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Internet service out for over 24 hours already. Just called and they said it may be another 48 hours. Do they realize how many people rely on internet for work?
Tag Archive for 'General'
Happy night at ailey, bad night at home
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Dead modem. So sick of time warner. Wrote a big alvin ailey post and about to publish when connection bit the dust.
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…
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…
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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.
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 can’t believe it’s already Labor Day weekend. Whoa. Where did the summer go??
Here are some pictures I took of the Downtown Dance Festival last Sunday in Battery Park. When it ended a brief wave of sadness swept over me. This festival kind of marks the end of summer. I feel like I was just returning from the Caribbean deeply annoyed that it was still in the 50s here…
Anyway, the first company on was Figures in Flight, which is a Modern dance school for kids.
One very cool thing about this school / company, as Artistic Director Susan Slotnick spoke about, is that they also teach Modern dance to men in prison. One of Ms. Slotnick’s former students who was just released from Woodburne Correctional Facility was there. The crowd went nuts with applause for him. Made the longtime former public defender in me very happy. I know there are many prison literacy programs, but haven’t heard of a dance program until now.
The kids of Figures in Flight. Slotnick said one thing she does is try to teach kids nonviolence through dance, teaching them choreography addressing or acting / dancing out issues they may be experiencing, like bullying at school. You could see some of that in the choreography. I met someone in an acting class I took years ago who taught drama therapy to mental patients at Bellevue Hospital here in NY. He basically helped patients learn to act out their problems, to use creativity to solve them rather than internalizing or using violence toward themselves and others. I can see Slotnick doing the same thing with dance and I love it.
Next on was Battleworks Dance Company, which presented Robert Battle’s energetic, mad fun Ella, set to Ella Fitzgerald and danced by Marlena Wolfe.
And Wolfe ends her frenzied fit of a solo by collapsing backwards, completely out of breath! This is the first time I’ve seen Battleworks at this festival. So cool to see what you normally only view in a large, distancing theater just feet before you.
Axis Danz’s Mermaids.
Dancewave’s Kids Company, whom I’d never heard of, did an excellent dance — a combination of African, Modern, and Samba. It was mesmerizing. One of my favorites of the day. And man can those dancers MOVE.
isadoraNOW presented Isadora Duncan’s lovely Southern Roses.
This was an interesting company, called Undertoe Dance Project. They combined Tap with Modern, having two dancers representing each style dancing onstage at the same time. Don’t think I’ve seen that done before. It worked.
On last, ending the festival, was Battery Dance Company, headed by Jonathan Hollander, the festival’s organizer. They performed his lyrical, beatific Where There’s Smoke.
Very pretty, very spiritual.
At the end, the Battery Dance Company dancers invited audience members onstage to learn some of their just-performed choreography.
exhibiting, as Hollander announced, that dance is for everyone…
Also, here are some more pictures I took of Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis! which was performed as part of the Sitelines series of downtown site-specific works, which I briefly mentioned earlier.
They held the performance at five different Financial District-area locations. The one I saw was at the Jeff Koons sculpture in the small park at 7 World Trade Center.
The dancer, dressed as you can see in a red lacey negligee, red ballet-like diaphanous chiffon skirt, long lacey gloves, patent leather red stilettos, and a clear plastic Butoh mask and platinum blonde wig, moved in extreme slow Butoh-style motion making various poses — some sexy, some more balletic (arms held wreath-like over head, toe pointed forward in tendu). She was very unbalanced on the heels — at several points went to do a low arabesque and couldn’t lift her back leg very high or it seemed like she’d clearly fall — and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was moving so slowly, if she wasn’t used to dancing in heels (so, not a Latin dancer ), or if she was faking it, only pretending nearly to fall so as to question the beauty and/or stability of a certain kind of hyper-femininity.
After a series of poses in front of the Koons statue — and beside a small plastic red teddy bear propped up before a red umbrella and holding a little bright blue Jeff Koons ’sculpturette’ — the dancer turned toward the large sculpture. It’s funny but at this point I noticed how sexual that sculpture is, with the little orifice in the middle surrounded by the three others, and then the stamen-like arm shooting up to the side. It’s like an industrial Georgia O’Keefe figure.
