No, I don’t mean at the Halloween parade, but onstage at City Center Well, last night was my first less than stellar night at ABT. But I’m not that bummed because I still had a good time.

First, the best.

(all photos from ABT website; this pic’s of Herman Cornejo, Sascha Radetsky and Jose Carreno)

Last night marked the debut of one of my favorites, David Hallberg, in Jerome Robbins’s “Fancy Free”, a short but sweet ballet about three loveably cocky sailors on shore leave vying for the attentions of only two ladies, and who, due to their silly preening competitiveness with each other, don’t fare so well.

This was an interesting role for David because he’s usually either the ethereal, lyrical type or the noble prince. He hasn’t been assigned a part with a real comical acting job before, that I know of anyway. He actually brought his dreamy, head-in-the-clouds romanticism with him to this role and it worked really well. And, I’ve never noticed the Fred Astaire-ish “tap dancing” steps so vividly. Oftentimes, the sailors all kind of blend into each other. Here, each had his own personality, which is the way it should be. David’s sailor was the romantic, sandwiched between Craig Salstein’s show-off, jumping-jack of a funny guy who tries to wow the girls by performing such feats as jumping off the bar into a splits, and Jose Carreno’s cool, hip-swaying, macho dude who fancies himself (wrongly of course) Mr. Seduction. (The way Jose grabs his dazed girl and forces her into a “romantic” tango is beyond funny; it’s like Pepe Le Peu tango.) David’s sailor initially tries to impress his girl with tall tales of military feats he hasn’t performed, but soon realizes, what the heck, he’d really rather just dance with her. Showing off is just not his thing, and he’s almost forced into performing his little solo by the other two, which, after finishing, he ends up at Gillian Murphy’s feet, lying on his stomach, head propped up in his hands, dreamily gazing into her eyes. Sweet!
Anyway, those three guys were a good end to a rather blah night.

More notably, the evening also marked the company debut of Twyla Tharp’s “Baker’s Dozen.” I sat in the Front Gallery, which is way up at the top of the City Center auditorium. They rarely open this area, especially for dance performances, but ABT was so sold out, they were forced to create some more space. Though I could see David and his marines okay, I don’t think it was generally a good place for viewing dance. Jorma Elo’s “Close to Chuck,” showed for the second time, and from all the way up there, the backdrop of Close’s gorgeous self-portraits was almost entirely obscured.

Anyway, back to Tharp: this was my first time seeing “Baker’s Dozen,” and I thought it was a fun jazzy little number. It involved an ensemble of 12, all dressed in egg-shell-colored jazz clothes (pictured above, with Isaac Stappas and Kristi Boone dancing). Nothing was on pointe, only jazz shoes were worn, and the piece — broken down into five parts all danced to Willie Smith music — varied between the playful and the lyrical. At times dancers would run up behind each other, tease with a shoulder-tap, leap-frog over each other. Craig Salstein (the poor man danced in three of the four ballets performed: I don’t know how he was still standing at the end of the evening), the best actor of the bunch, was constantly cajoled by a woman who repeatedly jumped on his back unexpectedly. He’d carry her off, she riding over his shoulders childishly flexed-footed, almost playfully piggy-back but upside-down, he with a sadly funny, hopelessly wearied frown. But then he’d return dashing across the stage with crazed high jumps, almost drunk on his freedom, however temporary.

The problem was, Craig was the only real actor of the bunch, and Tharp’s work methinks requires very good acting skills. Isaac Stappas and Sarawanee Tanatanit impressed as well, but they still didn’t have Craig’s level of comedy, and the rest of the company just kind of seemed to be going through the motions, not really giving the piece their all. Maybe that’s to be expected since it’s their first time with it, though. I have high hopes they’ll get more into it the more they perform it.

And then there was Marcelo’s Sinatra in Tharp’s lovely, ballroomy “Sinatra Suites.” I fell in love with this piece last year this time when I saw Marcelo dance it. For some reason, it didn’t have the same magic for me this time around. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps, this is where I really needed to be down lower in the theater. I couldn’t see his face very well at all, and, like I said, Tharp requires a real acting job. But maybe he just wasn’t that on, either, which is unusual for Marcelo. Or maybe my expectations were so high because of last year. Or maybe it was … Argh .. maybe it was

this damn DVD!!! I’d fallen so head over heels in love with the ballet last year that I: bought the DVD, in which Baryshnikov and Elaine Kudo dance the piece; insisted my ballroom teacher incorporate some of the lift sequences into a Foxtrot showcase I was working on; and, in preparation for said showcase, I then watched the blasted Baryshnikov DVD what must’ve been well over a hundred times, because I realized last night, I really have that thing memorized. Not good. I have to say, I do think when you know something too well, your spectating enjoyment is just diminished. All I could see were the things Baryshnikov and Kudo did that were not quite as smooth here, the tricks that weren’t quite as fancy, the difficult drags and pulls that went on for too short of a time, unlike B&K’s longer, extended ones, the little cheeky lifts where she is bent over butt up under him, between his legs, and he bends down and lifts her up toward his crotch, upside-down — it’s a very funny and contorted lift, but B&K did a few ups and downs, here there was only one. And, like, at the end of the third song, “That’s Life,” after he’s been a cocky, gum-chewing shithead treating her like crap throughout, and she angrily runs at him, throwing herself like a cannonball and he catches her in his arms but at the very last minute, surprising the both of them and the audience, and showing that she can really make him her slave if she wants: well, Baryshnikov was looking the other way when he caught her as she flew at him, so he surprised even himself. Marcelo looked back at her while she took her running leap, both making the trick not as extravagant (since he knew when she was going to jump because he was watching her) and dissipating his degree of cockiness since he was actually paying some attention to her. Which in a way is good really. Marcelo’s a nice guy; it’s hard for him to load on too much swagger His Sinatra is simply different than Misha’s. And what am I even saying? I mean, I’m faulting Marcelo for not dragging his woman across the floor like a sack of potatoes for long enough, not lifting her by the butt like a naughty child enough times, and paying her some attention … what’s wrong with me? Hmmm… I don’t know. Just don’t watch a DVD of someone else doing something a million times and then go see your favorite do it live. Others loved it: the audience downstairs went wild and I even heard some “Yeah!!!s” so it wasn’t just polite applause. Okay, no more DVDs. At least not when I have access to a live Marcelo. If you don’t have access, however, to a live Marcelo, or a live Jose, or an Angel, or a Herman, do buy the DVD of Misha — it’s gorgeous!

Ah, wasn’t he brilliant tonight on Dancing With the Stars! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest Latin ballroom dancer in the world! Excepting Slavik Actually, not though – Louis is the best; really years after his retirement from competitive ballroom dancing he is still the world’s greatest I strongly declare. And damn was that a fast cha cha he and Cheryl Burke did to that Barry Manilow song! Kind of a funny thing with this show: they hire a certain singer to perform, the song their choice, and then tell the dancers to dance something to it. Sometimes there really isn’t a ballroom dance that perfectly fits the beat of that particular song, so the dancers really have to be creative. I think Louis and Cheryl could have gone with a Hustle, but they chose to do a crazy fast Cha Cha instead, and wow! That standing ovation was so deserved. Oh, I love him so!

And I thought Jonathan Roberts and his wife Anna Trebunskaya did a beautiful waltz to “Oh Mandy!” What an adorably sweet couple! And, am I a dork for loving that song?

I loved the group Swing number and am glad they showed it again tonight. Christian Perry, the choreographer, actually used to teach at my old studio, Paul Pellicoro’s DanceSport. Every Friday night they’d have a social dance party, and beforehand they’d have an all-levels group class. All levels can mean either hideously over your head or ridiculously easy. In his case, it was always the latter, which I appreciated because it became more of an occasion for fun, or to work on improving technique since you weren’t worried about getting the simple steps down. This group number was really sophisticated though, for a bunch of amateurs. I would think that would be so hard, to choreograph a routine that had sufficient amounts of fun, performance-worthy showiness with some good lifts and fast dancing for a group of amateurs of varying abilities. Of course these are all extremely hard-working amateurs. He pulled it off well. Good for Christian!

I also enjoyed their little footage of the amateurs talking about how great it was to connect with each other over ballroom and yet how competitive they were as well. I feel what they all said is so true: you do really bond with each other, especially when you do a performance showcase, and you do really compete with each other when doing a competition. I think that’s why I grew to prefer the former so much more over the latter. Competition makes me so uneasy.

But what a shocker are the results?! Hip hop Cheeta Girl dancer extraordinaire Sabrina Bryan, whom I think everyone fully expected to make it to the finals, was axed tonight unexpectedly, to make a ginormous understatement.

Now I feel badly for criticizing her pro partner, Mark Ballas, earlier… it could have been that people were displeased with him either for the reasons I stated — that he was spending too much time showing off and not properly framing Sabrina (although I thought he did much better on that front with their foxtrot last night — hard to show off in standard ballroom though), or perhaps because people might have felt Sabrina had an unfair advantage getting to work with Mark’s mother, ballroom dame Shirley Ballas. Or, perhaps they thought it was unfair that she already had a good deal of dance experience and the scales were unfairly tipped to begin with? I think the show’s producers do that on purpose though — try to get people of varying levels of ability. I think they want to make sure the audience doesn’t get too bored with too many “bad” people. But they also want to have enough low-level beginners who can grow and improve during the show so the audience can have an underdog to root for. I think here their thinking might have backfired a bit, unfortunately for Sabrina.

(above image from Galadestoiles)

Judith Mackrell from London’s Guardian newspaper blogs that, according to the BBC News, Hollywood is interested in making a movie based on the life of Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta (who is now with the Royal Ballet in London and has formerly been with ABT and still sometimes guests with my favorite company; Danny Tidwell has listed him as one of his heroes, along with my love Jose who also happens to be Cuban).

Anyway, this project is so exciting to me. I remember when I was young and “White Nights” starring Baryshnikov came out. Everyone was talking. I remember seeing pictures in the newspapers of little Alexandra Baryshnikova (several years younger than me — wonder where she is now?…) being lifted out of a limousine by her father to accompany him down the red carpet for the film’s premiere. I remember all the talk about nude pictures Baryshnikov posed for with co-actor Isabella Rossellini to promote the film and his then-scandalous out-of-wedlock affair with Alexandra’s mother, Jessica Lange. I remember all the network news stories reporting that the little girl cried during the film when the KGB agents threatened her father and had to be comforted by him. I remember eventually seeing the film with my mom and thinking how fun was the tap dancer (Gregory Hines) and how beautiful and polished and smooth were Baryshnikov’s pirouettes (and how many he could do!), and I remember finding the KGB people thrillingly scary but their accents so attractive. I was too young really to appreciate the art of dance, other than Baryshnikov’s perfect, dizzying, never-ending turns, and I don’t even remember the film’s full plot, but to me ballet became this world filled with exotic beauty, intrigue, spies, scandalous taboo-breaking, glamour, Hollywood, the global political situation. Ballet was enchanting and beautiful in itself but it also heavily involved the world around us.

I think it’s time for another big ballet movie. I think perhaps Danny Tidwell has paved the way for mass audience appreciation of the dance, at least in this country. He may have called himself “contemporary” on SYTYCD, but that doesn’t matter; people recognize the form as ballet. And what better story than that of a boy born poor and minority in the slums of Havana who became one of the greatest dancers in the world?

The interesting issue is, as Mackrell points out, who is going to portray Acosta? He seems to want to play himself, but that seems odd to me: who has ever played himself in a narrative, non-documentary film? And talk about the potential for a struggle over artistic control between director and actors… “White Nights” was not the story of Baryshnikov’s life but rather very loosely based on what might happen if a plane he was on crash-landed in Soviet Russia, from which he had just defected. If the Acosta movie is going to be a direct re-telling of his life, I think it makes more sense for a professional actor to play him. But then of course who is going to be able to dance like that?!

I’m still in a state of sugar shock. Like when you’re having a little meal of chocolate truffles (as some of us are occasionally wont to do ); the first couple make your blood race in a good way and you’re hyper-aware and -active, but then you have one too many and hyper-activity turns to jitters and your brain starts racing ahead of you and you have no coherent thoughts whatsoever? Anyway, too much going on last night! It was the world premiere of two new ballets: “Close To Chuck,” a collaboration between choreographer Jorma Elo, composer Philip Glass and artist Chuck Close (whose self-portrait is pictured above) in tribute to Close’s body of work. It was also the not premiere but second performance of a new ballet by NYCBallet dancer Benjamin Millepied called “From Here On Out,” set to new music by 20-something composer Nico Muhly, whom I talked about here.

These premieres are so much fun to be a part of, they’re such an event extraordinare. Practically everyone in the ballet world turns out. I’m so thankful to Apollinaire for inviting me since they were nearly sold out. We sat in front of Tobi Tobias — so fun putting a face to writing. I was hoping we’d see some other familiar dance writer names, but they must have been sitting on the other side of the theater. On our side were also NYCB ballerina Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, and some people who I recognized but couldn’t put names to, including a Paul Taylor dancer.

