Tag: ABT

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American Ballet Theater’s “On To Act II” at the Guggenheim

Did you guys watch the live-stream last night or tonight? If you missed it, you can watch the video now archived on the Guggenheim’s ustream channel.

It feels weird to review a program that everyone can easily watch online, but I’ll just say my favorite moments last night were: the ABT II dancers in excerpts from Jessica Lang’s Vivace Motifs, which I thought looked like a lovely ballet; Hee Seo in the prayer scene from Coppelia; Susan Jaffe coaching Sarah Lane in another scene from that same ballet; and Jose Manuel Carreno’s interview by Wes Chapman.

I wasn’t really in love with the dance Carreno performed with Melanie Hamrick – Ronald Savkovic’s Transparante. I thought there was a bit too much falling down and standing up again, and, though some of the partnering and lifts were beautiful they were pretty basic and didn’t reveal much about the relationship of the characters and the dramatic action. But I loved hearing him talk – love how he still has that thick accent! Love that he said “oh shit” in reference to all the Don Quixotes he’s cast in during week one of ABT’s Met season! He doesn’t seem to have a plan for the future, but said he’d still do some freelance dancing for the next few years, and said he’s interested in exploring more contemporary work, other forms of dance. I think that’s why he wanted to dance Transparante instead of something from ABT’s season.

I liked Martine van Hamel’s discussion and performance of some of the character roles she continues to do – the wicked stepmother, always either drunk or hung-over, in Kudelka’s comical version of Cinderella, and the wicked fairy Carabosse in Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty. But they left out the Dacha Dweller from Ratmansky’s Bright Stream, which was on the program! None of us have seen that ballet yet and I was eagerly awaiting that excerpt … and then she said she wouldn’t do it because she couldn’t get something in it quite right yet. Well, I guess we’ll see it soon enough.

I really did like the excerpt from Jessica Lang’s Vivace Motifs. The ABT II dancers are always very good, especially Irlan Silva. Every time I see him dance I get annoyed that ABT hasn’t yet brought him into the main company. I don’t understand what they’re waiting for. He stands out so much to me. He seems better than most of ABT’s soloists and even some principals. And he’s not even in the corps yet. I really really really don’t get it.

Anyway, I’ll conclude this post with an excerpt of Carreno and Susan Jaffe dancing the Black Swan pdd from an earlier documentary about ABT:

 

And footage of Silva from the documentary, Only When I Dance:

 

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Jose Carreno and ABT Live-Streamed from the Guggenheim this Sunday and Monday

 

The Guggenheim’s Works and Process event this coming Sunday and Monday nights (May 1st and 2nd) is entitled “ABT: On to Act II” and focuses on what awaits a principal ballet dancer upon retirement from an illustrious career. The focus of course is on Jose Manuel Carreno, who will retire in June during the company’s Met season, and who’s long been one of my personal favorites in ABT and in the world. I remember when Julio Bocca gave his farewell performance I thought how upset I’d be when it was Jose Carreno doing the same. That day in late June is not going to be a happy one for me…

The W&P panel will consist of Carreno, Susan Jaffee, Frederic Franklin, and several ABT administrators, and there will be excerpts from the company’s upcoming Met season performed. (It hasn’t yet been announced who the dancers will be.) There will also be a slide show of the photography of Rosalie O’Connor, who successfully transitioned from ABT dancer to company photographer (and who took the above picture of Carreno in Don Quixote).

As with all of the Guggenheim’s W&P events of late, this one will be live-streamed on the Guggenheim’s ustream channel. So even though the event is sold out, we all get free admission 😀 Just tune in at 7:30 p.m. ET either night, and again, you can also participate in the live-chat which takes place on that channel alongside the live video.

