assoluta

For me it was the opposite: Somova expressive, soft, pliable, all consisting of spiritual contours, the music filtered through her body, Shklyarov next to her felt an odd addition, totally different wavelength, not even a hint of poetry.

3 hours ago, bridiem said:

 

I agree that the change is a fact, but not that men are coping with it better than women. I see no evidence at all for that.

How would you know it, unless you are a ballet professional, or you're frequenting classes at one of the top ballet schools and have close contacts with those who teach there, and with the dancers taking the classes?

On 02/04/2019 at 05:53, Richard LH said:

“Men (are)  now best at ballet”  apparently because of  technical and physical ability.  Women are seemingly “struggling to keep up”. But no evidence follows  for this sweeping assertion.

She may have meant that ballet became very physical, very athletic, and men are coping better than women. This is a fact, and the evidence is everywhere, from San Francisco to London. A sad fact for those who were drawn to ballet by its inner delicacy, its finesse, poetry expressed through the medium of movement.

The inner depth of a dancer is there or there isn't. Stepanova in her first year after graduating from the Vaganova Academy produced a fascinating Aegina at Mariinsky. Anybody who saw it retains vivid memories. As to Khoreva, she is not pushed too far or too fast. She did all the required preliminary work earlier, and did it very thoroughly. The life of a dancer is short. Very talented ones are very rare. One cannot afford wasting any one of them. Mariinsky over the last ten years did this on all too many occasions. Khoreva is already an accomplished dancer, whether she will also become a great artist, the time will tell. If you do not wish to watch a juvenile dancing mature roles, just do not watch. Even accounting for the last minute cast changes, we are still generally free to chose who we want to watch.

Thank you, Ann, for your report. I was invited to the Mariinsky Festival, unfortunately, I couldn't go. I am surprised to hear about the "very high standard" of the Mariinsky (ballet) orchestra. On many occasions when I was in the audience, those standards were embarrassingly low. Concerning Khoreva, I admit, she has not much stage presence, unlike Smirnova you mentioned, and she doesn't bring much depth to the stage either (who, by the way, does nowadays?); on the other hand she is equipped with incomparably superior physique, and her technique at the beginning of her career is vastly better.

On 03/03/2019 at 03:41, ninamargaret said:

i think the poor sales of tickets show how difficult it is to sell 'unknown ' ballets to the general public unless the tickets are very reasonably priced - let's say at triple bill level.

I am not sure about the 'unknown' factor, the premiere had a lot of publicity, but I am sure about one thing: it was a flop, a complete, unmitigated fiasco, the music and the choreography; the script and the mise-en-scène didn't help either. I think at least some of this must have filtered out to the theatre-going public.

32 minutes ago, capybara said:

Not all the dancers come out via the 'official' Stage Door but those who do appreciate being appreciated - as long as fans don't keep them for too long!

All dancers do appreciate "being appreciated", they really do, and they will listen with a sense of gratitude to anybody telling them how moved they are by their dancing and acting.

1 minute ago, Quintus said:

By way of contrast to the time it takes the dancers to get out, I'm always amused by the speed at which the orchestra manage to make an exit. I've often managed to be one of the first audience leavers at Sadler's only to find sundry musicians with large instrument cases way ahead of me, legging it up Islington High St at a rate of knots!

I confirm! The musicians are often leaving as if the building is itself on fire.

It's not just that Jennings mentions Glurdjidze, it is how he does it:

People ask me what has been the best thing that I’ve seen, and of course there is no “best”. But if you were to ask me which experience I’d most like to repeat, I think I know. It was a weekday matinee in 2007, and English National Ballet were dancing their traditional version of Giselle, with Elena Glurdjidze in the title role. Then 32, Glurdjidze had studied at the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, and had learned Giselle from her teacher, the great Lyubov Kunakova. Her performance reminded me of why I first fell in love with ballet. Nothing she did was technically extraordinary, nothing was showy, her legs hardly ever rose above the horizontal. But such was her transparency, so profound was her identification with the role, that you couldn’t really see the dancing. All was character, all was emotion, all was story. Glurdjidze stopped time, and that is what great dancing can do. Writing about such transformative experiences has been, to say the least, a challenge. But also, as my successor will discover, a joy.

