Cuban ballet star, currently a principal at the Royal in London, has a role opposite Natalie Portman in the movie, New York I Love You, set to open here October 16. You can see him in the trailer around the :58 mark.
If you can read Spanish (and I largely can’t anymore), here’s an interview with him, and here’s another piece about the possibility of a film based on his memoir, No Way Home.
…to rave reviews, particularly Benjamin Millepied’s latest:
“Receiving its world premiere performance, Benjamin Millepied’s “Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once” was a knockout. Contrary to its title, there was a lot happening all the time, as the full compliment of 24 dancers often filled the tight performance space with a busy but ordered beauty. Solos and lifts popped up like little tornados. A sensual pas de deux featured Stella Abrera and Marcelo Gomes. Near the conclusion, lines of dancers moved in a militaristic lock step.
During the final movement Daniil Simkin – a 22 year-old blonde Russian – stole the show. As the other men flung him up and about, he balanced in their raised hands and posed like a bare-chested god. And in solos that went by in a flash, Simkin seemed to tumble in midair, as strong as a gymnast yet light as a bird.
To the kinetic music of David Lang and the stark but effective lighting of Brad Fields, Millepied’s choreography was propulsive and contemporary. After making a strong impression with a new work at SPAC last summer, Millepied showed an even steadier hand here and with a larger compliment of dancers to boot. Move over Christopher Wheeldon, Millepied is now the ballet choreographer to watch.”
ABT begins its four-day NYC season at Avery Fisher Hall this Wednesday. Can’t wait!
Sorry posting has been kind of lame over the past week. I’m working really hard on finishing the final read-throughs of my novel and, as always, it’s more involved than I expected. I have several exciting Fall For Dance programs still to write about — a puppet-performed Petrushka, Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, the fabulous Trocks, Dance Brazil’s unique capoeira / samba / modern blend, Tiler and Gonzalo 😀 , the best Afternoon of a Faun (involving two fauns actually) I’ve ever seen — this is by far the best FFD Festival I can remember — and I plan to write about it all at the end of the weekend or early next week; after, hopefully, I’ve finished my rewrites.
In the meantime, above is my final cover. Took me forever to okay something I was happy with. At first I was going to go with this one:
But then I had dinner with a gay male friend, who said of this bottom one, “Okay. This looks like it’s about a girl who goes around New York giving blow jobs.”
Which my novel is NOT about! I sought others’ opinions — nearly drove all of my friends crazy — and most people agreed that, since it’s about a young woman with a disorder, the cover should indicate that. It’s just that the disorder she develops is due in part to her moving into the city — a city she feels largely alienated by — and so it’s partly about her ability to make her own home here. Which is why I thought an arty cityscape would work.
But apparently not with this title!
I’d gotten the idea for the arty cityscape cover from my favorite Breakfast at Tiffany’s edition.
I also love this cover, for Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend:
This is as large as I could blow it up, but it’s one of my very favorite covers. I’d asked my design team to come up with something similar (with a woman looking into the abyss), and they couldn’t. I showed a friend and she kind of burst out laughing and told me I’d need to hire an artist to make me something wholly original if I wanted something approaching it. I have that Lost Weekend edition (which I found at a rare bookstore in Durham, NC) and the cover is an actual piece art — it’s actually painted onto the cover, which is made of a sturdier material than regular covers — the result being that once the years go by and the cover ages, you literally can’t open the book without breaking it. So, the irony is that that book is unreadable; it must simply sit on my bookshelf facing out, to showcase the piece of visual art that it’s now solely become. In any event, even if I did want a book that could only be enjoyed for its cover, I don’t have the money to hire my own artist.
But I think my design team came up with something that works anyway.
My biggest problem with having a photo of a woman on the cover is that I was afraid it’d be taken for Chick-lit, a moniker I think every female writer has some kind of issue with, or at least thinks about. I thought an illustration would make it look like it’s about art — which it partly is: one of the protagonist’s friends is an artist and he’s an important character. And I thought a photo of a woman would alienate male readers. But then a friend who works as an artistic director of a magazine said illustrations don’t sell; you gotta have a photo, which she insisted was pertinent to books as well as magazines (and she has two published books of her own out). She’s one of four or five people (as I said, I drove all of my friends stark raving nuts) who helped me come up with the idea for my final cover.
