Ballets Russes

Todd Bolender, 92, a protege of ballet master George Balanchine and the former artistic director of the Kansas City Ballet, died of complications from a stroke Thursday at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan. Bolender danced professionally from 1936 until 1972. Much of that time was spent with Balanchine's New York City Ballet and its precursors. Bolender later held ballet director positions in Cologne and Frankfurt, Germany, before working as a freelance choreographer.

"So, Mme. Riabouchinska, do you think you'll ever outgrow being called a baby ballerina?" The question caused Tatiana Riabouchinska-Lichine, 73, to toss back her head and uproariously giggle. As she strained--unsuccessfully--to stop, her platinum blonde hair twitched until it seemed as if her beaming round face were ringed by a halo. There are those in the dance world who would say Riabouchinska has been blessed. Born on the eve of the Russian Revolution in Moscow, she began life precariously as a premature infant whose family had to dodge insurgents' bullets in their home.

THERE have been a substantial number of good-to-better Hollywood films this year and a wide range of notable independent and foreign films.

"It's just St. John. I had to drive from Santa Barbara, you know," said Hania Tallmadge of her black cape, with its fluted edge and splash of glass beads. "I had to wear something practical." Her ornate earrings were anything but: Gold-and-pearl clusters that cascaded to the shoulder, they'd originally belonged to Tallmadge's aunt, the early 20th century singer and socialite Ganna Walska.

Who would have thought there was so much lyricism in Stravinsky's raw, propulsive "Rite of Spring" until David Robertson and his Orchestre National de Lyon revealed it Sunday in UCLA's Royce Hall? Maybe it's that fabled French clarity and refinement that Robertson, though a native of Santa Monica, comes by legitimately, having served as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, founded by Pierre Boulez in Paris, from 1992 to 2000 until he took over the Lyon orchestra.

The triumphant 1999 four-hour Kirov Ballet reconstruction of the original production of "The Sleeping Beauty" might seem to have been the last word on that great collaboration between choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. However, there are mime passages that haven't been performed as part of the ballet since its premiere in 1890, according to dance historian Frank W.D. Ries, professor of dance at UC Santa Barbara.

Olga Spessivtseva, the Russian ballerina renowned for the spirituality of her dancing during a career that began in St. Petersburg and ended in the Americas with Sergei Diaghilev's touring Ballets Russes, died Monday of pneumonia. She was 96 and died at the Tolstoy Foundation Nursing Home in Valley Cottage, N.Y., where she had lived for many years after recovering from a series of mental breakdowns that curtailed her career.

When mental illness began to bring a premature end to Vaslav Nijinsky's career early this century, the renowned ballet dancer turned to visual art for self-expression. Unfortunately, until recently his works were dismissed as the idle, worthless doodlings of a madman. "The drawings are psychopathic charts," wrote American painter Marsden Hartley in the early 1940s, "and that is all that can be said of them."

In 1917, an all-star collaboration on the satiric one-act ballet "Parade"--between Jean Cocteau (libretto), Leonide Massine (choreography), Pablo Picasso (scenic and costume design) and Erik Satie (music)--made history. Cubism in the theater; typewriters and foghorns in the orchestra pit; gymnastics and other non-classical disciplines incorporated into the ballet vocabulary--all this was pretty daring, even for the adventurous Diaghilev Ballets Russes.