She approached the little teddy bear, seemed to delight over his little toy, seemed to ask him if she could hold his “baby-doll.”
She did a little dance with the small Koons dog/doll…
… then took him to his larger cousin, and eventually placed him in its middle orifice.
The whole thing took nearly an hour, the movement was so slow. It was weirdly poetic, and rather entrancing, not only catching but holding the attention of many passersby. I wish I could have made it to some of the other locations because I liked the performance but thought it would have been more of a “Hostile Takeover” had this hyper-sexy, hyper-’feminine’, hyper-artful, hyper-slow-moving dancer been in the midst of all the crazed besuited Wall Street dudes. This little park was not only already arty but kind of removed from the hustle and bustle. Could have better illustrated the contrast between art and commerce, calm and fast-paced, perhaps masculine and feminine (the program describes the performance as a “glamorous collision of sexual desire with masculinity and femininity and real and imagined worlds”; I’d perhaps question the essentialist nature of words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’).
Anyway, there’s one more Sitelines performance, in early/mid September. And then that’s it. Summer dance season in NY is officially over.
Happy Labor Day everyone!
“His mother was a dancer. This meant that she could be found on certain afternoons on the second floor of a building on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway, standing barefoot and in a leotard on a vast wooden floor, often in some strange position. His father had taken him a couple of times to the empty room with an upright piano in the corner. Together they walked up a long narrow flight of dimly lit stairs, at the top of which was a large sunlit space. Sweating men and women in leotards were either jumping around or standing and watching some other person jump around. Their leotards gave them the quality of something encased, like M&M’s. His mother always stood in their midst, panting.
She was also a choreographer. Alex understood this word to mean that she could tell people what to do, and they would listen. Once, when she told him he had to take a bath, he responded, ‘You’re not my choreographer,’ which had the desired effect of shocking her into a kind of marveling silence and therefore postponing, if only for another ten minutes, the bath.
She was a modern dancer. This distinction confused him. He asked his father about it.
‘It means she’s not a member of the Rockettes,’ he said.
One day, when he was seven, she told him that she would soon be having a concert.
‘What’s a concert?’ he said.
‘It’s when I perform in front of many people with my company.’
‘What does your company make?’ he said.
‘It’s a dance company,’ she said. ‘We make dance.’
‘Can people buy dance?’ he asked. At the age of seven he was demonstrating certain capitalist proclivities that had the effect of making his parents look at him with concern, as though he might be coming down with a fever.”
From The Sleep-Over Artist, by Thomas Beller (all italics in the original). I seem to be on a Thomas Beller kick lately and found the passage rather amusing; thought I’d share. I used to take Flamenco lessons at Alex’s mother’s studio, by the way. I think anyway… unless Steps used to be up at 89th Street…
For New Yorkers who don’t know, the Strand downtown — Fulton Street location — lost its lease and is moving out. They’re having a 50% off sale through, according to Galley Cat, the end of September. Above are some of my purchases — spent about three hours there and would have bought a lot more if the Joan Acocella and Balanchine hadn’t been so blasted heavy. I could barely carry my double bag-full home!
I bought The Dud Avocado because I remembered Terry Teachout had posted about it (and saw he’s written this edition’s intro.), and the White Swan, Black Swan looked interesting. It’s a collection of short stories written by dancer turned fiction writer, Adrienne Sharp.
There isn’t a whole lot left, but in the Dance section there are a couple more old-ish hardcover copies of the Balanchine for $7.50 apiece, an unused-looking copy of the newish Lincoln Kirstein bio for $9.00, and a bunch of huge photo books, some for as low as $2.50. The section doesn’t have its own label (what else is new?) but is within Opera and Classical Music.
One of China’s most revered classical dancers was seriously injured during rehearsals for Olympics opening night ceremonies when she leaped onto a floorboard that collapsed. She’s currently in the hospital unable to feel anything below her chest and is told she may never walk again. Here’s the Times article. (via Jolene)
On a side note, the NYTimes website can be rather ridiculous at times. They seem to have a policy that their writers are supposed to link only to articles within the Times’ own site. So, when this writer, David Barboza, tells you Liu Yan has become very popular on YouTube, you click on his (or his editor’s) link thinking you’re going to be led to a YouTube clip of her performing. But what do you get instead: a completely irrelevant article from the Times’ Business archive on the YouTube phenomenon. Why even link if it has nothing to do with the issue? I’m pretty sure everyone knows what YouTube is by now.
