As i'm going to play this role very soon for a gala,i'd like to ask you a question:is this famous pas de deux a part of a whole ballet that is no more danced as a whole,or is it only the pas de deux on his own?as i've always seen the pdd,so i was wondering...just as for "Diana and Acteon" etc.
I'm also working on the style and expression,as the steps themselves are quite easy.I've understood that i have to be ethereal and my movements have to be very aerial.About the expression i am a bit perplexed....i am trying to have a deep expression but looking evanescent and calm especially in the pdd moments.Anyway i don't wanna be banal and taken for granted.How do you think one should depict the character?Thanks for your answers.

dancerboy87,

As far as I know, Spectre is the complete piece Fokine set choegraphy to. It's not part of a larger piece.

As for expression and style, think of this as a Romantic ballet ; a character falls asleep and dreams of a vision like character, very dream like. Usually the male would be the sleeping character and the ballerina would be the sylph like characer but here it is reversed.


For me . the Spectre needs to have a geat jump, since Njinsky did it originally but also great softness and very ethereal. Also grace is mandatory.

The upper body is also extremely important. The Spectre has magical arms that entice the girl from her nap and get her to follow him.
aavoid those pitfalls.


Lately I've seen Herman Cornejo at ABT, he was very good with his jumps and lower body but a bit stiff with his his upper body and especally his arms. No one is perfect and I did enjoy his performance.

I've seen other Spectre's on video and TV and of these, I would rate Manuel Legris as the best out of a strong group of competition. I usually find him a cold dancer but here it works. But what really attracted me to his performance is his use of arms. With them , he wills the girl out of her chair, and shedances with him without waking up

Try watchink some of the video performances if you can get yours hands on them. But for me the worst is the Faruhk Ruzimatov - Nina Ananiashvili one, that
looks like they are making up the steps as them go along with Nina throwing in jumps here and there. And Farukh has a dreadful outfit. Camp the nth degree.


But let me also wish you will have a wonderful success with this

Hi, dancerboy.
Spectre begins when The Girl enters. I have seen shortened versions of the ballet, but only a few seconds can be cut.

To me, the style is extremely important. Fokine was deeply influenced by Art Nouveau, which was such an important movement of that time, so the body should emulate curlicues. Maybe you should think of your arms as vines or smoke. How far to take it is crucial, though. I hope you have a very good coach. Also, you should remember that the Spectre is not a rose but a dream -- a memory of a rose. It (as distinct from a "he") exists only in the girl's mind. In a sense, the role is not unlike Giselle in Act II -- something sensed and intangible.

I would disagree with Richard, above, in that I did not find Cornejo's Spectre stiff in any way. I thought he was absolutely perfecto.

Thanks guys for your advices.I found interesting the thought of the arms as smoke.The one I am taking inspiration from is Malakhov's.The worst I've seen is Baryshnikov's.The problem is that I have to prepare it in a week time.So i'm a bit nervous and at the same time i want to be in the perfect style as the technique is here sacrified.I'll do my best.Thanks again.

I would also suggest looking at some photographs of Nijinsky in the role. Can’t help you with the steps, but there is no dancer who comes across more powerfully in stills, in this role (and Scheherazade) especially.



I admire Legris, too. He comes very close to my idea of Nijinsky in the part, although I’d think the latter would indeed have a warmer presence. Legris achieves the desired tendril effect with his arms without looking as if he’s semaphoring.

The trickiest things about the role, it seems to me, are expression and flow. You need to worry about upper and lower body continuously and avoid starting and stopping.

My very best wishes for your success! Good luck.

I think Malakhov is a fine performance to get a sense of what the piece is all about. I thought he was very good although I've only seen him on video.

Baryshnikov, ugh, he's not really a favorite of mine. And this piece isn't actually a natural for him.

Again, all the best of luck with this.

I saw Edward Villella do this once. And that was enough. He had been taught the role by André Eglevsky, and it just didn't fit him. "Smoke" isn't quite it - I would go on record as favoring an interpretation of a rose's fragrance suspended about the girl's body, but easily fragile and wisped away by any sudden movement she might make. And yes, the rose is an "it".

I hope the performance goes well, dancerboy87. Please keep us informed.

