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Dancers who may have been lacking in technique,


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Here is Arlene Croce's review from July 23, 1979, from Going to the Dance:

Stephanie Saland is physically a larger Gelsey Kirkland, and though she's not as gifted a dancer she is sometimes presented as if she were. She did Square Dance with Helgi Tomasson, a charming performance overcast by the lengthening shadow of G. (for gargouillade) Kirkland. (Although Kirkland never actually performed Square Dance, it would obviously have been her part if she'd stayed with NYCB.) Saland, though, had by the time of Square Dance established her individuality in a dozen varied repertory roles, and except for Lüders she's the most improved dancer in the company this year. Long before this phase of progress began, Saland was compulsively watchable because of the elegant carriage of her head and arms and her warm, glamorous presence. She's still very much an upper-body dancer. The port de bras in the Violette Verdy solo in Emeralds looks second nature to her. Maybe a few more Square Dances are needed to sharpen her footwork. Saland is an instinctive actress, and her sense of theatre makes me think of Jillana, a dancer of the fifties and sixties whom she also physically resembles. As the Coquette in La Sonnambula (a Jillana role), Saland was all soft malice, and she was also astonishingly precise last winter as a last-minute substitute for McBride in Costermongers.

I would have loved to see her dance Lynn Seymour's role in A Month in the Country.

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It's often the quieter, less bravura aspects of technique that get lost in a discussion of a dancer's technique,

That is what I wrote in this post which I posted in the beginning of this topic .

I just did not think having good technique equals virtuoso. I do not think having a good technique only means being able to do super hard steps. I think it is how you do even the easiest steps.
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In a frenzy of excitement I have to rush to include this here without even finishing an extremely interesting article.

The article is by John Percival describing the Bolshoi's first appearance in London.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre...icle1168606.ece

He couldn't describe better my feeling about "Ulanova Magic", based only on seeing a few videos and looking through a picture book about her.

"On opening night we were to see the famed Galina Ulanova for the first time, dancing Juliet. She was already nearly 47, and off stage looked rather dowdy, but in this role (and again as Giselle during the season) she looked truly a young teenager.

"If you think I'm exaggerating, consider Antoinette Sibley's description of the Royal Ballet attending the Bolshoi's stage rehearsal after their own performance in south London. They arrived while Raissa Struchkova was doing the balcony duet:

"and then at the end this little old lady in the stalls got up, short greyish hair and wrapped in layers of wool - we all thought she was the ballet mistress. She went up on the balcony and said something to Yuri Faier, the amazing blind conductor. And then she took off her woollies and in front of our very eyes, no makeup, no costume, no help from theatrical aids whatsoever,

" She Became 14 Years Old. I've Never Seen Any Magic Like That In My Entire Life."

(I added the capital letters above.)

If you want to see what she really looked like when she was young, see her performance of the White Swan Pas De Deux on The Glory of The Kirov video. It and she are quite amazing.

An interesting aside. The Uliana picture book "Days With Ulanova"(??) was actually done by my first cousin, Albert Eugine Kahn. I can remember my aunt showing it to me when I was about 14. I couldn't have been less interested. Until recently I thought it was about Anna Pavlova. (I'm only a recent ballet "Lover".) I showed the book last year to my figure skating instructor from the Soviet Union, who had seen Ulanova often on television, etc. When she zeroed in on a picture of Ulanova's husband, her reaction was like, "Who Could This Possibly Be?" I sensed her feeling about pictures of the off stage Ulanova, herself, must have been exactly the same.

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"If you think I'm exaggerating, consider Antoinette Sibley's description of the Royal Ballet attending the Bolshoi's stage rehearsal after their own performance in south London. They arrived while Raissa Struchkova was doing the balcony duet:

"and then at the end this little old lady in the stalls got up, short greyish hair and wrapped in layers of wool - we all thought she was the ballet mistress. She went up on the balcony and said something to Yuri Faier, the amazing blind conductor. And then she took off her woollies and in front of our very eyes, no makeup, no costume, no help from theatrical aids whatsoever,

" She Became 14 Years Old. I've Never Seen Any Magic Like That In My Entire Life."

(I added the capital letters above.)

This quote (without the caps :)) is from Barbara Newman's book, Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing, which is my alltime favorite book about dance. It is a volume of interviews with 25 dancers (in the revised edition) around a particular role, in which the answers have been woven together into multi-page narratives that cover much more. Many of the dancers in the original volume danced with the Royal Ballet, with a few from New York City Ballet (LeClerq, Ashley) and ABT (Marks). Aniashvili is one of the dancers added in the revision.

I'm fairly certain there is at least one other mention of the Bolshoi tour in the book.

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As regards Smakov’s comments on Ulanova, Vaganova created the highly virtuoso pas de deux ‘Diana and Acteon’ for Ulanova’s graduation. There is a film of Ulanova in Act II Swan Lake Pas de deux with Sergeyev in which there is now doubt as to her technical ability and in the Messerer book on ballet technique there is a picture of Ulanova alongside Plisetskaya in a classroom exercise of jetes. After seeing these two examples and studying the roles she danced and reading opinions of her performance I had to reassess my own opinion that Ulanova was an extraordinary dance actress rather than having attained a highly developed ballet technique.
Having taken Striking a Balance off the shelf, I'm having a hard time putting it back, and with Antoinette Sibley's quote (from the book) on Ulanova still in mind, I seemed to remember that there was at least one other account of the impact of the 1956 Bolshoi visit to London. Rereading the chapter on Christopher Gable, I found another reference:
I watched every Romeo from start to finish -- I watched Ulanova. Ulanova was the greatest female dancer I've ever seen because she accounted for every second of stage time. She was a wonderful dancer; she had speed, enormous elevation, great technical assurance -- but all of it was only a means to an end. All her technique, all her athletic gifts, were put to the service of the role, and what one saw was an in-depth psychological study of a girl at a real crisis point in her life and how she dealt with it. I suddenly saw, 'That's what it's about,' and that was when I stopped thinking about how many spins I could do and whether I could jump higher than anybody else.

I think this ties directly into the recent discussion on technique.

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