Author: Tonya

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We Need More Artists On Whom You’ve No Choice But To Form an Opinion

 

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.

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Ratmansky Revisited

 

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…

 

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.

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Bolshoi Becomes American

 

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).

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New National Latin, Standard & Smooth Champs

 

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.

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Sorry!

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!

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Don’t Forget Fall For Dance

 

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.

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Written By a Woman About Women and Not "Chick-Lit" — How Can It Be?!

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.

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Kenn Duncan Exhibit at NYPL

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.

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Closing Out the Summer With Some Cool Downtown Dance

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!

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DWTS Fall 2008 Season Contestants

1) Grammy winner Lance Bass;

2) TV Chef Rocco DiSpirito;

3) Olympic Gold Medalist (just crowned) Misty May Treanor;

4) Gold medalist sprinter Maurice Green;

5) Broadway star and singer Toni Braxton;

6) Reality TV star Kim Kardashian (who seems to have just injured her foot);

7) Hannah Montana star (and youngest ever to be on the show; will be paired with Julianne Hough) Cody Linley;

8) * Actress (fabulous, I might add, and excellent comedian, and the oldest star ever on the show) Cloris Leachman;

9) Actor Ted McGinley (to be paired with new dancer Inna Brayer);

10) “Everything woman” (whatever that means) Brooke Burke;

11) Supposedly more raucous than Adam Carolla, Comedian Jeffrey Ross (who will be paired with Edyta Sliwinska);

12) Footballer Warren Sapp (paired with Kym Johnson, whom the annoyingly ingratiating Good Morning America host kept pronouncing “gorgeous, gorgeous”); and

13) (first time contestants number over 12 btw), the most famous actress in all of daytime, Susan Lucci. After making a big deal of her numerous unsuccessful Emmy nominations, said annoying GMA host pronounced being accepted to DWTS “better than any award.” Yeah, okay…

Anyway, it appears DWTS producers have tried to cover every demographic base conceivable: young Hannah Montana guy should appeal to the teenagers, while Leachman and Lucci older women (though Leachman really should appeal to EVERYONE — for people who may not know her, the woman quite simply rocks). And with the football and Olympic stars they’ve got the sports fans covered. Braxton appeals to Broadway lovers, the reality TV stars to the twenty-something crowd. And, in an attempt at creating nostalgic continuity, McGinley should remind viewers of Steve Guttenberg and Ross, the lovely Carolla.

Best thing about the Good Morning America broadcast by far: the mention of Maks Chmerkovskiy’s return. At least the silly TV talking heads haven’t forgotten the pro dancers make this show.

The new season begins September 22nd, the day after the Emmys in which host Tom Bergeron is apparently nominated for an award in the newly-created category of reality TV show host.