Haglund's Heel

Mayerling – not here

From London's Daily Express today:

WHEN it comes to exploring the darkest corners of the psyche through ballet there is nobody to touch the late choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. And they don't come much darker than Mayerling.

Based on the true, if veiled, account of the tragedy that befell Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and his semi-psychotic son, Crown Prince Rudolf, who ended up shooting his 17-year-old mistress before turning his gun on himself, it is replete with sex, death, guns, drugs and politics.

Not the usual subjects for dance but Mayerling isn't your usual ballet.

MacMillan's last great narrative work goes far beyond the customary tropes of classical dance to produce one of the defining masterpieces of 20th century ballet and remains one of the crowning glories of The Royal Ballet.

. . .

If the narrative complexity requires foreknowledge of the story, it is a small price to pay for an evening that goes way beyond polite appreciation.

A rare and precious night of dark alchemy.

Many believe that Mayerling is one of MacMillan's "greatest narrative works" but ABT has never performed it despite having an embarrassment of wealth of dramatic heavy-weights who could deliver Crown Prince Rudolf's character with such complex darkness that it would make the ballet one of ABT's "crowning glories," too.  The company completely wasted the opportunity to have one of MacMillan's hand-picked original cast members pass down her principal role and historical knowledge to ABT's dancers when it had Georgina Parkinson as its ballet mistress.  Today, in its ranks, it's lucky enough to have a dancer who has actually prepared and performed the principal role of Princess Stephanie in the Royal Ballet's production of Mayerling, but that is going to waste, too.

Lady Deborah MacMillan wants ABT to perform Sir Kenneth's masterpiece, but Kevin McKenzie doesn't think the New York audience would understand the story.  No doubt, he's also afraid of critic Alastair Macaulay's certain scathing reviews, because Macaulay is on record as despising Mayerling and carries a disrespectful attitude toward most of MacMillan's work. 

We're missing a lot by not seeing this fine work performed by an American company.  Someone needs to do it:  ABT, Joffrey, San Francisco Ballet. 

If we wish for it, it will come ....

Mayerling

 

Blimey! Marcelo the Magnificent @ the RB

Our very own Marcelo Gomes is off to London next week to fill in at a performance of Ashton's The Dream at The Royal Ballet on Thursday, Feb. 9th. 

Hopefully, while he's there, Dame Monica will introduce him to a little bit of Mayerling - just enough to whet the appetite - it won't take much.  Then, he could come home and perform the charming Wedding Night PdD with our little Stephanie-in-Residence, Gemma Bond, on Opening Night of ABT's Met Season.   YE-E-E-E-O-O-O-W!!!!

Dearest Dame Monica and Dearest Lady Deborah, pul-l-l-e-e-a-a-z-ze don't let this opportunity slip by!

If we wish for it, it will come.  Mayerling.  If we wish for it, it will come.  Mayerling.  If we wish. . . .

 

Enuff a'ready with the snow !

Are the guys in the Weather Modification Office drinking, or what?

This would be such a good day to stay in and watch the new Mayerling DVD with Edward Watson as Crown Prince Rudolf, but alas, that's one more thing we can't yet get in the U.S. along with the MacMillan bio by Jann Parry.

If we wish for it, it will come.

Thank you to the Film Forum

Karen Cooper, President and Director

Film Forum

 

Dear Ms. Cooper:

 

This is a long overdue thank you for bringing the wonderful Frederick Wiseman film La Danse:  The Paris Opera Ballet to the Film Forum and for generously extending its schedule.  So many people enjoyed the film, and as you are undoubtedly aware, enjoyed repeated viewings.  Films that present ballet as a subject matter are all too rare in this city.  Even more rare are full performance films such as those which the Metropolitan Opera now presents here and in movie cinemas nationwide.

 

New York legitimately can boast of having two of the most magnificent ballet companies in the world, and our city is a destination for every other great company.  Our ballet audiences are large, passionate, and knowledgeable.  As you observed with La Danse, our community fully supports extraordinary ballet films.