It just happens that I've been reading Kavanagh's biography of Nureyev, which contains a glimpse of how NOT to prepare for this role. Not long after his defection, Nureyev travelled -- travelling with Maria Tallchief, as it happens -- to Frankfurt to appear in Spectre de la Rose for German television.

I'd join those in praise of Legris -- the most wondreful thing about him is that he seems to like being the rose. It's so clean -- he's strong, soft, silken, beautiful, delicate, fluid, and musical -- it's especially the musicality. And he has a real feel for chasse. He reaches down into the floor, the downs are deep and rich and velvety, so the ups really come up from he downs, like temps lies that leave the ground -- which may be why he never seems to have a problem with breath. It must be a puffer, but his breathing seems just to keep on expanding, to get easier and easier.

So i'd concentrate on getting the breating to feel easy.

Today I tried the PDD parts and found it quite easy.Tomorrow i'm learning my solo parts;then in the week-end I'll improve the style and clean up the technique to make it as much precise as possible.

"a rose's fragrance suspended about the girl's body, but easily fragile and wisped away by any sudden movement she might make."

I liked that ;-).

Hi Dancerboy,

Another interpretation you might enjoy watching is Igor Kolb's. This Spectre de la Rose is from the dvd The Kirov Celebrates Nijinsky but there are also clips on youtube. For me he creates the atmosphere that Mel Johnson put so beautifully into words "a rose's fragrance suspended about the girl's body, but easily fragile and wisped away by any sudden movement she might make."

An interesting interpretation of the work, if your idea of a curse is, "May you live in interesting times," was Red Skelton's version with Patricia McBride. He entered by trampolining off the window-seat, and things just went downhill from there. In particular, this rose had rose fever, and when he sneezed, half the petals fell off his costume. McBride played it ever, ever so straight, thus making Skelton's cavorting seem even more outrageous. Oh, and I also can recall Jimmy Durante doing a sort of La Sylphide pas de deux with Lynn Seymour!

Oh God! to have a dvd of the McBride-Skelton Spectre! I tried to find it via Amazon, but there are too many RS dvds with too little description of what's on them. Does anyone happen to know where this might be lurking?

I loved Edward Villella - a wonderful, wonderful dancer - but letting him at the Rose Spirit strikes me as getting a pit bull to play a dove. As for Legris, Paul Parish said it perfectly. What I wouldn't give to have seen him on stage! (A lot of frustration in this post...) The more I see him just on film, the more remarkable he seems. Not only the musicality, but the ability to use dance as a language, to fulfill Balanchine's remark to Villella that "we are poets of gesture." He can convey more depth of emotion, more richness and complexity of feeling, in the turn of a hand than most dancers seem to in full dramatic spate. A great artist, and from what I have been able to read from fans and critics who have been fortunate enough to see him live (which sometimes requires translation), the films do not give a false impression.

I think it is quite an honor to be asked to do any role that Nijinsky danced! Much luck.... I hope to hear that you loved it and the audience did, as well.

If you get to look at photos of Nijinsky (the best book for that is Lincoln Kirstein's "Nijinsky Dancing") you will notice that for this, as for every role he played, he totally transformed his face with makeup. In this case, it seems to me (from the black and white photos, which always made me think that the costume was green, until I saw the original at the Hartford Atheneum and discovered it was pink) that he made his features very androgynous verging on the effeminate, especially in the eyes. It seems to me that he elongated his face as well, but I don't know why. The pose with his arm draped over his head seems telling in its softness.

I just checked a book called (without French accents) "Les Ballets Russes a l'Opera" and there are two quotes about his performance (I think the dress rehearsal), one by Jean Cocteau, but it's in French, so I can't convey to you the meaning. But just in case one or more of you speaks/reads French, here it is (again without accents- forgive any typos):

"C'etait en 1910. Nijinsky dansait Le Spectre de la rose. Au lieu d'assister au spectacle, j'allais l'attendre dans la coulisse. La, c'etait vraiment tres bien. Apres le baiser a la jeune fille, le Spectre del a rose s'elance par la fenetre... et retombe parmi des aides qui lui crachent de l'eau la figure, le bouchonnet avec des serviettes-eponge, comme un boxeur.

