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What Do Young People Want?!: Tap Dancing Rock Concert "Revolution" at the Joyce and Beautiful, Charming New Ballets At Columbia

With dance audiences supposedly dwindling, it seems like all the talk these days is how to attract the young (generally ages 20-40). Last week I attended two very different performances whose mission was basically just that. On Thursday I went to the Joyce in Chelsea for the tap dancing rock concert called “Revolution” by the show’s founders, tap dancer and rock and roller Michael Schulster, and the absolutely breathtakingly, mind-bogglingly spectacular Irish step dancer, Joel Hanna. Here’s a rather fun interview with the two very excited guys in Newsday. Anyway, If it isn’t clear from the list of adjectives I used to describe him, go see the show if you haven’t already if only to see Hanna. He’s the Joaquin Cortes of Irish step dancing. His fast fancy footwork is only the half of it; he dances with such an intense fiery passion it just sets the whole stage ablaze and makes you, as with Cortes, yearn to find out more about the underlying spirit of his dance. I remember seeing Riverdance when it first came out and I don’t ever remember seeing dancing quite like this. There was such a Latin fervor to Hanna’s pounding, beating steps I felt like he must have been influenced by Flamenco, or that Irish step dancing shared something fundamental with that Romani dance.

Unfortunately, I felt the rest of the show was unremarkable. It started out fun though. Electric guitars blared “Paradise City” by Guns ‘N Roses over the speakers (actually one of my favorite songs, not kidding!), and a set of six screens erected above the band showed different images of the dancers getting ready — in make-up, in a studio warming up, and eventually coming up the stairs to make their stage entrance. Very rock concert, maybe somewhat goofy, but uniquely cool for concert dance if you’re open-minded about it. As soon as an ensemble of dancers emerged onstage — four women and about eight men– and began tap dancing to the guitars, a camera guy entered and began filming them live from a variety of angles, the images then projected to the screens above.

I had a complicated oral argument in court Friday morning that I was nervous about, so my first thought was, excellent, something really to take my mind off my anxiety! After the initial heavy metal number, Schulster, a good tap dancer (though his rock and roll fascination makes him far different from my favorites in this department: Savion Glover or Jason Samuels Smith) took the stage for a solo. A tape was shown on the back screen of Schulster beating a punching bag with boxing gloves, explaining that his tap shoes were an instrument, akin to a musician’s guitar. The screen went blank, a combo of electric guitars and flashing strobe lights set the stage on fire and Schulster, center stage, began tapping like a fiend to the electrified strumming. Audience members (a combination of traditional dance-goers well over the target age and young’uns I’d never seen before) went nuts, screaming and cheering, raising their hands in the air as the strobe lights flashed through the crowd, blinding me at times, just like in a rock concert. I started laughing and couldn’t stop — it was really a lot of fun, and my argument was nowhere in my mind!

Then Hanna took the stage for the third number, the first of his thankfully many solos and I nearly fell out of my seat. It’s funny because here was true talent, and, at first the audience was so stunned they could only watch, no hoots and hollers, no screams, just staring at the stage in disbelief the way audiences unfamiliar with dance initially react to genius. After he finished of course everyone took a moment to process, then went wild with the applause.

The problem was, for me, it didn’t really move after this, as Sir Alastair’s rather sardonic review of the show indicates. It was just more of the same for the next hour and a half. Most annoying to me was the way the women were used. In their first number they wore skin-tight jeans, ridiculously movement-restricting, and such high stilettos everyone seemed off-kilter. Of course it didn’t matter that they couldn’t move in their attire because all they did was make a series of ludicrous sexy poses. It was like a Robert Palmer video, which, had Schulster played such music in the background, I might have actually liked the number, thinking it was intended as an ironic statement. Fortunately he didn’t confuse me. No ironic distance from his beloved rock genre there. Throughout this number, camera guy committed my cardinal sin — homing his camera in on the women’s body parts, and you can imagine just which body parts those were. While the men danced of course the camera captured their bodies in whole, often shooting them from below, making them look like demi-gods, or diagonally, making their dancing appear dizzyingly cool. I’ve noted before that I think dance filmed that way, at least in moderation so it’s not TOO dizzying, can be fun and engaging. But THE BOOBS AND BUTTS THING IS MY PET PEEVE, CAMERA MAN. It’s as if young men need to be told what to find sexy; they can’t figure it out themselves. What’s that about?

