kfw

I think that's well put. Yes!

why are we setting these up as opposites? Balanchine valued good dancing, for sure, but he also seems to have set out to create an American form of ballet. That's how you get Rubies and Western and Symphony in Three Movements, and Maria Tallchief and Arthur Mitchell. All great, all something beyond Caucasian/European ballet. I love those ballets and I wish I'd seen those dancers live, but Balanchine and Kirstein had an artistic and, presumably, a marketing agenda, not a political one. If a choreographer or AD today has that goal, more power to them, and lucky us. But it shouldn't be prescribed for them.

Here's something we can all agree is good, something bound to lead to more professional, too-good-to-be-denied dancers of color: NY Times

By a long chalk? I don't know if that's a Swedish figure of speech or a misremembered English one, but it's delightful. Technical difficulties make me unable to post smilies, but here, anyhow, are my virtual flowers!

In regards to euphemisms and circumlocutions, we can acknowledge the moral seriousness of racism, but that variety of forms dirac refers to might make us question whether we're really seeing the same thing in different guises in each case, or sometimes something else. I find, after periodically discussing this issue on a number of forums over the last 10 years, and being considered liberal on conservative forums and conservative on liberal ones, that a lot of people on both left and right are dogmatic on the issue, and that the further to the either side someone is on issue, the more firmly they are, naturally, to dismiss the other person's assertions out of hand, and the less likely their assertions are to be accompanied by the sort of point by point rebuttals and serious engagement with the other's reasoning which, happily, some of us have taken time for here, and which actually shed light on each other's thinking. Of course there is a time to for blunt talk, but cautious,softer language, even when it's euphemistic or circumlocutious, has the virtue of not coming across as moralizing, as talking down to people, which only tends to harden them in their thinking, shutting down communication. Precisely because racially based thinking need not be intended and accompanied by personal animus, using the same term in each case, as if one-size-fits all, trading as it does on the evil of actual racial animus, gives the user an unmerited rhetorical power, a shaming device, that is both logically lazy and and obfuscating. And counter-productive. Simply put, people who feel talked down to don't listen, and don't have a change of heart. Is the intention to shine a light on hurtful behavior in order to eliminate it, or to claim the moral high ground?

The New Yorker has a Transtromer poem in its latest issue: The House of Headache I woke up inside the headache. The headache is a room where I have to stay as I cannot afford to pay rent anywhere else. Every hair aches to the point of turning gray. There is an ache inside that Gordian knot, the brain, which wants to do so much in so many directions. The ache is also a half-moon hanging down in the light-blue sky; the color disappears from my face; my nose is pointing downward; the entire divining rod is turning down toward the subterranean current. I moved into a house built in the wrong place; there is a magnetic pole just under the bed, just under my pillow, and when the weather chops around above the bed I am charged. Time and again I try to imagine that a celestial bonesetter is pinching me through a miraculous grip on my cervical vertebrae, a grip that will put life right once and for all. But the house of headache is not ready to be written off just yet. First I have to live inside it for an hour, two hours, half a day. If at first I said it was a room, change that to a house. But the question now is this: Is it not an entire city? Traffic is unbearably slow. The breaking news is out. And somewhere a telephone is ringing. (Translated, from the Swedish, by John Matthias and Lars-Hakan Svensson.)

Me too. [insert smilie here] I think I may take your meaning, bart, but let me play completely dense and ask you to explain. Thanks Pamela and innopac.

