(photo by Tristram Kenton from The Guardian)

Oh, I am so jealous of anyone who’s in London right now. I went to the bookstore yesterday in search of the new issue of Movmnt magazine. Couldn’t find it but found an article in Dance International magazine about a new performance at the National in London, a collaboration between my favorite actress and Akram Khan, an intriguing dancer and choreographer whom I’d seen here last year and who I wrote about here.

Here is critic Judith Mackrell’s review of the evening (she thought Khan brilliant and lauds Binoche for continual self-reinvention but found her dance range too limited to sustain an entire performance, which, as much as I love Binoche as an actor, is unsurprising to me given the difficulty of learning to dance in adulthood). I’d still love to see it though. Here are some photos, and here’s an interview with Binoche. If anyone is in London and sees this, please do let me know.

(photo: Tristram Kenton)

Okay, I almost just spit out my wine when Cody looked all innocently at the camera and said of the Rhumba, “This dance is about sensuality, sex, passion, and to be honest,” cute shrug and conscious laugh here, “I don’t have all that much life experience.” He’s too funny! He did really well — the attitude was there, he supported her very well in all of those rather complicated (for a beginner) tricks, and his hips while not completely correct were a good try. Cute cucharachas

Haha –Maks did not look so happy about being in the middle… That was actually rather funny; wonder if he knew the camera was on him…

Other favorites this week: Warren. I’d like to see someone other than a footballer win it again, but I have to say, big guy though he is, he is really good. That Paso was right on. And Toni and Brooke are damn good. Brooke: whoa! Perfect lines, perfect shaping, gorgeous ronde, great arms, steps completely polished. Holy crap! At this point I’m rooting for Brooke because she’s kind of the underdog, is probably the least well known, yet she’s very, very, surprisingly good. I’d like to see the person who no one knows take the trophy, if she continues to deserve it that is…

My little foodie man didn’t do so hot this week I did love his comparison of risotto with rhumba (both the basics of their respective disciplines, romantic and seductive, like “cashmere on the lips” — mmmm) and his whipping up that dish for Karina, who finally seemed to appreciate it. I do hope he’s given another chance to improve next week.

Poor Cloris. She behaves this week and the judges are all confused, tell her they miss the wackiness. What’s a girl to do?

(photo by Andrea Mohin, from NYTimes)

So, Fall For Dance wrapped up nicely; there were really no pieces on the last night’s program that I didn’t like. First on was the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s production of a Twyla Tharp dance I’d never seen, SWEET FIELDS, from 1996, which seemed to me a bit unlike her usual fare. It was joyous, spiritual, very lyrical, with dancers dressed in white flowing cloth, moving to Shaker hymnals. The one section that was very ‘Tharp-y’ was filled with breathtaking group lifts: at one point a group of men held one man up high above their heads, they suddenly released him and he rolled down, falling almost bungie-jump-like nearly to the floor, until they caught him at the very last second. The audience collectively gasped then applauded wildly.

(photo by Erik Tomasson of San Francisco Ballet’s Lorena Feijoo and Damian Smith from Voice of Dance)

Second on was San Francisco Ballet dancing Jerome Robbins’ lovely, ballroom-y IN THE NIGHT set to melodious Chopin played by an onstage pianist. The dance consists of three duets performed by three different couples — one the wondrous Yuan Yuan Tan (whom I’ve heard so much about; and she definitely lived up to her reputation!) with Ruben Martin; the second by Sofiane Sylve (who used to dance with New York City Ballet) and Tiit Helimets; and the third by the celebrated Cuban dancer Lorena Feijoo and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba. Tan and Martin represented a more mature, in love couple, their dancing very flowing and elegant, Sylve and Helimets I wasn’t sure about because to be honest I didn’t feel all that much from their dancing, and Feijoo (who’s a real firecracker) and Vilanoba (who kind of played her straight man, appearing humorously unable to figure her out, to foresee her antics, her wild jumps into his arms) the fun, young couple whose relationship centered around rather cutely played out sexual angst. The audience had a lot of fun, giggling throughout, particularly at Feijoo and Vilanoba.

I have to say, San Francisco Ballet, who are currently celebrating their 75th Anniversary, was a lovely company; they brought Robbins to life for me in a way I’ve seldom seen, and I look forward to seeing more of them at City Center later in the season.

(photo by Todd Rosenberg, of Hubbard Street Dance performing COR PERDUT, taken from Critical Dance)

Third was popular Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s Compania Nacional De Danza performing his COR PERDUT, a Gypsy-esque male / female duet between two likely lovers, each often running after the other playfully, then turning more serious, the man eventually picking up the woman, sweeping her off the ground, twirling her about. Very sweet theme, and the music — Turkish and sung in Catalan — was gorgeous.

(photo by Lois Greenfield of Paul Taylor Dance Company, taken from Ballet.co)

And closing out the festival was Paul Taylor Dance Company’s popular ESPLANADE, set to Bach and choreographed by Taylor in 1975. This was a lot of fun; as dancers ran around stage, whizzing about narrowly missing each other, played hopscotch with each other’s bodies laid out on the floor log-like, and finally flew across stage taking a flying leap into each other’s arms, the crowd went nuts with applause, giving a standing ovation.