Anyway, later in the show, there was a number involving several duets with some nice partnering. At one point, a woman jumped on the back of a man, desperately attempting to win him back, he throwing her off. The audience gasped. The lift did look rather hard. I liked it because it was the one moment where I felt we got a little bit of meaning, a story. There were characters who wanted something from one another, who were having a conflict. It grabbed your attention. The show needed a lot more of that, a lot less of the sex poses, and more variety and depth. Even with Hanna’s fantastic dancing, I felt like more connection to Irish culture was needed. For example, when I’ve watched Cortes perform (whom I mentioned above), yeah he was a hot sweating shirtless guy dancing his heart out, but the performance was so much more than that. With the band playing the fascinating accompanying Gypsy music, at times celebratory at times haunting, his dancing expressed that complicated emotion. I knew nothing about Romani culture but from that alone longed to learn more. From the little I know of Irish culture, it contains the same dual complexity. Why not use Black 47 music, or something similar? Instead of just entertaining us, make us think.

It’s playing at the Joyce through next week; go here for tickets. As I said, worth seeing for Hanna’s raw talent alone.

The audience at Columbia University’s on-campus Miller Theater was almost the opposite of Revolution’s. This saddened and confused me. The majority of performances at Miller are of new music; this event, in combination with the Guggenheim’s Works & Process, was an ideal commission for the theater combining as it did new music and new dance. George Steel, the Theater’s director, says that he seeks to engage young people, at a minimum, the Columbia student population, in the arts. I saw very few students though. When I was in college and grad school (at University of Arizona and Brown University respectively) I went to practically every single thing the on-campus theaters took on. I remember seeing everything from Vienna Boys Choir to Cats to Christopher Durang’s play “Beyond Therapy” to Les Ballets Trockadero. I had so much fun taking in everything I could; youth is the ideal time to expand your mind with access to the most affordable culture you’ll ever have — that provided by your University. Perhaps with Columbia students, it’s just that there’s just so much culture in New York and everything’s easily accessible. I hope…

Anyway, the ballets included were: “dogwood” by Amanda Miller, a very modern piece in which four dancers made movements at times jerky and intentionally awkward suggestive of discomfort, at times more lyrical and fluid, and used chairs that to me resembled cartoonish mini-thrones and evoked something out of “Through the Looking-Glass”; “Four/Voice” by Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti, a very beautiful ballet exploring the intersection of dance and music; and “Sweet Alchemy” by Alison Chase, a charming ballet involving three sets of partners and their interactions with each other. Here’s the New York Times article (which I haven’t read yet).

My favorites were the latter two. I was surprised to have liked the Veggetti so much since I don’t know a lot about classical music and I’m usually not one to have much of an appreciation simply for danced interpretations of music. But here I was really mesmerized watching the dancers interpret in different ways the striking sounds made by a solitary cello played over a taped recording. The colors were really lovely as well, a combination of gold and black, the scheme repeated in the backdrop and stage lighting as well. These visuals worked very harmoniously with the music; somehow the colors just sounded like the cello, if that makes any sense. The dancers — two men (some of my favorites from New York City Ballet: Robert Fairchild and Daniel Ulbricht), and two women — at times resembled cello strings themselves. I really got lost in it, watching their bodies strike the chords. I was so disappointed when it ended! Beautiful!

