sandik

I went to opening night (on a kind of busman's holiday). I'd only seen the company once before, but felt they were better served with this program, and in turn they served the dances well. The Wheeldon felt a bit episodic to me, tick-tocking between Chopin and Weill. About a third of the way through he repeats a bit chunk of the choreography, including a very striking lift sequence -- what had been done to Chopin was now done to Weill. It's an interesting structural device, but this time around I don't think it showed anything different either about the music or about the movement, and since he didn't really follow up on it with anything similar I wondered why he made that choice. Julia Adam's work was indeed very bright, with about 3 times more ideas than she had space and opportunity to work out. She could have cut the piece in half, and really explored just those elements or "tricks" for the whole of the time, and still had more to play with. Although it had a couple of ragged moments on opening night, it's a witty and stylish piece, and would certainly be worth seeing again. I hadn't seen her work before, so this was a welcome introduction. "Facade" was the reason I made the trip, and I was so pleased to see it again. It's such a cheery pastiche of popular music and dance that it's easy to overlook the structure, but like Petipa, it has a kind of satisfying regularity to the phrasing and vocabulary -- it was a treat.

Since he was the Pittsburgh managing director, I doubt that he would be hired for an artistic director position. For awhile people seemed to be cycling in and out of PNB's executive director position, but D. David Brown has been settled in for several years now. Of course, he may chose to leave when Stowell and Russell do, or the incoming AD may have a choice about the position -- it's all in the air as far as I know.

If I remember correctly, Jeopardy included a question about Labanotation in the last year or so.

Serve me up a heaping helping of crow -- it's not Caron in Funny Face -- it's Audrey Hepburn. To make up for my error, may I recommend John Mueller's book on Astaire "Astaire Dancing" -- excellent analysis of the the films.

A friend asked me recently when theaters began to be built without a raked stage, and I wasn't able to track down any reliable information. Does anyone here have information about it?

All of them! Though I agree that Barkleys of Broadway is probably the weakest. And The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is very interesting, but mostly as an attempt to recreate the Castle's style, rather than developing the Astaire/Rogers partnership. "Pick Yourself Up" is a great number, in part for the way it moves between dance styles -- one of the many, many things that this couple did excellently was segue between ballroom and theater dance styles. So much of Astaire's popular acclaim is tied up in "elegance" that it's sometimes easy to forget that he could really pound the floor as a tap dancer, and you see that in this number. After you watch your way through all the A/R canon, take a look at some of his other dancing films. He's wonderful with Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings (and she's a much stronger dancer than Rogers), and I'm very fond of his work with Leslie Caron in Daddy Long Legs and Funny Face. And then there's always Ziegfeld Follies, where he dances with Gene Kelly. You will have a wonderful time!!

Adding my voice to the wake -- I will miss the publication and the feisty tone of the writing. And although I value this website, I cannot take it with me on the bus.

I may be hallucinating (in a strictly legal way) but didn't ABT used to dance at the State Theater? And wasn't one of the reasons that they moved to the Met that they couldn't do their Nutcracker at holiday time with NYCB in perpetual residence. I am more amused by the idea of a modern dance repertory company at the State Theater, and Peter Martins clueless suggestion. Yes, there are mixed rep companies doing excellent work, and many of them perform work that is not in the current rep of other groups (Amy mentions Hubbard Street with their cache of pre-ABT Tharp and Repertory Dance Theater, which may be the only group performing Alwin Nikolais now.) but I sincerely doubt that living choreographers would want their current rep performed in NYC by a company not their own -- a group that would be in competition with their own ensembles.

I've seen snips of his reconstructions in the past, and they have a remarkably truthful feel to them -- I'm really looking forward to this!

Hadn't thought of Imler as Gamzatti, but you're right -- I think she could be quite good. She seems to have a very clear sense of the Petipa repertory, even in the excerpted version, she's excellent in Paquita. And yes, Parce was fabulous on opening night too!

I'd like to get back to the "getting it or liking it" part of this thread. When I'm working as a critic, it's my job (or at least I think it is!) to see what's happening on stage, to do my best to understand what the choreographer is doing, to think about the work on its own and within its context -- and then to bring at least some of that to the reader (sometimes in 350 words or less) It's my job to "get it," but it isn't necessarily my job to "like it." Indeed, depending on the evening, the work, or the performance, sometimes it's my job to dislike it, and to explain why. Most of the critics I know worked hard to educate themselves before they started writing, and continue to do the same now that they're published. Frankly, I know many of them who continue to impoverish themselves to be able to see what they need to see, in order to know enough about the field. I'm certainly not holding up all the members of the profession as saints, but I think they often feel much more personal responsibility to the job than they are given credit for. I'll get down from my soapbox now...

