innopac Posted February 23, 2008 Share Posted February 23, 2008 Henning Kronstam: "At times when I am tired or uninspired, I always go and watch the children." from the section on the development of the company in Henning Kronstam: Portrait of a Danish Dancer by Alexandra Tomalonis. page 385 Link to comment
bart Posted February 23, 2008 Share Posted February 23, 2008 Here's one I love, from Alistair Macauleys's NY Times review of "Beauty in Motion." Everyone onstage dances like hell, and when we get to hell, it will be full of ballets like this. Its loud rock score, by David Rozenblatt, sounds like a refrigerator copulating with a hot tin roof. I won't mention the specific number. We've all seen something like this at one time or other, I suppose. Thanks, dirac, for the LINK Link to comment
canbelto Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Alexandra Danilova, in "Reflections of a Dancer": "Once i wanted to get pedicure and Mr. Diaghilev said no, you can cut your toe. And of course I went, and I cut my toe. He said 'I told you that you'd cut your toe so you dance!' So i danced with an infected toe." Wow. Link to comment
Cygnet Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 "She danced like a peroxide blonde with the odd root showing. Wait a minute.... She danced Shades like the whole thing was just a bunch of dull stuff between opportunities to show how high she can kick (I give her points for doing, or rather trying, doubles in both directions while holding the scarf, though.) And those arms. Dear God. And those jetes where she'd kick her front foot up so high it was like the prow of a Viking warship. Truly, truly ugly." (Eric Taub on Somova's Nikiya, April 1 at New York's City Center). Link to comment
liebs Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 Over heard last night at the Kirov at City Center, "They are all Russian. They all have Russian names." Link to comment
carbro Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 That's funny but not quite true. If you check the company roster on the masthead page, you'll notice a conspicuous exception: Ryu Ji Yeon. Link to comment
bart Posted April 6, 2008 Share Posted April 6, 2008 Thinking about the appealingly elegant, cheereful, high-speed, ultra-considerate world depicted onstage by Balanchine's Square Dance, currently being performed by Miami City Ballet, led me to this: Balanchine and Goldner on "reality" in ballet. Balanchine (speaking of the Nutcracker): "Actually, it's not a deam. It's the reality that Mother didn't believe. The story was written by Hoffmann against society. He said that society, the grown-ups, really have no imagination that they try to suppress the imagination of children ... They didn't understand that nonreality is the real thing." Nancy Goldner's comment: "Many of his other ballets move into a dreamlike or imaginary world that becomes a Balanchinian reality. Serenade is the most spectacular example, but it's not an overstatement to say that all of his ballets begin where Nutcracker ends -- in an eternal dream. The difference is that in the other ballets the dancers don't need to dream to be in a dream. The curtain rises, usually with a blue cyclorama as decor, and presto!, you're there, in a timeless placeless place. The dancers don't need a plot device to get them there; they don't need to lie down on a bed and fall asleep or take opium (like the hero in La Bayadere) or search for swans (like the Prince in Swan Lake). From: Nancy Goldner, Balanchine Variations, p. 55. (The Balanchine quote comes orignaly from Nancy Reynolds, Reportory in Review, p. 157. Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted April 9, 2008 Share Posted April 9, 2008 From a recent interview with 88 y.o Mme. Alicia Alonso: -How would you like to be remembered? - I’m telling you there is a future ahead. Ask me in two hundred years...! Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted April 15, 2008 Share Posted April 15, 2008 From an interview with the late Michael Bjerknes by Alexandra Tomalonis: A.T-"But there’s so much pressure to do this. 'No tutus and toe shoes for this troupe! They’re going beyond the rigid confines of ballet' — you read this over and over and over. M.B-I think that’s a lot of crap. I know with a lot of people that do that, it’s because they can’t." Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 "Dance to me is life itself.I have lived well. I have achieved a lot. I am aware that I have made history. I planted a seed which grew into a tree and the fruits have been exported all over the world." Mme. Alonso Link to comment
Helene Posted May 5, 2008 Share Posted May 5, 2008 "Bring half the amount of clothes and twice the amount of money." Sage travel advice for Ballet Talk on Tour! Link to comment
bart Posted June 2, 2008 Share Posted June 2, 2008 "In Alicia, a 1976 documentary made in Cuba ... Alicia Alonso is asked 'What is the hardest part of dancing?' and she answers 'Dancing well.'" -- Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance, p. 42. Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted June 3, 2008 Share Posted June 3, 2008 From Caitlin Sims' interview to Carlos Acosta. Pointe Magazine, June/July 2008 Issue. CS: "What is your greatest fear? CA: Losing my sense of reality and forgetting where i came from." Link to comment
innopac Posted June 9, 2008 Share Posted June 9, 2008 'Classicism,' he [Diaghilev] often said, 'is the university of the modern choreographer. The dancer and ballet-master of today must matriculate in it, just as Picasso must know his anatomy and Stravinsky his scales.' My Life in Ballet by Léonide Massine. page 85 Link to comment
