Haglund's Heel

Maria Riccetto appointed Artistic Director of Ballet Nacional del Sodre

Wow.

The rumor has been swirling for months. Now it's official. A huge congratulations to this former ABT gem and Uruguayan national treasure. Maria will become the next Artistic Director of Ballet Nacional del Sodre when Igor Yebra's term expires at the end of 2020. Here is the Google translation of the report from Montevideo.com:

Former dancer María Noel Riccetto will be the next director of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre (BNS), replacing the Spanish Igor Yebra, who will leave office at the end of 2020.

As reported by El País and confirmed by Efe, the former prima dancer of Sodre and awarded with the "Benois de la danse" in 2017 accompanied days ago the Minister of Education and Culture, Pablo Da Silveira, to a meeting with the dancers of the cast to be introduced in your new position.

Riccetto, who joined the American Ballet Theater in 1999, joined the BNS in 2012 as a resident principal dancer at the request of Argentine choreographer Julio Bocca, who was director of the latter between 2010 and 2018.

Her retirement from her dance occurred in 2019, the year in which she participated in "La Sílfide", "Noche Francesa" and the national tour of the BNS through the interior of the country to say goodbye to Uruguayans.

In addition, she at that time she returned to perform the work with which she obtained the Benois: "Onegin", by choreographer John Cranko, and she culminated her prestigious career with "Manon", by Kenneth MacMillan.

At that press conference in April 2019, Riccetto had assured that she was not going to move away from dance and that she was going to be available for whatever the Sodre needed. Now, a year and a half later, she made good on her promise.

Outside of dance, the future director of the BNS also participated as a jury for the "Got Talent" program and a few weeks ago was the protagonist of the presentation of the book "The balance of dancing", by Lucía Chilibroste, which tells her story.

Although she is already confirmed in her position, the official presentation still remains since Yebra continues to work at the helm of the cast and there are even pending performances of "La Tregua", the adaptation to the ballet that he made of the homonymous novel by Mario Benedetti, which is will take place in the next few days.

Maria has also recently become a judge on the Uruguayan TV program Got Talent. She's definitely got TV glam and confidence in spades. On a recent episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i4iL-esdhE ), she took over the stage at about 4:20 and directed the contestant into a star moment.

We've got great memories of Maria from her ABT days. Unfortunately, we never saw enough of her because she was another one who got sidelined while the company promoted guest artists. Let's pull out this old clip of her with Blaine Hoven on PBS's Sondheim Birthday Celebration:

 

Maria Riccetto and Blaine Hoven from Haglund's Heel on Vimeo.

 

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Rumors are swirling again in Uruguay that Maria Riccetto will soon take over the direction of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre. The Minister of Education and Culture, Pablo de Silveira, just informed Ballet Artistic Director Igor Yebra that Yebra would not continue in the position in 2021. Yebra replaced Julio Bocca in 2017. At that time, Bocca and many others thought that Maria would make a fine artistic director. Word was that her wish to continue performing as a member of the company made her appointment difficult.

Maria officially retired last December and has been Academic Coordinator for the Sodre Training Schools. However, she still occupies a huge space in the hearts of Uruguayans. The populace is not going to let go of Maria. No way. No how. Every time something comes up with regard to the Sodre Ballet, she gets mentioned as its most celebrated dancer ever and its most loved. They're not going to give up on her as a director of the ballet company -- ever.

El Observador tried to squeeze info out of the Director of the Soder's Board of Directors, Martín Inthamoussú, but he said that the announcement of who would run BNS next year would be made by Minister de Silveira.

Stay tuned.

Pictures from El Observador. The last photo is from her ABT days - Clark Tippet's Some Assembly Required which she danced so perfectly with the also perfect Jared Matthews:

 

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The good news is that Landmark Cinemas on W. 57th St. is going to have a single showing of the new Nureyev documentary. No White Crow faux-glam here, folks. This will bring back strong memories for many who lived through that incredible but at times terrifying era -- when news was actually reported in the media rather than manufactured unethically.

