Ivy Lin

The Royal Ballet fans are incredibly lucky that several times a season there are cinemacasts of performances. Here in the U.S. a dancer's instagram page is often the only video evidence we'll ever have of a dancer in a role. So I do follow several dancers if only because videos (and nowadays even photographs) are so rarely circulated otherwise. 

What I do find irritating is the dancers whose instagram stories are simply videos or photos of audience members praising said performance. 

You really can't put the toothpaste back in the tube though. Serious question: is all post-Petipa choreography going to be tossed out in this purification of ballet? Balanchine? Robbins? MacMillan? Anything post-war?

What do you all think of Alessandra Ferri? She had extremely over-arched feet and as the years went on wore bulkier shoes to support her feet.

53 minutes ago, katharine kanter said:

Cecchetti's not my God - his quotes are useful though, because he was quite the pithy man, and articulate, not to say downright RUDE.  And when it comes to technique, he knew a hawk from a handsaw.

 

Many think the same as Uncle Enrico, but could not/cannot articulate in WORDS.

 

As for " We really can't turn back the clock."

 

Well, feeding Christians to the lions was all the rage 2000 years ago.  It was modern then.  Putting people on the rack or burning them at the stake for heresy, was extremely modern in the 13th and 14th Century.

 

But, bizarrely enough, we managed to "turn the clock back" to more civilised times - e.g. the early Pharaohs, or early Christianity, neither epoch was wont to feed people to the lions, or frazzle'em at the stake.

 

For the past thirty years, we have been sacrificing dancers to the Cult of Hyperextension. 

 

Anyone object to shutting down the Roman Coliseum?  

Uh ... you didn't just compare a dancing lifting her leg above 90 degrees to throwing gladiators to lions did you? But also: then is all modern choreography to be tossed out? All Balanchine, all MacMillan, all Wheeldon, etc.? 

Also @maryrosesatonapin if you go up to dancers and tell them that they have to wear "beautiful" shoes that do not suit their feet then you are telling them to endanger themselves. Dancers today have custom-designed pointe shoes to fit the specifics of their feet. 

Katharine, I dont think you can lay all the blame on "but maestro Cecchetti didnt teach this way." Quite frankly modern choreographers demand different aesthetics than say Petipa. For instance MacMillan's Manon does require "leg lifting."

We really cant turn back the clock.

34 minutes ago, Tango Dancer said:

 

Yes I've observed this too.  I once sat behind 2 men who spent the whole interval discussing the fact that one of the dancers was apparently carrying more weight than she had last time they saw her.  They weren't commenting on her dancing skills but entirely talking about her bodily proportions and comparing them unfavourably with a different dancer.  They seemed actually quite indignant that she had dared not to maintain the same weight.  Honestly I was quite annoyed by the whole thing as it was her body and no business of theirs. 

 

I've always viewed pointe shoes as a tool.  You choose the ones that work for you bearing in mind the feet you have and the works you're performing in. The information on how they can be customised is deeply fascinating though.  I had no idea they could do so much to adjust them. 

I think it harkens back to a very ugly "tradition" where rich patrons often "owned" a ballerina and feel like they had a right to tell her how to dress and look. I mean think of this: do we dare go up to say, a professional tennis player and tell her that her sneakers are ugly? Or that she should wear prettier outfits on the court? Ballerinas are professionals who have difficult, dangerous jobs. They should wear the shoes that most help them achieve their dance assignments. 

The other thing is that many dancers simply do not have beautiful, arched, tapered feet. All this talk about Margot Fonteyn -- Balanchine once called her feet "slabs of butter" and Ninette di Valois used to say "Nothing we can do about her feet." 

From the side her feet did not have an especially high arch:

That is not her fault. It's not the fault of Alina Cojocaru, Natalia Osipova, and other dancers who have bunions. It's also not the fault of, say, Svetlana Zakharova that she has such beautiful arches:

Dancers are born with what they are born with.

16 minutes ago, Anna C said:

Today’s shoes are not “clumpy”, they’re safe, tailored to the individual’s foot (with the exception of Osipova) and ensure that a dancer can safely continue a career en pointe without exacerbating existing bunions and damaging the feet in future.   As I said in the other thread, how tapered or square the box is is entirely dependent on the dancer’s foot shape, toe length, degree of tapering and metatarsal width.   We should be grateful that these days, pointe shoes can be made in almost infinite combinations of shape, vamp depth, profile, construction style, shank hardness and length etc to ensure that a ballerina won’t have to hobble on damaged feet in later life. 

 

It’s a shame that some audience members seem to prefer an overly tapered shoe for “prettiness” than a shoe that has actually been made and customised to fit the dancer comfortably and safely.  

Ok you touch upon something that really angers me about balletomanes (not all, but some). They seem to act like Degas in that they view dancers' bodies as their personal aesthetic hobbyhorse. A dancer does not OWE you to wear your favorite/prettiest brand of pointe shoes. A dancer does not OWE you to dance on a tiny tapered platform so it looks better. A dancer has a job, and that job is to get through his or her dance assignments preferably without injury and a minimum of pain.

All those pictures of older dancers dancing on tiny tapered pointe shoes were re-touched. There's plenty of evidence that in real life these dancers wore more practical shoes -- just watch the films. Do you see the same tapered tiny toe shoes?

