Plisetskaya dances
A nice change from gloomy news can be found in this 1964 documentary on ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya. I saw it in a movie theater when I was young, and it made a tremendous impression on me. Despite the more recent advances in empty technique, no one since has even come close to her sheer dance ability, her fluidity, her smoldering sexiness, the power of her jump, her boneless-seeming port de bras (arms), and the excitement she brought to the stage with her every movement. And all this was accomplished with a body of relatively ordinary proportions compared to the hyper-flexible very slender and long-limbed dancers so commonly found today.
A movie, especially an old black-and-white one, can’t quite capture her dancing in its 3-D entirety, but it’s the next best thing and at this point it’s all that’s left – that, and memories. I saw her in person many times when I was a child, and she tore up the stage in a manner that was absolutely thrilling.
NOTE: Plisetskaya was great in many roles, especially as a swan with her liquid port de bras. But my favorite role of hers, which I saw her dance several times in person, was the Bacchante in Walpurgis Nacht. In the above documentary, it begins around minute 58:00 and goes on for two and three quarter minutes. The sideways leap into her partner’s arms, which occurs from around 1:00:13 to 1:00:17, caused the audiences of my youth to gasp in delighted shock.
Thank you for posting this video. It is wonderful.
Wow. So lovely and ethereal. Thank you once again.
It’s always nice to add another hero or heroine to my top shelf.
From reading about Plisetskaya on the web and watching her videos, I have the impression she was also an unusually decent person.
Neo says, “A movie, especially an old black-and-white one, can’t quite capture [Plisetskaya’s] dancing in its 3-D entirety, but it’s the next best thing and at this point it’s all that’s left – that, and memories.”
I came across a 2011 post by the curator of the theatre collection of the New York Public Library on the difficulties of dance preservation: “Literary or musical art can be transcribed to paper using a widely understood encoding system (e.g. the alphabet) and passed on to future generations. Documenting and preserving dance is not so easy. . . . ”
He notes the limitations of video, including Neo’s observation about its reduction of three dimensions to two: “Since the mid-twentieth century, many dances have been documented with video recording. Unlike written words or musical notes which encode sound by abstraction and are understood only by shared conventions, video transcribes the sensory experience itself and requires no special education to interpret. . . . Although video has a few obvious advantages over oral tradition or abstract notional systems, it is in other ways more limited. The technology forces the videographer to select focus and perspective and so flattens the experience of a dance from three to two dimensions and narrows the expansive view of a stage to the small confines of a video screen.”
I don’t know whether some of the technologies that he discusses toward the end of the post still offer promise, but I found his analysis thought-provoking. And huxley might like the illustrations in the post: the difference between the Eastern drawing of costumed kabuki dancers and the Western painting of a dancing class of the early nineteenth century [I don’t think those are pointe shoes that the young ladies are wearing] is striking, but each is beautiful in its own way.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/05/02/how-can-we-know-dancer-from-dance
See this review on the important new book by Christopher Rufo
America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/02/christopher-rufo-book-examines-radical-left/
I bought the book because the review and the introduction claim it is not just a litany of the terrible things that are happening to America. Rufo also claims to give us tools to fight back. We shall see. I will give an update after I finish reading.
As an aside, Rufo was appointed to the board of trustees of the far left Florida college or Ron DeSantis and they just abolished the gender studies department. They also fired the previous president. He has certainly taken action.
A news article about abolishing gender studies at New College of Florida.
Rufo, in an op-ed for City Journal, further explained that the decision to eliminate the department was linked to the board’s goal of reorienting the Sarasota college’s mission back to a “classical liberal arts education” and that concepts presented in gender studies “are explicitly opposed to the classical conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/desantis-new-college-florida-trustees-eliminate-gender-studies
More good news
Reports have surfaced that numerous faculty members have also elected to leave in the months since the trustees took over.
I’ve ordered the DVD of this documentary. It has excellent ratings from Amazon, so I’m hoping it will be less grainy than the YouTube. According to one reviewer:
__________________________
It is impossible to compare [Plisetskaya] to anyone, it is as if she curves the space around herself into a vortex and becomes a whirling pulsing center of everything on the scene.
Lovely, thank you.
David Brooks’s article last week has generated a lot of chatter at “The Bulwark.” A reader asks why is it that only Democrats or liberals try to understand the other side. Jonathan Last was agreeing with the reader when the paywall went up. I’m left wondering just what it is that we’re doing here all this time, other than trying to figure out why so many of our neighbors and relatives voted for Biden and don’t challenge his lies.
I’m sure Plisetskaya is wonderful, but today isn’t a ballet day for me.
Abraxas, Bob Wilson:
There are other topics far more suitable for political discussion than this.
Why post comments here?
I enjoyed watching her beautiful dancing. You do get that sense that she is warping space!
On the other hand, I can’t help but ask the question why did she stay in Russia? How is it that after her father was executed and her mother and baby brother sent off to the gulags she still claimed “Russia is my home” and stayed? Most importantly what element of Russian indoctrination that was so successful on this woman, is now being used on Americans by the rabid left?
Why didn’t she run?
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/54/d7/bf/54d7bfc341bf953231c7b4b88ee14a96–seymour-the-photo.jpg
for fun..
i sure do miss the chess games
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22seymour%22++maurice&tbm=isch&tbs=rimg:CQeF24A1C4IWYRC1kMzBs3s3sgIAwAIA2AIA4AIA&hl=en-US&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-q7uBy9yAAxUBE2IAHY6EBTYQuIIBegQIABAr&biw=1280&bih=951
Last night wife and I saw the movie Carla (Fracci), with great acting and quite nice ballet sequences. Close up slo-mo often adds a lot to the feelings.
Carla died in 2021 (at 84), and Neo has written a few times about her, maybe starting with giselle.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/03/11/and-now-for-a-change-of-pace-giselle-through-the-ages/
Sadly, none of the links worked for me.
(From an .ai creativity thread comment: there is no one definition of creativity, but researchers have developed a number of flawed tests that are widely used to measure the ability of humans to come up with diverse and meaningful ideas. )
I’m wondering if .ai won’t come up with terrible & great choreography in the … decades ahead.
Tom Grey:
Unfortunately, a lot of my older links don’t work anymore. But YouTube still has many videos of the wonderful art of Fracci, who was sui generis.
Such perfection…I was not familiar with this legendary ballerina. So pleased to have discovered her and your blog (through a friend). I made the choice between ballet and piano study at quite a young age, so though music has been my career, I have always loved ballet, and took some more classes here and there. I resumed as an adult student at age 60 and still going fairly strong 9 years later! As a pianist, I did enjoy playing for excellent classes/professional studios in the D.C. area when I was in h.s. and back in the region as a doctoral student. I can’t think of a dancer who better portrays how technique is a means to an end of expression in any art. Thank you for posting this amazing documentary.
Pamela Kelly:
You’re welcome!
I am in awe that you took up ballet again at that age. Cudos.
Thanks so much for the encouragement!:)