Okay, first things first: the evening began with another performance of choreographer Stanton Welch’s “Clear” again starring Jose Carreno, which I wrote about in my last post. Last time I saw him it was his debut in the role and I wrote that he concentrated more on the steps than the drama; this time I felt differently. I felt that he gave it much more emotion, was probably just getting the steps down the first time. I was also sitting on the right side of the theater instead of the left this time so I might have had a better view of his face. He danced it gorgeously, perfectly, emotionally, everything. I LOVE that ballet. The more I see it the more it evokes different things for me. Last night, it kind of reminded me of a more abstract version of Death in Venice, where the men, resplendent in pants that are skin-colored but have a bit of golden quality to their sheen, no shirts, have their arms and legs outstretched looking up to the heavens, as if they are both in worship and the objects of someone else’s worship (like the viewer’s). At other points, others of the men act silly and playful, covering their eyes with their hands, much like Tadzio (the older man’s muse and unrequited love interest in “Venice”), at times kind of bouncing around jovially zigzagging their heads. It goes from beautiful and poetic to cute and playful and back again, with the final pas de deux between the lead man and the ballerina ending in a beatific embrace, his head on her shoulder and her head pointed to the sky, her arm reaching upward. People have said they think the ballerina was superfluous, that Welch must have felt he needed to put her in because it was ballet. I thought about it and, though I think that ending scene is gorgeous, she was hardly in the ballet and she didn’t really seem to belong. Why not simply replace her with one of the other men, like one of the young sun-god, playfully flirty Tadzio-types, like the one danced by cute Jared Matthews? I know the ballerina on pointe has classically been the element bringing forth the poetic, but Welch’s whole point is that men in and of themelves can be so. Maybe he was afraid of it looking “gay,” or something, but, please, ballet audiences are more sophisticated than that.

Anyway, the fun thing about sitting on the right side of the theater is that it’s near the curtain, so when they pull it back and the dancers come out front for their curtain call, they’re right in front of you. Completely beyond surreal being that close to Jose. I love him so! You just want to reach out and touch… don’t worry I would never Oh, and then at the end of intermission, before the new “Close to Chuck” began, I spotted him in the back of the orchestra section, watching. I had to force myself to turn back to the front to see the ballet. Even standing there in a plain black t-shirt, the man just melts me.

(picture from Village Voice, of Angel Corella and Julie Kent in the leads, Herman Cornejo walking in background; I cc’d picture of Jose Carreno from ABT’s website in my last post, so won’t repeat it here).

Second on was the “Close to Chuck.” A disclaimer: I always get more out of a piece the more I go see it — I see all kinds of things I missed on first glance — so these are only my initial afterimages after viewing it only once. I have to say the costumes (by Ralph Rucci) and backdrop (various stages of a painting of Mr. Close’s Self Portrait pictured up top of this post) were so stunning, my focus was largely there. In future performances, I’ll pay more attention to the actual dancing The audience was abuzz. As the curtain lifted to reveal several people — Marcelo front and center, Herman to his left in back (this after Jose, both on stage and in audience is where my “truffles” were starting to go into overload…) — all covered neck to foot in shiny black, the bottom portion of the costume a long wide skirt for both men and women, the audience gasped in unison. As a curtain against the back wall lifted to reveal a sparsely filled-in black and white rudimentary etching of the portrait, a single person walked around stage, whipping off each dancer’s vest. The men were now shirtless, the women wearing black mesh leotards with a large black cross down the front and back. Everyone wore handless black gloves that started at the wrist, ended at the elbow. The costumes were very reminiscient to me of those used in Nacho Duato’s “Castrati” which I recently blogged about. They were very medieval, religious, but in a retro vogue way, not authentic like in the Duato. The long skirts for the men made Marcelo and Herman — two of the dance world’s most manly dancers– all the more striking, and ironically more rather than less virile, especially with the gloves which looked similar to the leather arm gear in Castrati.

Marcelo walked over to Julie Kent, dancing the lead ballerina here, examined various parts of her body — or perhaps measured her — his movements very rigid and staccato, almost unsettlingly so. After a short pas de deux, everyone left the stage, and the back curtain lowered back down over the painting. The dancers then re-emerged now without the skirts. The women wore simply the leotards, the men these biker-ish looking pants, all black but a darker more textured inky black lining the inner leg, a lighter, more diaphonous black lining the outer leg. A thick piece of elastic hugged the waist, and in front there was a long horizontal rectangular cut-out between the waist and pelvis which I found sexy and suggestive, albeit rather odd. The women were on pointe and then men wore either black ballet slippers or possibly jazz shoes — I couldn’t really tell, but it looked like there was a very small heel. The back curtain drew up again to reveal another black and white version of the portrait, but this one more filled-in than the previous. The work was being created.

Movement — both partnering and solo — was intentionally stiff, rigid, and awkward, but with hints of fluidity, very much like that I described in Elo’s just-premiered piece “Brake the Eyes.” In fact at one point, Marcelo performed the same exact movement pattern as the ballerina in “Brake” as his body was seemingly divided into two, the left half held stiff and bent, the right arm making flowing, wavy watery movements, as if half of his body was struggling to break free from the other. In “Brake,” I interpreted this to be half classical ballet, half puppet and thought of it as some kind of statement on the world of classical ballet. With Marcelo performing the same movement (and it looked very different on Marcelo’s huge body as compared to the petit ballerina’s), I thought of it more as the artist trying to break free of constraints or, in Close’s case, the limitations of his own body.

I don’t know a huge amount about Close, but I do know he was a promising youngish artist when struck with an aneurysm, which rendered his arms and legs nearly useless. He then developed a new kind of painting method, by which he would photograph his subject, then employ others to put various computerized graphs over the photo, over which he would, using an arm brace, paint in the little graphic squares, making a colorful complex portrait that was almost industrial-looking if viewed from up close, but poetic if viewed from afar. I felt like Marcelo symbolized the artist / subject (since Close was both) and both his personal struggles and his work process; a lot of the movement evoked the artistic struggle to create.

The dancers again left the stage, the curtain fell and rose again, this time revealing a colored, fully-painted portrait, very majestic.

Marcelo was the perfect body for Elo to create this piece on. With his large bone-structure, every awkward movement he made, a hip jutting out due to intentionally uneven weight distribution, a shoulder asymmetrically hung down, made the awkwardness of his body contortions all the more obvious. At one point, he almost looked like Billy Crudup’s Elephant Man that played on Broadway several years ago (Crudup, by the way, wore no makeup or prosthetics in that play; rather the way he moved his own normal body in such a distorted, awkward manner illustrted both the burden he bore from the disfigurement and how beautiful he was underneath it all). In the final segment of the ballet, the dancing becomes more mellifluous. The work is created, beauty triumphs. I’ll be seeing this ballet again at least one more time before the season ends, so I will likely, well definitely, get more out of it, and will report back when I do.

Oh, almost forgot: the curtain call was fantastic. Not only was Elo there (the choreographer usually takes a bow at the premiere), but Mr. Close came out onstage too! He was wheeled out in the most artful wheelchair. Instead of the regular four wheels on the floor, this one had its wheels stacked, two top two bottom, so it was like he was riding a permanent wheelie, making his height far above everyone else’s. Marcelo ran over and gave him a hug, as he’d done seconds earlier with Elo. Marcelo is happiness

The third ballet of the evening was the other new one, Millepied’s abstract “From Here On Out,” with original music by Nico Muhly. I’m sure that I’ll get more out of this ballet upon my second and possibly third viewing of it this season as well, but my initial thoughts are that the music far outshone the choreography. Muhly is a genius, make no doubt about it. After I’d seen Muhly speak about the project at the Guggenheim, I’d joked that I was excited to “hear” the ballet. Well, that’s exactly why you should go. I don’t know much about music but there were so many different kinds of instruments, I think a xylophone even, mixed with computerized sound to miraculous effect. And the way the percussion or horns would build into a crescendo then subside, then build again when you’re not expecting it, like a wonderful surprise. The music was enchanting, there was so much going on, it’s just a feast for the ears. I just felt that the genius of the choreography didn’t match that of the music. Which is not at all to say it wasn’t still interesting, it just didn’t take my breath away.

It may partly be that the choreography just didn’t start out strong enough. It opens with several dancers, all wearing purple unitards bearing various cut-outs — one on the side of the waist, another on the opposite hip, for the men over one breast — all standing in a huddle, simply shifting weight one foot to the other. There’s some partnering, then ensemble work, and eventually a pas de deux between a man and a woman takes place. For the most part this duet doesn’t do much for me save for a few longing stretches and holds. (Go here to see one of my favorite shapes from that duet performed by Marcelo and Paloma Herrera.) From there, the ballet builds up a bit then ends on a stronger note: several women get whisked up and carried off into the wings. It’s a rather lovely end. I just wish it had the same momentum throughout. But as I said, I’ll be seeing it some more this week, so will report back on what further viewings yield.

Until then, I just discovered that Muhly actually has a blog! Go here to read a cute post about his freaking out at the last minute over a note. Go here for a Times article about a couple of things ahead in the coming week for ABT (a revival of a piece by Antony Tudor and Tharp Tharp Tharp!), and go here for the rest of the season schedule and tix. Only one week left

Another happy night for me at American Ballet Theater [a.k.a Danny Tidwell's Old Company -- sorry, I'll only do that for this City Center season, I promise ] But that goes without saying; ABT is always a blast.

Tonight was the debut of a long-favorite dancer of mine, the legendary Jose Carreno, in “Clear,” Stanton Welch’s beautiful male-centered ballet which I’ve been chirping about incessantly here, here, and here. That first “here” links to my post chattering on about the excerpt of this ballet that I saw performed two nights ago with Herman Cornejo in the lead. Well, interestingly, Jose gave it a completely different tone here. Where Herman was more grounded and virile (‘man-god’ I called him), Jose was lighter and more ethereal, like Angel Corella, on whom the ballet was originally created. (Angel has skipped out on performing with ABT this season, I assume because he’s working on getting his own new company underway in Spain. Fun fun!). I know how much Jose admires Angel because, when I once sat in the front orchestra far to the side, I could see into the wings where Jose was watching Angel perform Sinatra Suite — so cute! — so I figure he’s watched Angel a lot and had his movement in mind. Also, abstract though the ballet is, Herman gave it a bit more of a story, with his more angsty interaction with his ballerina, at times seeming haughtily to refuse her, then taking notice of her, succumbing, and ultimately becoming, blissfully, one with her. Jose kind of kept it at the same level, being ‘nice’ to his ballerina throughout, and concentrating more on the watery fluidity of the movement. Jose excels at turns, and he was breathtaking in the ballet’s repeated sequence of continuous spins for the lead man, where he spots in one direction and fouettes himself around several times, then turns a quarter and spots in that direction and fouettes around, then the next quarter, and so on, into a full circle. Herman’s forte is his sky-high jumps. So, Herman’s “Clear” was more virtuostic, dramatic; Jose’s more poetic. Just fun to see how two genius interpretive artists, through their different strengths, make a ballet their own.

And can I just sound like a schoolgirl for a moment and get something out of my system: Jose is so damn gorgeous!!!!! The girls behind me were giggling all through the beginning movement. It was hard not to join them. But Sir Alastair was sitting right in front of me, so I had to behave like an adult…

And all the up & coming young dancers like Jared Matthews were so cute; I was sitting up close tonight so could see faces well. He and the others kind of had these looks like “oh my god, I can’t believe I am sharing the stage with this legend…” Adorable

Just one more thing regarding “Clear” and then I’ll shut up about it: Blaine Hoven!!!!! I made a trip to the ladies room during intermission and a woman in line whom I didn’t know turned around to me. “You know who I am really liking?” she blurted out to me as if we were the best of friends, as she looked down at her Playbill and scanned the cast list. Her finger stopped at Blaine’s name and just as she looked back up at me, I nodded and we simultaneously said “Blaine Hoven.” The man is starting conversations amongst complete strangers in the ladies room line! He needs to develop his artistry more, and perhaps hone his partnering skills, but as a soloist, his technique, his lines, and the ease with which he takes on the modern movement vocabulary: extraordinary.

(image of Julie and Marcelo taken from City Center website; top headshot of Jose from ABT site)

Second on tonight’s program was Lar Lubovitch’s beautiful, but somewhat eery, crepuscular dreamscape, “Meadow,” danced by my favorite partnership, Marcelo Gomes and Julie Kent. This is a ballet that makes me yearn to know more about dance and the way choreographers create meaning. The whole thing unfolds behind a scrim, so from the start it has that feeling about it that it’s not quite real; it takes place in the land of the imaginary. It begins with an ensemble of both women and men, the women wearing nude-colored tops, the men shirtless, and both in flowing, blue skirts (more like skorts for the men) bearing abstract, cloud-like shapes. They flitter around the stage almost like night-time fireflies, or night-nymphs, some throwing their arms up as they run, a couple at a time doing a lift and carry. The music is a melodic Franz Schubert. But intriguingly, at various points a sole instrument — an untuned violin here, a bass there — will strike out discordantly over the mellifluous music. It sounds like an orchestra warming up, one instrument at a time, but why in the midst of already-playing music? Then, the sound completely shuts off while the dancers are still in the midst of a sequence, before slowly scattering off into the wings. This musical disruption, to me, gives the piece a disconcerting, eery feel, like something is awry, but what?