Que de grace et de brutalite jointes! J'entendrai toujours ce tonnerre d'applaudissements; toujours je re-verrai ce jeune homme barbouille de fard, ralant, suant, comprimant d'une main son coeur, et se retenant de l'autre au decor, ou bien evanoui sure une chaise. Apres, gifle, inonde, secoue, il rentrait en scene, saluait d'un sourire" Jean Cocteau

HI, dancerboy...i really wish you the best luck. This is one my favorite ballet pieces, (Fokine is my idol), and i hope you can capture the esence of the romantic feeling that lies deep inside this short but lovely story...
He,He...BTW, seems that we always have opposite views about certain topics. I can't contain myself to declare that my role model for this part is Misha,(i find his mannerisms on this piece fascinating, (giving the obvious masculinity that usually caracterize his dancing), and the last one on my list would be your first one, Malakhov ...Talk about personal taste..! Still, i sincerelly hope you the best...Keep us informed and again, good luck!!

I love Misha but personally I think it's not at all a role for him.He puts too much technique,too many turns and double assemblés en tournant which are superficial and do not corcern the piece very much.And then Malakhov's body is better for such an evanescent role.Misha is too earthy for this,in fact I think his Basilio is the best in the world and i'd like to see him in Diana and Acteon(Hope he performed it) but this role is nothing earthy.It's more ethereal.Everyone has his role.I would be terrible in Diana and Acteon for example.Nobody's perfect;-)

I agree with the praise for Manuel Legris' Spectre, as well as Malakhov's.
The absolute worst is Farukh Ruzimatov. It looks like somewhere along the line he simply forgot the steps and just started improvising and posing to get through the piece. Not one of his finer moments.

Is Misha usually considered 'earthy?' I hadn't thought so particularly, but the term may mean something in ballet I don't know about. Nureyev is obviously earthy, but I don't think I know what 'ethereal' may mean in ballet, after all. I just know things like Merrill Ashley is not supposed to have been 'ethereal', but rather 'athletic', that someone here recently spoke of Sylvie Guillem as 'chic and earthy', that I probably imagine Alla Sizova to be ethereal, and that I think Suzanne Farrell is thought to be 'ethereal', but she also seems very earthy to me. This is somewhat , but not entirely, could be a good separate thread. Dancers like Adam Luders look ethereal, I guess, but I don't know if I think the physique always determines that. I can't for the life of me see Anna Plisetskaya as ethereal in that tape of 'Swan Lake', but maybe she is considered to be to those who are looking more purely in a balletic sense. Most NYCB dancers haven't seemed to me to be particularly ethereal or earthy, but maybe I imagine more of the Russians to be ethereal.

I think Misha is somehow too classical to be good in this part. The part requires a bit of perfume, a androgynous, feline quality. Misha simply doesn't have them. He looks too boyish.

The McBride-Skelton "Spectre" came from Red's weekly hour-long show. Villella and McBride did the piece correctly the first time through, then Red took the man's role, after a fashion. It was my second time seeing Villella do the part, the first being out on Long Island somewhere, maybe Jones' Beach? I also remember Nureyev's in the "Homage to Diaghilev" program with the Joffrey. It was kind of painful to watch, made worse by knowing that there was at least one other male dancer in the company who had been doing the part from his teens, and had the style down perfectly. And the style is almost everything in this one. The arms, in particular are in the High Romantic mode, and the distinct arms about the head pose has a name: that's "bras en couronne". Similarly, there aren't any third arabesques, the arms are in the softer "arabesque à deux bras" mode of the old French school, and occasionally "arabesque à la lyre". Fokine was definitely still in his "Sylphides" position when he put this together.

That's cool, good words--that 'lack of perfume' I wouldn't necessarily agree doesn't match 'boyishness' (because it might--think Bjorn Andresen in 'Death in Venice'), but I do agree it doesn't match Misha, at least most of the time. Something otherworldly in another sense is the quality seemingly being reached for here. He's otherworldly in lightness, but the aura is fairly ordinary in some ways, yes, and definitely not feline no matter how agile.

Ethereal are dancers who show much grace when dancing and usually have thin or anyway very lank bodies usually good at the role of the prince(ss),the fairy....very lyrical roles.I'd quote Zakharova,Legris,Bolle,Malakhov,Lacarra,Semionova....

