Monday, February 27

[dirac]

An interview with Adam McKinney in the Forward.

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Now, McKinney is preparing to move to Pittsburgh with a similar mission in mind. “A question that I often ask is ‘What can dance do other than entertainment?’” he said. “Not only does dance have the capacity to heal, but, for me, dance has the capacity to fill in the blanks of history.”

For McKinney, most recently an associate professor of dance at Texas Christian University, dance has always been intricately connected to Judaism. 

 

[dirac]

Q&A with Alice Robb on her new book, "Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet."
 

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Is it significant that you waited to write this book?

I quit ballet at 15 and was not ready to think about my dance experience for years. Throughout high school and college and into my 20s, I tried to avoid the subject; it was too painful. It was only after I had published my first book in 2018 when an old SAB friend reached out. As we compared memories, I started thinking more about how ballet had shaped my childhood and affected me as an adult.

 

 

[dirac]

A review of Ballett am Rhein by Vikki Jane Vile for Bachtrack.

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You could argue it’s the perk of being the director of the company that you can choose your own work in a mixed bill to form the title of the evening. However, in the case of Demis Volpi’s One and Others it is completely valid in a compelling 25 minutes which I am already longing to see again. Loosely, it explores the dynamic between five couples negotiating various states of togetherness; but even without programme notes it is a beautiful, theatrical, emotive creation that doesn’t require context. 

 

[dirac]

An essay on Balanchine, the waltz, and "Vienna Waltzes" by Laura Jacobs in The New Criterion's March issue.

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Expanding on that journal entry of April 1977, Kirstein discusses issues of repertory, whether it wouldn’t be better to revive loved-but-lost Balanchine ballets like L’Errante (1933) or The Seven Deadly Sins (1958). Everyone who had seen L’Errante wanted it back. But Balanchine, Kirstein reports, “feared that Errante with its Loie Fuller veils and rainbow lights might seem old-fashioned.” It’s fascinating that Balanchine’s thoughts leapt immediately to Fuller. Errante means “wandering.” The word waltzen means “to turn, to revolve, to wander.”

 

The map of Balanchine’s life once he left Russia in 1924 and until he finally settled into the New York City Ballet in 1948 may read as a kind of wandering, but his life as an artist was made of circles: the revolving of the repertory, the return to old ballets, the rethinking and recalibration of steps and phrases........ And despite the astonishing breadth of his repertory, it was dominated by what one might call the waltz step of desire–love–loss. In fact, this was a vortex Balanchine needed. The centrifugal pull of the waltz, its three-four time as self-generating as the tide, rolling and turning, drawing one in and under, was pure energy.