pumukau

I came upon this photo essay on the BBC site today;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pict...cher/html/1.stm

This seems so important to me. The school is near the river just outside the Green Zone, so what used to be an upscale neighborhood is now the scene of insurgent attacks on the US installation.

Once I sat next to a girl of about four who was at her first ballet with her mother. She was VERY excited about the ballet and full of lucid questions which she asked in a whisper and her mother answered quietly. I was really enjoying her until the guy in front of her turned around and glared and barked at her to be quiet. I almost smacked him, because none of us enjoyed the rest of the performance as much as we had with the little girl's help.

I'm not a silence nazi anymore. The last time I shusshed anyone she turned out to be the proud mother of a young man who was doing his first performance as a soloist. I was so embarrassed when we both went up to him after the show to congratulate him! But she was congenial about it.

But little children? ESPECIALLY at nutcracker for pete's sake. If they're into it it's the best part of the ballet. If they're not, mmm, better juice up the show. Oh, yeah, you go to nut to listen to the music? And wow, Amy, what would I give to sit next to Chloe at her first nutcracker!!! With a tape recorder running!

Ed, I have never been to opera in Italy but understand that the audiences are much more vocal there.

No, if someone is whispering ABOUT the ballet and obviously engaged in it it's fine with me. It's an opening for a conversation at intermission; I go to ballets and opera to meet people who are excited about ballet and opera!

On the other hand, I had two women in huge furs and too much perfume sit behind me and yack about the day's adventures at the mall during Serenade until I turned backwards in my seat and sat cross-legged until they stopped. And then there was the guy who let his beeper go THROUGH THE ENTIRE BALCONY SCENE of Romeo and Juliet. He was somewhere about five rows behind me, so at intermission I stood up and made the announcement that anyone who was sitting near the individual with the beeper was invited to join me in dragging him into the alley before the next act. Before I finished speaking thirty people were glaring at the offending party. So the final act was, well, properly tomblike.

Buy this book and read it. I have never read a ballet novel that rose above the level of execrable. This one is a masterpiece. That the NY Times gave it a merely descriptive review should only alert you to the noncommittal torpor into which their book section has drifted of late.

I went to a reading Mr. McCann did here and everyone spent the evening cooing about Nureyev; I saw him here, we worked together there, seeing him on tv inspired me to........ nobody said a word about how brilliant this book is, least of all Mr. McCann, who seems genuinely surprised by it, as if he awoke one Easter Sunday and discovered each of its pages in baskets hidden in his house.

What's slick about the book is that the presentation reflects the subject. As monumental, as unerringly unique as Nureyev's achievements were, and in spite of his incivility to most of the people he encountered, EVERYONE could relate to him in some very personal way, so the book examines him in short vignettes from the viewpoints of the people around him, some of them historical, some fictional, some not even identified.

At the reading Mr. McCann said that he had made up a name for one of Rudik's teachers, and when he visited the real teacher's grave in Russia, the woman who tended the cemetary had his fictional character's name! Now that's either really remarkable, or it's really first rate blarney; either way I admire him for saying it. It's precisely the risk that great artists are addicted to.

The book shows the immense power of our art form to draw all the threads of history into the fabric of the present and the future. It also demonstrates how a dancer starts with mud, blood, and determination and creates the airiest of fantasies.

Mr. McCann is an ecstatic with his feet firmly on the ground, so Nureyev is the perfect hero for him. One segment, I believe the only one from Rudik's POV, that describes one turn around the stage in about 3 pages (I don't have it here, you will know it when you read it) reminds me of that central chapter in Great Gatsby about the party at Gatsby's house that ends "one girl tosses down a drink for courage, steps onto the floor, and the world flies away...." That is, the descriptive power is so realistic and yet the subject matter is so transcendent that we are launched on a miraculous centripetal joyride into the unknowable. Melville's rapturous, rhythmic descriptions of the sea come to mind too.

