Tag: Body Image

Posted on

Does a Ballerina’s Weight Affect the Quality of a Performance?

 

So, if you haven’t heard, the New York dance world is all up in arms over NY Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay’s review of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker. The full review, which is here, I think is generally pretty good. But then he begins his concluding paragraph with this:

“This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals that dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity.” (Ringer and Angle are pictured above, in that production. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

Angry reactions have abounded: here are a couple on Huffington Post. In the second piece, Jennifer Edwards, quoting critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa (a friend of mine), notes that Ringer has had an eating disorder in the past and argues that this sentence was disrespectful, reckless, and irrelevant. Edwards also quotes an earlier reflection of Macaulay’s on his role as dance critic:

“My job is to be a professional aesthete with serious criteria; and I share my perceptions and my values with the reader as best I can.”

Edwards concludes by posing two questions:

“1. Do you read the Times dance reviews? Has this changed over time?

2. Do you feel reviews of this nature are of use to venues, arts organizations, audience members, aspiring young dancers, and artists?”

I wrote a little comment on HuffPo but thought I’d elaborate a bit here because I think it’s an interesting, and complicated, issue.

I definitely don’t think a dancer’s weight affects the quality of a performance unless the dancer really can’t dance. I’ve seen Ringer dance pretty recently and she is a tiny thing with no weight problem whatsoever. I didn’t see this performance but I’ve always thought she was technically a very good dancer with a lot of charisma, particularly in roles like the one Melissa Barak recently gave her where she can act as well as dance. And I think Jared Angle is one of the best male partners – if not THE best – City Ballet has.  I think Macaulay just wanted to be snarky – that’s part of his critic’s voice. I think he thinks he’s being funny. Maybe snark and sarcasm in critical reviews are partly a British thing? I see a lot of it though in reviews these days.

I think Macaulay knows a lot about dance history and I get the most out of his reviews when he focuses on that – on the history of a production, how this compares to others’ or past productions, the history of the performers, the artists, etc. I generally like his Nutcracker review, most of which focuses on Balanchine’s unique take on Tchaikovsky. The serious parts of it are very illuminating and show why this production is important and thus why a reader of his review might want to go see it. So the snarky part about Ringer’s weight seems really out of place. I actually re-read the sentence and that directly following it a few times, thinking maybe he meant that Ringer and Angle were dizzy, dancing with childish abandon when they usually dance like adults. But, no, I think he has to mean that they were both plumper than usual – the same as everyone else’s interpretation.

In response to Edwards’s question 1 above: I do remember former chief critic John Rockwell making references to dancers’ bodies, albeit not with the same snarky voice. In particular I remember him likening Marcelo Gomes’s legs to “tree trunks,” which offended some dance-goers. But it also seemed that he really loved Gomes and he’d lauded his dancing in the same review. So then it didn’t seem like he was making a value judgment, just a description.

It is tricky, because it’s hard not to talk about bodies since they’re kind of inherent in this art form. I offended readers (mainly on Facebook) once in my review of Burn the Floor on Broadway by saying that the tiny Broadway stage looked way too crowded during the ensemble numbers with all of those dancers and the band sharing it. I said it looked particularly crowded when Maks Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff were the leads, as opposed to Pasha Kovalev and Anya Garnis, since the former two – Maks in particular – were so large. I didn’t at all mean it as a criticism of him, but of the staging (and I suggested they take the band off of the stage, like in Tharp’s Movin’ Out). And, everyone who’s read my blog for any length of time knows that I often prefer larger dancers (Veronika Part, Marcelo, Roberto Bolle, Vaidotas Skimelis – come on!) But I was still attacked and even told if I didn’t remove it, those people would never read my blog again.

Also, sometimes a partnership just doesn’t work right when one dancer is too large for the other. Sometimes certain movement, certain styles look better on one dancer because of that dancer’s physique. I think those are valid criteria for judging the quality of a performance. But it can still get out of control – as in So You Think You Can Dance when the judges just start talking about the dancers’ bodies. How many times did they have to remark on Josh Allen’s butt? I always felt embarrassed for the whole show whenever that happened but everyone else seemed to think it was funny. But of course New York Times is not a corny TV show.

What is the purpose of a newspaper review anyway? To let your audience know from your educated perspective what is good and bad about a performance, and whether or not they should spend their money and go see it. I don’t really like Edwards’s second question because I don’t think the purpose of a review is to be of use to venues, artists, aspiring dancers, and arts organizations. The critic’s duty is to his readership – a general audience of potential dance-goers trying to decide whether to spend their money on a certain show. The critic has to be honest about what she thinks did and didn’t work in the show and why. And I also think for the presumably well-educated NY Times audience it’s nice when the critic goes into the history of a production, of a dance, the way Macaulay often does. But the critic can’t be protecting the artist from hurt and also serving his readership of potential dance-goers. Otherwise, he’s going to end up lying to someone.

Which gets back to the issue of whether a dancer’s weight gain or loss is a serious criterion in judging the quality of a performance. I think it’s ridiculous that someone would think it is, but what do you guys think? Why are we, as a culture, so hung up on weight anyway? People are always criticizing certain dancers for being too thin as well…

Posted on

Peep Show In Central Park

Saturday night I went to Central Park’s Summer Stage to see Israeli choreographer Nimrod Freed’s PEEPDANCE, performed by his new company, Tami Dance Company. The peep-show aspect ended up going along well with the little theme of my weekend, since I’d stayed up till all hours of the morning the night before finishing Charles Bock’s excellent BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, a dark novel about the underside of “the fabulous Las Vegas.”

Anyway, I loved this show!

They had about six different tents / boxes/ cages — whatever you want to call them — set up on the west side of the field, each housing one dancer apiece, one cage — the most popular one — a couple, male and female. All dancers were clothed, dancing mainly modern-style dance but some more social dance, making various poses, some acting, a couple breaking the fourth wall and engaging with the “audience” — meaning, the sets of eyes looking in on them, but there was of course no actual stripping, unless you consider the shedding of an outer jacket or a monk-type figure taking off and on his hood or a a woman off and on her mask to be such.

But it really made you think about the voyeuristic nature of dance, how dance can be a kind of strip-tease just in its emphasis on the body, the voyeuristic nature of voyeurism in general, and the gendered aspect of all this. In an interview choreographer Freed said audience members would run back and forth between the various cages, but it didn’t matter; you got what you were supposed to get if you simply peered into one box, from various peepholes. After viewing the show twice (they ran it two times) and talking to people during and afterward, I disagree with him. I think what you get out of it depends on which box you look into, whether you look into more than one, and in which order.

I began with this box of the monk (although on looking at my pictures, he looks a bit grim-reaperish; and, now that I look at the picture, those peep holes kind of look like bullet holes, though I didn’t notice that during the performance). He was moving slowly, deliberately, kind of hauntingly, taking on and off his hood, albeit without really letting you see his head. I thought this was interesting, but was curious what was in the other cages, so moved on.

Second cage was a woman making various modern dance moves, contorting here, expanding there. I moved on to another to see a slightly more agitated woman thrashing about, at one point donning a mask. Another box held a woman moving more gracefully, another an older woman doing the same.

One thing I noticed about myself was, when I started peeking in on the first woman, I felt kind of ashamed, like this is perverted. Is this what it feels like to be a man at a real peep show, I wondered. Do they even get embarrassed by what they’re doing? I backed away from my peephole and looked at other people peering through the holes. One woman standing next to me caught my eye and gave a nervous laugh; maybe she felt the same way.

