dirac

In today's Wall Street Journal, Robert Greskovic weighed in on Dance Theater of Harlem. He liked Robert Garland's piece but not the choreography generally. He also noted the company's depleted state and suggested that its classical skills need some attention.

Maybe ballet fans are just too nice.

Maybe because opera fans expect it? "Hmph -- Tommasini goes on about the unusualness of a Wagnerian soprano tackling bel canto and doesn't even mention Lilli Lehmann!" He might even get letters about the omission. ( I myself, when I read this review in the paper, thought he might also have given a brief mention to the Callas precedent -- she sang some Wagner in Italian early in her career, was famous for the dramatic oomph she brought to the bel canto repertory, and Norma was her signature role -- but I digress.) And the reappearance of "Norma" at the Met is an event of note, warranting more comment than usual. This kind of historical recap doesn't appear in routine reviews, I don't think. But it would certainly be nice to see more of it in ballet reviews.

He also directed several other dance related movies -- "Dancers," "Nijinsky," and "Footloose," along with several musicals.

Here's the obituary by Rik Stevens of the Associated Press:

http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/movies/apmo...lug=Obit%20Ross

Tell it to Dr. Freud.

There's also a Naxos recording currently available of Fauré's orchestral music, which includes Pelleas and Shylock. I forget the name of the orchestra, but can check on that.

It seems to me that the reviewer was deploying "provocative" correctly in both of the senses used by dancersteven. The piece was provocative in the primary meaning of stimulating and inciting a strong response in both audience and reviewer, although for different reasons. The audience's response was in line with one of the secondary meanings of the word in that they were reacting negatively to what they regarded as an indecent display. We tend to use "provocative" these days mainly in sexual contexts, as cargill says, but the reviewer found the performance "provocative of mental activity" to borrow a quote from my trusty OED. So the performance was indeed "a... provocative collection of dance works."

As for the dig about Russian ballet, I'd say it depends upon what the dance scene is like in Amarillo these days. If I were exposed to a constant diet of visiting troupes performing nothing but "Swan Lake" and "Nutcracker" I might get a little testy myself.

Thanks -- I would NEVER have thought of checking out the Harvard Business Review. The link seems to be only to an intro to the article, which apparently you have to order. But it's nice to know it's there.

Thanks for the post. Just tried it -- looks very useful!

You might try barnesandnoble.com, alibris.com, and powells.com, all of which have out of print titles with lots of information about the quality and condition of the books available. ( I should note out of respect for this site's sponsor that Amazon.com also has out of print titles, although personally I prefer the other sites for OOP books.)

Books are also auctioned off on eBay, and although I would not expect Laws' titles to pop up as frequently as better-known books, you never know -- and you can find some good deals, with the caveat that items are not always in the finest shape, so read the descriptions carefully and ask questions of the seller if you need to.

It doesn't hurt to check with the information desk at your local Borders, either -- sometimes I've checked on books I believed were out of print and been surprised.

A swing dancing revival constitutes a return to refinement? Yes, times have certainly changed.

The Onion wrestled with the problem of humor and the events of September 11, and I don't think they did a bad job. On the topic of Hollywood movies of the sort we've been discussing and the hijackings -- "American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie":

http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/american...turns_into.html

I wonder if Tchaikovsky was still getting his land legs with "Swan Lake," especially, as Richard points out (great post!) with no Petipa to guide him. I'm no musical expert, but it does seem to me that "Sleeping Beauty" and "Nutcracker" have a transparency and structure that "Swan Lake" for whatever reason -- interpolations or fussing with this part and that part -- doesn't have for me. When I listen to the latter two, it's as if the music is almost telling me what to see and how the action is unfolding. There are parts of the full-length "Swan Lake" where I'm emotionally moved and yet still not clear on what's supposed to be happening, and quite a few of those parts are in Act IV. (But "Swan Lake" is still my favorite. Go figure.)