He also dares to say a few refreshing things about some highly praised and highly founded mediocrity:

A fair amount of new work looked like dross. To me, anyway. Nederlands Dans Theater, for all the technical brilliance of its dancers, appears lost in a wasteland of pretension. I won’t miss Jérôme Bel’s sanctimonious and shallow “non-dance” events; his 3Abschied, a collaboration with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who should have known better, was an excruciating indulgence (basically, she sang Mahler’s Der Abschied, or tried to), and as a dud evening out was right up there with Alexander Ekman’s fatuous A Swan Lake (think classically trained dancers splashing around in two inches of water, for hours). And then there’s the whole turgid undertow of the Belgian nouvelle vague, with which I will not detain you.

2 hours ago, LinMM said:

I dont mind mind applause at certain points but not if it breaks up the mood of certain ballets or every time a dancer does more than two turns etc etc.

During the golden era of Classical Ballet it was not uncommon for the audience to request an encore of a pas that was particularly moving or brilliant.

18 hours ago, BeauxArts said:

I beg to differ: whatever the origins of this audience behaviour,  as far as the Bolshoi are concerned  we are talking about  claques. I cannot see that they are evidence of a "developed balletomane audience"  but rather they are entirely partisan in respect of the dancer they choose or -  some say -  are paid to support.  Watching Sunday's  performance in a cinema  I found the applause breaking out after a jump or a single lift intrusive and at worst irritating. I am pleased they have moved on from this behaviour at the Mariinsky, and I am sure their dancers enjoy a fulsome response from their audience - that is certainly what comes over from the comments  on the Russian Ballet Friends forum and video clips.  

There is a huge difference between a claque and a "developed balletomane audience" and I was most certainly talking not about claques. I am not pleased at all, neither my professional colleagues, with dead silence greeting the dancers and near total silence when they finish, this is what I recently witnessed at the Mariinsky. For us it a shocking barbarity. Re. your "I am sure their dancers enjoy a fulsome response from their audience" this remains, unfortunately, a wishful thinking. The persons you are referring to on that infamous forum are as partisan as one can be.

On 21/01/2019 at 22:16, Dawnstar said:

I found the Bolshoi Act 2 rather interminable, with at least half an hour of divertissements before any actual plot happened! I thought the Bolshoi production was very grand and, in some ways, it seemed very old-fashioned.

All classical ballet is, for some, "very old-fasioned".

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I presume it's the custom in Russia to applaud principal dancers not only on their first entrance but also on subsequent entrances and to applaud particularly hard lifts/jumps/turns.

The custom that you find disturbing has been common to most places with a developed balletomane audience. Long ago you could witness it in London. Unfortunately no more. You can witness it still at Bolshoi but, curiously, not at Mariinsky where the audience degenerated to the level of meeting and, frequently, parting with the dancers in near total silence, irrespective of the quality of their dancing.

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Knowing the Bolshoi's reputation I thought the dancing would be brilliant and I thought it was indeed extremely good, but no better than the RB's. The corps in the Kingdom of the Shades were not immune to the occasional slight wobble in all those arabesques (I lost count somewhere about 45) so even the Russians evidently can't manage to produce absolute perfection!

In some respects it was better than the Royal Ballet, in other it wasn't. Overall, the quality of the Bolshoi corps is significantly better than a few years ago. The Royal Ballet greatly benefited from Natalia Makarova's meticulous attention to the Kingdom of Shades scene. Few dancers alive display understanding of this scene as profound as she does.

On 29/12/2018 at 08:30, Stevie said:

Like Ivy, I also enjoyed the Bolshoi Sylphide in Cinema very much. I must admit that I missed the importance of the mime and will pay more attention next time. I go for the enjoyment and never try to dissect a performance for criticism. My friend complained about the condition of their shoes, but I didn't notice the condition of their shoes. Its very easy to look for fault if that's what one wishes to do.  

 

Can't agree more. Bravo!