I'm sure it _can_ be, and Helene's example does sound like one clear instance. That's half my argument. Better to point out the problem and potential solutions than to ascribe motives. LOL. Hyperbole is the new norm! Or maybe it always was. Quiggin wrote: With respect, that insistence on judgment is what I find discouraging. Without taking a partisan political stand, which is outside this board's scope, if I could use a political example: Conservatives constantly ascribe liberal leanings to character flaws, and liberals ascribe conservatism to other character flaws. Neither are entirely wrong, as everyone has character flaws and character can influence political thinking. But it is terribly unfair and a failure of empathy (the root also of racism) to say that most liberals just want someone to take care of them and most conservatives are just hard-hearted. There are other obvious and I think respectable reasons for both leanings. Likewise, while racism seems to play some role in keeping ballet largely white . . . but I think I've explained my thinking probably more than enough. As in all of life, the ideal is for both sides need to work towards the other, not to presume the worst about each other. I agree it was coy and humorless sometimes, although probably not too many people were both! However I have a 3-CD set of blues recorded at the Newport Folk Festival, 1959-1968. Acoustic blues is only one kind of folk music and didn't make up the bulk of the folk revival, but that's beside the point, as is the fact that younger blacks weren't listening to them. My point was that if race didn't keep these young whites from identifying with and idolizing and emulating the musicians, and race shouldn't keep whites from identifying with black dancers, it needn't keep blacks from identifying with white ones. It is then not true that "Fundamentally, ballet in America today rarely offers relatable programming for the African-American community, and there is not enough effort to attract new and diverse audiences." And if isn't racist for those audiences not to care about ballet because it's mostly white, which of course it isn't, then . . .

I think it comes to pretty much the same thing: roots. I think when it comes to the arts, leaders should be encouraged to broaden their tastes, not judged and labeled for those tastes. Sorry, I don't follow this. I don't see how being attracted to one kind of body more than another compares to justifying cruel and oppressive systems. Again, I compare an AD being excited about a dancer in a role with a lover being more attracted to his beloved than any others. If the latter is not racist, why is the former? Even if you want to say that, given the country's ugly racial history, ADs and school directors have a responsibility to promote dancers of color, their taste alone is not by definition racist. I have agreed they should, but primarily for the sake of the art. For me it's not that the trials of African-American dancers don't amount to a hill of beans. It's not that they're little people. It's that "racist" is the ugliest label in the English language, and for good reason, but one label doesn't fit all, and black dancers don't need to further emotional burden of seeing their troubles as evidence of a great evil. They don't need to draw a line between a white AD and Bull Connor, and while no one is saying they should, I think that's the logic of the phrase. My apologies for the unusual formatting. I'm having big formatting problems and I'm not sure if the problem is in my browsers or my computer.

That was Kirstein's artistic vision, and I'm glad of it. But if he saw it as an ethical imperative, I'm not aware of that.

bart, I too haven't read anyone here saying that ballet companies cast dancers because they're black, but that seems to be the implication of Aesha Ash's comments that ballet "should reflect all aspects of the American condition and thereby attract more interest and participation from all communities." I don't know where she gets that "should" from. In regards to ADs and the status quo, would agree if I thought that ADs intended to marginalize dancers of color. What I expect they're doing instead is simply failing to broaden their artistic visions, to everyone's loss. I don't see anything racist or unethical in ADs who have always seen white bodies in certain roles envisioning other white bodies when they cast those roles, not anymore than in my preference for a reggae band from Kingston over one from Kansas because the one looks native to the art form and the other doesn't. In regards to racial stereotypes, I'm talking about initial impulses, initial taste, not behavioral choices. Of course we most easily relate to people who are most like us, males to males and females to females, white Americans with European cultural roots to white Americans with European cultural roots and African-Americans with African cultural roots to African-Americans with African cultural roots. (Obviously the latter are nowhere near discrete camps). We begin from there and develop outward, and it's sexist and racist and pathetic not to develop outward, but when it comes to artistic taste I'm as hesitant to call someone who hasn't developed so far as to not prefer one ethnicity over another in an art form with particular ethnic roots racist as to call someone who only falls in love with people of their own race and cultural subset sexist. This is especially the case in ballet, because when it comes to bodies, eros is always a factor. And because ballet has so few jobs in the first place, and there are no legal barriers for dancers of color, I hesitate to see casting as a social justice issue. Yes, but here again I'm responding to Ash's wish.