Now the bad news. The screening has been scheduled for April 23rd, the opening night at NYCB. However, since that opening night doesn't include a step of Balanchine, it will make the viewer's choice one that requires more consideration. The trailer below is gripping.

One chance to see this documentary or one of many chances to see some of what you don't really want to watch anyway – decisions, decisions...

Tickets here.

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Former ABT soloist Maria Riccetto, who is the principal ballerina at Uruguay's national ballet company, Ballet Nacional del Sodre, will retire in December 2019 in a performance of Manon. She's a national treasure in Uruguay, and the announcement reportedly will be made next Wednesday by the country's Minister of Culture according to local news sources.

We have fond memories of Maria's delicate, crystalline clear artistry. It is unfortunate that she came up through ABT with a generation of enormously talented homegrown soloists who were so intentionally wasted by Kevin McKenzie while he expended all of his energy searching for guest artists. The best years of an entire generation were wasted and lost to ABT's audience.

Here's a little clip of a non-ABT performance at Avery Fisher Hall eight years ago that we go back to every now and then. It was made shortly before she decided to pack her suitcase to leave. We wish her all the best.

 

 

 

 

2017, an odd year

Odd and ugly.

 

Let's hope that 2018 brings evenness to our breathing again and an improved ability to handle the hysteria whipped up by the media’s hyperbolic reporting to generate online clicks and income – and of course, to create the news rather than report it. At the end of the year, we are left with a toss-up question: Who is more untrustworthy? The government or the media?

 

The greatest losses to the New York ballet stage in 2017 were Veronika Part, who was booted by ABT’s moronic director in a disrespectful, mean-spirited, and unprofessional dismissal that shocked the ballet world, and Marcelo Gomes, who resigned from ABT under murky circumstances in the wake of the media’s piranha-like feeding frenzy on men’s genitals everywhere, workplace or not. The partnership of these two dancers, along with Bocca and Ferri, brought us perhaps the most magical classical performances of the last two decades – an honest, truthful magic that doesn’t come along very often on the ballet stage. These days, fake ballet partnerships are contrived by PR in order to push lacking, insubstantial, or homely dancers to the forefront.

 

ABT’s ass-covering public smearing of Marcelo, who was the remaining singular titan on its roster, really comes as no surprise. No one expects ABT to do anything the right way any more. It’s the simple truth. The company has dealt with actual workplace sexual harassment situations over the years while Kevin McKenzie was in charge. Its executive director, Louis Spisto, and later its Assistant Artistic Director, David Richardson, were both accused of repeated sexual harassment in the workplace. The claims against them eventually found their ways to the EEOC after which each man left ABT under a disturbing dark cloud. Given its experience, there's really no excuse for ABT not handling the current matter more diplomatically and fairly to the artist.

 

Look what we have lost:

Photos by Gene Schiavone

 

ABT’s opaqueness and its quick, thoughtless smearing of Marcelo hark back to the fearful reactionary over-reaching during McCarthy’s popularity. We are, of course, in a McCarthy-like climate at the moment, but this time, the media is the unbridled aggressor pitching to the public unsubstantiated claims including those from anonymous claimants. Hopefully, New York City Ballet will show more steadiness in its response to the dubious claims against its leader which are being peddled and promoted by The New York Times and The Washington Post. New York City Ballet and its audiences will be best served by Peter Martins remaining Ballet Master in Chief.

 

We closed out this miserable year by seeing two NYCB Nutcrackers, both of which we suspect included final role salutes by principals. Maria Kowroski danced a remarkable Sugarplum Fairy in which she continued to instruct us as to exactly what it means to stretch a tendu beyond its obvious point. No others in the company do so as clearly and elegantly; no others in the company possess limbs that even approximate the beauty of Maria’s. Without question, Maria has a lot of horsepower left in her engine. But if this was her final salute to the Sugarplum Fairy, it was a plum performance that we’ll always remember. In one of the most difficult PdDs that Balanchine created, she was at ease while being sublimely partnered by Tyler Angle. Both tricky pique pirouettes into penche arabesques were as smooth and unruffled as we’ve ever seen them — with the exception of Melissa Hayden in the 1950s-60s on TV. Maybe Haglund’s memory is playing tricks on him, but he has a strong recollection of Hayden doing double pique pirouettes with a blind catch of the wrists by her partner from behind. Maybe she just did that for TV though… 