…which I’m happy with — I think it hints at what the book is about and is dramatic and somewhat provocative without being over the top. I just hope it doesn’t alienate potential male readers. But then, as practically everyone I know (of both sexes) have told me ad nauseam, men don’t read anyway — especially fiction; women read and Chick-lit sells. So just embrace it.
Anyway, there are many other issues involved in the whole Chick-lit quandary, and in book cover art, but I’ve blabbered for too long. Have to get back to my rewrites… And I need to go out for my Friday cupcake.
Have a good weekend everyone!
Stephen Hanna is returning to NYCB this winter season. Apparently he’s going to be listed as a guest for the upcoming season, but he’s resuming his principal rank. He leaves the Billy Elliot Broadway cast at the end of this month.
I’ll be excited to see him on the NYCB stage again, especially since the Billy Elliot production, ridiculously, didn’t give him enough to do.
His Billy Elliot replacement hasn’t yet been determined.
Over the weekend I saw the second of the two experimental performances sponsored by the Guggenheim in celebration of the museum’s current Kandinsky exhibit. (The first was the Isabella Rossellini reading / light show I wrote about earlier). This one, which took place at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, sought to honor the ideals of the early 20th Century Kandinsky-led Blue Rider movement, which advocated the bringing together of visual, music, and literary artists to produce art that would engage all of the senses.
So, this production, The Blue Rider in Performance, combined poetry/opera libretti, music, dance, and paintings and other visuals. During the first half of the program, soprano Susan Narucki sang libretti by various composers including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas de Hartmann, Arthur Lourie, and Anton Webern, while Sarah Rothenberg (who also conceived and directed the show), played piano.
Both women were brilliant. I also loved the images projected onto the back wall during the singing and piano playing. Sometimes a vibrant full-blown painting by Kandinsky would appear, at other times the wall would go blank and a black line would slowly begin wending its way across that wall — a painting in progress. At other times, there would be no painting, but instead a kind of light show of shadow play of what was happening onstage. The lights would catch Rothenberg as she played. She’d sometimes appear rather ghostlike, sometimes macabre, sometimes threatening, as she’d hunch over her piano, creating a rather wicked shadow, while swaying her body rather violently about as her hands flew back and forth across the keys, producing an equally violent-sounding melody.
I didn’t know that much about Kandinsky, and so, after these performances did some research. Art historians and critics have used his painting, The Blue Rider (above), to show how he used color. Kandinsky was considered the father of abstract art. He wasn’t as interested in painting figures realistically as he was evoking an emotional response in the viewer through color and shadow – -blue being the color of spirituality to him. In the image above, your eye is drawn to the movement of the rider. But the movement is depicted through a series of colors– the blue of his jacket is lighter than that cast on the ground by his shadow — rather than specific details. Is he carrying a child in his arms or not? It’s not really clear. But you get the sense that the rider is moving very fast toward something; you feel an urgency.
I felt that as well with the way they used the lights to shadow Ms. Rothenberg as she played piano. You couldn’t see details in her movement, which was illuminated in large shadows on the back wall, but she was moving across that keyboard madly, her movements blending into one another. She looked like a mad scientist at times. The sometimes chaotic melody, along with these shadows, combined to create this feeling of frenzy, or of being haunted by something.
In the second half of the program, the piano was removed and the Brentano String Quartet took the stage and played Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10 (Arnold Schoenberg was a member of the Blue Rider Group as well). During the first part of this second half, four dancers from Armitage Gone! Dance performed choreography by former “punk ballerina” Karole Armitage. Opera Chic informs that Schoenberg wrote this piece during a rather trauma-filled period in his life, when his wife left him for another man – an artist Schoenberg had hired to teach him to paint — then returned home, upon which the artist committed suicide and destroyed all of his artwork.
The four dancers — two male, two female — in broad strokes portrayed this story, the two women initially beginning as companions, then fighting, breaking into couples with the two men. The couples would mirror each other — one would struggle, performing tension-filled lifts and supported stretches, while the other would be more at peace with one another. Then it would change. At one point, one of the couples was engaged in this really sadly beautiful statue-like embrace where the woman leaned toward the man, putting her weight into his chest, seemingly needing him, while he, considerably taller than she, rested one elbow atop her shoulder, and held his hand to his forehead, as if his mind was full of turmoil, trying to decide what to do about her. It was such a mesmerizing pose, especially with the way they held it for a considerable time, I almost couldn’t take my eyes off of them to watch the other couple dance.
