Lobenthal.com

Why doesn’t the Metropolitan Opera–and opera houses around the country–market themelves as basically the last venues in the United States where you can hear the unamplified human singing voice?

She seems to have no intention of reforming, as her transition team picks demonstrate.

As Norman Solomon writes at Common Dreams, “on a vast array of issues—basic principles will require progressives to fight against her actual policy goals, every step of the way.”

And believe me, we/they will!  She is a woman with very poor judgement, so it is up to others to remind her that Obama part 3, will see her tossed out on her ass in four years, and the next Donald Trump elected.

Once again, there is the sorry spectacle of President Obama committing below-the-waterline injury to his own reputation, giving future biographers lots of fodder for head-shaking, as well as sticking it to the Democratic Party, the country, the planet.

This is a tale of two Obamas.

One is the president who has meekly accepted the GOP’s mugging of our judicial system, congressional precedent and constitutional mandate, its refusal to schedule hearings for his Supreme Court nominee. He seems to have just given up.  You can almost hear Obama saying, “Oh, well, I’m tired, and I’m almost out the door, anyway.”

The other Obama is newly engaged, Johnny-on-the-spot, ready to expend every last bit of political capital to something passed:

That is the Obama who is insisting that the democracy-targeting Trans-Pacific Partnership be voted on in the upcoming lame-duck Congressional session. TPP will override U.S. national sovereignty and further cripple that very same judicial system that the GOP has put in its rifle sights.

Obama’s obstinacy has, of course sparked outage among the progressive groups and constituencies that are not very happy about Hillary, but must show up in November in order for Hillary to get elected. It even contradicts Hillary’s own stated “evolutionary’ position on the subject. It contradicts Trump’s own faux-populist opposition to the treaty. It plays right into Trump’s hand.

The word “legacy” is one of those terms, concepts, adjectives that have been rendered largely meaningless by our “mainstream” “news” media. They tell us over and over again that Obama wants TPP passed to ensure his legacy.

Whether or not TPP passes Congress, certainly this will cement Obama’s legacy as a corporate toady who was always avid to give Jamie and all the other Jamies whatever they want at all and any cost.

Now that Facebook’s under investigation by the IRS, surely this is exactly the right time for Hillary to be touting Sheryl Sandberg for her cabinet.

Undoutbtedly Sandberg would be “creative,” “innovative,” and just as important, oh, so fervid an advocate of fiscal “flexibility”!

I had decided not to post/link to my book reviews–good, bad, or indifferent–it seemed just too awfully needy, don’t you agree?

But someone mischievously persuaded me otherwise in this case.

In for a penny, in for a pound, here’s the link.

HERE IT IS IN FULL!

“At the Birth of Modern Ballet: Where ballet training once focused on strength and stamina, Balanchine insisted on tall, light and fast dancers—Patricia Wilde was the prototype”

By Judith Flanders [Aug. 12, 2016 3:51 p.m. ET]

The life and work of George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet and choreographer of genius, is hardly unknown territory: The Library of Congress catalog lists nearly 300 titles exploring his art, his dance company, his life and even his cat. (Mourka was trained to leap balletically, and a book illustrating her photogenic skills has duly been cat-alogued.) Joel Lobenthal, associate editor of Ballet Review, has seemingly followed a more conventional path: “Wilde Times” is ostensibly a biography of an early Balanchine dancer, Patricia Wilde. But in truth the author uses her career to chart the unfolding of the New York City Ballet’s signature style and the creation of the prototypical “Balanchine dancer.”

Without belaboring the point, Mr. Lobenthal portrays a dance world that has vanished. Wilde, by birth Canadian, moved to New York to study dance at the shatteringly young age of 14, following the path set by her sister Nora, soon to join the Ballet Russe. By 1945, the 17-year-old Ms. Wilde had joined the same company. Ms. Wilde’s adolescent experience with the Ballet Russe saw her on a 79-city tour, during which it was entirely routine to give both matinee and evening performances, before rehearsing after the final curtain, and then traveling to a new city the next morning.

More importantly for her future, in the summer of 1945 Ms. Wilde worked with a pickup company Balanchine took to Mexico City, where she danced in “Apollo,” a seminal work in the Balanchine canon. “Balanchine taught class every morning at ten o’clock and conducted rehearsals late into the afternoon—without, unlike most of the city, a siesta break,” Mr. Lobenthal recounts. The dancers recalled this as a never-again-matched period of close collaboration with the choreographer.

