Last night, my friends, Alyssa and Angie, and I went to the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet studios in west Chelsea to take a GAGA dance / movement class from an assistant of Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of the Israeli dance company, Batsheva. From now through April 27th, the company is in town performing their most recent piece, Decadance, at Cedar Lake’s studios, and during that time, they are teaching daily weekday classes in Naharin’s unique dance methodology, in which his dancers train daily. The cool thing is that they have classes for both professional dancers (during the day), and for non-pros like me in the evenings!

Okay, I have to say, this is one of the best dance classes I’ve ever taken. There was no technique taught at all; rather it was all about utilizing your senses, letting all movement be ultimately about pleasure, and really letting yourself go. First, we began simply by feeling our weight shift, one leg to the other. Then we felt our hands kneeding dough, then the sensation of making circles with our hands, then our feet, then our legs, then our whole body, including internal organs. We melted into the ground, turned our bodies into water, rubbed imaginary oil over ourselves soothingly, used our bodies as drums and our palms as drumsticks, fell to the floor, jumped up quickly, fell again, jumped up again, again and again till we should have been out of breath but somehow weren’t, lay down, pulled ourselves up again and again till our abdominals (or at least mine) should have ached but somehow didn’t, bounced around the floor, bouncing and bouncing as much and as quickly as possible, feeling like complete idiots and laughing madly at ourselves and each other. “Yes, laugh at yourself, feel silly,” the instructor said.

At one point — my favorite — she had us balance on one leg and kick out, back, and all around with the other. Of course, I have some balance problems from an earlier inner ear problem, so had to concentrate on holding my center properly while balanced solidly over the middle of my standing leg, feeling my full foot spread out to grab the the floor, then concentrated on doing the perfect developee with my other leg. Well, she could read my mind, I swear. “No!” she yelled at me, lose your balance, don’t be afraid, lose it, LOSE IT!” So, I stopped concentrating, and let my standing leg wobble all about, kicked the other out randomly, haphazardly in every direction paying no mind to control or line. And, amazingly, AMAZINGLY, I didn’t lose balance at all! My balance was even BETTER than in ballet class where I’m often holding onto the barre for dear life! I don’t know if it was a fluke, but something, something worked! She smiled at me at the end because I think I really made progress in letting myself go and not giving a crap about what I looked like.

Oh, and the other thing — NO MIRRORS!!! It made ALL the difference, I swear! For the first time ever in a dance class I was not hystericizing about how awful I looked — about how I was the skinny spaghetti girl who could not move her hips or whose … everything … looked too big and oversized in the leotard (does ANYONE over the age of 12 actually look good in one?). Matt once blogged about some choreographer issuing the directive, “Banish All Mirrors,” and I don’t know if it was Naharin (Matt has no search function set up on his blog, grrrrr…), but all I can say is the no mirrors thing here really helped me to feel the movement coming from within my body, to sense the space around me, and really help me to keep my balance and to move without over-analyzing and obsessing how I looked doing something. Anyway, if it’s not clear, I highly recommend this class to anyone in NYC! Classes are $12 and are ongoing through April 27th. Look them up here.

Then tonight, I went to hear one of my favorite dance writers, New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella read from her new book, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, a wonderful-looking collection of essays on artists of all kinds from Baryshnikov and choreographer Jerome Robbins, to food writer M.F.K. Fisher, to authors Dorothy Parker (a favorite of mine), Susan Sontag (another fave), and Philip Roth, to visual artist Louise Bourgeois (whom I LOVE). I feel like I have all the same favorites as she. I’d never met her before or heard her read in person, and I didn’t know what to expect since she can be a pretty severe critic in her writing. But like most writers, she was a completely different person in real life from her writing voice. She was immensely personable and down to earth, funny, downright encyclopedic in her range of knowledge, very grateful for her fans, and very humble and embarrassed when one praised her, calling her Mark Morris book “Blakeian” and comparing her to film critic Pauline Kael. She read from her Baryshnikov essay because that one, she said, was the most popular. Of course this made me happy, since he is the one dancer profiled in the book. I wanted to ask her two questions: 1) if she felt there was anyone who was a contemporary Baryshnikov and if not, why; and 2) if she had any advice for an aspiring critic. But there was such a plethora of questions, and she was so generous in answering them all, we ran clear out of time before getting to me.

When I approached her to have her sign my book, I did ask her the second one though. Unfortunately her answer was one I didn’t really want to hear. “Oooh,” she moaned. “Oooh, dear, there are just no jobs, it’s just bad…” “Dance?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Ooooh,” she moaned louder shaking her head. Apparently all arts criticism is bad off, but dance is particularly a no go. “I had to take non-writing jobs to support myself all the way up until eight years ago when I got the New Yorker job,” she confessed. “It’s just so hard to make a living.” Ugh. If there are no jobs for writers, who is there to promote dance?…

I am a little weirded out right now on a few different levels. Okay, for one thing, I loved Paulina and am very disappointed she’s off (Dancing With the Stars of course — I’ll get to the relevance of the above pic in a minute). I was too busy to blog last night but if I would have I would have said how much I enjoy watching her dance because, ridiculous as it sounds since she is (or was anyway) a huge supermodel, I totally identified with her. Latin is so unbelievably hard if you weren’t raised with it. It’s so hard to get the Cuban motion just right, and, in order to make up for initially being unable to connect your back muscles to your abdominals and those to your hips, you tend to just bounce about, in Paulina’s case, or wiggle your butt and shake your shoulders, in Heather’s. And cute as it is, it’s just that — cute, which Latin shouldn’t be! But it’s still a lot of fun! And cute is … cute! It’s also nice, as a student anyway, to be able to identify with someone else’s limitations and their struggle to overcome them. And now she won’t have a chance. And I’m not sure why she was booted since she definitely was far from the worst and her personality was so sweet. She was so warm and funny and entertaining, and even humorously self-deprecating, which, as Jolene I think it was, pointed out in her comment in my post from last week, is such an unexpected surprise in a supermodel! She certainly had a better personality than some of the others. Oh well, at least Heather’s still in. Some of my co-workers today were expressing their dislike of her. I heard the word “golddigger” a couple times. I have to confess I don’t keep up with the gossip mags, so I know she was once married to Paul McCartney but don’t know much else. Anyway, I like her personality as revealed on the show. I think my favorite overall right now is Laila. I also like Joey.