Fun, but very tiring, 10 days…

Here is Claudia La Rocco’s review of the last program in the Times.

Last night of fall for dance

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Having last cup of $2 wine in the lounge with Ariel sitting on these orange pillowy things that actually turned out to be rather comfy.

(photo by Heinz Peter Knes, borrowed from Philip’s blog).

Last week I was invited along with a couple other bloggers to a rehearsal of an upcoming modern dance piece at the Joyce SoHo, called A LIGHT CONVERSATION, a collaboration between dance artists Wally Cardona (from the US) and Rahel Vonmoos (from the UK).

What was interesting and original about this is that the dancers moved not to music but to spoken word — and not poetry or a rhythmic kind of spoken word, but to a BBC radio-show discussion of Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, mainly his work and his thought and how it differed or took from Hegel, Socrates, and Kant, and a small bit up front on his personal life.

Well, I had the absolute hardest time focusing both on the visual movement and the words playing over the speakers. I realized about myself that when I concentrate hard on an idea, perhaps when I really use my intellect over my more physical senses (are they two different things?), or my left brain over right (to the extent they don’t work in tandem?), my eyes just naturally veer up and to the right. I guess many people’s do — maybe to varying sides depending on whether one is right- or left-handed. So, I caught myself several times looking up and off and not at the dancers! And, unless someone made a big, sweeping movement (Cardona did a few times, more often than Vonmoos, whose actions were generally much smaller), I had a really hard time focusing on the stage. And then when I tried to concentrate more on the movement, or when I tried to determine whether the movement informed the words or vice versa, I lost the intricacies of thought being spoken about.

At times they, smartly, either turned off the sound, interrupted it with silences so that you couldn’t hear a large part of the text, or placed another sound over the words, such as loud, booming drums. Then, I concentrated more on the dancers, and when I did noticed that Vonmoos’s actions, small as they often were, were rather mesmerizing in their detail.

But then at points, I’d still find myself trying to concentrate on what words were being left out or negated by the drums, whether that had any meaning in itself, whether I could fill in the blanks myself, etc., rather than the movement.

Perhaps part of my problem was that I took a lot of political philosophy in college and law school and I think I got carried away with trying to remember things, getting angry at myself for forgetting, etc. In any event, I found the whole concept intriguing and original.

Afterward the dancers talked a bit, and Cardona said they were really moving to the rhythms of the words; that he sometimes had a harder time hearing the rhythm of the woman commentator’s voice because it was softer and made such a marked tonal difference between the mens’. Vonmoos was less talkative but seemed to say the ideas expressed were important as well, not only the rhythms. I feel like this is a piece I’d need to see many times to more fully comprehend.

I’d love to hear what others think if anyone is able to go. Performances are next week, September 30-October 5. Tickets are $20. Read Philip’s review here, Taylor’s here (both concentrated more on the movement, so didn’t seem to have the same problems as I), and go here for more info. on the show.

Here.

Hehehe, I already “tweeted” Sharon, who runs the BDC discussion of the show that I was kidding about the little remark at the beginning of my Cloris Leachman assessment. I’d gone to bed Wednesday night, only to have my cell phone start beeping off the hook with angry tweets from West Coast BDCers annoyed about McGinley getting the boot over Leachman. Very 21st Century

Anyway, happy Friday everyone!

For New Yorkers, Christopher Wheeldon is holding a free, open-to-the-public dress rehearsal to be followed by a little talk (just like he did last year) on Sunday, October 5th at 12 noon at City Center (where Morphoses is performing). You need a ticket, which you can pick up starting at 11:00 a.m. that day. Doors will open at 11:30. Tickets are given out on a first-come, first-serve basis, and are limited to 4 per person. Last year I think this sold out at the speed of light, so if you’re gonna go, get there early!

Woo hoo, the orchestra pit!!

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The best night of Fall For Dance thus far, imo. 1) The Suzanne Farrell Ballet performing a little-known Balanchine work and appearing in New York for the very first time; 2) brilliant Modern dancer Talia Paz in a poignant, desperate, evocative solo titled simply Love; 3) the equally poignant, evocative, and at times desperate The Light Has Not the Arms to Carry Us by the Kate Weare Company; 4) The Lombard Twins from Argentina (whom I’d seen earlier dancing with Rasta Thomas’s Bad Boys of Dance) doing an original hip hop / theatre / “street” dance to Tango master Astor Piazzola, played wonderfully by a full onstage band; and 5) the excellent Afro-Modern Garth Fagan Dance company performing his 1978 celebration of the African origins of dance. He put me in such a good mood, I’d have danced home if the weather wasn’t so nasty.

Hula class in fall for dance lounge

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You need rhythm to do this dance! It’s kind of samba-y. And, as the class went on, I realized it was kind of Hip Hop-py as well. Not what I was expecting. Fun but hard.

At molyvos awaiting fall for dance

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What kind of person orders a second glass of wine during a Recession?