Earthy dancers are the ones who are better at roles full of jumps,turns,great technique and not graceful roles.I call them "braggers",in a good sense.These ones are the ones good at Don Chisciotte,Diana and Acteon,Le Corsaire,Bayadère....I'd quote Zelensky,Matvienko,Misha,Guillem also(but she's able to do any kind of roles perfectly)...

Usually if you are good at one role you aren't for the other.But there are also some exceptions.Malakhov makes me laugh doing le Corsaire as much as Zakharova and Bolle performing Don Chisciotte.The same for Baryshnikov doing "Spectre de la Rose" and Zelensky doing Swan Lake.You really feel they are in the wrong role;-).

Mel, would this have been with the Eglevsky Ballet, and at the Jones Beach Amphitheater?

It very well could have been. This would have been early '60s. I know that I went to Jones' Beach for stage shows, and that I did see the Eglevsky Ballet back then (Marina was still an SAB student), but I can't recall if the two circumstances coincided.

I still have some doubts on the facial expression i am supposed to keep.During the rehearsals i found myself smiling softly at my partner and i'm wondering if I should keep a neutral/deep expression.In the videos i've seen they look kinda sad for the whole piece.That's i think not good in the pas de deux parts.Yes,he's a ghost and can't look to happy and too much "alive" but he's anyway dancing with the girl.This thing doesn't make me sad....I am wondering if a soft sweet expression on my face would be senseless....The coach is not yet worrying too much about the expression,but still on the technique.I'll ask in the right moment but before that tell me,as audience,if you'd think a not sad expression would puzzle you or not.Thanks.

This has gotten me curious, so I checked the Nureyev (1979, Joffrey, with Denise Jackson) version and viewed it alongside Malakhov's.

Nureyev's technique was already ragged, but I was impressed by the way he related to the girl. He expresses a kind of urgency -- he has to reach her, somehow. Not to wake her, but to allow her unconsciousness to be touched by the dance. "Do not forget," he seems to say. "Let yourself relive what happened tonight because it's going to change everything."

This is actually rather moving, if you look at it with dancerboy87's question in mind. I've never seen an interpretation like it before. The approach is assisted by Jackson, who seems to be deeply asleep, almost catatonic, in the first part of the ballet -- more like la Sonnambula than a girl just home from her first ball. Her "awakening" (or half-awakening) in the middle of the partnering portion of the ballet, when the music crescendos and becomes faster, is especially effective.

(Malakhov, on the other hand, acts too much with his face. It fills up with an intense though generalized kind of Russian soulfulness. You either like this look or you don't. If you don't, you focus on Malakhov's port de bras, which is beautiful.)

I would think that a dancer preparing for the role might try to imagine the Spectre as something like a real characater -- not just a mood or a figment of the girl's imagination. Her dream has summoned him, but he has his own existence and his own agenda. Nureyev conveys this, I believe.

Arlene Croce, reviewing Nureyev with the Joffrey in the same year, also sees the Spectre as a character with his own motivation. She is more critical of Nureyev's acting, however, than I have been.
[The boldface is mine.]

Perhaps he was musing on the American Civil War tearjerker, "The Vacant Chair"?

Izzy Petipa sez: "Try rehearsing it stoned. If Twyla becomes more accessible when you're drunk, think what pot could do for Fokine! (That is, if you don't start giggling.)"

I was revisiting my "Spectre..."clips on my Youtube account, admiring once more time my favorite Misha's performance
Baryshnikov here seems to be seducing and inviting the girl, rather than protecting and guiding her. He is 100% boy, even in this piece and his style may not be adequate for this particular role, but God bless him for not being the second ballerina on stage!.

Yes.Misha is a real man;but this is not a piece in which you have to be very masculine.And anyway a ghost should be compared to a spirit,so not necessary sexually characterized.A more androginous look would maybe be better.The problem of his Spectre is not to me his way of being masculine;it's that if you continously put duble assemblé en tournant,pirouettes and too much technique,it becomes the Spectre of Turns.It deviates in a certain way and distracts.It's more a role of beautiful port de bras and style.Stop.
Today I've ended to study the Spectre solo parts.I am still puzzled about the expression.I don't know whether to take example from Ariel in "the Tempest" by Shakespeare or Puck in "Midsummer night's dream"and make it as a fairy....so maybe a little childish and strange.Or again being sad as Malakhov's as the ghost doesn't have to look to much alive,or again being neutral-sweet and to guide the girl and protect her,or again being seductive.Being seductive anyway is not the attitude i like most in this piece.I am afraid it would look ridiculous and wrong.I'll probably do a mix of different attitudes depending on the difference between the solo and the PDD parts.The stage will let me know the right way.