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Kurt Froman on Training Natalie Portman to Dance

 

But his funniest, most interesting words are about Mila Kunis:

“Mila, and I mean this in the best way, she is such a loud-mouthed kind of broad. You know exactly where you stand with her, if she’s not happy with something. All she wanted to do is smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, where it was like, “Come on Mila, we’ve got to work!” And Natalie was like completely the opposite, in a way. She never complained once…

“Mila was the further behind in terms of training. She’s not — she doesn’t have a really good sense of her body, she’s not really a dancer or whatever.”

It’s funny, but I know exactly what he means about not having a good sense of your body… something I never knew about myself until I started trying to to dance.

Anyway, this is from an interview in Front Row Magazine, by Peter Simek, with Kurt Froman (former NYCB dancer- turned – Movin’ Out lead dancer and choreographer for Billy Elliot on Broadway.) Apparently, the interview with Froman was originally published around the time the movie came out, but these excerpts didn’t make the final cut. Simek decided to publish them now in light of the current who danced what controversy. Btw, you all probably already know this, but Sarah Lane gave an interview to 20/20 about said issue. Froman gave the interview a long time ago, without knowledge that this would become a controversy, so it has the air of truth. Scroll down to the bottom to read exactly what he said about Portman.

But I also find it really interesting what he said about training Kunis. At least at the beginning, their intention was to make her like a real Odile – marked by virtuosity. Froman choreographed while Millepied was busy with a prior commitment and that’s what he was trying to go for with Kunis – to make her as believable as a virtuoso as possible. But then when Millepied returned, he changed everything, making Kunis’s character more about her sex appeal, and her sexual comfort level with herself (as opposed to Odette / Portman’s lack thereof). So then they added things like Kunis’s dancing with her hair down, being so comfortable with herself that she didn’t care about messing up, etc., and they took out the virtuosity. This, he said, was okay because it went along far better with what Aronofsky wanted than what Froman had been trying to train her to do. I just find that interesting, because that was one of the parts of the film where I had the hardest time suspending disbelief – that the company director would seriously consider replacing the lead with a seemingly ditzy girl who thought it was funny when she couldn’t do a series of turns without nearly falling over. Of course everyone keeps pointing out that the movie wasn’t about dance but about sexuality, madness, etc. And they’re right. It’s just interesting to me that initially the film seemed to be a little more about the actual ballet than it ended up. Makes me wonder if things were changed after everyone realized how impossible it was to make a couple of very good actresses believable as high-level ballerinas.

Sorry this is all I’ve been blogging about lately! It’s definitely not all I care about. But I’ve returned to practicing law and so am now trying to juggle three things: my job, my book, and this blog. I apologize if it’s slow going from time to time. I definitely plan to cover as much NYCB and ABT as I can this summer!

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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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The Bolshoi’s Don Quixote

 

So who went to the live-streaming yesterday? The Manhattan showing was such a blast. Daniil Simkin, ABT soloist and Natalia Osipova’s friend, was there, and I saw Marc Kirshner from TenduTv and several critics. And Evan McKie, principal at the Stuttgart Ballet, who many of us know from the Winger, was tweeting from Stuttgart or Canada or wherever he was. He was very informative too! I tweeted a bit under the hashtag #DonQLive – after I found out we were using that hashtag; I also tweeted about the performance without the hashtag earlier.

Anyway, I loved it. As always, I loved Osipova, though my friend who went with me, a longtime Gelsey Kirkland fan, pointed out that though she has excellent technique and athletic ability, she was lacking in artistry, particularly in her ability here to evoke a Spaniard. It’s true, and funny, because that kind of thing used to drive me nuts – when ballet dancers would perform straight ballet without any culturally specific accent (see my harping here on Paloma Herrera’s Bayadere). I remember when Angel Corella and Paloma Herrera used to be THE couple to see in Don Q in America, and of course they danced it perfectly. But then the next set of dancers – whoever it was I saw after them, all I could think was, couldn’t they have taken some Flamenco, some Paso Doble? But somehow at some point, I stopped being bothered by it.