OBT has announced their programming for next year. “Movement as Metaphor,” October 9 – 16, 2004 Swan Lake, Act III, Christopher Stowell, after Petipa/Tschaikovsky Concerto Barocco, Balanchine/Bach Orpheus Portrait, Kent Stowell/Liszt Nutcracker, December 10 – 24, 2004 Balanchine/Tschaikovsky “Body, Mind, Spirit,” March 5 – 12, 2005 In the Night, Robbins/Chopin Concerto Grosso, Charles Czarny/Handel New work, Stowell “Masters and Moderns,” May 13 – 22, 2005 Opus 50, Stowell/Tschaikovsky New work, Yuri Possokhov Company B, Taylor/Andrews

Oh dear. I adore the Grant film, but certainly not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. Although Alexis Smith makes an astonishing Linda. I usually like Kevin Kline's work, so I'll see this, but, well, maybe the music will be good.

I've read big chunks of this and, although the interviews with teachers and coaches are fascinating, shedding light on the process of getting a performer to the stage, the real text of the book seems to be a reflection on the status of ballet at the end of the 20th c. Newman seems to have gone in to the process of interviewing and assembling materials believing that there's something fundamentally wrong with the state of ballet, and this seems to have influenced some of her choices, but the issues she raises are important ones, and worth the examination she gives them.

I missed seeing this when it was first posted. If I'm understanding your question correctly, you wonder if we are in for a spate of ballets not just created to popular music, but somehow reflecting that aesthetic as well? And if there is or will be a company whose primary raison d'etre is to create those works? Answering the second question first, the nature of most ballet companies (that most of them are based in a community, rather than primarily a touring org) means that they usually have to be many things for many people -- a representative of the breadth of the art form. So that the Pittsburgh repertory you list (a little classical work, a little pop-art-ish work, a Nutcracker or something else suitably holiday) seems very typical to me. During James Canfield's directorship, Oregon Ballet Theater was very close to a rock ballet company, and yet they performed standard classical works (and from what I've heard, Canfield's Nutcracker was a very traditional production) As far as the first question goes, we've already seen a fairly steady stream of works to popular music, but the era of "popular" has ranged from early 20th (ragtime) to current. I don't imagine this will diminish -- what I find interesting is watching how choreographers deal with this material as it shifts from contemporary to historical. When Scott Joplin's work became better known in the 1970s (thanks, in part, to the film The Sting) it was used for several ballets. Some treated it as an example of its era, and the choreography tried to reflect that period. Other dancemakers used it just as "danceable music," without reference to its original time. The more contemporary the score, the harder it is for the choreographer to take that first path, to create a work that exemplifies a particular time, not our own.

I wish I were going too. An interesting sidelight -- a couple of years ago the Dance Critics Association screened the film of the Paris Opera Ballet reconstruction of Sylvia, and Morris was in the audience. He had already agreed to choreograph the work at that time, and I believe was interested in seeing the earlier version.

Oh lordy. As always, RG's historical materials are dead on -- there have been very few "official" assolutas. But like the term "prima ballerina" I've seen it applied indiscriminately by people who don't really understand the distinction but like the sense of hyperbole. It's a bit like grade inflation -- any woman dancing on pointe is immediately labled as a ballerina, so whichever dancer is the leader of that group is automatically a prima, which leaves nothing left for a dancer of real distinction. Sigh.

Actually, Ashton's had two (or, more accurately, we've had two about Ashton) and they're a good example of the affect of time and proximity on biography. Deborah Jowitt, who has been granted a significant amount of access to Robbin's private papers, is working on a biography which will be quite different than the Lawrence book of a couple years ago. I'd be happy to see a new biography of Balanchine, one that was structured to look at his life and career as a whole, but there are so many people in the dance world who haven't been about at all -- I worry about them as well. Sigh.

Croce has been working on this book for several years -- although it would have been nice to get it during the "official" Balanchine year, I'll be happy to see it whenever it appears!

I work as a freelance critic, and have a slightly different perspective on this topic. Many of my colleagues did indeed come to dance writing through a journalism pathway, but probably more of us were involved in dance first, and came to the writing part later. As far as formal training is concerned, it's easier to get practice writing about dance in a dance program (history, performance studies, etc) than it is in a journalism program. At this time there aren't any degree programs (that I know of!) specifically in dance criticism, but there are programs from the BA to the PhD level that study dance beyond or outside of a studio environment. There are dance or arts writing classes taught in several schools (Cornish College for the Arts in Seattle is one) -- I imagine that information about those specific courses would be fairly easy to get. On one level, it depends on your desires and interests for other parts of your life -- since there are few full-time dance writing jobs, most of us do something else as well. Some people come to dance writing as writers, and the rest of their life is involved in writing about other things. Some arrive through dance, and the balance of their time is spent there -- teaching or doing something else.

