sandik

Looking at the video, there are some striking similarities. The sequences with the soloist in front of a small group is pretty clearly copied from the older work, although the later sequence (rolling on the floor) is more generic. We're in a fascinating period right now as far as quotation is concerned. American modern dance was founded on the concept that an individual would create their own dance -- that modern dance was fundamentally an act of personal expression. You could study with someone and absorb their style, and most dancers did just that, almost to the point of becoming an acolyte, but if you were going to choreograph, the work should come from you -- it should be original. Alongside this point of view was the assumption that everyone would, at some point, make their own dance. Even people who did not really want to strike out on their own as choreographers were expected to take some kind of composition class and to make their own work. This was seen as an essential part of becoming an artist, even if you were eventually going to spend most of your dance life performing in someone else's work. This is particularly true in academic programs, where technique classes are often seen as worth fewer credits than composition classes. But we are still in the middle of a post-modernist phase, and one of the hallmarks of post-modernism in general is the use of historical reference. Add this to the contemporary use of sampling in hip-hop culture, and you've got a situation where people expect to use the entirety of the dance world as a cook would use a pantry, taking both raw ingredients and pre-prepared food that they combine in the final product. Beyonce, and whoever it is that works with her on these projects, are not the first pop music artists to quote extensively from existing material. Madonna's "Material Girl" and Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted Snake" were both almost step for step and shot for shot copies of older material. I never did hear anyone discuss issues of copyright with the Madonna video -- Abdul stated on a couple of talk shows that her video was an "hommage" to Bob Fosse. In both of these cases, the original material was from film, and the choreographers were dead -- I don't know if the contemporary artists approached any representative of the originators. Since it would have been very simple to prove the connection, I imagine that everyone came to some kind of agreement beforehand -- otherwise I'm sure we would have heard all about it!

Thank you so much for posting this -- I haven't seen it in quite awhile and this was such a treat!

I'm always interested in seeing another version of R&J, but I can understand why Boal would choose to present the balcony scene from the production he's already got in the repertory. Aside from the obvious logistical issues, this is a chance to either keep current cast members rehearsed in the part, or to give other dancers a chance to "audition." But if we're in the wishing business (and who wouldn't want to be?) I'd have been thrilled to see either the Ashton or the Tudor versions. A girl can dream...

(I've been trying to get to this post for a couple of days, but life got lifelike) I saw a lot of the Trocks back when Peter Anastos was making work for them, and they were excellent at walking the line between parody and exaggeration. Like Tharp, the comedy was on several levels, so that you might be laughing at a reference to a particular choreographic quirk and the person sitting next to you was just as amused at the sight of men in tutus. Their satires on existing rep (I particularly loved the Petipa and Fokine parodies) were dead on, making references to both the choreographers foibles (the ballerina stalking to dead center stage for a vertiginous series of turns, and the eternally wandering sylphs) and to the performance conventions of the ballet tradition. And his versions of Balanchine and Robbins (I'm thinking of Go for Barocco and Yes Virginia) showed us something essential and valuable about those two bodies of work. Anastos understood something really powerful about humor -- in order to make a really successful parody, you not only have to understand the work you're skewing, you really do need to love it. But one of my favorite experiences with the Trocks, and I think probably the most essential, was watching their version of (I think it was) Raymonda -- I cannot remember who was dancing the lead ballerina role, but as he/she walked out of the wings to start the variation I thought "that's Eleanor d'Antuono." It wasn't a humorous moment -- it was more like the Japanese onnagata -- a man playing a woman's part and paring it down to the essential 'female-ness' of the role. We don't have too many people making actual comedy about ballet -- Myra Kinch (I think -- I don't have time to look this up) used to do a parlor-sized piece called Giselle's Revenge. She made it at Jacob's Pillow, I think, and it toured around, but didn't last past her career.

