jessi's dancing

[greer]

i'm taking a ballet history class right now and wow... watching some of the ballets that jessi supposedly starred it makes me think how could ann ever think that an eleven year old could dance these parts? maybe they changed the choreography, but it seems like REALLY stretching the realms of what is believeable. does anyone else have an opinion on this... esp. anyone who's actually ever danced ballet? (I haven't... i'm terribly uncoordinated.

[lilafowler]

When I was Jessi's age, I had a teeny part in The Nutcracker and I was still dancing in flat shoes. I remember being eight, reading BSC books, and thinking I would be ready for pointe shoes by the time I finished elementary school. It was even more of a disappointment than all the family vacations where I never met a boyfriend

[wenonah4th]

I think she was really off, definitely.

[aln1982]

I have no idea as I only took ballet lessons when I was 4. ;D Maybe they made the parts easier, though I have no idea if this is possible. I know like with jumping classes in the breeds I showed, they made the jumps lower and courses easier for younger kids and made patterns easier sometimes for pattern classes. Have no idea about ballet, though.
Never really thought about the realism of it all because I enjoy reading about it. ;D (Also, I think of Jessi as being at least 15 so that might make a difference)

[greer]

when someone says they're doing the ballet sleeping beauty, they're doing the same choreography that has been done since 1890. so i'm not sure how they could change the choreography without ruining the whole thing.

[aln1982]

^ I doubt they could, either.

[wenonah4th]

Do any ballets have more than one set of choreography?

[Deleted]

I like it how jessie's devoted to dancing... even though I don't like doing ballet, I'm glad there's a dancer in the club.. (>O<)

[virgoscorpio]

Jessi's dancing sure comes in handy though sometimes! I finished reading Dawn's Big Move, where Jessi makes a grand ballet leap and makes the BSC win the funny dance race. Now I'm reading Dawn on the Coast, and funny enough, Jessi makes another grand ballet dance leap save when catching a runaway Shannon from the Thomas-Brewer mansion.

[supprazz]

Well if that's really true about it being the same as 1890, then someone hasn't done their proper research before writing #42 and just sticking that in. But I guess internet was not common then, so they didn't expect anyone to just wiki it and we just had encyclopedias and library books to go by.

[greer]

Mar 3, 2009 10:15:52 GMT -5 wenonah4th said:

Do any ballets have more than one set of choreography?

I think it'd be a different ballet--it's kind of like asking if a symphony has a different arrangement, I think.

[wanderingfrog]

^It's kind of hard to say. There are lots of different versions of The Nutcracker. Some of them are really different from each other, some of them are quite similar, and I wouldn't say that every single one of them is a different ballet.

Then there are things like La Sylphide, where the original choreographic notation is irretrievably lost and it's not like we have video footage of it from 1832.

La Sylphide (The Sylph) is one of the world's oldest surviving romantic ballets. There were two versions of the ballet; the version choreographed by the Danish balletmaster August Bournonville (1805-1879) is the only version known to have survived.

This article about Kenneth MacMillan's choreography for Romeo and Juliet mentions the many other versions, most using the same score:

Since [1940] there have been well over one hundred new versions by numerous choreographers, almost exclusively classical ballet in nature, and almost all using Prokofiev’s dramatically expressive score, the best known being those by Frederick Ashton (1955), John Cranko (1958, extensively revised in 1962), Kenneth MacMillan (1965), and Rudolf Nureyev (1977). A few choreographers have turned to Tchaikovsky’s well-known fantasy overture and Antony Tudor’s 1943 Ballet Theatre version now lost, used music taken from various Frederick Delius compositions.

I just think it's interesting that a lot of things online refer to different choreography as just another version of the same ballet. This is from the Wikipedia page for Swan Lake:

The choreographer of the original production was Julius Reisinger. The ballet was premiered by the Bolshoi Ballet on 4 March [O.S. 20 February] 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, billed as The Lake of the Swans. Although it is presented in many different versions, most ballet companies base their stagings both choreographically and musically on the 1895 revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, first staged for the Imperial Ballet on 15 January 1895, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

[mistrali]

I reckon that whatever version you used, it'd still be just as complicated. Keeping in mind that I haven't seen one ballet performance in my life and don't know much about it, those dances are *specifically designed* for adults. Professional adults, at that.

The stuff some of those dancers do might be achievable by a sixteen-year-old, but an eleven-year-old wouldn't have the physical ability.