Well, not being a dancer, I'm not sure I have any very useful advice to give about performance, but it seems to me that Puck and Ariel are not ideal models for the Spirit. He exists in the girl's dream - the dream of a young woman after a ball, a happy social occasion filled with intimations of courtship and growing up. Certainly a partner to whom she is attracted gave her that rose she's wearing when she comes in. So the Spirit, while not human, is not completely genderless - he probably should have at least a whiff of masculinity, a sense that he/it is also inviting her to a sensual awakening. Not sexual, but very delicately and suggestively romantic. The entire role is a balancing act of androgyny at the edge of a whole new world of the masculine for the dreaming girl. After all, she sees them as waltzing - the most daring of 19th century ballroom dances - men and women in each other's arms, with him leading. That balance and suggestiveness are the role's greatest difficulty I think, and letting Fokine's choreography express that. Baryshnikov erred too far on the side of the masculine, Malakhov perhaps a little too far on the side of the androgynous. I'm also reminded of an irate French critic who saw Nicholas Leriche in the role and snapped that the part did not need Burt Lancaster in Trapeze. It's a mine field of a part.

Using Shakespearean spirits might not be a good choice for the Rose. I can't, for example, picture him masquerading as a stool, then "slip I from her bum".

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a lot about "faerie", in which he approaches the topic of otherworldly creatures as having great powers, like the Elves of Middle-Earth. Perhaps those would be near cognates to the Spectre.

I still think Legris comes close to the ideal -- the quality of his attention to her is above all the finest thing. And he is personally so beautiful.

More beautiful than Malakhov. His jumps are so much airier than Malakhov's, whose sautes in arabesque remind me of Alicia Alonso's in Pas de quatre -- they're TOO SMALL.... Legris's are generous without being in any way show-offish, in fact he keeps it a refined but large version of a simple and lovely thing. he's SKIPPING -- the main thing it should have is the feel of skipping. It's not big and heroic, it's fun -- it requires natural sensuality, unconscious sensuality -- like the softness of the rose petals, andthat quality of having depth to htem that roses have.
RUb a rose against your cheek; get a friend to blindfold you and hold a rose and move around and make you find it with your sense of smell. See what expressions come into your face and neck as you actually smell a rose that's over your left shoulder....

If you've never done any social dancing -- many ballet dancers haven't -- try actually dancing with a partner and see what it feels like to share a center and move as one. Waltzing would be good, but ANY form of partnered dancing will teach you something about how to pay little attentions to the person you're leading and responsible for.

Very well put.

I agree that the Spectre exists in the young girl's dreams. But, as Freud and others have demonstrated, young girls' dreams are not always as innocent as we would like them to be. While the Spectre should not of course be sexually assertive, why shouldn't he have a a certain amount of masculine sensuality? Croce says the Speactre should be "supplicant, imploring, seductive in every move." This doesn't exclude romance, humor, gentleness, or even pulling a disappearing act after a brief flirtation.

There was also an Saturday Night Live version in the long ago with Steve Martin, refulgent in pink, opposite a languishing Gilda Radner, both of them shadowed by paranoid Russian agents. It didn't make you fall off your chair but Martin was funny.

I wish you well with your performance. The two best performance I have seen on video are by Maris Liepa who I always thought the best until I had seen Andris Liepa who is for me the best of many performances I have seen live and on film. Yes, it was a great shock for me to see Andris so perfect in THIS role.