Anyway, by far my two favorite boxes, and the two I kept coming back to were one containing a young woman, speaking Russian, whose dance was the most performance-art-y, and one containing the couple.

Both of these kind of told a little story with their movement, there was variety in their performance. When I first peered in at the couple, they were flirting, or she was trying to flirt with him rather. Later, they fought, later they cuddled lovingly, at one point there was almost an S&M quality, as she hurled herself at his feet, he nearly stepping on her. At one point, she carried him like a baby. He was shirtless, wearing a black faux leather skort, she a black dance top and short bottoms.

What was interesting to me was when he began to play to the audience, making eye contact with the various peeping eyes.

He was very confrontational with people, and it really unnerved me. I backed away when his gaze caught mine. It was then I realized how freakish other people eyeballs peering through those holes looked. All eyes began kind of darting back and forth at each other, seeming to think the same thing, worried this guy was going to come after us. There was a kind of bonding of peepers. The woman in the box with him tried to keep him at bay, but he wouldn’t have it. He sneered at the eyeballs, clawed at us, thrashed himself into one sides, making the whole wobbly box sway precipitously.

At one point, he even began climbing over the side. I ran away!

A woman who arrived late saw all the people standing at the couple’s tent, and walked over. The first thing she saw when she peeped in was him throwing his waist right into the side she was on, near her peep-hole. She backed away quickly, frightened. “I don’t think I like this!” she said to me. I told her not to worry, and to go look in some of the others; they weren’t so nuts!

What was interesting to me though was that he was the only dancer / ‘stripper’ to be so confrontational, to get so angry at the peepers. In fact the only other person to break the fourth wall and acknowledge our presence was the Russian woman.

But she wasn’t confrontational, and definitely not angry; instead she was by turns submissive, playful, humiliated. Here she is pointing jokingly out at a viewer. When someone stuck their camera lens through their peephole to photograph her, she puckered up and posed, then began laughing, at first cracking herself up, then her laugh turning into a cry, a wail, like she was a poor imprisoned animal. She threw herself on the ground, only to get up, brush herself off, and dance.

Then, she walked around the perimeter of her cage, asking in Russian for money, “Pojalsta, pojalsta, dollar,” she’d cry out, holding up a finger. At one point someone gave her one. She thanked him, put it in her mouth, and chewed.

She took it out and tried to give it back to the man who gave it to her, who wouldn’t take it. No one would. No one wanted a chewed spit-laden dollar bill! I thought how hilarious it would be if a real stripper did such a thing.

Then she tried to do what she considered a “sexy dance” — though she was so innocent, it, pretty hilariously, wasn’t strip-tease-like at all. She kept talking throughout, in Russian, which I didn’t understand, but, from the tone of her voice and the questioning look on her face, it seemed like she was asking us if we liked what we saw.

I just found it interesting that the man, the only man (besides the monk guy), was the only one who kind of violently acted out against being “peeped on.”

It was a great turnout. Here they all are onstage for a bow.

I met up with Evan there, who took some great photos and posted her own thoughts here. Also, the Winger’s Deborah Friedes wrote about seeing the show in Israel, here.

Posted on

Yay, Christopher Wheeldon Saves Ballet! And Wendy Whelan :) And Pasha!

Okay, Pasha didn’t save ballet; he actually doesn’t have much of anything to do with ballet, other than that he’s touring with Danny Tidwell right now. But he’s on my mind because last night, on my way to Fall For Dance, I stopped by Dance Times Square to pick up my receipt for the long-awaited and highly anticipated “DTS Students And Friends Outing” to the Nassau Coliseum next Tuesday to see Pasha’s tour!!! Er, I mean the So You Think You Can Dance concert tour 🙂 I chatted with Melanie a bit, and she told me that they’re trying hard hard hard, fingers crossed fingers crossed, to get the SYTYCD tour powers that be to allow us all backstage. Apparently they don’t have a problem with a couple of people, but they freaked a bit when she told them we’re a group of, more like … 40. Still! Come on, we’re a bunch of ballroom dancers, how rowdy can we be??? Please SYTYCD people in power, let us in to see our friend and beloved former teacher! We promise to behave! We promise!!

Okay, on to Fall For Dance. This is a most excellent event that’s taken place at City Center in midtown for the past I think three years now. Each night for about two weeks four or five different dance companies perform an excerpt from their repertoire. Tickets are a miraculously low $10 for the whole night. So, audiences — especially young audiences — can be exposed to several new companies for only $10 a night!

Last night marked the very first performance in New York by a promising new ballet company, called Morphoses, whose mission is to bring new life and new audiences to that most poetic of dance forms that many have feared is getting a bit withery and dried up. It’s founded by 34 year-old Christopher Wheeldon, formerly the first-ever resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. Wheeldon doesn’t yet have a permanent group of dancers, but is using guest dancers from several ballet companies, mainly NYC Ballet. I’ve loved so many of Wheeldon’s pieces that I’ve seen at NYCB over the past couple of years, so I have really high hopes, as do, I think, the vast majority of ballet lovers here. Last night the company performed not a brand new work, but one created by Wheeldon a couple of years ago for NYCB, a lovely duet called “After the Rain.” I see it as kind of a bittersweet pas de deux whose theme is a couple’s attempt to patch things up and find some common ground in the aftermath of a bad fight. It was danced by two NYCB dancers, the really cute Craig Hall and celebrated prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, to Arvo Part music composed of a string and piano section, in which the light tapping of high piano keys actually sounds like rain drops. It goes without saying that Wendy is just such an incredible dancer; when I see someone like her perform I realize it’s not just a choreographer who’s responsible for the success of his or her work. She dances with such conviction, with a fully formed thought in her mind of what her movements mean so that even though she dances mostly abstract ballets, as with this one, there’s just such an intensity and drama to her performance, the audience finds a story anyway. Well, listen to her talk about her work herself. I really love that City Center has done this this year — put up these little audiocasts on their website of interviews with several of the artists whose work is being performed at FFD. Go here to see a list of participating companies arranged by date, click on “info” for a breakdown menu of companies performing on that date, then click on that company to be taken to their info page where you can see an interview. Very cool!

So last night was actually my second night at FFD. I went Wednesday night as well but didn’t have time to blog about it yesterday. Highlights for me have been, in addition to Wheeldon, Keigwin + Company, a rather hip, young modern dance ensemble. I really wish Larry Keigwin, the company’s choreographer, would do a piece or two for SYTYCD. He’s so much fun. They performed “Love Songs” — several humorous duets performed by three different couples, pieces of which I’ve seen before. Each couple had its own distinct ‘couple personality,’ and told its own humorous story of relationship angst. On first and last was a youngish charmingly awkward pair who were obviously trying rather desperately to get to know each other better. They danced to a set of Neil Diamond songs. In another set, a more sophisticated couple, danced by Keigwin himself and one of my favorite modern dancers Nicole Wolcott, performed a voluptuous witty tango-y pas de deux to clever-sounding French music. And the third couple, the most wickedly funny imo, evoked, to Aretha Franklin music, the classic struggle between male and female for the upper hand in the relationship, rendered all the cuter by their mismatched sizes — fleshy woman (Liz Riga, my second favorite female modern dancer), smaller man. At times, when the woman wore the pants, she would drag her beau around, at times lifting and carrying him around the floor, and, when Franklin belted out some of her “let me tell you how it is” lyrics, she’d bop her head at him right along with the words. Then the reverse would happen; he’d have her begging. Then tables would turn, she’d have him back in the palm of her hands (literally with those crazy lifts), but he’d become too needy; she realized she should be careful what she wished for. It was so fun, funny, evocative, and very relatable.