 

Yesterday, Joaquin De Luz danced his final Nutcracker Cavalier at NYCB. Along with our sorrow of watching his amazing career wind down in the past few years has come a growing excitement to see what his second act will be. He has packed more than most into his long career beginning with the Victor Ullate Ballet Company followed by Pennsylvania Ballet, ABT, and his final and longest stint at NYCB. He has so much experiential knowledge and authority that his Act II in life may turn out to be more important to ballet than Act I. For his Cavalier variations yesterday, Joaquin opted to throw in double saute de basques with the manege of coupe jetes, a rarity among NYCB men. Rather than the turns a la second, he launched into a more difficult series of double tours/pirouette. His partnering of his illustrious Sugarplum Fairy, Megan Fairchild, was everything a ballerina could ask for. During a few lifts, he seemed to refuse to allow her to come down. It was a warm, generous, celebratory final salute to the Nutcracker Cavalier.

 

Lastly, because our hope and optimism are pathological and probably fatal, we must report that Julio Bocca announced that he would not continue with SODRE as either a teacher or coach following his exit as Artistic Director which occurred today. He had previously said that he would. That leaves him free and clear to accept whatever reasonable offer ABT’s board could come up with to end our decades long misery under McKenzie. Julio said that in the coming year, he has plans to work with ABT, San Francisco Ballet, Orlando Ballet, and English National Ballet. He’s going to set Le Corsaire on Paloma Herrera’s Ballet Estable del Teatro Colón. It sounds like he’s getting a second wind…

 

For Ballet Nacional Sodre's final performance under his direction, Julio chose an outdoor venue in beautiful Punta del Este on the Uruguayan peninsula where 5,000 people watched the company free-of-charge from beach chairs and the like under a moonlit sky —  just as people did in 2007 when Julio gave his farewell performance in Argentina. He’s not shy about saying how proud he is of the company he grew during his time in Montevideo. In reference to his upcoming work at Teatro Colón, he said (courtesy of Google translater),

 

"I hope they get used to my way of working. I have my form, and you saw the results, everyone saw them. We went to the Cannes festival this year and critics compared it to the Paris Opera. There is a way of working that is mine and I hope that the Colon can absorb it as they absorbed it here. I hope everything goes wonderful. I want to see what I can give that remains in the theater. I'm going to do something specific that is Corsair, it's to go, to work as we work, with excellence, those who are fit will dance, the idea is to open the curtain and make it a function of excellence."

 

If there is a god, he will bring Julio to us to end our nightmare.

 

Julio taking a final bow in Punta del Este:

 

 

observations 11-29

Ballet Nacional del Sodre has finally named a replacement for Julio Bocca. Igor Yebra,  a member of the generation of startlingly good dancers from the Victor Ullate School in Spain that produced Angel Corella, Joaquin De Luz, and Tamara Rojo, will now lead Uruguay's national ballet company. From the outside looking in, it's a promising choice if Yebra can deal with the political climate with the same force that Julio did. So, now it's official: Julio has a lot of free time on his hands although he says he plans to keep contributing to the artistry of the students and professionals as a teacher.

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Congratulations to Blaine Hoven for snagging two ABT performances of Nutcracker in Orange County while the first cast prince recovers from hernia surgery. Here's hoping for extra tight stitches made of fishing pole wire. It is curious indeed how there are a thousand tickets left for the Fakerina's Nutcracker performance on Wednesday the 13th. Her handlers and stakeholders haven't yet bought out the tickets for that particular performance to give them away. Nor did they buy out the tickets and give them away for the Fakerina's fall season performances. One might think that the big theater-side banner of the Fakerina in a faux sexy encounter that may well have led to a man's hernia would have sent the box office crazy. But nope, the Fakerina didn't ignite the box office and her handlers and stakeholders didn't buy out the tickets to make her look worthwhile.