As for “Sweet Alchemy” — what a fitting name 🙂 The ballerinas were dressed in short-skirted, flirty, rose-colored dresses evocative of a French countryside in summertime, and their slippers were tie-dyed dark pink on the bottoms. Music was performed by a string quartet. Chase is a former choreographer for the playful, comedic dance troupe, Pilobolus, famous for making shapes evocative of funny-looking creatures and other amusing objects. Although this was ballet and not modern (as is Pilobolus), you could see the influence. The dancers (all from NYCB), worked in partnerships of two, sometimes three, making interesting shapes and interacting with each other. At one point the men did what appeared to be hurdle-jumping over each other, in competition for the attention of the women, who at first sat facing them, then in unison, turned their backs. It was cutely funny. The women would climb all over the men, each using her danseur as a human jungle gym. Fun! 🙂 At times the men would lift the women awkwardly upside-down, the way a father would carry a misbehaving child off kicking and screaming. Except the women weren’t kicking and screaming. So tables were turned. Men were tricked into doing heavy lifting, perhaps? At times the men would carry the women so that their feet would touch the back wall, she scampering along the wall as he skittered along on the ground, ala Larry Keigwin, except here it was light and humorous rather than more intense. It was all sweetly, playfully romantic. Similar to Revolution, there was a large screen on the back wall, which showed, instead of live filmed shots of the dancers, still pictures of them. Some pictures homed in on an embrace, torsos pressed against each other, arms wrapped around backs, bodies linked, enmeshed in each other. So much more sensual, maybe even somewhat erotic if you want to see it that way, than the Robert Palmeresque poses and shots of sexualized body parts, if you ask me. An abstract work, there was no linear narrative here. You had to piece things together for yourself, use your imagination. It’s not as easy as being told what to think, but I would hope young audiences, at least intelligent ones, would be intrigued by the challenge.

One more thing: it’s so weird, albeit very cool(!), to see ballet in such a small, intimate setting. You notice little foibles that on a majestic stage like the Met Opera House or NYCB’s State Theater are completely lost on the audience. You see the difficulty in a lift betrayed by a man’s shaking knees or a woman’s vibrating body as she holds herself in position in the air, intense concentration or fearful hesitation registered ever so discreetly in the eyes. You notice that Charles Askegard is, delightfully, like, eight feet tall 🙂 I love this aspect of a small theater: it makes ballet more real, more human, to me.

Update: Here’s Apollinaire’s Newsday review of the pieces; here’s Tobi Tobias on the same; and here’s Claudia LaRocco’s NYTimes review (a different write-up from the one I linked to above). I’m the only one who liked the Chase! The others also found things I hadn’t in the Miller. Everyone seemed to like the Veggetti 🙂

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Officially Bitten

by the Ethan bug! Yes, I’ve repeatedly rolled my eyes at friends for falling for his goofy macheesmo motorcycle-riding ballet boy in Center Stage, for swooning right out of their seats over his simple (non-dancing) self-introduction at the start of Stiefel & Stars; I’ve shrugged my shoulders at his macho motorcycle-riding real self in Born To Be Wild (Jose‘s cuter and more interesting, being from the forbidden land, I thought), and his ceiling-high assemble during which he beat his feet together more times than I could count at ABT’s Met gala last year (pshaw, David can do that, I declared… well… almost). No one could understand my offensive nonchalance, my dumbfounding indifference, my mentally ill resistance to Ethan-infatuation. No, they couldn’t understand me, and I certainly couldn’t understand them.

Well, all that changed last night when I spotted him in the audience at the New Ballet program at Columbia University’s Miller Theater. (I’ll write about this very soon, along with the tap dancing rock concert, Revolution, which I saw at the Joyce in Chelsea Thursday night). He was watching the new ballets a couple of rows behind me, with Damian Woetzel. He had his hair all fashionably brushed forward and it looked like he had some highlights put in (yes, he has blonde hair to begin with, but his hair now seems to be different shades of blonde). He was just kind of sitting there flashing his cocked little half-smile at everyone who looked at him, seemingly slightly self-conscious about all the attention, but not in a shy way, if that makes any sense at all. At intermission, he got up and politely shook hands with some people, and when he sat down again I saw an older man — obviously a fan — approach him and ask him the obvious — was he coming back to the stage this Fall?? With a sad, wistful look in his eyes, he shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his knees. As they continued to talk, his cute cocked half-smile slowly returned. I could see him telling the man, “thank you.” Something about it was just so sweetly endearing. He just looked so handsome and forlorn. And I don’t know how to explain it, but something happened. I saw flashing lights. The skies opened. I saw what every other woman on the planet has seen. Right then and there I fell head over heels. I am in love with Ethan Stiefel! I am normal! All I could think about on my subway ride home was how I have to see him do that assemble again — soon! I almost even watched Center Stage again but then came to my senses 🙂 I’ll wait for City Center.