Anyway, FFD was good / decent tonight. I especially liked: Houston Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky Pas De Deux – wonderfully lively dancers (Sara Webb and Connor Walsh) who brilliantly brought both Balanchine and Tchaikovsky to life; BeijingDance/LDTX’s Cold Dagger, which I found nicely enigmatic and visually arresting in places; and The New 45 by Richard Siegal / The Bakery, a company I will most definitely be looking up the next time I am in Berlin. Full review coming soon…

I don’t have time to write a full review but yesterday I went to the Democracy in America exhibit at the Park Avenue Armory (Lex between 67th and 66th). It’s free and definitely worth seeing. Runs only through this Saturday though. Go here for more info.

I’d gone mainly to see Steve Powers‘ Waterboard Thrill Ride, which had premiered at Coney Island over the summer; I wrote about it here. There really wasn’t much to it; you put your dollar bill into the slot and for just a number of seconds watch a life-sized robot/puppet aim the spout of a flower pitcher at a supine man’s face, which was covered with a wet cloth. The water just kind of dripped out, as if he was delicately watering flowers. I’m thinking perhaps there were too many viewers and the water supply was getting low because I’d have thought it would be coming out a little more rapidly. Still, I found the exhibit pretty frightening and don’t know how Coney Island tourists could have found otherwise.

Here’s a how-to diagram at the entrance to that artwork. Someone graffiti’d it up and wrote on the top, “This exhibit is gay.”

There are a few other interesting installations too, most of them on the main floor in the big room. There’s one by John Hawke of a make-shift shelter constructed with wood. Inside are a series of journal-like entries and pictures documenting where all the shelter was placed — usually busy city streets — who all used it — people waiting for the bus, the homeless, people needing a little place to eat, especially when it rained — and how it was treated by police and other authorities — usually taken down, dragged out to the street.

There’s another exhibit, all of photos, aligning the side wall, by Greta Pratt. The pictures, taken throughout the country between 2007 and 2008, are of various pictorial renditions of the American flag — on bumper-stickers, on sides of buildings, on the cover of a magazine, on someone’s t-shirt, on someone’s mailbox, on the face of a grocery bag, etc. Sometimes the subject paraded the flag with intent, others seemed completely unconscious of it, just happening to don a t-shirt bearing such an emblem for the day. There are hundreds of pictures and it can take you all day to look at them. What I found interesting was that they show such an expansive view of middle America, one that is somehow neither ironic nor nostalgic, or perhaps rather a combination of both.

Third piece of art I had a very visceral reaction to was at the back of the ground-floor room, by Jon Kessler. A big installation involving numerous barbie dolls and tiny video cameras that were projected onto several TV screens aligning the back wall. Barbies (or Ken dolls, rather) depicted men at war, men being tortured. Just imagine all the things you can do with little plastic bodies to show the horrors… It was visually stunning, compellingly, thought-provokingly disgusting.

There are several video exhibits on the mezzanine and second and fourth floors that I found less interesting, except for one, by Carlos Motta, though I can’t say I liked it. The artist is a young Colombian man who shot a bunch of videos of Latin Americans talking about their governments. They are projected onto about ten or so screens throughout the room. On one screen, however, there is simply a starving dog looking desperately for food, nearly unable to stand up. He licks the dirt ground for water. It’s so horribly upsetting, and as a viewer sitting at a remove from the dog on the screen, you’re completely helpless to do anything for him, which is perhaps the point. A shop woman finally throws the dog a chicken wing, which he gobbles down, but still, he’s all bone and fur. It’s so upsetting.

I feel like there’s got to be something legally wrong with this kind of art — with hurting, sometimes killing defenseless animals for artistic aims. Human beings can make the decision to starve themselves for a movie, etc., but non-human animals cannot. I don’t know if Motta found this dog on the streets and just decided to film him, or if he starved the dog himself in order to use him for his little film, but it really shouldn’t be legal. Animal cruelty is a felony, at least in New York, and the artwork is being distributed here.

Plus, I’m not sure that watching a starving or victimized animal or human (the artist has done other projects on human victimization) really leads the average person to think, to be more compassionate. At least public executions in the past haven’t seemed to have that effect.

(all photos by Richard Termine)

So, last night I went to the Guggenheim primarily to see this Works & Process combination dance / fashion program, “A Two Part Affair — Ballet and Modern Meet Uptown.” I was really looking forward to it because, unlike the other W & P programs, which are more of a preview of an upcoming show, this was a performance only to be shown at the museum. Two choreographers — one, Pam Tanowitz, from the Modern world; the other, Brian Reeder, from Ballet — collaborated to form a kind of hybrid dance form.

Also exciting was that Jillian Lewis, from Project Runway, did the costumes. She, along with Tanowitz and Reeder, spoke about the production on a panel moderated by dance writer Robert Greskovic (who is actually a pretty funny guy — who knew! — cracking jokes right and left, making fun of himself for being so out of it as to not know who Lewis was I probably shouldn’t admit it but neither did I :S — I just don’t watch enough TV…)

Anyway, the program, as its name implied, consisted of two parts: the first danced to Renaissance music; the second to modern composers like Charles Wuorinen (creator of the upcoming operatic version of Brokeback Mountain), Philip Glass, and Lou Harrison. This second part, I far preferred to the first, though to be honest, I thought most of it was pretty eh… pretty, but just nothing that really blew me away, either costume- or choreography-wise.