Anyway, since I’m a blogger and can link to websites other than my own, here, here, and here are some YouTube clips I found of her performing. And she’s listed as the main soloist in this beautiful piece. There are many more. Hopefully she’ll recover.
There’s a really good discussion going on over at Claudia La Rocco’s The Culturist about the Olympic coverage — people are even likening it to porn!
I couldn’t help get off on a tangent about male versus female gymnastics. During the last Olympics I remember going out to dinner with a group of my feminist friends and they were bemoaning how women’s sports are taken so unseriously by the public, giving as an example the prominence of the ’silly’ ‘girl-child’ sport of female gymnastics over the more ‘real’ sports of women’s softball, etc. — the team sports. I thought the criticism was so unfair given how incredibly hard those gymnasts work, and I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t be in absolute awe of them as they did those impossible-looking tumbling passes and balance beam maneouvers and flying-through-the-air vaults. On the other hand, I’d played girls softball when I was young and felt there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do that the women players were doing without practice. So, why were they privileging team sports — so popular in men’s athletics — over individual sports, which women tend toward?
These friends were all lawyers and feminist legal scholars and I thought it was in large part my love of ballet and dance that made me at odds with them over this, so when I read Claudia (NYTimes dance critic, if you don’t know her) liken the female gymnasts to Jean Benet Ramsey, I thought, oh no!
After watching the women’s gymnastics last night in comparison to the men’s the night before, I did see a difference. The men do tend to be older (20-25), the women younger (16-20). And of course for anyone who watched last night, there seems to be a controversy over the actual ages of the Chinese female gymnasts. The cut-off age is 16 in the Olympic year (so you can be 15 now as long as you turn 16 by December 31, 2008), but no younger, and Bela Karolyi, among others, is questioning that some of those Chinese girls are that old. They did look quite young, but Asians are generally smaller-boned than Caucasians, and, as commenter Meg on Claudia’s blog pointed out, intense athletic training can delay the onset of puberty.
Of course the issue with the delayed onset of puberty caused by intense athletic training (which I hadn’t thought of) is an issue in itself. I’d think that’d be the case with any sport though, including Ballet. Maybe that’s one reason why ballerinas tend to be so thin, and not anorexia… And of course you don’t want to discourage female athleticism; wouldn’t that be sexist if you didn’t say the same for males? Does intense athleticism delay puberty for males though?…
And why favor female athletes so young anyway? Because they’re smaller and won’t go out of bounds on the tumbling passes? Because smaller bodies can tumble higher and get around those uneven bars at more astounding speeds, without fear of hitting the floor? Because as Karolyi said last night, youth doesn’t have as much fear of failure? Why isn’t all this the same for the men then?
The Chinese girls did seem to have more makeup on than the Americans, and they did seem to be jutting their hips and pelvises out and making poses on the floor that we might deem too sexy for their young-looking ages. But Jolene pointed out that that may be a cultural bias, and I agree. I went to an African dance performance with a Ballet friend the other night and she couldn’t stop laughing embarrasingly at the hip and pelvic movement; she’d never seen African before and didn’t know what to make of it, other than laugh at it and feel embarrassment for the dancers. Maybe their style just isn’t something we’re used to. Jolene also pointed out that the makeup seems to be an American thing, and I agree. I rarely see Asian women wearing that harsh bright aqua eyeshadow, yet that was a real fashion statement here in prior decades. They know they’re on TV, the Olympics are heavily dominated by the American press, and they’re trying to be like us. Ironically, it’s backfiring.
Finally, we’re also hearing all these stories about how awful the Chinese are to their children — forcing them into the sport, making them stay away from their families when the little girls really just want to come home, in comparison to the American stories, where the families always insist they’ve let their children decide how much dedication they wanted to give to their sport. Let’s just keep in mind that we’re hearing this all from the perspective of the American press. They assume we’ll feel better about ourselves, about our losing gold medals to the Chinese if we believe our society is so much more just. Not that I don’t believe in being critical at all of other governments; I didn’t have time to write about it, but I attended a reading organized by the PEN American Center of works by imprisoned Chinese dissident writers on the night before the Olympics began. But let’s just remember that our press exercises its own form of propaganda.
