Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
During meet n greet taking pics w fans. Danny didn’t show!
We're here!
Wine on the bus!
Jacob takes roll call
Dissing of Kyle Abraham And Shallowness of Ballet World Is Marring My Pasha Excitement
Tonight is the fabulous Dance Times Square escapade to see Pasha et al in the So You Think You Can Dance spectacular. I am really excited about it — have no less than three cameras in my bag just in case of battery outage (though I charged everything anyway — just the neurotic in me) 🙂 I do hope they let us backstage and to take pics; otherwise expect a copious write-up! Good: I was upset this morning after logging onto some of my regular dance websites, and am now feeling better just writing about tonight 🙂 Thanks Pasha, and thanks blogging software 🙂
What I’m really upset about is how shallow the world of ballet seems to be. At the Fall For Dance festival a few days ago I saw a most profound, moving work performed by African American dance-maker Kyle Abraham. As I wrote earlier, to me the piece used a combination of ballet, modern dance and hip hop to explore racial and gender issues and evoke the struggle to break free of prejudices — both those held by others and sometimes subtly taken on yourself. I’m very upset about the complete dismissal and oversight of Abraham’s work by both the press and the blogosphere. NYTimes chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay says only of the work that it was show-offy and involved too much upper-body “archness.” (Macaulay also criticized Wheeldon’s “After the Rain,” which I liked, but I’m not bothered by that because he actually gave it the time of day and analyzed it a teensy tiny bit; I’m far more disturbed by his complete dismissal of the meaning inherent in Abraham with no real analysis to speak of).
Similarly, Justin Peck of the Winger, a NY City Ballet dancer and Columbia University student wrote a little review of the night, perhaps for his class on dance criticism, and in his review of Abraham, he simply names the different dance forms used, then dismisses the piece as lacking “structure” (without further analysis). Neither reviewer seemed even to notice the racial or gender implications of the work. How anyone could fail to hear the loud gunshots and ambulance / police sirens going off at the beginning of the piece is completely beyond me, but I guess I’m a criminal appeals attorney who’s represented poor minorities for the past several years, so such noises may be more resonant to me. (By the way, a bit off topic but important: I think all attorneys should at some point in their careers represent someone whose life is starkly different from their own — even if it’s just pro bono — it expands your universe exponentially).
Then yesterday on The Winger, smart ABT dancer David Hallberg, posted this video of choreography by Mats Ek, whose work he was moved by at the Fall For Dance performance he saw. I thought it was a beautiful, moving portrait of a woman’s sorrow at losing her husband. Others, however, couldn’t see any sorrow, any story, but only focused on dancer Sylvie Guillem’s beautiful feet. Yes, Guillem has great feet. But is an attractive body part what really draws people to this art form? Is that what ballet is all about? Prettiness? Is it not about meaning, about moving people by telling them a compelling story, about making people think? Is ballet really that unintellectual? I have two advanced degrees. If you don’t at least try to stimulate my brain cells with your so-called art, I’m perfectly happy to return to favorite novelists who actually explore the human condition.
The problem isn’t just ballet fans though. I feel sometimes that those entrusted with stimulating public discourse are not even trying. (Here I’m primarily speaking of critics who write for the NYTimes, which I admit, is the only paper I regularly read due to both time and money constraints). Claudia LaRocco’s review of the final night of FFD read something like this: this whole festival is stupid, so it goes without saying that everything I saw that night was stupid. The first piece, in addition to being stupid was ethnically insulting in its “cliched” use of Indian dance to characterize London business culture (no further analysis as to exactly what it was about that piece — a huge crowd-pleaser that I found very intriguing — was cliched); the second piece (a brief excerpt of Camille A. Brown’s evocation of a woman trying to find herself) was bad because Brown moved too fast; the third piece was worthless because it was just there (no further analysis); the fourth piece comes from a choreographer (Jorma Elo) whose work always sucks; and the last piece was bad because it was “pleasurable only at a kinesthetic level and only at times.”
The critic character in Laura Jacobs’s novel, “Women About Town,” which I’ve quoted from before, views her work as deciphering for the public just what it is that makes a performance work or not, and unlocking and illuminating the hidden meaning of a piece (“there’s always a key,” she says at one point, though I’ve returned the book to the library so may be getting the exact quote wrong). I just don’t see any of that going on in the world of dance.
Tellingly, LaRocco begins her review by asserting that these days there is such a plethora of crap the best a critic can hope for is “competence.” These critics are coming from a place of anger, not of analysis. Countercritic led me to this article bemoaning how bloggers are displacing professional critics, which, the author argues, is tragic given critics’ historic role in leading the audience to understand and appreciate something in which they couldn’t previously find value (ie: Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot”). Okay, I understand that. But can someone please tell me when was the last time a dance critic illuminated a work of cultural value that was dismissed by the general public instead of the other way around?