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Lovely, Poetic TangoBalletOpera At Skirball Center

Last night, Philip invited me to a type of concert dance I’d never experienced before: a combination of opera, dance, and spoken word labeled, by the work’s author Astor Piazzolla, a tango operita. Piazzolla’s MARIA DE BUENOS AIRES, performed by the Gotham Chamber Opera and the David Parsons Dance Group, focuses on the life of Maria, a young woman from the suburban slums of Argentina, who makes her way to Buenos Aires where, lured by the music and dance of tango, she becomes a prostitute and is eventually destroyed.

I found the amalgamation of the three art forms delightful. At the start, as an ensemble of dancers tangoed in pairs of two or three, a man acting as a kind of chorus standing atop a pile of chairs spoke, forebodingly, in Spanish. Then two singers emerged, one, contralto Nicole Piccolomini, playing Maria, the other bass-baritone Ricardo Herrera, as one of her lovers. Two dancers, each representing the two main characters, danced the words they sang. The main action was portrayed by the two pairs, with the chorus and ensemble re-appearing throughout. All words spoken and sung were in Spanish and there were no supertitles (although a set can be downloaded from their website). Throughout much of the operita, the dancers were onstage at the same time as the singers, so you really didn’t need the supertitles anyway — the dancers beautifully conveying as they did what those words were.

The dancing was breathtaking. Co-choreographed by modern dancer Parsons and tango great Pablo Pugliese, it wasn’t pure tango, but a fusion of the quintessential Argentinian social dance with ballet, with lots of beautiful lifts and sensual partnering, resulting in movement at times sexy and sultry, at times poetic. I enjoyed this combination more than the more pure concert tango I’ve seen by the likes of Guillermina Quiroga and Luis Bravo. The balletic movement added an ethereal dimension to the voluptuous social dance. I was so smitten by the dancing in fact, that I can’t wait to see Parsons’ company — a colorful, multi-ethnic bunch that worked well here to exemplify the full flavor of Argentina — again. Although… the addition of the opera made me wonder if I’d be as fulfilled with only the dancing. The song, dance and spoken word each added a layer to the whole portrait of Maria.

I don’t really know how to talk about opera since I haven’t seen a lot of it, but the voices of Piccolomini and Herrera were gorgeously, decadently rich. Piccolomini in particular has a lush, sultry voice that really just seduces you like a thick, full-bodied Merlot. And the woman has vixenish allure galore!

My only real qualm was with the story. I really didn’t see one. The program notes made clear there was to be no linear narrative, but rather the (eye-rolling IMO) theme — “Maria, both Madonna and whore, represents the spirit of tango, Buenos Aires, and all of womanhood” — was to be expressed through poetic vignettes. I certainly don’t need a linear narrative and I like the idea of the vignettes, but I only really saw “Maria the whore” here. Maria, young and naive, only appeared for a second at the beginning, throughout the middle I only saw Maria the seducer and rarely Maria the seduced, and, at the end, Maria gives birth to another version of herself, beginning the process from virgin to whore to mother anew. But I wouldn’t have known a birth was what I was witnessing as the dancer Maria pops out from under a table and is carried about flexed-footed by a male dancer if the program notes didn’t so indicate. And I would have been more moved if I would have seen more dimensions to Maria, if I would have witnessed her transition from naive young girl to seduced to prostitute to mother.

Still, the dancing and singing were so superb, and the amalgam of the three art forms unique, this is definitely worth seeing. But hurry, you only having tonight and tomorrow night! It’s at Skirball: go here for tickets.

Here is Philip’s review. (I didn’t post many photos because Philip has compiled a lovely little gallery here; two photos above are courtesy of Richard Termine, send to me by Philip).

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Required Reading For The Day

I love this! When’s the book coming out here, when when when?! Perhaps the excerpt contains hints as to why Danny Tidwell may have felt not so at home in the world of ballet…

Also, I don’t have time to blog about Dancing With the Stars today, but hope to later in the week, after the results show tonight, which is, by the way, especially worth watching, even for those not solely into ballroom. The man widely hailed as the greatest tap dancer in the world will be on. That’s Savion Glover of course of course! So, that’s tonight, ABC, 8pm / 7 Central.

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Sir Alastair Speaks!

