Tag: Gender / Sexuality Issues

Posted on

Othello Cannot Survive Nonsensical Melodramatic First Two Acts and One-Dimensional Iago

Ugh. I’m so angry. Just got back from seeing the NY premier of ABT’s Othello and I should probably wait to blog until I’ve gathered my thoughts better, and I may well change my mind at some point in the future, but sometimes it’s more fun when you’re raging, flaming mad. Everyone who knows me and reads my blog knows how much I love ABT and have never ever trashed anything they’ve done. But my initial reaction toward this is repulsion. I love a good drama, but I feel like this was more melodrama and it left me feeling cheap, man-hating, and repelled.

I don’t know whom exactly to blame — whether it’s choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s fault for not fleshing things out better or explaining to his dancers what his ballet was all about, or whether it’s the fault of the dancers — mainly Sascha Radetsky. Radetsky danced the part of Iago, and he played him as complete, pure evil, no complexity whatsoever. Completely black and white. I’m sorry but Shakespeare’s character is so much more complicated, and Radetsky has nowhere near the level of artistry, sophistication and intellect to pull it off. And he is going to need Botox for that damn, deep-ass frown he insisted on wearing the whole way through. He’s got to have a permanent crevice in his forehead by now. I need to see David Hallberg in this part — he has everything that Radetsky does not, and he should not be playing Othello; he should be playing who is really the most important character in this play because if someone gives this one a dumb-ass one-dimensional intepretation, the whole thing is reduced to the level of a cartoon. And you DON’T reduce Shakespeare to a cartoon, you just DON’T.

I know Lubovitch keeps insisting he’s not going by the Shakepeare but is working from an earlier source, but guess what, Mr. Lubovitch, we all know Shakespeare, we don’t know the novella by Geraldo Cintio, most of us don’t know the opera by Verdi, everyone knows Shakespeare, so you’re getting compared to him.

Which is not at all to say Shakespeare can’t be taken in a different direction, and Lubovitch clearly gives the Iago / Othello interaction a homoerotic motif. I usually don’t do this, but I read some reviews of this ballet before I went tonight and one reviewer from Critical Dance noticed this theme. When I read her critique I rolled my eyes, thinking, oh sure, anytime there’s any kind of dancing between two men, it’s got to be considered “homoerotic.” But after seeing it — she’s totally right. And if she’s not, Lubovitch has some serious re-working to do. This makes me think that Lubovitch tried to give Iago some depth here and Radetsky just wasn’t getting it. NO MORE RADETSKY as Iago — use David, please Kevin, use an intellectually and artistically sophisticated dancer in this role — please! Jose Carreno could do it too… I know Ethan Stiefel and Max Beloserkovsky are supposed to dance him as well, but unfortunately I have to miss them. If anyone goes, please tell me how they stack up.

Anyway, besides my disgust with Radetsky in this role, my other problem is it really doesn’t pick up until the third Act, and that is way too damn late for a full-length ballet to get going. This is mainly because the first two acts don’t make a lot of sense; they just wiz by — I think the intermissions were longer than those acts.

The ballet opens with Othello dancing a solo, then the corps come out and do these puppet-like moves. Why puppet-like? I have no idea? It’s never explained. There are all kinds of odd, contorting, modernist, angular moves. They just don’t make sense. If they are there just to set the general tone that something is very awry, they’re way too obvious. Another ridiculously obvious thing: in the second Act, when Othello is on his throne having a nervous breakdown over what he wrongly perceives is Desdemona’s infidelity (and it is clear, contrary to Alessandra Ferri’s interpretation, as discussed below, it is wrong), the back of the throne is made of glass and it has a huge mar in it, as if a rock has been thrown at it. Has anyone heard of the concept of subtlety? Good lord, I mean really; you just want to laugh! In fact, there are creepily weird mirrors all over the place — why?

In the second Act, the frenzied tarantella (a dance that was popular at the time and considered by the Church to have satanic connections) is performed by the prostitute Bianca and other women and men standing around on the dock awaiting the return of Othello’s fleet (which has just defeated the Turks). So, Othello and the men of his command are still out to sea en route to home, but somehow Othello is running around stage carrying Desdemona over his head in one gigantic lift. Why? This is the scene where Desdemona, while dancing, will lose the handkerchief that Othello gave her at their wedding symbolizing her faithfulness to him, that Iago eventually gets his hands on and plants on Cassio — the other man — in order to convince Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity. So what is Othello doing running around stage with her? And while Adrienne Schulte is gorgeously tantalizing as Bianca (she makes all these intentionally broken lines — legs bent, etc., to illustrate the foreboding ugliness that will result from her actions), the rest of the dance is more repulsive than in any way sexy.