After the ensemble disappears, Marcelo and Julie, standing in the background and in the midst of an impossible-looking overhead lift, slowly come to view under an increasingly bright light shining down from above. They wear skin-tight unitards, Julie’s completely skin-toned like the tops of the night-nymphs, Marcelo’s the same blue with cloud shapes as the skirts / skorts of the ensemble. They complete a series of slow, high, dangerous-looking lifts that have that same, slow-motion dreamy feel. The ensemble returns, another pas de deux happens, and eventually Julie and Marcelo interact with the night creatures, Julie getting lost among them, and lifted away by one of their men-folk, Marcelo reaching out in vain behind her. It’s rather sad. The piece ends with the ensemble gone again and a final pas de deux beginning in the same crazy-high overhead lift as in the first duet. This time, though, Julie is lifted (by stage wires apparently emanating from the ceiling), all the way up to the heavens, Marcelo standing on the ground, reaching up, looking very alone. The audience oooohed and aaaahed over the trick with the wires, but I was left feeling unsettled; it was beautiful but discomfitting. And I still am not sure about the soundscape at the beginning. The dancers didn’t react to it at all; their movement corresponded to the underlying mellifluous Schubert. Maybe it was supposed to evoke the consciousness trying to wake the subconscious before it goes too far and there’s no turning back?…

Last was Balanchine’s pretty, poetic, female-centric “Ballo Della Regina,” which I also just blogged about as being performed opening night. This one starred Michele Wiles and Maxim Beloserkovsky. As I mentioned earlier, I was nearly knocked out of my seat and catapulted up to the chandeliers by David’s opening-night performance. So I was expecting to be a bit let down tonight, which I most definitely was not. Max was great, perfect really, for what I imagine Balanchine to have wanted. David took over the stage, but Max blended in more; he was just a happy-as-can-be man amongst the butterflies. Of course that’s not to say there was anything wrong with David’s performance. Never! David is what makes you want to spend the money and go to the ballet in the first place. You just really don’t want to see anyone else onstage when he is around; you just want him.

Michele was the one who really blew me away tonight. She not only danced the female lead here perfectly, she gave it so much life, so much sparkle, she set the stage on fire tonight. Of course Kristi Boone and others in the ensemble helped. The women’s bright smiles brought a real humor to some of Balanchine’s more original, subversive-at-the-time steps: the high-leg-lifted marching on pointe, sometimes with bent knee resembling a playful tip-toe-ing across the stage, the cute little square-dancish jumps, the jazzy can-can-esque kicks. I noticed the ABT dancers wear wide grins while the NYCBallet dancers (who perform Balanchine much more frequently) are generally more subdued (excepting Ashley Bouder). I don’t know which is officially better, or if one even can be said to be, but to me the lively facial expressions bring out the charming fun of Balanchine.

(image above, of Lord Hallberg and Gillian Murphy, copied from NYTimes website; here is Sir Alastair’s review of opening night)

Anyway, off to bed for me now, I’m tired… Tomorrow night at ABT is the premiere of a new ballet by NYCB’s Benjamin Millipied, and Saturday night another, the new one, a Jorma Elo / Chuck Close / Philip Glass collab. And tonight’s program will repeat later in the week. Go here for info.

Hmmm.. I found this through Blogging SYTYCD. Neil Haskell and Sabra Johnson, finalists from SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE are going to be performing in a Buffalo, New York production of the ballet, The Nutcracker. In lieu of the Spanish Variation, they’ll be dancing the Paso Doble piece they performed on the show.

I think it’s a very interesting move to merge different kinds of dance with ballet in this way. Not a Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, Balanchine blending of classical steps with a more modern vocabulary to create something original, but literally plunking down a wholly different kind of dance into the middle of a ballet. Sounds like it’ll work here though because it is a Spanish variation after all. I just wish the choreography from that routine was more authentically Spanish and not so showy. It’ll definitely broaden the audience base, that’s for sure!

Yay, my favorites returned to City Center last night I feel like I should call them DOC (“Danny’s old company”); can’t figure out if that sounds funny or obnoxious: ABT/ DOC… Hmm, guess it depends…

Okay, well, I gave my sum-up of the evening in the title’s post, above, I have nothing more to say now… No, seriously, I felt like there wasn’t a whole lot to the gala program, it was a pretty short evening of excerpts, but nearly everything I saw was spectacular.

First, I just have to say, I found the perfect place to sit in City Center with its universally acknowledged evil sightlines: the very last row of the rear mezzanine. You sit all the way back there, you fold up your seat til it’s against the seat back, and then you sit on the top of the seatback. You’re not blocking anyone since you’re in the back. Of course I have a permanent indentation on the tops of my back thighs and I could hardly walk afterwards since my legs were numb from cut-off circulation, but I could see!!!

First on was David in Ballo Della Regina, a pretty, pastel, story-less Balanchine with about 10,000 women wearing simple light-colored leotards and flowing diaphanous skirts, and one man in a white blousy top and pastel tights. David was the man. Well, I just said that… I don’t know if I’m “supposed to” feel this way since Balanchine’s ballets are so female-centric, but David made the ballet for me. He was by far the most beautiful, poetic element in the whole thing. His high high HIGH demi-pointe (tip toes), the way he just flies about the stage with those ethereal jumps — forget Balanchine’s gender divisive, man is human, woman is soul universe. David is the consummate combination of both. In her 1996 New Criterion essay, “Figures in the Carpet,” (contained in her book “Landscape With Moving Figures”) Laura Jacobs wrote this, “When you first see this dancer set foot upon the stage, though blond and not overly muscled, you can’t help thinking of Nureyev. He has the deliberate walk and the stage-bound self-containment … Where Nureyev brings a dark force to his dancing, he brings lightness, restraint… He can break your heart with a tendu.” She was talking about Vladimir Malakhov; David was a child then. (I feel that unfortunately, being relatively new to ballet, I’ve all but missed the era of Malakhov.) But I feel like she could easily be talking about David here. He’s not so ferociously feline or animalistic like Nureyev and he’s certainly not dark; he’s sheer radiant perfection. And talk about “breaking your heart” with a simple point of the foot… By the time the ballet was over I had this pit in my stomach and I felt kind of sick, like when you see something truly sublime and someone so perfect. I don’t mean to be corny. Gillian Murphy was sweet and danced beautifully as his partner, as well. David just stole the show to me. I think he’s the greatest dancer in the world right now.

Next, they juxtaposed Balanchine’s beatific feminine universe with some excerpts from “Clear,” Stanton Welch’s glorious male-centric ballet. Herman Cornejo and Xiomara Reyes had the pas de deux leads here. The more I see of this ballet, the more I’m loving it, and I’m realizing that though it is abstract, there is a little story in it. And I really love its spirituality. Herman is really starting to come alive to me. When I first started watching him dance I thought he was technically spectacular, but didn’t show enough emotion and so kind of bored me. Now I feel that he is really putting a lot of thought and emotional strength into everything he does. He was really intense in “Clear,” the way he’d brush off Xiomara’s advances, then hesitantly succumb to her. And the way he raises his chest, the way he jetes and pirouettes, he’s like a demi-god. He’s the antithesis of David, not ethereal at all but totally somehow grounded even when airborne (and he flies high). He’s a virile beauty.

Then there was a very short excerpt duet from Antony Tudor’s “The Leaves are Fading.” It was danced nicely by Michele Wiles and Alexandre Hammoudi, but the pas de deux was so short, it didn’t leave much impact.

(photo above by Roy Round, copied from ABT’s website; all headshots from ABT website).

Then there was a fun, flirty, Latiny pas de deux from the classical Petipa ballet, Don Quixote, danced by the now legendary Jose Manuel Carreno (one of my longtime favorites, and, for SYTYCD fans, Danny Tidwell’s chief idol!) and Paloma Herrera. I love Jose so much and I miss not seeing him as often as I used to; he doesn’t seem to dance all that often anymore. This fun, sexy Latin role is so perfect for him; he owns it like no other.

(photo by Rosalie O’Connor; Angel Corella in the air, also from ABT website)

And last was Jerome Robbins’s 1944 ballet “Fancy Free” about three sailors on shore leave and the comical little troubles they get themselves into trying to pick up women in a bar. This one “starred” (because that’s just the word that most comes to mind when I think of him) Marcelo, along with Herman, and Sascha Radetsky as the sailors, and Julie Kent and Stella Abrera as the unsuspecting pick-up-ees. So fun. I always love this little romp, especially when ABT does it. The guy next to me and I giggled throughout the entire thing. Marcelo is the best dramatic dancer out there, no doubt about it. He just brings the stage to life; he brings the whole theater to life. If anyone wants to learn how to have absolute massive amounts of stage-presence, look no further than the master!

That was it; then the party began (which I am far too poor to attend). Their City Center season is only two short weeks this year; usually it’s three. Two world premieres happen later this week: the Millipied, which I blogged about here, and the Chuck Close / Philip Glass / Jorma Elo collaboration, which I blogged about here. Just too much excitement for one week… Visit CC for tix.

Help. I’ll usually find an intriguing-looking book on a blog or at a bookstore, then order it online at NYPL and have it delivered to my local branch. It often takes a matter of weeks, sometimes even months, to arrive, but somehow this time they all came in at once. I now have two weeks to read all these books, and I’m still only about half-way through the Kavanagh.

Anyway, the book on the bottom left, The Epicure’s Lament, is not an NYPL order, it was actually just given to me by my friend, Dee, when I met her for drinks Saturday night. She was raving on and on about the author, Kate Christensen, whom I hadn’t read. Now, I see that today, one of my new favorite lit bloggers, Maud Newton (whom Terry Teachout led me to) has posted a short interview with the author. Funny, Dee actually told me she likes Maud too (though my friend never reads my blog! It’s okay, she’s not a dancie… )

The book in the top middle is a collection of Laura Jacobs’s dance writings from The New Criterion. I think it’s such a lovely title, “Landscape With Moving Figures,” because that’s one really nice way of looking at dance: a painting, but one with moving instead of still figures. I was led to the book after a dance writer friend pointed out to me, regarding a recent ranting post of mine, that a NYTimes review just can’t be compared to the longer, in-depth articles the New Criterion allows. So, I decided to check out those articles. Will post more as I read along, but so far am really enjoying it. Her prose is very poetic and it really immerses you in the world of dance; she calls the arabesques of the great dancers “more than a pose … a phenomenon…”

Last night I went to Dance Times Square’s biannual pro / am showcase, at the Danny Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. It was sadly Pasha and Anya-less, although maybe I shouldn’t be too sad: if Pasha was still there, I’d be spending loads more money that I don’t have on exorbitant privates. Happily, though, there were some new teachers, lots of new students (and a lot more men, which is great to see since ballroom classes are usually quite women-heavy), and some really cute routines Tony and Melanie designed that perfectly showcased the students’ varying levels of ability. In the pro section, Jose DeCamps and Joanna Zacharewicz, the new national Rhythm champs, performed a couple of fast fun Latin routines, likely in Pasha & Anya’s stead. I’m sad that Andrei Gavriline, former U.S. Latin champ, is no longer teaching at the studio, because it was always hugely exciting to see him and his partner, Elena Kruychkova, perform. There were a lot more people in the audience than before, likely because of Tony and Melanie’s now regular stints on So You Think You Can Dance (people behind us were definitely new to the showcase as they kept saying things like, “yep, yep, that’s her, that’s the one that danced with Pasha on the show!”), so it seems to me this is a great opportunity for all the ballroom pros to be seen by a larger audience than just the regular dancesport fanatics (like me). I know they’ve been on Dancing With the Stars before, but that show just doesn’t highlight the professional dancers so much. Now they’re having Jennifer Lopez on tomorrow night. She’s not a dancer. I knew continuing the streak of Savion Glover-caliber results-show performers throughout the season was too much to expect.

Speaking of that show: I found it very frightening when Marie Osmond fainted. Ridiculously, I was sitting there on the edge of my couch all throughout the commercials waiting and waiting to see what happened. Right before the show returned, I realized I was watching a tape and could have hit fast-forward. I’m glad it was nothing. I was very annoyed how the judges were harping so on Helio. I thought his rhumba was so cute, so sexy in its own charming way. Why can’t a smile be sexy? And why can’t rhumba be romantic or beautiful or soft and sweetly lyrical instead of some kind of lust-filled mating dance where everyone has to make goofy sex faces at each other? It’s just not natural for some people; let them be themselves. And that car, that car, THAT CAR I still worry about him getting hurt, but when he pulled up in that thing to scoop Juliana Hough off to the beach…ooh la la! Also, Mark Ballas is starting to annoy me. He’s such a show-off, doing all those cork-screw jumps and high kicks and snake dive things all over the floor while his partner dances by herself. A ballroom man is supposed to be the frame, not the picture, or the picture and the frame. And it’s just my pet peeve when pro men out-dance their female students like that. I was so glad when he went to do some crazy trick and the camera homed in on Sabrina. Thank you, camera man.

Okay, that’s all for now. Sorry this post is so all over the place.

In terms of dance ability, absolutely nothing, as these pictures so clearly show. So why isn’t the former as famous as the latter? I honestly don’t know.