I'm not sure we can blame ADs for mostly casting dancers who look like them and have stereotypical ballet dancers looks if we agree that it's only when potential audience members feel they "see something of themselves," "something they can relate to and feel a genuine emotional [ . . . ] connection" to, that they'll buy tickets. My feeling is that both are natural, both should be resisted, and neither rise to the level of pernicious racism. Always casting black dancers for the "exotic" and bad guy roles . . . that's another matter. When I go to the theater, I want to see good dancing, not "a truly American art form." It would warm all of our hearts to read that Alicia Graf had been given a principal's contract with ABT, but as an audience member I'm sorry I'll probably never see her as Terpsichore not because she's black, but because she's a beautiful dancer. I think black dancers should be encouraged in the schools and given plum roles onstage, but that's because it's clear they can dance. But if ballet companies shouldn't be casting dancers because they're white, they shouldn't be casting them because they're black either. That isn't the way to produce great art.

Reviving superannuated forms of pop and folk is often a form of academic excavation and it makes sense that it would appeal to educated bourgeois and aspiring bohemians. Academic? Bob Dylan said that rock'n'roll songs "weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." Eric Clapton called Muddy Waters a father figure. I'll wager that for every fan who pursued a degree in ethnomusicology, 1000 took up the guitar. They weren't reading papers at Club 47 or The Kettle of Fish. They were singing and swapping songs and emulating their heroes. They were relating cross-culturally. A golden age, to be sure. I have heard of Clapton and Dylan. I don't see your point.

Yes, it's on the Foundation's website.

"Every Step You Take: A Memoir," by Jock Soto. This book is out today, and here are a couple of blurbs: I'd post a link, but purchases through the Amazon link at the top of this page help support this site.

Reviving superannuated forms of pop and folk is often a form of academic excavation and it makes sense that it would appeal to educated bourgeois and aspiring bohemians. Academic? Bob Dylan said that rock'n'roll songs "weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." Eric Clapton called Muddy Waters a father figure. I'll wager that for every fan who pursued a degree in ethnomusicology, 1000 took up the guitar. They weren't reading papers at Club 47 or The Kettle of Fish. They were singing and swapping songs and emulating their heroes. They were relating cross-culturally.

Simon, I neither ignore that testimony, nor deny that culture and ethnicity help shape identity, nor that African-Americans have been severely under-represented in the media. All those facts are clear and obvious.What I take issue with is the assertion that kids can't relate outside those boundaries, that black kids can't relate to stories about whites, that poor kids can't relate to stories about the rich. There are other first person African-American testimonies, like that of the writer Albert Murray http://www.vqronline...-albert-murray/, who was a mentor to Wynton Marsalis. You've said it was institutional (white) racism that to this day holds black dancers back in the schools and in the companies, so if it's racist for white ADs not to cast black dancers, it's racist for white audiences not to want to see them. I personally prefer to get away from the term as often as possible, because its loaded, even when you put "benign" in front of it. Right. It's just ordinarily racist not to identify with any others, although as I say below, there is a great big mitigating circumstance in this case. Er, because you and I aren't casting directors? :-) If you're going to accuse me of benign racism, that's fine, because I value straight talk. But kindly do it for something I actually write. I did not say that all white kids who listen to rap are comfortably middle class. I said that many whites who are comfortable can relate to the less fortunate performers instead. Ditto for the other musical forms. The folk revival didn't start, nor did it really take hold, in the white working class, but in Cambridge, Mass. and Greenwich Village and at elite universities. To this day, it is educated whites who listen to Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and the like, not the working class people who could most easily relate to their circumstances. My only point here is that the gap can be breached. Of course black audiences have a hurdle to leap which whites don't, resentment at the fact that racism has, at least in the past, kept black dancers and would-be dancers off the stage. But racial healing has to involve both sides, including the side that's been wronged. I think that political correctness on this issue,well-intentioned though it may be, only hurts African-Americans by encouraging them to see racism under every rock. At some point, as Murray understood, that's counter-productive. Is that easy for me to say? Yes. Does that make it untrue? Of course, as I've agreed all along, they should be given the opportunity to dance it.