But, Osipova also doesn’t have the gracefulness of some of the others, like Yekaterina Shipulina as the Queen of the Dryads, and Chinara Alizade in the third act Grand Pas variation. I am beginning to notice that one – Alizade – more and more in these Bolshoi showings and I really like her.

Osipova is more of an athlete and my friend said she’d have made a great ice skater, or some kind of Olympian. Which is true. But I still think she adds so much to the ballet and creates so much excitement with all of the astounding things that she can do. The theater in Manhattan was more packed than I’ve ever seen it – nearly, if not completely full – and people were ooohing and aaahing during intermissions and afterward and were applauding throughout – like when, before the performance, the camera showed her backstage warming up.

Here she is in the Act One variation:

 

But it was Ivan Vasiliev who really wowed the audience – or at least he did as much as she. I’d seen him in Flames of Paris too and he was fabulous in that as well, but this is a larger role and so he stood out to me more here. He kept taking these flying leaps, sometimes with a turn thrown in,  and he got amazing height on them, especially given that he’s pretty short. He definitely has the muscular legs of a jumper. And he always landed so solidly, which not everyone who jumps that high does. And his form was perfect. And he had the flirty, slightly mischievous character down perfectly. And he had the Spanish flair, for the most part at least. So, he’s perfect, in a word! I don’t know if there’s been a dancer since Baryshnikov who’s danced such an exciting Basilio. Bring him to NYC, Kevin McKenzie!!

Here is he dancing on his own in the studio:

 

I also loved Andrei Merkuriev as Espada, the matador, though I don’t know if anyone will ever outperform my Marcelo Gomes in that role, imo 😀 But Merkuriev just did incredible things with that cape – I’ve never seen anyone – not in ballet or Paso – whip a cape around with such speed like that.

There were many more character dances than in ABT’s production. It was hard for me to keep straight who danced which one because in the program it wasn’t broken down by act and I can’t tell the difference between, for example, what was called the Spanish Dance, and the Bolero. If Anna Leonova danced the lyrical Flamenco-like solo, then I loved her. I thought she was beautiful and knew how to work the dress and her arms and hands and everything. It might have been Kristina Karasyova though, or one of the three listed under “Spanish Dance.” I also liked Anna Antropova as the gypsy dancer. Ditto for her. They might have been the same dancer, actually…because those dances were in different acts… Oh who knows.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I liked everyone and thought they danced beautifully. Honestly, this company is absolutely astounding. I don’t think there’s anyone in it who’s not only an excellent dancer but compelling to watch in one way or another as well. If you ever get a chance to see the Bolshoi, don’t miss it.

One more thing – about the third act Kitri variation. I’ve noticed when Osipova dances with ABT, she changes that variation from the one ABT usually does, and so I wasn’t at all surprised that she did the same here. I’ve always liked her version BETTER because she does those traveling passees at the speed of blasted light, and they look so much better on her than the hopping on pointe. But my friend thought the other version, which Gelsey Kirkland apparently did, was harder and more artistic. But then Evan McKie told me via Twitter that Natalia’s is the version the Russians usually do. So maybe it’s not an issue of changing the choreography to suit the dancer but just the dancer performing the version she knows best. Anyway, I tried to look up Gelsey on YouTube and could only find the final scene pas de deux with Baryshnikov; they don’t have the variations. But here’s what I’m talking about: first video is the ABT version, starring Nina Ananiashvili, second is Osipova:

 

 

Which do you guys like better, or do you like them both the same?

Anyway, the next Bolshoi live-stream will be Coppelia, coming up at the end of May. The next live-stream from Emerging Pictures will be the Paris Opera Ballet’s Coppelia, coming up on March 28th. Visit the Ballet in Cinema website for times and theaters. These are such a blast!

Above photo of Vasiliev and Osipova from here.