Oh, and going back a minute to the beginning, also making no sense is the choreography up front. In their wedding pas de deux when they’re in love, when Othello has no reasons to suspect Desdemona of anything, he still holds her head tightly, aggressively between his hands as if about to break her neck. In this scene it’s supposed to be a loving gesture and I guess also a foreshadowing of what’s to come, but it’s too obvious.

The best thing about the ballet was that Julie Kent (as Desdemona) and Marcelo danced gorgeously together –so much better than he danced with Alessandra in the excerpt on opening night. The problem with opening night, as I now realize Alastair Macaulay was getting at, is that, poetic as Alessandra is, she pulled that willing-victim schtick straight out of her butt. After now seeing the whole, I have NO IDEA what she was thinking — that is NOWHERE in the text, nowhere in the choreography, nowhere in the first two acts, and she completely made it up and Marcelo had no idea what in the world she was doing and couldn’t keep up with her. Julie’s Desdemona tried with all her heart to convince Othello of her innocence right up until the end; she loved him the whole time. No stupid childishly kinky crap that has no place. That’s why real partners work together and two people who may be great on their own just don’t. If Alessandra was going to do some crazy interpretation, she might have let her partner in on it beforehand. Alessandra’s admitted that she doesn’t practice with the rest of the company very much and it shows unfortunately…

The only other thing I have to say about Marcelo — not to be nitpicky, but why does he always need to raise his free arm in the air during a trick? Does he need to show that he can lift or hold Julie with one hand, or does he think it makes a good line? At one point, he didn’t even get his free arm all the way up, and it looked very odd. He held her in a lunge with one arm, the other shot up half-assed and failed to make a complete line. Then, he threw her into a lunge supporting her with the other arm, and the opposite hand shot up for five seconds making a likewise incomplete line. With his large bone structure, the free arm in the air doesn’t always look very beautiful. It’d look far more romantic if he left both arms wrapped around his ballerina. Who cares if he can hold the woman with his pinkie if it looks unnatural and off?…

One last note on the music. Very melodramatic, very loud, booming, frightening. Don’t sit near the orchestra pit. I was in the second row and I feel like I’ve just come from a rock concert my eardrums are so numb…

There was this gross older guy shouting, “yeah, baby” really horrendously pervertedly when Adrienne and Julie came out for their curtain calls. He really created a scene and several people looked his way. On the way out of the house he gave me the eye and I worried he was going to grope me from behind. If he would have done so I swear I would have found the super-human strength to push him to the ground, nail his crotch to the floor with my stiletto heel while calling the police on my cell phone. Something about this ballet made me feel dirty, disgusted, and repulsed at all men; I can’t help it — even Marcelo. I feel like between Lubovitch and Radetsky, they ruined Marcelo, ruined Shakespeare, ruined my night…

Okay, calming down: in general, the first two acts need to be fleshed out much much MUCH more, Iago’s motives and love for Othello need to be explored further, Iago needs to be better portrayed, the choreography needs to make sense, and the concept of subtlety needs to be realized. Then perhaps it won’t be flat, one-dimensional, cartoonishly melodramatic, and misogynistic…

Okay, Marcelo acted it really well and he gave the lead a lot of depth and was extremely conflicted and almost killed her by accident. But it’s after 1:00 in the morning and I’m tired and cranky and hating all men right now and that includes Marcelo so screw them all and him too!…

Posted on

Veronika's Beautiful Pathos, Diana's Passionate Abandon, Marcelo's "Every Guy" hero, and Ethan's need to join overactors anonymous: My Bayadere Roundup

Crappy picture of Marcelo Gomes and Veronika Part mid-bow after ABT‘s Friday night performance of Bayadere at the Met.

Uh, I meant to blog about this so much earlier but had to get a brief in today so my supervisor wouldn’t murder me.

Anyway, I finished my Bayadere viewings on Saturday night. I was toying with trying to go tonight to see the legendary Nina Ananiashvili perform the lead, but I just have too many things to do in preparation for my upcoming trip to Blackpool and just couldn’t swing it. So if anyone goes tonight, please let me know how it went!