I am very happy to announce that I will be writing some articles on ballroom dance for Exploredance.com, an innovative online magazine covering all different kinds of dance, including my beloved ballroom and ballet. Here is my first article, which is on the U.S. National Dancesport Championships that I attended last month. I’ve also put a link on the bottom right-hand side of my blog, which will take you to all of my pieces published on that site. Yay

Yep, rollicking great fun in Brooklyn the other night! On Thursday night I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s modern dance troupe, Compania Nacional de Danza, which I have been wanting to see ever since I saw a brief piece he’d choreographed for ABT a couple years ago. On the program were three pieces: “Por Vos Muero,” a beautiful work celebrating the variety of social dance in 15th and 16th Century Spain, set to lovely Baroque music and spoken word by pop musician Miguel Bose (whom I used to have a big crush on when I was first introduced to him in Spanish class); “Castrati,” an absolutely breathtaking all-male piece about the centuries-old Italian practice of castrating male opera singers so they could perform soprano roles, set to Vivaldi; and “White Darkness,” a dance that illustrated the effect of drug use through movement, at times spasmodic and violent, at times euphoric.

All three works were filled with beautiful movement that alternated between dark and heavy and light and lyrical to show different moods or states of being. The pieces were all gorgeously danced and Duato has a very strong, athletic, good-looking company. My favorite piece, though, was the second, “Castrati.” It began with one group of men all wearing these very interesting, almost foreboding, dark brown, monk-looking robes, which opened to reveal a muscular chest, then were buttoned tightly at the waist, and then flared into a skirt which was open in the front to reveal nude-colored footless tights. These men also wore these heavy black wrist-bands which added to the virility to the costume. This ensemble produced lots of high, heavily-landed jumps, hard kicks, fists pounding in the air, and crotch-grabbing, almost in Eminem fashion. So, it was very virtuostic, puissant, very manly. Yet, the way the skirts flared seemed to contrast sharply with all this “manliness”; it added a lyrical, more feminine quality. I guess you could read this group as either the ‘male’ men of the opera (the baritones and tenors), or as the pre-castrated version of the sopranos, or perhaps the sopranos’ lost masculine selves.

Then that group of men exited and a man wearing only skin-toned shorts danced a sad, lonely, frightened-looking solo, as he crouched on the floor in a fetal ball, shuddering. I was really scared for him.

His solo was followed by two men wearing powdery face makeup, white corsets and tights — so, the castrati, or the sopranos. This duet was obviously meant to evoke effeminacy, their dancing very feathery light and tightly controlled, their movements very small and slight, rather dainty, I guess, but in a beautiful, not silly, way. It was both sublime and immensely fake, like modern men in drag, as their built chest muscles popped out over the upper ties of the corsets. They looked sad, but was that because their painted-on faces were meant to be so, or because of what they had endured?

The three groups alternated, at times the baritone / ‘masculine’ men danced alongside the feminine men, sometimes partnering them, and in the end both groups hovered over the poor sole man wearing only the nude shorts, who ended up devoured and then, ultimately, bloodied by the group (fake blood of course). When the three groups danced together, the movement all became fluid and lyrical to me — making it both beautiful and violent and frightening. It seemed at times the ‘manly’ men would take on some of the more lyrical charms of the sopranos, symbolizing the fluid nature of masculinity, of gender, perhaps. Basically, what I loved about this piece was that it both made me think about the nature of masculinity and the issue of castration — it produced beauty but at what cost? — and it stimulated my visual and aural senses with the beauty of the movement and music. So, it engaged me both intellectually and sensually, which, to me, is what the best art does.

Anyway, according to the rather detailed program notes, the practice of castrating men to perform the soprano roles was borne of the Church’s forbidding women to speak in church, or in a theater. Opera, originating from church choir, was thus was forbidden from using women singers. “Castration,” the program says, “produced extraordinary vocal skills and a rather peculiar color to the voices, which meant castrati were in great demand and highly paid.” The program notes also give a brief history of castration in general, asserting that Egyptians used it as punishment, Arabs for religious reasons, and Turks to create a group of men with no sexual urgings to guard their harems. The program didn’t need to go into all of this detail, but it’s interesting that it did.

After the second show of every run, BAM holds an audience Q & A with the choreographer. There were a few interesting moments at this BAM dialog. One man approached the audience mike, and in a very agitated tone, asked Duato who was responsible for making the audience understand the meaning of the work. Duato looked confused and asked him to repeat his question. The man again asked whether it was the dancers who were supposed to impart meaning, the choreographer, or how the audiences were supposed to understand what was going on. Who decided the meaning? He seemed very frustrated; he sounded like I felt after the Wheeldon! Duato thought about it a bit, then told us how he worked: he went into the studio with music and a thematic idea; he did not go into the studio with any movement in mind, the dancers were responsible for that, and he worked out the movement together with them, to the music, after telling them his themes and ideas. So, everyone was responsible. He also likened dance to poetry, said his dances had no narrative, but he tried to give his audiences images to reflect and express his ideas, and if the viewer got something from it, even if it wasn’t what he had in mind, then he is happy with that. He gave an anecdote: a woman once told him she hadn’t read the program notes and thought the drug piece was about the passage of time, the salt thrown down from above onto the dances not a powder drug, but the sands of an hourglass. She was really shocked to discover it was intended to be about drugs. But Duato was happy because she loved the exploration of the passage of time that she saw. He was happy that his work spoke to her in that way, in a way that had meaning to her.

A little later, two young women, very Barnard-looking (but possibly young graduate students), approached the microphone. One asked, reading from her notebook, whether he ever considered setting the “Castrati” theme on women, and if so, how would that look. Murmurs sounded throughout the (rather packed, for a discussion) theater. Duato looked thoroughly confused. “No, but this is about the men, can’t be women,” he said frowning.

“No, I mean, in the context of female castration in general..” she began to clarify… But he didn’t seem to hear. “To have women jumping around aggressively like that,” he continued, “no, women can’t do those kinds of things.” At this, “Ooooohs” reverberated through the auditorium. Elizabeth Streb, where are you when we need you!?

“No, she means female genital mutilation” someone, a male voice, said.

“But… wait, why not?” Barnard woman said, now looking rather dejected at his answer to her misunderstood question.

“No, no,” Duato said now realizing, with her expression and all the “ooooooohs,” he’d said something very wrong but not really knowing what. “I mean, those jumping, it doesn’t look right on women. Too much. Women are beautiful.” More, louder “oooooooooooooohs!” “No,” he continued now getting flustered. “Women … I LOVE women,” he said spreading his arms out, He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands style. “Women, they are beautiful, but they are delicate,” he said, open-mouthed and flailing about. Many many more ooooooooohs. Duato looked flummoxed.

“But but but … that’s not … right…” Barnard started.

“No, she doesn’t even mean that,” another male voice called out. “She means female genital mutilation,” someone else said. Pandemonium was starting to happen, papers shuffled, people sat up, whispered to each other. “Ask your question again,” another male voice (all were male voices!) said. “Go back to you question, ask it again,” said another.

Barnard, now visibly upset from Duato’s women can’t do the same things as men faux pas said, “Yeah, I meant female castration, how would you show that?”

Duato looked even more befuddled. “Female… what? No, no, it can’t be,” he nervously laughed. “I mean, how can it be? These are men this happened to, the castrati, can’t be women?”

“No, female genital mutilation, female genital mutilation,” audience members started shouting. Poor Mr. Duato. First it was a sea of “ooooooooohs,” now a chorus of people chanting “female genital mutilation” at him. He looked horrified. Looking back it was rather funny.

Eventually, the moderator had to close the discussion and send us all home because it was so late, but as people began to gather their things and put on their jackets, several men approached the young women. “You just didn’t ask your question properly,” one said to her. “Yeah, he didn’t understand what you were trying to ask,” another agreed. I wanted to stay around and listen to their conversation but ushers were now walking up and down the rows asking people to leave and I had a long commute home. If I would have thought, I would have given her my card and asked her to email me or comment on my blog. Sometimes I just don’t think!

Anyway, I found the whole experience interesting, from the question itself, to some of Duato’s answers, to his misunderstanding of her, to all of the men who were trying to help her get her question across, obviously taking great interest in it. I thought it was a rather odd question to ask an artist, though I think I understand why she asked it. I think because the program notes went into such detail about the history of castration, she probably thought he was speaking to the entire history of the practice and not just the sopranos. Duato clearly didn’t seem to understand what she was saying, though I wasn’t sure whether he thought she was asking how would women look dancing exactly as the men had danced including the masculinity of the baritones, whether he didn’t understand that she was asking him to think of castration in an entirely different context, or whether he really didn’t even know what female genital mutilation was. It could have even been a language barrier issue with his Spanish, who knows. But I found her question interesting in that, to her, dance spoke at least in part on socio-cultural terms. On my way home I thought, well, what was she asking, and how could he have answered? If female genital mutilation in the places where it is still practiced stems from the belief that women are not entitled to their sexuality, which must be quelled in order to avoid a supposedly chaotic society, and the practice is so deadly dangerous, then where is the beauty, which was a huge element of Duato’s dance. The contrast of the violence with the beauty was part of what made the piece work for me. But then I realized that these sopranos were pre-pubescent boys when they were castrated and their fate was someone else’s decision. Certainly from the perspective of the young boy, what happened to him was not only through his own volition, but rather violent as well. So, where was the beauty in that? Maybe those corseted sopranos were only sad and it was my superimposed notion of beauty that made me think of them as such, that they weren’t like men in drag at all and I shouldn’t be thinking of the work in terms of its challenging gender assumptions.

Anyway, in the end, the whole evening from performance to discussion made me aware of what I look for in dance, and taught me that others share some of the same issues I do — others have a hard time deciphering meaning in abstract forms and don’t understand how the process many choreographers use aids in that; and others look for social relevance in art and don’t always focus on the visuals and the beauty of the movement and music. It also taught me that very good art provokes discussion, makes people more curious, and is ultimtely a dialog, a give and take, between the creator and the receiver. I hope Duato thinks about that question she asked even if just for the same reasons I did and not to construct another dance out of it.

And as for those notions of what female dancers are and aren’t capable of or what will or will not look good on them, I think Mr. Duato needs to be taught a thing or two!

So, the first round of Morphoses reviews are flowing in. Thank you Tobi Tobias for saying what I was trying so very hard to say way too late at night (there are plusses and minuses to writing immediately after a performance: on one hand the “afterimages” in Arlene Croce speak are the most vivid and fresh that they’ll ever be, but on the other sometimes your brain needs to chew things over a bit). Particularly resonant with me was Tobias’s paragraph about Wheeldon not engaging the emotions of his audience, or even perhaps himself. And thank you, Ms. Tobias for giving me one brief glimpse into the value of “Slingerland.”

One thing Tobias mentions that struck me: she says that she doesn’t know if Wheeldon’s desire to give the dancers too much free reign in the dances’ creations is a good thing. I’ve now heard several choreographers (Jorma Elo, Wheeldon, and most recently Nacho Duato — promise I’ll get to that review today!) say that the way they work is that they have some vague notion of what they want when they go into the studio, they choose the music, they have a general idea in mind, then they let the dancers go and figure it all out, discover the movement and how best to convey that idea. Helen Pickett even said at a Works & Process event that she lets her dancers improvise right on stage, during the actual performance. So what is the choreographer then? The music selector, the originator of the basic idea? I’ve heard theater and film people laugh when someone asks if they’d thought of a co-director. No way, they all say, there’s got to be one person and one person alone behind the helm of a project or everything just gets all confused and there’s no “voice” to the work and meaning is lost. I wonder if that’s partly what’s happening to me, I can’t always make sense of things in dance because there are too many interpretations going on at once on that stage and there’s no single voice or authority (ie: that of an older person with life experience and well-developed artistry) in control?

Anyway, I so would have liked to have gone to the Morphoses open rehearsal yesterday, but unfortunately couldn’t take off work. Kristin went and wrote a bit about it — apparently it was a rehearsal of Mesmerics, one of the pieces on Program 2, wherein Wheeldon corrected and instructed dancers on the movement, but it doesn’t seem that he talked about his process. There was an audience give and take but Kristin didn’t write anything about. I always like to hear what audiences have to say about something, what others get and don’t get and what they want to understand and know from an artist. Oh well, maybe next time I can go. Damn work interfering with my blogging life!! Also, maybe Works & Process can institute a little audience Q & A into their programs in the future?

Here’s Sir Alastair’s review. He echoes others, saying that the most notable thing about the company thus far was the fame of the dancers (true), but also adds that in his opinion, Wheeldon doesn’t take seriously enough his female dancers, makes them too passive. It’s an interesting take and something I hadn’t thought of.

Joel Lobenthal in The Sun gives a very fair, balanced review saying Wheeldon may not be the “great white hope” of ballet but is nevertheless a young, very talented choreographer “still in the process of finding himself.”

Apollinaire’s Newsday review is also fair and balanced (as always with her), and I love this paragraph in particular: “The sculptural twining of limbs yields imagistic sparks, but they don’t light a fire this time. Wheeldon seems to have gotten carried away by his own dexterous invention.” So, my “meaningless weird abstract shape after meaningless weird abstract shape” gibberish expressed much more eloquently She also gives me more to understand regarding Forsythe.