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Misty Copeland on Tavis Smiley

 

Apropos of our recent discussion on race and ballet, ABT’s Misty Copeland was recently on the Tavis Smiley show. She talks about race, ballet, elitism, her training, her recent appearance onstage with Prince, the immense difficulty of ballet, and of course, Black Swan. She’s very well spoken. Go Misty!

Also, speaking of Black Swan, here’s an essay by former NYCB dancer Toni Bentley in the Daily Beast. Bentley has more guts than anyone else in the industry, that’s for damn sure. Go Toni!

Above photo of Copeland taken from Martini Pink.

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Natalie Portman’s Black Swan Golden Globe Acceptance Speech

Did you guys watch last night? I thought she looked radiant, and her speech was really sweet. She seemed genuinely happy about both the film and her personal life. She still seemed to be in a state of blissful shock about the latter. I found the part where she reminded the audience about Benjamin Millepied’s character smirking when Vincent Cassel’s character asked him if he would sleep with Portman’s black swan, then said, “see – he’s a good actor because he really does want to sleep with me!” sweetly innocent, though I can imagine some might have thought it a bit crass or childish. Millepied to me looked a little out of his element though. He looked uncomfortable when the camera focused on him.

Some dance fans on Twitter noted that Portman thanked everyone involved in the film but the dancers. I think that’s more of a testament to the fact that this wasn’t really a dance film – the other dancers had the relevance and necessity of extras – than to any forgetfulness on her part.

Dance film or not, I’m glad she won. I think she was by far the best of the actresses nominated in her category.

And did you guys see Jackie Reyes sitting next to Aaron Sorkin! I know one person did! I guess she’s no longer with ABT though; she’s now a student at Columbia. I wonder why she left ABT. Though she was in the corps she always stood out to me and she was only 24 and had time to work toward a promotion…

I’m also glad The Social Network won so many awards, including the biggest – best film. I think it had the most reach and breadth and depth and importance of the films nominated. It also had great acting by everyone all around, great writing, great story-telling – everything you’d expect an award-winner to have. I wished Jesse Eisenberg could have won for best actor because I think he did a tremendous job. He found the vulnerability in that character and really created sympathy for him – that’s hard to do when your character is generally a supreme jerk. But there was no way with him going up against Colin Firth.

And speaking of social networks these days, I don’t know how many of you are on Twitter, but as I was watching I was following the #goldenglobes hashtag. I love doing that now when I’m watching something popular. I do it often during big sports games now. It’s one of my favorite things about Twitter because you can connect with people all over the country – all of the world really – who you don’t know but who are doing the same thing you’re doing at that moment. And sometimes people say very funny, clever things – especially during a big celebrity fest like this.

Anyway, Twitter puts the “top tweets” on a given subject at the top of its hashtag list. These are usually – or have been in the past – the tweets that have been the most re-tweeted. This is a way of rewarding the funninest, wittiest tweets on something, or a tweet that has resonance to many – people re-tweet and those tweets rise to the top of the list. Well, last night as I was following along on the hashtag, all of a sudden a tweet by Paramount was suddenly planted at the top. And it was obviously an advertisement for one of their films. It wasn’t a tweet that was clever or funny and had been re-tweeted. I assume the studio had purchased it as ad space from the Twitter execs. That’s what it seemed like anyway. And then several tweets like that started appearing at the top of the hashtag list. If you were reading on a cell phone with a small screen, you had to do some real scrolling down every time you refreshed the page to see the newest tweets.

After a while it became annoying and I just stopped following the hashtag. It really kind of saddened me though. What would Mark Zuckerberg say? According to The Social Network, at first he didn’t want advertising on Facebook because he thought it would ruin it by being too intrusive, not to mention corny. And he was right. But at least on Facebook the advertisements don’t interfere with your ability to use the site for what it’s for – to socialize.

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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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Is Ballet A Dying Art?

 

I must confess I haven’t yet read Jennifer Homans’ acclaimed but controversial history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels. I’m working hard on my second novel and have been knee deep in prison and cop memoirs and haven’t had time for much outside reading. I hope to read it soon though.

