YouOverThere

On the subject of Nancy Grace, I ran into a discussion on facebook about whether her outspoken opinion on the Amanda Knox case will ruin her chances on Dancing with the Stars. I tend to think that it will.

I'm getting more and more baffled. Last season we were being told how great things were going and now it turns out that they are on the verge of folding up. I came away from a reception for donors last Spring with the impression that they had lined up their share of the funding for a concert hall renovation and it turns out that they have no idea where the money is going to come from. Even the Colorado Ballet now appears to be in more solid shape. I'm really disappointed that they cancelled Faure's Requiem. That's one of my favorites. But at least I'll have more of a choice of dates to see Swan Lake.

I probably shouldn't get started on my reaction to this article. And I don't know what the musicians knew or when they knew it. But if I me employer had been telling everyone that their financial position was solid and then all of a sudden they say that they are losing money and they want me to take a pay cut rather than the pay raise we just negotiated a few months earlier, I'd want to take a few days to investigate what is going on.

The people in Colorado are saying that Tim Tebow should be the Broncos' starting quarterback. The behind the scenes goings on at arts organizations don't generate the same sort of "buzz" that they would in a lot of other places. Denver isn't a hotbed for the performing arts. I missed the opening weekend of the season since I got back from hiking too late to take in Saturday's concert, so I didn't get to talk to/overhear any of the other symphony fans.

The poet, Michael J. Henry, wrote an article on his perspective of the work in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-henry/ballet-nouveau-colorado-poetry_b_974441.html I guess what intrigued me most about the work was that there was no finality. It was left to everyone in the audience to come up with their own finish to the story. I kept searching for clues as to how the poet and the choreographer envisioned things turning out, and wondering whether they were intended as clues or not. My math isn't very good. There were actually 14 dancers involved. I didn't count the 2 boys from their dance school who played the police officer's sons.

If it was a scare tactic, it worked. The musicians agreed to a 14 percent pay cut.

Saturday evening (9/17), I attended a performance of Ballet Nouveau Colorado's season opener, Intersection. This was the second performance of a 6-performance, 2-weekend run. BNC premiered Intersection a couple of years ago, and I attended 3 or 4 performances of it back then. Intersection is a combination of dance (more modern than ballet) and pre-filmed video sequences accompanied by not only some of the greatest piano music ever written but by a collection of 13 poems written specifically for the production. Some of the poetry is in the background, along with the music, but some of it is also recited by dancers. The gist of the story is that a boy who is due to graduate from high school in a month decides that he is fed up with his life and walks to a freeway and hitchhikes to who knows where. The show mostly deals with the reactions of various people in his life to his disappearance, in particular the police officer from the Missing Persons Bureau who now begins to have flashbacks to his own rebellious youth spent in the wilderness in Utah and finds himself having to face up to some level of discontent with his own life. I've always found both the story and the production really interesting. Poetry and dance can really work well together. But it didn't have the same impact on me as the first time around. Perhaps I know the story too well, or perhaps it was because in order to accomodate (sp?) the preference of my accomplice for the evening I sat up front (2nd row), which I don't like to do. The dancing was crisp and flawless, with no obvious bobbles. One thing that caught my attention was the turnover among the dancers. Three of the 5 male dancers and 2 of the 6 female dancers from last year's roster are not with the company this year (plus there is an additional dancer apparently on maternity leave). Since they added a 6th male dancer (to replace a dancer who left after the 2009-10 season), that meant that 7 of the 12 dancers in the production were in their first production with BNC.

A week or so ago, The Denver Post carried an article that stated that an internal study showed that the Colorado Symphony Orchestra can survive at most 2 years in its present state. The CSO apparently lost $650k last year, which doesn't seem like an extraordinary amount for an arts organization with a budget on the high side of $10 million in the current economic environment. This came as quite a shock to me, as for the past few years the CSO has been portraying itself as a successful arts organization that is ready to move onto bigger and better things. They have pledges for tens of millions of dollars to pay for renovations to the concert hall and recently negotiated a new contract with the musicians that restored more than half of the salary cutbacks that took place in 2009. They claim to have set attendance records last season. I don't know quite what to make of it.