Okay, I’m done blabbering! Have a look at Claudia’s post and the responses.
I love this post by Counter Critic. Jacob’s Pillow (the esteemed summer dance festival held in Massachusetts) accepted his friend’s work but then asked her to delete some parts because the venue at which the company was to perform was deemed “for family.” CC covers all the bases: what is “family,” why accept a work then ask the artist to censor herself, why are adults even so hysterical over their children hearing the word “sex,” etc. Taylor mentioned she was attending a discussion tonight held as part of the New York Fringe Festival on issues involved in gearing dance performances to “families.” I wonder if this kind of thing will be discussed…
I found this short story by Alfred Doblin about a ballerina’s struggle with her body in Words Without Borders, whose current issue is devoted to psychiatric themes. (via Maud)
I thought tonight’s finale was rather eh. Nothing blew me away; last week was so much better. Well, that’s not entirely true — I loved Twitch and Joshua’s Hip Hop / Russian thing choreographed by Youri Nelzine. At first I thought the choreographer was calling it a Chekhov dance; I was like, Chekhov choreographed? Then I realized he was saying “Trepak,” as in the Russian Dance from The Nutcracker. I thought it was actually pretty ingenious of him to combine Russian folk and Hip Hop like that, playing on both dancers’ strengths — Twitch’s amazing thigh muscles and all that movement close to the floor, and Joshua’s crazy jumps. Loved the splits jumps, that twisting corkscrew of a jump. I wonder if we’re going to see a Nutcracker this year somewhere with those two performing that dance, like we saw Sabra and Neil do last winter…
Anyway, too much fun, those guys. I really want one of them to win. Twitch grew on me this week, so now I’m divided between him and Josh.
I was also impressed by Courtney, who I think has improved tremendously. She’s standing out so much more now. She really has become so theatrical. She’s become a real actor, and her movements are so much sharper than before. I don’t think she’ll win — I think the others still have more overall clout by this point, but I think she should be very proud of herself.
The two last dances were the worst, unfortunately. The Jive totally lacked energy and bounce and height. The kicks and the sailor shuffles, and just all the fancy footwork — not there at all. That’s what’s so fantastic about jive — the lightening-fast footwork, the crazy fun, the electric charge of the dance, not the aerials — which were excellent by the way, but it’s like they saved their energy for those. And what was that Mia Michaels number in the end? It looked like Shakers who’ve been kept from society for a little too long and have gone a bit haywire. I liked the very beginning though, with the unfolding of the satiny-looking crimson sheets. But that’s the only part I liked…
Anyway, my post on the results should be up on HuffPost on Friday.
Who do you guys think will win??? I predict Josh or Katee.
I went to Dance Brazil and RumbaTap at Central Park’s Summer Stage last night and damn was it crowded. The most crowded I’ve ever seen Summer Stage. I ended up only staying for RumbaTap; left before Dance Brazil because I was just too claustrophobic (in my mind they let way too many people in; I was near the top in the bleachers, my knees jutting into the guy’s back in front of me, my own back being probed by the knees of the guy behind me, serried between the man next to me and the woman on my other side illegally sitting on a bleacher step because there was nowhere to stand. They really need to turn people away next time for safety purposes). I’d already seen Dance Brazil anyway (which I wrote about here) and they were performing the same program — Ritmo — so I figured I’d let someone else get squeezed all to bits.
