Ray

I think that was what Kaufman was saying about the influence of Artistic Directors. Genius doesn't sit around waiting for an invitation or a contract. A creative genius creates because he or she has to, and s/he gets a bunch of like-minded people to collaborate, if s/he needs performers. S/he rents a warehouse, or in Balanchine's case, a high school, or finds another place to perform. Or s/he has a day job (Balzac, Ives, Zola, Tharp) and funds his/her work. If they are inspired by narrative, they'll choreograph narrative ballets. I think Helene is onto something that SK's aesthetic focus de-emphasizes: that repertory decisions are made by myriad actors in particular cultural contexts. SK uses "ballet" often as the subject of her sentences--"Ballet Must Make Room Onstage for More Than One Genius," "Ballet has to get its humanity back"--fuzzing the focus on the people who create, distribute, maintain, and promote the art: ADs, independent choreographers, EDs, and presenters. Like many dance critics she shies away from digging into and discussing the material conditions that shape repertory decisions, which are never as straightforward as they seem. The roots of a stagnant repertory problem are deeper than SK will admit (such as the problems of little-to-no training for choreographers in ballet, a lack of artistic/institutional long-term vision or leadership, reduced opportunities to allow choreographers to collaborate and/or to fail, etc.). I don't think SK's aesthetic arguments are compelling at all--abstraction can be deeply moving for many, whether rendered on canvas, in music, or bodies on stage, and furthermore people have been talking about this for more than a century--but her piece is suggestive in re the lemminglike qualities of many dance EDs and presenters who will blame all but themselves for poor or uninteresting repertory: audience expectations, money, lack of talent, etc.

Has this not been discussed yet? After 341 Years, British Poet Laureate Is a Woman Here's an excerpt from one of Carol Ann Duffy's poems, "Eurydice" from this link: Eurydice Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full-stop, a black hole where words had to come to an end And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems hovers about while she reads them, calls her his Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract noouns; just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death's door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to read with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O, was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to Zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt from their waves at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee silver tears. Bollocks. Furthermore, we've all, let's be honest, been bored half to death by a man who fucks like he's writing a book. And, given my time all over again, I know that I'd rather write for myself than be dearest, beloved, dark lady, white goddess, etc. etc. In fact, girls, I'd rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers - usually male - and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal......

That was quite a list. Is Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" still popular? Yes, absolutely!

Wow. That hadn't occurred to me, so you have, including African, Asian and South American countries, hundreds, if not thousands, of great women's literature, and should also include poets, I would think. But in America alone there would be hundreds of books by women we 'ought to read', insofar as there is such a thing. And, as you have it, there are all the rest of Austen and Woolf that weren't included. Indeed there must be 20,000 or so books of 'duty'. As far as novels go, here are titles by women authors that college students in English are likely to encounter today as part of the literary 'canon,' even though few schools follow St. John's model of explicitly labeling them as "great books": Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Alice Walker, Color Purple Aphra Behn, Oroonoko Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior Frances Burney, Evelina Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Radclyffe Hall, Well of Loneliness Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale Titles by: Jane Austen Virginia Woolf Toni Morrison Willa Cather George Eliot Nadine Gordimer Doris Lessing A.S. Byatt This is just off the top of my head. Add nonfiction, poetry, short stories, and drama, and the list grows exponentially, of course!

In spirit if not in letter. It's amazing how standard US high school reading lists can be, especially since we have no set national standards. When I recently assigned Great Expectations for a lower-level college course, for instance, almost all knew the book intimately. They seemed especially well-versed in the same mid-20th-century American novels, too: To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, The Sound and the Fury, Great Gatsby, etc. Only students in really good AP or IB programs had read a lot of more recent fiction (i.e., Blindness). The high school clock seems stopped at Slaughterhouse Five--not very different from when I was in school! Some high-school teachers I've worked with are cynical about this--i.e., many of the early-to-mid-century copyrights have expired, thus making the books cheap and easily accessible--but some truly believe that they are transmitting the Values of Great Literature. As a result--I think--students can bring to the college classroom an amazing conservatism about the value of novels over other forms of writing (short stories, poems, plays, etc.).

Sorry to disagree again; I'm for a healthy mix of "fresh meat" and expertise, and I don't equate a larger number of young bodies with a higher level of creativity. The firings constitute the kind of "artistic" behavior that's embarrassing to justify to non-dance-oriented friends whom I try to convert. Some find it capricious at best and anachronistically cruel at worst: "why would I want to support that? Maybe it's a form that deserves to die out." Not scientific, but real words from real people.

