Ray

What I was trying to say is that when we say a piece of writing has certain qualities, we are effectively saying that in writing it the writer was displaying those qualities. For example, when a critic gets off a unkind crack at the expense of a dancer, we don’t just fault his turn of phrase, we fault him. Fair enough, then. I think that JH's epilogue doesn't come from a place of intellectual generosity. If one, like Franko, doesn't think its harsh tone is substantiated by the evidence of the text--a text that in its quasi-academic form promises to offer substantiation--one has to wonder where it comes from. I think very few writers can get away with writing both an objective account and a screed.

In defense of Franko, though, Homans opens the door by starting from an autobiographical place. But I actually have to disagree that the criticism here is personal; he's characterizing the writing as nasty/self-indulgent, not the person (he's careful to aim his criticism at the writing throughout, I think). For "unnecessarily harsh and judgmental and personal" I'd look to Macaulay's review of Doug Varone--or any other dance review that launches an ad hominem attack. I don't know how we can separate attitudes in the writing from attitudes of the writer. In my opinion, right or wrong, clearheaded or fuzzy minded, etc. are appropriate categories. Where it gets tricky, I guess, for both critics and reviewers and readers, is that because art and writing about art are personal, attacking them can look like attacking their creators. I think, too, that this points to part of the problem for Franko: JH doesn't do a good enough job separating her personal agenda from the demands of the topic.

Interesting also that JH seems to be having a change of heart re Forsythe, as we can see in her most recent essay for the New Republic. Perhaps future editions of the book will include this material.

In defense of Franko, though, Homans opens the door by starting from an autobiographical place. But I actually have to disagree that the criticism here is personal; he's characterizing the writing as nasty/self-indulgent, not the person (he's careful to aim his criticism at the writing throughout, I think). For "unnecessarily harsh and judgmental and personal" I'd look to Macaulay's review of Doug Varone from a few years back--or any other dance review that launches an ad hominem attack.

I don't see that we've discussed Mark Franko's scathing review in TDR (Vol. 56.2, Summer 2012) of Homans's book. From the opening graph: "although impressive for its vast coverage, the book tends to be unreliable in its analysis and contradictory in its methodology. From the geometrical dances of 1581 in Le Ballet Comique de la Reine to Nijinsky’s American tour in 1916, many claims are compromised by the findings of recent scholarship, which the author has apparently not consulted. An agenda drives this chronicle. Jennifer Homans separates the wheat from the chaff of history by distinguishing what she considers to be “pure” ballet. This leads to value judgments, not social history. It is revealing to understand what Homans means by pure: ballet that does not tell a story, but evokes an essence or a feeling; ballet that exudes a godlike nobility; ballet that is rooted in highly conservative ideologies." And that's just for starters. He notes many odd things about her approach, such as the fact that while she often waxes autobiographically, she never refers to her professional activities as a dancer--referring to herself only as a dance student. More significant is that he excoriates her perfunctory treatment of the 18th century; all is blamed on what he sees as her almost total blindness to the dance scholarship (archival as well as theory-driven) of the past 30 years. He calls her now-infamous epilogue a "nasty and self-indulgent little diatribe that contains the key to so much that is erratically incomprehensible in her historiography"; and here's how he ends (the penultimate sentences): "This is not just a confused and a-disciplinary treatment of ballet history, it is just another pro-Balanchine tract masquerading as history, perhaps the last gasp in the Balanchine-as-the-be-all-and-end-all version of ballet history. It brings with it a peculiar amalgam of nostalgia, mourning, and arrogance."

Guys I don't mean to harp on the Freudian reading, but it's always seemed so self-evident to me, in thinking about PS being a product of its time: B has re-imagined the prodigal son as a Freudian neurotic, who sleeps with his mother but can't kill his father (and thus become an autonomous individual). Like so many other figures in modernist art of the period. Again, this is not to say that I think this is the only reading of the ballet. I just thought this was kind of a standard one (and the one to which Macaulay is alluding). And one which we can of course reject.

Well, Freud would say there's a connection there; and that mothers can "smother" their sons (don't shoot the messenger!). B was of course not a Freudian, but it was the 1920s here. And, after all. the end of the ballet affirms another Freudian anxiety: that in not escaping the "mother" you won't be able to detach yourself from your father, either.

Leaving Parsifal aside, a religious background the hero doesn’t appreciate? There is no hint of this in the Biblical story or, as far as I can see, in the ballet. A siren whose allure includes a maternal element? Does the son confuse domination with maternal love, or does Macaulay? A powerful recognition scene? In the Biblical parable, the son recognizes that he’d be better off as a hired hand on his father’s land than as the pauper he’s become. Is this really in the ballet? I'll disagree with one point here: I think a maternal reading of the choreography is entirely plausible (as it is in many B ballets, imho). The siren is larger than he is, for one, replicating mother-child proportions; and in the end pose he's curled up in her lap--we see a triumphant whore as she looks out at us, arm up-stretched in victory (or like a cobra?), but he's got his face buried in her bosom.

Hopefully, its being the decent thing to do will override their silence.

I'd like to see Ratmansky not produce for a while (which does not mean stop making work), as I'd like to see a lot of ballet choreographers stop producing for a while. Many need to think more, as our collective dissatisfaction with contemporary ballet shows; others need more time in the studio; most need to get their heads out of "the business" and back into dance. I say this b/c of the innovations I see in the other performing arts--music, theater, opera--that ballet as a field just isn't keeping up with. This is a luxury that the MacAruthur affords. IMHO.