Opus Arte Cinema, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Royal Opera House, has produced a number of films of The Royal Ballet's performances of Mayerling, Sleeping Beauty, Ondine, Swan Lake and many others.  Currently, their film of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling, due to show in London in February, is creating enormous interest in the ballet and theatrical communities.  Would it be at all possible for you to consider a possible arrangement with Opus Arte Cinema to present Mayerling at the Film Forum and perhaps some of the other Opus Arte productions as well?  Recently, DigiScreen Partners began presenting Opus Arte films in a number of Canadian cities and have expanded their offerings for 2010.

Thank you for your consideration, and again, thank you for presenting La Danse.

 

Regards,

 

Haglund

Haglund's Heel

 

PS  Because of the widespread interest, we've posted this email on our blog.

In Pursuit of Mayerling

Haglund wishes to thank Lady Deborah MacMillan for observing our international campaign to bring Mayerling to ABT and to congratulate her and her team on their beautiful new website which celebrates the life and choreography of Sir Kenneth MacMillan.  Her kind comments are posted here and here, but we thought we should replicate them with a bit more visibility:

I'm glad you like the new website for Christmas - we made it for Kenneth's 80th birthday!

Thank you for your enthusiasm.

While surfing your site, I came across your campaign for 'Mayerling'.

May I put the record straight on a few details?

'Mayerling' may have been made on the Royal Ballet, but I have never decreed that it should stay only with the Royal Ballet.

Budapest built their own production and did a fine performance - and whoever put about the idea that I removed the rights from them?

Vienna has acquired it, did a splendid premiere last year, and revival this.
Other companies are in discussion for future productions.

I'd love Mayerling to come to ABT - after all it's been to New York with the Royal Ballet. But the management of ABT has told me that the New York audience wouldn't understand the story........

Good luck with your campaign!

Deborah MacMillan

So, New York audiences wouldn’t understand the story of Mayerling.  Really, ABT Management?  So we only understand Disneyfied fairytales?   We are too shallow and uninformed to understand an historically-based dance drama?  Haglund politely takes exception – difficult as politeness might be for him in this instance.

New York audiences are as sophisticated as audiences anywhere else in the world.  Witness the productions at the Metropolitan Opera just this year:  Attila - which the Met describes as “the story of civilization’s encounter with barbarism“; Elektra who is self-tortured by obsessions of her mother killing her father; The Nose where a poor guy wakes up to discover his nose is gone (it turns up in a loaf of bread); Simon Boccanegra - a 14th century based political drama; Stiffelio - set in mid 19th  century Austria that explores faith and doubt; From the House of the Dead - about life in a Russian prison camp.  New Yorkers love a good mind-bending, gut-wrenching drama in any form – opera, theater, music,  or ballet. 

Given the benefit of a sensible marketing plan, New York audiences would trample all over one another for an opportunity to see ABT's Mayerling.  How many other productions does ABT have that allow its magnificent male dance-actors to carry the evening?  Not many.  Given the fact that the company employs, arguably, the greatest male dance actors anywhere on the planet today, it is a crime not to provide them with a vehicle that could make them truly legendary.  Given the fact that the company employs the original Empress Elisabeth from the Royal Ballet's first production of Mayerling, it is a crime not to have her pass on that unique Georgina-zing to a new generation of interpreters at ABT.

But there are options.  Yes, there are always options. 

Some other U.S. company could jump at the chance to do Mayerling and do it very well:  San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, or the Joffrey, to name a few, and they could bring their production to New York.  Another option would be for the world to see Marcelo Gomes perform the role of Crown Prince Rudolf as a guest at the Royal Ballet.  How mad would that make New Yorkers at ABT?  Pretty darn mad. 