Meanwhile, the Fakerina's clutzing around as Aurora in Australia was met with agent-created hoopla and critical faint praise that was as damning as it gets. When has a much ballyhooed Aurora debut ever been reviewed with absolutely no mention whatsoever of the Rose Adagio while much was made of the dancer's lovely personality? LOL. Her steroidal PR campaign highlighting her faux victimization continues to make it easy for the press to create click-bait instead of writing criticism. For certain, she will be the most asterisked dancer in history. (*Danced Swan Lake but couldn't do the steps; *danced Don Q but couldn't do the steps; *danced Giselle but couldn't do the steps; *danced Sleeping Beauty but couldn't do the steps; *danced La Fille mal Gardee but couldn't do the steps; *danced many other principal roles for which the steps had to be simplified.) Without ever having given a single performance of high merit in the classics, she's still managed to manipulate ABT's management into putting her under the spotlight while the much better dancers stand deferentially in the shadows as real victims paying the price of misguided affirmative action. ABT's peddling of its 3rd rate pay-to-play hackerina continues despite the Misty-fatigue among the paying members of the audience.

It is sad how ballet is seeing more and more dancers with media-made careers instead of stage-made careers. Even some with honest talent are more concerned with getting it right in the media rather than getting it right on stage. Hopefully, their future body of work will include performances that are memorable for their own dancing rather than for the surrounding media circus, their still photos of pretty poses, or the other dancers who shared the stage.

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It's going to be a light Nutcracker season here on the blog. The general public prices at New York City Ballet have reached a tipping point. Soon NYCB's Nutcracker will be only for the kid-performers' relatives who get discounts. What would Balanchine say if he saw a $300 price for a Nutcracker ticket? He might quip, "Don't buy." If some compelling casting shows up later in the run, we might splurge for a bad seat.

 

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El Observador reports that Maria Riccetto met with Ballet Nacional Sodre's Board of Directors and the Uruguayan government's Minister of Education and Culture today but rejected their offer for her to take over the directorship of the ballet company from which Julio Bocca resigned as director.

El Observador's sources said that the Minister and the Directors plan to try to persuade Maria to review her position.

Look at this woman -- confident, glamorous, a superb artist, and one of the most influential women in all of Uruguay. Hopefully, she'll hold everyone's feet to the fire until they agree to give her what she needs to do the job. Maria is going to make a great director for Sodre – whenever.

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We can't stop scratching our heads over this fourth dance that ABT is letting Benjamin Millepied make for the kids to perform at intermission on the David H. Koch Theater's promenade during the fall season later this month. Julia must really want Natalie to come to her ABT gala party. "Why am I not where you are?" muses Julia each morning over her soft, spoonable eggs while studying French vocabulary. 

Quasi Una Fantasia, baby. Never here nor where. But perhaps they would consider something along the lines of a Troika if Ben were given a fifth dance for ABT's season.

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We're pretty excited about seeing Sterling Baca as Prince Desire in Angel Corella's new production of Sleeping Beauty at Pennsylvania Ballet. We'll be at the premiere with bells on and expect to be bowled over by Oksana Maslova's Rose Adagio. It's an hour and twenty minutes by train to Philly, which is the time it took Haglund to ride the M66 across town today. Lots of dates and great casts to choose from right here.

Photo: Alexander Iziliaev

 

 

Bocca to resign from Sodre Ballet in 2018; Maria Riccetto's name being floated as his replacement

This is big, big, big news from Uruguay's El Pais.

The Minister of Education and Culture, Maria Julia Muñoz, confirmed in Parliament the resignation of Julio Bocca as director of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre. El Pais also contacted the president of the Sodre Board of Directors, Doreen Ibarra, to inquire about the differing versions of the resignation that had been communicated throughout the day. The chief explained that Bocca will cease to be the artistic director from 2018, clarifying that he will continue to be linked to the institution as a "resident teacher or supervisor".

El Pais quotes Telemundo as saying Muñoz told them that she recommended Maria Riccetto as Julio's replacement.

