Haglund's Heel

observations 5/9

Coming up tomorrow, Sunday 5/10 from Mariinsky TV:

Raymonda

Choreography by Marius Petipa (1898), revised version by Konstantin Sergeyev (1948)

Conductor: Valery Gergiev

Raymonda: Viktoria Tereshkina
Jean de Brienne: Xander Parish
Abderakhman: Konstantin Zverev
Clemence: Yekaterina Chebykina
Henrietta: Nadezhda Batoeva

© 2018 Mariinsky Theatre • Telmondis • Mezzo

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On Tuesday, 5/12, NYCB presents a digital performance with introduction by Sterling Hyltin followed by:

Jerome Robbins' "Spring" from The Four Seasons. Filmed on May 3, 2018, featuring Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle.

George Balanchine's "Theme and Variations" from Divertimento No. 15, filmed on September 22, 2016, featuring Lauren King, Sterling Hyltin, Ana Sophia Scheller, Abi Stafford, Tiler Peck*, Andrew Veyette, Daniel Applebaum, and Andrew Scordato* (*first time in a role).

Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, filmed on October 11, 2018, featuring Sterling Hyltin and Joseph Gordon* (*first time in a role).

George Balanchine's "Rondo" from Western Symphony. Filmed on May 9, 2019, featuring Teresa Reichlen and Roman Mejia*, with Lauren King, Taylor Stanley, Megan Fairchild, and Jared Angle (*first time in a role).

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Please wear a mask across the schnoz & kisser when in a public place. Personal pathogens exhaled by a maskless person can hang in the air for several minutes after that person has whizzed by and vanished from sight. 

Haglund has been sewing masks in his spare time using cuts from his T-shirt collection. If anyone around town observes a face wrapped in a blue "Ocean's Kingdom" mask, please feel free to compliment the wearer on his good taste.

 

observations 5/4

Coming up this week from NYCB's digital spring season:

Tuesday @ 8PM Rubies from Jewels with Megan Fairchild, Gonzalo Garcia, and Mira Nadon dancing the principal roles.

Friday @ 8PM Concerto DSCH featuring Sara Mearns, Tyler Angle, Ashley Bouder, Gonzalo Garcia,  and Joaquin De Luz. Watching Garcia and De Luz tear through this choreography with such delight was always a heart uplifting time in the theater.

The Mariinsky Theatre continues to broadcast terrific productions from their archives. The opening gala performance of the Mariinsky II with selections that spanned classical music, ballet, and opera was terrific entertainment. Their Tosca is coming up later today. (Skorik looked quite lovely in the Diamonds finale.)

Stay safe, everyone. Please wear a mask outside -- a legitimate mask, not a fashion scarf that does little to contain your personal pathogens. It is so disappointing to see these so-called "health conscious" maskless joggers running up and down the Hudson & Riverside Park paths heaving their hot breath onto the necks of walkers as they flash by without maintaining social distance. Ditto for the cyclists. Some people seem to think their faces are too damn pretty to cover up. By now, most of us know someone who was taken by this virus. Let's band together as a swarm of gadflies corps de gadfly to enforce common sense.

 

"and, possibly, dissolution."

ABT sent out a solicitation letter that warned in bold print that a lack of donations to its new Crisis Relief Fund could mean ABT's dissolution. It's not the brightest strategy to ask for money while saying you may be going out of business. Perhaps suggesting some cut backs and a new artistic management might have been a better plan to attract donors.

Look, this company has been in the same situation for years -- and always with a load of excuses. How has New York City Ballet managed itself to a position over the years where it can now afford to pay its employees during a crisis lay-off, but ABT as an organization can't survive even by laying off everyone and eliminating virtually all expenses? Questions have to be asked and answered. Again, why doesn't ABT have a revenue stream built from performance video? How has ABT justified the tremendous expenditures on costumes and scenery for productions that were not particularly successful? These types of painful questions have to be addressed so that ABT doesn't end up in a position where it has to plead that the company is on the verge of dissolution if donors don't open up their wallets for ABT's benefit during a global crisis where other people are dying and starving.