The other one I loved Wednesday night (along with the crowd) was Urban Bush Women‘s performance of its most famous piece “Batty Moves.” They tell you in the program notes that Batty is a Caribbean word for rear end, and the piece is a rather fun, raucous celebration of the African-American female form. The women sang rap lyrics, called out to the audience encouraging proud black women to rise, then launched into solo after solo of amazing combination African / modern dance. The audience was on its feet; a perfect ending to Wednesday night’s show.

Unfortunately, I felt really badly for ballet Wednesday night. The audience was filled with young and /or newcomers to dance and people related so much more to Keigwin and Urban Bush Women. The two ballets performed — one by Royal Ballet of Flanders — was a very abstract and rather slow-moving meditation on the passage of time and consisted of four couples dressed in generic pink leotards and white shorts doing abstract movements center stage while others dressed in black simply walked slowly around the stage’s perimeter.

The other ballet performed Wednesday night was NYCB’s small-scale one-man performance of Jerome Robbins’s “A Suite of Dances,” in which a male dancer interacts with an onstage violinist, at times almost cutely competitively. Robbins is my favorite “old time” choreographer, but he did most of his great work in the 1940s and 50s. And even though this particular piece had its premiere in 1994, the movement still had a very 50s feel to it, like Fancy Free. I love many of his ballets (particularly Fancy Free, as it’s often performed by my favorites like him and him), but I feel like every time I go to the ballet nine times out of ten they’re putting on something decades or centuries old. The audience was so much more into the aforementioned two pieces, not the ballet. I left with the feeling that ballet is encountering some serious relevancy problems. Kristin Sloan and I had an interesting little back and forth regarding “Suite” in the comments section on this post. I understand what she is saying, that’s it’s a softer sale, but I don’t know if the audience is really automatically pulled into a man’s own playful encounter with music. At least it doesn’t have the same urgency or speak to the human condition in the same way that glorifying a body Western Culture has long deemed “other” does. I don’t know, perhaps I would have had a different reaction if one of my favorites had performed the piece. There’s something about Marcelo‘s very being that is somehow always contemporary and relatable. It’s an extremely interesting discussion, though, classical ballet’s ability to speak to modern audiences, and I’m very interested to know what others think.

Anyway, that’s why I was so happy last night to see the Wheeldon. It was contemporary, meaningful, relatable, and gorgeously, poetically danced. Also standing out to me in last night’s program was the piece immediately preceding Wheeldon’s, “Inventing Pookie Jenkins” by Kyle Abraham. It began with Abraham, an African American man, sitting in a pile of white tulle, which, when he stood, was revealed to be a long skirt reminiscient to me of Matthew Bourne’s all-male Swan Lake. He moved about, first on the ground, then standing, at times jerky, at times with beautiful lyric fluidity, to a soundtrack of gunshots and ambulance or police sirens. Then the soundtrack changed to a provocative / celebratory hip hop song, “Respect Me” by Dizzee Rascal. Abraham’s movements alternated between hip hop and lyrical modern, as he seemingly tried to break free of … of what? A policeman’s custody, stereotypes superimposed on him, even his own self-image — which took on both a racial and gender significance. It really just blew me away and if you ever get a chance to see him perform, by all means do!

Tomorrow night is, sadly, the last night of the festival. I’ll be looking forward to “Quick” by Indian company Srishti, in which several ‘London businessmen’ use classical Bharantanatyam technique and South Indian rhythms to deal with today’s cut-throat corporate climate. Interesting! I’ll also be looking forward to “The Evolution of a Secured Feminine” by Camille A. Brown, which I’m dying to see just because of its name alone! (go here for Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s audio interview with Brown), Jorma Elo’s Brake the Eyes, which I blogged about before, and South African troupe Via Katlehong Dance.

Finally, I’m very excited about the illustrious Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott’s commenting on my last post on Nureyev!!! Apropos of that post, apparently there was a big book party for author Kavanagh, which he attended and wrote about on his blog. Sounds fun, albeit a bit nerve-wracking! There were many members of the ‘glitterati’ there, including Jay McInerney, an abundance of “New Yorker” people, and even our favorite Sir Alastair 🙂 It made me think of the book parties I’ve been to — only two: one for my former Feminist Jurisprudence professor, Drucilla Cornell, a comparably very academic, toned-down affair, and one for a friend of a friend, Ben Schrank, at which I made a flaming fool of myself in front of favorite author Colson Whitehead, a story which I’ll have to save for another day since this post is now 500,000 words long.

Anyway, while I’m kind of on the subject, for reasons that are too ridiculously complicated to explain, I haven’t been able to set up a “recent comments” column here yet, so just want to point out that artist Bill Shannon whose work “Window” I reviewed earlier, left a comment on that post, along with a YouTube link; and Ruth left a comment on my Suzanne Farrell post inviting interested people to participate in a Farrell fan site she’s set up.

Okay, I’m finally done blabbering. More on my final FFD later this weekend 🙂

Posted on

"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.

Posted on

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!

Posted on

Where Does the "Queen" End and the "Woman" Begin?: Alexis Arquette. And, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet

Last night, I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival a documentary about the journey of Alexis Arquette, of the famous acting family, from man to woman.

I’m glad I pre-ordered tickets; door sales lines were long:

Entitled “Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother,” this was one of the most fascinating documentaries I’ve seen, but not for the reasons touted by the filmmakers, who, unfortunately, had to return to L.A. and England and were unable to stay for an after-show Q&A. Will teach me not to wait until the end of the festival to see a movie — that’s one of the reasons I go to festival films, argh. And how much I would have LOVED to meet Alexis — a true character! Anyway, the press release stated that, though filled with celebrities, drag queens and Hollywood glitterati, the film was a serious look at transgendered life. I felt like it was actually more about the former, and regarding the latter, it left me with more questions than it answered — neither of which made it at all a disappointment. To the contrary, it was absolutely mesmerizing.

My only other experiences with the subject of transgender life come from Jeffrey Eugenides’s profound, brilliant novel Middlesex, one of the greatest American novels, ever, I think. And that story differered from this because the main character was hermaphrodic and, without an operation, decided to re-define himself as a man after being raised female. I missed the Felicity Huffman movie, which Oberon blogged about in detail. Other than that, I remember a person in college, who called herself Tatiana. My school was huge, though, and I never knew her; I only knew she tried out for both male and female parts on the cheer squad, freaking out many a male cheerleader, including my lovely then boyfriend. I felt sorry for her.

But this, I found to be more a very sympathetic portrait of a younger sibling lost in the shadows of his very famous sisters and searching desperately for his own voice. It drove home the point, without necessarily meaning to, that growing up in the light of the cameras with a large family and many flamboyant, big-personalitied drag queen friends, can, ironically, make for a very lonely life.