So, the casts I saw were: 1) Paloma Herrera, David Hallberg, and Gillian Murphy as, respectively, the temple dancer (Bayadere), Solor the warrior, and the princess Gamzatti, which I blogged about in my earlier post (and if you’re not familiar with the ballet, please go there for my description of the characters and story); 2) Veronika Part, Marcelo Gomes, and Michele Wiles in those same parts; and 3) — probably the most chi chi “famous people cast”: the critically acclaimed Met Goddess Diana Vishneva, “Center Stage” heartthrob Ethan Stiefel, and Stella Abrera.

So, I have a couple of thoughts that kind of border on the sacriligious 🙂 The first is that, I thought long and hard about it, and … I actually preferred Veronika over Diana as the Bayadere!!! Diana was beautiful and she made gorgeous lines and had, as Susan had commented on my last post, more of the authentic, Indian-looking styling with the more beautifully expressive wrists and exotic, sinuous arm movements and flexible back arches than the others (though Veronika I think had all that as well, but not as pronounced). She is also known for, both literally and figuratively, throwing herself into her roles with such abandon that she sometimes makes too hasty of a stage exit that she trips and falls, or to show her character’s misery, she’ll throw herself down on the floor with so much passion that she’ll come up a bit bruised and bloodied. I can see why. She was so heavily in character, that when something upset her and her bayadere needed to flee the stage, she really did fly up those back stairs or into the wings, running at full speed. I found this made for very passionate dancing fully in-character, but to me this also made her bayadere seem a bit immature.

Veronika was the opposite — a very mature bayadere sadly accepting of her fate. She brought me so fully into her world, I nearly cried for her. She was not at all melodramatic, but held her deep sorrow inside, showing it subtilely through closed eyes — to me all the more powerful than running at full speed into the wings. And she is such a tall, beautifully statuesque ballerina with such exquisitely elongated lines, as Delirium said to me, she just “devours the stage.” Perhaps because of her larger bone structure, she may not have the ability to make the same intricate poses with her hands and wrists as Diana, which, ironically, is what I was complaining about in my former Bayadere post. But she was overall such a beautiful dancer who brought me so completely into her world anyway that that styling “authenticity” didn’t matter. I will most definitely be watching for more of her. And, I’ll be seeing several more of Diana’s performances as well; I’m sure I’ll see more of what makes people so enamored of her in the weeks to come.

Regarding Paloma’s performance in the role, I love her in general but didn’t think she really inhabited this part very well. But I think she rocks as the fun, flirty Kitri in Don Quixote! Former New York Times chief dance critic John Rockwell had suggested that ABT and the other big dance companies be more “star” driven, and, like the Met Opera, alternate ballets on a daily rather than weekly basis so that one or two dancers could “star” in a certain role without getting tired. I think this is a very worthy idea, especially since, with my upcoming trip, I’m only going to have the opportunity to see one Othello, a couple of Sleeping Beauties, and am going to have to miss entirely the Dream / Symphonie Concertante mixed rep, which disappoints me because David is debuting in that. That if a person goes away for a week they miss an entire program, combined with the fact that certain dancers excel in certain roles, I think Kevin McKenzie should take seriously Rockwell’s proposal…

Now, on to the MEN OF ABT, my very favorite people 🙂

Oh, and now I am going to have to recant what I said above because, the men of ABT are so great, I just want to see ALL of them in every role… As I said in my earlier post, David can virtually do no wrong in my eyes… it’s so interesting to me because he and Marcelo perform just about all of the same roles and there couldn’t be two more different dancers; you just get a completely different character depending on which one is performing that night. David’s Solor, as all of David’s characters are naturally more sensitive, more vulnerable, more cerebral, more pensive, whereas Marcelo’s characters are warm-hearted, down-to-earth, the every-guy. Marcelo’s the guy you want as your boyfriend: fun-loving, always happy, dependable, a big fuzzy teddybear in a way (I hope that’s not offensive 🙂 ) — I know, everyone says he’s a really good bad guy, and he is, but I think that’s because he’s never really THAT evil; deep down he’s just Marcelo 🙂 And David is the male friend who you just wanna talk to all night long 🙂 I love seeing them both — it’s just when David’s up there on the stage, you’re going to get the noble, poetic, sensitive warrior / Prince Charming / Romeo; with Marcelo it’ll be the everyman, old familiar high-school boyfriend, all-American boy (even though he’s not) version of the same. Funny, beginning tomorrow night, they are both alternating as Othello, and Art had mentioned in a comment on an earlier post that when he saw that ballet Othello tended to come across as a big brutish rather brainless hulk. There’s simply no way either of these two are going to play it that way, even if they tried!