I hadn't followed along with all of the WSS discussion, but I must say Sondheim's observation doesn't surprise me. PNB has Robbins' West Side Story Suite in its repertory, and so I've seen it several times in the last couple years -- I think that Robbins did himself a disservice by ending the work with the "Somewhere" number, which has a very bucolic, deMille-like feeling. It's very pretty, but it's not West Side Story. I'll be very interested in seeing an Oklahoma with recisions -- there's a production currently on tour coming to Seattle where it will have new choreography by Donald Byrd, whose work is generally quite intense and harsh. It should make for some fascinating comparisons! Tangentially, I think you make a very interesting point about the relationship between Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy in Sleeping Beauty. Pointe or no pointe, I've seen it set up where the hierarchy is very clear -- like Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West -- they are obviously on a different level from the rest of the fairy ranks -- the conflict between the two of them is about a fundamental conflict between good and evil, rather than battling personalities.

Oh, this is my favorite dance sequence in the film -- I just wish your clip had stretched to include the Jackie Gleason step! And yes, this would be a great addition to a Post-Feast Film Festival!

Just a reminder that Doug Fullington, sometime denizen of Ballet Alert, will be presenting his lecture-demonstration on the work of Marius Petipa and the changes that have been rung on some of that repertory next Thursday 20 October at 5:30 at the Phelps Center. I'm sure it will be a fascinating evening.

IT sounds like some of the most central works in his repertory are currently owned by a wide variety of people. I hope that this does not turn out to be a problem.

Society of Dance History Scholars 3416 Primm Lane Birmingham, Alabama 35216 6 September 2011 Society of Dance History Scholars Announces 2010 de la Torre Bueno Prize® winner Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History The Society of Dance History Scholars announces the 2010 winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for the best English language writing on dance historiography. The Bueno Prize has been awarded annually since 1973 to the year's most distinguished book of dance scholarship. Named after José Rollins de la Torre Bueno, the first university press editor to develop a list in dance studies, the Bueno Prize has set the standard for scholarly excellence in the field for more than thirty years. Society of Dance History Scholars takes special pride in awarding the Bueno Prize for scholarship in dance. Through this prize, we recognize the particular labor and outstanding achievement that demonstrate the best of dance historiography, regardless of the era, genre, or group of dancers under scrutiny. Congratulations are due indeed, to the winner, and the special citation recipients. The 2010 award goes to Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History by Constance Valis Hill. Special Citations have also been awarded to Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka by Susan A. Reed, and Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: A Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento by Jerri Daboo. A reception for the author will be hosted by the SDHS at the American Tap Dance Foundation on October 22, 2011 at 5:30pm. The event is by RSVP only, please direct inquires to info@sdhs.org Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History by Constance Valis Hill, Five College Professor of Dance, Hampshire College, is a ground-breaking book that analyzes tap dance as a multi-layered fusion of African, European, and American influences, embodied and transformed by generations of men and women dancing across the racial divide. With a scope of 400 years of performance history, Tap Dancing America spotlights long lost dancers, as well as celebrated ones, documenting their performances and the social, cultural, and racial contexts in which they took place, while providing a deeply informed, yet lively account of tap’s aural, rhythmic, and percussive forms. Multiple stories weave into a narrative to show how individual dancers learn from one another, mastering, revitalizing, and ultimately transmitting their art to new generations and communities. This book is certain to have a profound influence on how we think about American dance. Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka by Susan A. Reed, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Anthropology, Bucknell University. Dance and the Nation is an important and unique monograph on Sri Lankan national dance, one that finely details and illuminates the processes of transformation from a local ritual performed by men of a hereditary caste to that of national emblematic performance, open to all castes and to women. The book is an original study in Asian dance, underpinned by extensive fieldwork over several years, critical engagement with a wide variety of sources both historical and ethnographical, and insightful reflection on the relation of grounded data to theoretical perspectives on postcolonialism, ethnic identities, politics, gender, and the aestheticization of cultural practices. Dance and dancers remain a focal point throughout, vividly represented in the high quality of the accompanying DVD, the structure and narrative of which provide a valuable model for future publications in the anthropology and history of dance. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: A Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento by Jerri Daboo, Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of Exeter, is one of few modern studies in English of the ritual known as tarantism and the related music and dance called pizzica, originally used to cure women who claimed to have been bitten by a spider. The book focuses on Salento (in the southern Italian region of Apulia), where the ritual has been performed for centuries and where in the last twenty years it has become part of a large revival movement crossing art, popular performance, and the tourist industry. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse examines this complex phenomenon from multiple perspectives, providing a historical overview of the medical, scientific, religious, and philosophical discourses produced around tarantism in the last several centuries along with a thoughtful analysis of neo-tarantism and performances of pizzica in Salento today using the lens of performance studies. Dealing with issues such as embodiment, experience, identity, and authenticity, the book contributes new conceptual frameworks to the study of dance in relation to ritual and cultural performance. The committee for the 2010 prize was comprised of Theresa Buckland and Susanne Franco, with Lynn Garafola as chair. The awards will be presented at a special reception on October 22, 2011, 5:30pm at the American Tap Dance Foundation, Inc. (American Tap Dance Center, 154 Christopher Street #2B, New York, NY 10014). Please direct all inquiries and replies to info@sdhs.org SDHS was organized in 1978 as a professional network and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1983. The society now counts among its members individuals and institutions across the globe committed to the interdiscipline of dance studies. SDHS was admitted to the American Council of Learned Societies as a constituent member in 1996 and is committed to the advancement of the field of dance studies through research, publication, performance, and outreach to audiences across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. SDHS holds wide-ranging annual conferences; publishes new scholarship through its proceedings and book series; collaborates regularly with peer organizations in the U.S. and abroad; and presents yearly awards for exemplary scholarship, including the de la Torre Bueno Prize®.

