Nureyev/Fonteyn in Swan Lake

[canbelto]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8PJGXvZ4u8...feature=recentf

I had never seen this brief clip before! But it's definitely not from the film they made in 1966, which I've never liked. Watch and enjoy.

[leonid17]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8PJGXvZ4u8...feature=recentf

I had never seen this brief clip before! But it's definitely not from the film they made in 1966, which I've never liked. Watch and enjoy.

I think this film was made around 1963 and it shows Fonteyn elegaic but not at her most expressive. I especially remember a full

length performance they gave in 1967 in which they both hit heights they never reached before or after.

This film is a happy memory of how the ballet was once danced. Thank you.

[Paul Parish]

That's Ed Sullivan who comes out to congratulate them at the end. He had the most-widely viewed TV variety show in the USA during hte 60s, shown on Sunday nights. Milions of people would have seen this broadcast.

Under these circs -- dancing the last third of the pdd, for a TV audience on a variety show -- i.e., amidst these indignities -- they're suitably expressive, impressive, and beautiful. They certainly give something that audiences in the farthest reaches of the country could recognize as high-minded, stately, glorious, doomed. I wish I had seen it then, but we watched the Steve Allen show, on NBC, the opposite channel. I was in high school growing up in Mississippi at the time -- I had sheet music for Beethoven and Chopin, hard-copies of Hans Christian Andersen and Hawthorne's re-telling of hte Greek myths, records of Rubenstein and Melchior and Flagstadt and The Marriage of Figaro -- not very different from country gentry anywhere. But we didn't see great dancing like this. Sullivan, and the Bell Telephone Hour disseminated these things.

Fonteyn can direct your eye across her body in fascinating ways -- the neck bend, the bird-like head, the tiny movements of her feet as her whole leg shimmers in the phrases at the very end -- the BIG back-bend in the middle -- she does not call attention to her leg in arabesque, which is not very high but is beautifully placed and is there like the vanilla in a chocolate cake. If it weren't perfect we'd hate her, but she's not calling attention to it, but to her eyes, her neck, her arms, her heart -- the swan/woman aspects.

Lopatkina is close to this in the decisions she makes. her leg IS high in arabesque, but that's what's de rigeur these days. She's similarly about the eyes, the neck, the timing, the phrasing of serrender.

THere may be a connection, maybe through Nureyev -- Lopatkina's coach was Kurgapkina, who was amazingly intelligent and deeply thoguhtful about the deep contaent of a role and was of course Nureyev's partner-in-crime and probably one of the people who challenged him most to think about what he wanted to show. it's probably no connection at all but a community of like-mindedness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8PJGXvZ4u8...feature=recentf

I had never seen this brief clip before! But it's definitely not from the film they made in 1966, which I've never liked. Watch and enjoy.

I think this film was made around 1963 and it shows Fonteyn elegaic but not at her most expressive. I especially remember a full

length performance they gave in 1967 in which they both hit heights they never reached before or after.

This film is a happy memory of how the ballet was once danced. Thank you.

[leonid17]

That's Ed Sullivan who comes out to congratulate them at the end. He had the most-widely viewed TV variety show in the USA during hte 60s, shown on Sunday nights. Milions of people would have seen this broadcast.

Under these circs -- dancing the last third of the pdd, for a TV audience on a variety show -- i.e., amidst these indignities -- they're suitably expressive, impressive, and beautiful. They certainly give something that audiences in the farthest reaches of the country could recognize as high-minded, stately, glorious, doomed. I wish I had seen it then, but we watched the Steve Allen show, on NBC, the opposite channel. I was in high school growing up in Mississippi at the time -- I had sheet music for Beethoven and Chopin, hard-copies of Hans Christian Andersen and Hawthorne's re-telling of hte Greek myths, records of Rubenstein and Melchior and Flagstadt and The Marriage of Figaro -- not very different from country gentry anywhere. But we didn't see great dancing like this. Sullivan, and the Bell Telephone Hour disseminated these things.

Fonteyn can direct your eye across her body in fascinating ways -- the neck bend, the bird-like head, the tiny movements of her feet as her whole leg shimmers in the phrases at the very end -- the BIG back-bend in the middle -- she does not call attention to her leg in arabesque, which is not very high but is beautifully placed and is there like the vanilla in a chocolate cake. If it weren't perfect we'd hate her, but she's not calling attention to it, but to her eyes, her neck, her arms, her heart -- the swan/woman aspects.

Lopatkina is close to this in the decisions she makes. her leg IS high in arabesque, but that's what's de rigeur these days. She's similarly about the eyes, the neck, the timing, the phrasing of serrender.

THere may be a connection, maybe through Nureyev -- Lopatkina's coach was Kurgapkina, who was amazingly intelligent and deeply thoguhtful about the deep contaent of a role and was of course Nureyev's partner-in-crime and probably one of the people who challenged him most to think about what he wanted to show. it's probably no connection at all but a community of like-mindedness.

I very much like your description of Dame Margot, but I can't quite get entirely, the complete parallel with Lopatkina.

I have only seen Lopatkina dance the full length Swan Lake once and although the high leg extensions (which is not an arabesque in the academic classical ballet sense), offended, I thought the control, fluency and expression in the lakeside scene was extraordinary. So much so, that I said to my friends, I am now going home as I do not want to spoil the experience. They persuaded me to stay and I

should have gone home.

There is no doubt that Kurgapkina did bring out something extraordinary from Lopatkina, which struck me as odd, given that

the Kurgapkina I witnessed in the early 60's was the kind of soviet dancer I most disliked.

I have now seen a number of the Ed Sullivan shows, sadly we never quite had the longevity of celebrity TV show here on UK television.