Of course he doesn’t seem lonely, having adopted that same ‘huge personality’ as his sisters and drag companions. It’s a self-made documentary, so his face and voice are everpresent, and, while his incessant whining can really grate on your nerves at times, overall he’s just simply fascinating. By the way, I’m very aware that some would say it’s wrong to use masculine pronouns to refer to him since he sees himself as a woman, but this was the crux of my problem here. Unlike Cal in Middlesex, who begins life as a girl but narrates his story from his older, male point of view which compels the reader to envision him as a man, Alexis, who changed his name in his teens but, interestingly, never says what from, for the vast majority of the film actually is a man and seems, to me, essentially masculine — a total preening Queen, who loves dressing in drag and wearing makeup and continuously changing hair colors, but definitely a man. The film includes several clips of him growing up, and spending his teens, twenties and early thirties as a gay man, and a really good-looking one at that — in fact, he kind of reminded me of Evan McKie on the Winger 🙂

A gay man, he seemed to know little of women’s bodies. When he goes to the plastic surgeon, of course he wants humongous breasts, with nipples practically at chin-level. The surgeon can only laugh. “What, you can’t do that?” Alexis asks dejectedly. Forced to undergo psychiatric therapy in order to gain the right to have the surgery — understandably humiliatingly aggravating (is this mandatory for people having breast enhancement or lyposuction?) — Alexis brings his therapist a self-made drawing of how he envisions his future vagina: it resembles a sweet, tiny peach core. First thing though, he is quick to assert, the nose has got to go. His nose, he tells his surgeon, is that of a man — the type of man he is attracted to for sure — but it’s just not a female nose. So, he has a very idealized notion of the exact female body he wants. It wasn’t surprising to me that many of his friends began to accuse him of making the film not because he actually wants the reassignment surgery, but for attention.

For a film about changing one’s sex organs, it dealt very little with actual sexuality. There are some really interesting interviews with doctors about how far male to female reassignment surgery has come in the last few years: parts of the penis are maintained and used to construct the clitoris, making the new clitoris nearly as sensitive as a real one — but that’s more physical than sexual. As a gay man attracted to and used to sleeping with other gay men, if he became a woman he would need to turn to straight men for romantic partnership, with whom he seemed to have little experience. That’s just so completely mind-boggling to me. I’d think it would take a very open-minded straight man to go for someone who was once another man. At one point, he does film himself with a very young boyfriend, but he is still male then, and it’s unclear whether this shy, untalkative young man, so different from Arquette, is gay, straight, or bi.

Unlike in Middlesex, where I felt myself vehemently hating any character who wanted Cal to remain female, here I found myself wanting so badly for Alexis NOT to get the surgery. Maybe it was just that I kept thinking of that young Alexis as so Evan-y and such a beautiful man, or maybe it’s that I was just so scared for him, as I would be for anyone, to have such a serious surgery. I won’t reveal the end, but he begins to freak out a little as well after he “passes” his psych exam.

All in all, I found it an absolutely fascinating portrait of a preening but confused, emotionally needy, but very human person whose need to feel comfortable in his skin, though taken to another level here, is ultimately something everyone can relate to. If he was trying to gain celebrity, and I DON’T think he was, I have to say, he is as unforgettable as Cal, Eugenides’s main character. From here on, I think every time I see anything starring any Arquette, I will definitely think of him. I highly highly highly recommend it when it hits the theaters.

On Thurday night, Dea and I, used Dance Link’s two-for-one ticket offer (you’ll get a one-year subcription to their discount program if you attend the Fall For Dance Festival), and went to see the fabulous Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet at the Joyce in Chelsea. They danced two pieces, “Migration” (about “the hierarchical migration of birds and mammals”), and our favorite, “The Moroccan Project,” a gorgeous contemporary ballet danced to beautifully rhythmic and melodious African, Moroccan, Arabic, and Andalusian Flamenco music. To me, it epitomized what I love in contemporary ballet — dance ripe with possibilities for taking traditional ballet and fusing it with other kinds of beautiful movement from around the world — here, African, Spanish, Moroccan, Indian — to create something really sublime and worldly.

The piece consisted of a combination of beautiful duets — some romantic, some playful, some fraught with discontent — solos, and ensemble work. During the group parts, the dancers would never dance alone but always worked with and off of each other, looking closely at each other, reacting to each other’s movement, at one point literally bouncing off of each other: during one of my favorite parts, four men laced arms and turned away from a lone woman who, in “Red Rover” fashion, thrashed and hurled her body at them desperately attempting to convince them to allow her into their fraternal circle.

Another favorite part of mine were the “solos” — where only one dancer is actually moving on one part of the stage, but other dancers are onstage as well, very closely watching the moving dancer, examining his or her movement, their facial expressions and tilted heads intently trying to understand the statement that moving dancer was making with her or his body. Visually, it had the effect of being an exercise in learning another language: the moving dancer was definitely speaking to the stationary dancers, and they were surely listening and understanding. With the music bearing foreign lyrics beating in the background, the point is compellingly made that dance is another language as vibrant, complex and meaningful as any spoken.

Dea and I also noticed that the dancers — all wearing matching costumes of understated peach dresses for the women, tan gaucho-styled pants for the men — somehow blended in with each other, though they had varying skin color: no one person stood out as being, for example, “the African American dancer” or “the Latino dancer.” Because it was a truly multi-ethnic company, it did not look at all out of the ordinary for, for example, a red-haired freckled man to be doing intense African-based movements to Gnawan percussive instruments. How awesome is that!! “If I could be a ballet dancer,” Dea said, “this is the kind of company I’d want to be in!”

Also, Dea brought this for me from Brazil:

 

It’s a CD by a Brazilian singer named Marisa Monte, with lots of really pretty samba songs. I’ve never heard of her and I love the music — how sweet is Dea 🙂

Posted on

Help, I Don’t Want a Lap Dance!!!

Last night Alyssa and I went to see the closing night of Keigwin Kabaret at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side. Here we are with our little silver tambourines that were atop each seat’s armrests when we arrived. If audience tambourines are supplied, you know you’re in for a little zaniness!

Anyway, the show didn’t start until 8:30, so we met at Cleopatra’s Needle beforehand, where we caught the beginning of a jazz band and got some drinks and snacks.

I have GOT to stop snacking at night on chocolate martinis and french fries … I’ve gained five pounds in the last couple of weeks; Luis is going to drop me flat on my butt in my lesson tomorrow night…

Anyway, even with the fries to soak up the alcohol, the martini was rather strong and by the time we arrived at Symphony Space, we (or I anyway) were a little tipsy. When we sprinted into the lobby ten minutes before the show was to begin, and the usher asked us which show we were there for so as to direct us either to the upstairs or downstairs theater, we looked at each other quizzically. I’d completely forgotten the name… Alyssa, quicker than I, blurted out “Gender!” and the guy told us, “downstairs.” No gender upstairs, nope, all gender is downstairs…

When we got downstairs, the place was pretty full and the only available seats were in the first two rows. A bit of a tiff eruped between us and several other near-late-comers, over who would have to sit in the first row. “What are they going to be doing,” one woman shrieked? “I don’t want a lap dance!” No one up front at least seemed to know what to expect. Alyssa and I eventually ended up with the highly coveted second-row seats, I am, as it turned out, very happy to say! Note to everyone who is unfamiliar with extreme hyperactive drag king extraordinare, Murray Hill: if you’re a shy, non-audience-participation-type, DO NOT SIT IN THE FRONT ROW OR ANYWHERE NEAR IT when seeing a show that he emcees. Alyssa and I seemed to be either too non-visible and uninteresting, or else too obviously completely freaked out, to be his fodder, but an unfortunate but well-humored guy in the first row who happened to be wearing a colorful, Christmas-y sweater, was not so lucky. Nor were the people in back of us, nor the guy in back of them … but more on HIM later…

Anyway, the, as the name implies, cabaret-style show, was a lot of fun. The company’s artistic director, Larry Keigwin, was a great dancer (and really cute to boot!), and I LOVED assistant artistic director Nicole Wolcott. She was such a beautiful dancer. I so wanna be like her! Seriously, she really makes me want to learn modern now. She made it seem freeing and fun while also being based in solid formal technique, if that makes any sense, and she just moved so amazingly gorgeously in her solo, to “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks. I also really liked her duet with Keigwin, a tango-y kind of thing to French music, the first part of which involved chokehold-drop (what they’re called in ballroom anyway) after chokehold-drop. This is where the man wraps his hands around the woman’s neck and it looks like he’s strangling her, then drops her into a dangerous-looking dip. Teachers of mine have wanted to put it into my routines, but I’ve refused to do it because it seems dangerous to me (all the more so since I’m a frightened amateur who doesn’t really know what she’s doing) and because I feel like it just looks somewhat misogynistic. But, since this was a gender-bender thing and they were specifically questioning that, it worked here. Although, I would have preferred for her to do it to him a few times as well, but perhaps it is hard for a woman to balance a man’s body that way … but isn’t that what gender-bending stuff is made of…?