By the way, speaking of my phrasing, James Wolcott linked to my write-up (so wonderfully nice of him!!), calling it “a trembling ordeal of terror worthy of the Simpsons’ Halloween special” as I found myself “buried under a paper mache rock slide of ‘meaningless weird abstract shapes,’ and live[d] to tell the tale.” Hehehehe, I couldn’t stop laughing. I guess it did sound like a nutty Simpsons-esque Halloween cartoon! Good, imaginative writers can make things sound so nice… (Off the topic of Wheeldon but on the topic of Wolcott, he has an entertaining, socio-cultural history of the Twist in the November Vanity Fair.)

And here is Philip, who said what I thought he would, focusing on all of the great dancers involved in the program (although he is also a big opera lover and talked about the beauty of the music a bit too).

Here’s a Washington Times review.

Here’s what Ballet Talk balletomanes had to say.

And, in case I left something out, here is a fuller list of reviews, including those from London, where Morphoses premiered in September.

I saw Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s Compania Nacional de Danza last night at BAM and had an absolute blast — both during the performance and afterward at BAMs audience dialog with the choreographer, which was nearly as well attended as the dance performance — something I don’t think I’ve EVER seen before. Anyway, I have lots and lots and lots to say about both the dances (in particular about the second piece performed, “Castrati,” a gorgeous work about Italian male sopranos) and the talk (the latter not so much for what the choreographer said but for the audience’s scintillating questions and how he responded to them … or not!) It was a thrilling evening, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get the post up and I don’t get a lot of readers on late Friday afternoons, so I’ll just say now that I highly encourage everyone in NY to go out to BAM and see this show: it’s only on tonight and tomorrow. Go here for info.

A couple of other things: experimental choreographer Clare Byrne sent me a couple of videos she put on YouTube in response to chief NYTimes dance critic Alastair Macaulay’s writings (and some of his remarks recently at Barnard), which I think are quite funny, especially the second one (which can apply to some other people I know as well ). I once saw a piece at PS122 about the choreographer’s excitement over a cool pair of shoes he saw Gia Kourlas wearing, which was pretty funny. Interesting when critics become the subjects of the art they critique…

And here is something else I found really interesting. JP Morgan is apparently running a writing contest for students. The subject is which non-profit organization do you think is most deserving of funding, and the winner gets a $25,000 grant given to their subject organization. Chris Elam of Misnomer Dance Theater is encouraging students to enter the contest in support of dance.

Finally, Doug Fox is going to be giving a talk downtown next Wednesday on the internet and the future of dance. He found classical music writer (and blogger) Alex Ross’s article in the New Yorker about the internet’s promotion of classical dance thought-provoking. I’d skimmed that article but started to get discouraged because many of the things he highlighted seemed largely inapplicable to dance because of the way music better records than dance (shades of Paul Parish here). Anyway, read Ross’s article and Doug’s post on it yourself and if you have any thoughts write to Doug and he’ll hopefully address it all next week.

And (NYers) don’t forget to go to BAM this weekend (and read my enormous upcoming write-up on castration and female genital mutilation and gender and masculinity and femininity and beauty and drag and all the other deliciously sexy thoughts Duato’s work and discussion of it provoked!) Dance can really be so much fun

How cool is this?! Kristin Sloan of the Winger recently made a commercial for Apple’s iphone, promoting the device, which she now uses for mobile blogging for the website. It’s like cross-advertising: she’s promotes Apple and they in turn promote the Winger (and, by extension, dance!) Everyone wins. Very cool. According to the comments, people have already seen the commercial; I haven’t because I hardly ever watch TV, save for my two favorite shows. Hopefully they will air it at those times, because, hello, it would make sense! There are four real-life, non-actors promoting the phone on the commercials; another is the “My First Time” guy, who has started this new theater networking site. Kristin’s new site, offering the same for the dance community, cleverly titled “The Intermission,” is here.

And anyone who has been reading my blog for the past couple of weeks knows it pains me to say that. But unfortunately tonight was one of the most mind-numbing, boring nights I’ve ever had at the ballet. And I was looking so forward to it! Maybe too much…

First of all, when I referred earlier to Christopher Wheeldon as a genius, I meant the Christopher Wheeldon who’s choreographed some of my favorite ballets for NYCB, like “Scenes de Ballet” his first, “An American in Paris,” “Carousel,” “Klavier,” “Evenfall.” What happened to him? Not that I like everything syrupy sweet — definitely not — but those ballets had meaning you could latch onto, a storyline even if slight, SOMETHING. Tonight was like an extended Rorschach test, and even those can be more fun assuming you’re with someone who’s oversexed and keeps seeing genitalia in everything. Tonight was completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape. I’m not stupid, can you please engage my mind, Mr. Wheeldon? One abstract piece fine, but a whole night of them is insulting; I have better things to do. I probably shouldn’t say it that way: I mean that I just get tired of visuals all the time; can a dance-maker alternate the visual with the intellectual? I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting out of all this abstraction and it gets so frustrating when that’s all there is.

Second, regarding my earlier pronouncement of Wheeldon a genius: I think either I need to stop going to the Guggenheim Works & Process things or else I need ONLY to go to those, because everything looks so different on that small stage and in that intimate setting. All of these ballets tonight were not only abstract but when they weren’t pas de deux they utilized very few dancers, and I think either these dancers didn’t know how to dramatize or project or emote, or else the stage was just too vast and the audience too far away to really see any subtlety, to make any sense of anything. Either Wheeldon needs to make larger-scale works for a larger stage or keep these smaller scale ones and put them in a more intimate setting.

Okay, first on the program was “There Where She Loved,” a piece which I’d just raved about after seeing it at the Guggenheim. Unfortunately, the only part of it that was really compelling was the part that they staged at Works & Process. The whole is about 20 times longer and it’s so long and drawn out, it really loses its steam; it’s just completely boring. And by the time we get to the good part which I’d seen earlier (and was waiting and waiting and waiting for), I was so on the verge of falling asleep I almost missed it. To be sure, there was one earlier sweet little pas de deux evoking young love danced by Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia whose charm is likely due to its prettiness (lots of “awwwwws” in the audience), but it only lasted a couple of minutes.

Second was “Tryst Pas De Deux” which was danced by just-retired Royal Ballet legend Darcey Bussell, and Jonathan Cope. All I could see in this ballet was: two people come out onstage, regard each other, walk toward each other with purpose (making me momentarily intrigued), but then simply begin doing lifts, making a series of abstract shapes with their connected bodies. Then it was over.

Then came William Forsythe’s “Slingerland.” From what I’ve seen of his work, Forsythe is a choreographer who really respects the intellect of his audiences; he’s a very smart man and he really gives you something to chew over with his dances. And everytime I’ve seen anyone other than his own company perform his work: it’s a no-go. I wish if others were going to put on something of his, they’d work directly with him, let him coach the dancers. He has something very specific in mind and if the dancers or the person who staged the piece isn’t in on it, the audience certainly isn’t going to be. The way this came out here, it was now Wendy Whelan and Edwaard Liang who walked out onstage, regarded each other, then proceeded to make weird meaningless abstract shape after weird meaningless abstract shape with their bodies.

Next was “Prokofiev Pas De Deux.” What can I say: more abstract shape after abstract shape, although these shapes were more traditionally balletic than awkward, and the female lead was danced by Tina Pereira, who is one of the few exceptions to what I said above in terms of dancers not really knowing how to emote, dramatize or project. Other exceptions to that are: Sterling Hyltin, Gonzalo Garcia, Ashley Bouder (for sure!), Michael Nunn, and sometimes Wendy Whelan and Maria Kowroski depending on the piece. Unfortunately, for anyone who wasn’t there tonight, you’re not going to get to see the affecting Ms. Pereira because she’s being replaced by Alina Cojocaru for the remainder of this program.

Next was “Dance of the Hours.” Okay, I’ve never seen this one, but, according to the Playbill, it is taken from La Gioconda, Act III from 1876. The audience found this funny, and I easily got the idea that it was a riff, a joke on something, but I didn’t know what. Because of the way the magnetic Ashley Bouder dramatized it, I laughed along with everyone else, but the problem I feel is that if Wheeldon wants to draw new audiences to ballet through his work, he has to make sure everyone gets the joke. The humorous riff is a lot funnier if you have a sense of what is being “riffed” of course. And the program doesn’t tell us.

Then last was “Fools’ Paradise,” another Rorschach test, this one involving several dancers instead of just two. At one point Maria Kowroski came alive, she had a series of abstract, awkward shapes, but she had a real intention to them, her body was making a shape for a reason, and believe me the entire audience in my section leaned forward almost simultaneously. Dancers: please understand, we can tell when you think, when you’re not just doing a series of steps by rote. Unfortunately, within 15 seconds she’d disappeared into the wings.

In the New York magazine article, which I linked to in my last post, the writer frames the piece by showing Wheeldon’s venture from the perspective of a very young girl who happens in on a rehearsal, presumably the kind of new viewer Wheeldon wants to attract. The little girl likes sports, not ballet, which she knows nothing about. Wheeldon invites her in, lets her watch. At the end of the first performance, he asks her if she likes ballet now. She says no. He asks her if she likes ballet dancers, she smiles and nods yes. He says, “well then you like ballet.” But is that true? I think that’s a big part of what goes on in the ballet world right now. People are connecting to their favorite dancers. Do NYCB fans really love Balanchine and all that his ballets stand for, or are they connecting with their favorite dancers? Would I like “Clear” and “In the Upper Room” and “Sinatra Suite” as much if they weren’t danced by Marcelo Gomes and David Hallberg and all of the ABT faces and bodies and personalities that I’ve come to know and love over the past few years? I don’t really know; I’ve never seen those ballets performed by anyone else. Maybe part of the reason I wasn’t so enthralled with tonight’s program is that Wheeldon has used many dancers with whom I’m not familiar; I’m positive Philip is going to have a completely different take when he sees the program tomorrow night, and I’ll bet you he focuses mainly on his favorite dancers and not on Wheeldon’s work. Is this a good thing though? I want to get something from the choreography; I want the choreography to speak to me, the same way Forsythe’s choreography does, not just the dancer. Otherwise, I’ll only ever want to see ABT. And, how will new fans be made, who don’t already love these dancers, who don’t already have favorites? In my opinion, there’s far too much, almost absurdist, abstraction in contemporary ballet, that speaks to no one. On Friday afternoon, at his open rehearsal, Wheeldon really should spend a good deal of his time explaining to young newcomers exactly how they are supposed to read these ballets, exactly what they are supposed to get out of them. Because I’m almost positive that, with this program, no new fans will be made.

Anyway, I feel badly disliking my evening as much as I did, since I had such high hopes. As I said at the beginning of this post, maybe I had been looking too forward to this, with all the hype. So, the good thing is, if you’re reading this and haven’t yet seen Morphoses and are going to, now you’ll have this nasty review in your mind and can think how off the mark that crazy blogger was, how it’s not at all as bad as she said it was, she was just nuts. So there, I just made your enjoyment of it that much better

Last night marked the start of the new season of Writers Room member readings downstairs at the Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village. Turnout was amazing — the best I’ve ever seen! Hey man, it had better be the same for my reading, in January… Last time I read was in late June, when everyone had apparently already taken off for the summer… This was an interesting audience: I’d say about two-thirds were men, yet three of the four readers were women. That’s the way it should be of course: a bunch of men listening to women

It seriously made me very happy to see so many people supporting the written word. Readings are every third Tuesday of the month; cover charge is $7 and includes a glass of wine. What better way to spend a Tuesday evening than drinking wine and hanging out with a bunch of writers, right!

Got home just in time to see Dancing With the Stars. Aw, I was sad boxer guy got eliminated; he was one of the ones whose attempts at the Paso tour jete I was so enjoying Monday night. And I’ll definitely miss my favorite, Karina, although it seem like the pros are returning often to perform on the elimination shows. It was kind of nice that when Gloria Estefan didn’t show, they bumped the backup band to center stage for once. They were pretty good. As for Wade Robson: I’m sorry, I just don’t get him. I’d say his dance was like a circus, but, well… I think he is a great mover himself though. My favorite part was at the beginning when he danced. He kind of reminded me of Walter Dundervill. To be honest, I think I’d like to see more of him, less of his choreography, though it seems everyone else loves the latter, so I must just be weird.

Anyway, a couple of other miscellaneous things: here’s a good article on Christopher Wheeldon in New York magazine; the same issue also has an interesting cover story on huge media blog Gawker and what the writers’ increasing snarkiness says about the have and have-nots in today’s media hierarchy. (Should there be a Gawker for dance? Perhaps that’s part of our friend CC’s purpose?) And here is a website I just found devoted to Pacific Northwest Ballet company. It’s mostly website as opposed to blog: you can write in and ask your favorite dancers questions, and there’s a little portrait of one dancer at a time (current one is of Carla Korbes), and some photos, but it would be very cool if they could host several of their dancers’ blogs as well. And I can’t seem to find anything on my former favorite NYCB man, Seth Orza yet. Hmmm….