I feel like we’re currently in the midst of a rather unfortunate period of Minimalism. Choreography consisted mainly of ballerinas tip-toe-ing around, taking very small steps, men and the sole female Modern dancer doing these small side-sweeping steps, sometimes with flexed feet, sometimes pointed. Once in a while there’d be a leg slightly raised and a very small waist-high lift, but overall there was nothing spectacular, nothing the least bit dramatic about the movement. I think choreographers still need to tell a kind of story with the movement, even if it’s not a full narrative but of the Balanchine (“whenever a man and woman are onstage together, there’s a story) variety. I just didn’t see that here — dancers kind of partnered at random with one another, broke into a short solo, but there didn’t seem to be anything to it that you could hook onto.
And the costumes — well, here are some more pictures so you can see for yourselves:

(again, all photos by Richard Termine)

So, as you can see, all of the men’s costumes consisted of pink or blue diaphanous t-shirts and tights with cut-outs that were also see-through in places. The female dancers all wore leotards with exterior underwire bra; the two ballerinas sassy little striped tutus and the Modern woman a lacey thing that wrapped around her neckline feather boa-like. But the tutus and boa were worn only in the first, Renaissance section; they were taken off for the modern.

I mean, Lewis was likely going for sexy– she said she wanted to focus on the body, highlight the human form — but to me, I guess that’s just been done before. Plus, she used such light colors and mundane-looking fabrics, the costumes just kind of almost weren’t even there. And, even including tutus and boa, they just didn’t seem to fit at all in the context of the Renaissance. I then remembered seeing David Hallberg dance earlier at the Guggenheim in a fabulous Christian Lacroix. He left out the delicious candy-apple velvet jacket, but here are some pics he took of himself in the tights. I mean, hello — THIS is what we need to spice up Ballet, I say! I say away with minimalism; bring back Lacroix!

Anyway, I really did appreciate the concept of this program; I think collaborations can be very fruitful and lead to innovation and creativity. Back to the dancing for a moment, I really just think the choreographers needed some more time. There was one point during the second, modern, part where Roman Zhurbin (center, in the bottom picture) held his arms out and each ballerina grabbed on. He lifted, walked slowly around stage carrying the two of them. To me, it was beautifully reminiscent of Balanchine’s Apollo. At center stage was one of the male modern dancers in a kind of Martha Graham-esque pose, body bent over forward, foot flexed back, seeming to carry a non-existent world atop his arched-over shoulders. So, also Apollo-like, yet fundamentally Modern in form. It was like a double-sided Apollo. I feel like they should have gotten rid of everything else, used this stunning moment as a starting point.

I think the rest of it was kind of too hybrid. They didn’t use the Ballet dancers to show the beauty and poetry of the dance form; ballerinas were going on pointe and Zhurbin would point instead of flex his foot at times, but that doesn’t really mean anything. It just looked like a very watered-down form of Ballet. And then both Zhurbin and the female ballet dancers had these very muscular bodies — particularly Zhurbin (aka Ballet god! — never noticed that before; ABT is really under-using him…), and the Modern dancers were more thin, almost a bit scrawny in comparison. But of course there’s a reason for that — Ballet requires great use of the legs, the thigh muscles for those huge jumps and the calves for pointe work. And the upper body is so developed for spectacular overhead lifting. If you don’t show some of that difference in the movement, I think the bodies end up looking a little weirdly unbalanced…

One final thing: writer Claudia La Rocco didn’t see the program, unfortunately, but here’s an interesting discussion she and her commenters started about Ballet’s current kind of identity crisis and how costuming fits into that.

What did you guys think? I actually haven’t finished watching it yet! I got home from North Carolina late in the afternoon then had to go to a dance /fashion event at the Guggenheim (which I’ll write about later today), and arrived a bit early for the unveiling of the building’s restored facade. When I got home I was too tired to watch all of DWTS and only watched the tail end and about the first quarter of the tape. I loved the last guy on though (Warren Sapp?), and I also liked Maurice Greene, and Toni Braxton, and thought Rocco DiSpirito was a little cutie with an adorable personality. And who doesn’t love a man who can cook I love his attempted bribe… I haven’t yet seen Cloris! How did she do??!! Will write more when I’ve seen it all.

Update: Okay, now that I’ve seen the whole thing, I want to add Lance Bass to my list of favorites. I thought Kim did better than expected, judging from the practice clips. Latin will probably be the real test for her though, balance-wise and all. I thought Cloris did well (particularly with the turns and pivots), particularly taking into account her age (which is part of what makes this show so different from SYTYCD, and so much harder to judge). And I agree with you guys (see comments) that she went a bit too far after dancing, though I can’t help but still love her! Len was so good-humored about it though — I sometimes just want to squeeze him he’s so cute And so sweet of him to say, “Everyone who comes on this show is a winner,” after the comedian danced. I think he’s going to be the first to go tonight…

Guggenheim restoration complete

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Was unveiled tonight by Mayor Bloomberg. At night they’re projecting some word art onto its facade.

