kfw

From The New Criterion's weblog --

(N.b. the Times will be returning to daily reviewing in November--filing at 11:30pm. It is remarkable that something done regularly fifty years ago should be so rare today, but that's progress).

Armavirumque:

Re the quote kfw gave us above -- how nice that someone is writing against gymnastics! (I'm assuming that the piece asks us to look at Part as something more than a gyroscope.)

And how! A teaser:

“Dance critics don’t talk about bodies anymore, or rather, female bodies. It seems to have been deemed politically incorrect, impolite, as if it’s unfair to discuss something that can’t be changed. But the body is where it all begins and Part’s is one of the wonders of ballet today.”

Part is bucking every trend in ballet today. She uses her strength to touch the precarious . . . .

Laura Jacobs writes about Veronica Part, Mozartiana,and Raymonda in the October issue of the The New Criterion:

Who will be the next assoluta in the ballet world?

EXCERPT:

We live in a time when strength has come to mean a buttoned-up performance, clean as a gymnastics routine, cool doing ever more two-dimensional, presentational, airtight. This is what people respond to in the dancing of Svetlana Zakharova, Sylvie Guillem, a whiplike dominatrix control that pushes you back in your seat in submission. But when you over-control you lose what is unknown, magical.

I used to get Vietnamese food in that part of town. It's good to know it's still available!

More when I have a chance.

Great stuff, Jack. Thanks a lot.

[quote

Bentley made the connection explicit in her introduction to Sisters of Salome:

"Partial, simulated, decorated, and disguised nudity is part of the appeal of a ballerina," she wrote, going on to explain that after a hip injury forced her to stop dancing for NYCB, "My desire to strip was surely due in part to the loss of a theatrical outlet and the daily physical challenge, though it is certainly not the aim of every ballerina who has been grounded."

Bentley's quote is ambiguous. Is she speaking of the appeal for the audience (so it would seem from from the syntax) or for the dancer (so it would seem from her second sentence). In any case, every time I read a dancer referring to the approximate nudity of white leotard ballets, it's with modesty and trepidation.

"I wore a white leotard in that part, which is the most exposed you can get, aside from being nude. When I thought about it afterward I realized that of course it looked sexual, and I was never able to do it well again." -- Diana Adams, re: "Electronics" in Robert Tracy's "Balanchine's Ballerinas: Conversations with the Muses"

Nothing is more erotic that modesty.

What an impossible question. Folks is just deaf, dumb and blind, if you ask me.

Art has displaced my childhood and occasional adult interest in sports largely because of its beauty. It moves me, whereas sport only excites me, or move me because of what I know of the lives of the athletes. I’m guessing that most sports fans are similarly moved by pop art. Like sports, it provides a simpler emotional payoff.

Just a wild hunch . . .

The article must be in "Going to the Dance," because it isn't in the other two initial collections. Jack, Croce writes in 1971 (in "Out of the Storeroom" reprinted in"Afterimages") that "Ivan Nagy understood his part less well than Carla Fracci, who could become a great Juliet."

I quite agree, kfw, none of those gentlemen could be accused of taking a personal interest in such matters.  Particularly the Attorney General, whose fervent disapproval of dancing is a matter of public record.

Determined to stamp out dancing, the Attorney General nominates a choreographer's biographer to the NEA!

I already had my doubts about Teachout as a severe case of lightweightism, and I guess being hand-picked by the Bush people sort of clinches it for me.

I don't think Ashcroft or Rumsfeld or the two left-footed W himself handpicked the guy, and Dana Goia's no lightweight (or a real conservative). As for Teachout, I'm looking for a big band CD he recommended.

I've read Joyce's "Dubliners" and reread his "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." I've also read John McWhorter's "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and We Should, Like, Care," and have dipped into my next non-fiction read, David L. Chappell's "A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow." Presently I'm luxuriating my way through Joyce's "Ulysses" and a stack of commentaries on it.

Thanks, Ari!

For me, the Balanchine aesthetic includes his romantic view of women and his Orthodox Christian faith. Not that they're discernible in every single ballet, but they're obviously there in the overall corpus of his work. From what I read and what little new work I see, both faith and romance seem in short supply on stage today.

Let's say we go with the Suzanne K. Langer theory Alexandra so succinctly sums up. If we need art as a kind of indirect worship, then the reason we need it less as a society now is because our society is moving towards more direct religious experience--in other words, a society of evangelicals communicating directly with God (or engaging in pop mystical practice), needing neither priest, teacher, nor mediator, be that Balanchine, or Bach. (That would be the sacred music or dance part of worship spun off, but retaining its spiritual power.)Art as an investigative tool is also less needed, because who needs to investigate when already directly guided?

Perhaps there is something to that theory, but many Direct Communicators patronize the fine arts, and some DC schools and universities have fine arts programs. My feeling is that the DCs you're talking about, if I understand you correctly -- for example the pop-mystical (nicely put) "Christian rock" fans, and the "Christian rap" fans -- only follow the larger culture in their taste, substituting as they do the direct, easy and shallow for the indirect, difficult and evocative. I don't see a break theologically that accounts for why, at the risk of sounding flip, Christians aren't still creating masterpieces at the same rate.

For what it's worth, I too very much see art as a form of indirect worship.

I too would really like to hear from anybody who enjoys reading her.

Her editor? When I was relatively new to ballet and had only the media for reviews, I looked forward to what she had to say and had to teach me. Ballet Alert and DanceViewTimes have changed everything! :cool2:

. . . I prefer the shorter, starburst ending, which always moves me terribly. There is a bit of clumsiness to going up the stairs, . . .

The Beacon is fine but so is the Y, and it's just a block from Lincoln Center, which is especially nice in the hot, sweaty summer. If you can get a southwest corner room there, especially from the top floor, the view sure beats what the Beacon offers.