I can’t even begin to describe what that auditorium sounded like after the presentation of Elo’s work (the ‘always sucky’ choreographer). His “Brake the Eyes” which I wrote about earlier, was so stunning, so brimming over with meaning, the audience was buzzing with discussion after the china doll / puppet ballerina snapped her fingers and the lights flicked off. “Was she controlled by the others or was it the other way around?” “That combination of music was so interesting!” “What was that cool music besides the Mozart, it doesn’t say in the Playbill.” “What was she saying in Russian?” were some of the questions I overheard. People are starved for analysis. Some of these people (especially the young and internet savvy) are going to come home and Google “Jorma Elo” or “Brake the Eyes,” and what are they going to find? Certainly not analysis. How can the public find meaning in concert dance, see it as anything other than the movement of attractive body parts if the writers aren’t trying to lead them the right direction?
Of course I know newspaper writers are under very strict word count limitations, making it impossible for them to delve very fully into their subject. But in the age of the internet, can’t at least the web articles be longer? Also writer Paul Parish has an interesting analysis of the newspaper problem (go to the very bottom of this post — scroll all the way down to where the bold reads “Paul to Tonya et al” and then to the paragraph that starts “I still think…” Foot in Mouth posts tend to be delectably gargantuan!!!). I don’t entirely understand what Paul is saying, but it sounds intriguing!
Anyway, the closer it gets to 4 pm (when the magic DTS bus departs for SYTYCD land), the better I am feeling. Hopefully I should have a good dance night: there won’t be any ballet there, after all 🙁
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 🙂
America's Love Affair With Models Has Ended, Methinks…
If Dancing With the Stars is any indication. Last season the first contestant knocked off the show was Eighties supermodel Paulina Porizkova; this season the first two to go have been the two models — the first, Josie Maran, a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit one no less… America used to worship supermodels; what happened!
I was actually disappointed and a bit surprised last week when Maran was booted — I thought she could possibly be this season’s Kelly Monaco-esque underdog; she’d definitely have worked very hard and she seemed sweet. I was a little disappointed this week as well. When I first saw Albert Reed, I thought what an immature goof. But then his silly playfully little-boyish charm started to grow on me. And I felt he was far from the worst, though that has nothing to do with anything on this show, as we all know.
Personally, I like that Sabrina brings something different to ballroom — I rather liked watching her hip hoppy take on Cha Cha the first night — but I don’t really think it’s fair that she’s in the competition since she obviously has a great deal of dance training that the others don’t have. I do want to see her make it far along in the comp though since she’s dancing with a member of this country’s royal family of ballroom, Hon. Mark Ballas 🙂 And it shows: he’s quite the nimble, quick-footed dancer. And my crush grows on the cute Brazilian, Helio! (Am dying to know if Marcelo talks like that!)
I hope people watched the results shows both weeks — last week to see tap legend Savion Glover and this week to see several of my ballroom favorites! Isn’t Nick Kosovich a dream! And Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed — aren’t they just oozing with charm!
And, most importantly: J.T. J.T. J.T.! I’m so happy she was on dancing the tango tonight. As they said on the show, and as I’ve blogged about before, she and her partner Tomasz Mielnicki just won the American Smooth championships this year. Of course that goofus Drew Lachey got her name wrong — it’s J.T. DAMALAS not J.T. Thomas (her partner’s first name). J.T. used to teach at my former studio. I remember one time I was having a really difficult time doing a lift with Pasha and J.T. was in the studio practicing. Pasha called her over and she nicely took time out of her practice session to help me. And she worked magic! She not only demonstrated by doing but gave me tricks on how to push my shoulder and arm down over his back onto his opposite shoulder in order to help me lift myself. (I hadn’t wanted to push down on his shoulder, thinking I’d be hurting him, but she explained I was hurting him a lot more by not having any way of holding myself up and making him do all the work). A lot of teachers just show you by demonstrating themselves and then they think you can pick it up through imitation, but they don’t realize a lot of us need more: we need actual instructions. Anyway, I remember that moment well. I never ever EVER would have thought I was so lucky to be standing between two such people — one of whom would go on to dance on an extremely popular television show and be known by millions, the other who would become the national champion and be seen on another popular show. So completely surreal!
Sir Alastair Speaks!