So, I said I had two sacriligious thoughts about Bayadere. First is my preference for Veronika over Diana, and my second is that … I must confess, I just don’t get Ethan’s appeal! I just don’t — isn’t it horrible! Of course I haven’t yet seen “Center Stage.” I mean, yes, his jumps were spectacular, and I’ve never seen anyone beat his feet together as many times as he during his super-high assembles. You’d NEVER know he was just coming back from double knee surgery. As I mentioned in this post’s title, I thought he overacted, which Jennifer Dunning of the Times recognized as well, so I’m not alone on that! He does this thing where he widens his eyes when he’s freaking out over something. Well, I could see those bulging eyes from the Dress Circle (mid-priced seats about half-way up to the ceiling for people unfamiliar with the Met) sans binoculars. And the throwing the arms to the ceiling thing: can everyone stop, PLEASE!!!! Okay, Marcelo did it a bit too, but he is Marcelo and I’m so infatuated he could do cartwheels across the stage and I’d be all, “oh isn’t that the greatest!” Ethan’s jumps were truly breathtaking though, as I said. And I’m sure once I see “Center Stage” I’ll completely understand the madness 🙂

Other thoughts: I liked all three ballerinas who performed the role of Gamzatti (the princess betrothed to the bayadere’s love-interest). Stella was splendidly bitchy — she was plotting and evil and nasty and all the things that I guess a good Gamzatti should be. Michele Wiles seemed more like the snooty rich spoiled white girl, which worked as well. And Gillian was the most interesting princess to me because she has such a natural sweetness; just look at that headshot! How could this girl ever be wicked! She was like Glinda the Good Witch Gamzatti, which worked in its own way because her princess was more an unfortunate victim of circumstance than an evil, plotting shrew.

I LOVED Craig Salstein as the lead fakir (in the ballet, the fakirs are these weirdly cute loinclothed animal-like people who jump wildly back and forth over this makeshift campfire — really so much fun and one of the most entertaining parts of the first Act, IMO). Who better than Craig to do all that crazy wild jumping. Craig performed the part on Saturday night; on Friday night, equally bedazzled, I looked in my Playbill and was shocked to see it was Jared Matthews under all the wild-man hair and body paint… he’s so sweet-looking and seemingly well-behaved — who knew he was so capable 🙂 Expectedly, Herman Cornejo was an excellent Bronze Idol, another male bravura part (which, for some strange reason I keep wanting to call the Bronze God), but so were the others, such as Arron Scott (who also happens to be Matt’s new cohort in crime). I find myself always disappointed by the idol though because he’s only onstage so briefly; he leaves me wanting so much more…

One last thought: Susan’s comment in my last Bayadere post suggesting that Matthew Bourne or Mark Morris re-make an authentic Bayadere made me think … what about a male Bayadere ala Bourne’s Romeo Romeo? Not all male: a male Gamzatti would make for a completely alternate universe, but just a male bayadere would be realistically intriguingly different — I’m sure some Radjas had male temple dancers after all…

Posted on

Gender Bender Confusion!

Last night I went to see the last third of a three-part dance series on the theme “Gender Benders” at Symphony Space. This one was by Monica Bill Barnes & Company and Nicholasleichterdance. (Unfortunately, I missed the second part of the series, by Les Ballets Grandiva; the first was Keigwin Kabaret, which I blogged on earlier). Like the Keigwin, this was comprised of a series of short pieces, some mostly dance, others more like wordless skits, some containing both, and all presumably aiming to challenge our notions of gender.A couple of the pieces choreographed by Barnes and performed by her and Deborah Lohse that stuck in my mind were these cutely humorous Vaudeville-esque sketches featuring the two women in overdone makeup and platinum blonde wigs and wearing maid-like aprons over ruffly skirts, who were kind of simultaneously sexed-up — one kept bunching her skirt and wanting to lift it — and naively sweet and confused. It was very funny, very cute, and Lohse’s expressions were brilliant. She has a tall, thin, somewhat gangly frame, and she really seemed to know how to use that to maximum comical effect here. I recognized her name in the progam then her face as soon as I saw her onstage, and I realized where from when I read her bio: she has her own newly-started company, ad hoc Ballet, whose website I’d visited after the introduction of a new Winger contributor from that company. Anyway, I’d actually like to learn more about Vaudeville since I’ve seen a few modern companies use it now. Kind of ridiculous that I know so little since my boyfriend in grad school was writing his dissertation on its history, and I read Fred Astaire’s autobiography…