(sorry so blurry; I’m one of the few who actually obeyed the “no flash photography” rule)
Anyway, Max Pollack’s RumbaTap was good (and I recognized one of the dancers, Matt’s sister, Carson Murphy, right off the bat because of the big hair!). They danced to a variety of Latin rhythms — Salsa, Merengue, traditional Afro-Cuban, and even some Bulgarian (which is Mr. Pollack’s heritage). It was a bit hard, though, to see from so far away (one thing that annoys me greatly about Summer Stage is that no matter how early you get there, it’s hard to get a seat up front because they reserve practically all of them), and it was very hard not to be distracted by the hordes of people trying to find a seat, buying food, talking to each other and paying no attention to the dancing, etc. etc. etc. I think tap, like ballet, is probably too small, the movement too subtle and soft, to work well on a big, open-air stage like this where you don’t have crowd control. I’m thinking Dance Brazil’s Capoeira, with all the big, flashy acrobatics, probably captivated the crowd, especially in the back, much more successfully.
The crowd waiting for Dance Brazil…
Anyway, there’s one more Summer Stage dance event, next Friday, when Jennifer Muller and Erica Essners perform. Go here for info on Muller and Essners, and go here for the rest of the Summer Stage schedule (most of which consists of music events).
One of the great things about New York in August is the abundance of free outdoor events, most of which include dance: Lincoln Center Out of Doors, held in Damrosch Park, just behind the State Theater and facing Fordham Law School, is showcasing Armitage Gone! and Noche Flamenca, among other dance companies; the Lower Manhattan Culture Council’s Sitelines is a series of site-specific dance performances all taking place in lower Manhattan which are usually pretty good; the Downtown Dance Festival, sponsored by Battery Dance Company, takes place August 16-24 also at various Financial District-area locations; and, finally, my beloved Alvin Ailey continues celebrations of their 50th anniversary with several free performances and dance workshops throughout all five boroughs, including an all-day outdoor street festival on Saturday, August 9th in front of City Center in midtown Manhattan, with free performances inside that theater throughout the day.
Speaking of City Center, don’t forget Fall For Dance coming up September 17-27. Tickets for these $10 multi-company performances go on sale at 11:00 a.m. on September 7th and sell out in days if not hours. It doesn’t appear this year’s schedule is up yet (it’s on my mind because they were passing out flyers for it last night), but I’ll post it when it is. For those who don’t yet know about FFD, I don’t think there’s any greater value– you see a variety of top-notch dance companies for only $10 a ticket ($15 if you buy online, but STILL!)
Finally, as my art historian friend alerted me to, if you’re lucky enough to be in Paris in the near future, Sotheby’s is presenting what appears to be a magnificent collection of Ballet Russes material in celebration of that dance company’s 100th birthday. Looks fabulous.
(photo by Tom Caravaglia)
Again, I plan to have a full review coming soon, but just want to tell everyone to try to make it to Battleworks at the Joyce in Chelsea this week, if you can. They’re on Thursday night and Saturday (Keigwin + Co. is Friday night). I find Robert Battle’s work so engagingly complex. The meaning is complicated, but you get the definite sense there is something there, that you want to spend time thinking about, dissecting. And there’s so much emotion is his dances — dancers spin in a whirlwind toward each other, hurl themselves to the floor repeatedly, pick themselves up again, fall backward in exhaustion, do violent flips, at times seem to walk on a tightrope… emotions range from elation to anger to searching thought, to humor, to sad world weariness, and movements from African, tribal, Hip Hop, to Martha-Graham-esque modern… it’ll leave you stunned long after the show is over. Do try to go!
(photo of Mr. Battle by Tom Caravaglia).
Oh and Samuel Roberts is a MIRACLE! (photo, again, Tom Caravaglia).
Go here for Philip’s review.
Muchas muchas MUCHAS gracias to Philip for finding this. It’s a collection of absolutely stunning photographs by Richard Calmes of dancers taken in various locations throughout NYC. Above is Yannick LeBrun from French Guiana, newest member of Alvin Ailey (formerly with Alvin Ailey II, their studio company), and one of my new favorites.
The other night, despite my headache, I went out to Lincoln Center to see Midsummer Night Swing — not to participate, just to check out its new location at Damrosch Park (it’s usually held on the Lincoln Center Plaza but with all the construction, they relocated it for this summer). I think it’s actually a much better location than the Plaza. There’s much more space to set up food stands, sell drinks, and there’s even a nice little gelato place in the front. And there’s tons of space in the park’s wide walkways — far more than on the crowded Plaza — to dance without having to pay the $15 to go into the bandshell’s dance floor (which is probably why they don’t normally hold it here).
