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Which concluding tableaux or poses are the best?


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While contemporary ballets often end with people continuing to move as curtain falls or lights dim (jumping, turning, running, walking, rolling on the floor), classical ballet tends to conclude with a grand tableau, everyone frozen in position. This is also true of the grands pas de deux.

Which classical endings are the best? And who does (or did) them best of all? (Where's that penche smiley when you need her?)

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I would have to put the Kirov's reconstructed Sleeping Beauty at the top of my list--breathtaking. It's difficult for me to choose any others because they seem to vary so much from one production to the next. Is there a standard ending tableau for, say, Don Quixote?

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Is there a standard ending tableau for, say, Don Quixote?

No, and the reason is quite simple. Minkus didn't write any music for a final scene and dance. Apparently, Petipa wanted the orchestra to reprise the overture, but that practice dropped away over the years. So decades of borrowed bits followed. And some pretty godawful music by people with less of an ear for a tune than Minkus.

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Hans, I was going to say the final pose of the new/old Sleeping Beauty too. Unfortunately, we will probably never see it again, but there is a sort of a transformation scene, as the ceiling rotates to a classical vista (perfectly timed to the glorious music), and Apollo (ie, Louis XIV, I suppose) poses on the top of some steps with the dancers posed symetrically around him. Carabosse is there too, in a corner, with guards around her, so evil isn't vanquised eternally, reminding us, I guess, that we have to be careful. There are lots of other endings that I like, but this is unbeatable. Mary

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I loved the ending tableau of Mejia's 'Romeo and Juliet' for Suzanne Farrell, although I can't describe it exactly. But it's always the inexorable way it folds itself into place that has stayed as one of the 2 or 3 images that suggests itself to my mind when I remember that one performance I saw in 1980.

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I loved the ending tableau of Mejia's 'Romeo and Juliet' for Suzanne Farrell, although I can't describe it exactly. But it's always the inexorable way it folds itself into place that has stayed as one of the 2 or 3 images that suggests itself to my mind when I remember that one performance I saw in 1980.

Was that where the eight Romeos arranged themselves into a bier for Juliet?

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Was that where the eight Romeos arranged themselves into a bier for Juliet?

Even if there were the eight Romeos, I wouldn't have known it, but maybe so. What I remember was this shroud that I think was drawn around Farrell somehow, but it's all nebulous looking back. I seem to remember it with her standing or kneeling and the shroud like a long train behind her that I hadn't expected, but that doesn't sound like a bier. I can't get past an image of her still looking out toward the audience, but my memory may be failing me--but somehow I think she was. I could be remembering her photograph on the back of the booklet they gave us at the Beacon, it was on glossy paper, but I don't still have it.

(Please correct this image, anyone, I'd like to remember it properly; by now, I primarily remember it as a sensation, with only Farrell and the shroud as tangible.)

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Thanks for the response, Patrick. I can't be sure now whether the eight men in black were meant to be Romeos, other characters, or unidentified dancers, but I was struck by them just as you were by Suzanne's white shroud/train, which I don't remember. In a failed attempt to recall more of the occasion, I googled Kazuko Hillyer, who was the producer of "Ballet at the Beacon." I thought I was getting close to paydirt when the subject became "Multiple Personae." But that turned out to be an old Ballet Talk thread in which I had mentioned Ms. Hillyer. The wonders of the internet never cease to amaze and confound. At any rate, it would indeed be wonderful if someone out there knew the ballet we are talking about. I lost my Beacon booklet long ago, as well.

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as an inveterate paper packrat i cannot throw out paper materials w/o great trauma.

i found my beacon prog. (cover scan below), and can note what was printed re: mejia's tchaikovsky ROMEO AND JULIET:

choreography by paul mejia

music by piotr ilych tchaikovsky

lighting by jim rule

suzanne farrell and sean lavery

and

students of from the school of american ballet (given in an daggered footnote as follows: ethan brown, serge compardon, garrison clarke, dennis ferguson, mitchell flanders, steve jones, david keary [a dancer known to have posted on ballettalk] john king, alexander krameravsky, peter lewton-brain, joseph marlborough, clay miller, sean musselman, serge rodnunsky, sean savoye, keith schaeffer, and einar thor.)

this work appears on both program A (oct. 26 and eve. 27) and prog. B (oct. 27 mat and 28 mat.) 1979.

the program states the following in its text on mejia's ballet:

"the plot of mejia's ROMEO is summarized as follows: Romeo is in the final stages of his suicide at Juliet's tomb. Her sarcophagyus is made of four other dancers. She awakens to find Romeo dead. While effecting her own suicide, she recalls their brief love together - courtship, parties, brawls, fighting, and intensely vibrant love-making. The props as well as the characters druing these flashbacks are created by other dancers. After Juliet, kneeling together [sic], are dressed in a very large white cape which billows out in an increasing wind with increasingly bright light. These two lovers thus enter a heaven to celebrate their marriage more formally than they did on earth."

as i recall there are some max waldman photos of this ballet. some were published as postcards, others must be in a book of waldman's works.

post-848-1154708466.jpg

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The Mejia ballet is still being performed. From a review of a performance in 2003: It served as a star vehicle for the famed pair Lucia Lacarra and Cyril Pierre, at Ballet Arlington.

Mejia's version offered a pared-down interpretation of the story of the lovers and Tybalt, presenting the essence of the piece in a series of flashbacks beginning with the tomb scene. Lacarra was a captivating Juliet: vulnerable, confused, and touching as events around her spiraled out of control, culminating in her suicide. Pierre seemed restrained in Romeo’s exuberant moments, but the love duet found him ardent and secure. The only noticeable loose end was poor Tybalt, excellently danced by Alexander Vetrov, who was abandoned after his duel with Romeo to wriggle off stage as best he could.

While three principals are featured, a corps of 24, clad in black body stockings to the wrist and over the feet, is called for in this ballet. In a choreographic master stroke, Mejia arranges these shadowy dancers in various groups in the murky lighting to suggest props and scenery. Six dancers, three to a side, bend toward one another and become an arched window. Others become doorways or a bench for Juliet to perch on. Even Juliet's byre is made up of carefully stacked bodies. Adding a theatrical flourish of his own, Mejia reunites the lovers after death in a celestial wedding, complete with an enormous silk train floating behind as the curtain comes down. Shakespeare might have second thoughts, but it works as dance.

http://www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=2219

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Wow! Thank you, rg and drb! I can see it now...

Me too! I was trying to force my mind back and I was definitely seeing the cape more 'ship's sail-like' than 'dress with long train' because it did billow out and to the sides. I knew that there were other dancers still on stage, but couldn't remember exactly how they were formed with Farrell.

And that photo--how miraculous to get to see it again! I was going to say to Farrell Fan that I thought the dancing was among the most rapturous I ever saw her do, but that it was in this performance that I found her natural beauty also especially breathtaking. The picture is solid evidence of that.

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