Anyway, reason number two that I’m disappointed is that, with six hours now under its belt, we can see where the show’s going to go this season. They pumped tonight as showcasing great professional talent, and, I’m sorry, but who was that? It was just all the pros already on the show. Where are Joanna Leunis and Michael Malitowski? Where are Bryan Watson and Carmen? Even bring Van Amstel back and let him dance with Smirnoff for cry eye, but don’t limit it to the pros on the show — they’re not top class (excepting the aforesaid Karina, but, since ballroom takes two, you can’t see what she’s made of unless you see her dance with a great pro partner). (How much do I LOVE, by the way, that there’s a Wikipedia entry on Louis?!) For Standard, we have a top world couple right here in the U.S. Is it that hard to fly Jonathan Wilkins and Katusha Demidova from NY to LA for one night? The pros on the show are fine for dancing with the celebs but if you’re going to tout the first results / all pro show as showcasing great professional talent, bring in the best.

But what really weirded me out the most about tonight was, after being upset that Paulina was voted off (the first time, I must confess, that I’ve ever been annoyed about anyone on the show getting the boot), I visited the DWTS message board to see if anyone perhaps had a chance to say anything yet. I figured I’d be WAY too early. Wow, was I ever wrong. I logged on at 10:02 — 2 minutes after the show ended and maybe 5 or 6 after Paulina was announced first off. In that time, there were nine threads. The top one, posted less than 60 seconds before I logged on, had already received 1,113 views. THAT’S 1,113 VIEWS IN LESS THAN 60 SECONDS. I’m sorry but when I post a message on the Winger message board I’m lucky if it gets 10 views in a whole day — and that’s the most popular website in existence on ballet. Doug Fox of Great Dance, an extremely popular dance website centered around using internet technology to promote concert dance, recently revealed his stats on his page views and I think he got that many in an entire day on the whole site. I feel like I’m beginning to understand where Terry Teachout’s annoyance is coming from. I had no idea there was this degree of difference between a popular TV show and ballet. I no longer think that the internet is the be-all and end-all right now, the best way to reach out to people and gain new audiences. If the internet is the future I don’t think it’s the present. The present is still the good old fashioned TV. Obviously the internet is a good aid for promoting dance, through the blogs and message boards, but there needs to be more ballet on TV. I don’t know how — commercials maybe? A full-length ballet once in a while like the Met Opera is doing. Except it needs to be on a basic network and during prime time. When I was watching Leeza and Tony do their foxtrot to “Strangers in the Night,” I of course thought of Marcelo (okay, AND Baryshnikov!) Tharp’s ballets are so modern, so fun, and so relatable. Certainly the same audience who gets so into ballroom would be into her, right?! Or, Alvin Ailey’s The River or Pas de Duke, or Revelations even — they all contain some elements of Samba and Jive, etc. Anyone who takes any interest in DWTS would simply be blown away by those dancers and choreographies.

Also, reading the show’s message boards made me a bit nauseated. This was hardly Ballet Talk. People were talking on such a low level. Though many were, happily for me, disagreeing with Paulina’s being booted, most were saying things like ’so and so sucks,’ ’so and so is horrible,’ ‘no, that’s idiotic, it’s so and so who needs to be put out of his misery’… etc. etc. with nothing more, no specifics about their technique. But maybe viewing the greatest dancers in the world do Tharp’s version of “ballroom” would start to elevate the level of popular discussion of dance, and, hence, better promote it? I dunno, I’m tired and annoyed and just a bit disappointed in ‘my peeps’ right now!!!

EVIL PEOPLE FORCING PEOPLE TO SPEND MONEY!

(Sorry I can’t resist, but he doesn’t seem to mind!; headshots taken from ABT website and flying David from The Winger)

So today was the official opening of exchange-your-subscription-and-buy-a-bunch-more-damn-tickets day at the Met. I waited in line for nearly an hour to exchange two — one (Romeo & Juliet) because I later realized I can’t attend on that particular night, and the other (Sleeping Beauty) because casting finally happened and Marcelo is dancing a different night — as well as buy a bunch more. Ended up spending another $339, which, in addition to what I’ve already spent on my subscription plus Alessandra’s farewell performance, brings my total ABT spending this MET season to nearly $800. I said Met, by the way; ABT spending total was over $1,000 including City Center. Am I crazy? Are other ABT fans this insane?

Eh. In addition to my dwindling bank account due to ABT addiction, I am worried about this:

We only have a matter of weeks now until the performance and I only have half the choreography semi-memorized. I feel like I really should be tripling and quadrupling up on lessons from now until then, but at $95 per lesson, that’s several thousand dollars. Plus, I still owe hundreds more on the actual showcase cost. Not to mention the several-hundred-dollar costume. The hard thing about ballroom expenses are that you don’t really think about how much you’re spending until you look at your credit card statement and have a near nervous breakdown. It’s not like going to Woodbury Commons and spending several thousand dollars on clothes in a few hours. You’d realize how much you were racking up and would be incredibly reckless not to be able to control yourself. With ballroom, you have a definite and serious goal in mind, you have to be good, very good, performance-quality good by a certain date, and when it means you have to practice practice practice, which, since ballroom depends on two and one of you is your private lesson teacher, means spend spend spend. You don’t realize how much you’re spending because your focus is on your goal. And once you’ve already committed and put down a deposit, it’s too late, there’s no turning back.

Ugh. I guess from now on, I should set aside several thousand — seriously, probably no less than $6,000 — before committing to a showcase or competition. Or maybe committing to a competition far far far in the future and then just taking one lesson every other week. But, no, actually; I’ve done that before, and, just because of the student / female ‘I’ll never be good enough’ mentality, when it gets close to the show / comp you can’t take enough lessons. I blogged yesterday about ways to save on costumes, and now I’m thinking I may even go to Capezio and see what they have in stock that I can dress up myself. Mirella sometimes makes fancy leotards and I can buy some matching chiffon and go to the Garment District and find some rhinestones to glue on myself…? Maybe…

And then I have Blackpool coming up. I’ve already paid my fee for the festival, and fortunately B&Bs and food there are very cheap, but I still have the plane ticket…

What can I say? It’HARD having a dance addiction! No one understands… Is there a way to get paid for this???

After hearing from very sweet Kristin Sloan and some others, and having the day to think stuff over, I feel much better about things regarding my last post. Still dismayed that it happened (and it definitely was not in any way, shape or form Kristin’s fault!!), but I guess the lesson I’ve learned is that you have to not let people instigate crap and get a rise out of you, both in blogs and in life. So, I’m over it!

Anyway, it was an okay day… but would’ve been better if the weather forecaster was more correct about the weather! It was definitely nowhere near the upper 50s / low 60s, but I went to the park anyway:

Both pics are of Strawberry Fields — -people hot-blooded enough to hang out on the benches, and in some cases, sing and play guitar to each other!