I had such a great dance-watching night last night! First I went to yet another of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process events, this time to hear choreographer / artistic director Christopher Wheeldon talk about his new company, Morphoses, which, I know, I just can’t shut up about and am likely driving everyone crazy with! (But at least I’m not the only one! Also, Philip has an interview up with Morphoses choreographer Edwaard Liang, who was supposed to dance last night but unfortunately did not.)

I just think Wheeldon is such a genius, at least in terms of his choreography. His head may be a bit in the clouds as an artistic director regarding what the company may be capable of in terms of all the visual artists / musicians, etc. etc. ETC. he wants to collaborate with (especially in light of last week’s huge news about corporate giant Altria’s pulling the plug on crucially-needed dance funding in NYC), and executive director Lourdes Lopez told a funny story about his extremely last-minute, day-of-performance, without-a-care-in-the-world wish that she locate a violinist in rural Colorado to play live. But one thing is for sure: as a creator of dances he is brilliant; he is a contemporary Kenneth MacMillan, I do believe.

So, we saw a solo excerpt from “Elsinore,” an abstract, mesmerizing feast for the eyes (which I usually don’t say about either abstract ballets OR solos) danced by Russian ballerina Anastasia Yatsenko. And that was preceded by this absolutely beautiful bittersweet pas de deux called “There Where She Loved,” which tells the story of a woman trying in vain to make herself believe she doesn’t love her cheating husband, and which contained some of the most inventive, gorgeous partnering I think I’ve ever seen. It was danced by NYCB ballerina Maria Kowroski and Ballet Boyz danseur Michael Nunn. It seriously nearly made me cry, a sentiment expressed as well by a woman I met afterward waiting in line for the bus.

They also showed a short documentary-style film about the troupe’s world premiere in Vail, Colorado this summer which was really cute. An excited Tyler Angle exclaimed that you don’t even realize how hard you’re working because of all the excitement of being part of something fun and new. Wendy Whelan sweetly remarked that it was clear Wheeldon had taken pains to assemble a group of dancers who got along so well together, which was a part of the joy and success of working with him. There was no studio in Vail so they brought barres out onstage and took class there. (I always love watching professional dancers take class; I once watched an instructional tape of Fernando Bujones doing the same and it was so unbelievably thrilling just watching a master execute beyond perfection everything you try so hard to do.) Illustrating his charmingly goofy sense of humor, Wheeldon, raising a cup of coffee to the camera man, said, “Okay, I’m ready to run a company now, I’ve had my morning coffee.”

Wheeldon told us his artistic vision and reasons for starting the new company were twofold: to take ballet in new directions by creating fresh programming that would both draw new audiences and re-invigorate current ones; and to give dancers as fulfilling a career possible by allowing them to broaden their training in new dance styles and to share in the creative process by collaborating on the pieces. He believes the old way of running a company top down doesn’t work anymore: dancers are intelligent, they juggle college courses now with their full-time dancing, they don’t need to be lorded over and their minds can and should be used in the artistic process. You can always tell when a dancer had a part in creating a role, he said.

Wheeldon is such a little cutie — a genuinely wonderful, warm, happy guy with a very cheery outlook. I can’t wait to see their first full program, on tomorrow night!

Then, I came home and watched Dancing With the Stars. I was very happy to see Jonathan Roberts convince his celebrity student Marie Osmond to take a ballet class in order to get down some dance fundamentals, such as finding her center. “I don’t know what a core is!” she screamed, like a typical beginning adult. How much can I relate to that, and to her complete inability to do those grand jetes!!! Too funny I loved to see her trying though, and realizing how very hard it is.

But more: ahhh, how much do I love watching all those amateur men try the tour jetes in Paso!!!! This is by far my favorite Paso Doble step for the men, of course being the bravura-loving balletomane that I am It’s really the one ballet step that is used in a Latin dance and it’s so gorgeous of course when executed properly, balletically, as Slavik Kryklyyvy, my favorite, does! Looks very Don Quixote. I’d always get very annoyed at competitions when there wasn’t at least one big huge tour jete in each Paso routine. But those amateur men last night! They were so cute trying to get it right! The boxer guy dancing with Karina Smirnoff jumped quite high, but kicked his feet together then lifted both legs in back instead of only one; I thought he was going to come down right on his knees. Fortunately he fixed it mid air and did what looked like a spiffy Jive bent-knee jump instead, but with a bull-fighter Paso attitude. But it was cute! And another guy just jumped forward with the one foot and turned around in the air and came down on the other, but without gaining any height or even trying to bring his legs together, so looked very squat! Still, definitely better than I can do and I found it all a thrilling blast to watch. I think Karina and the other pros should send their students to Vladimir (I don’t know how to link to that specific step in ABT’s dictionary, but go here, scroll down to jete entrelace and watch Vladimir Malakhov execute the perfect balletic tour jete). Actually wouldn’t it be awesome to have a ballet dancer come on the show and teach!!!

And how cute is that Helio! I love him so much I am already worrying myself sick over him getting injured in a car accident. Be careful, Helio! Judge Carrie Ann said, “Watching you makes me happy to be alive, Helio.” Exactly. That’s precisely the way I feel about Marcelo. It’s a Brazilian male dancer thing, quite obviously. Brazilian male dancers make you happy to be alive

Speaking of which… it’s just one week now!!!

When I was in the bookstore earlier I finally had the chance to check out this newish magazine, co-founded by Danny Tidwell and journalist David Benaym, devoted to pop culture, fashion and of course dance. I remember they had a stack of an earlier issue in the lobby at Bad Boys of Dance at Jacob’s Pillow, and I remember flipping through and seeing some ads featuring Mia Michaels, but at that point I wasn’t really sure what it was.

It’s slim (as is to be expected with any new publication), but has some good articles. There are, amongst other things, an interview with choreographer Lar Lubovitch (one of my favorites) by dancer Rasta Thomas (also one of my favorites!), an article on up-and-coming choreographer Aszure Barton, an interview with Grey’s Anatomy song writer Ingrid Michaelson, a photo essay on Cuba that’s part glossy travel essay and part photo-journalism, and a write-up of The Winger featuring interviews with five of its contributors: founder Kristin Sloan, ballet and modern dance stars David Hallberg and Miki Orihara respectively, and, happily, South African grad student and dance artist Maia Jordaan, and dance and technology expert and B-boy Tony Schultz. Being theory-based, the Winger posts of the latter two are a bit more esoteric than the others’, and thus harder to understand (though definitely worth trying!), and I’m really happy the magazine decided to include interviews with them instead of only the most “popular” contributors. In particular, I just love Maia — she’s so smartly charming: “My work is inspired by the sense of a body in motion emoting a connection with the audience. Even stillness contains movement … In a society where the head is often cut off from the body, it is essential to bring head, heart and body together … My work is open-ended, asking the audience to fill the empty spaces with their own appreciation and understanding…” There’s also a little description of one of her own dance pieces, entitled “Still Waters” a site-specific work in which Jordaan, wearing pink underwear, half submerges herself in the dangerously murky waters of the Kaolin Quarry not knowing what may be found underneath. I don’t remember ever seeing this posted on the actual website and I wish she’d post more often her own work and South African performances she attends. She and Tony have thus far concentrated on leading the book discussion group, which so far has focused on the very theory-oriented work of dance philosopher Andre Lepecki, which is, I think very difficult for non-grad students of dance to comprehend.

In his “letter from the editor” at the front of the magazine, Benaym says he’s recently travelled around the country speaking with today’s teens, asking them that age-old question, what do you want to be when you grow up? Benaym laments the responses of the Facebook / MySpace generation (which Thomas Friedman calls Gen. Q.) as centering more around being “famous” than real achievement. “What happened to wanting to be an actor, or an astronaut, or a fireman?” he asks. “Yesterday’s kids dreamed of becoming heroes. Today they just want to be famous.” The magazine, by bringing pop culture together with artistry, “yearn[s] for a movement where talent and dedication take precedence over a thirst for stardom.” Hopefully they’ll continue to showcase and bring public attention to those who, like Jordaan and Schultz, have a hunger for art and knowledge and can pass it on to their audiences, and not just go after the celebrities. Anyway, I think it’s off to a great start!

§ devoted to dance on main floor of b&n

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

A few little kids have walked by expressing interest in the alvin ailey. Aww!

(photo by Lois Greenfield; dancers Craig Hall and Wendy Whelan)

For people in NY (or nearby), Morphoses (which I blogged about earlier when they premiered here at Fall For Dance) is going to have a free, open-to-the-public rehearsal next Friday, October 19th at 4:00 p.m. at City Center.

During the rehearsal, choreographer and artistic director Christopher Wheeldon will work with several of the company’s dancers in order to illustrate the artistic process involved in creating a new work, and will hold an open conversation with the audience. I think this is such an excellent idea, especially in light of my earlier post where I was so upset over my inability to understand some of the newer pieces because I felt no one was really talking about them. I think events like this, which is really one of the first of its kind (in terms of the conversation aspect), should go far to helping newcomers to dance understand this art form. Go Christopher!

So, that’s City Center next Friday the 19th, doors opening at 3:30, limited seating on a first come first served basis. If New York City Ballet’s recent open rehearsal for Romeo + Juliet was any indication, if you plan to go, get there way early!

It’s almost 4 in the morning and I’m very tired, so am just going to post some pictures now and will blog about it (So You Think You Can Dance tour) tomorrow (well, later on today, I guess). In general, it was a lot of fun, the dancing was all excellent — really some of the best I’ve ever seen, the choregraphy so so (some good, some not as good as the rest, but oh well … there was a new group number I hadn’t seen before: the swamp creatures? Was it on a show I missed? Anyway, I really liked it — it was contemporary lyrical mixed with some African moves, very interesting). Dominic is a doll, has THE BEST personality with a great comedic sensibility and I think has a future as an actor, seriously! He also looked awesome break-dancing on that big stage! Danny it goes without saying looked great on a big stage as well, but I still think his solo (same one he did on the show) could be much better — turn some of those grand jetes into barrel turns and do some of the pirouettes on a bent knee going up and down like Angel Corella In my opinion Pasha and Anya stole the show with their samba/cha cha, but of course I am biased One thing I noticed is that Latin / Ballroom looks better on TV and on a small stage, ballet on a big stage. (Tidwell, by the way, introduced himself as a jazz and contemporary dancer, no ballet.)

My only real criticism of the program is that they had too many flashbacks and too much talk about the show and not enough dancing! They had three big screens erected over the stage and they used them to show all these scenes of early rounds in which bad people were eliminated (why do we need to see this again?), they showed scenes over and over and over again of people falling, they had a bunch of footage of those little off-screen moments between the dancers most of which were already shown on TV, and the judges’ reactions to things, and even some of the dancing on the show. I wish they would have axed all this and just created more original dances for the dancers to perform. I guess it was more of the actual show on tour rather than the dancers on tour. But it was still a very fun night. I’m perturbed at Danny though for not showing up to the backstage “meet and greet”!!!!! Where were you, Danny????

Anyway, here are a few pics (the rest you can find by clicking on the link to my Flickr page, which is that very last link on the right-hand side of the blog):

Pasha greeting former student, Elaine, and spotting me!!!

Anya doing the same! (greeting another of Pasha’s former students, Mariana). So many of us He sure was popular

Sabra greeting Tony Meredith.

Dominic and Lacey.

Neil greeting what appear to be friends.

Neil and Lacey performing the Mia Michaels choreography dedicated to her father.

Danny and Neil doing Mia’s “Princes” piece.

Sorry my pictures are so blurry but I was one of the few who actually obeyed orders and turned off my flash. If you’re a dancer and you’re reading this and you’re thinking of trying out for the show, just be assured that if you make it to the end you’re going to be performing amongst bizillions of flashes going off incessantly! It was crazy — it was like a continuous light show in there!

Pasha’s solo. He used a cape this time, no mannequin

Group number.

Danny and Anya’s beautiful waltz.

Pasha and Anya’s samba / cha cha.

Pasha and Sabra’s quickstep.

Hehhe, going back in time to the beginning of the trip, when we were just boarding the bus to go out to Long Island, this is Steve, a friend of mine from the studio and Anya’s former student, telling me, apropos of my crazy rampage yesterday against poor Claudia LaRocco and dance criticism in the Times (he assures me he reads my blog, just doesn’t comment ), that he enjoys The Sun!

One more of Pasha! Here with former student Mariana. Isn’t he cute!!!!!

Okay, that’s all for now, I have to go to bed. It was a very fun night and I really had a lovely time reuniting with all of my friends from the studio, and of course seeing Pasha and Anya, and of course watching all of these amazing dancers. I am out of my bad mood now At least until I read the reviews!!!

Pasha!

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

During meet n greet taking pics w fans. Danny didn’t show!

We’re here!

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

T-Mobile

Wine on the bus!

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

T-Mobile

Jacob takes roll call

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

And then the pasha people will be off!

