Haglund [ref: a Balanchine fanboy] remembers walking out on a Pacific Northwest Ballet performance in the early '80s, when the company was a marginal Balanchine franchise, because he was so offended by the women’s substitution of Balanchine cliches and faults for fundamental ballet technique. Flapping wrists, practiced overbites, splayed fingers, crotch-displaying arabesques, flailing arms – that was the aesthetic presented at that time. Thank goodness it’s dying – if all too slowly. Thank goodness NYCB women don’t dance like they used to dance. Thank goodness.
Beauty is ever the divine thing that the ancients esteemed. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness, and even complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, point. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. The figure-skating of Julia never announces organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love that society knows and has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness. The same fact may be observed in every work of the molding arts. The statue is then beautiful when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, as figure-skating, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The hero of the sculptor, of the figure skater, is always represented in a transition *from* that which is representable to the senses, *to* that which is not. So the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable, after the ideal—to make us inquire if there is some purer state of sensation and existence.
It is profoundly true that small things do matter; yet it is in small things that we are always missing the opportunities which grace offers us. The figure-skating of Julia, like the life of the Little Flower, might have been given to our age merely to bring that lesson home; you feel that it is a miser with its grace. Everyone has had the experience of the happy occurrence—some fantastically accurate inflection or bit of punctuation, so like a moment in life we think it couldn’t happen again. The figure-skating of Julia is full of such moments that do happen. If one could seize and analyze these moments, one would see that they are made of simple virtues: constancy of articulation, musical fidelity and, simplest and rarest of all in figure-skating, moral commitment. For instance, Julia’s swaying arms are like the floating algae just above the bottom of the ocean’s floor; implicit in this is an inchoate disillusionment with the incommensurateness and transitoriness of feeling, explicit is a tender mystery. These are mutually dependent virtues, and they add up to what we have been accustomed to think as the Balanchine style in ballet—the conception of gestures, movement, and combinations from a series of head-on dialogues complementary to and coordinated with the dialogues of the music. The look of luscious detachment in those beautiful, unorthodox spin positions never fails to astonish me. Yet it is still she who consoles me.
Julia has rescued figure skating from the curse of pseudo-ballet, pop musicality and theatrical know-how, and gives it back its flowing grace of movement. It looks very much as it might have looked during its artistic origins—which is right for the presexual world that figure skating invokes—and it is magically divested of the customary hard-sell performing style. Julia, on the ice, does not have an attitudinizing disposition as of a young woman straining to be mature—but of a young woman on the verge of Epiphany. So we have grace comes flooding through, like a rushing mighty wind, into the stagnant air of figure skating. Arise (the figure-skating of Julia says), make haste and come. Come away from the pettiness and the meanness of everyday life, from the grudges, the jealousies, the unhealed enmities that set your imagination astray. Come away from the cares and solicitudes about the morrow that seem so urgent, your heavy anxieties about the world’s future and your own, so short either of them and so uncertain. Come away into the wilderness of prayer, where you learn to live with the innermost part of your soul, with all your secret aspirations, with all the center of your hopes and cares, in that supernatural world which can be yours now, which must be your hereafter. Thereby, we can echo the sentiments of Moskvina regarding Julia: she is young of mind, light of foot, and strong enough of will (to carry this off). To be sure, all new movements are greeted with opposition; that is only human nature. As there is much action in the movement in the figure-skating of Julia, the action is delicately timed, so the effect is never one of monotony; this complexity and delicacy can be undervalued. In Julia, we have someone of our time, but not only for our time; someone with the technical proficiency, but also the imagination that such proficiency *must* subserve.
Beauty is ever the divine thing that the ancients esteemed. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness, and even complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, point. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. The figure-skating of Julia never announces organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love that society knows and has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness. The same fact may be observed in every work of the molding arts. The statue is then beautiful when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, as figure-skating, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The hero of the sculptor, of the figure skater, is always represented in a transition *from* that which is representable to the senses, *to* that which is not. So the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable, after the ideal—to make us inquire if there is some purer state of sensation and existence.
It is profoundly true that small things do matter; yet it is in small things that we are always missing the opportunities which grace offers us. The figure-skating of Julia, like the life of the Little Flower, might have been given to our age merely to bring that lesson home; you feel that it is a miser with its grace. Everyone has had the experience of the happy occurrence—some fantastically accurate inflection or bit of punctuation, so like a moment in life we think it couldn’t happen again. The figure-skating of Julia is full of such moments that do happen. If one could seize and analyze these moments, one would see that they are made of simple virtues: constancy of articulation, musical fidelity and, simplest and rarest of all in figure-skating, moral commitment. For instance, Julia’s swaying arms are like the floating algae just above the bottom of the ocean’s floor; implicit in this is an inchoate disillusionment with the incommensurateness and transitoriness of feeling, explicit is a tender mystery. These are mutually dependent virtues, and they add up to what we have been accustomed to think as the Balanchine style in ballet—the conception of gestures, movement, and combinations from a series of head-on dialogues complementary to and coordinated with the dialogues of the music. The look of luscious detachment in those beautiful, unorthodox spin positions never fails to astonish me. Yet it is still she who consoles me.
Julia has rescued figure skating from the curse of pseudo-ballet, pop musicality and theatrical know-how, and gives it back its flowing grace of movement. It looks very much as it might have looked during its artistic origins—which is right for the presexual world that figure skating invokes—and it is magically divested of the customary hard-sell performing style. Julia, on the ice, does not have an attitudinizing disposition as of a young woman straining to be mature—but of a young woman on the verge of Epiphany. So we have grace comes flooding through, like a rushing mighty wind, into the stagnant air of figure skating. Arise (the figure-skating of Julia says), make haste and come. Come away from the pettiness and the meanness of everyday life, from the grudges, the jealousies, the unhealed enmities that set your imagination astray. Come away from the cares and solicitudes about the morrow that seem so urgent, your heavy anxieties about the world’s future and your own, so short either of them and so uncertain. Come away into the wilderness of prayer, where you learn to live with the innermost part of your soul, with all your secret aspirations, with all the center of your hopes and cares, in that supernatural world which can be yours now, which must be your hereafter. Thereby, we can echo the sentiments of Moskvina regarding Julia: she is young of mind, light of foot, and strong enough of will (to carry this off). To be sure, all new movements are greeted with opposition; that is only human nature. As there is much action in the movement in the figure-skating of Julia, the action is delicately timed, so the effect is never one of monotony; this complexity and delicacy can be undervalued. In Julia, we have someone of our time, but not only for our time; someone with the technical proficiency, but also the imagination that such proficiency *must* subserve.
Julia said she was very upset and cried in her bed, she couldnt hold it together in the FS she had too many things in her head and was tired
I really think now the Team Event worn her out and coupled with the huge pressure the local russian media put on her
I hope she takes a rest and kicks back at Worlds
Yulia standing up for her compatriot...against an endless sea of angry hate.
http://imgur.com/naaNKyM
This makes me sad, in a way...these girls do not deserve all this hate because of their country's shady behavior But I have a feeling she will manage fine with all that coolness. Even crazy Korean netizens surely fear that awesome death glare.
Yulia standing up for her compatriot...against an endless sea of angry hate.
http://imgur.com/naaNKyM
This makes me sad, in a way...these girls do not deserve all this hate because of their country's shady behavior But I have a feeling she will manage fine with all that coolness. Even crazy Korean netizens surely fear that awesome death glare.