Anyway, the show was a combo of modern dance performed by Keigwin and Wolcott and their company, which includes Patrick Ferreri (who’s damn cute! and performed a hilarious drunk-off-his-butt riff on Tharp’s final Sinatra Suite, danced to One For My Baby, which I think Angel should DEFINITELY try out on ABT audiences next time he performs it 🙂 ), and Julian Barnett (who did this sweetly endearing thing to a heavy mental number on overcoming being a picked-on gay kid). And, there were the cabaret performers including my favorite Mike Albo, who did this scream-inducing parody of TV show “Ugly Betty” by mimicking the gay male character who plays the slavish, somewhat whorish employee of Vanessa Williams’ Cruella deVillish boss and sidekick to her scheming receptionist, Amanda. Other dancers included Ying-Ying Shiau, Liz Riga, Alexander Gish (who portrayed a cute but frightening cherub-faced waiter who got a little over excited about a big ole butcher knife he carried around in his pocket), and Jamacian burlesque dancer Akynos, whose pasty came off at the end of her number, leading her to finish with her left hand over her breast. How do those things stay on anyway???

One of the craziest parts of the evening was when they ran this audience-participation contest, drawing three people out of the audience at seemingly random to compete in ‘sexiest in dance’ to Justin Timberlake music. Hill picked on the guy from the fourth row who was cackling loudly throughout, and insisted he come up onstage to be the male contestant. Hill kept calling him “a gay” while he was in the audience, and when he got onstage, Hill said, “Oh, I thought you were a gay out there in the audience, but now that you’re up here I see that you’re not one at all.” Alyssa and I were DYING of embarrassment; he is nuts. Anyway, I don’t know if this guy was part of the act, but after initially looking out at the audience, like, crap, what did I get myself into, he proceeded to, I swear, perform the funniest, sexiest, cutest, lewdest cheesecake / beefcake strip-tease I’ve ever seen. Afterward, Hill asked him what he did for a living and he said vaguely that he was in show-biz. Don’t know who he is, but I definitely want to see him again! I don’t know what the guy’s sexuality was — I try not to make assumptions since I’m usually wrong — but if Hill was right in his final analysis, I think it’s perhaps funniest to see straight men who are freaking out try to do strip-tease…

All in all, I thought it was fun, though, I have to say, it was billed as part of a several-part program Symphony Space is doing entitled “Gender Benders,” and nothing besides the presence of Murray Hill, who is the biggest walking talking gender bender I’ve ever seen, challenged my notions of gender. I guess Shiau and Riga ridiculed the male gaze, the former by standing at the edge of the stage doing nothing more than licking an ice cream cone, the latter by kind of “talking” with her breasts with the assistance of Wolcott, standing behind her; and there were plenty of gay men humorously grabbing their crotches and riffing on both straight and gay male identities, etc. Hill remarked that he’s never been north of 23rd Street (though I saw him at the Supper Club, in Times Square, not long ago…), acting like it’s such a big deal to be all the way uptown, but uptown is still New York City, for cry-eye. This kind of show is more needed for the middle-Americans who frequent Hooters and drool over the waitresses’ tight shirts only to have near-nervous breakdowns when people like Matt and his fellow ABT guys sing at the bar. Also, I found it interesting how the audience would go “woooo” and hoot anytime the women were onstage being ‘sexy’, but when the men were on grabbing their crotches, everyone laughed. I just think as a society in general, we’re still very uncomfortable “objectifying” men the same way we do women… Anyway, Keigwin & Co. will be performing at Skirball Center near NYU next week. I definitely want to see more of them!

Just really quickly since this post is now about 100,000 words long, Friday night, on Gia’s Winger recommendation again, I went to see “Becky, Jodi and John” at Dance Theater Workshop. Much more mellow than Keigwin Kabaret, but I found it compelling in its sublelty and bittersweet humor. Choreographed by John Jasperse and featuring him, Becky Hilton, and Jodi Melnick (all 43 years old, oddly enough), it dealt mainly with aging and dance: the dancer’s ‘aging’ body; how changing self-esteem and increasing self-knowlege alters how you present yourself and what you’re willing to do during a performance (after Jasperse asks her to do the project, Melnick goes through a long, humorous litany of problems she’s been having lately with her joints and muscles, and tells him there are certain things she doesn’t like to show anymore, such as her arms); the choreographer’s ‘aging’ mentality and how s/he’s perceived by critics and peers as “old” (at one point, Jasperse came out onstage naked, carrying a load of bricks, placed the bricks down and assembled them into a structure while another dancer read a critic’s review of his work, telling him he was too “formalist” and needed to loosen up); and the power and absolute necessity of maintaining friendships with each other over the years and across the miles (after Jasperse finishes his ‘building’ he walks to Melnick who stares down at his genitals questioningly, humorously, then they perform a beautiful pas de deux illustrating their mutual reliance on each other for physical and emotional support. Like the Forsythe and Young works I blogged about recently, this also was multi-media, using video projections, spoken word, and of course dance to explore its themes. While it was centered around dance, I still think many people could relate to the themes — to the process of aging, feeling your body begin to give, feeling “old” compared to the younger generation, maintaining friendships while people go their separate ways, etc.

Also, I just have to say, I just saw Melnick in another piece, Vicky Schick’s Plum House with Laurel Dugan, also at Dance Theater Workshop, and it blows my mind that she is 43. She looks soooo young. Not that 43 is not young of course! All three dancers did amazing things with their bodies, especially in the first part, where they’re spread out on the floor in various stretch poses. I, for one, could not have the turnout required to do some of that floor work…

Here is a picture of the lobby, where they have a splendid chocolate bar! It was the most crowded I’ve ever seen it, and I think the shows sold out all nights, so hooray for them!

Finally, I just want to point out that Dance Theater Workshop has an interesting little thing on their MySpace blog. In their playbills, they pose a series of questions about the performance you’re there to see, titled “Cat Got Your Tongue?” They are: 1) How did the body move?; 2) How did you feel during the dance?; 3) How was the piece organized?; 4) What was the dancers’ relationship to each other, to the audience?; and 5) What, if anything, do you think the artist wanted to communicate with you? I think they’re interesting questions designed to make you think about what you just saw, thereby getting more out of it. Sometimes, oftentimes, modern dance is difficult to make sense of for the average viewer, which is the main reason, I think, why modern dance does not draw the audiences that ballet and other kinds of dance do. I feel like I get more out of a performance after I blog about it, so I think DTW’s MySpace blog is a potentially wonderful tool.