During the second half, the dancers exited and the soprano returned. So there wasn’t a whole lot of dance. But, despite that, I really enjoyed these two experimental performances the Guggenheim put on. More please!
The Kandinsky exhibit continues through mid-January.
Speaking of Baz Luhrmann, Roberto Bolle, who has said recently that he’d like to work with the director, was spotted at opening ceremonies for Milan’s Fashion week, which kicked off yesterday. Via Treehugger. For more Fashion Week photos and vids, go here.
No, I shouldn’t say that. Not after tonight, when Bruno actually behaved for once! Baz was sweet. And young! He must have been 20 when Strictly Ballroom came out?… I’m glad that movie’s mention received the most cheers by the audience. Makes me feel like viewers really do respect ballroom; like this show’s not all about celebrity.
Anyway, I thought all of the dancers did a little better tonight than last week; some — like Melissa — were greatly improved. I think my favorites overall were still Donny Osmond and Kym — he’s just too much fun and so cute! He had all that fast footwork in the Jive so down, from the tricks, the flicks, the kicks, the slides, the character — all of it.
Other favorites were Mark and Lacey’s Quickstep — wow, he can really dance: that high jete in sync, that leapfrog over her head, the runs, the footwork. Very polished, and very athletic. I didn’t expect that from a chef…
I also liked Mya and Dmitry’s Jive. I think she is a natural. She did those turns like a pro
Continue reading “BAZ LUHRMANN SHOULD REPLACE BRUNO ON DWTS”
I’m so sad to hear of this. I didn’t really know Mr. Mason, but over the last couple of years, he’s been seated next to me at many dance performances. I knew who he was because so many critics would stop by our row and greet him. He was the most lively man. I remember sitting next to him last year when then new ABT wunderkind Daniil Simkin danced Flames of Paris with Sarah Lane, and after Simkin completed an astounding series of barrel turns, Mr. Mason whistled, raised his eyebrows and shook his head, letting out a little laugh. I remember thinking, okay if this man, who’s apparently been around a while and seen a lot, is impressed by this guy, Simkin is officially impressive.
I also remember seeing Mr. Mason not long ago at a Cedar Lake installation performance. A young woman slid off our bench and began stretching and several of us kind of looked at each other, obviously wondering whether she was a dancer and part of the performance but too shy to ask. Mr. Mason took one look at her, and got up and called out to her, “Are you part of the performance?” (She wasn’t, she laughed.)
I feel like I just saw him and he looked perfectly healthy, although with elderly people I guess you never know — it can be any little thing that causes death. I’m actually shocked he was 88; I thought he was in his early 70s — probably because he was so active and sprightly.
And active he was, as you can see from the obituaries. I was just recently introduced to the excellent critical journal he edited, Ballet Review, one of the many things he did.
It’s just so sad thinking that you just saw the person and, now, that’s going to be the last time you ever saw them. I thought the same with Clive Barnes.
Here is James Wolcott’s obituary, and here Alastair Macaulay’s.
Oh how I wish Anthony Lane would have reviewed this film; unfortunately the New Yorker didn’t assign him. I always value his insights, particularly on movies I find disturbing. And I found this one so not because of the subject matter (race and gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa), but because of the way men, women, blacks and whites are all depicted, the extremely outmoded essentialist terms in which women and men are portrayed (ie: I am man, therefore I desire to rape women; I am woman therefore I love children and won’t have an abortion, etc. etc.)
The film is based on the Booker-prize-winning novel of the same name by Nobel-winning writer, J.M. Coetzee, a white man from South Africa who currently lives in Australia.
David Lurie (Malkovich) is a 52-year-old white professor at a Cape Town university who’s attracted to younger biracial women. As the movie opens, we see him soliciting a prostitute who fits such description, and shortly thereafter he becomes taken with one of his students, Melanie, and the two begin having an affair. It’s not clear how Melanie feels about him though. She seems completely dead during their sex scenes, and whenever she leaves his house, she always looks sad and violated. But it’s not like he’s raping her; she’s there of her own volition and she’s an adult and went into the affair knowingly. Nor is it made clear that he’s committing quid pro quo sexual harrassment — telling her he’ll fail her if she doesn’t do as he pleases; in fact it’s later revealed that the opposite is true — he passes her even though she’s truant and fails to show up for exams.