I really LOVED Nicholas Leichter though. My favorite pieces were his “Baby Doll,” a solo which he performed, and “Undertow,” a piece for four men wearing tight form-fitting skirts with sexy thigh-high back slits, leather jackets with nude mesh undershirts, and finger and toenail polish. That piece explored in a short time a rather large panoply of male interactions, as the men, flirted with, hugged and caressed, lifted, fought with, and threw each other about. The costumes, along with some of the snaky Samba-y hip swaying would have been very “sexy” on women — but how did they look on men, I felt Leichter asked.

In “Baby Doll,” Leichter came out onstage alone, dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit, then, pretending to have a conversation with someone else — initially maybe someone gazing at him, then coming onto him, then perhaps a lover who was jilting him — reacted against what that absent other was doing. Initially, he seemed embarrased about being looked at, then nervous and somewhat frightened, then burst into hysterical laughter, then hurt and crying, lashed out. At one point, he pulled his pants down and mooned the absent other, then waddled around the stage, too lazy or angry to pull them back up. It was funny but disconcerting to see a man do such a thing, do all these things. Also, I thought how “feminine” the emoting and the reactions were, which contrasted sharply with his muscular “masculine” physique.

The thing that threw me was, I hadn’t known who Leichter was before this, so I looked in the program and saw the name of the performer for this piece listed as “Clare Byrne.” I then looked at the insert, and saw that they had changed it to Leichter as the performer for tonight’s show. I thought, huh, “Clare” is a strange name for a man … then when I got home looked up the name on the web and found that she was not a man at all. (In fact, she’s the one who’s doing that Kneeling piece throughout next week at various NY locations, which I am definitely going to scope out!) But, unless the whole thing was just a misprint, I couldn’t believe he had choreographed this piece for a woman — it would have been so completely different for a woman to have performed it — gone would be everything I just said above. And that made me think that, of everything I saw in this “gender bender” series, it was really only the men’s performances that I found “gender-assumption” challenging. Not that I didn’t find the women’s dancing beautiful or remarkably athletic. But, I guess women can kind of look or act any ole way — we can wear short sexy skirts, pantssuits, men’s underwear, army camoflauge or ruffly skirts, and we can be ballerinas or pole dancers or breakers or sexy sambistas and it’s all just that; nothing looks out of the ordinary. But for a man to cry or emote at all, to don nail polish and a skirt with a high back-slit and move his hips in a sexy figure eight motion… it just makes you stop, look, and think. And, I mean, how many of the DWTS celebrity males have (beyond annoyingly) freaked over looking too feminine in the Latin dances — Ian and Billy Ray this time around, George Hamilton last time; and there were several guys in my old social dancing school who dropped out of the international Latin classes because they were “too girly”… It’s interesting though, because at the same time, I don’t think this greater gender flexibility amounts to women actually having more power…

Anyway, this was a short program, but it’s inexpensive and thought-provoking. Visit Symphony Space for tix; it’s on through the 21st.

Posted on

Break Dancing, Drag Queens, Afghanistan, and Childbirth All At Tribeca!

Just got my tickets for Tribeca Film Festival (my first few anyway), which I’ve gone to every year since it’s inception, post 9/11. My dad is a big film buff (and kind of a frustrated filmmaker himself) and has gone to every major film festival in the world. But this is the first film festival I’ve ever gone to. It’s special for me since I work a block and a half from the World Trade Center and was strongly affected by 9/11 and its aftermath, along with the rest of DeNiro’s beloved neighborhood.

Anyway, being the dance fan that I am, I’m particularly excited about the showing of the above film, called PLANET B-BOY, a documentary about the global resurgence of break-dancing which culminates in a World-Cup-esque global break dancing competition. It’s showing at the Tribeca Drive-In, located at the World Financial Center Plaza (which means it’s FREE!! — but likely will be hugely crowded) on Saturday, April 28th at 8:00 p.m. I’m hoping to get a bunch of friends together — should be lots of fun! (Also, in celebration of the 20th Anniversary of DIRTY DANCING, that film will be shown on the WFC Plaza on April 26th.

