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BBC4 Dance Programmes - May 2018


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Not sure if this is the right place but I have caught up with Dark Kinght and Dying Swan or if there's a need for a new thread. 

 

Interesting that Dark Knight emphasised how good Kenneth MacMillan is at telling a story when the documentary seemed rather meandering with little narrative dynamic.  Also I found it irritating mixing three different Romeo and Juliet couples and including some slow motion.  There are of course some fabulous sections/archive clips so well worth seeing but I can't help thinking it should have been much better.

 

I very much enjoyed Dying Swan.  There is an incredible section where Zen watches Natalia Osipova rehearsing Dying Swan - it really is wonderful to see and very poignant indeed.

 

 

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I have mixed feelings about Dark Knight . On the one hand there were some tantalising archive footage of Macmillan choreographing and excerpts from several filmed productions which are unlikely to surface in their entirety, plus some interesting contributions and yet... It was the latter which I felt was an area where we were let down- where were contributions from Lynn Seymour, Marcia Haydee Mukhamedov or Jann Parry(author of the substantial Macmillan biographer, Different Drummer)? The documentary makers seemed to be on an economy drive choosing to draw exclusively on Royal Ballet luminaries who were on hand - would Alessandra Ferri have been included had she not been guesting with the company this year? How strange too, that there were no clip of the televised production of Romeo and Juliet Ferri danced with Wayne Eagling while she was talking about this ballet . Instead, there were three other filmed clips of the balcony pas de deux. My other  criticism is that the title of the documentary Dark Knight was the Macmillan choreographer that we saw exclusively There was scant reference to anything other than his 'tortured/dark' subjects for his ballets and the range of ballets discussed within this category was also narrow  ( no mention of Requiem, Isadora, Winter Dreams, Elite Syncopations , Dance Concertante . I don't mean to be churlish because an hour documentary inevitably has to be selective, but I ended up feeling these  were several key omissions.

 

 

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Alison: Thanks for moving John's post - having created the thread, I quite forgot how to move a single post rather than an entire thread!

 

Mixed feelings chez nous about the MacMillan documentary, with the absence of Lynn Seymour and Jann Parry particularly curious, as already noted.  That said, I can't think when I last saw Ms Seymour take part in an interview but I'd have thought that Jann Parry might have ben amenable to an approach from the producers.  Lots of Lady MacMillan, not surprisingly, though I doubt she knew him in his earlier 'dark' days.

 

I found the Yanowsky piece absolutely charming.  I'd no need of reinforcement on her qualities as a dance-actress, but I was completely taken by the portrait of her as a woman, mother and, indeed, daughter.  My respect and admiration grew throughout the all-too-brief 30 minutes.

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There was some lovely footage in the Macmillan documentary, and it was very nice to hear his voice again. I also found the 'home movies' part very moving - it's so unusual to see him smiling and happy and he clearly adored his wife and daughter. But as a documentary I found it very frustrating. If I didn't already know all about him, I think I would have found it pretty unilluminating (though I hope the dancing itself would have grabbed me). And they kept showing subtitles including essential information about what you were watching, in small letters that were difficult to read and didn't stay up long, and that you had to (try and) read instead of watching the footage itself. Why not have a 'narrator' for the documentary? Leaving 'talking heads' and a few subtitles to tell the story is a very risky strategy, since people may not say anything particularly interesting, and there may be lots of interesting other things that should be said. It strikes me as a rather lazy way of making a programme - as if you don't really want to take editorial/authorial responsibility for it. It was also entirely uncritical, both in the sense that it was only positive and in the sense that there was very little real analysis of what he did and what made his actual choreography so effective. And as Odyssey has said it didn't really cover the range of his talent. (I also thought it dwelt unnecessarily and rather ghoulishly on the manner of his death, which although terribly poignant, and deeply shocking for all concerned, is not really relevant in considering his life and work.) So, frustrating, but also great to see a whole programme about him and the various excerpts from his works. (Bussell's bourrées in Song of the Earth!! Fantastic.)