Eventually her young black boyfriend finds out about them and exposes Lurie. Students drop his classes and the disciplinary committee calls him for a hearing. Lurie seems to agree with the committee that he’s done something wrong (though it’s not clear to me what this is — again, she’s an adult and the sex seems consensual), but won’t defend himself because he can’t apologize for what he considers his (male) “nature.” The disciplinary committee dismisses him from his post and he moves to the country, into his daughter’s farmhouse.
His daughter, Lucy, is a lesbian whose lover has just left her. She shares the farm with a black man, Petrus – -he lives not in the main house but in a shed — who’s worked part of the land, installing pipelines and a well, and who, because of his labor, now owns part of the land. I wish the film had done more to educate viewers about this practice. It’s not clear, in post-apartheid S.A., whether Lucy is trying to help Petrus (she’s clearly liberal-minded and believes in righting historical wrongs) or whether this is the way the new system works to enable black South Africans to gain land ownership. In any event, Petrus is depicted early on as someone who’s up to no good. He’s nearly drooling at the mouth when we (and Lurie) first meet him (like a dog, I guess, since that seems to be the main — totally overdone — metaphor here).
So the dogs: Lucy houses several out back in a cage, partly for humane purposes — apparently there’s an over-population of dogs in S.A. and Lucy’s friends with a female veterinary nurse who catches them, tries to adopt them out and then euthanizes them when she can’t — and partly for protection. We’re made aware up front it’s very dangerous out on the farm — there’s been a lot of pillagings. She also keeps a loaded rifle in the house. At one point, she and Lurie are walking one of the dogs and Lurie tells her dogs are “creatures of habit.” He tells her a story of his childhood neighbor’s dog. The dog (a male) would always go nuts when the bitch next door was in heat. He’d dig holes in the yard, tear things up, etc. — create chaos basically. So his owner would punish him every time this happened. Eventually, the minute the female dog went into heat, the male dog would crouch and whine and walk around with his tail between his legs. The horror of this Pavlovian game, Lurie says, is that the dog eventually learned to deny his own nature. This is why, Lurie says, he shouldn’t be expected to deny his own nature (screwing around with young women, presumably to their detriment).
One day, Lucy and Lurie return to the farm after walking some of the dogs, to find three young black men taunting the caged dogs. Lucy approaches them and asks them to stop. They give her a story about one of the boys being stranded and ask if he can come inside and use her phone. She cages the dogs she’s walked and tells him yes; he alone can come inside. This is a ruse and after she’s caged her dogs, the boys drag her and Lurie into the house, gang rape her, lock Lurie in the bathroom where they douse him with gasoline and set him on fire, and use Lucy’s gun to shoot and kill all of the caged dogs. They also loot the place and cart off Lucy’s possessions in Lurie’s car. Lurie manages to save himself with toilet water but he’s still badly burned.
Lurie tries to get Lucy to go to police but for some nonsensical reason she won’t. Ludicrously, she tells him he doesn’t know what happened because he didn’t witness “the crime” — ie, he wasn’t in her bedroom, which, ridiculously, he doesn’t argue with. Her friend echoes her — he “wasn’t there” during “the crime.” He tells her he’d like to talk to the police, but she tells him there’s no information he could give them that she can’t, which he also inexplicably doesn’t argue with.
So a man is bludgeoned and set on fire and almost killed, but he isn’t the victim of a crime? He sees the attackers as they kill the dogs and pour gasoline on him, then throw a match at him, while Lucy is still in the bedroom, but he has “no information” of “the crime” that she doesn’t have?
Sadly, there are still parts of the world where women are considered male property, and therefore her rape is seen as the worst possible thing that could ever happen to her (or her “owners”). Worse than being set on fire. Worse than being shot and killed. I find it beyond shocking that the rape is seen as the only crime here.
It turns out Lucy is pregnant with the child of one of the rapists. Lurie tries to get her to have an abortion but she responds with, “I’m a woman. I don’t hate children because of where they came from.”