Posted on

Calling Forth My Own Dancer Alter Ego, and Other Thoughts on Women and Dancers and Bodies and Men…

Last night I went to the monthly Writers’ Room member readings at Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village (in which I’ll be reading at some point in the not-too-distant-future). Reading were Susan Buttenwieser, a Pushcart Prize finalist, Lara Tupper, a lounge singer-turned novelist whose debut novel, “A Thousand and One Nights” has just been published (how jealous am I?!?!), and last but not least, Signe Hammer, who, because of her bio, I was very interested in hearing. The funny host, playwright Stan Richardson, whom I personally like (though I’m not sure that sentiment is universal amongst the WR crew) always asks the readers what, from the bio they provide him, they are most proud of (still have no damn clue what I am going to say when it comes my turn…) Susan said hers was being nominated for the prize, Lara said hers was being a member of the Barry Manilow fan club (hehehe), and Signe said her short-lived career as a dance / performance artist with Meredith Monk‘s original dance group, The House, was her proudest moment! Immediately everyone clapped loudly; all the writers and their friends knew already of Monk with no further explanation. So, Yay For Dance!! She gave some brief little humorous tidbits about her work with Monk, saying they founded site-specific “Dance Theater” (performing at the Guggenheim and Judson Playhouse before obtaining their own space), as opposed to “Dance Dance” which is what she termed Twyla Tharp’s main enterprize, after trying and failing at Dance Theater. Tharp, she said with humor, realized the genre wasn’t for her after her first effort, which Monk remembered as being a piece where bodies hurled through the air as if propelled by a canon, one after the other, and … that was it. After labeling her and Monk as “Downtown,” Stan asked her if she considered herself “downtown” in terms of her writing, and she snapped, “no, downtown is dead!” Because there is no derriere-garde anymore, she proclaimed, there is no avant-garde either. Hmmmm.

Anyway, the readings were interesting, but maybe it’s just that I’ve seen so much dance lately (and, I guess contemporary Dance Theater), that, I kinda think, uh, the art of simply reading from some pieces of paper requires somewhat of a performance artist. I mean, lying down on your futon with your legs hanging over the back of the frame with a book open in your face — how I read anyway — that’s just the way words were meant to be taken in– by visualizing them on the page. Hearing them spoken just doesn’t allow them to penetrate my brain the same way. Usually. Except when spoken by Ann Liv Young and Laurel Dugan and Forsythe’s dancers. Hmmm, maybe I should ask Laurel to help me, to be my dancer alter ego! Ha ha. No, stage is far too small, and Stan would freak. I’ll have to call forth my own dancer alter ego 🙂

Anyway, in the audience, I met this lady:

Her name is Alice Denham and she was all excited about her new book, whose full title is “Sleeping With Bad Boys: Literary New York in the 1950s and 1960s,” being reviewed in the New York Times. I looked her up and she’s been reviewed all over the place! She gave me a little flyer showing the front and back covers of the book. Back cover reads “Denham’s lusty memoir is a juicy tell-all about a time when male writers were gods and an aspiring and gorgeous female novelist tries to win respect… Caught between the sheets are James Dean, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth… The steam rises page by page as Denham — the only Playboy Playmate to have her fiction published in the same issue as her centerfold — chases her dream of writing as a young, oversexed beauty in the literary swirl of 1950s Greenwich Village…” The Denham I met seemed interesting, intelligent, quirky, and opinionated, as she rolled her eyes at some of our host’s jokes and wasn’t shy about yelling out, “that’s the ONLY funny one of the night” at the one that actually made her laugh (and she’s of course a lot older now than in her picture as shown above)… but she didn’t seem so ‘oversexed’ to me. I guess she read my thoughts because she said, “Oh, they sexed it up, you know,” rolling her eyes. “It’s really a feminist account of a woman in the 50s trying to be taken seriously as a writer.” Looks good, and I do think I’ll check it out. And Susan Brownmiller of “Our Bodies Our Selves” gave it a thumbs up!

One thing though: feminism and the whole (false) mind / body binarism has captured my interest of late, and Denham’s back cover made me think of it again. As dancers, our bodies are all important, and in a way, I guess we are our bodies. But we are also obviously intellectual beings. It’s just upsetting when someone — a man, doesn’t want to accept that, who thinks that because you’re a dancer he can treat you a certain way, disrespect you, say certain things, look at you a certain way — all things that can even be a bit threatening. I’m a lawyer, I’m not used to this. And it’s definitely not all men — definitely not even most; most men are totally cool; it’s just some who ruin it. Do a lot of female dancers get this treatment? What about “sexy” female writers like Denham? Or Candace Bushnell? Ann Liv Young said she got some suggestions about ways she could make her piece “sexier” by men who didn’t understand her work; she just rolled her eyes inwardly and thanked them. Very Dorothy Parker. I love her. Someone asked for Santoro’s phone number, I think she said as well. I wonder how Santoro reacted.

Anyway, on a more positive thought, regarding feminism: there are some really cool things going on in the city this weekend. There’s a “Global Feminisms” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on feminist art, and “Indwelling” — a combination of photography exhibits on women’s bodies by female artists, screenings of shorts films such as the movie “A Girl Like Me” which I saw at TriBeCa film festival and blogged about earlier — awesome awesome AWESOME short film by a high-schooler about young African-American girls’ self-perceptions — and some play readings such as The Vagina Monologues. The theme is women’s body images, and it celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute and takes place at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Sounds excellent.

Posted on

"The Virgin is a Lovely Number"

 

On Thursday night, I went to see Ann Liv Young‘s “Snow White” after seeing it posted on The Winger, by Gia Kourlas, who also has a good interview with the young iconoclastic choreographer in TONY. Very in-your-face, very rawly unabashedly unerotically naked, very hilariously WTF??, very post-post-post-feminist, and I LOVED it! This was my first time seeing anything by her, and I had to do some research, both on her work and the classic fairytale, to make a bit of sense (but I love that sort of thing — and I had no idea reinvention of the fairytale was so popular — in addition to Anne Sexton and Gregory Maguire, Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt have had their take). Young said it was based on the Grimm Brothers version and not Disney, which was pretty obvious, but I don’t think she needed to say that anyway: it’s really just her own thing entirely.

I’m not sure if I got what I was supposed to get out of it, or if there’s even some specific thing that she wanted me to get, but some themes I saw were pretense or illusion versus the real, tearing apart sex and gender stereotypes– rather lewdly too, subverting the (male, I guess) gaze, questioning the meaning of eroticism and nakedness versus nudity, etc.. It was kind of like a play within a play, but in a way that questioned what was performance and what was real. When the audience walked into the theater, the three performers were already standing onstage looking out at us waiting for us to take our seats. Young herself kind of glared out at us, a challenging look in her eye: she was not up there to please us, to show us prettiness and gratification. Similarly, at the end of the performance (which was rather abrupt), they just got up, took their things and walked off the stage, not waiting for or needing our applause, no bows, no “curtain calls.” And throughout the show, things would go wrong — sound devices that wouldn’t work, costume malfunctions, problematic props, etc. — and would be fixed onstage. It’s as if she’s questioning what a performance is, what are its confines, and at points, I wasn’t even completely sure if what was happening was supposed to be happening or if it was part of the show.

But back to the beginning. The three performers — one man (Michael Guerrero), two women (Liz Santoro and Young herself) — all wearing simple white ballet leotards and heavy black sneakers (the last of which is the only item of clothing that remains part of the costume throughout), play a rock song — Guerrero on drums, Santoro keyboards and Young singing. Each person, by the way, plays two characters — Guerrero the sound technician and The Queen, Santoro The Woodsman and The Prince, and Young the play’s director and Ms. White. After the song finished, all three stripped naked and changed into their next costume — all onstage. No strip-tease, nothing artful or sexy about it, just a clothing change done onstage — and therefore — really somewhat shocking. Certainly not Kenneth Clarke’s definition of “the nude.” Plus, none of the bodies are “idealized” — no makeup, no starving oneself for months on end or working out like a madperson for the idealized physique — these are real bodies.

