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Fall For Dance Finale

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

Fun, but very tiring, 10 days…

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

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Intriguing Work at Joyce SoHo That Perhaps Tests One’s Ability to Sense and Intellectualize Simultaneously

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DWTS HuffPo Piece Up

Here.

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

Anyway, happy Friday everyone!

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Morphoses Free Dress Rehearsal

 

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

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Woo hoo, the orchestra pit!!

Woo hoo, the orchestra pit!!

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


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

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At molyvos awaiting fall for dance

At molyvos awaiting fall for dance

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


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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…

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Democracy in America

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just Say "No" To Minimalism, Please!

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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DWTS Season Premiere

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…