The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cold War Supremacy over the Arts

by David Caute

Oxford University Press, 788 pp., $39.95

From the current (May 27) issue of The New York Review of Books --

"In May 1961, the Kirov Ballet arrived in Paris. Its star was a peculiar, vain, and willful young dancer whom the company almost did not take with it on tour because Soviet officials could not be sure what he might do once he reached the West."

From Amazon.com --

"The cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow, New York, London and Paris, with the most intimate frontier war staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, Caute explores the cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical music, popular music, ballet, painting and sculpture, as well as propaganda by exhibition. Artists such as Miller, Picasso, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky became involved in this fierce cultural competition through which each of the major Cold War protagonists sought to establish their supremacy. Caute challenges some recent, one-dimensional, American accounts of 'Cold War culture', which ignore not only the Soviet performance but virtually any cultural activity outside the USA. The West presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of liberty, even through monochrome canvases and dodecaphonic music appealed only to a minority audience. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were exceptionally high, but the fear of freedom and innovation virtually guaranteed the moral defeat which accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union."

The organizers could have hired almost any actor in NYC to do what Parker did with no loss of quality. Same if the first trumpet for the New York Phil had played instead of Marsalis.

But couldn't they have hired a decent writer?

I loved hearing Marsalis, not seeing him.

The actors who obviously know little about ballet; the frequent cut away shots in the first few minutes to the Plaza where people were trying to watch what we were trying to watch; the dull cliches used to tell Balanchine's story (the clips were nice); the predictable but still painful overuse of superlatives and of superlatives modifying superlatives; the distracting suspense over whether the camera would cut off the dancers' feet . . . when they weren't dancing, I was cringing.

Fortunately, I loved the dancing throughout, especially the excerpts of Liebeslieder, which I've never seen in the theater.

Well, I always wanted to have an online conversation with myself, so now I am! Writing in The New Republic, Jed Perl doesn't much care for the Brooklyn's "hipper than thou" approach either.

Museum director "Arnold Lehman may talk incessantly about his populist ambitions--about making the museum more people-friendly--but the Brooklyn Museum was always the people's museum."

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=mindseye&s=perl041604

I wonder if any Ballet Alerter's have been to the Brooklyn Museum since it opened its new addition to the entrance. I haven't seen it, but I'm curious about whether a circular glass and steel structure works in front of a Beaux-Arts grande dame. Writing in New York Magazine, architectural critic Joseph Giovannini condescends towards the old building and 19th attitudes towards art.

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/a...eviews/n_10278/

"Cinderella transformations can rejuvenate and even redefine buildings grown rigid and opaque with age and which, in the case of cultural institutions, have come between the dancer and the dance." The problem, of course, is that "a generation of patrons . . . have largely ignored these institutions, having found them elitist and, worse, forbidding."

Naturally this is in part the fault of the Brooklyn's original architects, McKim and Mead, who made "the unsuspecting visitor . . .climb a penitential 28-foot-high flight of stairs to an entrance colonnade in a Sisyphean, all-too-symbolic attempt at rising to high art: The permanent dominance of culture over the individual was cast into the building's posture."

To which I want to ask, do the Supreme Court's steps cast those who argue cases there in the role of penitents? What about visitors to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? And since when is a challenge to better one's taste -- or, to please Mr. Giovannini, to expand them -- by definition "Sissyphean"? If recognizing high artistic achievement for high artistic achievement is elitist, run right up those stairs, Mr. Giovannini, and start studying to join the elite.

And as for the dominance of culture over the individual, in Giovannini's confused phraseology, we can argue about the canon all day, but what's wrong with aspiration spurred by humility, by the consideration that one's forbears might have something to teach us through the artists they considered great?

Anyhow, the old grand staircase is too intimidating, so a new "boardwalk invites visitors into the inner rings of the steel-and-glass superstructure, offering 360-degree views inside and back to the street, as though the museum and city were theatrical happenings to be observed alongside the exhibitions within." Why focus on art when you can watch the women?

Heck, why go to the expense of turning museums into culture malls anyhow? Why doesn't the Brooklyn just lend the paintings to Starbucks, or email an image a day to "the young and hip" on their Palms Pilots?

But as I say, I haven't seen the new addition, so I'm withholding judgment. I'm not really opposed to livening up the streetscape, either. It's Giovannini's egalitarianism run amok that I'm irked with. So has anyone been to the Brooklyn?

Alexandra has given dance fans so much, I’m sorry to see any of her ventures go down the tubes. But I’m more concerned about Mme. Theo, the World's Oldest Prima Ballerina Assoluta, who presumably received a little something in the mail for her ever-sensible, ever-encouraging advice column. Had Mme. been writing of late? How did she take the news? Can she land another gig?

And what about Madge, God bless her? With a temper like that, can Madge find another editor?

I've always found MCB a very likeable troupe, but while I enjoyed yesterday afternoon's performance, especially of Stravinsky Violin Concerto, I wasn't swept away by it. Consequently, my memories are already fading. That may be less attributable to the fine dancing than to the lack of live music. Still, I do remember some thrilling performances of Rubies from this company -- and they kick up a storm on my tape of Villella's Kennedy Center Honors ceremony -- but they seemed a little tired this time, so the ballet lacked its usual exuberance.

I agree with Ari that Ilyin was superb, and Cartoya was lovely and exciting, but in my opinion she wasn't in Ashley's league yesterday in her ability to show the steps within the flow. But then I wasn't expecting the 2nd coming of Merrill Ashley.

I admire her dedication, but it sounds like a waste of her career experience for her to be teaching a style she didn't dance in, presumably, ballets she didn't dance.