally being made by you NYCDog -- What I object to has to do with your tone and with what I perceive as your lack of patience. You are the one who proposed this topic. Surely you did so because you wanted to discuss it with other people and not solely to challenge everyone into the ring and then to knock them on the head. If it's the former, it's a great topic. If it's the latter, I really don't think that is right.

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This is not the kind of subject that admits of a definitive answer.  The pleasure has got to be in the discussion -- which supposes that we will patiently listen to what other people have to say.  When it is reduced to people vehemently contradicting what other people say and little more, there is little pleasure in it. And little to be gained by reading it. 

[ADMIN BEAN ON]

Exactly.

[ADMIN BEANIE OFF]

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Some NYCB-goers have stopped going over the years as they feel the quality of the Balanchine rep - and NYCB in general - has declined since GB's death. Some have continued to attend, though they are sometimes depressed by what they see. Others continue to go because they appreciate the opportunity to see the Balanchine masterpieces continually and because they like the dancers who are dancing today. I would imagine on a given night a substantial percentage of the audience never saw the Company during Balanchine's lifetime. Many may not even be aware that it is "Balanchine's company". They have come to see beautiful, sexy people move to beautiful/edgy music and do things with their bodies that most of us can't do.

I believe Balanchine has been quoted as saying that he knew his ballets would not look the same after he was gone. And of course he knew that the dancers he made the pieces on would move on and they would be replaced by others who would bring a different look or perfume to a given role.

Are there individuals other than Peter who might have done a better job in preserving what Balanchine created? Maybe, but we can't be sure. The job has two aspects: the energy and dedication to keep things alive artistically, and the fund-raising capacity to keep the Company functioning. It wouldn't matter how splendid it was visually if the money wasn't there to keep it viable. I think Peter's done pretty well on both counts.

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Oberon's post adds balance to the discussion -- and provides plausible reasons to support the idea that NYCB under Peter Martins has expanded and even extended the Balanchine legacy. Thanks. I knew it couldn't all be as dire as some say -- otherwise why would a sophisticated dance audience buy tickets?

Query. I don't know how much the NYCB has toured outside the country under Peter Martins. How do Europeans and others view the company? How would THEY answer the question posed by this topic? How would this compare to the reception abroad of other American ballet companies, San Francisco, etc.? (I don't count visits abroad by NYCB guest artists. I'm asking about the company as a whole.)

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Bart, I’m sure I could speak for a lot of people when I say I really look forward to your posts.

As far back as Robert Gottlieb’s 1991(?) Vanity Fair piece, now a touchstone of post-Balanchine NYCB criticism (somewhere I still have my copy), I remember complaints that the artistically sophisticated Balanchine audience was decamping. I don’t live in New York City, but I wonder if Oberon’s description --

They have come to see beautiful, sexy people move to beautiful/edgy music and do things with their bodies that most of us can't do.
-- isn’t correct. Given the dearth of first-class choreographers these days, I can imagine it is.

Oberon, Balanchine foresaw that his ballet’s would look different when he wasn’t there to look after them, but because the dancer’s couldn’t do the steps? “First, a school.” The consensus seems to be that Miami City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet and, lately, Suzanne Farrell Ballet catch the spirit of Balanchine ballets more faithfully, yet NYCB gets the cream of the SAB crop, where students are bred to dance Balanchine. I don't see how this couldn't be Martins’s fault. Almost certainly he's had the pick of ex-NYCB dancers too.

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I don't think Balanchine was referring to the steps but rather to the "style" that would look different after he was gone. Balanchine changed steps in his ballets himself over time; my impression from reading the various biographies and accounts from dancers on how he created and rehearsed his ballets is that he did not feel that the steps were etched in stone. He would adapt things to suit a given dancer.

I'm sure that Miami, San Francisco & Suzanne Farrell companies have all given some fine Balanchine performances, but they don't have the length of season nor the sheer number of dancers needed to give Balanchine rep in all its depth and diversity that we get at NYCB. I believe the young dancers coming out of the school feel NYCB is the place they hope to dance; other companies are considered less prestigious and less desirable gigs, despite their artistic merit. I would guess the pay is higher at NYCB, too - always a consideration.

Twenty years after Balanchine's death, NYCB remains the best place to see the spectrum of Balanchine's work and that of his "disciples" - though I do feel that a large number of the audience on a given night are not necessarily there to receive Balanchinian rapture but simply to be entertained, moved or astonished by music, movement and theatrical expression.

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But do you suppose that the dancers of today have NOT spent countless hours reviewing the performances from the past? Their technique has evolved from what went before.

I've always been kind of surprised at how little interest dance students have in performances before their time. And I knew artistic directors who adamantly didn't want their dancers to view videotapes of themselves or others but rather to listen to their coaches/rehearsal directors instead. They were concerned that the dancers would have a different consciousness of their dancing if they were thinking about the video images (we should come up with a word for this, if one doesn't exist, there must be some video equivalent to a "mirror dancer" don't you think?)