bart Posted June 9, 2008 Share Posted June 9, 2008 "I liked this number [Reminiscence] best because I did not have to understand anything." -- Samuel Chotzinoff, NY Post, reviewing the first first Manhattan performance of Balanchine's fledgling American Ballet in 1935. Reminisence was a trifle, choeographed to what Balanchine called the"cute, nice, melodic" music of Benjamin Godard. Chotzinoff did not like Serenade, on the same program, presumably because that ballet DID require that you understand something. Source, Richard Buckle, George Balanchine: Ballet Master, p. 94. Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted June 9, 2008 Share Posted June 9, 2008 George Balanchine to Gelsey Kirkland: "Dear, you're young. Young people don't have injuries. Go home and read fairy tales. Try little red wine. You need nothing but this place. You don't need anybody else; you don't go anywhere else. You have a beautiful theatre here. You come in the morning. When you don't work, you go into studio by yourself; you do releves. You just stay here all day; you go home, drink little red wine. That's all you need". From Gelsey Kirkland's "Dancing on my grave" Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted June 16, 2008 Share Posted June 16, 2008 MCB Principal Rolando Sarabia, when asked to reflect on being in exile: "There is nothing left for us but to live off our memories.'' Link to comment
cubanmiamiboy Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Oh, well...and here we go with the old "Think vs. Dance" issue. "I think too much, far to much, to dance. For years i've been told this by friends, lovers, teachers and messiahs. Maybe I should have listened and stopped thinking. But must thinking be the death of my career?" Toni Bentley: "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal" Link to comment
papeetepatrick Posted June 23, 2008 Share Posted June 23, 2008 Oh, well...and here we go with the old "Think vs. Dance" issue. Oh vell, Cristian, while I can hardly thank you in the most sincere way for that one, I may, however, repay you with one of her productions from 2005, in the New York Review of Books: In the full-page ad, her beautiful, mournful gaze, twenty years after losing her maestro, peers like a blond widow out of a black web. She, the last muse of the Man Who Knew Time, is posed with her arm across her neck like a noose. Unlike the Joan Acocella review of Bentley's book, you don't even have to pay for this one. I can't imagine why...on the other hand, I may be because, even though quotable, I'm not sure if for the best reasons. The one you placed is along the same lines, very 'The Days of Our Lives.' Edited to add: Sorry I forgot, she was talking about Darci. It's possible one might not have known. Link to comment
innopac Posted August 6, 2008 Share Posted August 6, 2008 ..."when challenged directly once with the question "What keeps you in ballet?" he [John Cranko] answered. 'Well, if it's just steps, it's obviously not worth devoting one's life to. ... There's a limit to the amount of jumping around people can do. You can lift a girl only so high; she can spin around on her foot only so many times. One has to convert this extremely physical image -- a physical way of expressing oneself -- into a spiritual way of expressing oneself.'" Theatre in My Blood: A Biography of John Cranko by John Percival. Page 139 Link to comment
bart Posted August 23, 2008 Share Posted August 23, 2008 I do go to every performance. [...] When you do this, of course, you must realize that you're seeing something entirely different from everybody else. From someone who sees Swan Lake once a year. You become intimate with the work. With the way the dancers are performing. You begin noticing people in the corps. The choreography -- I can still be brought up short by a ballet I've seen over a hundred times. I'll come out and say, "Was that little such and such always there in the third movement?" and they'll say, "Well, yes, it was," and I say, "Oh, I never noticed it before." Of course, your mind wanders a good deal. -- Edward Gorey, interviewed in Dance Magzine by Tobi Tobias, January 1974. Included in Asscending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey. (ed., Karen Wilkin, Harvest Book, 2001), p. 17. Sounds wonderful ... though Gorey, whom many of us on Ballet Talk saw regularly in the City Center and NY State Theater lobbies, probably overdid it ... just a tiny bit. Link to comment
bart Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening -- nobody on the stage at least. -- Edwin Denby, 1947. Link to comment
carbro Posted August 28, 2008 Share Posted August 28, 2008 Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening -- nobody on the stage at least. -- Edwin Denby, 1947. Yes, you do have to confine that distinction to what comes from the stage. Link to comment
Jemil Akman Posted August 31, 2008 Share Posted August 31, 2008 I am going to ad two quotes. The first was from Marcel Marceau. He was describing a ronde jambe to a class of mimes and I was sitting in the audience. He said, "Think of it this way, someone has just dropped their wallet and you don't want them to see you push it behind you with your foot." The second quote was from Linda Kintz (Prima Ballerina for Washington D.C.'S Late, lamented National Ballet). She and I were in a Pas De Deux class...actually, she and I were assisting the late Stanley Herbertt (from the old Ballet Theatre) as he gave the class. One teenage girl, with designs to go to New York to study, raised her hand and asked Linda, "Is it true that there is a lot of crime in New York and what do you do when you hear a gun shot on stage?" Linda didn't miss a beat and replied, "When in doubt, bourré out!" and she followed this up by a quick bourré out into the hall. 25 years later, I am still telling that story to dancers. Link to comment
innopac Posted September 22, 2008 Share Posted September 22, 2008 "... Clement Crisp recalled the "words of the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who described dancers as 'butterflies of a brief summer'." from "Turning Point" by Valerie Lawson in the Good Weekend. The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 2008, page 21. Link to comment
Recommended Posts