Category: Dance Chatter

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Jose Carreno in “Swan Lake” on Dancing With the Stars

Did you guys see it last night? I don’t know who choreographed but it’s obviously a version created for fans of Black Swan the movie, showing both black and white swans vying for Prince Siegfried’s attention, and shortened for the allotted time. Lorena Feijoo from San Francisco Ballet and her sister, Lorna, from Boston Ballet, danced the white and black swan. Interesting that they didn’t have Jose in tights. I hate it when male ballet dancers don’t wear tights. You can’t see the movement at all; it just doesn’t look like ballet. Still, I think our Jose looked better than Jose Martinez in pants.

Also, regarding yet more Black Swan controversy: E! is now positing that because Sarah Lane and Isabella Boylston are both in ABT, Lane’s statements to Dance Magazine about the amount of dancing she did for the film were motivated by sympathy for Boylston. This is becoming just a little absurdist.

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Moonlight on the Beach

Happy President’s Day everyone! I’m spending the week in South Carolina at my cousin’s timeshare – I needed a few days away from New York and the ocean is  my favorite place. (If I ever have money, I’m definitely buying a beach house somewhere.  I could never be one of those New Yorkers who buys a country home up in the mountains. I don’t understand those people. Who wants to risk a run-in with a bear or coyote or jaguar? Not to mention deal with permanently cold temperatures…) Anyway, the light from last night’s full moon on the ocean was gorgeous. My iPhone is not so good at taking pictures at night, so you’ll have to take my word for it 🙂

The condo’s wireless connection is a bit off and on, plus, it’s unexpectedly nice weather here – 71 degrees today, plus I’m supposed to be working on my novel, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to blog. But here are a few items of interest:

Roberto Bolle makes his Hollywood debut;

John Epperson talks about his role as “Jaded Piano Player” in Black Swan; and

Our friend Benjamin Millepied is now getting hounded by the tabloids for working too hard and not paying enough attention to Ms. Portman

Also, here are some photos I just received of the magnificent Sara Mearns debuting as the Siren (opposite Sean Suozzi) in Balanchine’s Prodigal Son a couple weeks ago at NYCB:

 

 

 

Finally, if you haven’t seen Natalia Osipova dance yet, next Sunday, March 6th, will be your chance. She’ll be dancing Kitri in Don Quixote with the Bolshoi, in a performance that will be live-streamed direct from Moscow via Emerging Pictures’ Ballet in Cinema series. NY performance time is 11:00 a.m., at the Manhattan Big Theater, and she’ll be dancing opposite Ivan Vasliev. This is the role that made her famous, and she owns it, so try not to miss it if it’s showing at a theater near you. Check Emerging Pictures’ website for times and locations.

Okay, that’s all for now. Happy holiday everyone!

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Is Millepied a K-Fed or a Baryshnikov?

I’ve seen a good number of articles like this one popping up on various celebrity gossip blogs, contending that Benjamin Millepied poked holes in his condoms and is basically just after Natalie Portman for fame and money – I guess like Kevin Federline arguably was with Britney Spears. Millepied has always seemed kind of like a romantic, like a Balanchine, always falling for his muses, so it didn’t really faze me when I heard he was dating the latest ballerina he’d choreographed on. Of course I don’t know him, and everything on those blogs is hearsay. I’m more interested in the public perception though.

I’m just wondering if anyone remembers well the Baryshnikov era. Was Baryshnikov similarly attacked for impregnating Jessica Lange? I was a very small child when that all happened but it seemed like the public just adored him, the two of them together. Or maybe that was just me lost in my little girl ballerina dreams. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t remember when the two first became a couple; I have no memory of him until they’d already split and I was terribly jealous of their beautiful daughter because she got to go to the White Nights premiere with her father in Hollywood. Anyway, if he was perceived differently, I wonder what is different.

In other Hollywood/ballet gossip, Aaron Sorkin is allegedly dating ABT’s Jacqueline Reyes.

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BLACK SWAN = SHOWGIRLS!!!! HAHA!!!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! All throughout watching this movie, I kept thinking, damn, this is really on the same level as Showgirls. Actually, more like Showgirls meets Valley of the Dolls meets Mommy Dearest. Apparently, others had the same thought. Thank you!!!! And thank you so much, dear friend, btroubles, for linking to it.

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Gillian Murphy Critical of “Black Swan”

 

Apparently, Gillian Murphy gave an interview to the L.A. Times in which she called Black Swan unrepresentative of the ballet world and said she was a little disturbed by its intentionally overdone darkness. She says in her experience the lecherousness of the artistic director is fake (thankfully!) as is the competitiveness within the company, though she admits it’s competitive to get into a big company in the first place. I would have thought it would be competitive within a company as well, but from the time I’ve spent around ABT and NYCB dancers (and from reading their blogs) it does seem that the dancers are very supportive of each other. And the support doesn’t seem false, like it’s forced whenever outsiders are around, but genuine. Look at how everyone came to the support of Jenifer Ringer over Macaulay’s snarky comment about her weight.