Maybe it's different at SAB with the library with all those fabulous archives next door.

Has the trend changed? Are dancers now studying old dance performance videos?

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Comparing the performances of NYCB to those of regional companies is tricky, because there are a lot of differences between them that account for what we see onstage. Oberon has touched on some. The quality of the balletmastering, which is essentially what we're talking about here, is just one of them.

During the Kennedy Center's Balanchine Festival several years ago (an event that featured most of the Balanchine-influenced companies we're been discussing), I was struck repeatedly by how overjoyed the dancers seemed to be to be dancing such glorious works. I have never seen NYCB dancers look that way, not in my over 30 years of watching the company. They didn't look like that in Balanchine's day, and they don't look like that now.

The main reason, I think, is that NYCB dancers take for granted a lot of things that dancers outside NYC cannot: topnotch ballets to dance, frequent performances, lots of opportunities for dancing solo, demisolo, and principal roles, and exposure on a national stage. ABT dancers have also looked as jaded in their own repertory, so I figure it's a function of being at the top of the chain.

Put another way, if NYCB gave only a few programs at lengthy intervals over the course of a season, if they had only a limited number of performances in which to show their stuff, if their Balanchine ballets were bestowed on them only after special application to the Balanchine Trust and staged, with lots of rehearsal, by imported balletmasters who were new to them, every performance would be more of an event and would have that special sheen that we admire in the work of other companies. Since the dancers in NYCB have, generally speaking, bodies and techniques that are closer to what Balanchine wanted than the dancers in other companies, the end result would indeed be glorious.

I'm not saying that lacklustre performances by NYCB are inevitable -- far from it. I think there's lots of room for improvement in the way they're performing Balanchine, starting with coaching by dancers who worked with him. But it's important to separate out those other factors and know what we can realistically expect.

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I'm not sure Balanchine would want dancers to look "overjoyed" while dancing his ballets. From everything I've read and heard, Balanchine did not want to see much "emotion" onstage. I think he may have felt that the music and the steps were expressing what he wanted to show and that he did not especially want to see the dancers adding an additional layering of personal "feeling". We always hear quotes: "Just dance. Do steps." or "You are not in love with your partner." I'm sure he had nothing against smiling when appropriate (WHO CARES? or parts of WESTERN SYMPH, etc) but I think this is how the idea of "New York City Ballet face" evolved...a cool & somewhat detached expression. You even see it on the dancers' faces when they are walking down the street. Farrell epitomized it: not cold but cool, refined, mysterious. When she did smile it really meant something.

As far as coaching, it is not always clear-cut. Different dancers who danced a given role will not always have the same "take" on what Balanchine wanted. A couple of years ago at a lecture-demonstration, two very prominent Balanchine divas were coaching an ABT dancer in a solo. The two women got into a rather nasty disagreement on a point of interpretation...at a public forum! The young dancer just stood there while the two women duked it out.

I believe Merrill Ashley recently coached Ashley Bouder in BALLO DELLA REGINA. It was a big success for Bouder, and very impressive. However, it wasn't really "like" Merrill's BALLO - it was for sure Bouder's BALLO. Which is as it should be. No one can reproduce exactly what another dancer has done in a role. Nor would we want to see it.

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I believe Merrill Ashley recently coached Ashley Bouder in BALLO DELLA REGINA. It was a big success for Bouder, and very impressive. However, it wasn't really "like" Merrill's BALLO - it was for sure Bouder's BALLO. Which is as it should be. No one can reproduce exactly what another dancer has done in a role. Nor would we want to see it.

No good coach would want to reproduce a clone of herself. I have never seen a dancer with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet who reminds me of Farrell. Yet they bring a dimension to the Balanchine choreography that is missing at NYCB. Even as superlative a performer as Peter Boal brought something extra to his performances with the Farrell company.

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Leigh, correct me if I’m wrong, but I never hear anyone make the same overarching complaint about MCB or SFB or the Farrell troupe that many make about NYCB. Particular stagings and castings are criticized, but I’m not aware of people saying that those companies are losing the spirit of ballets, as Croce did when she called the ’93 Balanchine Celebration “The Balanchine Show.”

Oberon, we’re agreeing the Balanchine referred to the style changing, not the steps, and yes he changed the steps himself. My point was that he probably didn’t envision the style being eroded because some dancers couldn’t do the steps. You and Ari make great points about why the ballets might often look fresher in other companies.

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But kfw, why would they? Do people complain about the quality of education at SUNY Binghamton (to name a decent college randomly) or do they carp about what is happening at Harvard? The onus is only on one of them.