This film was shown at the Petipa Bicentennary conference in March and caused a scandal among the ballet historians and scholars who were present.

P.S. You may want to see what has been written about it at the time on the Dansomanie forum:

http://www.forum-dansomanie.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=108720&sid=739737bb7e85a114dfc18a0dd8c08cf7

Le film a été très mal accueilli par le public présent à l'Académie Vaganova pour l'avant-première, et la directrice administrative de l'institution s'est même excusée de l'avoir diffusé, ne l'ayant pas visionné au préalable.

Le film pose plusieurs problèmes. D'une part, son indigence sur le plan scientifique et historique, avec des raccourcis grossiers (genre"avant la venue des danseuses Italiennes à Saint-Pétersbourg, c'était plan-plan et routinier, avec des russes sans expressivité et sans âme"), et d'autre part, par ses biais politiques. En gros, il s'agit de montrer que seul l'Occident honore dignement la mémoire de Petipa et en préserve l'héritage, pendant qu'en Russie, on ne fait rien. Le film débute par un plan sur... New York, et dès lors, le ton est donné. Petipa, c'est là bas, c'est à Harvard, c'est à Paris, c'est à Milan, c'est à Berlin, c'est à Londres qu'on s'en occupe, mais surtout pas à Saint-Pétersbourg. D'ailleurs, pas un plan n'est tourné au Mariinsky. Ce film est une véritable insulte à la Russie, et les Russes l'ont compris comme tel. On est juste dans la provocation.

16 minutes ago, Scheherezade said:

They did indeed, on the basis that he shouldn't have done it without first obtaining her unequivocal permission, ...

...in the presence of a lawyer and a notary, in order to avoid a charge 25 years later that waking up Aurora was predatory, a sexual harassment, and abuse of power.

5 hours ago, SMballet said:

But in the main, I think that , while in the UK people are well educated enough to know that *of course* it's a fantasy world that says more about 19th Century high Russian cultural mores than anything else.

Well, a ballet lover who thinks that may not be educated enough as the ballets like "la Bayadere" are not the product of the 19th Century high Russian culture and tell us nothing about "Russian cultural mores". "La bayadere", "Swan Lake", Nutcracker", and a few other ballets, are simply the only survivors of an enormous body of stage pieces produced in Paris, London, Milan, Saint-Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, etc, throughout the 19th Century. When one moves back in time, the situation becomes even worse, "orientalist fantasies" of Versailles are even more fantastic, yet those who enjoyed them in the palaces of Louis XIV or Louis XV had a far greater right than us to talk about what "constitutes a good taste".

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I just have, like I suppose all of you, very clear ideas about what constitutes good taste in art.

I hold an opposite view, to the effect that almost none of us today have any idea, much less -- a "clear" idea, about what constitutes a good taste in Art.

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This reinforces the idea that until they arrived and he began to create his Tchaikovsky ballets he was working in a vein not that far removed from Perrot's.

This needs a correction too. Between Perrot and Petipa, there was an important period when Saint-Léon was in charge in Saint-Petersburg, and one must remember that he was a master choreographer. Petipa's shift away from a ballet-pantomime towards a dance-feerie and grand-ballet happened very much under the influence of the leading Italian choreographers who dominated Milan and Paris throughout the 1880-ies. It was them who created the familiar framework of a ballet with a ballerina-etoile showing off in dramatically meaningless displays of difficult tours de force. If Petipa wanted or, perhaps, if he had to, imitate the style of those new ballets (under the pressure of the public opinion, for example; one must remember that well to do Petersburg public was regularly visiting Paris and would expect to see in Petersburg what was considered fashionable in Paris), then he needed capable performers. It was exactly then that he was charged with a mission to hire some of those famous Italian virtuoso ballerinas. His mission was not entirely successful, none of the star ballerinas of the Opera was persuaded to switch Paris for Petersburg, but the etoiles of the Eden Theatre, like Cornalba and Zucchi, both went to Petersburg and this was the beginning of the period of "Italian domination" of the Imperial ballet troupe in Petersburg.

