5 replies to this topic

[rg]

these two scans of photos, neither much credited or dated, include the presence of John Prinz, once prominent in both New York City Ballet and in American Ballet Theatre.

Prinz is on the dance calendar this week with a program, described below, being given in a single performance event on Sunday. Copy from the press release reads in part as follows:

JOHN PRINZ, esteemed former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, in association with DanceTracksNYC, is pleased to present a spectacular evening of classical and contemporary ballet, highlighted by dances by John Prinz, Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov, and an appearance by New York City Ballet dancers Rachel Piskin and Ralph Ippolito, Sunday April 5, 7:30 PM, at the Ailey Citigroup Theater/The Joan Weill Center for Dance, 405 West 55th Street.

the two photos scanned here show him with ABT.

in the trio photo he's posed as [Caroline's] Lover, with Carla Fracci as Caroline, and, Mimi Paul[?] as An Episode in His Past, from Tudor's JARDIN AUX LILAS.

in the quintet photo, with Tudor, he's pictured as Romeo, paired with Natalia Makarova's Juliet. (the couple on the left is Fracci paired with Ivan Nagy, as Juliet and Romeo, in Tudor's ROMEO AND JULIET.)

Attached Files

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•  R_Jfoursome_ATwm.jpg   225.01K   75 downloads

[richard53dog]

rg, on Apr 1 2009, 09:23 PM, said:

these two scans of photos, neither much credited or dated, include the presence of John Prinz, once prominent in both New York City Ballet and in American

in the trio photo he's posed as [Caroline's] Lover, with Carla Fracci as Caroline, and, Mimi Paul[?] as An Episode in His Past, from Tudor's JARDIN AUX LILAS.

rg,

I believe you are correct in your identification of Mimi Paul in the Jardin. I no longer have the programs but I think I saw those three together. And those huge eyes are a trademark of Paul.

[bart]

Wonderful photos.  I wish I could remembed more about Prinz.  I know I must have seen him in the original casts of La Source (a pdd with Verdy) and Dances at a Gathering shortly before he went to ABT, but I don't remember details.  By the way, Robert Garis's book, Following Balanchine, has a lovely photo of Verdy and Prinz in La Source, 1968

My memory must be going, because I had even forgotten that Mimi Paul moved to ABT from New York City Ballet !  Or that Makarova apparently began her US career as a brunette.    

I seem to recall that Paul's defection to ABT was one of the consequences of Balanchine's favoritism to Suzanne Farrell?

rg's photos made me curious about this era of marvellous dancers at ABT (Fracci, Makarova, Nagy].  How did Prinz and Paul fit in, after they had crossed over?  Arlene Croce wrote a report on Makarova in Feb. 1971:

Quote

[Makarova] made Tudor's fantasy in Jadin aux Lilas work, [...] bringing to the part of Caroline such an outpouring of tragic emotion that the ballet surged with life as it rarely does.  Makarova's intensity was almost too much at times -- the emotion reaching floodtide couldn't always recede in time to preserve the stoic facade of the social code Tudor's choreography captures so brilliantly; and though John Prinz met her more tha halfway (in a performance much improved but much to violent), one couldnt really believe in them as a natural pair of lovers.

Paul apparently danced Les Syphides with Makarova in the same month

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[Her] movements reflect only utter bafflement or a pretty notion of how sylphides comport themselves.

[ .... ]  Makarova's zephyrous lightness, in the leaps that were scaled down for the small stage of the City Center, or in the magnificent weightlesslyli asscending lifts with Nagy, would have been impressive in any ballet, but here one was struck even more by the vividness of her head and arms in poses that seemed to belong to this and to no other ballet, and by the continuous active impact of these poses as a means of focusing the attention of the audience not upon Makarova as a person but upon the meaning of the ballet.  That meaning is what Mimi Paul toyed with in her Prelude but couldn't project because her arms kept losing tension in a step-by-step definition of the dance instead of sustaining that tension like a charged current througout the dance as a whole.

From the same year:  

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Natalia Makaroava, the great Russian star now with Amreican Ballet Theatre, is unsurpassed in her own limited repertory.  She made an affecting debut last winter in Tudor's thirty-five-year-old classic Jardin aux Lilas, but her future in a company that has been unable to do anything with Mimi Paul and Cynthia Gregory is questionable.

Here's Croce on the Tudor Romeo and Juliet in the fall of 1971.  [I have interpolated a couple of responses of my own.]:

Quote

The event of the American Ballet Theatre season and one of the great events of the ballet year was the revival of Tudor's Romeo and Juliet with the Eugene Berman scenery and the Frederick Delius Music, and with Carla Fracci and Natalia Makarova heading alternate casts.  [WOW!   ]  The ballet is not Shakespeare's tragedy but a shimmering vision of the Renaissance, weighted by one of the most splendid architectural sets of modern times. Tudor's choreography curls around it like an insinuating growth.  [ ... ]  

The lovers in this ballet are aesthetic objects rather than characters.  Ivan Nagy understood his part less well than Carla Fracci, who could become a great Juliet.  I did not get to Makarova, whose Romeo was John Prinz.  [Darn it!      ]

[carbro]

Once again, thanks for these wonderful pictures, rg.

bart, on Apr 1 2009, 09:00 PM, said:

My memory must be going, because I had even forgotten that Mimi Paul moved to ABT from New York City Ballet !  Or that Makarova apparently began her US career as a brunette.

Don't blame your memory.  Look a bit more closely at the top of NM's forehead, near the part, and you might detect a wigline.  I've seen Makarova's hair in various shades ranging from medium reddish-brown to almost-blonde (and, pre-defection, quite blonde indeed!) but not as dark as this seems to be.

[bart]

Looks like you're right, carbro.  What an eye!  I guess that the dark hair was an attempt to make her (a) more stereotypically "Italian" and (b) more llike Fracci?

It would be wonderful to hear from someone who has actually seen one of these performances?  And from those with vivid memories of Prinz.

[Alymer]

In the original production Alicia Markova is described as wearing an auburn wig.  Given that it's a black and white photograph might that be the answer?