But the best option, the very best option, is to mount the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's beautiful, cozy 2100 seat theater where faces can be seen and world class dance theater can be produced.  If BAM is big enough for ABT’s new Nutcracker, it’s big enough for Mayerling.  That is the best option.  Let’s not allow the opportunity to slip through our fingers.

If we wish for it, it will come.

New Kenneth MacMillan Website!

The MacMillan Estate has launched its fantastic new website.   It contains some rare video footage including a clip of Irek Mukhamedov, Leanne Benjamin and Michael Nunn in the body-chalking / gang effort segment of The Judas Tree and Lynn Seymour and David Wall rehearsing Mayerling with MacMillan and John Lanchbery.  Very powerful stuff.   There is a fascinating 17 minute long clip of Donald MacLeary teaching the Royal Ballet's Edward Watson the Mandolin Solo from Romeo and Juliet.  How valuable will this be to every Romeo on the planet.

You can read an excerpt from Jann Parry's biography of MacMillan Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan, which we still cannot buy in the U.S. but can get on amazon.com.uk if one wants to pay a fortune for shipping.

Congratulations on this beautiful new site.  It is a wonderful Christmas gift to us all. 

If we wish for it, it will come.

MacMillan Symposium - The Ballet Bag Report

Emilia and our friends over at The Ballet Bag have invited everyone to read their full report on the Kenneth MacMillan Symposium that was held in London earlier this month.  It sounds like it was a content-packed event with attendance by so many artists and scholars who worked with MacMillan during his periods of intense creativity.

Emilia emailed Haglund that she had a chance to speak with Edward Watson and informed him of our grassroots – now international – lobbying campaign to have ABT mount a Mayerling in New York:

"During the event we had the opportunity to speak to Watson again and share the story about your campaign to get an ABT Mayerling.  Just so you know the RB's quintessential Prince Rudolf would be happy to guest, so carry on lobbying!"

Oh we love you, Emilia!

If we wish for it, it will come.

ABT - Tease, tease, tease

Over on ABT’s Facebook page, there’s a little teaser that asks readers what they would like for the 2011 Met season.   It ends with “Maybe Kevin will take your advise!”  This is all too tempting.  Haglund will now design the 2011 season (a Met season and two City Center seasons):

Mayerling
Firebird - a new production that makes good dance-use of the final 5 minute musical orgasm.
Cinderella - Ashton’s
Giselle
In the Upper Room
Green Table
Dark Elegies
Spartacus - if the kids on Dancing with the Stars can do Irek’s one-armed overhead lift, so can our guys!
Rodeo
Manon
The Nutcracker - Baryshnikov’s production (or maybe Stiefel’s new one for NCSA) for two weeks in December at City Center.  You’ve got all those kids in the JKO school who need something to dance.  We can never have too many Nutcrackers in this city.  Never.  Every kid deserves the chance to dance in a Nutcracker.
Onegin
Othello
Paquita
Petrouchka
The Rite of Spring - Nijinsky’s
Swan Lake

Did we mention Mayerling? 
Didn’t we mention Mayerling? 
For the love of god, how many times do we have to mention Mayerling?! 

If we wish for it, it will come. 

The Ballet Bag – On the Mayerling Trail

Go immediately to The Ballet Bag to read Emilia's fantastic interview with Edward Watson of the Royal Ballet.  Watson speaks so eloquently about Kenneth MacMillan's choreography, in particular, his preparations for and commitment to the role of Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling:

The most research I did was with Mayerling because Crown Prince Rudolf was a real person and so you have a responsibility to be very honest. I read a lot of books on the subject. Deborah [MacMillan] lent me a book which Kenneth gave her for her birthday which he based the ballet on [The Road to Mayerling]. She lent me her copy so I could find things that he had underlined in there, things that were really important to him. I also had a weekend in Vienna, I went to visit Mayerling and saw the grave. It fascinated me, this ballet has always fascinated me since I was a kid, from having seen the South Bank documentary originally with Lynn Seymour and David Wall. It is one of those ballets that grow on you. The more you see it, the more you want to see it again. Being in Mayerling had an impact on me because it doesn’t come around that often. It wasn’t in the company for about 8 years while I was here.

