American Ballet Theatre - Spring Season 2012!!

Who can't wait????????

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Angel Corella will retire from ABT this year as well - he will continue to dance elsewhere. It is a tremendoues loss to this company.

I think Wiles simply got better work overseas.

I think there's gonna be some beautiful stuff this season.

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Dancers retire, Dottie. They can't do what they did for love forever. And he's 44 now!

I'm looking forward to seeing Ivan Vasiliev dazzle me again and Natalia Osipova. And seeing Roberto Bolle for the first time and Julie Kent. And Herman Cornejo and...

What I'm NOT looking forward to is AnthVoice's precious and pretentious prattling about it.

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I meant Carreno is 44. Corella is 36.

Have you seen Vasiliev? I've seen him twice now and his tours en l'air never fail to make me gasp out loud. I'm seeing him in the Bright Stream and he's one of those ballet dancers who can genuinely be funny.

And I've never seen Roberto Bolle live--have you?

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This is Ivan Vasiliev. Sometimes when he jumps, it's as if he hovers in the air, defying gravity, like a helicopter:

http://youtu.be/5y7xlP0AUMg

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I had no idea that Vasiliev even had danced with ABT. His performance in Esmeralda (which was a great reconstruction of a forgotten ballet) was a highlight.

The entire ballet can be found online in the usual places. I haven't been able to see live ballet in a while, so the Bolshoi cinecasts have been a Godsend (their Corsaire a few months back was pretty incredible as well).

PalJoey, the Bronze Idol is in La Bayadere. I think you might be referring to Ali in Corsaire.

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Updated On: 4/18/12 at 09:06 AM

PalJoey, I watched that clip of Vasiliev last night - Wow!!! What an exciting dancer.

I, too, miss talking ballet with Glebb. I recently joined the BalletAlert forum as they seem to be in the loop over there.

Kind of surprised that ABT just announced Angel's retirement as opposed to earlier and that he's ending his career with them in Swan Lake as opposed to in Le Corsaire. Also surprised he isn't dancing in Romeo and Juliet this season either.

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Yeah the Bronze Idol is Bayadere as pointed out (and was actually a 20th century Soviet addition, partly to include more spectacular male dancing but even when the Mariinsky did their great reconstruction of the original Petipa production, designs and all, they incorporated it).

The Bolshoi Corsaire live screening (which I hope gets a DVD release--some of them have--it's by far the best production of the ballet I've seen albeit extremely long, close to four hours including two intermissions--there are so many different variations on the ballet, with soi many different bits of music it can be hard to keep track) had Svetlana Lunkina as Medora, Russlan Skbortsob as Conrad, Andrei Merkuriev as Birbanto, and the famous Pas D'exclave danced by Anastasia Staskevitch and Vyacheslav Lopatin.

Bright Stream certainly has some wonderfully funny moments, but I don't remember that... :P

That would be an amazing staging...

No..

I should have been more specific ....I was in the wings of the theatre - stage left to be exact. When Osipova reached the point where her solo was about to come on..Craig Salsteen (standing near me in the wings) shouted to everyone "get out your iphones" and several people did.

I taked to Craig once - very nice guy.

He said he worked in a shop to help pay his way through Ballet School. No attitude or Elitism, at all.

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Wow, nice photo. I'm going Thursday night. I just noticed something unusual with ABTs pricing. I purchased my ticket over a month ago ($75 dress circle). Then when I went to look to see what other seats were available in that section last week the price was listed as $85. Today they're listed as $90. Is this something new? Didn't think prices would increase the closer to the performance date.

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