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are becoming so common these days! I remember giggling at my mom’s old photos and home movies from the 60s of family members walking up the wobbly narrow airplane steps, grabbing the hand rail for dear life to steady themselves for turning and waving to my mom, sometimes even with an infant in one arm, and thinking, wow how much more civilized we’ve become with the little inside hallways that make it seem like you’re not even leaving the airport. And now I’ve done just as my “ancestors” several times in the past couple years, even including international flights…

I have hardly any time to blog since I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for North Carolina (for a cousin’s wedding), and as usual have left myself far too little time to pack. I’ll probably write a more formal review for Explore Dance as well.

Rundown of program one: 1) excerpts from Shen Wei’s “Map.” Shen was the choreographer the Beijing Olympics’ Opening Night ceremony, which hopefully some of you caught, but I, stupidly missed.

(Shen Wei’s “Map,” photographer unknown, taken from here)

I liked this better on my second viewing. It’s set to music by Steve Reich that nicely, at times hauntingly, combined techno-industrial sound with chorals. The dancers began all on the ground, rolling in a row, propelling themselves around the floor by helicoptering their arms, then legs. At times, both when supine and standing, they appeared to be in flight, at one with the air around them. Their costumes were gray/blue with small red lines snaking up the outer edge of the leg, and their tops containing a darker back area, like a parachuter’s jacket. On a back wall were painted mathematical formulas, the mid-section resembling a diagram of an aircraft with a complicated configuration of flight patterns. The dance was intriguing, and I liked how it began. It seemed to go on a bit too long to me, losing steam in the middle.

2) I loved Pichet Klunchun’s “Chui Chai” as did the audience, who clapped happily when the curtain rose to reveal several female dancers in traditional Thai costumes, with gilded headwear, moving in extreme slow motion, their wrists and fingers bent miraculously to make the most stunningly beautiful lines. I wrote about his work earlier here, and the meaning of the bent wrists and fingers. The program notes tell us the title stands for “transformation” and the dance tells the story of the princess transforming herself into the king’s enemy’s queen. About mid-way through Mr. Klunchun appears, making a stark contrast to the women with both his modern garb (black t-shirt and jeans) and his more modern movement. It still had the Thai feel, with the hyper-flexed wrists and toes, but his faster movements, his throwing himself into a bend or a kick, resembled more of the western modern dance tradition. I didn’t really see the story flesh itself out, but I loved the movement so much I didn’t care. At the end, when the dancers took their bows, the lay all the way down on the ground, completely prostrate to us. The audience applauded like crazy, some even giving a standing ovation.

3) Third was Keigwin + Company’s “Fire” — one of the middle sections of his larger work, “Elements,” which I wrote about here. “Fire” hadn’t been my favorite of the “Elements,” but tonight it really grew on me, partly I think because two of the three dancers were different from before. Keigwin is good at juxtaposing dancers with different physicalities against each other to hilarious effect (ie: a large-boned woman with a tiny guy), and with physiques that don’t seem to fit the music or attitude of the dance. This piece ends with a hip hop number, and the male dancer who performed last night and tonight was a small, cute, innocent-looking white guy, Julian Barnett, and his well-acted attempts at playing it cool, at getting the hip hop attitude down, were downright hilarious. They got the biggest applause of the evening.

4) and finally, my overall favorite, was the National Ballet of Canada’s rendition of Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian’s “Soldiers’ Mass,” a sorrowful, poignant poetic elegy to men on the battlefield.

(photo courtesy of Netherlands Dance Theater archive, taken from here)

Okay, that’s all I have time for right now. Here is Philip’s review of program one.

Happy weekend, everyone!

I mentioned earlier that over Labor Day weekend I had a little Swan Lake marathon and became quite intrigued by the life of Tchaikovsky. I’m not sure exactly how that happened — I think it may have been because the video I saw of the Bolshoi version (from the late 50s) paid such homage to him, as if he were more important than Petipa and Ivanov or anyone else involved, as if the ballet belonged more to the composer than to anyone else. Anyway, I spent an afternoon camped out on the floor of Barnes & Noble and became fascinated. Talk about drama; I’m not sure if there’s any composer, or any artist for that matter, whose life could be more interesting… (even the writing of his life has been fraught with controversy).

(photo from Wikipedia)

The books at B&N were very expensive (one was $72), so I got home and ordered a stack through the NYPL. I was very excited by one in particular — his diaries (Dnevniki). I always prefer to read about the person’s life directly from the subject himself — his thoughts, his letters to others. Reading a biographer means you’re getting things through a certain lens, from a distance usually several times removed. So, I was very excited to see that the library had his journals.

But then when I picked the book up:

I actually took Russian in college; now I’m kicking myself badly for not taking more, and for not keeping up with it over the years.

I guess the fact that I saved my books all this time (and that they’re in my New York apartment and not with one of my parents, along with my other things from college and before) shows I was expecting to use them at some point.