Do you know if there are performances with Maris or Andris Liepa dancing Le Spectre de la Rose available on dvd or video? I just tried a lengthy google search without any luck.

ps.
I am with cubanmiamiboy on this one
"I know...BTW, i miss Leonid's posts... "

I saw what I believe were some of the first performances of Spectre that Nureyev gsve after having learned the proper choreography. This was with the company that is now English National Ballet at the Kennedy Centre, many, many years ago. They were amazing. All at once the piece made sense to me and I can only sum it up by saying that he was masculine and sensual without being sexual. And technically it was fine, but it wasn't the technique that you noticed, rather the complete identification with the role in the way that popularlibrary summed it up so aptly.
Alas, all that had vanished the next time I saw him in the role, and it was Nureyev giving a Nureyev performance from then on.
I saw Barishnikov with Lynn Seymour in Spectre at a gala in Hamburg, and while it was beautifully danced, it was a classical pas de deux we saw rather than Spectre. Much the same could be said of Misha in the pas de trois from Pavillion d'Armide which he danced on the same programme

For some reason, i don't see any shadow of "over-masculinity" in Misha's performance. On the contrary, the first time i saw his "Spectre", it made me smile to see his softness and sensuality...And then, considering that his portray is not as androginous as some like the dancers to be on this role, what's wrong with it...?, I mean, the girl is dreaming of a rose who has taken the human form of a boy, not of that of another girl, and boys can be masculine, right?...If Fokine's idea would had been that of "confusing" a little bit the audiences, he could had created the role for another ballerina, given the simplicity of the steps...I simply see this lovely duet as a little love story between, perhaps, two adolescents, perfectly defined in gender: the male one soft, yes, ethereal, yes, delicate, yes, but not androginous at all...

Exactly. In the later Joffrey version, although you can see the effort Nureyev has to make in some of the dancing (using arms for lift, etc.) he still has the quality.

That was my impression, too.

Try salsa...

I can imagine that Spectre would suit Andris Liepa very well. Like innopac, I'd love to get a DVD/video of him in Spectre, if anyone has any info.

Sorry if I disappeared for a while but I didn't have my web connection during the last week.I'll tell you now how it went the performance.I've had some troubles with finding a good costume,as this piece is not very much played.I've tried in many specialized places but,maybe i'm too fussy when it's about my job and the Aesthetic taste i pretend when i'm performing something.It's a vice,sorry.Not being able to find anything I had to order it. 85 euros and they had the courage to give me a whole tight suit,from the chest to the feet,skin coloured....without anything!Just a very tight suit.I don't even know why I paid it.Then,as usual I had to make the costume myself....at least I was sure about the result.I used the suit as the starting point.I had to add myself the petals of the rose around the neck,front and back,around the sleeves and around the left leg at the beginning of it.Then it stilled missed something.Like a thunder a genial idea came to my mind.Why not giving the idea of dewdrops on the petals?the problem was how to give back the illusion.How? light gluedrops on the external part of the petals covered in a few glitters,the most sober possible.The result was great,you should see it.Everybody said to me:"but you made it yourself?How good you are!you could have been a stylist!".I could maybe but i'm a dancer;-).Coming to the performance.I told you that i didn't know how to interpret the role and that the stage will let me know in the right moment.I just stepped on stage and become a spectre.I've found myself being softly seductive and a bit malicious in the moments of solo and when trying to wake up the girl,protective in the PDD moments.Don't know if this was the right way,but it was my way.The girl was perfectly in the role and pretty in her "degas".Everything went alright,but a moment in which I forgot a little part but nobody noticed...i just invented a few steps which i think worked.The only thing I didn't like was that it was an Opera gala and you surely know how the Opera audience is absolutely not interested or a little interested in watching a ballet moment.They asked me to go and bring a Waltz piece and i brought the Spectre but it wasn't the warm audience of ballet.They applauded very little and not very much concerned about what was going on.I could have danced better(as always...we can always be better!)but i'm satysfied,as i had only a week to prepare the piece and had also to make the costume on my own .

Thank you for the report, dancerboy.

Sounds like you came up with a very effective costume! And I'm glad to hear you were generally satisfied with your performance. Too bad you didn't have a better audience.

I hope you get to perform the role again. You deserve a chance to continue to grow in it.

dancerboy--I liked this a lot too, it was like going through the whole process with you in getting work together, envisioning it and developing it in the mind; and then completing it. The description of the costume and performance is first-rate--so that this turns out to have been one of the nicest threads I've seen on Ballet Talk.

Thanks, dancerboy. It's so interesting and refreshing to read about ballets being discussed from the point of view of the performer, as you have done here.

Working out problems of interpretation, costume, and audience differences make the dancer's achievements seem even more miraculous to me.

I hope that you'll continue to bring these matters to Ballet Talk. All best wishes ...