Anyway, Dance Times Square (Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin’s studio) is going to be hosting this Thursday’s lesson and performance. According to the schedule the dance is Swing. Go here for the full schedule.
Also, in preparation for spending the rest of the summer revising my novel yet again (hopefully for the last time) and working on some other smaller things, I’ve been going to readings, many of them outdoors. Here are a few:
A discussion by debut novelists (from left to right) Charles Bock (whose book, Beautiful Children, I’m reading now), Stefan Merrill Block (whose book I want to read next), Sophie Gee, and Ceridwen Dovey moderated by biggie Random House editor (and novelist) David Ebershoff, in the Bryant Park reading room.
Gee had an interesting idea: she’s an English professor at Princeton and teaches 18th Century lit, which most of her students, she said with humorously self-deprecating woe, take only to meet their period requirement. Tired of getting dead stares and snickers when she exclaims how fascinating is some of the literature, like Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, she decided to rewrite the story, for contemporary audiences. Definitely want to check it out.
Jonathan Miles reading from his debut novel Dear American Airlines at The Half King in Chelsea. He is surprisingly soft-spoken and with the acoustics in the pub it was very difficult to hear him. I used to love going to readings there but they’ve got to either turn down or off the pub music while the reading’s going on or get better padding for the door separating the bar from the restaurant reading area (and then prevent people from constantly leaving and entering). I personally think they should just open everything up, turn off the music and put the reader’s mike on all speakers; let the damn boozers listen to a 30-minute reading for cry-eye!
Junot Diaz (Pulitzer prize winner for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”) and Aleksandar Hemon read together at Central Park’s Summer Stage, and the place was very happily packed. This area’s normally used for bands, so very exciting for a couple of writers to fill it up. That was an excellent reading and discussion (albeit, at a little over two hours in length, a bit short). I think all writers going on book tour should take reading lessons from Diaz; he’s by far the liveliest I’ve ever heard. In response to an audience question about why some authors get so much public attention and seem unfairly more popular than others, he said you can’t worry about how the work is going to be received by the public as you’re writing it; you don’t write for the present, you write for the future.
I went to a dance performance with Philip tonight (more on that in a minute) and taped So You Think You Can Dance. My VCR timing system must have slightly malfunctioned because I set it for 7:55 p.m. and my tape started about halfway through Courtney and Joshua’s first routine. Did they mention why they’re substituting Comfort for Jessica? Did Jessica get hurt? Did they just change their minds about the top 10? I’m confused!
Pas de deux? As in Ballet?
Eeeee, Desmond Richardson!
Nigel likens D.R. appearing on the show to Nureyev’s tap dancing on The Muppets saying, “You share your love of the art of dance wherever you can.” So true, Nigel. So true. So true!
I have been getting a good number of visitors to my blog through Google searches from this little ole mobile post I did when I was in Blackpool. I’ve also gotten several comments. Damn, I wish we could see the show here! Perhaps American networks should take notice of its popularity… sounds much more interesting than that “Who’s the Biggest Loser” we have now.
My write-up on SYTYCD’s Week 2 elimination round is up on HuffPost. Can’t believe Marquis is gone …
You guys, I’m wondering if people can answer a question for me. I guess this applies mainly to my readers who are not located in NY and who have never before seen American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, or any of the companies I write about. But it also applies to anyone who has an answer really.
Do you think if a writer is really good and can convey the beauty of a dancer or of a dance, that pictures are unnecessary? Are there any such writers? Joan Acocella, Arlene Croce, Edwin Denby, Julie Kavanagh, Laura Jacobs? (I use those examples because those writers have published books, in which there are few if any visuals). Is it even possible to convey the beauty of an inherently visual art form in words? Do pictures even do justice since dance is not just visual, but inherently movement-oriented?
Do you need a combination of writing and visuals? Is there a difference between blogs, books, magazines, and newspapers in terms of what you expect?
Do you care more about the dancers the writer is talking about if the writer posts a picture of them? Do you have more of a human connection to them that way? If so, is a full-body picture of them in a dance pose better than a headshot? Do you connect more to the face or body form? Or do you honestly just not care about them at all if there’s no chance you’ll ever see them perform?