Last night was the Colorado Ballet's apparently annual appearance at the Arvada Center, a performing arts facility in the northwest suburbs. The format was different this year, with a single show lasting about 2 hours rather than an opening act followed by a full-length main show with a lengthy intermission between them (the shows were in the outdoor theatre, so patrons could bring supper or buy food there), and since the CB shared the stage with a chamber orchestra called the Playground Ensemble, which apparently consists of musicians with some affiliation with the University of Denver, the CB's performance only lasted an hour. The CB's program was in the same format as previous years, with the first part consisting of a series of classic dances from various ballets followed by a full performance of a short ballet. The difference was that this year the first part consisted of only 3 dances rather than the 6-8 of previous years. This year's choice for the second part was "The Faraway", a ballet that was choreographed for the CB by Matthew Neenan and which they premiered last September. This is a high-energy, high-paced work having something to do with the art and/or life of Georgia O'Keefe and set to excerpts from various early works of Shostakovich (which automatically qualifies it as as masterpiece :-) ). The performance was a little crisper than last year's, maybe because it was a little later in August so that the dancers have been back to rehersals for longer. Though once again Maria Mosina struggled with a set of 32 fouettes (this time in the black swan pas de deux), something that she's never done in an actual full ballet. The CB has had 5 major personnel changes since last year. The most significant was the retirement of leading man Igor Vassine, owing to a deteriorating knee condition. Sayaka Karasugi, who was the clear no. 4 female dancer, apparently has retired from serious dancing. Her Facebook page merely lists her as a student at Colorado State University. Viacheslav Buchovsky was promoted to fill the opening for a male principal (and was impressive in last night's show) and Caitlin Valentine (aka Caitlin Valentine-Ellis)and Shelby Dyer stepped up to soloist. There was also one departure the corps. It looks like the CB promoted a few dancers from the studio company to maintain a 30-dancer roster. The Playground Ensemble's performance was horrendously boring. They approached it like they were giving a lecture to a theory and composition class. I'm not particularly interested in what "music" sounds like if there is no structure or if the notes were selected at random. Ironically, they stated that one of their goals is to show young people that classical music can be fun.

This item is actually a few weeks old. Garret Ammon, the artistic director of Ballet Nouveau Colorado, won a $20,000 Livingston Fellowship. Prior to hearing about this award, I had never heard of a Livingston Fellowship, and I still don't know anything about it. But in the world of dance, $20,000 is not an insignificant sum. The newspaper article stated that the purpose of the grants is so that recipients can enhance their "leadership skills". Does that mean that they're supposed to spend it on getting an MBA? http://blogs.denverpost.com/artmosphere/2011/05/12/just-in-ballet-nouveau-su-teatro-figures-score-tens-of-thousands-in-livingston-fellowships/1645/

It seems that in order for a play to receive lots of awards, it has to follow The Formula, with a perfectly predictable plot in which the audience knows EVERYTHING that's going to happen after the first 5 minutes, characters with no depth or complexity, and simplistic, unchallenging dialogue.

The musical version of Billy Elliot came to Denver. I unfortunately lucked into a $15 ticket. 2.5 hours of my life that I will never get back. It was the worst play that I have ever seen. No originality; totally predictable; absolutely moronic dialogue; zero-dimensional, completely stereotypical characters; wooden "acting" (because the actors weren't given anything to work with); cheezy music; and cheap attempts at sentimentality. Ignore the incredibly talented kid that played the lead role, and what was left was an effort that couldn't even compete with a high school production. I was highly tempted to leave at the intermission, but I guess that I couldn't believe anything could possibly be that bad and I was expecting the second act to be better.

To do something different, I attended the Zikr Dance Ensemble's performance titled "Mysteries, Rites and Revelations" on Saturday (May 7) in Boulder, CO. And different it was. And difficult to describe, so I'll just quote from the program: The performance contained just about everything (though only a few brief snippets of classical ballet), including a 2,000 year old Assyrian mourning dance. The Zikr Dance Ensemble was founded a few years ago by a man named David Taylor, who in 1979 founded a "contemporary ballet" company in Denver which probably not coincidentally is named the David Taylor Dance Theatre. He retired from running the company, handing it over to his protege, and apparently got bored with retirement and decided to form a dance company to explore sacred dance forms. He doesn't have a fixed line-up of dancers, instead hiring local dancers for each program. The 15-member cast for this program included 6 dancers from the David Taylor Dance Theatre, 5 dancers from the Colorado Ballet plus nominally retired CB principal Gregory Gonzalez, a couple of local dance instructors, and a dance student. Most of the choreography was created by David Taylor, much of it based on ideas from mystical dances from various cultures such as the Sufi, but there were a few pieces choreographed by an early 20th century mystic named George Gurdjieff. I think that the term "mind-blowing" is quite appropriate for this production.

They finally have the press release posted on their website http://www.coloradoballet.org/_webapp_3886005/Colorado_Ballet_Announces_2011-2012_Season This will be a different version of Peter Pan than last time, and will be their third program created by the choreographer-composer team of Michael Pink and Philip Feeney (the other two being Dracula and Hunchback of Notre Dame). I had heard rumors that the CB thought that they would have enough funding to get back to staging five productions, but obviously that didn't happen.

I believe that I set a personal record for most times viewing 1 production by taking in 5 (out of the 9) performances. Despite the length, my attention never wandered. There were enough differences between the 2 pairs in the lead roles that it wasn't repetitious (actually, there was a 3rd pair that did a single performance). To me, Sharon Wehner and Dmitri Trubchanov portrayed Juliet and Romeo as innocent, carefree, impulsive young adolescents that you would have always had the feeling that things were likely to turn out badly and you wondered why Friar Laurence didn't tell them to come back in a few years. The Juliet and Romeo portrayed Maria Mosina and Alexei Tyukov seemed older but determined to overcome the odds, which in a way made the ending seem even more tragic. Both were effective, and it wasn't just women who were wiping their eyes at the end. The CB seems to have solved their ticket problems. Purchasing tickets at the ticket window went smoothly and reasonably fast.