Whatever you think of Nureyev you shouldn't miss the experience of reading this book. I personally feel all those "Man of the Century" lists three years back were rendered meaningless by omitting him from nomination, not because of his greatness but because so much of what happened in the 20th century flowed through his life. McCann has given us a work of literature as audacious, entertaining, and pitilessly brilliant as its subject.

Didn't Wisconsin look green?

Surely the program erred on the side of heterosexual display if you're from the coasts, but non troppo. Here in Wisconsin the most common response to "I'm a ballet dancer" is still "That Roodolf Brishnakov, din't he die of......" so I appreciated it. They were clearly playing to the diverse PBS audience. Partnering ballerinas would have expressed this more eloquently than the locker room asides, however.

I admit I cringed when I saw Ethan without a helmet too, but then I used to work in an E.R. This is Harley country, remember. A cultural thing. Brett Favre would play without a helmet if they'd let him. Besides which a big dome would have ruined the shot. We're in the eye candy business after all.

Amy wrote"; (I assume one can have a male muse?)

Interesting. Nijinsky/Diaghilev for example?

Amy wrote"; (I assume one can have a male muse?)

Interesting. Nijinsky/Diaghilev for example?

Here's a game: which ballets are the most explicit messages from Mr. B to his muses? Certainly Don Quixote when he felt too old to be with Farrell, similarly Midsummer Night's dream. Tzigane when she came back from exile (you gypsy!... the first time whe wore red on stage). These just off the top of my head.

I have read that his creative flourish right after there was no more hope that Le Clerq would dance again changed the whole relationship between men and women in his ballets.

Here's a game: which ballets are the most explicit messages from Mr. B to his muses? Certainly Don Quixote when he felt too old to be with Farrell, similarly Midsummer Night's dream. Tzigane when she came back from exile (you gypsy!... the first time whe wore red on stage). These just off the top of my head.

I have read that his creative flourish right after there was no more hope that Le Clerq would dance again changed the whole relationship between men and women in his ballets.

I saw the Oct. 20 evening show, which included the complete George Harrison ballet.

I thought the two Georges were a surprisingly good match. Balanchine and Harrison were both men who never sought the spotlight even at the height of their celebrity. They both demonstrated to the American public that sexual love and the love of beauty on the one hand and the love of God on the other were not as incompatible as the Puritans lead us to believe. Ballet is the perfect vehicle for depicting this refinement of the flesh. Within You Without You is a balletic examination of five aspects of love and spirituality that I found both enjoyable and thought provoking.

In "Something" I liked the irony of Angel Corella dancing all the 360 degrees of infatuation while the object of his affection stood inert facing upstage. "Guitar" was deliciously sexy. In "Within you without you" a bright overhead spotlight and a black backdrop made Mr. Cornejo's striking physique dematerialize onstage. The line "With our love, we could change the world" is as succinct an expression of a dancer's role as I can think of. Divorcing this lyric from the heavy handed Lennon-McCartney counterpoint "when I get older" that it's been glued to there on the album for thirty years is a revelation in itself.

It was an evening I will never forget.

That said, I did not find myself sharing Ms Kisselgoff's enchantment with the finale, "My Sweet Lord". I felt it snatched tepidity from the jaws of triumph. Seeing the choice of music I anticipated a rousing crowd mover, a sort of hippie "Wade in the Water". Instead, the composition seemed to owe a great deal to the influence of those news banners that crawl along the sides of buildings in Times Square or the stage treadmill used to imply travel to Padua in "Kiss Me Kate".

And then there was the fleeting blurry projection of George Harrison's face. To me the image created was 30% Big Brother 20% Heere's Mickey! and 50% Shroud of Turin. Am I way off base here?

I saw the Oct. 20 evening show, which included the complete George Harrison ballet. Please redirect me if the following should be a new topic; as you can see I'm a new member.

I thought the two Georges were a surprisingly good match. Balanchine and Harrison were both men who never sought the spotlight even at the height of their celebrity. They both demonstrated to the American public that sexual love and the love of beauty on the one hand and the love of God on the other were not as incompatible as the Puritans lead us to believe. Ballet is the perfect vehicle for depicting this refinement of the flesh. Within You Without You is a balletic examination of five aspects of love and spirituality that I found both enjoyable and thought provoking.