Thanks, Simon, for all of the insight! I just finally read Macauley's preview, and this part caught my eye: " I would also guess that “artistic reasons” for the sackings do exist in Mr. Cunningham’s mind. They can hardly be grievous: Ms. Farmer was evidently his favorite female dancer earlier this decade, and all three dancers performed valiantly this year. But they have probably outlived their chief usefulness to him. Having absorbed the freshness and openness of his company’s younger members and RUG apprentices, his appetite has moved on. Genius does not keep functioning successfully without occasional ruthlessness. Within any great creative temperament there will always be a force that says, “My will be done.” Even in the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Cunningham — otherwise a genial and courteous man — often hurt dancers by not taking their feelings into consideration. Those feelings were not his business." Here AM offers my second least-favorite excuse for bad artistic decisions: Genius Must Be Ruthless. Ruthless acts have a justifiable context, usually, often to resist institutional inertia or right some artistic wrong. But MC is not Richard Wagner, and this is 2009 not the 1850s. This is an excuse often trotted out in defense of The Great Choreographer by many critics who don't want to sully their hands with extra-aesthetic investigation. Reeks of a bad middlebrow mix of Nietzsche, Jung, and Ayn Rand. I don't buy it anymore; sometimes people exercise power just because they can. I think, once again, that Simon is reading the politics of the situation right. Even if not--that is, even if MC did issue these decisions brutally--couldn't it be that they are BAD ones (shock and horror--the genius is making poor choices!)? And if so it's sad that Carlson et al. couldn't intervene to mitigate their brutal effects on these amazing artists (whom we know to be amazing also from the Company's own press materials).

Very telling. I'm skeptical enough about the "artistic decision" excuse; this doesn't make me like it any better. That firing to me is miles away from any sort of artistically responsible "thinking"; the more I think about who he fired, actually, the less it makes any sense--even economically. Thanks so much for translating and posting this!

I stumbled upon this program in the archive of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life; it made me laugh out loud (I think there was a thread once on on-stage disasters; perhaps a canny moderator can move this there--I couldn't find it). Description from the website: 61: Fiasco! Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses. This week's show is a philosophical inquiry in the nature of fiascos — perhaps the first ever. Act One. Opening Night. Writer and TAL contributing editor Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan, in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved. (23 minutes)

Thank you SO MUCH for posting this groovy image; I had never seen it, and it really made my day!

Don't kill me people, but the more and more I read about B's SL "version" the more I compress my brain to try to understand what makes it different from other takes. What I saw was just a traditional Act II with some IV additions...(the mechanical swans and the props making it even more antique-looking on my eyes...). As per the music, isn't the same beautiful T's used in every production ...? Don't know, but I couldn't really see that famous Odette's depersonalization so often talked about... I have to disagree, but I'm biased because I like it, I guess: B's SL is a late modernist take on the ballet. It's sleek and condensed, and many of the corps configurations suggest a family resemblance to some of the "art deco" formations of Serenade and Four Temperaments. Much of the choreography is entirely original with a lot of B's signature steps.

Looks interesting, but your link didn't work, I think because the "http" got repeated; here's what worked for me: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2...e_over_time.php It's a neat little article, although it posits a rather simplistic relationship b/t spectators and performers--asserting that "these postures [positions and extensions] have responded to subtle pressures from the 20th century's ballet-going audiences." The story doesn't take into account the influence of tastes and standards w/in ballet communities themselves that tend, I would assert (anecdotally, of course), towards exacerbating these changes. And of course it doesn't consider differences in national schools, or the post-Soviet influx of Russian bodies and training into the international pool. Studies for others to carry out--perhaps some of our BTers?

Square Dance--lots to do for both corps men and corps women; fun but also complex and exposed.