In the meantime, I have read some of the reviews, including Laura Jacobs’ in the WSJ and Toni Bentley’s in the NY Times. The two reviews focus on very different aspects of the book so it’s interesting to read both of them. Bentley says Homans is best on Balanchine (both Bentley and Homans danced with him). But Jacobs find the earlier sections enlightening as well.

The controversial aspects of the book seem to be toward the end when Homans argues that, for various reason (but according to Bentley many of them being that Balanchine has passed and his legacy is not being kept alive), ballet is a dying art.

I don’t want to go on too much since I haven’t yet read the book, but I will say that ballet seems to be alive and well in many European and Latin American countries. I do notice a real influx of visitors to my blog whenever the big European stars perform with ABT. I don’t think Roberto Bolle, Alina Cojocaru and Natalia Osipova fans think ballet is dying and certainly not because Balanchine is no longer with us. Ballet may be less popular in this country since the Baryshnikov era passed though, and it remains to be seen whether movies like Mao’s Last Dancer and Black Swan can do anything to revive it. I’m doubtful but want to be hopeful. I think it’s more likely that Natalie Portman marrying Benjamin Millepied will draw audiences to ballet than the actual movie will.

But then I recently ran across this interview with Homans over at the Ballet Bag, a London blog. At the beginning of the post, the writers say audiences there have been dwindling a bit and they’re worried about the future of the art form as well. Which scares me.

Anyway, has anyone read the book?

Another thing I wanted to call attention to is the book cover. The top one is the British cover, the second the American. Which do you guys like better, and think will sell more books? Just about every single time I see a European cover beside an American cover, I like the European better. But maybe it’s just me.

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SLSG’s Dance Highlights of 2010

Instead of trying to remember which were my favorite performances of the year, I’m just going back through my blog archives from January of this year and linking to the most memorable posts. More fun that way! A lot happened in a year…

January

Pacific Northwest Ballet made their debut at the Joyce; it was my first time seeing them live.

The Post‘s Page 6 announced that you know who and you know who are dating, and the ridiculous homewrecker attacks began.

Baryshnikov and Annie Liebovitz starred in a very cool Louis Vuitton ad.

February

I totally fell for New York City Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty.

…and Mark Sanchez 🙂

I found myself quoted in Colin Jarman’s book, Dancing With the Quotes.

I also fell for Sara Mearns’s Odette in Peter Martins’s Swan Lake.

On a personal note, my former judge, the esteemed Honorable Sylvia Pressler, passed away.

The Kings of Dance came to town.

Morphoses shocked the ballet world by announcing that Christopher Wheeldon was leaving the company.

March

My friend’s organization, Art for Change, held a benefit for Haiti after the earthquake.

Rasta Thomas’s Bad Boys of Dance announced that Danny Tidwell and SYTYCD’s Jacob Karr were joining the company.

Corella Ballet Castilla y Leon finally made their NYC debut!

I found myself actually getting press for liking Kate Gosselin – or for not hating Kate Gosselin rather – on Dancing With the Stars.

I fell for Keigwin + Company’s Runaway.

I was delighted to receive an email from NYCB ballerina Yvonne Borree’s aunt regarding of all things, my novel.

April

I had my first experience as a dance writer panelist! Thank you, Marc, from TenduTV!

Tiler Peck appeared on Dancing With the Stars in a Travis Wall routine, which everyone was so excited about. But it ended up amounting to not a whole lot…

Roberto Bolle danced a naked Giselle, in Italy of course.

May

New York City Ballet opened their spring season with premieres of Millepied’s Why Am I Not Where You Are and Ratmansky’s Namouna, both of which I liked, though Ratmansky’s had to grow a bit on me.

Baryshnikov returned to the stage.

I greatly enjoyed ABT’s new production, Lady of the Camellias, though most critics panned it.