In "Something" I liked the irony of Angel Corella dancing all the 360 degrees of infatuation while the object of his affection stood inert facing upstage. "Guitar" was deliciously sexy. In "Within you without you" a bright overhead spotlight and a black backdrop made Mr. Cornejo's striking physique dematerialize onstage. the line "With our love, we could change the world" is as succinct an expression of a dancer's role as I can think of. Divorcing this lyric from the heavy handed Lennon-McCartney counterpoint "when I get older" that it's been glued to there on the album for thirty years is a revelation in itself.

It was an evening I will never forget.

That said, I did not find myself sharing Ms Kisselgoff's enchantment with the finale, "My Sweet Lord". I felt it snatched tepidity from the jaws of triumph. Seeing the choice of music I anticipated a rousing crowd mover, a sort of hippie "Wade in the Water". Instead, the composition seemed to owe a great deal to the influence of those news banners that crawl along the sides of buildings in Times Square or the stage treadmill used to imply travel to Padua in "Kiss Me Kate".

And then there was the fleeting blurry projection of George Harrison's face. To me the image created was 30% Big Brother 20% Heere's Mickey! and 50% Shroud of Turin. Am I way off base here?

Can anyone tell me why the order of the ballets was reversed from what was in the program?

One other thought, Jenny, could you post your paper when you finish it? You don' t have to of course, but I've always thought that threads that begin "I have to write a paper about...." should at least end with the finished product!

I agree with Mel; it's hard to see much of what Marx wrote in the society that Stalin created. But it is always instructive to study how Russia's unique mix of genius and brutality, freedom and repression, xenophobia and xenophilia (?), wealth and poverty shaped and was shaped by art.

"Between Heaven and Hell....The story of a thousand years of artistic life in Russia" by W. Bruce Lincoln is a great read and a good resource to give you a perspective. The chapter on Socialist Realism applies to your paper. The index backs up Mel's observation; in a 500 page discussion of art and repression in Russia there is not a single reference to Karl Marx! So I guess you might want to examine how Lenin and Stalin distorted the Marx, although if your teacher is looking for an indictment of Marx that's probably what you should give her.

Ballet at the time of the revolution was the showpiece of Russian culture, in part because Russia's brilliant literature did not export well to European languages and print. It was a major conduit for conveying the artistic enthusiasm and idealism that infused the revolution. How ironic that the real realists were Diaghilev and Balanchine and the many dancers who knew enough to flee the realities of Social Realism! By the time Stalin was in charge novels had to be dumbed down to what a factory worker could read after shovelling coal for 12 hours. Sort of like cable TV come to think of it.

Here's what I think: great art is a gift of God to individuals in a vital social context. For my money there is no greater metaphor for this process, or tool to carry it on, than ballet. Societies that either decide that there is no God or that only the supreme rulers are in touch with the divine inevitably destroy themselves.

Isn't it interesting that ballet was one of the last arts to become "plotless" and it's wedded to the first; music. I think the problem comes from people who think that going to a theater means going to a play. I don't think anyone was shocked that Well Tempered Clavier had no plot line. And that sort of goes back to the discussion of the relationship of libretto, music, and choreographic ideas.

I suppose the anthorpologists out there would have something to say about it. The music as a spiritual content and the dance as the more human physical aspect of the process. By imitating human and earthly situations in the dance we are binding heaven and earth. And of course it's easier to sell something with a plot that the powers that be can either approve of or excoriate.

The Balanchine quote "God creates, man assembles"....

When I'm exploring a piece of music by dancing it I feel very close to the generations of our ancestors who lived in jungles and survived by responding skillfully to the music of the spheres. A "plotless" ballet clears a lot of cultural claptrap off the stage and helps us to experience the moment.

Well this thread is titled how to watch a ballet and we seem to have strayed into how to write about one. But communicating your subjective impressions of the ballet experience is so much a part of watching and learning that that is as it should be.