I remember reading that Kenneth MacMillan was unhappy with the libretto of "The Prince of the Pagodas," but there was only so much tweaking he could do, because the tight construction of Britten's score would not permit it. "Swan Lake," on the other hand, perhaps offers too many allurements to those inclined to wholesale revision.

I certainly don't approve of the premature sexualization of kids barely out of their latency period, but I suppose we cannot be ostriches and pretend that teenagers don't have hormones. (And remember that the tango was once a sexual shocker. Not to mention the waltz -- where the man actually -- yes!-- put his arm around the woman's waist!) Otherwise you just get the two-tier system where the kids dance politely for their oblivious parents and then go somewhere else to do dancing they actually enjoy. I posted a Links item some months ago that reported a number of high schools actually cracking down on sexy dancing, so it may not be gaining universal parental approval.

I don't mind overtly sexual dancing as long as it's done with skill and flair and isn't just plain overt; but I agree with kfw that subtlety never hurt anyone. However, in a culture that shows on prime time television a commercial wherein Britney Spears shakes her booty for an appreciative Bob Dole, well.

kfw's mention of "Center Stage' reminds me that one of my chief beefs with that movie was its depiction of the heroine as going through the motions in ballet class, only to find true release in club dancing (and ultimately leaving the classical company for a new dance fusion group).

....like Ben Stevenson scorned? Below is a link to a Houston Press item about the cold shoulder the paper is getting from Houston Ballet since a piece by Lauren Kern met with the company's displeasure (scroll down):

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2001-09...27/hostage.html

The original piece by Kern:

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2001-08...html/page1.html

I thought it would be worthwhile to reiterate the general injunction against political commentary for its own sake on these boards. Politics inevitably obtrudes into discussions of art, for financial, social, and cultural reasons, but if we can avoid making such comments for their own sake it might be advisable, especially at such a tense time, with thousands dead in New York and hundreds of thousands hungry, homeless, and equally innocent Afghans who as I type this are at the Pakistani border in hopes of escaping our retaliatory measures. It's an ugly situation for everyone, and the less said here the better, perhaps.

Please don't take this personally, anyone.

I don't see art being any different. As salzberg said, works will be made about or inspired by what happened, and some will be good, some will be terrible, most will be mediocre, and maybe one or two will be great, if we are fortunate.

The-violence-in-entertainment debate is not one that I'm going to wade into here. I will say that, of the movies mentioned in the letter to the Post, I quite liked the first "Die Hard" and enjoyed watching Will Smith punch out extraterrestials in "Independence Day." It's true that lots of things explode in these movies, but their cartoonishness seems fairly harmless to me, unlike some "serious" movies I can think of.

Thanks for the alert. I read it and also found it worthwhile. The emphasis is on Nureyev's affair with Pushkin's wife, but hey, it's Talk. Apparently a biography will be appearing shortly, in translation. Baryshnikov also has some interesting things to say about Pushkin as teacher and man. I remember seeing a clip of Pushkin in class; one got the impression of someone with great authority but also great gentleness, which seems to have been true of him. He lived for his work, which led to tensions in his marriage. The article also notes that the Pushkins were in great danger from the authorities when Nureyev defected -- it almost makes it seem like a good thing that Pushkin had his fatal attack before Baryshnikov's flight.

I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with the notion that Bourne's "Swan Lake" is known to some people who are unfamiliar with the original; I just thought Bourne's comments were a tad grandiose -- he said "most" not "some" people, and I do think that's an exaggeration.

There are indeed almost too many ways to approach this topic. I'll just make a few points.

I thought Howard's piece was interesting and thought provoking. "So why do major ballet companies' seasons still deluge us with story ballets?" Well, they put butts in seats, for one thing; audiences do seem to be more willing to shell out large sums of money for a mediocre full length ballet with a familiar story than an excellent mixed bill.

