Stanley Donen's movie Give a Girl a Break (1953) is a charming divertissement. A year earlier Donen had directed the much overrated Singing in the Rain, with the overly athletic Gene Kelly, but in 1953 budgets at MGM had been cut and Give a Girl a Break does nicely with Bob Fosse and Marge and Gower Champion, with Gower Champion doing the choreography. The serviceable songs were by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin and Donen does an impressive job creating the competition for a leading role on Broadway with a low budget and standing sets. Each female dancer competing for a starring role has a man who helps her and there is a fascinating subtext about the question of love or career, Donen coming down in favor of both. Marge and Gower Champion have a wonderful rooftop reconciliation duet, "It Happens Every Time" and Fosse's choreography, which he reportedly did himself, shows his need for domination. My quibbles are that the couples don't support and help each other enough in their dancing and that the whole enterprise is too theatrical. Fred Astaire's films have shown that just because a musical is about the theatre it doesn't mean the dancing can't be subtle and intimate.
Astaire, of course, was one of George Balanchine's favorite dancers and the complexity, subtlety and intimacy of Balanchine's choreography was brought out nicely in Live From Lincoln Center: Curtain Up, The School of American Ballet Workshop Performance, performed last year and recently shown on PBS. The School of the American Ballet provides the dancers for The New York City Ballet and does a workshop performance every year at Julliard. I confess I have never been to one of these workshops and it is obvious from this broadcast I am missing a great deal. This performance had the complete Serenade, staged by Suki Schorer (who wrote an excellent book, Balanchine Technique, that I have consulted for help with my own dancing); an excerpt from Swan Lake, staged by Darci Kistler; the last act of Coppelia, staged by the school's staff of six; and the last act of Western Symphony, staged by Susan Pilarre (who says she learned many things from Balanchine, "no matter how small your role was he made you feel that he couldn't do the ballet without you.") All were beautifully performed and the little girls were adorable in Coppelia, but I tend to prefer complete ballets to excerpts out of context. Serenade was gorgeous, elegantly danced by the school's corps and by Alston Macgill and Joshua Shutkind; their youth made one realize how youthful this ballet still is, even though it was the first ballet choreographed by Balanchine in America, eighty years ago. Kudos to the director of this broadcast, Matthew Diamond (a former dancer), whose camera angles were minimal and effective. Most televised ballet cuts constantly between long shots and close-ups, often missing things. Diamond was able to cut down considerably on shifting camera angles because the performance was on the small stage at Julliard.
There is an impressive article in The Nation this week (Aug. 17/24) by Marina Harris about Violette Verdy, now a dance teacher at The School of the American Ballet. Verdy, now 81, is teaching Sonatine to New York City Ballet dancers Ashley Laracey and Chase Finlay; this was the last ballet that Balanchine did on Verdy, in 1975 ( I saw her perform it that year in the Ravel festival). Two important points that Harris makes in her piece: first of all, "nothing can replace the guidance of a person who has danced the role many times and knows its secrets" and, secondly, Verdy's descriptions of how Balanchine wanted her to do a role, "he had to keep me quiet and busy." Balanchine often tailored a role to a particular dancer and when a new dancer took on the role he might change the choreography to suit that particular dancer, an option that New York City Ballet obviously no longer has (the only changes I have seen are to make the roles somewhat easier and less demanding!).
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