Still too chilly for me to hang out outside for more than about 45 minutes, so came home and immersed myself in brain candy Slightly embarrassed to admit I’m reading this, but what better way to try to get over being bummed, right! I bought this book for $1 at my local library’s sale — can’t get a better price on such candy

And then got the mail and was delighted to see an offer from Theater Development Fund of discount tickets to see the Eifman Ballet at City Center in April! Very excited — I’d wanted to see them, and, with all the money I spend on ballroom leaving me little for any outside leisure spending money, I’m always thrilled about getting a deal Thanks TDF!!

Anyway, my friend from the studio, Elaine, and I are planning to go out to costume-maker Valentina’s shop next weekend, so I have to figure out what kind of costume I want for the showcase. Jacob had suggested something strapless and backless (how’s it gonna stay on???) with long gloves. Sounds beautiful but he also said it wouldn’t look completely right without being covered with rhinestones, which I don’t know if I can afford this time around. Ballroom’s getting REALLY expensive — just spent nearly $1000 for 10 lessons!! He said I could always buy them and put them on myself which would be considerably cheaper, but I don’t know if I trust myself to do a good job with such a thing! Anyway, thinking about Rita Hayworth as my role-model, since it’s foxtrot and all, I came up with some ideas:

If there’s mesh covering at the top, it’d stay on… Or:

This kind of top is pretty… As is this:

How cute is she!! I so wanna be her!!

Hmmmm.

Aww….!

Another possibility, although that one may be too expensive. Longer = more money…especially if rhinestones are involved…

Oh, but aren’t they cute!

Something like this is what I really really love — the flowing, layered chiffon skirt, part of which can be gathered and held up with the hand at certain points. Which is really similar to the basic black that Elaine Kudo wore in the original Sinatra Suites:

Dunno if you can really see it, but it’s a basic black leotard with a black chiffon skirt, about knee length, and only a few rhinestones right on the top on the bust. May be perfect for my routine, and perfectly affordable

By the way, all of the above pictures of Rita Hayworth are taken from this website.

I’m really upset about something that happened yesterday on The Winger, a big dance website for anyone who might not know, and just have to talk about it since no one there is. Basically, I got caught up in cross-fire between two contributors, both of whom I like very much. One of them, a young dancer, used a term that I’ve never heard of before and the other told him some of his fans, such as I, would be offended because it was a sexist and racist term and he shouldn’t use it. Since I’d been drawn into the argument, I searched the internet to try to figure out what the term meant. When I realized it was being used, at least these days, to refer to just about anyone, I wrote in saying I wasn’t offended by it but thanking the other contributor for his sensitivity. Another person, who I’ve never seen on The Winger before then got involved attacking the young dancer for being racist and sexist, and eventually, after I defended him, hurling nasty personal insults at me for not being offended and being stupid enough to not know about this term. I can’t believe I actually spent time on this and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit I took time out of my day to even engage in this battle, but I asked some of my youngish co-workers if they’d ever heard the term and no one had. We are public defenders in NYC after all; we have heard a lot. Anyway, the whole thing escalated completely out of control, and in the end, I felt very vulnerable, upset, and even threatened.

I did receive a personal apology from one of the contributors, who brought me into the debate, and I’m very thankful for that. I also received some personal messages of support from one very nice commenter. But I feel like now it is being brushed under the rug and I don’t know exactly what I want, but I feel like more should be said. I realize that dancers, and anyone really — definitely me– can become emotional over something and can be fragile, and get easily upset over something that to no one else may seem to be a big deal. And I know I didn’t have to get involved and definitely felt like there was something more going on between these two contributors than I knew about or could control, but I liked them both a lot and felt the need to say something, especially given that my name was mentioned. In the end I felt like I was somewhat taken advantage of and now the two contributors seem to be trying to make amends with each other, but I am left feeling vulnerable and weakened. I felt like The Winger was a safe place, and now it is not.

I’ve also received some emails through the blog that have upset me, and am trying to deal with it all. Some of my friends have told me they think blogging and commenting on blogs is dangerous, which used to make me laugh. Now I’m seeing their point. I don’t know why I’m writing this exactly, I don’t know exactly what I want other than an assurance that people are sorry and will be more careful not to let things get so out of control. I am still really upset while I’m writing this, but writing it does make me feel a little bit better, and hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll be a little less bummed. It’s nice weather out (at least in NYC); everyone should enjoy their weekend.

Update: Just wanted to say, as per my post following this one, everything is good now! Thanks, people, for being so nice I was going to take this post down, but decided to leave it up and just say, in one commenter’s words, “don’t let other people make their anger your own.” Sometimes if someone who’s not a friend and whom you’ve never met before is attacking you unfairly, it’s best not to respond at all, and if you feel like you need to, you can just say that it wasn’t meant the way they are taking it. Period. It’s just not worth having so many unnecessary battles! Anyway, thanks

Last night I went to the monthly Writers’ Room member readings at Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village (in which I’ll be reading at some point in the not-too-distant-future). Reading were Susan Buttenwieser, a Pushcart Prize finalist, Lara Tupper, a lounge singer-turned novelist whose debut novel, “A Thousand and One Nights” has just been published (how jealous am I?!?!), and last but not least, Signe Hammer, who, because of her bio, I was very interested in hearing. The funny host, playwright Stan Richardson, whom I personally like (though I’m not sure that sentiment is universal amongst the WR crew) always asks the readers what, from the bio they provide him, they are most proud of (still have no damn clue what I am going to say when it comes my turn…) Susan said hers was being nominated for the prize, Lara said hers was being a member of the Barry Manilow fan club (hehehe), and Signe said her short-lived career as a dance / performance artist with Meredith Monk’s original dance group, The House, was her proudest moment! Immediately everyone clapped loudly; all the writers and their friends knew already of Monk with no further explanation. So, Yay For Dance!! She gave some brief little humorous tidbits about her work with Monk, saying they founded site-specific “Dance Theater” (performing at the Guggenheim and Judson Playhouse before obtaining their own space), as opposed to “Dance Dance” which is what she termed Twyla Tharp’s main enterprize, after trying and failing at Dance Theater. Tharp, she said with humor, realized the genre wasn’t for her after her first effort, which Monk remembered as being a piece where bodies hurled through the air as if propelled by a canon, one after the other, and … that was it. After labeling her and Monk as “Downtown,” Stan asked her if she considered herself “downtown” in terms of her writing, and she snapped, “no, downtown is dead!” Because there is no derriere-garde anymore, she proclaimed, there is no avant-garde either. Hmmmm.

