I am looking forward to reading the following books when they are available. Has anyone here had a look at Hogan's book? For some reason, it is presently unavailable on Amazon.

Balanchine (Paperback – April 2008)
by Anne Hogan (Editor) Currently unavailable

Balanchine Variations (Paperback - May 11, 2008))
by Nancy Goldner

Balanchine the Teacher by Barbara Walczak and Una Kai (Paperback - Sep 4, 2008)

One more question: is the memorial publication "Tanaquil Le Clercq, 1929-2000" by Nancy Lasalle (Editor), Randall Bourscheidt (Editor) worth the $$ if one has the Ballet Review memorial issues (from 2000), and her cookbook, etc., etc.?

Thanks very much for your thoughts,

Neryssa

it would seem the LECLERCQ item might be the little booklet prepared for the memorial gathering, which was nicely produced but not much more than an essay or two and some photos. is this now being sold somewhere? if it's shown w/ a light blue cover this is the same memborial/program booklet.
if not, i'm not sure what it is.

Yes, it is the same booklet. It is being sold (as used) on Amazon, Alibris, AddAll and other online (and offline) bookstores.

Neryssa

We just received a copy of the Hogan book at Pacific Northwest Ballet. I've not read it yet, but it includes some wonderful photos I've never seen.

I Googled and found this, from the British publisher. Sounds interesting, even if only 128 pages. It's not yet on Amazon or Dance Books, but you can order it directly from the publisher.

http://www.sylpheditions.com/balanchine.html

Home page and titles list is here:
http://www.sylpheditions.com/index.html

My copy of Nancy Goldner's "Balanchine Variations" arrived this week and I've taken the time to read a few of its 20 chapters, each of which is devoted to a particular ballet (including Jewels). The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with the first Balanchine ballet we still have, Apollo, and ending with Ballo Della Regina.

The book derives from lectures Goldner has been delivering at the behest of this company and that across the country and under the auspices of the Balanchine Foundation since 1998. It's no surprise then that Goldner's prose is clear and almost conversational -- "my intuition tells me" -- and that to read her is like having coffee with someone who has loved the ballets for decades and eagerly tells you their secrets. Not that she would claim to know their secrets: she writes that while her analytical side says "Balderdash" to Balanchine's claim that dancing can't be put into words, "the part of me that weeps and smiles when watching his ballets lays pen to rest."

A few examples from the first chapter that especially delighted me:

"When Apollo dances with the three muses he sports with them as if they were parts of a mobile . . . " (emphasis mine).

Of Terpsichore: "If there is one salient characteristic of her solo, it's that she keeps revolving around herself, showing her body to the audience from all possible angles. She offers full disclosure. Decades later, in other ballets, Balanchine was still arranging his choreography so that the ballerina would be presented to us as fully as possible."

Of Apollo's solo after his pas de deux with Terpsichore: "What I particularly love about his solo is its encoded homage to ballet technique." While Apollo thrusts his arms skyward as if to hold up the world, "it's not his arms that give him Herculean strength; it's his legs locked tightly in fifth position."

Each chapter here is illustrated with black and white photos in passable but not high quality reproductions. Many are by Costas and others are credited simply to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. I've seen a few dance books in my life as a balletomane, and there are photos here that don't look familiar. The book concludes with over a page of recommended readings. Longtime fans will have them all, or will at least know of them, with the exception perhaps of Brenda Dixon Gottschild's1 996 book "Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance."

kfw, I agree with you completely on the Goldner book. What an asset when preparing to see one of these ballets -- or when trying to organize thoughts and memories about those one has seen.

Goldner is a superb dance writer. She makes you want to look again, more closely and more attentively. For example, her discussion of the Balanchine Midsummer Night's Dream made re-watching the Pacific Northwest Ballet video a doubly interesting experience. Her comparisons between the Balanchine and the Ashton Dream got me to re-watch the Ashton (ABT) as well.

I found myself wishing she had included many more ballets. But Goldner did have a rationale for limiting her list. She writes, in the Introduction,
She also omits Symphony in C, Stars and Stripes, and Liebeslieder Walzer, because she has not experienced them outside New York City.

As an aside, there is a rave review of the Goldner book by Macaulay in today's NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/books/03maca.html?ref=arts

Hope it is ok to post it here (as opposed to in links) but it certainly seemed appropriate to do so.

