Lobenthal.com

That’s what Elizabeth Kendall calls Dancing on Water in the current, June issue of Dance Magazine.  I don’t think it’s available on line, however, so buy the issue!!

Two years ago, when Charles Dutoit  led the Philadealphia Orchestra in Strainvksy’s “Apollo,” it was played differently than I’d ever heard it when seeing Balanchine’s ballet performed.  It was fascinating to compare interpretative decisions, the way that any musical reading makes different accommodations and adjustments without the inevitable dictates of human limbs and sinews.

In the adagio, phrase endings were clipped–no leg was onstage stretching to utmost breadth.  There were fewer syncopated accents–Balanchine’s choreography was not there to underscore them.

The score itself seemed rather pleased at being released from the obligations of  accompaniment or even partnership!

Last week at the NY Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert led Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, featuring violinist Lisa Batiashvili.  I’ve heard it so many times as I watched Opus 19: The Dreamer, the ballet that Jerome Robbins made to this music for New York City Ballet in 1979.

Now, the entire score seemed to be less plangent, less manifestly embedded by the dancer’s steps on the ground.  The rubatos were freer and more liberty was allowed in extremes of tempi.

Well, not quite.  But it’s really one of the most gratifying things you can easily do to make yourself believe that you’re part of the solution, not the problem, when it comes to the global environmental tailspin.

And it’s always intriguing to me that something that’s customarily treated as garbage can actually be fuel for something to be cherished—I love that dark composted soil!

Now Mayor Bloomberg wants NYC to get serious about composting

Mireya Navarro reports in The New York Times.

McClatchy (Knight-Ridder at the time) was one of the very few news organizations in this country to challenge the Bush administration’s fabricated, and even cockamamie accusations about Iraq’s potentially apocalyptic but non existent WMD.

Now, as the latest war is ginned up in the White House—Dem. or GOP, it’s all war, all the time—McClatchy applies the litmus test of reality to Obama’s trigger-happy posturing on Syria and the alleged chemical weapons attacks perpetuated against the “rebels.”   (I’d wager that a great deal of the people who throw that word around have no particular idea who these people are, how many oppositional factions they may actually consist of, and what their particular intentions may be.)

Anna Spelman, about whom Elena Tchernichova writes admiringly in our book, (and deservedly so), called me from Houston.  She’s visiting there from Chicago, a guest teacher at the school owned by Robert Underwood, another talented ABT alum, (he went on to become a principal dancer in Germany) whom I got to know during the 1980s.  She loves our book!  She said we had captured exactly what ABT was like during the ’80s.

That meant a lot to me.   Anna and Robert are two people who love and understand ballet at least as much for what it is as for what it’s given them.  (Someday I’m going to write up the terrible story of how Spelman was ejected from ABT’s revival of Tudor’s Dim Lustre in the mid-1980s, AFTER receiving a glowing review from Tobi Tobias in New York Magazine.)

Jacobs casts a wide net and does the diapason thing smashingly.

When she’s not writing the back-jacket blurb for Dancing on Water, she is covering the Met’s punk fashion show for The Wall Street Journal, deconstructing Mary McCarthy and her Group on the occasion of it’s 50th, (can’t get the gosh darn link for this), and commemorating the no-less-than 100 years since Le Sacre du Printemps first detonated  for The New Criterion.

Call them the Gold Dust Twins.

Going through papers—I’m always going through papers—I found a letter from Dean Goodman, written in 2005, a year before he died.

Goodman was an actor, writer, director.  He was also married to Dietrich’s daughter Maria Riva.

In my bio of Bankhead, I cited a story told me by actor Glenn Anders and, if not exactly confirmed, alluded to by assistant director Artie Jacobson:

Tallulah, determined to fan rumors that she and Dietrich were having an affair, raised her dress on the Paramount set to show her privates dusted with gold—ostensibly the same glitter with which Dietrich was known to powder her coiffure for the camera.

Dietrich and Bankhead were not having an affair, but were boon companions and bisexual playgirls—Sandy Campbell in his privately published memoir of Bankhead recalls how while both Tallulah and Marlene were at Paramount in the early ’30s used to boast of lesbian conquests in as loud and (so they hoped) shocking a voice as they could.

Anyway, Goodman in his long letter—there’s more I want to disclose from it—volunteers that while they were married Rivas confirmed the gold dust incident.

Now I’ve got to pick up his memoir, Maria, Marlene & Me, published by Shadbolt Press in 1993.

This way to download my interview about the book with Rob Sachs of Voice of Russia-USA radio.

Last week, Irina Kolpakova celebrated her 80th birthday, prompting me to review again the footage available of her on youtube.

A decade ago,  I donated to the Library for the Performing Arts a copy of most of a Soviet TV special made on her ca. 1970.   It shows excerpts from her performances in modern works, not simply the classical leads for which she is today best remembered, since that’s what she usually danced when the Kirov toured abroad.

I see that some of that documentary can now be seen on youtube, but apparently not all.  In any case, there is more on the dub I donated, and it provides a more comprehensive look at her.

I was also interested to see on youtube, courtesy Russianballetvideos, a valuable record of her partnership with Mikhail Baryshnikov.  They dance Sleeping Beauty’s act 3 Grand Pas de Deux.

In the Canadian documentary Leap of Faith, there’s also a brief glimpse of them in the Beauty pdd, presumably amateur footage from their performances in Toronto just before he defected in 1974.

“I was trying to match her style,” Baryshnikov recalled to me in 2010.

And I don’t mean Noonan’s vaudeville turns.

Turning is certainly not the strong suit of New York City Ballet’s men, so it was great to see all the whirling going ’round at ABT’s Symphony in C.  And given that’s it’s Balanchine choreography, the turning never gets out of hand.

Message to James Whiteside, however: cool it.

Somewhat in the first movement of Symphony in C, and even more so in Morris’s “Drink to Me,” one was too aware of how much this very talented dancer has to prove–or believes he has to prove–this season.  He’s just left the Boston Ballet to join ABT as a soloist but his Met season is basically a matter of making one principal role company debut after the other.

He did not make too much of Gremin in Onegin on May 17, but where dancing rather than acting is involved, this week he showed that he can do a lot.  But he was sinking to a bit too much thrashing and overreach.  And yet he has a biting attack that’s worth venting.

It’s a fine line–everything in ballet.