(This includes material about several different events, but they all seemed related to me, so I didn't want to split them apart) Sometimes it seems like watching dancing is like buying a car -- you don’t think twice about Volkswagens until you’ve got one, and then the streets seem filled with Bugs and vans. At one point, we’re all supposed to have dreamed about flying, but it hadn’t crossed my mind in ages until this last weekend when flying cropped up in nearly everything I saw. The Henry Gallery at the University of Washington just opened an exhibit of work by Trisha Brown and several of her collaborators, including Robert Rauscheberg and Donald Judd. Brown gave a public talk Thursday night where the idea of flying came up several times, as she told levitation stories and gave an impromptu performance of “Accumulation with Talking.” The gallery exhibit includes the installation structure for her 1970 work “Floor of the Forest,” where dancers are suspended above the ground on a kind of rope grid, and rotating groups from the local dance community will be performing the piece twice a week from now until summer -- an amazing opportunity to see something in depth. The set and costume pieces in the exhibit are fascinating, but even better, as far as I’m concerned, is the wealth of video that comes along with it, generous excerpts of “Set and Reset,” “Handmade,” and “Glacial Decoy,” among others. The next evening I saw “Without a Net,” a performance of trapeze artists at a local gallery. Like ice dancing and synchronized swimming, aerial work lies so close to dance that it’s easy to look at it with the same eyes, but that’s not really right -- the physics of hanging in the air are different than jumping into it or leaping through it, which makes the aesthetics different as well. The work made me think of magicians, and their ability to direct our attention away from the mechanics of the trick -- while some of the performers had painstakingly choreographed each transfer of weight or change in grip to make it look like just another gesture, others were almost blatant in their presentation. “I am pulling myself up a rope and looping it around my foot. I am letting go and dropping upside down. I am sliding down the rope and stopping just before my head crashes into the floor.” And as I’m watching the bottom is dropping out of my stomach. It reminded me of the equipment pieces in Brown’s exhibit, huge constructions of exposed track and wires, like mountain climbing gear. And it reminded me of the title of the Duchamp large glass -- “The Bride Stripped Bare by the Batchelors.” And if that wasn’t enough, later that weekend, in a mixed bill by Arc Dance (a local ballet and modern company) there was more trapeze work of the “nothing up my sleeve” variety. Seattle has seen a lot of aerial work, back to Robert Davidson’s low-hanging trapeze dances in the 1980’s, including “Airborne Meister Eckert,” where the hypnotic affect of swinging supported the image of the German religious mystic. (and now that I think of it, Pat Graney’s dancers were hanging upside down before that, in “Childrenz Museum.”) I must be a slow study, because it took me awhile to realize back then that the dancer doesn’t really have to move on the trapeze in order to appear to be in motion -- the spinning and swinging of the equipment supplies the action to something that might otherwise be a static tableau, like the ubiquitous ballerina in the music box. It takes effort to get something moving -- to pump a swing or wind it up, but once you take your feet off the floor, the stored energy plays itself out very gradually -- momentum and entropy take the place of friction as you slow to a stop. This work seems to be all about turning, and a kind of lyrical grace, where the circling trapeze makes complex parabolas out of simple gestures. The Brown exhibit is open until mid-July, and the company will be in Seattle at the end of May, in case you’re planning a trip out here.

At a local rummage sale this weekend I found a 1928 single volume edition of Theophile Gautier's fiction. I've only had time to skim, and so far it's charmingly florid -- is anyone here familiar with any of his work other than his dance writing?

Melinda Bargreen in the Seattle Times write about this topic -- paraphrased, her response could be described as "it's the voice..." http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/...321&query=opera

You can rent the Antonio Gades/Carlos Saura film (the the fabulous Christina Hoyos) on video -- it's obviously been restaged to work as a film (including setting the dance as a rehearsal) but it's a gorgeous piece of work.

Olivier Wevers is still dancing prince roles at Pacific Northwest Ballet, but he's got a flourishing side-career going as a character performer. His Gamache in Don Q was a clueless wonder, and his Carabosse is very disturbing -- "she" kisses the snake after she threatens the court with it. Very twisted.