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ballet is the best


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i am interested in what organsismo board members enjoy ballet, and which of you have seen works performed back in the day. i used to semi-like classical music, but ballet brought me all the way there. As i grew to like ballet more and more, it was interesting to note how my **dislike** of opera and symphony GREW, counterbalencing the other side of the equation....

my biggest problem in ballet is that i am so torn about the nutcracker. on one had, the kids like it, and they have fun and its all about the kids, right? but on the other hand it is like the #1 piece in ballet that could use a full on revision, into a proper ballet for ballet dancers and no crazy stage sets. I know it could work, because back around 1987 they did in nyc a new interpertation of CARMEN/ my first impression was shock as it was so different than what my mind was used to seeing, while listening to the Carmen music....so my first impressoion made me kind of uncomfortable.....but after the curtain went down i realized on how important this was.....WOULD YOU ONLY WANT TO LISTEN TO ONE VERSION OF A NIGHT IN TUNISIA THE REST OF YOUR LIFE??????? no of course not. you want to hear Tyronne Washington play it with art blakey in 1969 on the campus of NYU, ***AND*** u want to listen to bird play it at the bird and a basket club on central ave////

the AAA #1 greatest ballerina currently performing in the world is named Louise Nadeau. To make you guys understand, its like if the ballet was The Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, and louise was the Cal Tjader--Vince Guralidi Quintet, with special guest saxophonist this evening, Stan Getz.

also original sin by john lewis is a jazz ballet

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Was taken to a Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo performance at about age 12 (my younger sister was a big ballet fan, took ballet herself and was pretty good), but it made no sense to me -- just seemed like a lot of arch, frilly posing. And the tights and the tutus! Not for me. Then at about age 18 I went to a modern dance performance by Sybil Shearer:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn41...22/ai_n15943731

(my sister was among her young students for a while) and was astonished. In Shearer's solo work (she mainly worked solo, I think), every gesture "spoke," and in one ensemble piece you could also virtually see the lines of force that ran from each dancer, and his or her limbs, to the other dancers and their moving limbs. Wow. I began to get it.

Then a few years later I saw the New York City Ballet do, among other things, Stravinsky's "Symphony in Three Movements." There's a moment IIRC when the whole company moves suddenly and aggressively toward the front of the stage in (probably) three horizontal lines, and it was very powerful and also damn scary -- as though they might just keep on going right into the audience, run you over, and beat you up. Yet it was still, as they, dance. That taught me that there's probably no vein of emotion that dance can't convey; it's not just about being pretty and how to jump. Have seen other good things over the years -- much less than I should have though. If I'd lived in Manhattan while Balanchine was still around, I would have tried to be at the NYCB as often as I could.

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  • 6 years later...

Stumbled into this documentary on Netflix quite accidentally last night, and was just going to wait until LTB fell asleep and then get over to baseball, but no, the vintage performance footages transfixed me at once, and when it was over, I rewatched from the beginning. The whole "tragic life story thing", ok, yeah, tragic life story, that it is, but the footage...holy shit, the footage.

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Afternoon-of-a-Faun-Tanaquil-Le-Clercq/70298351

70298351.jpg

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Always appreciated the idea of it more than the reality of it (at least what I saw of it), but this stuff is freakin' riveting. How much of that is Balanchine and how much of it is the dancers inspiring Balanchine (and how much of the impact is intensified by kinescope, I always feel kinescope footage very....rawly), I don't know, and at this point neither care nor need to know. I'm still working on the whole Ellington thing for that equation. Until then, hey, this is a groove of it's own, and a beautiful groove it is.

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  • 1 year later...

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