What a wonderful thing to say!

I'm afraid this is where I off-load extra thoughts I couldn't fit in a review -- just scroll down if you've already had enough. At the top of the show, the people sitting in the balconies see the conductor enter the orchestra pit before the people in the spendy seats on the main floor, so the pre-show hush starts upstairs and makes its way down to the rest of the audience. I usually sit on the main floor (I sit where they put me -- as a solo person I’m easy to move around) so when I hear things settle down I look to see the conductor’s head pop up when he steps onto the podium. Kershaw had a mane of white hair, while Dameron’s frizzy halo surrounds his bald spot. de Cou (aka the new guy) is a brunette, but that’s all I know so far. Carousel - I know that everyone is excited about the carnival effects and the merry-go-round at the end of this work, but honestly, that’s the least interesting thing for me. Wheeldon has made a ballet here, with the same kind of personnel that St Leon and Petipa used, and it’s very interesting to see what he does and doesn’t do with that heritage. This isn’t the highly structured kind of work that Caniparoli made a couple years ago. That work used a pre-existing score that had divided the project up into discrete sections (very Petipa-like) while this piece is more through-created. There are distinct sections in Carousel as well, mostly delineated by songs from the original musical -- it’s not strictly an orchestral version of the R&H score, but it does tend to keep each song separate. And since so many of those are keyed specifically to events in the original book, Wheeldon does “tell the same story,” but it isn’t as literal as the source material. The lead couple are Billy and Julie, and their big duet, which culminates in “If I Loved You” reflects those characters, but doesn’t act them out per se. The rest of the cast are more generically part of the community -- we see more of the two soloist couples, but they aren’t really specific -- no Carrie and Mr Snow. Some of their movement has a bit of character attached to it -- some task-like gestures for the ensemble and the tumbling cartwheels that resemble carnival rides, but for me, the interesting stuff was his use of more standard vocabulary. He knows what to do with women on pointe, uses some very inventive partnering and in general seems happy to own his heritage as a ballet choreographer. I saw Korbes and Orza in the main roles, and they were well suited to the style and to each other. He’s got an excellent vibe as Billy -- there’s a note of aggression in his dancing that really works with this part, and she was very clear about the transition between wariness and abandon -- you could see where her character chose to commit to him. Elsewhere, it was great to see Kiyon Gaines as one of the soloists -- I missed his presence on stage for much of last year. Ben Griffiths was the other solo man, and the two of them were very in sync. They’re close in stature, although they’re not really twins, but there were a couple of moments where they were just identical --same line, same initiation, same follow-through. It was very effective. Later in the program, Griffiths dances with Lucien Postelwaite (the male duet in Polyphonia) -- they do a fine job, but in some ways I think his duet here with Gaines is better matched. They were partnered with Margaret Mullin and Kylee Kitchen, who were both very flowy, and made good use of the waltz rhythms in the piece. After the Rain - This is one of those works that is open to all kinds of interpretation. It has a gentle and methodical quality to it, and for all that the vocabulary choices are far from classical it doesn’t feel tricky to me the way that some of Polyphonia does. When I first saw it here a couple years ago, I thought it was mostly about endurance, that this was a couple who had fought a long and taxing battle, and that we were seeing them at the end, where they may have been victorious, but you couldn’t really tell