Petrus, who was suspiciously missing during the time of the break-in and whom Lurie suspects of having set the whole thing up so that he could scare Lucy away and own the farm himself, returns to the farm, with a new wife, and throws a party in the shed. At this party, Lucy and Lurie discover that one of the boys who raped her is the son of Petrus’s new wife. Lurie wants to call the police but Lucy forbids him from doing so, saying she needs to get along with these people since they’re now co-owners of the farm.
Lurie goes to talk to Petrus. Petrus insists his new son is not one of the rapists, but tells Lurie because of what’s happened, he would still make him marry Lucy but for the fact that he is too young for her. Petrus then tells Lurie he will marry Lucy himself (I don’t know if the filmmakers forgot that Petrus is already married or whether in S.A. bigamy is legal). Lurie delivers this message to Lucy and she accepts Petrus’s marriage proposal. Lurie thinks she is completely nuts (as does most of the audience, I’d venture to say) and tries to plead with her but to no avail.
Eventually, through all of this trauma, Lurie realizes the wrongness of his ways (because, apparently, in this world, rape is equal to sex with prostitutes and consensual sex with adults). He visits the father of the student he seduced to apologize. It’s a testament to Malkovich’s enormous talents that this climactic scene actually works, based in nonsense though it is since he’s really done nothing wrong to this supposedly full-grown woman.
Lurie begins having an affair with Lucy’s friend, the humane euthanizer, and helps her put the dogs down. In the second climactic moment, Lurie sacrifices his favorite dog in order to show that he’s finally has decided to disavow his own male / dog “nature.”
By the end of the movie, Lurie has learned to accept his daughter and her pregancy. In the last shot, the camera slowly pans across the land (like in Howard’s End) to reveal the entire farm. The bright new house Petrus has built himself is a marked contrast from the shabby, broken home housing Lucy. So, through rape and pillage, black South Africans have “taken over.”
The biggest problem with the movie (apart from the bad metaphors, the infantalizing of women and the equating of sex with rape) is that all the black South Africans are portrayed either as evil or easily taken advantage of. I’m sure it can be very dangerous for whites on those farms, particularly for women living alone, and I’m sure there are many rapes. But the film doesn’t present the perspective of any of the black South Africans, the historical oppression, the conditions creating the severe inequality that have led to such hatred and violence. The film is one-sided and in my mind comes across as feeding into racist stereotypes.
The film’s only redeeming quality, to me (apart from some beautiful shots of South Africa), is Malkovich, who — I have no idea how — was able to make his way through all the aforementioned problems and create a truly sympathetic, memorable portrait of this man. He always does that though, no matter how unlikeable the character. The man is a genius.
Has anyone else seen the movie? Or read the book? I have the book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I didn’t like Diary of a Bad Year and so was putting it off but I probably should now because I have a feeling there was a lot left out. I hope there was anyway.
By bringing home the World Standard trophy from Tokyo this weekend. First time a U.S. couple has ever won the World Standard championship. Now if we could only return to the MGM era, we would have a new Fred and Ginger and the whole world could enjoy them as much as we ballroom fans do.
Also at the championship, Jonathan Wilkins and Hazel Newberry announced their retirement. No no NO, it can’t be Mr. Wilkins!!! Whatever are we going to do without our Ralph Fiennes of the ballroom 🙁
Reigning champs Mirko Gozzoli and Alessia Betti of Italy didn’t seem to compete, though Dance Beat doesn’t say why.
Photos by Andrew Miller, taken from Dance Beat.
I was browsing around in the bookstore yesterday and spotted this. Apparently in the summer of 1518, in Strasbourg, one woman began dancing and couldn’t stop. This “hysteria” spread until a great number of people had literally danced themselves to death. It’s referred to as the dancing plague, which I’d never heard of before. The book is written by medical historian John Waller, and has received pretty good reviews. I’m definitely going to read it.
Of course it reminded me of the wilis of Giselle and made me think, though we moderns love to roll our eyes at some of these “silly” ballet characters — girls being turned into swans, maiden ghosts forcing the men who snubbed them in life to dance to their deaths — it’s interesting to explore their bases in history, myth and literature. The ideas usually came from somewhere.