For the next song, Young sings naked (except for the heavy black sneakers), while Guerrero works the sound and Santoro changes into her Prince costume — underwear with a giant strap-on dildo. The sound goes wrong, not enough is coming out of the mikes, and Young stops the performance mid-song to yell and scream at everyone for it. One male European blogger I read likened her to Eve Ensler, but to me, this ranting naked woman reminded me more of Karen Finley. Except, where Finley would often rant about overtly political issues, Young’s fist-pounding naked woman is political in another way: if traditional onstage female nudity (ie: for male gratification) must render (at least in fantasy) the woman vulnerable, humiliated, and subjugated to men in order for it to be titillating, Young’s dictating everyone around, forcing even the rather muscular man to run frantically about, his penis dangling between his legs, is nothing but amusing. She is hardly the vulnerable, submissive one, and is humiliating everyone else. Maybe the image is a bit shocking as well; I found it funny.

The Disney version has oft been criticized for reifying the virgin / whore dichotomy. As Sexton’s poem notes, the Queen is the sexed-up slut well deserving of her eventual demise, Snow the glorious good girl who is, for all intents and purposes a virgin — of course every woman must at some point perform those horrid ‘wifely duties’ but Snow’s “china-blue doll eyes … open to say Good Day Mama” but are “shut for the thrust of the unicorn…” Since she denies her sexuality, the fantasy of her virginity remains intact. Here, Young screws all such fantasies: the “Prince,” topless and with her giant strap-on dildo, climbs aboard Young, balancing his body over hers in a push-up, as if looking into the glass-box where the poor dead beautiful Snow lies. But instead of being a beautiful dead girl, Young is alive and active. She jumps up, pushes the Prince over, climbs atop him and straddles the dildo. Young told Kourlas part of what she wished to do was play with skepticism, so she wants the audience to see it penetrate her. The spectacle is rather outlandish and the audience kind of didn’t know how to react. Personally I don’t see how anyone could possibly find this ‘girl-on-girl action’ to be intended for male titilation — it seems way too vulgar — but Young told Kourlas that a European male viewer wrote to her that he thought the performance was quite sexy, but if she wanted to make it yet sexier she should lose the tennis shoes. In an earlier piece, entitled “Michael,” which I only read about and now wished I would have seen, apparently part of the action takes place in a trailer bearing three naked women dancing, and a male outside peering through the window, naked as well, and masturbating. He later comes inside the trailer, only to have his penis tied to the couch by the women, who pour soda over him while screaming, “I don’t love you anymore.” Is she saying that this is the fate that befalls the poor man who assumes women’s bodies exist solely for his gratification? Anyway, at one point during Snow White, Young reads to the audience some letters of criticism from former viewers, but she didn’t include this tennis shoe one and I wish she would have.

In the last section, the three performers pretend to be part of a radio talk show. One discussion revolves around how each character’s Valentine’s Day was spent. Young tells a story in which she was driving down the freeway topless, rocking out to cranked-up music and having herself a great time. A trucker sees her and begins following her. Of course, right then her tire goes flat. She throws a shirt on, jumps out of the car, and goes to the trunk to retrieve her spare, when the trucker stops and approaches her. He shoves her up against her trunk and pulls down his pants. Just then his black lab jumps out of the truck and attacks him, allowing her to run away. She flees into some bushes and hides, only to hear a shotgun go off. After the trucker pulls away, she goes back out to the street and holds the dog in her arms as he dies. A caller phones in and tells her if she’d just keep her clothes on her life would be much easier. Very disturbing, and Finley-esque.

Anyway, “Snow White” is playing at The Kitchen this Wednesday through Saturday. There’s tons of good stuff I left out. My friend, unfortunately, was disturbed by it, so I guess it may not be for everyone, but if you want to see a real spectacle that will likely challenge your notions of things and make you think, then just go and check it out for yourself.

Posted on

My Prize From Root Magazine!

So, I just received in the mail my prize from Root Magazine for being a winner in their essay contest for my piece on making an ass of myself in Samba class! I love “Rough Guide,” and it’s perfect for me — covers dance festivals worldwide, and has a whole section, OF COURSE, devoted to Rio’s Carnival! Lists inexpensive hotels, how to get tickets to the parade and what times to go to see the best schools, and how and when to sign up with a Samba school if you wish to dance in the parade (it listed Mangueira as the best, which Cathy had first told me about!) So, now I have NO EXCUSE for not going next year 🙂

The book also lists a bunch of other fabulous world festivals (both dance-related and non-dance), including, New Year’s Hogmanay in Scotland, PETA’s “Running with the Nudes” — as opposed “Running with the Bulls” — in Spain, NY’s very own Halloween parade, and one in particular that caught my eye — the Gay and Lesbian Festival in Sydney — supposedly the largest of its kind in the world and in which participants really know how to “lose their inhibitions,” clothing-wise. Sounds like the perfectly SAFE place for that — and probably ideal for someone like me who freaks over her costume showing a milimeter of cleavage (more about that in a later post…) Hmmm, ideas for more stuff to spend my non-existant monetary funds on…

Here’s a picture from the inside flap — I’m not sure if this is that Sydney festival or something else, but it looks intriguing 🙂

Anyway, it was the perfect prize for me! Thanks again so much, Root!

Posted on

You Made Me a Monster

Last night, I went to see another piece by Forsythe, this time at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. My usual dance friends were all busy, so I managed to convince my friend and fellow co-worker, Jonathan, who rarely goes to dance events, to accompany me. This task proved to be quite difficult since the website described the work as involving “audience participation.” When you’re a ballroom dancer and you invite your very dance-shy friends to socials at your studio promising them they can simply sit and watch all the action, only to get there and have everyone and their dog dragging them kicking and screaming out onto the dance floor, then go and invite them to an audience participatory dance event, they simply won’t trust you. I had to promise him on my life that this was a world-class concert dance company and the only ones doing the actual dancing would be the professionals.

Anyway, You Made Me a Monster was, like Three Atmospheric Studies, dance theater, and involved not only dance but other elements of theater as well, this time sculpture, sound effects, and words (this time not spoken but written, and projected from a video monitor onto a screen). The theme was the devastating effects of cancer on the body.

A group of 80 of us walked into a room where about 10 or so tables were set up, each bearing a partially constructed model of a human skeleton made from cardboard pieces. Guides divided us into smaller groups, took each group to a different table, and directed us to build off of the partly put-together puzzle, but not in a logical way. In other words, a spine should not resemble an actual spine, but the audience-member should twist and bend the carboard bone so that it made an artful design, then attach it to the model not where it “should” go on a “normal” human body, but in a more unconventional, surprising place. If we liked, we could also take some of the pieces of white paper below the table and trace the shadows made by the distorted model body.

Okay. Can you pick the lawyers out of the art crowd?… Yes, with us, this proved almost as bad as if we’d been asked to dance. While everyone else at our table enthusiastically went to work, Jonathan and I looked at each other, picked up a cardboard piece, looked quizzically at it, surreptitiously regarded the instructions we were told to pay no attention to, looked at each other again hopeless confusion covering our faces. Beginning to stress out about looking like a couple of idiots, I finally shrugged my shoulders and started bending and twisting a femur. Jonathan frowned at what I think was a collarbone, then put it down and excused himself to go to the bathroom for the next ten minutes. He’s never coming with me to a “dance event” again, I know it… In the end, I contributed to our table’s body by placing a very long, twisty bone protruding straight up from the center. It looked more amusing than anything else.