Still, the New York City Ballet, founded in 1948 by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, must have seemed like just one more ephemeral group when Ms. Wilde joined it in 1950. Balanchine’s prodigious, untamed talent would ensure its longevity, and then its institutional status. Ms. Wilde was part of that transformation: Balanchine, as Mr. Lobenthal so astutely notes, uniquely blended his own desire for dance pared back to its essence with the theatricality that the Ballet Russe instilled into dancers like Ms. Wilde and Maria Tallchief (later to become one of the many Mrs. Balanchines). This is the author’s gift: The ability to take an impermanent visual art and anatomize it for his readers, showing what makes a dancer, or a piece, or a style, so special. For instance, he uses Ms. Wilde’s technical strengths—her speed, her precision, and her fearless, almost ferocious attack—to detail the difference between older dance training, focused on “strength, stamina, and control” and the more modern choices of height, lightness, speed and turnout. These choices were, in great part, established through Balanchine’s own preferences.

But while we read of Balanchine’s endless supply of creativity, turned into visual reality by Ms. Wilde and her coevals, there is another story in the background. Balanchine’s towering artistic gift was not matched by an equivalent love of humanity, or even the milk of human kindness. He was frequently unforgiving and ruthless. Dancers were set at odds with one another; some were banished for daring to have private lives. Sometimes, suggests Mr. Lobenthal, the choreographer deliberately created an aura of uncertainty, even fear, simply to increase his own enjoyment of a piece of which he had begun to tire.

The two sides of the choreographer are mirrored elsewhere. Ticket prices were kept deliberately low, to ensure the widest possible audiences. That is, of course, laudable, but without other sources of funding, also an institutional weakness: On tour the dancers were forced to go into debt, their per diem payments well below subsistence level. Mr. Lobenthal fails to connect these two points, even as he recounts both. There are other conclusions, too, that he fails to draw.

Ms. Wilde’s toughness is one of these. Dancers are frequently spoken of, and to, as children: They do what they’re told without the diva-dom of opera singers, or the independence of actors. Yet many of the greatest dancers worked as adults, as Ms. Wilde did, from early adolescence, and they had the survival skills that came with it. In 1953, Ms. Wilde married George Bardyguine, yet when, after decades of marriage and two children, he became ill and unreliable in his post as technical director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, it was Ms. Wilde, then its artistic director, who told him he had to go. It appears that she learned more than just choreography from Balanchine.

The book’s starting-point, hundreds of hours of interviews with Wilde, perhaps prevents the author from drawing these conclusions. Instead of the banal observations that interviewees are prone to make—does it tell us anything to know that people Ms. Wilde stayed with were “Exceedingly nice”?—more of Mr. Lobenthal’s astute analyses would have been of far greater value. Nonetheless, Mr. Lobenthal has created a new way of seeing an old subject, and it is very welcome indeed.

as will this post.

Was noodling around in the wee hours and checked in to ABT’s casting for their fall season.

Had to laugh when I saw that Veronika Part is down for Balanchine’s Siren with ABT in October.

Not that she isn’t right for the role–it’s how right she is, and how long it’s taken her to do it.

So I started to post, got sleepy, pressed Publish instead of Save Draft.

Rescinded that this am.

Anyway, here’s the drill:

Flashback to the fall of 2000. ABT was reviving Prodigal Son after a long respite.

Tchernichova and I had seen the Kirov in the first of their two London seasons that summer. I reviewed it for Ballet Review. There was a lot of fabulous dancing on Covent Garden’s glorious, storied stage.

While she was there, Tchernichova discussed with then-Kirov director Makhar Vasiev how salutary to all concerned would be guest appearances by some of the company’s rising, reigning crop of  “girls”–the names of Lopatkina, Part, and Vishneva were mentioned in parley.

Distinctly remember speculating with Tchernichova on how all three “girls” would be wonderful for the Siren.

When she got back to New York, Tchernichova phoned Peter Martins and Kevin McKenzie, who of course never got back to her.

Irony of ironies, Part of course has been a full time member of ABT since 2002.

Irony of further ironies, Vishneva since 2005 has been one of ABT’s many guest, permanent guest, part-time members of the company– or whatever they’re called–stars.

In Tallulah’s autobiography, she talks about returning with friends from a Diaghilev performance in London—“Caught up in the graces of that artistic riddle we felt we should celebrate.”

Well, Laura had to get up early the next morning, so we didn’t go out for a drink after taking in the Sarasota Ballet’s all-Ashton program at the Joyce—playing through the weekend.

But we did rap about it the next day.

Valses Nobles et Sentimentales

LJ: Ashton loves ballet. He makes no bones about it.

JL: So refreshing in an era when ballet is tempted to apologize for itself.

LJ: He loves it down to its tiniest pieces—a tendu, a fourth position, a notch of epaulement. He loves these pieces just as they are and doesn’t feel the need to make them anything extra beyond what they are.  He’s exploratory in the way he puts the pieces together, not so much in the way he stretches or distorts them.

JL: He wants to beguile us with beauty. He’s geisha-like almost. Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is one of the last in that long series of haunted-ballroom ballets, which began perhaps with Balanchine’s Le Bal in 1929.