Oh Lord, we need Julio in New York. Come on, Julio ...

If ABT's board has so much as an ounce of brains spread among its members, they will do whatever needs to be done to sign Julio before somebody else does (like San Francisco Ballet or some other company with a director who may be close to retirement).

How much worse do things have to get before the board will pull the trigger and make a change? Look at this pitiful fall season. It is among the worst ever presented, and it will, perhaps appropriately, serve to "celebrate" McKenzie's 25th anniversary. What next? Will McKenzie lose two, three, or four weeks of future spring Met Seasons and then claim that it was all part of his genius plan? Enough is enough. Throw this bum out the door and bring in Julio. There is no reason whatsoever to show any mercy to McKenzie. He should have left more than a dozen years ago but has become entrenched like a tick under a dog's skin.

 

YAGP Honors Julio Bocca at Lincoln Center 4/14 It Was A Good Friday

Literally.

 

YAGP’s 2017 Tribute to a Dance Legend honored Julio Bocca, the beloved star of ABT for twenty years who is now Artistic Director of Uruguay’s national company SODRE which he has buffed and pumped up into that country’s most high-profiled performing arts institution.

 

The evening was a mix of tribute and roast. In tribute to his former colleague, Marcelo Gomes described how as a young ABT corps dancer he would sit in the studio corner watching Julio rehearse while wondering if he could ever be as good. Then as if to answer his own question, he performed a couple of sequences from Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Songs with Luciana Paris and then the balcony PdD from MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet with Maria Riccetto. Luciana, in the years prior to joining ABT, was a principal dancer and frequent partner of Julio's in his Ballet Argentina. The company also included Herman and Erica Cornejo. Maria, of course, is the former ABT soloist who is now the Resident Prima Ballerina in Julio’s company of 70 dancers. 

 

For the roast part, Joaquin De Luz offered a hilarious, deadly accurate imitation of Bocca’s famous stage walk during which he would trace an arc the width of the stage with his chest puffed out and chin, eyes, and downstage arm raised to the highest seats in the house as he circled to the back to begin his variation. 

 

There were many admirable performances during the evening, most notably Yuan Yuan Tan and Vitor Luiz of San Francisco Ballet in the final PdD from Bells by Yuri Possokhov, and Tamara Rojo and Isaac Hernandez from English National Ballet in the Don Q PdD. Yuan Yuan, who is 40, has been blessed with the exceptionally narrow and lengthy limbs that are so highly prized and create such exquisitely graceful shapes. But she still has enough strength to pull off a respectable Black Swan PdD as she also showed with Luiz on Friday night. Tamara, who is about to turn 43, didn’t offer a “lite” version of her Don Q variation either. Nosiree, Bob. She packed it with virtuosity and energy that anyone half her age would be grateful to have.

 

In all the celebration of Julio’s career, however, important parts of his story were missed. 

 

Julio’s meteoric rise in the world of ballet began with a spectacular failure that he turned into gold - literally. At the 1985 Moscow Ballet Competition, an early forerunner of the YAGP, 18-year-old Julio took a messy, bruising fall during his Don Q variation. But he rose above it and also performed a stellar Nutcracker PdD that drove the learned Russian audience wild and impressed the hard-to-impress judges who included Yuri Grigorovich. It’s all on tape – the fall, the recovery, the rise. (Don Q, Nutcracker, and one of Haglund’s all-time favorites of Julio's Don Q with Cynthia Harvey - Baryshnikov version.)

 

Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov heard of Julio’s performances in Moscow, invited him to audition for ABT, immediately hired him as a principal dancer, and became his mentor and ardent taskmaster. That probably didn’t sit very well with Kevin McKenzie who struggled to get Baryshnikov’s respect as a dancer and has since made an effort to erase Baryshnikov’s years from ABT’s history. Nevertheless, it was a surprise and a little disappointing to see YAGP fail to credit Baryshnikov for his discovery of Bocca or even mention the Moscow competition.