But apparently Dancing on My Grave presents another story. Maybe things have really changed since then.

Interestingly the article mistakenly calls Murphy British (as if they’re trying to present her as uppity toward Hollywood). She’s American though, and has never seemed the least bit snobbish, imo.

Above, Gillian with Ethan Stiefel in Swan Lake (as the white swan! 🙂 ); photo by Fabrizio Ferri, from here.

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Vote for David Sedaris to be on Dancing With the Stars!

 

Fabulous publishing industry blog, Galley Cat, is taking votes on which author you’d most like to see on Dancing With the Stars. They think there a way to push an author into that spotlight with enough publicity. I’d unfortunately missed Galley Cat’s initial nomination post or I’d have nominated Junot Diaz or Gary Shteyngart, but of the existing nominees I’d by far most want to see David Sedaris.

If you’re on Facebook, go here to vote. Other nominees include Jodi Picoult, Nora Roberts, Harlan Coben, and several others. Claire Cook thus far seems to have the most votes.

C’mon, vote, and help get an author on the show!

Above image taken from the Guardian.

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SWALLOW ON CRYSTAL REVIEWS

Swallow has received another positive blog review 🙂

I was out at ABT last night (Sascha Radetsky and Hee Seo’s Thais Pas de Deux is, I think, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all season. I’d seen them in rehearsal and it was well worth waiting for, and I enjoyed this cast of The Dream – David Hallberg as Oberon, Gillian Murphy as Titania and Herman Cornejo as Puck – much better than the first, and Maria Riccetto for the first time really caught my eye in both The Dream and Ashton’s Birthday Offering – she was really lovely).

Anyway, I was out late last night (actually was working all night on this, which was unbelievably hard to write, that case is so complicated). Am just now getting around to watching So You Think You Can Dance. I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve watched it. I hope it was good!

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DEVIN ALBERDA IS HILARIOUS!

 

Headshot by Paul Kolnik, from NYCB website.

One of my Twitter followers, a law blogger go figure, sent me a link to this article, by Gia Kourlas in the NYTimes about how several ballet dancers, mostly from NYCB (apart from Maria Kochetkova and Daniil Simkin) are now actively tweeting. I found Alberda’s posts to be absolutely hilarious. Follow him!

Kourlas didn’t mention them, but David Hallberg, Marcelo Gomes, Drew Jacoby and Roberto Bolle are all on Twitter too. Roberto and Marcelo, unfortunately, don’t tweet much. Marcelo in particular cracks me up though. He started the account to tweet about ABT’s recent Culinary Pas de Deux. He had several tweets leading up to it: can’t wait for the culinary pas de deux, follow us as we tweet throughout, etc., then the two tweets the night of the event were something like: almost time for the culinary pas de deux!, then, wow that was a great culinary pas de deux! But no tweets throughout 🙂

It’s hard because dancers are so used to expressing themselves with their bodies, not their words and I know they’re encouraged to do this — blog and tweet — to reach out and try to gain new fans. My advice though: they have to make sure they remember they’re talking to a general audience, not an audience of already converted ballet fans, lest their posts be largely lost on most. They have to try to bring new people into their world, not exclude them with terminology that wouldn’t make any sense to an outsider. That’s why I think David Hallberg made the Winger so popular for the time that he was actively blogging there. He wasn’t just its biggest star; he had a way of communicating with people who don’t know everything there is to know about ballet, and of making them want to know more. I’ll bet he doesn’t have any dancers in his family and basically had to grow up doing that. His tweets are mostly about his travels guest starring all over the world.  His friend, Evan McKie, from the Stuttgart Ballet, who also used to blog on the Winger, is also on Twitter and it’s fun to keep up with him as well.

And those are only the ones I know of; there are probably many more. I don’t have time to search for people’s Twitter accounts, but just do as Kourlas suggests if you want to find them (or any other dancers): Google their name + Twitter and you should find them if they’re on there.

By the way, speaking of ABT’s Culinary Pas (see some photos of that here), my friend happened to go (she was invited by someone else, a patron, and didn’t even know it involved ABT until she got there!) She had a blast, said Marcelo and Craig Salstein (the organizers) were very nice, Craig in particular was very well spoken, which I’ve noticed before, that Marcelo and Gillian Murphy danced some duets from Dirty Dancing, including the mambo scene (said ballet dancers can’t move their hips properly for Latin dance 😀 ), and that Blaine Hoven was cutting up a rug on the dance floor along with Sascha Radetsky. I hate going to parties like this but love hearing about them afterward.