yvonnep

My friend and I are going to London for a treat of Mayerling marathon in Oct but failed to get seats we want for the performance on Oct 15. We will be beyond happy if anybody has two tickets in Amphitheatre center for sale. Thanks a lot!

On 21/07/2018 at 16:29, FLOSS said:

I think that it might be time to resurrect this thread as it contains several interesting suggestions  about old recordings you might find on the internet of repertory with which you are almost certainly already familiar. There is a recording of The Dream with Dowell and Park in the lead perhaps some of you remember seeing the ballet in 2017 ? I wonder which version you think is the more  likely to be authentic  ? There is also a short film in which Ashton coaches  Sibley and Dowell in the reconciliation pas de deux and they in turn coach some younger dancers.

I personally like the 1968 BBC broadcast best because of two reasons:

1. It doesn't have a lot of close-ups and allows us to see the full picture all the time, which I think is really important for Ashton's choreography. (But of course it is lovely to see close-ups too because their gazes at each other are also so intriguing. )

2. The musicality is better and the movements are more fluid. I had thought that the Ed Sullivan recording was the best reconciliation pdd ever, but after watching the BBC recording and thinking of Ashton's coaching, I realised that the latter is even better. I remember two things especially: that most difficult movement of Sibley folding and unfolding under Dowell's arms looks more natural and at ease, and the way that Sibley was able to quickly arrive at this position and hold (which Ashton explicitly pointed out in his coaching) also matches the music perfectly.

Judging from the fact that the Ed Sullivan show as in 1966(?) and the BBC broadcast was in 1968, I think their interpretations grew more mature and natural over the years in practices and performances.

I doubt I can take to anyone else as Titania after watching Sibley. The way that Sibley moves every part of her body to incorporate the role and the aura of magic and dream it produces are simply incomparable. I did see both recordings of the RB performance with Park at the Met and the ABT performance of Ferri. I would say that the RB performance is way better and more true to the spirit of the ballet. Park was very good, (perhaps because she was also coached by Ashton?) and that RB recording still remains the best full performance of The Dream we can see today on the Internet.

2 hours ago, yvonnep said:

I'm now living in New York. Since discovering the archive that LPA had a couple of months ago I have paid several visits to it and had the chance to find a few hidden gems there: Act IV of La Bayadere by Fonteyn and Nureyev, Clips of Giselle by Fonteyn and Nureyev with Sibley and Shaw dancing the Peasant PDD, Sibley&Dowell&Seymour&Nureyev in balcony PDD in a promotion video of Romeo&Juliet, etc. There is a lot more to explore and I'm so grateful that NYPL has made an effort in preserving these recordings. I hope one day they will be able to digitalise all of them (right now they're short of funds as far as I know, so the digitalisation has been very slow).

 

Oh and how can I have forgot to mention that they also have the full recording of a dress rehearsal of The Two pigeons with Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3c8814e0-f87e-0130-4822-3c075448cc4b I spent that whole afternoon indulging myself in watching it again and again... I can't even imagine that such cuteness existed...

On 06/01/2018 at 14:40, FLOSS said:

The BBC broadcast the Dream in March 1968 with the original cast on BBC1.I  have been warned by someone who had the good luck to have seen the original cast in the very early years of the ballet that he thought it had been filmed before the cast had finely conquered the choreography and turned the reconciliation pas de deux into the beautifully flowing thing it became. But there again perhaps it looked like that on television because the camera brings you that much closer to the dancers. Of course it is too much to hope but perhaps it will turn up on the ICA label in a restored state. We had to wait for fifty years for the recording of the original cast performance of Fille to be issued on DVD. Perhaps as the recording of the Dream will be fifty years old this year it too will be issued on DVD in due course. The BBC only allocated forty five minutes to the whole performance but I find it hard to believe that it was cut.

