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Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
Ben millepied is sitting beside me, whose ballet i criticized!
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Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
Ben millepied is sitting beside me, whose ballet i criticized!
You always have the best luck when it comes to sitting next to dancers! Did you survive? I’m going to have to call my sister and tell her, she loves Benjamin!
How do you recognize all these people… like McCauley?
Haha, I don’t know if it’s luck, Ariel! He didn’t look too comfortable, and he got up and sat elsewhere at the first intermission! I think he found some friends and probably sat with them. I don’t think he has a clue who I am of course; I just think he saw me with pen and paper and knew I was some sort of critic, and I think performers and artists are naturally uncomfortable with anyone writing things down during a performance, whoever they may be! No, I’m probably just imagining everything; it was fun sitting next to him 🙂 He seems like a nice guy who doesn’t take up very much space — he doesn’t hog the elbow rest, for example 😀 He told the people behind me, who were trying to speak French with him, that he was there for Corey Stearns, who had the lead (replacing Marcelo) , which I’m writing about very soon!
SanderO, I recognize Macaulay because I went to that Barnard talk he gave last summer, and I recognize the others just from having had them pointed out to me by critic friends (like Apollinaire!) I managed to figure out who Gia was all on my own. The only ones I can think of who I have no idea what they look like are Robert Gottlieb and John Rockwell. Ariel knows Rockwell.
Even if Benjamin knew who you were I doubt he would be anything less than charming if you had spoken to him. I think choreographers realize that not everyone is going to like their work. He used to come to Tower on occasion when I worked there and he was very friendly.
He once told me an interesting ‘backstage’ story of how he rescued a performance at NYCB by stepping in in the middle of a ballet when the scheduled guy got injured onstage. I was at that performance and the funny thing was: some people sitting near me did not notice the first man falling nor that Yvonne Borree danced by herself for five minutes before Ben came racing on.
Don’t feel bad. I was sitting talking to the person I was with about a piece that one of my favorite small companies did at Spring To Dance. I was basically saying that it was good, but had been a lot better before the two best dancers in the company left, plus on other that was pretty good, left and got replaced. Wanna guess who was sitting RIGHT behind me? The entire company. Yeah.