I ask mainly because bloggers are beginning to run into copyright violation issues with videos and photos.
The annual DCA conference happened last weekend in Washington DC. I had really wanted to go but there was so much going on here and I kind of exhausted my travel budget last month between England and the Caribbean :S
Speakers and panelists included Laura Jacobs (a critic and novelist who writes beautifully lyrically about dance), Doug Fox of Great Dance (who spoke about using the internet to promote dance, his specialty), my friend Apollinaire Scherr (it was her first time speaking there!), and of course Alastair Macaulay (chief critic of NYTimes), among others. Presiding over the event was Robert Abrams, the Association’s President and the founder of Explore Dance (and my editor there — which is probably why my Blackpool review isn’t yet up )
Anyway, thankfully Taylor went and she will be writing about it in her next few posts. It appears from Taylor’s first post that it was a fascinating and inspiring weekend and now I’m all the more sad I didn’t go…
Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
T-Mobile
On my way through Times Square subway station I noticed a Salsa competition video showing in the window of one of the shops. Organizer Billy Fajardo was then shown giving an interview, followed by more dancing. His Salsa competition in Miami several years ago was the first one I ever did, so it brought back nice memories. Also nice to see people stopping in the subway to watch dance.
Before I left for the Caribbean, I saw several films at the Tribeca Film Festival, which I still have to blog about. The first was the documentary “Gotta Dance” about the NetSationals, the first ever senior citizen cheerleading dance team, which entertained at halftime during New Jersey Nets’ home games. It was a sweet film. I wrote about it for Explore Dance here. Above are some blurry pics I took in the theater, where, after the film, some of the dancers came up and did a little hip hop performance, then spoke briefly about the movie.
Soon to come on Explore Dance will be my review of the other dance movie I saw, “Whatever Lola Wants,” a narrative that I didn’t like as well.
Hi everyone — so sorry it took me so long to post! I finally have my little photo album of my trip up here. Click on the thumbnail for a full picture and caption.
Here are a few of my favorites:
coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
the Bacardi mascot! And the only picture with me in it — my reflection, looking a little cross-eyed trying to get the perfect shot, is in the back mirror…
Puerto Rican folk dancing show in the San Cristobal Fortress in central Old San Juan.
long, dark, kinda-scary-if-you’re-alone tunnel leading to the Fortress’s courtyard.
colorful buildings of old San Juan, on a busy street at night-time.
pastel-colored, yacht-ridden Tortola, capital of the British Virgin Islands.
“Treasure Island” in the back through the haze, off the coast of Tortola.
beautiful clean water!
climbing the long, tortuous, dirt roads of the immensely mountainous island. Houses are sparsely located; each owner seems to have their own latitude (or is it longitude?) of mountainside…
about half-way up to the top. How large does our ship look down there?!
mural of Tortolan folk dance known as Bamboshay, which our tour guide described as a cross between Dominican merengue and Cuban / Puerto Rican Salsa.
Samana, a very rural, agricultural area on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. In sharp contrast to the very middle-class Tortola, Samana is very poor.
children would see our open-air tour bus approach and would run outside hands opened begging for American money. This little boy started to cry after our tour guide told him to get lost. After that, people felt sorry for the little ones, so they’d give them dollar bills, which really opened up the flood gates of every house along every street…
They’re building a dam so hopefully by this time next year they will have running water. Right now people — mostly women and children from what I saw — had to walk to a well or a local proprietor with imported bottled water for sale and carry large bottles back to their houses. Most people didn’t own cars. Some had a mule or horse, and a lucky few had scooters, but most just walked everywhere.
a man on his chicken farm. People here were so unused to tourists, everyone was so nice. They’d all come out of their houses, wave at us, or come up and talk to us — or our tour guide anyway, who would translate their Spanish into English.
man washing his hands in the ocean.
artwork for sale on the beach.
hehehe, I was one of the two Americans brave enough to eat the local food. At a beach restaurant (basically two picnic tables set up outside of woman’s kitchen) I tried to order rice and beans, but the restaurant owner / cook couldn’t understand my Spanglish. A man ordered fish, so I asked her if she had “pollo / chicken?” Her face brightened into a big smile and she screamed “yes, yes!” It was definitely her specialty — the best barbecued chicken I’ve ever had!