Tonight is the fabulous Dance Times Square escapade to see Pasha et al in the So You Think You Can Dance spectacular. I am really excited about it — have no less than three cameras in my bag just in case of battery outage (though I charged everything anyway — just the neurotic in me) I do hope they let us backstage and to take pics; otherwise expect a copious write-up! Good: I was upset this morning after logging onto some of my regular dance websites, and am now feeling better just writing about tonight Thanks Pasha, and thanks blogging software

What I’m really upset about is how shallow the world of ballet seems to be. At the Fall For Dance festival a few days ago I saw a most profound, moving work performed by African American dance-maker Kyle Abraham. As I wrote earlier, to me the piece used a combination of ballet, modern dance and hip hop to explore racial and gender issues and evoke the struggle to break free of prejudices — both those held by others and sometimes subtly taken on yourself. I’m very upset about the complete dismissal and oversight of Abraham’s work by both the press and the blogosphere. NYTimes chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay says only of the work that it was show-offy and involved too much upper-body “archness.” (Macaulay also criticized Wheeldon’s “After the Rain,” which I liked, but I’m not bothered by that because he actually gave it the time of day and analyzed it a teensy tiny bit; I’m far more disturbed by his complete dismissal of the meaning inherent in Abraham with no real analysis to speak of).

Similarly, Justin Peck of the Winger, a NY City Ballet dancer and Columbia University student wrote a little review of the night, perhaps for his class on dance criticism, and in his review of Abraham, he simply names the different dance forms used, then dismisses the piece as lacking “structure” (without further analysis). Neither reviewer seemed even to notice the racial or gender implications of the work. How anyone could fail to hear the loud gunshots and ambulance / police sirens going off at the beginning of the piece is completely beyond me, but I guess I’m a criminal appeals attorney who’s represented poor minorities for the past several years, so such noises may be more resonant to me. (By the way, a bit off topic but important: I think all attorneys should at some point in their careers represent someone whose life is starkly different from their own — even if it’s just pro bono — it expands your universe exponentially).

Then yesterday on The Winger, smart ABT dancer David Hallberg, posted this video of choreography by Mats Ek, whose work he was moved by at the Fall For Dance performance he saw. I thought it was a beautiful, moving portrait of a woman’s sorrow at losing her husband. Others, however, couldn’t see any sorrow, any story, but only focused on dancer Sylvie Guillem’s beautiful feet. Yes, Guillem has great feet. But is an attractive body part what really draws people to this art form? Is that what ballet is all about? Prettiness? Is it not about meaning, about moving people by telling them a compelling story, about making people think? Is ballet really that unintellectual? I have two advanced degrees. If you don’t at least try to stimulate my brain cells with your so-called art, I’m perfectly happy to return to favorite novelists who actually explore the human condition.

The problem isn’t just ballet fans though. I feel sometimes that those entrusted with stimulating public discourse are not even trying. (Here I’m primarily speaking of critics who write for the NYTimes, which I admit, is the only paper I regularly read due to both time and money constraints). Claudia LaRocco’s review of the final night of FFD read something like this: this whole festival is stupid, so it goes without saying that everything I saw that night was stupid. The first piece, in addition to being stupid was ethnically insulting in its “cliched” use of Indian dance to characterize London business culture (no further analysis as to exactly what it was about that piece — a huge crowd-pleaser that I found very intriguing — was cliched); the second piece (a brief excerpt of Camille A. Brown’s evocation of a woman trying to find herself) was bad because Brown moved too fast; the third piece was worthless because it was just there (no further analysis); the fourth piece comes from a choreographer (Jorma Elo) whose work always sucks; and the last piece was bad because it was “pleasurable only at a kinesthetic level and only at times.”

The critic character in Laura Jacobs’s novel, “Women About Town,” which I’ve quoted from before, views her work as deciphering for the public just what it is that makes a performance work or not, and unlocking and illuminating the hidden meaning of a piece (“there’s always a key,” she says at one point, though I’ve returned the book to the library so may be getting the exact quote wrong). I just don’t see any of that going on in the world of dance.

Tellingly, LaRocco begins her review by asserting that these days there is such a plethora of crap the best a critic can hope for is “competence.” These critics are coming from a place of anger, not of analysis. Countercritic led me to this article bemoaning how bloggers are displacing professional critics, which, the author argues, is tragic given critics’ historic role in leading the audience to understand and appreciate something in which they couldn’t previously find value (ie: Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot”). Okay, I understand that. But can someone please tell me when was the last time a dance critic illuminated a work of cultural value that was dismissed by the general public instead of the other way around?

I can’t even begin to describe what that auditorium sounded like after the presentation of Elo’s work (the ‘always sucky’ choreographer). His “Brake the Eyes” which I wrote about earlier, was so stunning, so brimming over with meaning, the audience was buzzing with discussion after the china doll / puppet ballerina snapped her fingers and the lights flicked off. “Was she controlled by the others or was it the other way around?” “That combination of music was so interesting!” “What was that cool music besides the Mozart, it doesn’t say in the Playbill.” “What was she saying in Russian?” were some of the questions I overheard. People are starved for analysis. Some of these people (especially the young and internet savvy) are going to come home and Google “Jorma Elo” or “Brake the Eyes,” and what are they going to find? Certainly not analysis. How can the public find meaning in concert dance, see it as anything other than the movement of attractive body parts if the writers aren’t trying to lead them the right direction?

Of course I know newspaper writers are under very strict word count limitations, making it impossible for them to delve very fully into their subject. But in the age of the internet, can’t at least the web articles be longer? Also writer Paul Parish has an interesting analysis of the newspaper problem (go to the very bottom of this post — scroll all the way down to where the bold reads “Paul to Tonya et al” and then to the paragraph that starts “I still think…” Foot in Mouth posts tend to be delectably gargantuan!!!). I don’t entirely understand what Paul is saying, but it sounds intriguing!

Anyway, the closer it gets to 4 pm (when the magic DTS bus departs for SYTYCD land), the better I am feeling. Hopefully I should have a good dance night: there won’t be any ballet there, after all

Tonight I went to another Works & Process event at the Guggenheim museum, this one focusing on the upcoming season of my favorite ballet company in the world, American Ballet Theater We were treated to brief excerpts of four of the works they’ll be putting on, including, most excitingly, a brand new ballet choreographed for ABT by New York City Ballet principal dancer Benjamin Millepied called “From Here On Out.” I was hoping Millepied would be there to talk about his work, but he wasn’t; instead the composer commissioned to create the score — prodigy / wunderkind / kid genius Nico Muhly, and ABT’s orchestra conductor Ormsby Wilkins were there. Muhly really cracked me up. He’s 26 years old, recently graduated with his MFA from Juilliard (Columbia undergrad), and is already a highly sought after composer — I mean this is an orchestral work for the largest dance company in the country! He was so cute, so excited about this piece. Since I don’t know much about music, most of what he said was like overhearing a conversation in another language: the piece is a pasacaglia with a baseline melody with repetitions, the variations and entrances of which can be disguised, like a trick, which can be very provocative, etc. etc. He described the musical repetitions with variations as being like several NY city blocks, all of which span the exact same distance but which vary in terms of their flavor depending on neighborhood, which I thought was a nice little analogy. Wilkins, the conductor, told us the music to this piece was so amazing, so compelling, we should make several trips to the ballet this season to see each and every one of its performances. That way, he exclaimed excitedly, we could actually watch the ballet the first time, then the second, third and fourth sit back and listen to the sheer genius of the music! Or, if we preferred, each time we saw it, we could keep one eye on the stage, and both ears on the music!

“Yes!” Muhly shouted, grabbing the air. Since he was so young, he explained further, he was really nervous that this would be the end! Every work his last! “I mean, this may be the last ballet I ever do; I had to put everything I had into it, everything!” he said gesticulating wildly and nearly smacking moderator Wes Chapman right in the face. Anyway, we saw a very brief excerpt of the dancing, and it did look very lovely, with lots of wave-like movements, very watery, flowing, and some beautiful partnering. I can’t wait to see, oh, I mean HEAR it in full!!!

They also had some excerpts from “The Leaves Are Fading” created for ABT in 1975 by Antony Tudor, a ballet comprised of several pas de deux telling the story of a male / female relationship, at various stages. I’ve never seen this one before and I’ll be interested to see what it looks like on the big stage in costume and in full. From the excerpts I saw, it looks pretty, but without a lot of originality in the partnering — a lot of the lifts I’ve seen before and then again and again and again. I guess it is from 1975. Whenever I see a romantic pas de deux, I can’t help but compare it to something by MacMillan, and he always far outshines whatever else I’m watching. To me, he was just the master of the passionate, poetic pas de deux and I fear I’ll never feel so moved by anyone else’s work again. He was so original; no lifts, no movements were repeated, and nothing was something learned in a basic partnering class — everything was completely unique — every shape, every passionate or frenzied embrace an original form. Anyway, the nice thing about this portion of the talk was that they had two of the original dancers from the first ever production discuss what it was like to work with Tudor; they also showed some slides of that 1975 performance. The dancers — John Gardner and Amanda McKerrow — said Tudor wanted them to strive for pureness and simplicity, told them not to “put anything on top of the movement,” to keep it “simple and clean.” I interpreted this as meaning no acting, no passion, no intensity, which is likely one reason it didn’t do much for me. I like passion and drama; I like pieces that mean something and that allow a dancer to make choices that give us an in on that meaning. We’ll see how Marcelo and Julie do with it…

Then there was an excerpt from Agnes de Mille’s “Fall River Legend,” about the tragedy of Lizzie Borden. And last, but the antithesis of least, was an excerpt from Australian choreographer Stanton Welch’s “Clear.” I have to say after Fall For Dance I was getting a bit disillusioned by ballet, thinking it, in comparison to all of the other amazing dance I saw, the form most lacking in relevancy, meaning, urgency and ability to make one think (more on that later). But “Clear” reminded me of what is so compelling about just watching something abstract that is beautiful, even if you can’t decipher the meaning. “Clear” is a male-centric ballet, with only one ballerina who’s only onstage for small portions of the ballet. And the men dance so beautifully. You just get so lost in the sublime movement. I guess you don’t normally think of men as delicate and beautiful — you think of them as virile and daring and strong, carrying a ballerina high above their heads all over stage then doing a bunch of injury-defying twisty leaps, but you don’t often see a group of men dancing together and just looking so beatific. So perhaps there is actually a gender element, a challenging of convention that I’m finding provocative in this piece. But regardless, I can’t wait to see it in full at City Center. I can just watch it again and again and again and get so lost in its beauty.

One last thing: afterward, during the reception I met Barbara, who comments frequently on my blog and on The Winger! I’m so glad she came up and introduced herself to me, along with her daughter. It was really fun chatting over wine and little finger foods about such things as how we felt about seeing David Hallberg perform for the first time: Blown Away! She’d gone to see another dancer who was out sick and reliable David took over. She hadn’t known who he was but was immediately was so taken by him that she came right home and Googled him and found our blogs And now she’s more hooked on ballet than ever! Yay! We also agreed that Blaine Hoven, who performed in two excerpts tonight, is amazing and is soon going to be promoted. I especially love how he moves his upper body; the way he’ll scoop his shoulders forward and you can see the wave ripple all the way down to his hips. Most ballet dancers with their classical training are so straight in their upper bodies that contemporary moves like that are all but impossible. Blaine definitely has something special. Anyway, it was so great meeting and hanging out with you guys, Barbara! Thanks so much for introducing yourself to me!

Okay, Pasha didn’t save ballet; he actually doesn’t have much of anything to do with ballet, other than that he’s touring with Danny Tidwell right now. But he’s on my mind because last night, on my way to Fall For Dance, I stopped by Dance Times Square to pick up my receipt for the long-awaited and highly anticipated “DTS Students And Friends Outing” to the Nassau Coliseum next Tuesday to see Pasha’s tour!!! Er, I mean the So You Think You Can Dance concert tour I chatted with Melanie a bit, and she told me that they’re trying hard hard hard, fingers crossed fingers crossed, to get the SYTYCD tour powers that be to allow us all backstage. Apparently they don’t have a problem with a couple of people, but they freaked a bit when she told them we’re a group of, more like … 40. Still! Come on, we’re a bunch of ballroom dancers, how rowdy can we be??? Please SYTYCD people in power, let us in to see our friend and beloved former teacher! We promise to behave! We promise!!

Okay, on to Fall For Dance. This is a most excellent event that’s taken place at City Center in midtown for the past I think three years now. Each night for about two weeks four or five different dance companies perform an excerpt from their repertoire. Tickets are a miraculously low $10 for the whole night. So, audiences — especially young audiences — can be exposed to several new companies for only $10 a night!