I just don’t know how I’ll ever re-learn everything. Things are coming back, but not at the rate I need to read something like this. Isn’t there a Russian speed-learning course somewhere?!

In fall for dance lounge

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Where you can get $2 glasses of wine. Woo hoo!

Update: Review coming soon (after I see the program again tonight). Thank you to Philip for letting me use his boyfriend Wei’s ticket last night!

The festival got off to a good start last night. There was some initial confusion over ticket lines out front, but the audience was excited (and, expectedly, huge), every seat taken. The lounge though could use some improvement I think. Though they were selling food and drinks at pretty good prices, they had very few chairs. Instead, they had an area that seemed to be marked off for a dance floor, and DJs blasting away. But no one seemed to be dancing or enjoying the raucous music; instead were trying to find a piece of wall to lean up against while eating.

Here’s a very nice collective tribute to writer David Foster Wallace. And here’s one literary agent’s homage. I was struck by one line of the agent’s in particular: “Whether you liked his work or not, he was at the very least the kind of writer you had no choice but to form an opinion on, and we need more writers like that.” I think we need more artists in general like that. What’s the point of making art if you’re not going to really say something, if you can’t be fearless?

I went to the bookstore last night to get a copy of Infinite Jest but there was a big hole in the section of shelf where his books should have been.

(photo by Nicole Bengiveno, from NYTimes)

Hmmm, this is turning out to be a bit of a drama. NYTimes chief Sir Alastair weighs in on Alexei Ratmansky’s joining ABT, as does Apollinaire Scherr, who points to this piece of commentary, one of the most interesting in my opinion, by Robert Johnson in the New Jersey Star Ledger.

Johnson is the first critic I’ve read who’s not head over heels in love with the choreographer, but one of his reasons for so being is that he seems to think Ratmansky has somewhat of a Communist streak. He says that during his directorship of the Bolshoi, Ratmansky tried to revive the company, suffering in the wake of Perestroika, by re-staging some successful Soviet-era ballets. Johnson asks what “red eminence” this programming might have. Ratmansky’s own work “Bright Stream,” set to music by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovitch, and praised by many dance critics here (the ballet, that is, was praised, not Shostakovitch), Johnson calls “a disingenuous frolic on a Soviet collective farm,” then interprets Ratmansky’s latest “Concerto DSCH” which recently premiered at the New York City Ballet as a mockery of Imperial Russia, with Soviet revival style triumphing.

I unfortunately haven’t seen “Bright Stream” or any of these other Soviet era ballets, but of course am now dying to. I did see “Concerto DSCH” and didn’t interpret it at all the way Johnson does.

But, even if you can attribute these underlying, subconscious politicized ideas to the choreographer, which is a huge if, so what? Can’t someone critique the Imperial period without being considered pro-Stalinist? (Johnson reminds of the bloody atrocities committed by the Soviet regime) Has anyone ever seen Peterhof? It looks just like Versailles. Your first thought is, whoa, look at all this opulence, no wonder there was a rebellion. But in any event, can an aesthetic critique be interpreted as a political critique? I personally think not, but even if so, is this reason for threat? Aren’t we post-Cold War now?

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I found that part of the article a bit shocking in a McCarthyist kind of way. But I do have to say, I applaud Johnson for resisting herd mentality and offering the first real Ratmansky criticism. (He does have more bases for criticism; this is just the one that seemed most prominent to me. And, by reading James Wolcott, Laura Jacobs seems critical as well — I’ve got to get a subscription to the New Criterion!) In the end, I do have to say, with all I’ve read on Ratmansky this past week, Johnson most makes me want to run out and see everything I can by the man…

(photo by Jennifer Taylor, of “Bright Stream” from NYTimes)

Oh and, somewhat apropos of the critics jumping on the bandwagon thing, I just want to point people to an interesting discussion, begun by Claudia La Rocco (who is so awesome to comment here ) on fans versus critics down in the comments section of this post.

(photo by Gueorgui Pinkassov from New York Times Magazine)

So, the big news in New York for the past couple of days is that Alexei Ratmansky, currently artistic director of the Bolshoi, and beloved choreographer of many a dance critic here, will be the new resident choreographer for American Ballet Theater. Story is a bit of a soap opera as well since he was recently asked to fill that position with the New York City Ballet and declined. It appears to have been a timing issue.

Anyway, this is a most exciting move for ABT, who desperately need to electrify their contemporary repertoire. Ratmansky’s an almost absurdly prolific creator, churning out new ballets practically monthly it seems, and from what everyone seems to think, never sacrificing quality. I personally have seen four of his works: one I really liked (actually, there are two in that post, one I liked, one I didn’t, so I’ve seen five of his altogether), another I really liked and wanted to see more of, one about which I could only say hmmmm, and one I couldn’t figure out what all the critics were going hog wild over but am willing to give it a few more viewings to see.

Honestly, I’m really excited, really excited, to see what ABT’s magnificent dancers will do with his work. It appears his post won’t officially begin until next spring. We have a lot to look forward to.