I’m also seeing ALEXIS ARQUETTE: SHE’S MY BROTHER, a documentary about sex, celebrity, and transgender life filled with drag queens and Hollywood glitterati (just my thing 🙂 ), and AUTISM: THE MUSICAL, which is, as it sounds, a documentary following a year in the lives of five austistic children as they write, rehearse and perform in their own full-length musical. That one’s almost sold out, so if it sounds interesting, hurry up and get tickets.

I highly recommend this festival to anyone who’s never been. Every year I’m exposed to something new, out-of-the-ordinary, and completely eye-opening. My advice though: DON’T get tickets to something big and Hollywoody that looks like it’s going to get mass distribution (for example, SURBURBAN GIRL, based on the Melissa Bank novel, GIRLS GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING, and starring Sarah Michelle Geller and Alec Baldwin) — stuff like that is going to hit every theater on the planet, and why pay more now (Tribeca FF tickets are a whopping $18 this year, up from $12 last). Go see the small, foreign or American indie stuff that may or may not get a distributor and expose yourself to true originality.

Other stuff that struck my eye, that I’ll probably try to see: THE WORKSHOP (because, clearly, I’m a sexaholic 🙂 ), WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME IT WOULD BECOME THIS BAD IN AFGHANISTAN (film shot on location entirely with a cell phone!), THE POWER OF THE GAME (kind of a MAD HOT BALLROOM but about soccer), ON THE DOWNLOW (about coming out as a gay black man in Cleveland), THE MAN OF TWO HAVANAS (documentary about a former friend of Castro’s who lives in Miami and opposes the embargo, thus becoming a CIA target and recipient of death threats, etc.), THE BUSINESS OF BEING BORN (produced by Rikki Lake and about varying childbirth practices that actually looks quite interesting), THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK (inside look at Darfur genocide), BOMB IT (documentary about the art of graffiti around the world that assures “you will never look at public space the same way”), and short film series ARCHIVING IDENTITY, MOOD ENHANCER, and PORTRAITS OF WOMEN. I’d see it all if I had the time and money! There’s just so much; go here to check it all out for yourself.

Finally, for people who really really love NYC, the OUR CITY, MY STORY is a very sweet little treat. It’s a collection of shorts made by NYC students and youth, and last year, I saw a short in that collection that, to this day, I can’t get out of my mind.

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

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 🙂

Posted on

Hooray, David and Marcelo Tickets Have Arrived!

ABT season ticket envelope

Very happy to receive in the mail today my American Ballet Theater Met season subscription tickets! Well, they haven’t printed the tickets out yet, but they sent me a letter confirming that I got the series I wanted. I had a subscription last year, but when I went to renew it, realized there were different dancers performing on the nights of my old subscription, and some ballets that I wasn’t too keen on seeing, so I called and asked them to change the series to a different night. They told me they would try hard to accommodate me but couldn’t ensure I’d get the same seat on the new night. But, according to the letter, they were able to give me what I wanted — I’m up front to the side near the curtain on my new night, which will include: Othello starring Marcelo (and Julie), Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet (Marcelo and Julie again), and Cinderella with David as the perfect Prince Charming. Only thing is, I just realized I’m supposed to be reading from my novel at the Writers Room reading series at Cornelia Street Cafe the night of Romeo and J, so will have to exchange that one (believe it or not, my novel is more important than Marcelo 🙂 ) … which is okay, so I’ll see a different Romeo — maybe that’s a good ballet for Jose…

Anyway, when I first saw the envelope, I immediately had this weirdly dream-esque thought that ABT management was writing me to say, no, you can’t have your Marcelo tickets; you hold him to too high a standard in his real life… ABT is in Paris / London on tour right now and I saw him going to a strip show in another ABT dancer’s blog and became really kind of disgusted and commented on how I felt, upsetting the very sensitive blogger. I know I may be weirdly old-school / pre-postmodern feminist for my age and all, but I just find any kind of strip show reductive of and demeaning to women — whether it’s burlesque, a Vegas-style thing, or some greasy bar, I just do. And to see a favorite dancer of mine doing something I abhored really made me not want to know very much about him, and wonder how much I want to read that blogger’s blog anymore… (so odd for a gay man to be at a female strip show anyway…). I mean, weirdest thing I think is seeing a celebrity you so admire doing something normally private on the internet. Eh, I’m over it. I still love Marcelo and probably always will, unless I see him killing a small animal or something…

Anyway, apropros of my post about having too many gay friends and not enough romance, and intrigued by my experience at the last LVHRD event (which I, badly, didn’t think to invite her to), my lovely friend, Kathy, in an effort to make good on my promise to go with her to the next LVHRD event, sent me this link. Apparently, the next one is to be some kind of dating thing. Ugh, why!!! Why can’t it be another dance-off or paint-off or fashion or architectural duel — dating stuff, blah!