through the exhaustion. At the very end, when he picks her up and turns around with her in a deep back arch, and then puts her down in a kind of back-bend bridge, I thought of a dog that turns around itself as it gets ready to sleep, so that when he slides under her and then gently pulls her down on top of him it was as if he was getting to bed and she was his safety blanket. This time around there was something about the way she leaned forward while standing on his thigh, like a bowsprit, that made me think of sailing and of travel. They were on a journey, and found their destination in the end. I got two casts -- Chapman and Cruz are very well matched physically, but he seemed more of a support than an equal partner this time around. Rachel Foster and James Moore felt like an even-handed pairing. They’ve both had big success with the more contemporary parts of the repertory, and it shows well here -- they don’t editorialize on any of the steps -- they just do them. Polyphonia - I wish I could see this a couple more times -- there’s so much going on that I have to keep myself watching the piece as it unfolds rather than taking a moment to puzzle out a particular step or relationship. It is indeed the most “Balanchine-y” of the works on the program, and some people might think it’s almost too derivative, but I think he makes excellent use of his adopted heritage, quotations and all. When I saw the lec-dem during the first week of the run, I thought that seeing this work next to After the Rain might undercut the two pieces -- that they might seem too much alike, but that wasn’t the impression I got in performance. They may have real similarities in their vocabulary, but the time out of time quality of the duet doesn’t really have a match in the Ligeti. The opening section, where the four couples take the main phrases apart and put them together again, does look like Balanchine in his Stravinsky mode, but the pattern games seemed more front and center here, and made me think of Wheeldon as a part of the post-modern dance generation as well as a neo-classicist. But then, at the end of the section, when the front lights started casting shadows on the upstage scrim and the eight dancers on stage looked like part of a larger, more noir-ish crowd, the piece took on an emotional weight it didn’t have before. That sense of mystery kept reasserting itself through the ballet, particularly in the next duet, with its creaturely images. So for me things seem to alternate between games with patterns and more emotionally evocative material. Thinking about it in those terms, I was most struck with the two duets in the middle -- Nakamura and Griffiths dancing like furies with windmill arms, and Griffiths again, with Postelwaite this time, in a tag team dance that looks like Bournonville’s Jockey dance and Balanchine’s male duet from Agon. The more mysterious stuff really came to a head for me with the Allegro con Spirito (Sarah Ricard Orza and Jerome Tisserand in the performances I saw) The contemplative feeling of the side-to-side shifting at the top of the duet played out through the whole of that dance and into the following solo for SRO. Towards the end of her solo she does a series of chaine turns with her arms descending from a high fifth position, her hands holding onto an invisible something. It’s a moment you can interpret a hundred ways, and each of those ways becomes a story about who she might be and what powers she might invoke, and then it’s over and we launch into another section of the ballet. I’ve seen Polyphonia maybe five times now, and would line up in less than a minute to see it five more. Variations Serieuses - This is such a smartypants work. Between the snarky takes on backstage behaviors, the references to 42nd Street and The Red Shoes, the sharp observations in the faux-19th century choreography, and the skewed stage space, this is Wheeldon offering up something for everyone in the audience. I could bring my most hide-bound dance friends to this and sit them right