Only thing is, he’s recently said Swan Lake is dead (thanks to Evan for finding that article), which, before Labor Day weekend, wouldn’t have made me all that upset. But thanks to a writer from Ballet.co who told me at the end of ABT’s production of that ballet to make sure I saw …blahblahblah… ’s for comparison (I couldn’t hear the name because this was during curtain call applause), I went to the library and ended up checking out every single copy of Swan Lake they had. This is a post for another day, but I really fell in love with it, and with Tchaikovsky. It can’t be dead, Mr. Ratmansky…

Also, check out ABT’s principal dancer page. There appears to be a new face… (thanks to Philip for the heads up).

So, the results of the USDC are as I expected: Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruychenko new Latin champions, Arunas Bizokas and Katusha Demidova new Ballroom. Jonathan Roberts and Valentina Kostenko beat J.T. Thomas and Tomas Mielnicki in Smooth, so we have new winners there as well. And Jose DeCamps and Joanna Zacharewicz remained Rhythm champs.

It looks like Andrei Gavriline and Elena Kruschkova (prior Latin champions) didn’t compete this year; I didn’t see their names in results. Nor did Emmanuel Pierre-Antoine and Julia Gorchakova in Rhythm. In the Open to the World category, it looks like the only major non-US dancer to compete was Dmitri Timokhin from Russia (who used to dance with Karina Smirnoff before she became a Dancer W/ Stars) and his new partner Natalie Petrova. So, no Slavik (and whoever he’s dancing with these days), no Sergey and Melia.

It looks like Pavlo Barsuk and Anna Trebunskaya placed in third Latin, and my favorite Vaidotas Skimelis and Jurga Pupelyte in fourth. Yes!

Here is DanceBeat’s full coverage of the championship. And here are the full event results lists.

Mefears in the age of the internet, soon writers and artists won’t make any money at all from their work. Still, far better than people not reading at all, right? (I love his line about the tree in the forest and the writer’s silent scream, and his Fedoku story.)

Anyway, some of these books do look pretty funny.

With my favorite essay from that time.

Blogging will resume as soon as a Wednesday deadline passes, I promise!

In the meantime, here are a few things to keep you entertained:

1) Christopher Wheeldon (choreographer and artistic director of Morphoses — upcoming next month at City Center) talks ballet and creativity on Big Think here, here, and here; general Wheeldon link here. (Also, read some Morphoses dancer and choreographer blogs here);

2) check out Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Project 52, a year-long documentary on the company in weekly video installments;

3) Claudia La Rocco discusses the new Broadway musical Fela!;

4) a discussion I found interesting about whether J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye should still be required reading for high schoolers, or whether it no longer has adequate “currency” so as to resonate with young people today, here, here, and here;

and

5) if you’re interested in the writing life, guest blogger Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, turned The Elegant Variation into a crash course on creative writing last week. His entries begin here.

Okay, wish me luck!

Just wanted to remind New Yorkers (and anyone traveling to NY in the near future) that Fall For Dance tickets go on sale this Sunday, 9/7, at 11 a.m. Tickets are $10 if you choose to stand in line at the City Center box office (which I don’t recommend), or $15 (with $5 surcharge) if you book online. Tickets sell out very quickly, usually within a day or two. Here’s the schedule and lineup of artists.

Also, this weekend is the Evening Stars series of free performances at Battery Park. Tonight is Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, tomorrow night Rasta Thomas’s Bad Boys of Dance, and Sunday night Los Vivancos flamenco group. All performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Go here for more info.

Outside of New York, this weekend is the United States National Dance Championships (most important Latin Ballroom event in the country) in Florida, which for the first time in a couple of years, I am not attending. Sad day. I will definitely keep my eyes peeled for results. I expect Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruychenko to take tops in Latin, and Arunas Bizokas and Katusha Demidova in Standard but am always happy for a surprise. If anyone is there, please let me know what’s going on, and who all’s there for the World events! If I miss Slavik or Sergey I am not going to be happy.

I don’t have much time to write (deadlines loom!) but just want to point you all to a most excellent book I read over the weekend, Janelle Brown’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. It’s a biting, point-on satire on the order of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; it’s also what the TV show Desperate Housewives could have been had the originator been allowed to keep his satirical vision, had network television not ridiculously cheesified it, made it into the antithesis of its potential.

AWEWWE is about a Silicon Alley family coming unglued, ironically in the wake of a financial windfall from skyrocketing stock. The patriarch decides his wildly successful IPO makes for the perfect time to abscond with his mistress, who happens to be his wife’s good friend. Matriarch Janice, a prototypical upper middle-class suburban housewife, gave up career and grad school to be a homemaker, raise the family in the highest style her husband’s salary could afford, only to become by turns the pity and laughingstock of her suffocatingly stuffy gated community. Left career- and husband-less at 49, she has nothing, and it’s heartbreaking to watch her drugged up in her bedroom poring over old copies of Parisian gossip mags in an attempt to regain her youth. After college, she was all set to go on postgraduate study abroad, a dream stifled by her first pregnancy.