Posted on

Bad Gay Friends!!!

I was going to blog about this, but Jennifer beat me to it! Ha ha! Time Out New York‘s cover this week features a fat, fluffy, very cuddly-looking, female-friendly kitty, with the cover story, “Why You’re Single (And What You Can Do About It).” Inside, they list a plethora of reasons for that conundrum, one of which is titled “Because you’re a straight woman who only goes out with her gay friends.” I found it kind of funny that this reason is listed nearly half-way through, and not at the top of the article (this is a NYC magazine after all — don’t a great many women suffer from this here!!!) Anyway, Katharine Rust, who wrote the little piece under this topic, which contains ideas for bars, restaurants and events where such a person could go to to meet Mr. (Straight) Right, begins by noting: “A gal would be crazy NOT to surround herself with fabulous-looking guys who are quick to tell her she looks marvelous, but…” And I started thinking, hmmmm, I don’t get told I look “marvelous” all the time. Hey man, I’m being cheated out of romance AND compliments! 🙂

Posted on

"Dirty Talk"ing Angry Macho Homophobes

Evangelina and me at Dirty Talk

Who us? Of course not!!! Above is a picture taken last night of my good friend Evangelina (who is on the right) and me (sorry for poor picture quality; could my camera please not have a nervous breakdown whenever both zoom and flash are used simultaneously???) We’re in the very comfy lobby of the off-off-Broadway theater Center Stage, waiting to see a new play called “The Dirty Talk.” It was a special occasion because it marked the foray of Evangelina’s husband, Michael, an accountant and actor, into theater producing — go Michael!

Dirty Talk box office

The play was good. It was about these two men who agree to meet in person after having met online in one of those naughty-talking chat-rooms. Only the one guy, characterized by the title of this post, thinks he is going to be hooking up with a Hooters-working nursing-school student with the stereotypical enormous breasts, instead of a sensitive bisexual man. The two end up stuck alone together in a Jersey cabin out in the woods during a nasty thunderstorm, and the encounter eventually compels the first man to explore the reasons underlying his, shall we say, problematic personality traits, which are partly responsible for ending his marriage, and which stem from upsetting childhood experiences in which his father attempted to “make a man out of him” via various disturbing rituals.

Why do men do that to their sons??? My grandfather and grandmother did that “becoming a man” b.s. to my dad by forcing him into the army. But he was far too sensitive for the military, and I think it’s permanently damaged him psychologically.

Anyway, my only gripe with the play was with the second character, who I thought was just not fully fleshed out enough. I understood his need to pretend to be a woman online, but couldn’t fathom what he was thinking by actually showing up at the cabin as … himself. At one point, the other character asks him, “what were you thinking?” and he doesn’t really have an answer. So, he seemed to be more of a catalyst for the other, more compellingly dynamic character’s self- exploration.

The acting was excellent, and the play was by turns hilarious and sad. I used to go to these small off-off-Broadway plays all the time when I first moved to New York, and haven’t been in a while. I’d forgotten how much I like them. You can sit practically onstage, where you can see the action up close and really feel like you’re a part of it. To me, you get so much more out of the production than you do a big Broadway play, which, in those huge theaters, is so distancing in comparison. Evangelina and I have both been so busy — me with dancing and writing and working, and she with her new marriage and her and Michael’s decision to buy some property upstate and build their first house (!), that we haven’t seen each other in nearly a year. But, as with all close friends, the minute you plop down next to each other on the sofa with a glass of wine and start yapping away, it’s like you just saw each other!

I hope everyone had a nice day off today in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King. I didn’t have to go into the office, but I brought some work home, which makes me feel a bit guilty, being from the Evan Mecham state and all… But, at least I only read the transcript from my next case’s Voir Dire (Jury Selection), which I don’t see so much as work: it’s one of my favorite parts of the trial since it’s where I get to “meet” all the different kinds of New Yorkers who are considered for selection on my client’s jury. Anyway, WordPress blogs don’t take kindly to YouTube embeddings, so I’m linking to Doug Fox’s post today, for The Speech!