The problem may lie in the deceptively simple directive, "tell the story clearly." Balanchine didn't do a lot of story ballets, but he knew how to tell a story when he wished to do so. That Ashton could tell one goes without saying. I'm not sure that the younger choreographers always can. There was a piece on clothes designer Stella McCartney in a recent issue of The New Yorker, which mentions that she and Alexander McQueen are unusual among their generation of designers in that they had gone out of their way to acquire bread-and-butter Savile Row tailoring skills; "she knows how to build clothes," is how I recall the quote. It takes a lot of years and training to acquire this kind of skill; and if you've been raised on a diet high in pure dance and low in mime and theatrical technique, you're going to have problems. Playwrights, to take another example, aren't born knowing how to construct a well made play, and a choreographer undertaking a story ballet is a kind of playwright, even if the libretto is not original. (Shakespeare used to help himself to other people's plots, remember.)

I don't quite understand what Howard means when she implies that the classic ballets once made sense both as dance as story but no longer do. As Alexandra observes, if they don't, it's because the people retelling the story aren't doing it right, not because there is no ballet equivalent of supertitles. Skilled mime is perfectly clear, even when telling an archaic story. (And opera was understandable in the days before supertitles, although I don't want to get into that here.)

At the risk of exposing myself as someone lacking in powers of comprehension, I also don't quite understand what Matthew Bourne is on about. The formula he says he developed sounds very much like the one other choreographers are trying for in their Cleopatras, Draculas, and Pied Pipers. And ,"Now we're the Swan Lake most people know"?? Really?

Finally, I question the distinction between "dance" and "theatre," or at least the sharpness of the distinction as made here. (I can see, for example, discussing as discrete phenomena Martha Graham dance and Martha Graham theatre). In the movie "The Band Wagon" there's a funny sermon on The Nature of Theatre into which the producer played by Jack Buchanan launches whenever he spots an opportunity, and one passage goes (I quote from memory) "There is no difference between the rhythms of Bill Shakespeare's immortal verse and the rhythms of Bill Robinson's immortal feet. It's all THEATAH!" Yes.

My heartfelt best wishes go out to all of you in Manhattan and Washington. Our country has been very fortunate up to now in for the most part managing to avoid this kind of horror, experienced by some other countries almost daily.

I feel almost embarrassed to be tucked away here in the boonies. Here, there does seem to be a little panic in the air in locations where it doesn't quite seem to be justified, a sort of vicarious fear. A co-worker of mine talked today to a woman neighbor of his, who asked him urgently, "Aren't you keeping your children out of school?" My friend was doubtful that the suburban day school his children attend would be targeted by fanatics in hijacked jet planes, and said so, tactfully.

My own feeling is that in actual wartime it's important for the arts to carry on, if at all possible. I can recall hearing on the radio once a brief excerpt from a rather awful performance of "Tosca" from Berlin. The poor performance might be excused by the fact that the show was going on very late in WW II, as the bombs were falling and the city was coming down around its inhabitants' ears. But the singers were singing, the orchestra was playing, and an audience was there to hear it. Obviously my sympathies were on the other side in that particular conflict, but I thought the performance was a gallant gesture.

A real danger in actual wartime, especially in periods of total war, is that a general feeling often arises that all things artistic must be subordinated to the Cause. This generally results in bad patriotic poetry, bad propaganda films, bad novels, and muscular concertos with titles like Triumph in the Air. People who refuse to follow this pattern sometimes get berated for their indifference and lack of patriotism, but the preservation of culture is a cause in itself, I think.

[ 09-12-2001: Message edited by: dirac ]

I haven't heard a thing, but it sounds interesting. We should hear more after the screening. Also, when these festivals end there's usually a wrapup of what succeeded and what tanked.

A belated thanks for this post. I have never seen Ms. Weese perform, but it's interesting that there seems to be such a wide divergence of opinion. Some seem to regard her as an omnicompetent automation, while others obviously see her very differently!

Thanks for the alert. The link is posted on today's Links thread. Lots of good stuff there.