Anyway, the readings were interesting, but maybe it’s just that I’ve seen so much dance lately (and, I guess contemporary Dance Theater), that, I kinda think, uh, the art of simply reading from some pieces of paper requires somewhat of a performance artist. I mean, lying down on your futon with your legs hanging over the back of the frame with a book open in your face — how I read anyway — that’s just the way words were meant to be taken in– by visualizing them on the page. Hearing them spoken just doesn’t allow them to penetrate my brain the same way. Usually. Except when spoken by Ann Liv Young and Laurel Dugan and Forsythe’s dancers. Hmmm, maybe I should ask Laurel to help me, to be my dancer alter ego! Ha ha. No, stage is far too small, and Stan would freak. I’ll have to call forth my own dancer alter ego

Anyway, in the audience, I met this lady:

Her name is Alice Denham and she was all excited about her new book, whose full title is “Sleeping With Bad Boys: Literary New York in the 1950s and 1960s,” being reviewed in the New York Times. I looked her up and she’s been reviewed all over the place! She gave me a little flyer showing the front and back covers of the book. Back cover reads “Denham’s lusty memoir is a juicy tell-all about a time when male writers were gods and an aspiring and gorgeous female novelist tries to win respect… Caught between the sheets are James Dean, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth… The steam rises page by page as Denham — the only Playboy Playmate to have her fiction published in the same issue as her centerfold — chases her dream of writing as a young, oversexed beauty in the literary swirl of 1950s Greenwich Village…” The Denham I met seemed interesting, intelligent, quirky, and opinionated, as she rolled her eyes at some of our host’s jokes and wasn’t shy about yelling out, “that’s the ONLY funny one of the night” at the one that actually made her laugh (and she’s of course a lot older now than in her picture as shown above)… but she didn’t seem so ‘oversexed’ to me. I guess she read my thoughts because she said, “Oh, they sexed it up, you know,” rolling her eyes. “It’s really a feminist account of a woman in the 50s trying to be taken seriously as a writer.” Looks good, and I do think I’ll check it out. And Susan Brownmiller of “Our Bodies Our Selves” gave it a thumbs up!

One thing though: feminism and the whole (false) mind / body binarism has captured my interest of late, and Denham’s back cover made me think of it again. As dancers, our bodies are all important, and in a way, I guess we are our bodies. But we are also obviously intellectual beings. It’s just upsetting when someone — a man, doesn’t want to accept that, who thinks that because you’re a dancer he can treat you a certain way, disrespect you, say certain things, look at you a certain way — all things that can even be a bit threatening. I’m a lawyer, I’m not used to this. And it’s definitely not all men — definitely not even most; most men are totally cool; it’s just some who ruin it. Do a lot of female dancers get this treatment? What about “sexy” female writers like Denham? Or Candace Bushnell? Ann Liv Young said she got some suggestions about ways she could make her piece “sexier” by men who didn’t understand her work; she just rolled her eyes inwardly and thanked them. Very Dorothy Parker. I love her. Someone asked for Santoro’s phone number, I think she said as well. I wonder how Santoro reacted.

Anyway, on a more positive thought, regarding feminism: there are some really cool things going on in the city this weekend. There’s a “Global Feminisms” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on feminist art, and “Indwelling” — a combination of photography exhibits on women’s bodies by female artists, screenings of shorts films such as the movie “A Girl Like Me” which I saw at TriBeCa film festival and blogged about earlier — awesome awesome AWESOME short film by a high-schooler about young African-American girls’ self-perceptions — and some play readings such as The Vagina Monologues. The theme is women’s body images, and it celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute and takes place at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Sounds excellent.

Yikes, it’s coming up so soon! I’m so not ready!!

I started up again with Luis last night His hair is so long now — it’s funny because I feel like I just saw him, but I guess it’s been about five months — time really does fly! I remember him saying he was going to grow it out, but I’d forgotten — almost didn’t recognize him!

Anyway, he learned the first half of the choreography already – -Jacob was really nice and helped teach him. So, in about forty-five minutes, he now knows it better than I do, and I have been learning it for over two months! I am so not a professional dancer!!!

Another thing that defines me as so not a pro — my dinner; dinner of pigs! They had these in the coffee shop near my work and I just had to try one. So yummy. But so blasted big!

So, my lesson ended at 7:50 p.m., and I then rushed home to catch Dancing With the Stars. I know, “cheesetastic” show (in Terry Teachout’s words), but it promotes ballroom dancing and increases attendance at ballroom studios, which in turn promotes ballet and concert dance and hence increases attendance at those events, so we support cheese here!!!

Anyway, it was interesting to see Paulina again — she must be in her forties by now and of course looks all of 24. I used to not like her because I remember her saying things like “I wish women would just be women” — ugh, like why can’t we just all be whatever we want for cry-eye, but that’s when she was younger and she seems to have a very cute, fun, humorously self-deprecating personality, so I definitely hope she stays. I have to say though, as gorgeous as she is, her dancing really drives home the point that beautiful skinny girl with long limbs does SO NOT a dancer make! I mean, aside from her gorgeous face, body-wise she really reminded me of myself: hunched over because you’re taller than your partner, spidery arms flailing about everywhere, spaghetti center, etc.! But because of that I am so very glad she’s on the show — I’ll love to see her improvement in the coming weeks, and it’s so fantastic to see someone who looks like you (body-wise of course — I WISH I had that face ) dancing and dancing well and to everyone’s liking. And I am also so glad Heather is on the show — how awesome!!! She looked beautiful.

On one last note, ABT is on tour right now — they’re in Chicago today, but were in Detroit recently, and I saw this on Matt’s blog. How horribly upsetting. Living in NY for such a long time now, I forget that such people still exist…

“No matter what life you lead

the virgin is a lovely number:

cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,

arms and legs made of Limoges,

lips like Vin Du Rhone,

rolling her china-blue doll eyes

open and shut.

Open to say,

Good Day Mama,

and shut for the thrust

of the unicorn.

She is unsoiled.

She is as white as bonefish.”

Anne Sexton, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” from TRANSFORMATIONS.

On Thursday night, I went to see Ann Liv Young’s “Snow White” after seeing it posted on The Winger, by Gia Kourlas, who also has a good interview with the young iconoclastic choreographer in TONY. Very in-your-face, very rawly unabashedly unerotically naked, very hilariously WTF??, very post-post-post-feminist, and I LOVED it! This was my first time seeing anything by her, and I had to do some research, both on her work and the classic fairytale, to make a bit of sense (but I love that sort of thing — and I had no idea reinvention of the fairytale was so popular — in addition to Anne Sexton and Gregory Maguire, Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt have had their take). Young said it was based on the Grimm Brothers version and not Disney, which was pretty obvious, but I don’t think she needed to say that anyway: it’s really just her own thing entirely.