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its significance is that Justament was the last man to stage a revival of Giselle at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century. The revival was staged, I think,in 1868

This is not correct, FLOSS. Justament's only work for the Opera was his very successful ballet within Gounod's Faust. Justament's notation of Giselle is believed to come from the late 1850's. Giselle was for the last time performed in before Justament' (very short) tenure began.

On 04/10/2018 at 13:03, Amelia said:

       At last she danced it at Mariinsky:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY8ttFrAz7k
https://youtu.be/GU6uQgg40gE
https://youtu.be/Q7MhksmUvGA
https://youtu.be/Ug_o01IJIAshttps://youtu.be/tY8ttFrAz7k 
https://youtu.be/AzkMQaJ-kh8

 

I have to admit I had very mixed feelings watching her "Swan Lake", there were many signs of decay in her balletic craft. Some exquisite nuances here and there between vacuous, disjoint movements (was it a quail running away from a hunter, not a Swan queen?). Odile's variation, crumbling and disintegrating, palms of hands wooden stiff with terribly sticking out fingers, fouettes shaky, finished early, but worst of all, lack of coherent expression throughout.

On 04/08/2018 at 06:35, Richard LH said:

Having an idle thought - is it just my lack of knowledge, or are there  hardly any ballets set to choral music?  Beyond the  Waltz of the Snowflakes in the Nutcracker, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms in Yugen, and Mozart's Requiem by the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, I am struggling..... 

Why is this, I am wondering....?

Singing is generally highly distracting when full attention should be focused on watching dancing. An illustration of this is provided by the recording of Natalia Makarova's "Dying Swan" to the accompaniment of singing.

17 hours ago, Bluebird said:

 

The Bolshoi brought' Pharaoh's Daughter' to the ROH in 2004 and 2006.   Why is it not considered 'realistic' in 2018?

Several posts in this thread contain the answer to your question.

It was already mentioned that neither "Raymonda" nor "Pharaoh's Daughter" were realistic. Nor "Sylphide", for different reasons. This leaves Coppelia, though I can imagine it easily dismissed by the critics and I am not sure it would sell.

23 hours ago, Richard LH said:

But even for fans of these versions, the choice  is very disappointing, compared to other options, ...

Compared to what options?

1 hour ago, FLOSS said:

 I am sure that the Hochhausers know their audience  but I can't help thinking that London deserves something a bit more enticing than a  programme which includes only one decent production, and that, of a heavily revised nineteenth century classic . I imagine the programme is intended to display the company's range but for me it is a disappointing selection. Personally I can do without the soviet bombast of Grigorovitch's Spartacus; the heavy handed attempts at humour of Ratmansky's Bright Stream; the modernish choreography of Maillot's Shrew and the exceptionally dull production of one of Petipa's great ballets, with all of its poetry  surgically removed,which is the company's current Swan Lake. It looks like I shall be saving a great deal of money next summer. If the programme had included Raymonda, Jacobson's Spartacus or the new Nureyev, even if the latter were to prove to be the Russian equivalent of MacMillan's Isadora, I should be feeling far more enthusiastic about the Bolshoi's visit. I can only hope that when the Mariinsky next visit these shores that the repertory they bring includes The Fountains of Bakhchisharai, a soviet orientalist melodrama based on a Pushkin poem.

Show me a single "Swan Lake" among the current productions that retains its pristine poetry. I cannot. Certainly not the most recent one from Royal Ballet, there was never any in Nureyev' version in Paris. The Leningrad-St Petersburg version that comes closest, every time it comes to London is met with loud derision. We just had two among the currently best interpreters of the Odette/Odile roles for two weeks and there was nearly dead silence in this forum, and a general lack of understanding or good will from the majority of press critics.

Jacobson's "Spartacus" - to ask this from Bolshoi is an utopia, as for "Raymonda" - it would have been derided by the London critics and might also meet with protests by some simpletons, or even invite a terrorist attack by a hothead. I doubt we are ever going to see here "Raymonda", or "Pharaoh's Daughter", for that matter.

"Nureev" might set up great expectations but would, I am afraid, turn out to be an even greater disappointment. There is an enormous amount of spoken narrative in it.