Last night marked the very first performance in New York by a promising new ballet company, called Morphoses, whose mission is to bring new life and new audiences to that most poetic of dance forms that many have feared is getting a bit withery and dried up. It’s founded by 34 year-old Christopher Wheeldon, formerly the first-ever resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. Wheeldon doesn’t yet have a permanent group of dancers, but is using guest dancers from several ballet companies, mainly NYC Ballet. I’ve loved so many of Wheeldon’s pieces that I’ve seen at NYCB over the past couple of years, so I have really high hopes, as do, I think, the vast majority of ballet lovers here. Last night the company performed not a brand new work, but one created by Wheeldon a couple of years ago for NYCB, a lovely duet called “After the Rain.” I see it as kind of a bittersweet pas de deux whose theme is a couple’s attempt to patch things up and find some common ground in the aftermath of a bad fight. It was danced by two NYCB dancers, the really cute Craig Hall and celebrated prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, to Arvo Part music composed of a string and piano section, in which the light tapping of high piano keys actually sounds like rain drops. It goes without saying that Wendy is just such an incredible dancer; when I see someone like her perform I realize it’s not just a choreographer who’s responsible for the success of his or her work. She dances with such conviction, with a fully formed thought in her mind of what her movements mean so that even though she dances mostly abstract ballets, as with this one, there’s just such an intensity and drama to her performance, the audience finds a story anyway. Well, listen to her talk about her work herself. I really love that City Center has done this this year — put up these little audiocasts on their website of interviews with several of the artists whose work is being performed at FFD. Go here to see a list of participating companies arranged by date, click on “info” for a breakdown menu of companies performing on that date, then click on that company to be taken to their info page where you can see an interview. Very cool!

So last night was actually my second night at FFD. I went Wednesday night as well but didn’t have time to blog about it yesterday. Highlights for me have been, in addition to Wheeldon, Keigwin + Company, a rather hip, young modern dance ensemble. I really wish Larry Keigwin, the company’s choreographer, would do a piece or two for SYTYCD. He’s so much fun. They performed “Love Songs” — several humorous duets performed by three different couples, pieces of which I’ve seen before. Each couple had its own distinct ‘couple personality,’ and told its own humorous story of relationship angst. On first and last was a youngish charmingly awkward pair who were obviously trying rather desperately to get to know each other better. They danced to a set of Neil Diamond songs. In another set, a more sophisticated couple, danced by Keigwin himself and one of my favorite modern dancers Nicole Wolcott, performed a voluptuous witty tango-y pas de deux to clever-sounding French music. And the third couple, the most wickedly funny imo, evoked, to Aretha Franklin music, the classic struggle between male and female for the upper hand in the relationship, rendered all the cuter by their mismatched sizes — fleshy woman (Liz Riga, my second favorite female modern dancer), smaller man. At times, when the woman wore the pants, she would drag her beau around, at times lifting and carrying him around the floor, and, when Franklin belted out some of her “let me tell you how it is” lyrics, she’d bop her head at him right along with the words. Then the reverse would happen; he’d have her begging. Then tables would turn, she’d have him back in the palm of her hands (literally with those crazy lifts), but he’d become too needy; she realized she should be careful what she wished for. It was so fun, funny, evocative, and very relatable.

The other one I loved Wednesday night (along with the crowd) was Urban Bush Women’s performance of its most famous piece “Batty Moves.” They tell you in the program notes that Batty is a Caribbean word for rear end, and the piece is a rather fun, raucous celebration of the African-American female form. The women sang rap lyrics, called out to the audience encouraging proud black women to rise, then launched into solo after solo of amazing combination African / modern dance. The audience was on its feet; a perfect ending to Wednesday night’s show.

Unfortunately, I felt really badly for ballet Wednesday night. The audience was filled with young and /or newcomers to dance and people related so much more to Keigwin and Urban Bush Women. The two ballets performed — one by Royal Ballet of Flanders — was a very abstract and rather slow-moving meditation on the passage of time and consisted of four couples dressed in generic pink leotards and white shorts doing abstract movements center stage while others dressed in black simply walked slowly around the stage’s perimeter.

The other ballet performed Wednesday night was NYCB’s small-scale one-man performance of Jerome Robbins’s “A Suite of Dances,” in which a male dancer interacts with an onstage violinist, at times almost cutely competitively. Robbins is my favorite “old time” choreographer, but he did most of his great work in the 1940s and 50s. And even though this particular piece had its premiere in 1994, the movement still had a very 50s feel to it, like Fancy Free. I love many of his ballets (particularly Fancy Free, as it’s often performed by my favorites like him and him), but I feel like every time I go to the ballet nine times out of ten they’re putting on something decades or centuries old. The audience was so much more into the aforementioned two pieces, not the ballet. I left with the feeling that ballet is encountering some serious relevancy problems. Kristin Sloan and I had an interesting little back and forth regarding “Suite” in the comments section on this post. I understand what she is saying, that’s it’s a softer sale, but I don’t know if the audience is really automatically pulled into a man’s own playful encounter with music. At least it doesn’t have the same urgency or speak to the human condition in the same way that glorifying a body Western Culture has long deemed “other” does. I don’t know, perhaps I would have had a different reaction if one of my favorites had performed the piece. There’s something about Marcelo’s very being that is somehow always contemporary and relatable. It’s an extremely interesting discussion, though, classical ballet’s ability to speak to modern audiences, and I’m very interested to know what others think.

Anyway, that’s why I was so happy last night to see the Wheeldon. It was contemporary, meaningful, relatable, and gorgeously, poetically danced. Also standing out to me in last night’s program was the piece immediately preceding Wheeldon’s, “Inventing Pookie Jenkins” by Kyle Abraham. It began with Abraham, an African American man, sitting in a pile of white tulle, which, when he stood, was revealed to be a long skirt reminiscient to me of Matthew Bourne’s all-male Swan Lake. He moved about, first on the ground, then standing, at times jerky, at times with beautiful lyric fluidity, to a soundtrack of gunshots and ambulance or police sirens. Then the soundtrack changed to a provocative / celebratory hip hop song, “Respect Me” by Dizzee Rascal. Abraham’s movements alternated between hip hop and lyrical modern, as he seemingly tried to break free of … of what? A policeman’s custody, stereotypes superimposed on him, even his own self-image — which took on both a racial and gender significance. It really just blew me away and if you ever get a chance to see him perform, by all means do!

Tomorrow night is, sadly, the last night of the festival. I’ll be looking forward to “Quick” by Indian company Srishti, in which several ‘London businessmen’ use classical Bharantanatyam technique and South Indian rhythms to deal with today’s cut-throat corporate climate. Interesting! I’ll also be looking forward to “The Evolution of a Secured Feminine” by Camille A. Brown, which I’m dying to see just because of its name alone! (go here for Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s audio interview with Brown), Jorma Elo’s Brake the Eyes, which I blogged about before, and South African troupe Via Katlehong Dance.

Finally, I’m very excited about the illustrious Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott’s commenting on my last post on Nureyev!!! Apropos of that post, apparently there was a big book party for author Kavanagh, which he attended and wrote about on his blog. Sounds fun, albeit a bit nerve-wracking! There were many members of the ‘glitterati’ there, including Jay McInerney, an abundance of “New Yorker” people, and even our favorite Sir Alastair It made me think of the book parties I’ve been to — only two: one for my former Feminist Jurisprudence professor, Drucilla Cornell, a comparably very academic, toned-down affair, and one for a friend of a friend, Ben Schrank, at which I made a flaming fool of myself in front of favorite author Colson Whitehead, a story which I’ll have to save for another day since this post is now 500,000 words long.

Anyway, while I’m kind of on the subject, for reasons that are too ridiculously complicated to explain, I haven’t been able to set up a “recent comments” column here yet, so just want to point out that artist Bill Shannon whose work “Window” I reviewed earlier, left a comment on that post, along with a YouTube link; and Ruth left a comment on my Suzanne Farrell post inviting interested people to participate in a Farrell fan site she’s set up.

Okay, I’m finally done blabbering. More on my final FFD later this weekend

This book (the latest biography of the greatest dancer EVER imho), which officially went on sale yesterday in bookstores everywhere, is so huge it’s almost overwhelming just to look at. I think it makes more sense for me to give my thoughts on the book in segments, so that I don’t end up with a 100,000- word-long review!

In the first couple chapters Kavanagh paints a fairly well-rounded portrait of Rudik’s parents and upbringing. (I hope I don’t sound pretentious, by the way, calling him that — I just think Rudik is so much cuter than Rudolf and more original and “Russian-sounding” than Rudi ) He grew up in abject poverty in a provincial state in northern Russia called Ufa, far removed from any city with its attendant vibrant cultural life. His family is Tatar, which is an oppressed ethnic minority in Russia, and he was raised Muslim and Tatar-speaking; didn’t learn Russian until later in school. (I actually hadn’t known Tatar was a language). He had three siblings — all sisters — and his mother, Farida, who had wanted to become a school-teacher but whose hopes for an education were dashed by pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy, took care of the children while his father, Hamet, served in the Red Army, his status forever in frightening limbo by Stalin’s erratic demotion / murder sprees.

Rudik was actually born on a train, when Farida went to visit Hamet at his bunk, which is how Kavanagh sweetly starts off her book. Much of his childhood was filled with such train rides, and the family at one point lived near train tracks. Rudik thus retained a life-long fascination with the locomotives, and when he was older and a professional dancer, part of his performance preparation consisted of leaving the studio and sitting outside near train tracks, listening for the sounds of the engines to get their rhythm into his body.

Hamet didn’t return home permanently until Rudik was well into boyhood, and by then, Rudik had been surrounded by so many women, he didn’t know how to react to the presence of a male; he seems to have been a bit afraid of his father. Hamet, well-liked by his comrades, was a real “mensch” type, and freaking out a bit over his son’s effeminacy, tried to make the proverbial man out of him by taking him on hunting trips, etc. Sensitive and quiet by nature, Rudik didn’t fare so well, needless to say, beginning a lifelong struggle with his father, exacerbated of course by his desire to become a dancer. Rudik had the best relationship with his older sister Rosa, the most intellectual and artistic one in the family who took dance and piano lessons and would teach her younger brother what she had learned in her ballet history lectures and bring him home costumes which he would (in his words) “gaze at so intensely that I could feel myself actually inside them. I would fondle them for hours, smooth them and smell them. There is no other word to describe it — I was like a dope addict.”

Rudik was introduced to ballet when he was seven years old and Farida bought a single ticket to a performance in Ufa, and managed to sneak all of her children into the theater with her. He knew then and there what he wanted to do with his life, and he never looked back. But even before that he had shown he was a natural dancer. Starting in kindergarden, as with all Russian children, he took national folk-dancing in school, exhibiting such talent and charisma, he was often chosen as a soloist in his school’s performances which they took on the road, performing in hospitals housing men recovering from war wounds. Kavanagh quotes from the (very well-written and gorgeously descriptive) novel, Dancer, by Colum McCann, which is based on the life of Nureyev. “In the spaces between the beds the children performed . . . Just when we thought they were finished, a small blond boy stepped out of the line. He was about five or six. He extended his leg, placed his hands firmly on his hips and hitched his thumbs at his back . .. the soldiers in their beds propped themselves up. . . Those by the windows shaded their eyes to watch. The boy went to the floor for a squatting dance. When he finished the ward was full of applause…” That’s one of my favorite passages from McCann too and I really love that Kavanagh quotes from a novel.

Because of his family’s poverty, Rudik got a late start on ballet, preventing him from ever acquiring full hip turnout (which must be attained before puberty, when hip ligaments and tendons are still flexible) thus making it all but impossible for him ever to develop wholly proper ballet technique. Poor and poorly clothed (in too-short pants, lacking shoes, etc.), Rudik was often made fun of by his classmates, and he struggled not to let their taunting get to him. When he later began ballet school in Leningrad, he was older than most of the students by several years. In response to their condescending stares, he, rather (in)famously, announced he would outdo them all. Talk about haughty, Shane Sparks (who told Danny Tidwell he was “arrogant”) And of course, through eating, breathing, and sleeping ballet basically for the rest of his life, he did outdo them all.

Kavanagh has done an amazing job of gleaning so much information (the book took 10 years to complete), but she includes so much detail that it kind of weighs the narrative down. She also doesn’t footnote, which, I don’t know if it’s the lawyer in me or the former History grad student or what, but it’s driving me nuts. For example, she asserts that Nureyev had a “lifelong willingness to let women martyr themselves for him” (pg. 21) that he derived from his father, then quotes — I guess either Nureyev or Hamet (?) saying, “‘At home she must work harder than her husband and when he is relaxing she must still carry on.’” Where is this from? What’s the context? Who is speaking? I need sources!!!

She also assigns motives to and makes judgments about her subject that to me are a bit ill founded. For example, she argues that Nureyev fabricated that his father had beaten his mother and him, and her basis for claiming that this is a lie is that the other family members denied it — as if a family’s denying allegations of abuse in order to protect one of its own has never been known to happen before. She claims that Nureyev lied because he was angry at his father for his refusal to tolerate his dancing: “There was only one real reason for his contempt: Hamet refused to tolerate his dancing.” (pg. 22). It just doesn’t strike me as all that mind-boggling that someone who’d spent a large part of his life in the military and looked down on his son for his supposed lack of masculinity could be physically rough. Plus, if dancing is your identity, your being, your life, and a parent refuses to acknowledge you, then that’s a pretty profound reason to harbor some hostility.

Okay, that’s all for now; more to come as I read further. Here is Joan Acocella’s review. Here is Gia Kourlas’s interview with Kavanagh. And here is a quoted excerpt of a review from John Carey that I found on James Wolcott’s blog. Reading the excerpt prompted me to Google Carey. And look at this book I found! I wonder what he’d have to say about the Ballet versus “So You Think You Can Dance” debate?! Hmmm, this may have to be next on my reading list…

In the orchestra pit!

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

At Fall For Dance.