I’m not sure if I got what I was supposed to get out of it, or if there’s even some specific thing that she wanted me to get, but some themes I saw were pretense or illusion versus the real, tearing apart sex and gender stereotypes– rather lewdly too, subverting the (male, I guess) gaze, questioning the meaning of eroticism and nakedness versus nudity, etc.. It was kind of like a play within a play, but in a way that questioned what was performance and what was real. When the audience walked into the theater, the three performers were already standing onstage looking out at us waiting for us to take our seats. Young herself kind of glared out at us, a challenging look in her eye: she was not up there to please us, to show us prettiness and gratification. Similarly, at the end of the performance (which was rather abrupt), they just got up, took their things and walked off the stage, not waiting for or needing our applause, no bows, no “curtain calls.” And throughout the show, things would go wrong — sound devices that wouldn’t work, costume malfunctions, problematic props, etc. — and would be fixed onstage. It’s as if she’s questioning what a performance is, what are its confines, and at points, I wasn’t even completely sure if what was happening was supposed to be happening or if it was part of the show.

But back to the beginning. The three performers — one man (Michael Guerrero), two women (Liz Santoro and Young herself) — all wearing simple white ballet leotards and heavy black sneakers (the last of which is the only item of clothing that remains part of the costume throughout), play a rock song — Guerrero on drums, Santoro keyboards and Young singing. Each person, by the way, plays two characters — Guerrero the sound technician and The Queen, Santoro The Woodsman and The Prince, and Young the play’s director and Ms. White. After the song finished, all three stripped naked and changed into their next costume — all onstage. No strip-tease, nothing artful or sexy about it, just a clothing change done onstage — and therefore — really somewhat shocking. Certainly not Kenneth Clarke’s definition of “the nude.” Plus, none of the bodies are “idealized” — no makeup, no starving oneself for months on end or working out like a madperson for the idealized physique — these are real bodies.

For the next song, Young sings naked (except for the heavy black sneakers), while Guerrero works the sound and Santoro changes into her Prince costume — underwear with a giant strap-on dildo. The sound goes wrong, not enough is coming out of the mikes, and Young stops the performance mid-song to yell and scream at everyone for it. One male European blogger I read likened her to Eve Ensler, but to me, this ranting naked woman reminded me more of Karen Finley. Except, where Finley would often rant about overtly political issues, Young’s fist-pounding naked woman is political in another way: if traditional onstage female nudity (ie: for male gratification) must render (at least in fantasy) the woman vulnerable, humiliated, and subjugated to men in order for it to be titillating, Young’s dictating everyone around, forcing even the rather muscular man to run frantically about, his penis dangling between his legs, is nothing but amusing. She is hardly the vulnerable, submissive one, and is humiliating everyone else. Maybe the image is a bit shocking as well; I found it funny.

The Disney version has oft been criticized for reifying the virgin / whore dichotomy. As Sexton’s poem notes, the Queen is the sexed-up slut well deserving of her eventual demise, Snow the glorious good girl who is, for all intents and purposes a virgin — of course every woman must at some point perform those horrid ‘wifely duties’ but Snow’s “china-blue doll eyes … open to say Good Day Mama” but are “shut for the thrust of the unicorn…” Since she denies her sexuality, the fantasy of her virginity remains intact. Here, Young screws all such fantasies: the “Prince,” topless and with her giant strap-on dildo, climbs aboard Young, balancing his body over hers in a push-up, as if looking into the glass-box where the poor dead beautiful Snow lies. But instead of being a beautiful dead girl, Young is alive and active. She jumps up, pushes the Prince over, climbs atop him and straddles the dildo. Young told Kourlas part of what she wished to do was play with skepticism, so she wants the audience to see it penetrate her. The spectacle is rather outlandish and the audience kind of didn’t know how to react. Personally I don’t see how anyone could possibly find this ‘girl-on-girl action’ to be intended for male titilation — it seems way too vulgar — but Young told Kourlas that a European male viewer wrote to her that he thought the performance was quite sexy, but if she wanted to make it yet sexier she should lose the tennis shoes. In an earlier piece, entitled “Michael,” which I only read about and now wished I would have seen, apparently part of the action takes place in a trailer bearing three naked women dancing, and a male outside peering through the window, naked as well, and masturbating. He later comes inside the trailer, only to have his penis tied to the couch by the women, who pour soda over him while screaming, “I don’t love you anymore.” Is she saying that this is the fate that befalls the poor man who assumes women’s bodies exist solely for his gratification? Anyway, at one point during Snow White, Young reads to the audience some letters of criticism from former viewers, but she didn’t include this tennis shoe one and I wish she would have.

In the last section, the three performers pretend to be part of a radio talk show. One discussion revolves around how each character’s Valentine’s Day was spent. Young tells a story in which she was driving down the freeway topless, rocking out to cranked-up music and having herself a great time. A trucker sees her and begins following her. Of course, right then her tire goes flat. She throws a shirt on, jumps out of the car, and goes to the trunk to retrieve her spare, when the trucker stops and approaches her. He shoves her up against her trunk and pulls down his pants. Just then his black lab jumps out of the truck and attacks him, allowing her to run away. She flees into some bushes and hides, only to hear a shotgun go off. After the trucker pulls away, she goes back out to the street and holds the dog in her arms as he dies. A caller phones in and tells her if she’d just keep her clothes on her life would be much easier. Very disturbing, and Finley-esque.

Anyway, “Snow White” is playing at The Kitchen this Wednesday through Saturday. There’s tons of good stuff I left out. My friend, unfortunately, was disturbed by it, so I guess it may not be for everyone, but if you want to see a real spectacle that will likely challenge your notions of things and make you think, then just go and check it out for yourself.

I was informed tonight during my lesson that Luis, my former fab teacher, is returning to the studio!!! Because I’d worked with him for quite a while and did my prior showcase with him, we decided that I should try to do my Sinatra routine with him. So work with him on that will begin next week!! Hehehe, Luis got a bit freaked when I posted previously about our joke appellation for the problematic snake that continuously occurred during our Mambo, but EVERYONE thought it was hilarious, so the name of this post is in honor of his return It’s my fault because of my long legs, ha ha ha! Anyway, Yay Luis!

In other ecstatic news,

Delirium pointed out to me ABT’s announcement that Marcelo, along with Veronika Part, will lead the cast in the world premiere of Kevin McKenzie’s Sleeping Beauty, on June 1st!!! Unfortunately, I’m going to be in Blackpool that evening watching the World Standard Ballroom competition, but will be back by Monday, the 4th, when those two dance again. So excited!!!