About ten minutes into our “body-building” project, shrill, screeching sounds began to emerge from the speakers, and dancers, three in all, came out, approached a table (each a different one), and began conveying through movement the design we’d created with our “bodies.” Their movement was much like that of the mother and diplomat’s assistant that I described in Three Atmospheric Studies — twisted, distorted, and contorted to grotesque, misshapen effect. I recognized the dancers from Atmospheric Studies, since I’d just seen it.

Funny thing, Matt Murphy had told me one of his favorite dancers from Atmospheric Studies was “the bald guy.” That man was one of the dancers here. I hadn’t noticed him much at Atmospheric Studies, since he didn’t “play” one of the main characters. Here, he took my breath away. Matt was so right! Dancers … they do notice dancing! With me, I guess supreme dance skill has to be shoved right in my face for me to see it…

After finishing at the tables, the dancers went to the front, stage area, and danced behind three separate stands each holding a piece of paper with a tracing an audience-member had made of the shadows of their model. They resembled musicians playing instruments while reading music sheets.

Behind them was a screen, onto which was projected a series of sentences, each running across the screen one by one. This use of words was somewhat ineffective to me. Every once in a while, I’d see solitary words or phrases that shouted-out to me, like “xenophobia,” “seeds of one’s internal destruction,” “reproductive organs were removed,” “grasp of space … uncanny, delirious,” “repulsive, occult, lethal,” Aliens” etc. etc. But I couldn’t focus on the words because that would take my concentration away from the dancers, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I only got an intermittent sensory effect from various words or sentence parts, without understanding how they fit together into a fuller narrative. I would have much preferred the words to have been spoken. There were sound effects blaring over the speakers as well, but to have the words on top of the sound effects would have enabled me to better understand them, since I feel that sounds can better compete with each other than visuals. You can only look at one thing at a time!

I noticed right before leaving that the pieces of paper on top of and underneath the tables contained those same sentences. I snatched one and put it into my bag. I’m not sure if they were there for us to take, but I’m very glad I did, because I read it on my subway ride home, and it made the performance all the more sorrowfully compelling to me. A man, whether it’s Forsythe I’m unsure, tells about his wife’s illness then death from cancer of her reproductive organs. The woman, a dancer, had been bleeding profusely, obviously weakening her and making her unable to perform. Her doctor, who happened to be a woman, told her it was just that she was dancing too much — obviously a judgment laced with sexism and devastatingly destructive medical inaccuracies — something with which a few of us are just a bit familiar. He goes on to talk about what a “dance genius” his wife was: “She had been able to reach into the profound heart of dancing and bring it to light…” The two were working on a piece about xenophobia, in response to several murders of political refugees in Germany. She had likened her cancer to xenophobia, which “constitutes a fear that the seeds of one’s internal destruction reside in a foreign body…” One thing I love about Forsythe is his ability to merge and analogize seemingly disparate things to shed new light on both. The “story” ends when, years after the woman has died, the man and his children began to assemble a cardboard jigsaw puzzle-like model of a human skeleton given to the wife before her death by a friend. They did not follow instructions, however, but “randomly bent, folded and attached the various intricate pieces until there was a model of something I understood. it was a model of grief.”

Amazing writing central to the piece that I thought should have been more central to the performance. As Jonathan and I were walking to the subway, I said that the dancing seemed one-note to me. He said he thought it was thematic and he enjoyed it overall and didn’t need a narrative with a big-bang climax. It WAS thematic and I didn’t need those things either, but I still wished there would have been something beside all the images of distorted, mangled, devastated bodies. I wished there would have been some beauty somewhere. I guess I found that in this writing, which was beautifully written. I just don’t know how many people saw the pieces of paper to pick up before leaving, so I don’t know how many people missed out on it.

One last note, on gender: two of the dancers here were men, one a woman. I thought it was interesting that Forsythe used male dancers to portray a woman’s illness from a feminine form of cancer. He also used female dancers in traditionally male roles in Atmospheric Studies — ie: a diplomat. This is interesting to me, this kind of playing with gender roles and assignments, unless I am reading too much into it. However, there was one line in this written story that struck me. After the woman’s cancer-ridden reproductive organs were removed, the man says, “I noticed afterward, she no longer smelled like a woman.” He goes on to talk about how, once she started on a course of radiation therapy, she began to “bend” “los[ing] the ability to fully lengthen her body” as a dancer must. So, the cancer depleted her of both her ‘womanness’ and her ‘dancerness’ — the two things that defined her, at least to the man (who is the one, after all, left to speak for her). But the line about the reproductive organs and “smelling like a woman” bothered me. It’s horrible for a woman to lose her reproductive organs — it’s horrible for anyone to have to lose any of their organs — and I definitely think doctors have been too haste to recommend hysterectomies and mastectomies and have done so out of pure and simple laziness over having to deal with the complexities of our bodies. But what exactly does ‘a woman’ smell like? Do we all smell the same? Are we all one thing, are we all defined by the same thing — our reproductive organs?

Posted on

Katusha Demidova = Rita Hayworth!

So, Jonathan Wilkins and Katusha Demidova are the America’s Ballroom Challenge Champions!! The top photo, by the way, is copyright of Jeffrey Dunn for WGBH, from the America’s Ballroom Challenge website. I couldn’t be happier for them. For the first time, I absolutely fell in love with their dancing, while watching them during this competition. I have always championed the couple I call the underdogs of Standard, Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed, but here I really saw why Jonathan and Katusha are the reigning U.S. Standard champions and third overall in the world. Though I haven’t studied much Standard and don’t know much about technique in that dance style, I could tell what a perfect connection they had, like they were just made to dance with each other. And they exhibited such class and charm. The way Katusha wore her hair, with her curls bouncing around behind her, particularly during their short number — their swift-footed, gleeful, sweetly flirty Quickstep danced to “It’s Too Darn Hot,” she reminded me so much of Rita Hayworth dancing with Fred Astaire. What sophisticated beauty and grace and elegance. It made me wish the Standard competitors wore their hair down all the time, instead of up in the oftentimes rather severe buns.

Though I’ve liked Latin, watching these two made me feel like Astaire and Hayworth, like class itself, had been brought back into American Dance. I wish Standard was more popular here.

Of course I love Latin. I love Latin primarily because I love learning about the cultures from which the different dance styles originate. I love being exposed to, and learning to ‘feel’ different kinds of music, with the beautiful sounds made by foreign instruments, the mellifluous foreign languages… But too often, I feel that people sexualize Latin dance, and it makes me uncomfortable. Latin dancing is really not about sex. One of my friends from my old studio, Juana, once told me that Rhumba, for example, grew out of slave culture. The Rhumba basic — a step, followed by downward motion of the back shoulder muscle toward the hip, followed by the settling of the body weight into that hip, mirrored the way the slave women who had to carry heavy loads on their shoulders would walk. I love that she taught that to me. It made the Cuban motion so fundamental to Rhumba all the more clear to me. And, I felt like I was having a mini history lesson. Funny thing, Juana wasn’t even a dance instructor, just a very knowledgeable and historically-aware fellow student. In any event, this basic movement is not sexual. Latin dancers in part wear “skimpy” costumes because this isolation of movement of a single part of the body is important to the dance, so the judges must see their backs, hips and rib cages in order to determine whether they are exhibiting proper technique. Not that the costumes can’t ever be called “sexy,” but I feel that sometimes people go too far, and reduce Latin dance to that, and thus reduce Latin dancers to sexualized objects. Sometimes other kinds of dancers can be reduced to sexualized objects as well, and I find this very disturbing. I have a lot more to say about dancers and bodies, but will save that for later. For now, I just want to say congratulations to Jonathan and Katusha for some very beautiful, very inspiring dancing 🙂