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Song by song?


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I'm making this thread separate from the discussion of the Altogether Different Festival itself (it's in the "Dance" forum) but there was something I noticed at the Doug Elkins concert I wanted to bring up for general discussion.

Both pieces Elkins showed were created as a series of songs: fade up or transition - song - fade up or transition - song - and so on. It's a construction style used in both ballet, contemporary ballet and other forms of dance, I think for many practical reasons, the biggest is efficiency. Using songs breaks choreography into manageable chunks, doable in brief working periods, and smaller groups of dancers can be called for rehearsal. An artistic reason rather than a practical one - the popular music form of this place and time is the three minute pop song. If a choreographer wants to speak about popular culture, chances are they'll be using songs (Think of Paul Taylor's Black Tuesday, A Field of Grass and other works.)

The danger to the style is the same as its advantage. Using songs breaks everything into discrete chunks, and often they never coalesce. Also the work's length seems arbitrary - right now, the Elkins works are a few numbers too long and they look like a presenter saw them and said "Make it longer." It feels like pop-it beads.

Have you seen a dance that was a group of songs (pop or otherwise) that you particularly liked? Have you seen this style of work in ballet as well, and what did you think?

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I hadn't liked the song on song on song format since I first saw various moderns using it in the early sixties with Daniel Nagrin's solo programs, and Donald McKayle's "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder", but Twyla Tharp overcame my objections with her "Deuce Coupe" for the Joffrey, both in the first version with her dancers and then the II version for the Joffrey dancers alone. She had Beach Boy songs remixed, and didn't use whole songs, as a rule. Sometimes live concert sound was included and the speech was choreographed to. They were wise and witty interpretations of pop songs, and all tied together with an alphabetical lexicon of classical ballet with a dancer in white (Erika Goodman) superimposed over the whole.

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Well, Liebeslieder Walzer works very well, but this is also a ballet of discrete pieces yoked together (and Brahms wrote the songs to be performed together). Who Cares is another ballet that is a series of solos and duets with some ensemble work at the beginning and end. The important thing about both of these ballets, however, is that they are very solidly constructed. That may be what many other song ballets lack.

With Western Symphony and Stars & Stripes, Balanchine hired a composer (Hershy Kay) to create new pieces of music incorporating songs and band numbers — and both ballets use a corps. I think this latter approach offers choreographers a wider range, and the ability to create dances for more than one or two people. But it's time-consuming and expensive, so it hasn't become popular.

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Ballets to song-cycles like Dark Elegies or Liebeslieder Walzer where the songs were composed to be played together tend to avoid the problem I mentioned because the songs are already composed with some sort of overall trajectory in mind. I also like Balanchine's approach with Western (and Who Cares) - hiring a composer to make the works symphonic and Ari's right, it is expensive!

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For me, one of the problems with ballets to songs is that it is difficult to build any musical momentum. That lack of drive or natural musical climax is much more problematic for me than the question of how literally does the choreographer choose to take the lyrics. Balanchine gets around this in Western and Who Cares by having the songs treated as a whole musically.

Of the ballets (dances)choreographed to songs, Tharp and Taylor, in the pieces, mentioned above and a few others have been the most successful.

I never felt that Robbins was at his best in either Ives Songs or Songs of the Auvergne (or is that a Martins piece?).

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Ari made the point that in order to succeed these works have an especially strong need for masterful structure. Balanchine can, Tudor can, Tharp can but doesn't always (Sinatra Songs fails here). Without the solid underlying structure, song ballets do seem to be series of tenuously related events. While it isn't strictly speaking a song ballet, "Dances at a Gathering" suffers from this problem.

I always wondered what it was about "Dances" that bothered me. :confused: After reading this thread, I now know. Thanks for raising the issue, Leigh.

It might be worth pointing out that "Revelations" fits the genre. Anyone think that doesn't work?

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I do admire the choreographers who can do a remix of unconnected songs and make a whole score from them electronically, as Twyla did in "Deuce Coupe" and others, as it works especially well when the vision of the piece seems to be to invoke a "zeitgeist" - a spirit of the times, rather than tell the story of the songs. But getting the rights to remix the music and finding the artist to do so is probably as expensive as finding a composer to write a new score.

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Elite Syncopations comes to mind as a ballet to a series of - well, populare tunes, if not songs - and it holds together fine for me. Perhaps it's a question of structure within the whole - the choreographer has to select pieces of music that go well together, give light and shade, and each adds something to the whole, rather than duplicating something already there.

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I am interested in the notion that "Sinatra Songs" "fails." I cannot get over that dance, years distant from having seen it, I still just adore it. I think it succeeds, fabulously--by using two different versions of MY Way, Tharps gives the piece a shape, and a resolution. The individual dances were all, with the first cast, so distinctive and wonderful. When Keith Young entered carrrying Shelly Washington over his head, so she flew on stage feet first, it was just about the most romantic and sexiest thing I've ever seen. (To Strangers in the Night.) Of course Tharps Movin Out is a song suite. I realize neither of these is strictly ballet, but since the thread has the choreographer and the Sinatra embedded in it...Sinatra is in some ways like Liebeslieder--the individuals, then the gathering. Liebeslieder, of course, stands alone. The epitome of the genre. (I mean Balanchine's. Mark Morris's is more than okay, too.)

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This is somewhat tangential, but as a lifelong admirer of Frank Sinatra's singing, I was always bothered by the fact that Twyla Tharp, in her various Sinatra ballets, invariably chose the corniest, least interesting of his recordings, the worst being the egregious "Strangers in the Night." Scooby doobie doo. :rolleyes:

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I've always adored this ballet. The final moment in "One for My Baby" with Tom Rawe and Shelley Freydont is etched on my memory. Split second timing unlike I've ever seen. Baryshnikov could match it in his version with Kudo.

Farrell Fan, I've always thought that the choice of Sinatra recordings was deliberate, a layering of high art over popular art to create something that blended the two.

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Today, I had occasion to ask a former professor of music and active concert pianist (my sister's father-in-law :)) about Liebeslieder -- whether it was written as one work comprised of many parts or written as many parts that were then lumped together as a single piece.

He confirmed what I thought I had learned earlier: That Brahms wrote it as one work in two sections of eighteen parts. That factor surely affects the cohesiveness of both the Balanchine and the Morris (which I haven't seen). :)

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