Something that I learned, to my delight, when I started writing about ballet on the Internet, was that to the extent that anyone's opinion counts, the opinion of the complete newcomer who kind of thinks they might like ballet is next in importance after the critic in your hometown paper and the chairman of the board at your local arts funding drive.

That's because all the machinations that go into training dancers and creating ballets don't count for anything if the finished product doesn't elicit a response from at least some people who don't know a gargoulliade from a failli for heaven's sakes. You are important because you bought a ticket. Your life experiences are what train you to "watch" a ballet as much as doing homework on the minutiae. If the performance sparks your interest, read more about the choreographer, composer, company, history, and so on.

As for writing about it, I just blunder ahead, with great sincerity out of profoundest ignorance. I frequently learned more from the people with whom I disagreed than from anyone else. I haven't reached that ten year mark yet but I think Leigh is right about that being a reasonable amount of study before you can speak with great authority. But don't wait that long to tell us what you think! There's more to learn here than anyone could ever know.

I chose Ballets Russes too. But this got me thinking. Yes, dance is ephemeral and many ballets have disappeared. But how exciting it is to live in 2002 and have ***some*** information about ***all*** these eras to call upon when we're making our dances! What better time machine exists than the music steps and costumes of a 200-year-old ballet?

I chose Ballets Russes too. But this got me thinking. Yes, dance is ephemeral and many ballets have disappeared. But how exciting it is to live in 2002 and have ***some*** information about ***all*** these eras to call upon when we're making our dances! What better time machine exists than the music steps and costumes of a 200-year-old ballet?

No takers? Hey what's the matter? I'll have to set you straight on this one.

Everyone knows that the device of which you speak was created by Ginger Rogers in the title number of Shall We Dance? (1937) where twenty Gingers appear to dance with lovestruck Fred.

As with St. Joan and Mishima, not to mention Martha Graham herself, the reduplicated personae are a comment on the central paradox of celebrity; a person so unusual as to rise above the throng to lead them finds him or herself standing in a crowd of their own likenesses.

Or maybe its because dancers are cosubstantial with their work in a way unlike any other art, so that seeing four of the same one is really a lot cooler than seeing a roomfull of Cezannes. A dancer can't walk away from their dance and leave it for someone to look at later, just as Joan or Yukio could no more walk away from their movements no pun intended than Ginger could ditch Fred.

And it certainly evokes another fundamental attribute of dance, that it is a very internal artform that is almost always performed in the company of others.

Um.

Or maybe it's something else.

When you say "all of them indistinguishable" are you referring to the Mishimas or to Bejart's ballets? Just wondering.

op. cit. the 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T., Send In the Clones, The Patty Duke show, Mourning Becomes the Rockettes

Otchi Tchornya!

Fascinating discussion. I'd like to back waaaaay up and add some very basic observations that are obvious to choreographers and videographers but don't even occur to most of the rest of us.

Video is never the same color as live. Audio is never as rich. Both are limited, as you have said, by the direction the technician is pointing the instrument, but also by the inadequacies of any recording medium. Anyone who has tried to capture the range of light and dark, loud and soft in a ballet performance appreciates the rich spectra of experience that a dancer can convey that the videographer cannot. Video is two dimensional, particularly wide shots from the back of the orchestra section with a telephoto lens, which is what we are frequently limited to.

Video cannot capture the sensation of being at a performance. What the person next to you smells like. The conversation you had with the usher seven years ago. The movement of the building from the music and the performenrs' footsteps. How big the Thompson kids are getting. The performers' auras merging like Aurora Borealis. It's a completely different thing.

Dance is a prehistoric activity, and our sensoria have evolved with it. Television is not useless but the pernicious assertion that it is anything like attending a performance is like telling an ancient Sumerian that he can milk the marks on his clay tablet instead of the cows that they represent.

Leigh, your Les Noces was a project where, I thought, the tensions and questions introduced by the act of redesign were a big part of the statement, shaped the decisions, and for the audience, fused the sensory experience with the intellectual one.