It's not uncommon at all, and blacks understandably have mixed feelings when whites pick up a black art form, water it down, and make a whole lot more money off of it than its creators did, at the same time bringing those creators wider recognition and more money. But "Love and Theft," to quote the name of a Dylan record that quotes a book by a black writer and borrows/steals from a myriad of black and white sources - the appropriation is a form of appreciation and respect. In other words, it has nothing to do with that marginalization, and goes a good ways towards countering it. Well, the ideal is for us all to look for what we have in common, so if kids can't relate - and again I think that's a problem older kids have, when they have it at all - that's an opportunity for adults to teach. Justified black resentment is a understandable barrier to identifying with whites, but it is no longer true that most white people are racist, except in the sense that, as the researchers tell us, we're all to some degree racist, sexist, and my groupist. To the extent that black students believe or fear that the ballet world is racist, black examples are important.

I didn't imply that at all, I said it was the logical import of your (false) claim that You say it's racist for whites not to want to see black dancers. Why isn't it racist for blacks to reject white Disney characters? In fact, as I said, young kids don't make those distinctions. Yes, Disney ought to create more black and Hispanic heroes and heroines. But that is, among other reasons, so that older black and Hispanic kids relate more, not because "there is nothing there to relate to" in the white characters. Very few of those white college kids in the late 50's and early 60's who sparked the folk and blues revival in America could directly relate to being either white hoboes or black sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South either. Nor could a later generation of white kids who made stars of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh directly relate to being black slum dwellers hounded by the police in Kingston, Jamaica. Nor can a lot of today's white fans really understand the inner city background of their hip-hop favorites. But they saw/see all these performers as images of proud manhood. So why can't a black girl relate to Snow White's virtue, or Odette's fear and longing? She can.

"I can't relate to fairy tales because they're full of white people" is the same feeling as "I can't relate to a black Sugar Plum Fairy." If one is racist, so is the other. In fact, young kids have to be taught that skin color matters. They're not natural racists. Where is the evidence of racist balletgoers? I thought the problem was that ADs weren't casting black dancers, so audiences didn't get to see them. If there is a pool of black talent not getting onstage, that's everyone's loss. If a black dancer devotes her early life to ballet and skin color holds her back, that's a tragedy. But a preference, however narrow-minded, for art of one ethnicity over another is not by definition racist in the sense that everyone really uses the word, to mean a character fault. It undoubtedly is in some cases, but it needn't be. It just looks that way on the surface when there is a history of racism. If I go see a reggae band, I'd prefer they weren't from Kansas (there was some such band, as you probably know, and they were supposed to be great) - is that a racist preference? I think racism will be with us as long as human nature is, but the races will get along a lot better if we're slow to presume ill will.

Wow! Aren't front-of-curtain bows pretty much de rigueur at the Koch State Theater?

Thanks, macnellie and Jack! The link to tonight's performance is here. I can't wait to see the company again next month. Sorry, that link worked last night, but not this morning. I have fixed it now.

Thanks, macnellie and Jack! The link to tonight's performance is here. I can't wait to see the company again next month.

You find the same sort of thing in jazz clubs, at least in the U.S. - whites and Asian tourists, but very few African-Americans, even when everyone on the bandstand is black. And you base this statement on an exhaustive list carried out from surveys, polls and statistics from the thousands of Jazz clubs throughout the US, in every city, every performance 365 days year over how many years? I base that comment on 30+ years of club-going in Chicago, Boston, NYC, D.C. and elsewhere, and also on 30+ years of reading the jazz press. Other people are of course free to disagree. Speaking now as a moderator on this forum, I will remind you that Ballet Alert! has a tradition of frank but respectful discussion and debate. Snide and sarcastic questions are unnecessary and unwelcome. You can find Ballet Alert!'s Golden Rules here. Kindly observe them.

You find the same sort of thing in jazz clubs, at least in the U.S. - whites and Asian tourists, but very few African-Americans, even when everyone on the bandstand is black.