 

Julio has recently mentioned in an interview that he would like to take a year off to recoup and refresh, like he did after retiring as a dancer, and to assess what challenges he wants to invite into his next chapter of life. Friday night he looked very good and happy but also contemplative. Perhaps he knows, as do we, that it is time for him to come home – that this is where he can make his greatest positive impact and this is where he is needed most.

 

The many wonderful photos of the evening which are dancing their ways through the internet ensure our long memory of the celebration. Balletomanes, though, have elephant memories; we never forget.

 

 

More here....

 

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ABT has posted some Whipped Cream costume photos on its website. There are some very imaginative designs including the costume in which Justin Souriau-Levine seems to have graduated from the Little Mouse in Nutcracker to the Master of Ceremonies in Whipped Cream. How time flies.

Before anyone begins grumbling about this production being copied off of The Nutcracker, please be aware that the original Whipped Cream ballet, under the German name Schlagobers (1924), preceded the popularity of The Nutcracker which had its first performances in the U.S. in 1944.

The costumes from 1924 were pretty outlandish. Here is a link to an image of the original production at the Vienna State Opera maintained at the U.K.'s Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Digital Library. Here's another one from Theatermuseum - Straus und die oper.

Here's hoping that ABT knocks it out of the park with this production and that it draws a lot of interest from the family-oriented audience. It's odd how there is no mention from ABT that Ratmansky already choreographed this ballet in 1994 with Tatiana in the lead. We're wondering if this is all new or if it is part revision. It doesn't really matter. Today's choreographers don't seem too keen on revising their works after the initial publicity dies down; so, if an important one shows that it can be done successfully, that will be a plus – maybe even start a trend.

Looking forward to the premiere.

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Reminder about the Lincoln Center Festival Jewels jubilee tickets:

Pre-sales are in process for donors. From LCF:

This is the schedule:
Monday, February 27: Member levels $1,000 and above
Monday, March 6: Member levels $500 and above
Monday, March 13: Member levels $100 and above
Monday, March 29: General Public

We will be announcing the full lineup for Lincoln Center Festival on March 20, so stay tuned.

This is going to be such a huge event!!!

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Speaking of huge events, don't forget about the April 14th YAGP tribute to Julio Bocca which will also mark his 50th birthday. What a perfect year it would be for him to move back home to New York. What a perfect time it would be for ABT's board to do something about the sorry state of the company's directorship.

Look at this video of Julio as he speaks (in Spanish) so articulately and passionately about his company Ballet Nacional Sodre. He is so youthful and full of energy. Imagine all of the glorious Latino talent from around the world that would be beating down the doors at ABT to get in if Julio were the director here. (Print summary here.)

If more of ABT's board members would get out to see the quality of dancing at NYCB, they would realize what a piss poor job McKenzie is doing. Very few of the ABT dancers, regardless of rank, would qualify for a corps position at NYCB. The difference in institutional achievement is that stark.

 

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The Australian Ballet has announced that David Hallberg has been appointed as its first International Resident Guest Artist. He will perform in two seasons in the coming year. This is good news that makes us happy. Aside from his obvious gratitude to TAB and its medical team for managing his physical recovery, it seems that Hallberg has formed an attachment to the Tivoli Road Bakery in Melbourne.

In our opinion, Hallberg should be opening the week of Giselles at the Met during ABT's spring season this year. A Saturday night performance on a big holiday weekend when so many people, including wealthy donors, rush out of town for the first nice weather getaway, is going to make many people unhappy. Poor planning by ABT again.

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Maria Riccetto has been nominated for a Prix Benois de la Danse for her portrayal of Tatyana in Cranko's Onegin which was set on the Ballet Nacional Sodre by none other than Marcia Haydée. Best of luck to her. We miss seeing her on stage in New York.

Meanwhile, YAGP will be celebrating BNS Artistic Director Julio Bocca with its Legends of Dance series on April 14th at Lincoln Center. Maria will return to perform along with Marcelo Gomes, Luciana Paris, Joaquin De Luz, Tiler Peck, and others. Also, there will be appearances by Nina Ananiashvili, Manuel Legris, Cynthia Harvey, Susan Jaffe, and Julie Kent, among others.