Perhaps we'll know after their contracts expire. Like others here I feel for the dancers and wish that instead of insinuating that they no longer meet Cunningham's standards, Carlson had praised them for their talent and long service. If the difference between the salary levels of junior and senior dancers is so slight, that suggests that Merce really was motivated by artistic considerations, and that he probably has his eye on new dancers he wants to make room for. Carlson could have stated or implied as much. On the other hand, people who really care about dance, including directors of other companies who might be hiring, won't be misled by the press release, and will know how good these dancers are. The dancers' reputations won't be damaged. It is cruelly ironic that Farmer is being let go after being featured in Mondays with Merce. But the dancers knew they were entering a field where there is little job security. Would we call it autocratic for the founder and director and chief artistic force of an artistic enterprise to fire an employee who he'd hired, say, only 2 years ago? Sentiment suggests that because these senior dancers have dedicated long careers to his work, they deserve to be kept on, to be taken care of financially. That seems only decent. But for how long? And what if (through no fault of their own) they really don't any longer stimulate the choreographer's imagination when he's making new work? Isn't that part of what they were hired for? I feel bad for the dancers and I'll miss seeing Farmer, but I don't know how to answer those questions. We're in synch, kfw, about Carlson's rhetorical missteps, although I'm less sanguine about their effects on the dancers' reputations. As far as your second 'graph, I have to disagree and say that what we know about the context just doesn't support the ambivalences you raise about the firings here. Just because the field is inherently insecure doesn't justify an AD's unstable actions. And thanks, miliosr, for pointing this out: "To my knowledge, Limon and Ailey never experienced any major disruptions in terms of former dancers being frozen out. Whatever other difficulties they may have experienced, the former dancers were always on hand to pass on the works to the next generation(s). And so, whether the works are to your taste or not, you can still see them as living things close to the creators' intentions rather than as museum pieces."

Ray, Carlson says that it was Cunningham’s decision, so perhaps it’s not quite fair to dump all on the PR guy, although taking the flak is a flack’s job. Carlson is not just a "PR guy"; he's the company's ED (although point taken, Leigh, about him acting as the "enforcer"). While I'm sure this decision did emanate from MC, this rhetorical buck-passing only makes things worse for the dancers' reputations.

Thank you, Simon, for your erudite and informative post. Like LiLing, I want to place much of my scorn on Carlson's PR coarseness; Simon, however, shows us how these firings are part of a deeper pattern--one that reveals an unfortunate link b/t ballet and modern dance practices in re extreme autocracy.

Let's hope that this is enough to get them through this year. And how much will the ED and AD reduce their salaries and benefits?

Ugh. These are fabulous dancers; their seniority makes them expensive, and fresh meat is more fun. This makes me remember why I quit the dance world. Everyone hides their decisions behind the artistic director's "artistic reasons"; and the paper doesn't allow any space for discussion or investigation on the part of the reporter.

Let's not forget Mel Tomlinson, of DTH and NYCB fame. I believe he danced Melancholic too (others will have to confirm this), but his back could be seen in action in Arthur Mitchell's Manifestations (1975), in which he played the Serpent in the Garden of Eden (sound campy? It was! But a wonderful performance from Tomlinson). For those curious about what ever became of Mr. Tomlinson, you can read a 2007 story on him here.

I agree...I wonder what the story is on that? Also, WHEN are they going to promote Jermel Johnson? (Notice BTW how few soloists PA Ballet has.) My personal opinion is that they will lose him to ABT or Ailey if they don't act soon; he's spectacular.

Yes we are! I provide the clarification it so that people know how amazing this money really is--i.e., it's given out of a whole program devoted to dance in the Philly region; it's not a one-off grant (through which Pew also grants funding directly, such as to the new Barnes museum). The Pew also funds sister programs--all autonomous--in music, fine arts, and theater, AND gives money away to artists across arts disciplines through their fellowship program. If you go to the website be sure to check out the Archives--I've mentioned before that there are interview there with ballet artists from the Royal. Now here's hoping the Pew's stock portfolio prospers!

It's Pew money, but the Pew does not directly fund dance companies (nor provide the imagination): Dance Advance does, in an annual panel-adjudicated process. Dance Advance is housed at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, which is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is administered by The University of the Arts.

I will also add that the more I watch that video--which is almost 30 years old now!--the more I marvel at Merrill Ashley (in Sanguinic).

My error: Marjorie S. is who I mean. Certainly B did that, but I guess I'm less enamored of seeing "differences" as flaws than I was when I was younger. I know how the the power dynamics of this can work too: a dancer is made to feel that she or he is "lucky" to be dancing, despite their "difference." (I'm speaking generally, not specifically about the dancers in this video.) This is complicated, though: I also find myself thrilled at the uniformity of body types when I see the Kirov do Swan Lake.

Funny little detail about the PBS version. Look carefully: when the 1st Theme dancers are in silhouette, the woman is in a slight plie, and she only straightens her legs in time to make the first move. She (Marnee Morris) did this b/c she was ever-so-slightly bowlegged! (Hearing about these kinds of things make me very frustrated with our art form!) Now who suggested to her that she should do this I don't know--i.e., I don't know if she was self-conscious or B directed her to do it.