LJ: Did Ashton see Balanchine’s Cotillon?

JL: Oh yes, the Ballet Russe did it in London all through the 1930s.

LJ: I’ve always loved Ashton’s commitment to croise and it’s everywhere in this ballet.

JL: What does it mean to you?  

LJ: I guess there’s something quintessentially English about it. Propriety, containment, this not spilling yourself all over everybody—in efface and en face. And the wit of telling it slant, with a bit of shadow.

JL:  Ashton arranges things that fit the music expertly, he heeds the mood of the music, but Balanchine choreographing La Valse in 1951, to the same music, seems to reach into its deepest, unspoken dreams, desires, anxieties.

LJ: Yes, Balanchine’s anxieties—the snake in his garden—the sense that death is always waiting. In this music Ashton plays with the lighter shadows of love; Balanchine goes for a more preying and expressionistic darkness.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee 

LJ:  This side of Ashton—the dance hall, pantomimes, folk dance—is pure joy.  He just seems to toss it off, as if he never had to learn it because it’s in his DNA.  And it really gives you the fun of dance, which is something that has gone missing from choreography today.  Ratmansky tries sometimes, but it’s too self-conscious and comes off as faux or labored.  This is light and true.

JL: A knockabout romp that is deliciously silly—let’s us laugh like kids again.

Paradise Garden

LJ: The Walk to the Paradise Garden duet is like MacMillan’s Romeo.

JL: Definitely Ashton’s gloss on MacMillan.

LJ: Was it Ashton who called himself lazy? Even if he was, his invention eventually kicks in, usually metaphysically. That Brahmin-esque Figure of Death, so William Blake with those outstretched arms and hanging panels, he’s like a bas relief chiseled on a tombstone. The lovers aren’t afraid of him, but attracted and curious, like they’re playing in a cemetery.

Friday’s Child

JL: “Friday’s Child” from Jazz Calendar was done originally for Sibley and Nureyev, and for me they are inscribed all over it—the toasts of London in 1968. They were integrated into the city’s cultural “elite”—that dreaded word in today’s cultural discourse—in a way that today’s ballet dancers might have a hard time comprehending. At the same time, they were accessible, because ballet was economically accessible. Sarasota’s young man should have worked his arabesque more, like Nureyev undoubtedly did.

The ballet steps don’t always sit organically on the bluesy score, but who cares? I don’t know Richard Rodney Bennett’s concert work, but he was a great soundtrack composer. Have you seen 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain?

LJ : No.

JL: You must.

LJ:  Please explain why.

JL:  Fabulous, haunting theme, and altogether a score that goes hand in glove with what the movie’s trying to say. It’s a seminal Cold War thriller. The arch-villain is a clearly insane Texas mogul who makes the very same noises that today are given credence as geopolitical pieties.

LJ:  “Friday’s Child” made me think of Blow-up.  The bedroom threesome with Jane Birkin, etc.  I don’t exactly know why it made me think of that, something about sex and spontaneity and not caring that the act should be more than some physical manipulation and an orgasm—oh that’s nice, gotta go.

JL:  There’s some romance there, too. So long as the warmth lasts, the affection is real. Of course Ashton knew company culture and he knew metropolitan culture.  Furtivity may have had its own allure, but he was clearly pleased that what was once covert was now more moving into the sunlight. Yes, Ashton’s Mod exercises of the 1960s were a little self-conscious—but there’s a real appreciation there, a love for youth in its high season. 

Sinfonietta

JL: In the Sinfonietta adagio, the multiple men lofting the woman around recall “Beauty Beauteous” in his Illuminations. Always interesting the way a great creator can return to the same themes or ideas and make them new.

LJ: It’s like “Lost in Space” or “Star Trek.” So it fuses spirituality with space.

JL: Lunar.

LJ: The patterns he makes with the 5 men and one woman are like one of those floating campuses in space that we get in the movies. But with Ashton, it always comes back to the woman and the pointe. Her supporting leg in arabesque is the axis of the universe.

Facade

LJ: I don’t love Façade. I should, given what I said earlier about Tweedledum and Tweedledee.  Maybe it doesn’t add up for me.

JL: I’ve never seen it before, so it was exciting to see something that’s been written about so much. A suite of variety and exhibition dance numbers—fun, and a bang-up finale.

LJ:  The Swiss Jodeling Song had me thinking about the “Two Ladies” number from Cabaret. Again, louche while innocent. But then, the primal/feral is very much in the system of ballet—“L’Apres-midi d’un faune” after all!—and it’s surprising that it doesn’t express itself more than it does. Ashton, though, is very much aware of this impulse.

by Martha Swope of Balanchine with Mimi Paul before a New York City Ballet Symphony in C,  from the digital collection of the Library for the Performing Arts.