But he didn’t say much. And I should probably stop calling our new(ish) Chief Dance Critic ‘Sir Alastair’ and come up with a different nickname; he came across more as a jolly, down-to-earth commoner than a lord. Anyway Mr. Macaulay, along with dance writer and professor Mindy Aloff, addressed a crowd of mainly students, critics, and dance insiders last night at Barnard College. He spoke of: his move to New York (he’s still not completely moved into his new apartment and has no television, allowing him neatly to evade the question of the moment — what about all this dance stuff on tv?); what he misses about London (his garden, the West End’s plethora of Shakespeare plays); how he felt about becoming the NY Times’ chief dance critic (it was a welcome mid-life change, he and his audience at the Financial Times in London had grown a bit tired of each other, he was worried his appointment wouldn’t be well taken since he was from out of town — and rightly so, why should a critic not be homegrown?– people laughed at this, not sure why); his most trying life moments (serving jury duty and having to announce the verdict to a raucous courtroom, being charged with taking indecent pictures of minors after an officer saw him photographing frolicking children on a beach– don’t worry, it all worked out well as charges were eventually dropped); his dance training (ballroom, reading ballet technique books and sitting in on ballet classes); his favorite artists (Shakespeare and Mozart), etc. etc. — things on that level. It was nice to see his face and hear his voice, and it did make you realize he was human despite his sometimes harsh reviews, which was probably the point of the whole thing, but it was hardly the in-depth discussion of issues important to the dance world that I was hoping for.

During the Q & A, a student asked him if he felt that bad reviews played any part in declining dance audiences. He thought for a moment and answered that he didn’t know how much of an effect reviews really had on audiences. He thought his reviews had absolutely no effect on that of American Ballet Theater, as the Met Opera House was far from packed each week during the their summer season regardless of what he’d said in his most recent review. He also felt as a critic a certain degree of harshness was necessary, as it was the critic’s responsibility to “hav(e) a passionate subjective response” to a work. Wendy Perron, editor in chief of Dance Magazine, after noting that he’d largely written subjective reviews frequently inserting his own voice, asked if he’d ever taken a more objective tone. He responded that he wasn’t sure of the difference between subjective and objective with respect to criticism, but felt that his writing was a combination of the two. He viewed the objective part as describing what he saw, the subjective to tell why it mattered.

Eva sweetly asked him in her beautifully mellifluous voice whether he was going to explore the entire New York City dance scene and all the wonderful things it has to offer. He brightened considerably and said he’d just discovered “downtown” and had gone to a performance entitled something like “Accounting” and really liked it. He sounded authentic and it was actually rather cute. I don’t think he knows he got reemed for his review of that 🙂 Countercritic guy asked him something along the lines of whether he had to consider something beautiful in order to value it. I thought it was an interesting question and Macaulay did too, and even said so. “But I’m not sure how to answer it,” he replied. He said he liked it when a choreographer challenged his notion of beauty as Mark Morris has on occasion. Which I thought was a good answer. He mentioned other such choreographers, but I’ve forgotten who– I’d put my notebook away by then and was packing to go.

Hmm, what else do I have in that notebook?… He takes a few notes during performances but usually they don’t amount to much. He was first seriously impressed with the New York Times when he picked up a copy of the paper in London and saw a review of a classical dance performance on the front page. Such a thing would never have happened in a London paper, he said, as concert dance wasn’t considered “sexy.” He doesn’t regularly read others’ reviews of a piece because he doesn’t want them to influence his own, although his favorite critics are the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella (who has an “engaging” “shrewd” voice that, even if you disagree with, “you really want to spend time with”) and Wall Street Journal’s Robert Greskovic, who has a gift for detailed description (and is his good friend and sends him copies of his reviews). He said dance and music criticism were very challenging because the dialog one had with the piece was not a direct or natural one (as with a play) but forced the critic to translate from one language into another. I thought that was nicely stated.

That’s all. It was about an hour and twenty minutes altogether. It was okay, just wish the discussion would have gone deeper.