For me it took a production that dealt with the transition from agrarian to machine ages and placed it in the context of our present transition from machines to information and genetics. And then sort of stood back to see what happened.

Did you learn anything from doing that ballet that would be relevant to this conversation?

Thanks Victoria. It's nice to have an excuse to go back and read my notes for that piece. I had immersed myself in the externals of the performance and wrote a first draft which I showed to Donald Mahler on the day before my deadline. He complimented me on it but said, politely, it completely missed the point. But he didn't tell me what the point was. A little panicky, I went home and slept but awoke at 3 in the morning with the first line in my mind, very clearly spoken to me by a man's voice. In fact I remember now that the dream said:

There is a truth within you and in your life that will sustain you. You cannot buy or sell this truth, because commerce depends upon scarcity, and truth is abundant beyond measure. You are here to find it and share it.

The rest of the article wrote itself. It was wonderful to have spent that time with so many dancers and their characters who were formed by this man.

In April of 1998 we had an all-Tudor program here in Milwaukee. It was a profound experience for me. I think the article I wrote about that performance gets at Tudor's importance, but also why he's not often seen any more. Tudor's is a sensibility we need right now, mostly because we don't even realize how much we need it any more. It's too late for me to translate that into English, sorry. FWIW here's the piece I did.

There is a truth within you and in your life that will sustain you. You are here to find it and share it.

That is the sort of thing you might hear at an especially enlightened therapy session or church. It is a rare sort of insight to encounter in a ballet, despite the fact that dance has been, since the dawn of time, a means of discovering and expressing personal truth. The four Antony Tudor ballets performed by the Milwaukee Ballet this week are distinctive in many ways, but unique in the manner in which they reach back to that prehistoric function of music and movement and apply it to our lives today.

Tudor was an English choreographer born in 1908. He produced ballets in London in the ‘30s under circumstances that could be described as challenging, if not crude. In 1939 he moved to the U.S. to join the American Ballet Theater in its first season and remained there until his death in 1987. He is revered for developing an unprecedented psychological, dramatic, depth in his dancers, both in rehearsal and in performance.

"This is not a normal ballet performance," said Basil Thompson, artistic director of the Milwaukee Ballet. That is unfortunate. Ballet in the U.S. has moved away from drama, to spectacle and athleticism. The situation is partly a vestige of dance as an imperial amusement and partly a marketing attempt to draw the circus crowd. Meanwhile we are entertained into a stupor while we are starved for involvement and meaning.

We have a singular opportunity this week to enjoy an technically gifted dance company, a live orchestra playing great music, and dramatic choreography presented by individuals well-versed in the Tudor tradition. Sallie Wilson and Donald Mahler, who are setting the ballets, along with Thompson and balletmistress Fiona Fuerstner, comprise as knowledgeable a convocation of experience with these dances as you are ever likely to see again.

You won’t need an esoteric background or Cliff’s notes to be delighted by this performance, either. Continuo is a compact celebration of beauty, The Judgement of Paris an essay on decadence' Dark Elegies is about grief, and Gala performance satirizes celebrity and elitism. They are all visually delightful, technically rich, brilliantly musical, and dramatic.

Continuo is the first on the program although Tudor created it 30 years after the other three. He choreographed this short piece in 1971 as an exercise for his students at Julliard shortly before his retirement from that institution. The music is Pachelbel’s lyrical "Canon in D".

The term "continuo" is a contraction of basso continuo, in which a repeated bass melody is echoed and filled by the other instruments. It’s a statement of how Tudor felt toward his dancers; his steady influence providing the foundation for their dance. The music and dance are fluid yet disciplined, baroque and Spartan, complex but pure, fleeting and eternal.

This is the sort of paradox that Tudor left us. The attention to detail and process that makes them difficult to re-create is exactly what makes them important and enduring. He had a reputation for a caustic wit and consistently demanded more from his people than they thought they could produce. Those who stayed with him sensed that the demands were not made to demean them, though, but to make them grow despite ambiguity and stress.