June

ABT celebrated Alicia Alonso’s 90th birthday with three all-star Latin American casts (plus Natalia Osipova) dancing in Don Quixote.

Yvonne Borree gave her farewell performance at NYCB.

Bill T. Jones won a Tony for best choreographer for Fela!

Philip Neal gave his farewell performance at NYCB.

Natalia Osipova was mugged right outside of Lincoln Center.

Two of the greatest ballerinas in Europe – Osipova, and Alina Cojocaru – gave back to back Sleeping Beauty performances at ABT.

Albert Evans gave his farewell performance at NYCB.

Tap great Savion Glover made headlines by voicing his annoyance with Alastair Macaulay’s NY Times criticism of him – onstage, during a show.

Conductor Maurice Kaplow gave his farewell performance with NYCB.

Darci Kistler officially ended the era of the Balanchine-trained dancer with her farewell performance with NYCB.

July

Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from ballet and his foray into modern dance.

Alex Wong, probably the second greatest contestant ever on SYTYCD was injured and unable to finish the show.

My friend, Taylor Gordon, was profiled as a freelance ballet dancer in a New York Times article 🙂

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s beloved Denise Jefferson passed away.

Nilas Martins retired from NYCB oddly sans fanfare, sans criticism, sans a performance.

August

I interviewed tWitch about his role in the movie Step It Up. Fun fun interview!

I had a blast covering Ailey Camp.

I nearly fell over when Wendy Perron, esteemed E-I-C of Dance Magazine recommended Swallow on Twitter!

September

NYCB began their excellent “See the Music” series.

October

I loved Ashley Bouder’s Serenade.

Emerging Pictures’s awesomely exciting Ballet in Cinema series began with the Bolshoi’s Flames of Paris.

This cool new Lincoln Center-area street art sprouted up.

One of my favorite posts of the year, though it received no comments, was about Anne Fortier’s novel, Juliet. I jokingly daydreamed about it being made into a film, and which of my favorite ballet stars might take the lead.

November

ABT made an historic visit to Cuba and oh how I wished I could have gone with them.

I think I was the only person in the entire dance world to sympathize with Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars.

I had a blast covering New York So You Think You Can Dance auditions.

All of a sudden Black Swan was everywhere.

Nearly fell over again upon hearing Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruychenko took the world Latin ballroom title – making them the first U.S. couple ever to do so.

December

My take on SugarPlumpGate.

Black Swan finally premiered which I didn’t love but was happy to have ballet brought back into the spotlight.

I was in awe of Alvin Ailey’s 50-dancer Revelations, staged in honor of the 50th anniversary of that dance. I also loved several other dances in their City Center season – Ailey’s Cry, Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, and Geoffrey Holder’s The Prodigal Prince – just to name a few.

Robert Wilson / Roberto Bolle’s Perchance to Dream exhibit in Chelsea was a lot o’ frightening fun.

ABT’s new Nutcracker premiered, which I really enjoyed, almost as much as the Bolshoi’s.

Portman and Millepied revealed they are now engaged and expecting.

I had great fun, despite the crazy snowstorm, going down to Wall Street and covering Judith Jamison’s ringing of the closing bell at the NYSE.

Pretty busy year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Photos of ABT’s New Nutcracker

As promised, here are some photos of Ratmansky’s new Nutcracker for ABT.

I forgot to mention in my last post how much I loved the Alice in Wonderland-like high chair for Clara to sit atop to watch the mice / nutcracker & soldier battle scene. Really brilliant sets. Richard Hudson is a genius.

The battle scene and the many-headed mouse king.

The mischievous little mouse (Justin Souriau-Levine) holds the nutcracker doll.


David Hallberg and Gillian Murphy as the Nutcracker Prince and grown-up Clara. I forgot to mention that they do get married in this version.

David and Gillian in the final pas de deux.

Top four photos by  Rosalie O’Connor; bottom two by Gene Schiavone, courtesy of ABT.