I came home and watched the video I’d taped of Dancing With the Stars. I’ll blog about it more tomorrow — am too tired now — but, very briefly: ridiculously, he hasn’t even danced yet and I am totally in love with Helio 😀 Does Marcelo have that same accent 🙂 🙂 😀 Am also in dancerly love with Mark Ballas 😀 How great were the perfs by those “girls” — Cheetah and Spice?! Whoa! And that opening pro number: you can’t say the ballroom dancing, despite Pasha and Anya, is better on So You Think You Can Dance! I wish there were more pro numbers like that! You can tell how different the demographic is for this show as compared with SYTYCD though — they have a lot of older contestants here. I thought Marie Osmond was a bit of a goof, but charming in her own way, and Jane Seymour was sweetheart 🙂 Could some ballroom insider please smack Chmerkovskiy for me for that self-description: “I’m known as the bad boy of the ballroom. But how can I be so bad when it feels so good?” 🙂 Okay, more tomorrow, I’m off to bed…

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"The New York City Dance Community"

dance community NY group photo in bryant park

I don’t know who in the dance community annoys me more: those who consider themselves hipper than thou and call themselves “downtown,” or those who consider Ballet the only form of dance.

Spurred by Eva’s suggestion, I went to Bryant Park this afternoon to take part in the first ever group photograph of the New York dance community, organized by Belgian online dance initiative Sarma and local dance collective Chez Bushwick. Everyone who considered themselves part of the dance community was invited. Since I’m a dance blogger, ballet and modern fan and amateur ballroom dancer, I decided that included me.

When I arrived I spotted a robust, jovial-looking, curly-haired man wearing a t-shirt that announced he was a member of the photo op, and headed toward him. I kind of look like Sylvia Plath but shorter and with darker hair, or maybe Suzanne Farrell but not anywhere near as pretty 🙂 I have long hair and was wearing a ballet-y black bouncy-skirted sundress bow-tied at the waist by a red silk scarf, and sandals whose straps were topped with embroidered flowers. I was carrying an oversized pink bag bearing books. After making brief eye contact with me, the man peered around me to another woman and began greeting her, until I stopped right in front of him.

“Oh hi,” he said to me, surprised. “Um, we’re actually taking a photograph of the New York dance community here. Would you like to participate?” he asked hesitantly.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I’m here for,” I said.

“Oh. Oh good,” he said handing me a piece of paper announcing the rules (you gave them permission to use the photos of you on the internet and in magazines, yadda yadda). He also told me after the picture was taken, I was to sign my name on a roster of attendees and would receive a sticker entitling me to a free drink at one of the concession stands. He then told me they were running a little behind schedule and directed me to take a seat at one of the tables in an adjacent elevated area along the path.

I did as he suggested. Turned out to be the perfect little perch for me since its elevation gave me a good view of the crowd. I enjoy being an observer. Plus, I was having a bad hair day and was a little worried of running into Marcelo or David or one of my ballet heartthrobs, so could be on the lookout and duck for cover if need be. I had nothing to worry about as it turned out: there wasn’t a soul from the ballet world there.

Many people began arriving, and I didn’t know anyone. Finally, I spotted a fellow blogger in the crowd. As he was making his way to the tabled area after receiving his instruction paper, I waved to him.

“What are you doing all the way over here?” he said as he approached. I didn’t really understand the question so responded with a quizzical look.

“We don’t ever see each other,” he then announced, “because you’re a snobby elitist who only goes to uptown things. I go to all the cool downtown things.”

I just stared at him, not really knowing what to say. He laughed. Apparently I was supposed to take it as a joke.

“Well, I’m going to go around and meet new people while you sit here like a wallflower.” And he was off.

I kind of sat there stupefied. I think I saw Eva, but after that didn’t feel like getting up to say hello. Maybe some other time. I saw Jonah Bokaer, one of the organizers of the event and a dancer with Merce Cunningham. He’s rather cute in person 🙂 He was going around giving people who looked like they belonged small bottles of water. That didn’t include me. He looked right through me when he passed directly in front of my table even though I had my piece of paper with the instructions prominently displayed. A twenty-something woman with dark hair bearing a green “press pass” around her neck was going around with a notepad. She stopped at a table in front of me at which sat a man and two women with really cool-looking dreadlocks. I overheard them tell her they were retired dancers, now choreographers. I wondered if the interviewer was Gia.