 

I had a rather similar reaction to the Yanowsky programme. Again, lovely to see a programme devoted to her and the footage of her dancing. But it didn't in the end tell much of a story. The injury aspect (which had been trailed as the theme of the programme) petered out half way through, and since the programme kept mentioning her retirement from the Royal Ballet it was a bit odd that it focussed entirely on a non-RB performance at Sadler's Wells. It just seemed rather confused. And it didn't show enough of her career before this performance, or why she was so special. And again it relied largely on her talking to the camera rather than a more structured, informative approach. I thought she deserved better.

 

 

Edited by bridiem
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Not to mention that it implied it was her retirement from dancing, when we know she's on at the Barbican in another week ...  Presumably more of a "hanging up her pointe shoes".

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1 hour ago, JohnS said:

Very interesting to read these posts - I've tried to 'like' them but I'm not sure the function is working following the software upgrade or is it me?

 

Seems to work for me, John.  I've just liked yours :) 

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Thanks very much for these reviews- sadly I don't feel surprised that these documentaries are lacklustre. Gone are the days of great TV arts documentaries by such as Tony Palmer.

The best art documentaries these days seem to be by people like EOS ( Exhibition on Screen) which are distributed to cinemas then go to DVD ( e.g. recent films on Canaletto, Vermeer). It would be marvellous if they or similar could make some good in-depth ballet documentaries.  After all, ballet  requires the film treatment more than painting....

 

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It works OK with my laptop.  On my phone I had to press on the black circle that appeared.

 

As regards to Dark Knight, I was also surprised by the non-appearances mentioned elsewhere.  It was lovely and rather moving to see the home movies.

 

I absolutely loved the way they interspersed the R&J balcony duets!

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2 hours ago, JohnS said:

Very interesting to read these posts - I've tried to 'like' them but I'm not sure the function is working following the software upgrade or is it me?

 

I've just raised this in the Problems forum.

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11 hours ago, Odyssey said:

There was scant reference to anything other than his 'tortured/dark' subjects for his ballets

Yes I didn't enjoy the lengthy time spent discussing, and  lingering on the scenes of, sexual violence in The Invitation and The Judas Tree. It didn't exactly encourage me to want to see either  of those!

Despite the quite touching family-related parts, and some lovely dancing sequences,  to me it all portrayed  a slightly depressing impression of Macmillan, when really I would have hoped for something more uplifting, given his wonderful choreography and production values in other works. Also, all the “talking heads” of dancers were those who had retired, or at least pretty close to doing so, and it would have been good to include some current virtuosi  giving their views as to the ongoing relevance of Macmillan’s work today and their enjoyment in performing it.  

Edited by Richard LH
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I haven't yet had a chance to view my recording of Dark Knight - but I wondered how it compared with Derek Bailey's documentary of some years ago, made when MacMillan was still alive.  Did anyone on the forum see that documentary - called Out Of Line?  As far as I remember, that one was much more balanced.

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47 minutes ago, Richard LH said:

Also, all the “talking heads” of dancers were those who had retired, or at least pretty close to doing so, and it would have been good to include some current virtuosi  giving their views as to the ongoing relevance of Macmillan’s work today and their enjoyment in performing it. 

 

Yes, I thought that too, at first, but then I realised they were sticking to those people who had actually known Kenneth.

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13 hours ago, Odyssey said:

There was scant reference to anything other than his 'tortured/dark' subjects for his ballets and the range of ballets discussed within this category was also narrow  ( no mention of Requiem, Isadora, Winter Dreams, Elite Syncopations , Dance Concertante . I don't mean to be churlish because an hour documentary inevitably has to be selective, but I ended up feeling these  were several key omissions.