next to colleagues who eschew the slightest reference to classical dance, and put them in the laps of people who know nothing at all about the art form and they would all be having a grand time. Strangely enough, that’s the same kind of thing I say about Twyla Tharp’s choreography (that it’s full of multiple references from disparate parts of the dance world) but I don’t see Wheeldon and Tharp making similar works. He got my ‘loves an arcane moment’ self from the opening of the curtain with the ghost light on the apron of his fake stage and from there it was ‘name that reference’ all the way though. I spent a big chunk of time trying to figure out who he was basing his ballet-inside-a-ballet on. When the aspiring dancer first tries out some steps when she thinks she’s alone, it looked a bit Balanchine-y to me, like a fourth muse in director’s-cut Apollo. Later on, the twitchy ballet master made me think Massine, and his rehearsal felt a bit like one of his symphonic works, but once the women started filing in wearing their costumes, romantic-length skirts with wings on their backs and wreaths on their heads, a la Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide, I thought it was more like an homage to Fokine, a post-modern variation on a neo-romantic evocation of a Romantic era ballet.. There are lots of aphorisms out there about how hard it is to do comedy, and I think it must be even more challenging to do it in dance. We have very few comedies in the ballet repertory, compared to theater and music we seem like a noble and dour bunch. Most of the humor in VS come from its references to existing concepts or stereotypes: we already know the fussy director, a conductor with his head in the clouds, the self-absorbed diva and the winsome ingenue -- we’re familiar with those types even when they appear in contexts other than a ballet company. When the diva is working up a head of steam to retaliate against the doofy chorus boy who knocked into her she literally paws the floor with her pointes -- she looks like a bull in that old Bugs Bunny cartoon about bullfighting. It was fascinating to see Imler and Gilbreath in the role during the first weekend. Imler’s diva is right in line with what I think of as her Edith Wharton parts -- the Queen Mother in Swan Lake and the Matron in The Concert -- women who know their place in their community and wield their power. With Gilbreath, it’s easier to see her as the result of the same life cycle we follow in the ballet -- she was once an aspiring ingenue herself and replaced whatever ballerina came before her. The ballet is stuffed with fun details -- I loved the Barbie pink costumes for the men with the slashed doublets (very Ballet Russe) and the little wiggle for the Diva when she walks through a cloud of perfume. And the cast embraces them all with relish -- this is the most relaxed I think I’ve ever seen Seth Orza, and the most nuanced. He was attracted to the ingenue, empathetic and familiar with the diva, businesslike with the ballet master -- a rounded human being. And Ezra Thompson was an excellent Jughead, snoozing in the wings, chatting with his colleagues, and coming in at just the wrong time to catch the diva as she hurtles into the orchestra pit. But what makes VS really special to me is that alongside all this charming fun, Wheeldon is making some very tricky choreography. I spent one performance trying to visualize what I’d be seeing if I was sitting in the fake audience over on the real stage right, and as near as I could tell, it was a very interesting and stylistically consistent ballet. It made sense on two sides simultaneously, and that’s a difficult thing to accomplish with an art form that is very wedded to the geography of the stage space. Peter Anastos made a series of works for the Trocks that were funny because they took on the structural themes of the ballets they referenced (rather than only satirizing the characters), and Wheeldon has done the same thing here. Like I said, what a smartypants he is.