So, I just received in the mail my prize from Root Magazine for being a winner in their essay contest for my piece on making an ass of myself in Samba class! I love “Rough Guide,” and it’s perfect for me — covers dance festivals worldwide, and has a whole section, OF COURSE, devoted to Rio’s Carnival! Lists inexpensive hotels, how to get tickets to the parade and what times to go to see the best schools, and how and when to sign up with a Samba school if you wish to dance in the parade (it listed Mangueira as the best, which Cathy had first told me about!) So, now I have NO EXCUSE for not going next year

The book also lists a bunch of other fabulous world festivals (both dance-related and non-dance), including, New Year’s Hogmanay in Scotland, PETA’s “Running with the Nudes” — as opposed “Running with the Bulls” — in Spain, NY’s very own Halloween parade, and one in particular that caught my eye — the Gay and Lesbian Festival in Sydney — supposedly the largest of its kind in the world and in which participants really know how to “lose their inhibitions,” clothing-wise. Sounds like the perfectly SAFE place for that — and probably ideal for someone like me who freaks over her costume showing a milimeter of cleavage (more about that in a later post…) Hmmm, ideas for more stuff to spend my non-existant monetary funds on…

Here’s a picture from the inside flap — I’m not sure if this is that Sydney festival or something else, but it looks intriguing

Anyway, it was the perfect prize for me! Thanks again so much, Root!

Yay, opening night is in two months exactly! Oh but two months is soooo long…

And DH looks here like he is gaining just a bit of weight (in a good way!) (for non-obsessed ABT fanatics, he’s the guy in the grey sweater, then white shirt) I’m sorry! It’s just that he’s so mesmerizing; every square milimeter of him, in both movement and in pictures, is just fascinating And Matt has a knack for bringing out the goof in everyone

Above pic is of Marcelo, of course of course!

Ah, how beautiful is that! I tried to do something like it so we could put it into my routine, except I wasn’t arching back, just kept a straight body, but I was too @#$^%$# scared! Now I’m so mad at myself!

So, I turned my pretty ending lift into a boring fish (again):

I mean, when I did my first fish, it was great fun, and it is pretty and all, but now that it’s the only thing I’m not scared out of my mind to do, it’s just frustrating… Ugh. Maybe I’ll get up my nerve to try the over-the-shoulder one again, but I was really wobbly and I feel like if we do that one, half of the next two months is going to be spent trying to overcome my fears instead of learning foxtrot. (Above pic by the way is of me and Luis during last showcase; top one, which is actually hanging on my wall, is of the fearless and beautiful Carmen Corella with HIM, in a photo by Roy Round in the book “Roundabout the Ballet.”

Anyway, we finally finished the choreography, so I just transferred what I shot on the camcorder in the studio onto tape so I can watch it over and over and over again on my TV and hopefully someday memorize it (the only way I know how to memorize my choreography).

The routine is pretty … a lot of foxtrot and not a lot of lifty / tricky things, but I guess it will give me a chance to focus on … dancing, which is what I’m supposed to be doing after all. Maybe if I do well in the next couple of weeks, he’ll put more hard things in In looking over it, I realized we forgot to put in the trick where my butt kept getting stuck on his shoulder — which may be for the best after what happened last time…

One more pic of Tony and Jacob finishing up the choreography. Jacob’s about to sit on Tony’s back and do air kicks … it’s pretty cool. I got in trouble for taking this pic though — too flashy, and almost blinded everyone! Ooops!

Last night, I went to see another piece by Forsythe, this time at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. My usual dance friends were all busy, so I managed to convince my friend and fellow co-worker, Jonathan, who rarely goes to dance events, to accompany me. This task proved to be quite difficult since the website described the work as involving “audience participation.” When you’re a ballroom dancer and you invite your very dance-shy friends to socials at your studio promising them they can simply sit and watch all the action, only to get there and have everyone and their dog dragging them kicking and screaming out onto the dance floor, then go and invite them to an audience participatory dance event, they simply won’t trust you. I had to promise him on my life that this was a world-class concert dance company and the only ones doing the actual dancing would be the professionals.

Anyway, You Made Me a Monster was, like Three Atmospheric Studies, dance theater, and involved not only dance but other elements of theater as well, this time sculpture, sound effects, and words (this time not spoken but written, and projected from a video monitor onto a screen). The theme was the devastating effects of cancer on the body.

A group of 80 of us walked into a room where about 10 or so tables were set up, each bearing a partially constructed model of a human skeleton made from cardboard pieces. Guides divided us into smaller groups, took each group to a different table, and directed us to build off of the partly put-together puzzle, but not in a logical way. In other words, a spine should not resemble an actual spine, but the audience-member should twist and bend the carboard bone so that it made an artful design, then attach it to the model not where it “should” go on a “normal” human body, but in a more unconventional, surprising place. If we liked, we could also take some of the pieces of white paper below the table and trace the shadows made by the distorted model body.

Okay. Can you pick the lawyers out of the art crowd?… Yes, with us, this proved almost as bad as if we’d been asked to dance. While everyone else at our table enthusiastically went to work, Jonathan and I looked at each other, picked up a cardboard piece, looked quizzically at it, surreptitiously regarded the instructions we were told to pay no attention to, looked at each other again hopeless confusion covering our faces. Beginning to stress out about looking like a couple of idiots, I finally shrugged my shoulders and started bending and twisting a femur. Jonathan frowned at what I think was a collarbone, then put it down and excused himself to go to the bathroom for the next ten minutes. He’s never coming with me to a “dance event” again, I know it… In the end, I contributed to our table’s body by placing a very long, twisty bone protruding straight up from the center. It looked more amusing than anything else.

About ten minutes into our “body-building” project, shrill, screeching sounds began to emerge from the speakers, and dancers, three in all, came out, approached a table (each a different one), and began conveying through movement the design we’d created with our “bodies.” Their movement was much like that of the mother and diplomat’s assistant that I described in Three Atmospheric Studies — twisted, distorted, and contorted to grotesque, misshapen effect. I recognized the dancers from Atmospheric Studies, since I’d just seen it.

Funny thing, Matt Murphy had told me one of his favorite dancers from Atmospheric Studies was “the bald guy.” That man was one of the dancers here. I hadn’t noticed him much at Atmospheric Studies, since he didn’t “play” one of the main characters. Here, he took my breath away. Matt was so right! Dancers … they do notice dancing! With me, I guess supreme dance skill has to be shoved right in my face for me to see it…

After finishing at the tables, the dancers went to the front, stage area, and danced behind three separate stands each holding a piece of paper with a tracing an audience-member had made of the shadows of their model. They resembled musicians playing instruments while reading music sheets.

Behind them was a screen, onto which was projected a series of sentences, each running across the screen one by one. This use of words was somewhat ineffective to me. Every once in a while, I’d see solitary words or phrases that shouted-out to me, like “xenophobia,” “seeds of one’s internal destruction,” “reproductive organs were removed,” “grasp of space … uncanny, delirious,” “repulsive, occult, lethal,” Aliens” etc. etc. But I couldn’t focus on the words because that would take my concentration away from the dancers, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I only got an intermittent sensory effect from various words or sentence parts, without understanding how they fit together into a fuller narrative. I would have much preferred the words to have been spoken. There were sound effects blaring over the speakers as well, but to have the words on top of the sound effects would have enabled me to better understand them, since I feel that sounds can better compete with each other than visuals. You can only look at one thing at a time!