About half an hour later, an announcer muttered something over a microphone that barely worked. From the crowd’s actions, I figured he was telling people to line up to his left. I followed suit, but kind of wish I’d just have stayed where I was to take pictures. I got a space all the way in the back of the crowd. I could hear him now telling taller people to move to the back, but apparently the average man over six feet either doesn’t understand English or has no sense of his size in comparison to others. Or else “downtown” male dancers are just rude. Some tiny women in the back brought over some chairs and stood on them. Soon, a security guard was in on the action ordering the people to get off the chairs. They paid him no mind. He yelled louder. They continued to ignore him. I couldn’t believe their audacity. And it did look dangerous: the plastic chairs were very insubstantial and the ground was really rocky and unstable. I wouldn’t stand on such a thing and these were dancers. He walked right up to one of them and yelled in her face to get off the chair or else. This was far more exciting than the photographer up front!

“Oh come on, officer” she whined like a character in Rent. Thankfully the last picture was snapped and the whole experience over, so there was no further trouble.

Good thing about being in the back was I was first in line to record my name. That of course didn’t mean I was actually first to do so. As the man handed me pen and paper, someone reached over my head and snatched the whole right out of my fingers, bumping me on the crown with the back board. Other pens and rosters were handed about, arms flying feet stomping everywhere. About fifteen minutes later I was finally able to scribble my name, identity (blogger), place of birth and email address, and receive my sticker, which I promptly took to the nearest concession stand.

“What’s this thing?” the clerk snapped.

“We’re supposed to get a free drink?” I said.

She laughed shaking her head. “I don’t know nothin’ about this.”

“The dance community gathering, over there,” I pointed to the raucous crowd bombarding the man with the rosters and stickers.

“I don’t know and I don’t wanna know,” she spit.

I guess it was a fitting end to a discomfiting experience. Weird, I was just saying how good it felt to be part of the dance community.

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Petipa is the New Black

“‘What color would you say this is?’ Lana asked, handing her the pump. ‘Not quite turquoise.’

‘Oh I’d say Bluebird. Very franco-russe, very Petipa.'”

Hehehehe, I’m really enjoying this novel, Women About Town, by dance critic, Vanity Fair contributing editor and novelist Laura Jacobs. One of the main characters, Lana obviously, is a dance critic, and it’s so fun reading about her world. At times kind of frighteningly competitive and at times sweet. Dance critics so live, breathe, sleep (and shop!) dance, sometimes more so I think even than the dancers… Anyway, can you imagine going shopping with your girlfriend and speaking about the clothing and colors in ballet terms? I love it — can totally see me and Ariel doing such a thing, when she moves to NY 🙂 Probably with us, it’d be more like, ‘whoa, that’s Tybalt yellow!’

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Times Joins SYTYCD Debate, Ignoring Some But Not All Blogs

Claudia LaRocco writes briefly in today’s NYTimes about TV show So You Think You Can Dance and whether it’s of any value in bringing concert dance to a larger audience. She didn’t mention the lively debate taking place on Apollinaire’s blog, in which I nominated the wonderful Rasta Thomas as “Ambassador of Dance.” Apollinaire sweetly made me feel good about the Times’ mention of him as well in that role, since when all the other nominations came in and people began talking, I felt really stupid, as if I’d nominated Playgirl’s Playmate of the Year (if they even have such a thing 🙂 ) So, I’m glad the powers that be were on a similar wavelength 🙂

I’m also glad that Ms. LaRocco interviewed Kristin Sloan of the Winger to weigh in on the question, and so didn’t completely leave out the blogosphere. Unfortunately, SYTYCD was mentioned not once on the Winger. I don’t mean to be critical at all, it’s still my favorite dance blog and I dearly love many of the contributors, but I think with so many of them now, no one’s really in charge and everyone’s expecting someone else to take on the important issues, so the debates have been had elsewhere. I just wish the dance community was a bit more cohesive. I just feel sometimes like everyone’s writing, blogging, talking in a vacuum, and that’s unfortunate for dance because it cuts down the level of discussion…

Update: Kristin just published a really interesting post on a Chinese TV show on cable that she compared to our SYTYCD. I like the sound of this one! Okay, I take back what I said above 🙂 🙂

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Survived First Dance Class in Four Months!

Okay, how come I always look like an ass in ballet class, but a ballerina in all the other styles of dance I take? Tonight, I took my first dance class in four months now (yikes) — a beginner Flamenco class at 92nd St. Y. Seriously, in lieu of the beautiful palmas (fluidly wrist-bending Latin / Indian hand movements that are one of the three basic elements of the dance), I did the perfect port de bras (balletic arm movements). I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t have looked like perfect port de bras in ballet class, but they sure did in Flamenco. No matter how much Latin I take, for some reason I always have the tendency to turn my wrists inward so that my palms are toward my body (as in ballet), rather than turned out, away from it, as they usually are in Latin. It’s ridiculous.