The youngest daughter, 14-year-old Lizzie, hopelessly overweight, turns to promiscuity to try to reverse the tide of her unpopularity at school. Middle daughter Margaret is the character I personally felt the strongest for — perhaps she is the one whose life most resonated with me. At 29, with several degrees she’s the opposite educationally of her mother, yet she finds herself completely suffocated with debt after trying to make a go of a serious writing career. Problem is she put all her efforts into founding a literary post-modern feminist magazine, which doesn’t do so well, particularly in L.A. So angering to watch her screenwriter and music video-producer friends throw money around the table of a posh restaurant like confetti, while Margaret struggles to come up with her third of the friend’s birthday meal — $350.

This is what you get in these lovely United States for doing well in school, for remaining true to your ideals, for being a good housewife and mother and giving up your career for an unplanned pregnancy, for trying to lose weight and become popular.

Of course it’s not entirely dark. Through crisis the women (all so different) do come to understand each other, or at least try to. My only problem with the book is that the father seems a little too one-dimensional. Satire or not, I think all characters have to have some semblance of believability, of sympathy, even if we strongly dislike them.

Interesting thing though, I was glancing at the customer reviews on Facebook and Amazon and people seemed pretty bewildered, didn’t seem to get that it was a satire. Customer reviews were sharply at odds with those by professional critics. I scrolled down to see that the booksellers were likening AWEWWE mainly to books by Jane Green, Jennifer Weiner, Lauren Weisberger — authors of a genre that has come to be known over the past decade or so as “chick lit,” a term many female writers find demeaning (Weiner doesn’t; I’ve heard her speak on the issue). The biggest problem I find with the term is that, unlike its male counterpart, “lad lit” (think Nick Hornby and progeny), it’s become ludicrously overbroad, has come to apply to anything written by a woman whose main characters are women.

I found this book through The Elegant Variation, whose input I’ve come to trust, and when I saw who’d edited it — Julie Grau — I knew from other books she’s done I’d likely be happy with this one. But when I went searching for it at Barnes & Noble, I found it shelved with “beach reading,” along with the other aforesaid books. I don’t think I would have picked it up if I hadn’t seen it on Mr. E’s blog, and after finding it where I did in the bookstore I questioned whether I wanted to buy it until I saw the editor. If a book is classified a certain way, people expect a certain thing. With “chick lit” I guess they expect a light romantic comedy with pretty, happy people whose crises are slight and common enough that many readers can wholly relate without trying very hard. AWEWWE is a dark satire, much more akin to, as I said, The Corrections, or to Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm or Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land. No wonder people were shocked. But then again, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to “trick” young people into reading literature…

Anyway, here’s an apropos interview Ms. Brown gave to Jezebel.

(Mikhail Baryshnikov photo by Kenn Duncan, from NYPL site)

There’s a very good exhibit right now at the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts branch of photographer Kenn Duncan’s work. Duncan (1928-1986) was a dancer and champion roller skater in the fifties and became a photographer in the seventies. As a dance photographer, he worked for Dance Magazine and After Dark (a 70s NY weekly apparently covering theater and dance), and later photographed celebrities for various national mags including Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Time, and Life.

He published several collections in book form, many of nudes, mainly with male dancers as subjects. Many of those are included here, likely the reason for the big viewer discretion sign posted on the gallery door. Most of the dancers in that collection I didn’t know, except for Sir Anthony Dowell and Ivan Nagy, but there’s one of a man named Eivind Harum, who kept reminding me of David Hallberg (whom I had to banish from my thoughts for the time being); actor Sal Mineo (from Rebel Without a Cause) is also included in that section. There are some highly creative poses — some poking fun (I think) at beefcake, others very artful.

There are also sections on dancers, dance companies, and choreographers — including photos of a young Twyla Tharp (who I think looks her absolute best right now — I definitely wanna age like her), the Alvin Ailey company in its youth (which looked very different than today — lots of excellent afros, and mainly white female dancers, interestingly), the Houston Ballet, and of course all the greats — Carmen de Lavallade, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Gelsey Kirkland, Suzanne Farrell and Paul Mejia, Natalia Makarova, Peter Martins, Alexander Godunov, Cynthia Gregory, etc. etc. I also spotted a dance belted Lar Lubovitch jeteing artfully over a sash.

Included in the celebrity section are a young, doe-eyed Dianne Keaton, Bette Midler, Maxwell Caufield (remember him, from Grease II was it?), Morgan Fairchild and her then male-cohort in a series of rather hilarious (now anyway) sexed-up poses for some Tarzan and Jane-like TV series they must have been doing, Eartha Kitt, Angela Lansbury, and a very young and almost frightfully innocent-looking Christopher Walken.

Duncan also did some Broadway photos (Hair, The Wiz, Equus, etc.), and some of those are up, as well as several of his fashion ones — mainly a Gucci spread — one of the most fun parts of the exhibit, the 70s being what they were! The ambient music is most evocative (sometimes comically) as well.

It’s a great trip through recent history that ends up making you think about what it is that makes a piece of art either timeless, period, or dated.

The exhibit, at Lincoln Center’s Library For the Performing Arts, continues through October 25th and of course it’s free.