I found it made me want to purchase the book, quite badly.

Another rave review of Nancy Goldner's appears in the double edition of the New Yorker, August 11-18. The reviewer writes:

Anyone who cares about Balanchine should buy it immediately.
Here's the link: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/brie...n_brieflynoted2

I just received "Balanchine The Teacher" today. Most of it is literally a class, with short chapters (sometimes lasting only a page or two) here and there explaining where Balanchine was in terms of his work and developing his ideas on technique and class. I'm eager to see how it differs with or agrees with Suki Schorer's book on "Balanchine Style."

Another review of Nancy Goldner's amazing book: Robert Gottlieb in the NY Review of Books (Oct. 9)
Dirac has posted a LINK to it today.

Goldner in her book perpetuates one of my pet-peeves about recognizing the different companies Balanchine worked with. Too often short-shrift is given to his two years with the Denham Ballet Russe from 1944 to 1946, and in some cases completely ignoring it--going from the American Ballet to Ballet Society. In her essay on 'Concerto Barocco' she states: "Nevertheless, they (Berman's costumes) and the decor as well were discarded in 1951". Actually, they were discarded in 1944. Those two years were most important in Balanchine's career---without them there might not have been a NYCB. He was in the right-place-at-the-right-time when he came to the attention of the City Center management.

Atm, are you positioned to write about this? Someone should! This is a great historical argument that I'd love to see someone pursue. Goldner's book is fine as far as it goes (a bit too "preaching to the converted" for my tastes but hey I'm extra prickly), but should not be seen as a substitute for the kind of deep and extended scholarship that's sorely lacking in ballet (and dance in general) despite the recent flurry of long biographies.

Goldner's book reminds me of Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, where Vendler offers commentary on each of WS's 154 sonnets. Each study is fairly brief, a couple of pages long at most, and very accessible to any interested reader. With Shakespeare, though, unlike Ballet, a reader can choose from among a vast range of types of studies and commentaries, from dodgy speculative biographies to scrupulously detailed and rigorously documented exegeses.

Ray, I am far from the only one who has felt this way. Robert Garis in "Following Balanchine" complains about Nancy Reynolds in the same way: "the story c ontinues as if what took place at the Monte Carlo had nothing to do with Balanchine's career." Also in the otherwise excellent biography of Lincoln Kirstein (Duberman) it's more of the same. Perhaps I am so sensitive about it because those Monte Carlo two years were my introduction to Balanchine; and also to many other New Yorkers. His BS and NYCB audience came out of those years. The City Center's mantra was "Popular Prices" and indeed they were less than the other theaters. Aside from all the Balanchine they had some wonderful dramas---in particular two I have never forgotten: "Othello" with Paul Robeson, Jose Ferrer and Uta Hagen and a "Tempest" with Zorina as Ariel.

Rich material, atm! Clearly, there isn't one story of NYCB's beginnings, but many. Now to get historians working! There's no reason you couldn't start it. Even assuming you're not a professional historian, why not start the ball rolling? American colonial history, to name one field of study, has had some great amateur contributors to it. I'm sure you'd have a captive audience here on BT!

atm711, this is (as Ray says) a very interesting observation. Do you have any idea of WHY there seems to be a silence about, or lack of attention to, these years and this particular affiliation?

About Goldner: to be fair, she is not claiming to write biography or ballet history, only using elements of these while discussing her own experience of observing Balanchine's ballets closely.

Alistair Macaulay's review in the NY Times has a couple of interesting observations and 2 significant endorsements.


I've been preparing for MCB's upcoming perfomances of 4 Temperaments by watching the old Dance in America dvd ... and reading Goldner. It's been a revelation. She has an incredible eye and lots of experience. She writes simply with great clarity. Unlike most performance reviewers, she is not obliged to stick to brief summaries or to evaluate the performances of individual dancers. Goldner tells us what she sees and feels as the ballet progresses. Sometimes I see it very clearly through her eyes, sometimes I don't. But always I find myself focusing harder and seeing something I never noticed before. And understanding it more.

It would be fun to be able to sit around the dinner table and to listen to brilliant pontificaters like Edwin Denby or Arlene Croce as they talk about ballet. It would be even more fun to have a conversation with Nancy Goldner.