The other Americans, though they wouldn’t order food, had no problem ordering drinks. They all ordered pina coladas, but I took the tour guide’s suggestion and ordered a local “coco loco” which I discovered was simple coconut juice and rum. The woman who owned the restaurant came out to our table bearing what appeared to be a machete. I jumped in my seat, almost threw my wallet at her and ran off. Everyone must have had the same facial expression as me, since she looked at us all like we were nuts. She soon returned with some pinapples and a coconut for me, hacked off the tops of the fruit, plopped some straws into each and set them before us, along with a big ole bottle of rum. We all looked at each other quizzically. We were supposed to decide how much rum to put in our own drinks! I’m not a bartender! I had to ask her to do mine for me. She really thought we were a crazy group. That was an excellent meal though…
One woman felt sorry for the dog sitting at my feet and ordered a chicken plate just to give to him. Of course after she was all done feeding the cute little guy, her hands were covered with barbecue sauce and grease (I ate mine with fork and knife). She then asked for a faucet. There’s no running water on the island, hence no such thing (we had to flush toilets with buckets of water — I never got the hang of it to be honest and just resigned not to have to go to the bathroom the whole time I was there). When the restaurant owner simply frowned, the American woman of course began to hystericize — “what do I do, what do I do, my hands, my hands!” The poor restaurant owner had to bring out a jug of very coveted water and pour it over the tourist woman’s hands. Then everyone else wanted some. I was so embarrassed!
some more houses amidst the beautiful, lush greenery.
now taking a private scooter ride into the town to shop. The tourist shops were overpriced, but I felt like it was such a poor country that so needed tourist dollars, I bought a couple of things — a cute little monkey made out of a coconut and a little hand painting.
Anyway, I have many more pics, here!
Tomorrow night (Monday, April 21), PBS is airing a dance special honoring America’s national parks. Several choreographers made site-specific dances which were performed in various outdoors national monuments including: Yosemite National Park; the U.S. Virgin Islands; the Coral Reef National Monument off the coast of St. John Island; Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, from which the Wright Brothers first took flight; Mammoth Cave; and Hawaii’s Volcanic national park.
I was fortunate enough to be given an advance preview. My favorite parts were the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team performing underwater amidst the beautiful corals and exotic sea life of the Virgin Islands, the dancers often looking like tantalizing sea creatures themselves; members of Donald Byrd’s troupe performing dances evoking freedom and slavery set first on Cinnamon Bay, Virgin Islands, then in ruins of an old Sugar Plantation on St. John’s Island. I also liked the very end, Doug Varone’s troupe dancing to folk music in the Mammoth Caves. Varone uses film and video in his productions as well, to good effect. I also loved seeing the footage of the Hawaiian volcanic beaches — breathtaking. And Project Bandaloop (whose dancers perform airborne activities, often while climbing large mountainous rocks), whom I know other bloggers like, is included as well.
Overall, I felt this program, which is 90 minutes long, gets bogged down in too much discussion of process – the choreographers trying to figure out what they want to evoke, how best of evoke it, instructing the dancers on the same, the dancers telling us how best they feel they can draw something out, how difficult it can be to do so — it’s too much, and it gets boring and ruins the magic of the performance. Anyway, it’s worth watching for everything I mentioned above even if it gets tedious at points. And since it’s not on until 10:00 (ET), it won’t interfere with Dancing With the Stars
So, did anyone watch the first episode of “Step It Up and Dance,” on Bravo? My first thoughts, honestly: it made “Dance War” look like a work of genius. I think this is the worst of all the dance shows I’ve seen. What was that horrid “choreography” in the group competition numbers? Who were those people sitting in the judges’ chairs, telling the one guy to act more like a “man” and the two women (doing hip hop after all) not to be so butch. “I need you two to be careful not to dance like angry men.” Well, I need intelligence and sophistication. This was an insult. And, they almost eliminated the only decent dancer, the Italian guy. Well, the Movin’ Out guy was the second best, and they liked him, surprisingly. I feel like I just have a completely different concept of dance than the show’s producers, to put it mildly…