I've written about Farrell's company for Ballet Review both in '99 and in '03-'04. In both cases I expressed the same reservations about repertory choices and casting. There's no reason to make an overarching complaint; she isn't charged with custodianship of the repertory. And this is not to say that she didn't do a perfectly fine job, but I have not yet seen out of Farrell's company a staging or performance that beat the best I have seen at NYCB during the same time frame.

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Guest nycdog

Amy:

"Maybe it's different at SAB with the library with all those fabulous archives next door."

When they had the Fonteyn exhibit at the Library for the Performing Arts last May on a couple of occasions I noticed groups of 3 and 4 girls obviously SAB students with headphones on watching every moment of the video presentation on Fonteyn. They spent a lot more time there than me!

I wonder why the library can't make tapes or even DIVX or mpeg (DVD) encoded movies available for LENDING from the vast collection of videos they have in the dance collection? Would that be a copyright violation even though they are simply being lent without profit?

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I see your point, Leigh.

nycdog, the links you posted are to excerpts of commercially available videos filmed under Balanchine's supervision in the late 70's or on the final night of the Balanchine Celebration in 1993.

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I'm not a dancer so not as attuned the details as a lot of you, but I honestly don't see a decline in technique. I do, on the other hand, see a definite change in style. My main complaint is that the dancing can, at times, seem too studio-bound. Balanchine may have wanted dancers to do "just the steps," but that's because he knew that the more clearly and unaffectedly those steps were done, the more transparently the personality of the dancer came through. However, that assumes the dancer has an interesting personality to begin with, and the ones Martins favors don't always have that, or else he doesn't know how to bring it out. He has many gifts, but I'm not sure communicating poetry or spirituality is one of them (that's why I find his ballets so blank). This is not to say that he doesn't know this aspect is important--he's a smart guy, after all.

I think Balanchine's mere presence (practically a religious figure) when he was alive probably encouraged his dancers to believe in the mysterious poetry in "just the steps," and with the resident genius watching over everything they did they were possibly more constantly aware than dancers today of the ballets' deeper meanings, or more ardent about seeking them out. I always remember Farrell's talking in an interview about how she'd see the costume for the evening's performance hanging in her dressing room all day, and she'd carry that image, and the anticipation of the ballet, with her all day. Come performance time, the day she'd had--the weather, where she'd eaten lunch, a conversation with someone--informed her performance, making it always a new experience, both for her and for the audience. This is a lot like Balanchine, who's supposedly abstract ballets, as we know, are actually full of autobiographical and other references--a merging of art and life.

When Balanchine was around, his body of work was an organically growing and changing thing, and our view of them changed accordingly (it could be exasperating!). Now, it's a thing accomplished, the Balanchine Oeuvre, and Peter Martins is its custodian. It's a hard balancing act, I think. When does individuality serve the genius of Balanchine and when does it distort? When does too much reverence of "just the steps" suppress their expressivity rather than clarify it? How can one know this without Balanchine himself around to tell us? I think it's entirely possible that we would find Farrell mannered and distorting (some of the dancers she displaced believed this at the time) if we didn't know she was Balanchine's Chosen One.

I agree with Leigh that in general the performances of Farrell's company are rarely on the same level as NYCB's (though it's amazing what she accomplishes with what is, basically, a pick-up troupe). But she does seem to have a tremendous ability to communicate what's behind the steps--this comes out in spades every time you hear her talk--and that's what I respond to in her company. (Unfortunately, I've never seen Miami City Ballet. Why don't the come to NYC every year?) I wish NYCB had more people like her.

By the way, Leigh makes an excellent point. When we watch Pacific Northwest, we compare them to NYCB. When we watch NYCB, we compare them to the Ideal. It's impossible!

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Do people complain about the quality of education at SUNY Binghamton (to name a decent college randomly) or do they carp about what is happening at Harvard?  The onus is only on one of them.

Good point. We hold NYCB to the highest standards, and rightly so. After all, they're the standards the company has set for itself. When we praise MCB or PNB or either of the SFBs, what we're really saying is, "How wonderful — for a regional company!" Our expectations are lower, so it's easier for them to delight us.

I think Balanchine's mere presence (practically a religious figure) when he was alive probably encouraged his dancers to believe in the mysterious poetry in "just the steps," and with the resident genius watching over everything they did they were possibly more constantly aware than dancers today of the ballets' deeper meanings, or more ardent about seeking them out.

I think there's a more practical explanation. In Balanchine's day, the repertory was just as big, the ballets often as sloppily prepared. BUT, Balanchine could swoop into a rehearsal at the last minute and give the dancers the kind of guidance that made all the difference between a mechanical performance and one with spirit. That's why it's important, when he's no longer around, to have people who remember those kinds of things, to pass them on to this generation of dancers.

This ought to be happening, because of the eleven people listed in the program as ballet masters or assistants, all but two spent most of their careers working with Balanchine (although Christine Redpath and Jean-Pierre Frolich handle the Robbins rep). But obviously there's a problem and these critical details aren't getting passed along.

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