I completely agree. My only criticism is that the moving around between scenes is a little too visible (or maybe the houselights were a little too bright). I'm not sure about cutting down on Act III. There is a whole lot of plot there. But maybe Act II could have been shortened. The "market scene" is long relative to its importance to the plot, most likely to give the other women in the company more of a chance to dance. But I never found my attention wandering. On my first trip, I sat fairly far forward (too far forward for my taste) in the center orchestra, and the orchestra did not sound very good. Tonight I was stuck in the loge (since there were only a handful of tickets left - given my economics, I have to depend on getting tickets at "rush prices"), and the orchestra sounded really good from up there. I think that because the orchestra is so far below the seating level, if you are up front on the main floor the wall at the front is blocking the direct sound. And because they are using such a large orchestra, they have to open the under-stage area to accomodate(sp?) the orchestra so that there isn't a wall behind the orchestra. It really is phenomenal how well this production is doing. And the Colorado Symphony is having a great year attendance-wise. I wonder what is triggering this sudden interest in the performing arts in Denver.

I made my second trip to see the Colorado Ballet's 2011 version of "Romeo and Juliet" tonight. It is way too complex a performance for a non-dancer like myself to review, but I did want to make a few comments. The choreography this time around is significantly different from the 2003 version. In 2003, Martin Fredmann developed his own choreography with emphasis on the the violent aspects of the story. The current version, using choreography developed by someone named Alun Jones, is more concerned with the romantic parts of the story, even omitting the killing of Paris so that Romeo and Juliet could die together. The timing of the 2003 production was during the run-up to Bush's invasion of Iraq, and I've always wondered if Fredmann was trying to make an anti-war statement. The strength of this choreography is that it has a lot of good ensemble parts, so that the corps gets plenty of opportunities to dance, and the weakness is that the role of Juliet is the only female role that gets to shine (indeed, 2 of the top 4 women in the CB have been relegated to playing the minor role of Lady Capulet). It is quite a long production, with close to 2 and a quarter hours of actual performance. Whoever created the costumes did a fantastic job. Possibly the best, most colorful costumes ever at a CB performance. The review in the Feb. 28 The Denver Post (Links forum moderators can take that as a hint ;-) ) applied perfectly to tonight's performance. Maria Mosina has brought her 'A' game to this production. I've never fully warmed to Alexei Tyukov. He is technically very good but his gestures always seem stiff and unnatural, which I think was why the DP reviewer thought that he "brought too little emotional investment". I liked Dmitri Trubchanov's performance in the Saturday matinee better. The best part is that the run is doing really well at the box office. I was pleasantly surprised at how many people showed up on a weeknight, and Friday's opening night was a rare near-sellout. I can't leave without saying how bummed out I am about the retirement of Igor Vassine. From the news report (IIRC, in the Feb. 25 links) it does not sound like he was planning on retiring in the near future, but was forced to because of a degenerating knee condition. He and Maria Mosina became an established pair the first year that I started attending ballet and are an important reason why I became a fan of ballet. His retirement means that the CB has lost a principal male dancer 2 years in a row. I will go back on Sunday for his final performance. I hope that he finds something to do in Denver, because he and Maria Mosina have partnered offstage as well, and if he moves away I fear that she will follow him, and that would be a devastating loss to the CB.

The Colorado Ballet sent out a blurb to patrons and season ticket holders on Dec. 22 that contained the statement "This year, The Nutcracker has been our most attended production ever". This presumbly means that it is setting an attendence record.

I noticed today that there is a $5 credit from the Colorado Ballet on my credit card account, so it appears that they have refunded the will call fee.

The ticketing dept. at the Colorado Ballet has been a source of frustration for years, and the reason that I bothered to complain was more about trying to get them to pay attention to the problem than about the $11. The administrative side at the CB has always lagged behind the artistic side, though last year things seemed to be improving. Unfortunately, a number of key people left.

The Colorado Ballet doesn't seem to have been impressed by my suggestion that they refund my will call and convenience charges, despite the fact that my ticket was not available at the will call window and that I derived no "convenience" from ordering online since I had to stand in line at the box office anyway.

"Facility fees" are pretty common in Denver. My recollection is that I paid "facility fees" when I bought tickets for the local professional hockey team even though the arena is owned by the same company that owns the hockey team.

Mahler was the most beautiful and the most profound composer of the twentieth century. Jeffrey Kahane chose Mahler's 5th symphony to end his tenure as the Music Director of the Colorado Symphony. I have never seen as intense a performance of any kind of music as was produced in that performance. He was so exhausted that though he is usually long-winded at post-concert Q&A sessions he could barely talk after this one. My violinist friend once said, "Mahler wrote great parts for every instrument."

TicketMaster/LiveNation is essentially the only US ticket vendor (TicketMaster has managed to absorb most of its competitors). The person to whom I complained about my ticket snafu said that there simply wasn't any other choice but to go with a foreign company, given that the Colorado Ballet was struggling to meet TicketMaster/LiveNation's high fees.

Unfortunately, in the USA your only choices are to use the overpriced monopoly or to go with a foreign ticket vendor.