And this picture by Johan Persson of Watson as Rudolf with his "friend":

Haglund looks forward to any and all coverage that The Ballet Bag will publish on the upcoming symposium: Kenneth MacMillan's Choreographic Imagination & Psychological Insight: A symposium to explore and celebrate MacMillan's creative genius Imperial College London, 8 Nov 2009.  That's this Sunday!

Psychoanalysts, writers, and artists and former artists of The Royal Ballet, including Viviana Durante (an astonishing Mary Vetsera), Edward Watson, Clement Crisp, Wayne Eagling, and Monica Mason are among the participants.

What's it going to take for us to get an ABT Mayerling?

If we wish for it, it will come.

Mayerling: If we wish for it, it will come.

The Movement is building.

The Mayerling Movement.

We've waited long enough. 

Haglund has been crying out for a home team production of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling for some time.  And now The Movement has crossed over into the next borough where Swan Lake Samba Girl  has raised her voice and joined The Call.

If we wish for it, it will come.

We must prepare.

We shall dispatch our Marcelo Gomes, David Hallberg, Isaac Stappas, and our own Edward Watson: Eric Tamm, to Greece to learn the fine art of using guns and human skulls as sex toys from the great Irek Mukhamedov, perhaps the most frightening and disturbed and sexually-magnetic Rudolf ever to walk our planet - and now the director of the Greek National Opera Ballet.  And we must commence our search for the perfect Mary Vetsera of the Viviana Durante mold. 

Yes, we must prepare.  Because if we wish for it, it will come.  And when it comes, well, yes, we will have asked for it.

 

Buy it here.
 

Royal Ballet Celebrates MacMillan with Mayerling

Just reading this little preview paragraph by Judith Mackrell in The Guardian started Haglund's spine tingling, his limbs shaking, and his breathing, well, heavy:

The Royal opens its new season with a nod to the 80th anniversary of Kenneth MacMillan's birth, reviving the choreographer's 1978 ballet Mayerling. It's a work that's at the core of the MacMillan canon, mixing his gift for large-scale ballet spectacle with his willingness to push the form beyond its comfortable boundaries. Telling the true tale of Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro- Hungarian Empire, the ballet explores a weak personality warping under the pressure of a dysfunctional family and a paranoid political situation. Rudolf's violent, ambivalent relationships with women are charted by MacMillan in a series of shockingly charged pas de deux, culminating in his death by suicide at the Mayerling hunting lodge, along with his 17-year-old mistress Mary Vetsera. Opening cast is Edward Watson reprising his manic, febrile interpretation of Rudolf and Mara Galeazzi as Vetsera.

What's it going to take to make our home team bring this production to New York?

 

Crazy for Rudolf

While wandering around the Upper West Side in a dark mood, Haglund stopped by Barnes and Noble to browse the music selections. Nothing appealed to him enough to shell out cash he should not spend anyway until he observed on a shelf at eye level, a DVD with a beckoning photo. Irek Mukamedov. Mayerling. Either the Rx for a dark mood or lethal poison - depending on how you take it. Haglund smoothed out the cash for the DVD and then ran with pounding heart three blocks to catch the Express train home.

A glorious theater ballet with depravity and decay, and sex with guns, MacMillan’s Mayerling sucks the breath out of you.

After viewing the DVD, Haglund had two thoughts: 1) a career-defining performance for Mukamedov and 2) the world must not be deprived of seeing portrayals of Crown Prince Rudolf by Marcelo Gomes and David Hallberg.

With all due respect to Lady MacMillan’s view that her late husband’s production is so identified with the Royal Ballet that it would be unfair to allow any other company the rights to perform it, Haglund and others believe that if Sir Kenneth knew of the unique dramatic abilities of Messrs. Gomes and Hallberg, he would want them to dance this work.

We need to make it happen.