I noticed right before leaving that the pieces of paper on top of and underneath the tables contained those same sentences. I snatched one and put it into my bag. I’m not sure if they were there for us to take, but I’m very glad I did, because I read it on my subway ride home, and it made the performance all the more sorrowfully compelling to me. A man, whether it’s Forsythe I’m unsure, tells about his wife’s illness then death from cancer of her reproductive organs. The woman, a dancer, had been bleeding profusely, obviously weakening her and making her unable to perform. Her doctor, who happened to be a woman, told her it was just that she was dancing too much — obviously a judgment laced with sexism and devastatingly destructive medical inaccuracies — something with which a few of us are just a bit familiar. He goes on to talk about what a “dance genius” his wife was: “She had been able to reach into the profound heart of dancing and bring it to light…” The two were working on a piece about xenophobia, in response to several murders of political refugees in Germany. She had likened her cancer to xenophobia, which “constitutes a fear that the seeds of one’s internal destruction reside in a foreign body…” One thing I love about Forsythe is his ability to merge and analogize seemingly disparate things to shed new light on both. The “story” ends when, years after the woman has died, the man and his children began to assemble a cardboard jigsaw puzzle-like model of a human skeleton given to the wife before her death by a friend. They did not follow instructions, however, but “randomly bent, folded and attached the various intricate pieces until there was a model of something I understood. it was a model of grief.”

Amazing writing central to the piece that I thought should have been more central to the performance. As Jonathan and I were walking to the subway, I said that the dancing seemed one-note to me. He said he thought it was thematic and he enjoyed it overall and didn’t need a narrative with a big-bang climax. It WAS thematic and I didn’t need those things either, but I still wished there would have been something beside all the images of distorted, mangled, devastated bodies. I wished there would have been some beauty somewhere. I guess I found that in this writing, which was beautifully written. I just don’t know how many people saw the pieces of paper to pick up before leaving, so I don’t know how many people missed out on it.

One last note, on gender: two of the dancers here were men, one a woman. I thought it was interesting that Forsythe used male dancers to portray a woman’s illness from a feminine form of cancer. He also used female dancers in traditionally male roles in Atmospheric Studies — ie: a diplomat. This is interesting to me, this kind of playing with gender roles and assignments, unless I am reading too much into it. However, there was one line in this written story that struck me. After the woman’s cancer-ridden reproductive organs were removed, the man says, “I noticed afterward, she no longer smelled like a woman.” He goes on to talk about how, once she started on a course of radiation therapy, she began to “bend” “los[ing] the ability to fully lengthen her body” as a dancer must. So, the cancer depleted her of both her ‘womanness’ and her ‘dancerness’ — the two things that defined her, at least to the man (who is the one, after all, left to speak for her). But the line about the reproductive organs and “smelling like a woman” bothered me. It’s horrible for a woman to lose her reproductive organs — it’s horrible for anyone to have to lose any of their organs — and I definitely think doctors have been too haste to recommend hysterectomies and mastectomies and have done so out of pure and simple laziness over having to deal with the complexities of our bodies. But what exactly does ‘a woman’ smell like? Do we all smell the same? Are we all one thing, are we all defined by the same thing — our reproductive organs?

Speaking of whether art and politics can be mixed to profound effect, ABB brings the artistry of political blogging to a new level. I simply love this woman! And, she’s even got some military fans. Go ABB!

As with DEATH IN VENICE, I’m totally late in writing this (blasted briefs, annoying job!), but better late than never, right?… On Thursday night, Dea and I went out to BAM to see THREE ATMOSPHERIC STUDIES choreographed by American-expatriate-in-Germany, William Forsythe.

I’ve seen excerpts of Forsythe’s work before, but this was the first full-length piece I’ve seen by him, and I had no idea what to expect, but I absolutely LOVED it. Instead of pure dance, it was German ‘dance theater’ (“tanztheater”) so there was dialog, as well as acted-out or talked-about images, in addition to movement. There were three “studies” (ie: Acts). In the first, a woman comes out and tells the audience that the scene is going to be about the arrest of her son, and she points to the dancer, wearing a bright red shirt, who is portraying that character. Aside from that, the first scene consists entirely of dance, and, from there, becomes rather chaotic and remains so throughout. Dancers violently grab each other, hurl themselves at each other, jump on each other, throw each other, run from each other, fight, fear and comfort each other. It was honestly really amazing to me that no one got hurt. I also attended a pre-performance discussion at which Forsythe spoke a bit, and one audience member asked him if he considered whether his dancers would be injured and he assured us that dancers have a “very meticulous” sense of time and space. There was no music (apart from the dancers’ heavy breathing which acted as a kind of natural sound effect), so he must have been making a huge understatement! If someone was one millisecond of time or one milimeter off on floorspace, they or the person they were hurling themselves at at full force and lightening speed could have really got whacked. When I dance, I count my music by the beats; still baffles me how they all kept such exacting time with no music?…

At various points, the dancers momentarily freeze to make painting-like tableaux. It wasn’t until the second scene when the woman whose son had been arrested began speaking to a translator to tell her version of the events that I realized that, because there was so much violent commotion in the first scene and because I was so in awe of the amazing ways the dancers manipulated the floor and moved their bodies, I’d totally missed ‘the story’ of the arrest. Forsythe had said that one of the ideas he wanted to play with was our ability as an audience, both in the theaters of dance and of world affairs, “to pay attention”. I realized that I’d failed that test, and had no idea how the arrest happened, even after the woman had specifically pointed out to me what I was supposed to watch for!

So, in the second scene, the woman tries, unsuccessfully, to give her account to a translator so that she can make a police report. The language barriers, the fact that there simply are no words for certain concepts or objects (“you say ‘bird’, I can give you ‘airplane’ … for ‘castle’ how about ‘apartment building’”) is a metaphor for the severe limitations of language to connect people. At the same time that this dialog is happening, there’s a dancer in the middle, speaking and illustrating with movement, the content of several different photographs and paintings. Sometimes his words overtake the woman’s and the interpretor tries unsuccessfully to translate his descriptions of the images into words as well. There was a lot of confusion as to the meaning of this, but to me, it was a way of saying that we can be bombarded with so many images that, ironically, they ultimately prevent us from empathizing with the subjects depicted in them. Forsythe said another thing he wished to explore was “compassion fatigue” — how the multiplicity, and perhaps sensationalism, of images of others’ suffering exhausts our ability to feel compassion for them, and results in drowning out the truth depicted therein. So the image becomes more important than the reality. At the end of the second scene, the woman, interrupted by the dancer’s voice describing yet another “composition” cries out, in frustration, “which composition are we on now?”