The Judgement of Paris sets the Greek myth in a French dive. Three girls compete for the attention of a customer who proceeds to drink himself into unconsciousness. The music is from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and the look is right out of Toulouse-Lautrec.

"This looks like the easiest one but it’s the hardest, because they have to find their characters," Sallie Wilson said. Imagine what a stretch it is for a dancer who has spent years perfecting every detail of her idealized image to play a fallen woman, who in turn represents a Greek goddess. The festive, sad music and a plot that is a total travesty of the conventions of courtly love complete the ironic tension.

Dark Elegies was created in 1917. It is about a community responding, individually and together, to the deaths of their children. The music is "Kindertotenlieder (Dead Children’s Songs)", written by Gustav Mahler to five poems by Friedrich Ruckert. The masterful use of gesture, stillness, and motion, communion and isolation, light and dark, a building storm followed by a resolving calm, make this a monumental statement. The whole effect is never one of contorted anguish or even of sadness, but of tragedy and dignity.

Ballet is a mythic narrative. It’s the stories your favorite grandparent told you. It is a suspension of rational thought, where any transformation is possible but the truths are eternal. Myth is our guide to times of rapid change. That’s why Diaghilev could dazzle the most sophisticated audiences in the world with simple fairy tales in the days before World War I. Tudor’s approach is different, but the goal is the same. Elegies is a story of the human spirit surviving the most excruciating of experiences in a time when we used compassion instead of Prozac. Empires have been built and crushed to dust since 1937, but this ballet-nothing more than a pattern of bodily movements and a series of sounds- endures.

In Gala Performance three great ballerinas - French, Italian, and Russian - have come to a small theater to perform. This piece can be read as a living treatise on the dance traditions (and eccentricities) of these three countries. It is also a richly humorous satire where Tudor warns us about taking ourselves too seriously and not taking art seriously enough. Finally it is an engaging play-within-a-play where even the audience has a role; we play the audience of 100 years ago.

Part of the challenge of writing about Tudor’s ballets is that he never told anyone what to think. he would be very specific about the details, steps, and gestures, but what everything meant was up to you. Ultimately this gives the work a heightened realism, a carefully prepared feeling of natural randomness. It is a still pond in which you can see both the beauty and the shortcomings of the world, and your own reflection.

Hi Estelle!

I really haven't been writing about dance much this year, I guess my excuse is that I'm too busy dancing and videotaping dance and opera companies here. But I really feel compelled to get the word out to all of you that we have an outstanding ballet company here in Milwaukee that is looking for new direction. When Christine came as Exec. director five years ago we were over a million dollars in debt and she did a marvellous job of turning things around. And as the article above describes there has never been anyone who has reinvigorated the company artistically the way Simon did.

I haven't heard what the intentions of the board are yet. On the executive side I suspect the idea is that a successful company requires a different management style from one being rescued. They have cut back staff; Christine had a pretty big organization but it was certainly justified considering the disorder of the operation she took over. On the artistic side, the choice of Simon three years ago was a bold move from a solid traditional company under the stewardship of Basil Thompson to a much more contemporary eclectic look.

The first full length ballet that Simon choreographed was Galileo last year. It was too long and had some really dopey stuff in it, but had some parts that were brilliant and challenging and pioneering. It got crucified in the local press http://www.jsonline.com/enter/performingar...gal16021501.asp

Frankly I don't think Milwaukee was ready for a ballet that cast the Catholic Church as the villain. Inquisitions happen, ya know? Deal wid it. I don't think that influenced his decision to leave but it may have hastened it. He was noncommittal the one time I talked to him about it but I do hope he produces it again somewhere.

Anyway, they put together a wonderful organization. It would seem that finding someone to take the helm of a going concern would be easier than it was to find these two fine people when things were so grim. I hope you all can help, and I will try to keep you informed.

After three seasons as artistic director, Simon Dow is leaving to direct the West Australia ballet. Our executive director, Christinge Harris, is leaving as well. It would be difficult to tell you how far these two have brought our company.

http://www.jsonline.com/onwisconsin/arts/m...mar02/27256.asp