 

I agree - I seem to recall there was a still photo, or a couple of seconds' clip, of Concerto, but it wasn't discussed.  Elite Syncopations featured briefly in a piece of rehearsal footage as I remember hearing the music (possibly the Calliope Rag?) but again, wasn't discussed.

 

12 hours ago, bridiem said:

(I also thought it dwelt unnecessarily and rather ghoulishly on the manner of his death, which although terribly poignant, and deeply shocking for all concerned, is not really relevant in considering his life and work.) 

 

Yes, I felt the same.

 

Also, was it my imagination, or was there a clip of Juliet about to take the potion, but the "music" playing at the time was the "heartbeat" moment from Mayerling just before they shoot themselves?  That really threw me for a moment.

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1 hour ago, Richard LH said:

Also, all the “talking heads” of dancers were those who had retired, or at least pretty close to doing so, and it would have been good to include some current virtuosi  giving their views as to the ongoing relevance of Macmillan’s work today and their enjoyment in performing it.  

 

Indeed. Somebody (possibly Monica Mason?) said that dancers seek out the Royal Ballet as an employer specifically so they get to dance MacMillan; I have only recently heard a dancer of the RB say she'd done exactly that (Meaghan Grace Hinkis, in the Q&A session at the Saturday matinee of Steps Back in Time) and it would have been good to have that angle.

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I really enjoyed watching Dark Knight having such a varied 'friendship' with his works - there are some that I love and some which I frankly feel indifferent about (unlike Ashton who I love unequivocally).  It really helped to build a picture of a man I know very little about and have since picked up a copy of Jann Parry's tome - it arrived from Amazon today and I didn't expect it to be so massive! So I think it did a good job of a basic introduction for those of us who are less familiar with his work.

 

I also enjoyed Dancing in the Blitz although there wasn't much new information there. I'm a historian at heart and I think what was particularly interesting was how the war mobilised a nation in its love for British ballet but I think I would have liked to have understood more about the audiences and how they were converted to ballet from it being far more specialist -  over and above the balletomane who created his own newsletters. I would imagine that there are few to none left, however.

 

Still to watch the other programmes...

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I may not know much about ballet but have some professional experience of the making of documentaries, for the BBC and others. I watched Dark Knight: might one suggest to Lady MacMillan that her influence, if that is the right word, does not always achieve the best result?

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On 10/05/2018 at 12:11, RuthE said:

 

Indeed. Somebody (possibly Monica Mason?) said that dancers seek out the Royal Ballet as an employer specifically so they get to dance MacMillan; I have only recently heard a dancer of the RB say she'd done exactly that (Meaghan Grace Hinkis, in the Q&A session at the Saturday matinee of Steps Back in Time) and it would have been good to have that angle.

 

This point gets made quite often: I've been turning it over in my head for a few days and I'm not sure that dancers enjoying MacMillan is relevant to his quality as a choreographer. I'm very happy that it appears to attract dancers (and so could be said to lift the overall quality of RB recruits), but I can never shake the words of a film reviewer who said that whenever he hears a cast talking about what a super time they had making a film his heart sank as the enjoyment in making a film seemed to be in inverse proportion to the quality of the end result.

 

There are similar observations to be made about e.g. Mozart operas: some of his soprano arias in particular are fiendishly difficult and deliberately hell on the upper passaggio (he was striving for a particular effect). In my experience singers talk about how good Mozart is for the voice as there's nowhere for sloppy technique to hide, but it's noticeable that these days they tend to drop him as soon as, for example, Puccini comes knocking. But no-one thinks of Mozart as a lesser composer for this.

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The dying swan was Charming - loved the children doing their homework (or not) in the dressing room. Agree half an hour was too short but better than nothing. 

 

Dark Knight was too superficial in my view- I didn't understand why Macmillan was drawn to dark stories - little was mentioned of his childhood. Was there a connection? It was good to see so many clips of dancers but they didn't appear to be credited.

i think for real insight I will need to read a biography.

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