Today in the London Review of Books: "Moore has written a cool, businesslike introduction to his remarkable life and times, drawing on the full range of vivid memoirs and fervid recollections. It’s true that when you look at the original versions of the passages she paraphrases they are usually much more vivid, but when the events are so brilliant, tragic and poignant, and when what is written about them is so often overwrought, then a proficient and professional guide is just what is needed." EDITED TO ADD: The link should be fixed now.

Jayne, I'm not seeing a lot of non-whites of any ethnicity in my viewing. Certainly not anywhere near reflective of the general population.

By implication, other companies don't "embrace the goal of diversity"? No, others have already been quite active in embracing that goal. Still, as Sandik notes, anything that promotes ballet to diverse communities is a good thing and I'm glad to see the ABT program, especially the corporate sponsorship and the partnership with Boys and Girls Clubs. My personal opinion is that most companies pay lip service to this idea, at best. I cannot substantiate that observation, however. What is crystal clear to even the most casual onlooker, however, are the abysmally low numbers on non-white dancers in any big ballet company today: they just don't support the effectiveness of any kind of "embrace." I say the time for mere incremental changes, including "diplomatic language," is long past.

Well yes and no. You could also say that it's sad and unfortunate that the primary reason people are being cast is because they are white. And it would be good for people to know that such an initiative exists (finally) and that it's effective. Business as usual is just not working.

Just tuned in to BP last night for the first time; tuned it out very shortly thereafter. I am not averse to the guilty pleasure of reality TV; I keep up, for instance, with Project Runway. BP has a tenuous relationship with the reality of an actual ballet company, however. I have to agree with Phrerank that "BP is not really a show about ballet, it's about the relationships of dancers who happen to be in a ballet company."

The Irish Times obituary appears here. One of my favorite lines from his translation of Beowulf, about Beowulf himself: "drunk, he slew no hearth-companions."

A line I did like very much in the essay was this: "English departments democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the books of the past available to all. It’s a simple but potent act." As in our political democracy, however, it's not always certain that everyone wants to participate, as these studies make depressingly clear ("33% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives" and "42% of college graduates never read another book after college").

I found this to be a passionate defense of appreciating literature, but not a good defense of English as a discipline, which can include everything from literary theorizing (not popular here, I am guessing), to deep and careful archival research (making a roaring comeback in the digital age). Gopnick, in my opinion, seems unfamiliar with the field today; to quote Sean Wiley, a colleague in comparative lit., "he ends up arguing for studying the humanities but spends the bulk of the article excoriating them." And I found the quotation below, among others, painful and pretentious: "If we abolished English majors tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to start making quantum proton-nuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever; they would all migrate someplace where they could still talk Shakespeare and Proust and the rest." Fish, for one, no longer teaches English; Greenblatt and Vendler have uneven reputations in the field. It's timely that this appears now, at the start of school; I have to spend a good deal of time introducing students to the idea that we're going to think about literature and analyze texts--even, gasp, make arguments about them, not just rhapsodize about how much we love them.

This one is a real howler and a sad reminder of how shallow most people's knowledge of dance is--it's a shame that this particularly ignorant person was paid to write a review, of a recent Joffrey Rite of Spring performance of with "choreography after Vasliz Nijinsky." The "critic" calls it "a lavish, overblown and pompous dance recital with fancy costumes, fancy lighting and fancy stage settings"; and, if that description wasn't evocative enough for you, the writer takes a particularly ignorant jab at the Joffrey's remounting of the original Roerich design: "It was a costume mixture of what looked like Native Americans, Cossacks and Peruvians at war with one another with a group of six dancing bears thrown in for good measure." Oy.

rg is right; bu I'm not sure how any dancer would feel about being called out on such an in-between moment, though! Perhaps over a drink would be best.

Thank you for so meticulously identifying the dancers. This is something that everyone who deals with images should do consistently.

A conversation between the choreographers, first of five parts, as featured in ArtsJournal.

DH will be featured on a segment of PBS Newshour tonight (started at 6 EDT, but probably is repeated at different times in different markets): http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2013/07/dancer-david-hallberg.html

Not stellar commentary from the local anchors, but at least it's being covered: http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/entertainment/6abc_loves_the_arts&id=9130593

I'm with you, Quiggin. Then again, why is the nobly restrained Apollo....er....."playing his instrument" at the start of the ballet (after the birthing scene...or start of the shortened version)? When Scholl first told us that he was about to play a clip of Balanchine's 'little wicked surprise' at the start of Apollo, I thought that he was referring to the mother in the birthing scene/legs-wide-open pose at the audience. LOL! Nope - it was Apollo himself, holding that instrument, then strumming it in circular motions. (Great clip of POB's Ganio, by the way. Little did Ganio know that he'd be Exhibit A at a Symposium!!!) Well--and this is not a new argument--one could say that Apollo is harnessing "crude" energies in order to make "refined" art (as opposed to the Dionysian let-it-all-go method). Assembling rather than creating, to use Balanchine's words. It's a vaguely Freudian notion too, isn't it? I have to say I'm not always convinced by Scholl's conclusions about movement; at another talk he gave, about Balanchine's Serenade, I felt that he had completely missed a very obvious gestural thing (sorry can't remember more specifically). BUT I am so glad there are scholars out there who are venturing interesting ideas about ballet and dance.