The most powerful, disturbing part of that scene was toward the end, when the woman rises from her chair and moves around the stage, contorting and distorting both her body and voice in quite grotesque ways. That frightening distortion I thought graphically illustrated both her emotional devastation and the impossibility of her truth being told because of the distorting effects of images and language. Forsythe is known for exploring the relativity of truth. Perhaps he is saying pure movement is the best way of getting to truth?

I guess the last “study” is the most “political” if you want to call it that — at least in terms of it echoing a current, specific geopolitical situation. There has been a bombing and the woman, whose whole village has now been destroyed, is so devastated she can now hardly move. A man is struggling to hold her up. A dancer portraying a diplomat tries to console the woman, telling her (rather amusingly at times) the bombing has been for the good of the community, etc., and a dancer whom she (interestingly, the diplomat is played by a woman) points to as her assistant (also a woman) conveys the diplomat’s words through dance. The assistant’s body-distorting, somewhat grotesque movements, reminiscient of the woman’s in the second scene, evince the ludicrousness of the diplomat’s words and their powerlessness to explain, defend, or console.

I found that the combination of the dialog, images, and most importantly, the brilliant movement, made me think about all of those ideas that were explored — the relativity of truth and its vulnerability to reduction to false images, the effect of bombardment of images on the observer’s attention span and ability to connect to the subject, and the distorting effect of language. And I felt the theatrical combination of the three art forms was more powerful than one alone. Discussion of this piece has centered on whether dance can (or should) provide political commentary. But I’m unsure of the reasons for this focus. I think this ballet was ‘political’ in the sense that everything is political — the word comes from the word “polis” — the people, after all — so anything that has as its subject matter human beings, is to an extent ‘political.’ But I was compelled to think about the issues mentioned above, not that war is bad or the current situation in Iraq is the U.S.’s fault or something simplistic and obvious like that. In general, I think it’s far more productive to talk about the ideas presented by a work of art than whether they are political.

Anyway, today Ashley commented on Matt’s blog as well, posing some more interesting questions related to the Forsythe discussion underway there: what meaning professional dancers as opposed to audience members with little or no dance training extract from a ballet; whether non-dancers can understand pure movement in the same way pro dancers do; and, if non-dancers don’t comprehend pure movement, what then attracts them to the ballet — particularly the contemporary, story-less ballets and modern dance? I thought those queries were really intriguing, particularly in light of viewing this work. I, for one — someone with very little dance training — don’t “understand” pure movement at all, and don’t really try to either. The contemporary story-less ballets that I enjoy, I enjoy because I love watching the dancers move in amazingly beautiful ways. But then, the dancers have to be really really good. And, in fact, sometimes they have to be dancers with whom I’m already familiar. I don’t know if I would have loved “Clear” which ABT recently did, if David, Max, Angel, and Jared were not dancing it; I don’t know if I would have liked “Meadow” as much if it wasn’t Marcelo and Julie performing. I need to connect to the dancers, especially with story-less ballets (which is why I think books like “Round About the Ballet,” magazine interviews, and websites like the Winger are so important to promoting ballet and concert dance).

I think a lot of dance fans also go to the ballet for the sensual experience: they perhaps enjoy Balanchine, for example, because they savor the feminine beauty, the pretty, dulcet charm of his ballets. I prefer ABT’s celebration of masculine (including both male and female) beauty and strength exuded by the ballets they present. I think people often go for the sensations the experience, the way the ballets make them feel, rather than to make them think. But then, for me, Forsythe is a welcome change to all that, at least once in a while. I think I’ve been seeing so much contemporary ballet of the “Clear” and “Meadow” variety during ABT’s recent City Center season, I was quite starved for more — to be given a chance to use my mind, to be compelled to decipher meaning, at points rather complex. That’s me, anyway. Very interesting to ponder just what it is that draws non-dancers who presumably derive no solid ‘meaning’ from pure movement to concert dance though…

So, Jonathan Wilkins and Katusha Demidova are the America’s Ballroom Challenge Champions!! The top photo, by the way, is copyright of Jeffrey Dunn for WGBH, from the America’s Ballroom Challenge website. I couldn’t be happier for them. For the first time, I absolutely fell in love with their dancing, while watching them during this competition. I have always championed the couple I call the underdogs of Standard, Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed, but here I really saw why Jonathan and Katusha are the reigning U.S. Standard champions and third overall in the world. Though I haven’t studied much Standard and don’t know much about technique in that dance style, I could tell what a perfect connection they had, like they were just made to dance with each other. And they exhibited such class and charm. The way Katusha wore her hair, with her curls bouncing around behind her, particularly during their short number — their swift-footed, gleeful, sweetly flirty Quickstep danced to “It’s Too Darn Hot,” she reminded me so much of Rita Hayworth dancing with Fred Astaire. What sophisticated beauty and grace and elegance. It made me wish the Standard competitors wore their hair down all the time, instead of up in the oftentimes rather severe buns.

Though I’ve liked Latin, watching these two made me feel like Astaire and Hayworth, like class itself, had been brought back into American Dance. I wish Standard was more popular here.

Of course I love Latin. I love Latin primarily because I love learning about the cultures from which the different dance styles originate. I love being exposed to, and learning to ‘feel’ different kinds of music, with the beautiful sounds made by foreign instruments, the mellifluous foreign languages… But too often, I feel that people sexualize Latin dance, and it makes me uncomfortable. Latin dancing is really not about sex. One of my friends from my old studio, Juana, once told me that Rhumba, for example, grew out of slave culture. The Rhumba basic — a step, followed by downward motion of the back shoulder muscle toward the hip, followed by the settling of the body weight into that hip, mirrored the way the slave women who had to carry heavy loads on their shoulders would walk. I love that she taught that to me. It made the Cuban motion so fundamental to Rhumba all the more clear to me. And, I felt like I was having a mini history lesson. Funny thing, Juana wasn’t even a dance instructor, just a very knowledgeable and historically-aware fellow student. In any event, this basic movement is not sexual. Latin dancers in part wear “skimpy” costumes because this isolation of movement of a single part of the body is important to the dance, so the judges must see their backs, hips and rib cages in order to determine whether they are exhibiting proper technique. Not that the costumes can’t ever be called “sexy,” but I feel that sometimes people go too far, and reduce Latin dance to that, and thus reduce Latin dancers to sexualized objects. Sometimes other kinds of dancers can be reduced to sexualized objects as well, and I find this very disturbing. I have a lot more to say about dancers and bodies, but will save that for later. For now, I just want to say congratulations to Jonathan and Katusha for some very beautiful, very inspiring dancing