This would be an interesting topic of discussion outside this thread -- while PNB most certainly has a strong NYCB affiliation in its history, I'm not sure that, looking at the current repertory, we're really a "Balanchine Baby" company anymore. You're dead on, though, when you imply that acting skills take time to develop just like more abstract technical chops do. And one of the challenges of working in a repertory company like PNB is getting the consistent opportunities to practice those skills. I remember watching Noelani Pantastico's first go at Sleeping Beauty -- I wouldn't characterize her performances as a deer in the headlights, but her dancing certainly had a kind of precarious caution -- she knew this was important stuff and she was a little wary. The next time the work came up in the repertory, she did a lovely job with the very delicate characterization of a young woman on the verge. Maria Chapman had a similar expression on her face when she danced her first lead in Symphony in C (yikes!), and like Pantastico, has truly deepened her expressive skills over time. We've been seeing Gilbreath in a big bouquet of "firsts" lately -- she's acquitted herself quite well in most of them (Serenade), and I'm looking forward to seeing her development.

Using her world famous fingers and elbow!

This corner of YouTube is full of treats -- if you watch to the end of The Count counting Farrell's turns, you can watch The Count sing along with Cab Calloway!

Not to mention the next video -- taking little and big steps!

Can't be absolutely sure that this is the link that sandik meant to include, but I googled "39 reels belonged to Karel Shook," and that key phrase landed me here --> http://preservingdth...overdue-update/ . I am so sorry -- I posted this on the Dance Theater of Harlem section, but since the company has been inactive I thought I'd cross post here. Obviously I made a hash out of it, but Carbro has made sense of my nonsense. That is indeed the right link, and if you have a few moments to rummage around in the blog, I think you might find it very interesting.

Just make sure you call first before you start hauling things over -- my sister used to work for the local opera company, and the number of people who would try and bring in back copies of programs was really impressive. I think many of them assumed that the company was not keeping copies of their own materials. The little that I've done with this kind of item has been quite varied. Some institutions do like to get multiple copies of their old promotional stuff, to distribute to audiences, and in other cases (especially smaller towns without big library staffs) the local library or historical institution can sometimes use ephemera from companies and other presenters -- materials that they didn't have the capacity to collect when the events occurred. In my community, the university maintained a fairly comprehensive collection of programs from local theaters (including a nice run from the vaudeville houses).

I've been reading through a blog written by a dance archivist working on the Dance Theater of Harlem archives, and just wanted to point people in that direction. She's got an incredible task going with this collection, but this comment just makes my heart ache. I already posted a little something about this in the DTH section below, but if you don't read there, here's the link

Have been reading through this blog about a project sponsored by the Dance Heritage Coalition to sort out DTH's archives, and they mention a new work by John Alleyne that is headed toward a re-launch of the company. Aside from that piece of news, the blog itself is fascinating, not so much for the specifics about DTH, but the challenges of managing records in the performing arts in general. Well worth looking at.

He spoke at a Dance Critics Association conference the last time he worked on Fille for ABT and he was full of fun! As I understand it, he did own the rights to the ballet, but I'm not sure if they revert to the Ashton estate on his death.

There was a significant amount of discussion about this interview in the dance analysis community, and it does indeed seem that the network (and the anchor as their representative) was acting on a 'cut subsidy' agenda. And the CBC was overwhelmed with the response! Gillis has done yeoman work in dance, and has represented Canada all over the world -- it was particularly sour that she was the artist who wound up in this interviewers crosshairs.

The October/November issue of Pointe has Lindsi Dec on the cover, with a very nice profile by Rosie Gaynor inside.

Go. Absolutely, go. This is not ballet, but in his world, Morris is as important an artist as Balanchine, and the current company is dancing beautifully. We're seeing Festival Dance here in December, but not the other works (Violet Cavern instead). V is particularly exciting. Go, and then tell us what you saw.

I'm very sorry to be missing this film series, but this description "pre-premiere preview performance" really made me giggle.

I rummaged around, but couldn't find out who staged this particular production -- does anyone here know?