 

Although I have to say that the two recordings of Ashton ballets that i would really love to get my hands on are restored copies of the film of The Enigma Variations danced by the original cast which was made by the Argos film company and the recording of Symphonic Variations which was made for Granada television in the !970's.It has an ideal cast, if not the ideal cast, of Sibley, Dowell, Penney, Coleman ( in the Brian Shaw role), Ann Jenner and Gary Sherwood.Tiny snippets of this recording turn up on the internet and even with the distortions caused by filming the images on the television screen it is quite wonderful as everyone knows how to dance it as a flow of movement. The entire cast is so musically aware and astute that they are able to bring shading and a sense of poetry to their performances. In large part this is because the casts were not changed each time it was revived. I once went through the performance database looking at the casts for Symphonic Variations and  Scenes de Ballet and discovered that during a fairly extensive period there was a nucleus of dancers who appeared in Symphonic revival after revival with the occasional dancer given an opportunity to dance it but rarely used again and that the ballerina role and the main male role in Scenes were even more exclusive. Dancers were not given the opportunity to show they could do with the roles they were selected for them. It is easy to forget what a fine classical dancer Coleman was capable of being, but for years he danced the male lead with Sibley, the preferred exponent of the ballerina lead, or Penney a close second. This suggests that the criteria applied to casting the ballerina role was the ability to dance  Aurora in the grand manner rather than anything else.

 

If you really want to make yourself miserable about the gems that lie locked away somewhere in the archives take a look at the Ashton Filmography and then trawl through the BBC Genome where you can look at back copies of the Radio Times. The thing that really makes my mouth water is not a film but a talk that went out on what I think was still the third programme, rather than Radio 3,  when the company first staged Les Noces. The talk is about the significance of Les Noces and the speakers are Ashton and Nabokov. I just hope that someone realised the importance of the talk and that it was either recorded in its entirety or that it was at least published in its entirety in The Listener. 

I usually don't post on the forum but feel that I have to rely to this one to share information about these recordings.

The 1968 recording of the original cast of The Dream is preserved by the Jerome Robbins Dance division at the Library of Performing Arts (LPA) of New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, New York. It's not digitalised yet and I had to seek LPA staff's help in finding the recording and playing it. The tape can only be watched once at one time, because to watch it again it has to be rewound by the staff and the rewinding usually takes 15 to 20 minutes. The performance was inexplicably beautiful, almost magical. Sibley and Dowell were so wonderful together. I have to say nobody can ever hold a candle to them in these two roles.

And I think they also have the recording of Symphonic Variations here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/87437fd0-4b52-0133-4044-60f81dd2b63c . It's been digitalised, so one doesn't need the staff's help to watch it. However it can only be viewed onsite on one of the computers at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of LPA. I haven't checked it out yet but judging from the cast information listed on the page, it is the recording you mentioned.

I'm now living in New York. Since discovering the archive that LPA had a couple of months ago I have paid several visits to it and had the chance to find a few hidden gems there: Act IV of La Bayadere by Fonteyn and Nureyev, Clips of Giselle by Fonteyn and Nureyev with Sibley and Shaw dancing the Peasant PDD, Sibley&Dowell&Seymour&Nureyev in balcony PDD in a promotion video of Romeo&Juliet, etc. There is a lot more to explore and I'm so grateful that NYPL has made an effort in preserving these recordings. I hope one day they will be able to digitalise all of them (right now they're short of funds as far as I know, so the digitalisation has been very slow).

On 1/26/2014 at 13:40, Terpsichore said:

But I think you are very wise not to press for her autograph now.   You saw Sibley when she was in her prime and there is still plenty of footage of her from that time. You don't need a scrap of paper.

 

I am so delighted to see Sibley again after all those years. Though Fonteyn is the dancer I most admired, Sibley is the dancer I most liked.

Agreed!

Sorry to veer off the topic a bit. Speaking of footage, do you know if there is any chance I can find a recording of the 1969 BBC broadcast of Sibley and Dowell's Sleeping Beauty anywhere? I've been desperate to find one...