And damn do those castanets require patience! We only did basic taps, but tapping the pinkie finger, then the ring, then the middle, then the pointer, then moving to the left hand in a continuous one-two-three-four-five rhythm, faster and faster and faster was so unbelievably trying on my nerves, for some reason. I had to keep shaking my hands like I was shaking off a bug or something. And keeping my arms up in the air was a bit painful, embarrassingly. I am just a bit out of shape here 🙁 And forget trying to coordinate the castanet taps with the wrists with the arms with the foot toe / heel stomps (my favorite part — gets rid of some real aggression :D)… forget it! This dance is so hard. It’s not athletically hard in the way ballet is, but it requires maximum coordination that I don’t have!

I’ll probably stick with it anyway; it’s good for me 🙂 Unfortunately, the teacher has a strict dress code — all black — so I can’t wear my pretty purple Flamenco skirt (above). Don’t really understand this — I took a Flamenco class at Ballet Hispanico months ago and wore the skirt to Paso Doble classes at two different ballroom studios and no one’s ever had a problem with the color. It cost $75 too, so I have no intention of buying another one in black. My black ballroom skirt will have to do, though it doesn’t have the pile of ruffles at the bottom so is not going to look wholly right for Flamenco… I just always pride myself on being different, so was rather pleased with myself for finding such a color.

I’ll never forget the first dance class that blew me completely to Heaven, made me feel like I was experiencing a whole new level of humanity, made my heart race: it was basic ballroom Samba with Roula Giannopolu at DanceSport studio. I remember I was squealing when I came out of there, practically crippled with blisters, my classmates trying to steady me and asking if I was okay. “What kind of music was that?” I screamed out demandingly, collapsing on the lobby sofa. No one knew and Roula had sprinted off to her next class. “That was like ballet and African and Latin and just the whole world!” I cried, flailing about. I haven’t had that same exact experience since and I so long for that feeling again. I think I may sign up for group ballroom classes next month. I like the solitary Latin dance classes I’ve taken — Brazilian Samba at Alvin Ailey and now Flamenco. But ballroom’s really where my heart is.

Anyway, on another note, here are some more pictures I took today during my lunch hour of the Bill Shannon “Window” site-specific dance performance that I blogged about at the beginning of the week. It was funny seeing it down on Liberty Plaza this time, after having watched from the high-rise before. I had thought when I was inside looking down that people were trying to be good New Yorkers and avoid any weirdish person making a “scene,” but being down there with the people, I realized that the area the dance was performed in was so vast, without music, it was actually pretty hard even to notice. You had to really seek him and his dancers out to see him. Dance is also so music-dependent I realized. Upstairs we had the music blasting from the speakers to accompany the movement we saw out on the plaza. It really got you into it, made you move a little yourself. Being down there with no speakers, the movement just didn’t have the same meaning, it wasn’t as fun, it wasn’t as noticeable, it wasn’t as “performancey” which I guess was the point…

One of Shannon’s break-dancers.

The guys in white are the performers. It might be apparent, it might not.

This is Shannon himself, on the crutches. I didn’t notice him zooming around on the skateboard this time; he used it more as a prop than a vehicle, unless I just arrived a bit late and missed that part of it.


On, and another thing, at one point a woman walked up to him while he was on the ground break-dancing. I guess because he had the crutches, she thought he was hurt and tried to help him up! He spoke with her a bit, but with all the city noises, I couldn’t possibly hear what they were saying. I wonder whether he went along with her, told her what was really going on, or if I just completely misunderstood the whole interaction and she was actually part of the performance!

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David Speaks!

Matt posted a little video he made of him and David Hallberg attending a live taping of the Broadway play “Legally Blonde” for MTV. Pretty good video, Matt! But interesting thing to me is, this is the first time I’ve actually ever heard David speak! He’s more fragile-seeming than he appears onstage. He’s so cute 🙂 🙂 🙂 It’s just funny because in dance (in contrast to theater, movies, etc.) you see a favorite dancer onstage many many times and you never hear the sound of his voice.