That picture of Fonteyn is either retouched or she changed her shoes as she advanced in her career because later pictures show her with a flatter, wider platform:

Darning a big flat platform isn't out. Uliana Lopatkina did it:

17 minutes ago, LinMM said:

Are you sure they are Pavlova's shoes ....except that my memory is that they were hardly pointe shoes at all!!

Perhaps I'm remembering the wrong persons shoes....maybe there were some shoes there from before Pavlova? 

I can't remember whether you were allowed to take pictures in the Vaganova museum but if you were the other friends with me all had iPhones with them so may have taken a picture of this display. 

It was Taglioni who barely had pointe shoes. Pavlova was the first to wear big blocks and had a leather sole to strengthen the insole. It was considered "cheating" back then.

Pavlova retouched all her pictures because she was sensitive about this. Here are other examples of her shoes:

11 minutes ago, Amelia said:

Ballet is a highly aesthetic form of art and is loved, first of all, for its beauty. I regret very much that the majority of dancers choose now to dance in shoes with wide blocks. For me it is NOT beautiful. I remember very well the time when ballerinas' points were really pointed like on this photo of Galina Ulanova (37) as Aurora in 1947.

Anna Pavlova pointe shoes. Look at the thick ugly darning. But she was renowned for the beauty of her dancing.

I'm pretty shocked by some of the comments on Osipova by Russian balletomanes. One of them dismissed her with "she's Jewish." End of story. Nothing more to say for her at least. 

Did anyone see this in London? This was one of those things where I expected to love it but didnt:

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/11/akhaten-sing-like-egyptian.html

I have worsened an already horrible ankle injury and have had to cancel several planned performances I wanted to see. But I have been staying at home and found several different Apollos. I compared them over time:

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/11/will-real-apollo-please-stand-up.html

I wrote a little appreciation of her in video compared to contemporary accounts of her dancing:

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/10/alicia-alonso-written-word-vs-video.html

1 hour ago, Douglas Allen said:

Thank you, again, for the reviews you continue to produce. They are essential reading for me. I hope your ankle improves.

I love Piano Concerto 2 - it's one of my favourite ballets of all time and I really enjoyed the performances I saw recently, but the costumes!! I've never known a ballet (whether performed as Ballet Imperial or as Piano Conc 2, to be so badly served by so many apalling looking productions. Increasingly I think the only good looking production designs I've seen were the original Berman designs which I saw two or three times too many years ago to think about. 

The women at City Ballet looked pretty good (as a generalisation) but the men still concern me somewhat. Only Gordon and Mejia seem to have stand-out talent. It might be my bad luck in what I've seen recently, but the "senior" men are looking no better than "carefully correct" and hence lack some excitement. Possibly Taylor Stanley may be an exception.

Adrian Danchig-Waring looks pretty good to me. He rdoes get injured a lot though. Agree about some of the senior men. And thanks for the well wishes about the ankle.

I didn't go to as many ballet performances as I usually do because of a bad ankle injury but I did review the major revivals and new works for bachtrack and made a season-end summary here:

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/10/nycb-fall-season-wrap-up.html

14 minutes ago, Lizbie1 said:

 

Is this piece hostile though, or just patronising? And while I don’t like or want to defend this school of writing I don’t think it was reserved for NYCB by any means.

I'd have to read more of his criticisms though. He does seem to have a hostility to the Balanchine aesthetic.

I found this review Nicholas Dromgoole wrote of NYCB in 1998. His hostility to NYCB is unwavering:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4715138/Yankee-brilliance-comes-to-town.html

I was more horrified at the girl who was expelled for being 'fat' when she was skeletal.

Here are clips of Osipova/Hallberg pre-injury (both of them):

I stand by my statement that if you've only seen Hallberg post-injury, you haven't seen him. The magnitude and amplitude of his dancing has diminished considerably. His soaring jump now is rather careful. He's still got beautiful lines, elegant bearing and all, but he's limited in what he can do.

As for the Bolshoi he did return to dance Winter's Tale there:

https://davidhallberg.com/Dates-News

Heres just a hint of what he was like pre-injury:

7 minutes ago, Lizbie1 said:

Thanks for posting this: I booked for it at ENO without much enthusiasm and was surprised how much I liked it as my only previous exposure was the seemingly endless Rattle recording. I think the only cast member in common is Latonia Moore - I felt lucky to have heard her.

Latonia Moore is amazing. There are some excellent films of Porgy. I love the film with Willard White from Glyndebourne.

I think this documentary is more of a chronicle of the process of the boys' class graduating. I don;t think Tsiskaridze thinks Kirill is untalented, but that he could be even better. And the graduation/final exams/performance process is often very tense and stressful. 

The ENO's production of Porgy and Bess also made its way to the Met. I saw it and was totally overwhelmed and will go back in January to see it again (fall run completely sold out). In January I see Kevin Short as Porgy.

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/09/porgy-and-bess-triumph-of-catfish-row.html

I really recommend people catch this on HD in February.

Manon (Oct 26 HD) is NOT a must-see:

https://humbledandoverwhelmed.blogspot.com/2019/09/manon-glitter-and-be-glum.html