But he didn’t say much. And I should probably stop calling our new(ish) Chief Dance Critic ‘Sir Alastair’ and come up with a different nickname; he came across more as a jolly, down-to-earth commoner than a lord. Anyway Mr. Macaulay, along with dance writer and professor Mindy Aloff, addressed a crowd of mainly students, critics, and dance insiders last night at Barnard College. He spoke of: his move to New York (he’s still not completely moved into his new apartment and has no television, allowing him neatly to evade the question of the moment — what about all this dance stuff on tv?); what he misses about London (his garden, the West End’s plethora of Shakespeare plays); how he felt about becoming the NY Times’ chief dance critic (it was a welcome mid-life change, he and his audience at the Financial Times in London had grown a bit tired of each other, he was worried his appointment wouldn’t be well taken since he was from out of town — and rightly so, why should a critic not be homegrown?– people laughed at this, not sure why); his most trying life moments (serving jury duty and having to announce the verdict to a raucous courtroom, being charged with taking indecent pictures of minors after an officer saw him photographing frolicking children on a beach– don’t worry, it all worked out well as charges were eventually dropped); his dance training (ballroom, reading ballet technique books and sitting in on ballet classes); his favorite artists (Shakespeare and Mozart), etc. etc. — things on that level. It was nice to see his face and hear his voice, and it did make you realize he was human despite his sometimes harsh reviews, which was probably the point of the whole thing, but it was hardly the in-depth discussion of issues important to the dance world that I was hoping for.
During the Q & A, a student asked him if he felt that bad reviews played any part in declining dance audiences. He thought for a moment and answered that he didn’t know how much of an effect reviews really had on audiences. He thought his reviews had absolutely no effect on that of American Ballet Theater, as the Met Opera House was far from packed each week during the their summer season regardless of what he’d said in his most recent review. He also felt as a critic a certain degree of harshness was necessary, as it was the critic’s responsibility to “hav(e) a passionate subjective response” to a work. Wendy Perron, editor in chief of Dance Magazine, after noting that he’d largely written subjective reviews frequently inserting his own voice, asked if he’d ever taken a more objective tone. He responded that he wasn’t sure of the difference between subjective and objective with respect to criticism, but felt that his writing was a combination of the two. He viewed the objective part as describing what he saw, the subjective to tell why it mattered.
Eva sweetly asked him in her beautifully mellifluous voice whether he was going to explore the entire New York City dance scene and all the wonderful things it has to offer. He brightened considerably and said he’d just discovered “downtown” and had gone to a performance entitled something like “Accounting” and really liked it. He sounded authentic and it was actually rather cute. I don’t think he knows he got reemed for his review of that 🙂 Countercritic guy asked him something along the lines of whether he had to consider something beautiful in order to value it. I thought it was an interesting question and Macaulay did too, and even said so. “But I’m not sure how to answer it,” he replied. He said he liked it when a choreographer challenged his notion of beauty as Mark Morris has on occasion. Which I thought was a good answer. He mentioned other such choreographers, but I’ve forgotten who– I’d put my notebook away by then and was packing to go.
Hmm, what else do I have in that notebook?… He takes a few notes during performances but usually they don’t amount to much. He was first seriously impressed with the New York Times when he picked up a copy of the paper in London and saw a review of a classical dance performance on the front page. Such a thing would never have happened in a London paper, he said, as concert dance wasn’t considered “sexy.” He doesn’t regularly read others’ reviews of a piece because he doesn’t want them to influence his own, although his favorite critics are the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella (who has an “engaging” “shrewd” voice that, even if you disagree with, “you really want to spend time with”) and Wall Street Journal’s Robert Greskovic, who has a gift for detailed description (and is his good friend and sends him copies of his reviews). He said dance and music criticism were very challenging because the dialog one had with the piece was not a direct or natural one (as with a play) but forced the critic to translate from one language into another. I thought that was nicely stated.
That’s all. It was about an hour and twenty minutes altogether. It was okay, just wish the discussion would have gone deeper.
I came home and watched the video I’d taped of Dancing With the Stars. I’ll blog about it more tomorrow — am too tired now — but, very briefly: ridiculously, he hasn’t even danced yet and I am totally in love with Helio 😀 Does Marcelo have that same accent 🙂 🙂 😀 Am also in dancerly love with Mark Ballas 😀 How great were the perfs by those “girls” — Cheetah and Spice?! Whoa! And that opening pro number: you can’t say the ballroom dancing, despite Pasha and Anya, is better on So You Think You Can Dance! I wish there were more pro numbers like that! You can tell how different the demographic is for this show as compared with SYTYCD though — they have a lot of older contestants here. I thought Marie Osmond was a bit of a goof, but charming in her own way, and Jane Seymour was sweetheart 🙂 Could some ballroom insider please smack Chmerkovskiy for me for that self-description: “I’m known as the bad boy of the ballroom. But how can I be so bad when it feels so good?” 🙂 Okay, more tomorrow, I’m off to bed…
I officially HATE Flickr!
Last night I posted via mobile that Max and Yulia won National Latin but apparently it didn’t go through. Anyway, we have new national Latin champs — Max and Yulia!!!! Yay! Delyan and Boriana came in third — which was awesome for them; obviously Andrei and Elena (now former champs) came in second, and I correctly predicted that Vaidotis Skimelis and his partner took Pasha and Anya’s old spot — they came in fifth. Anna Trebunskaya from Dancing With the Stars and her partner Pavlo placed sixth. Certainly if Pasha and Anya were still competing, they’d have moved up in the ranks. But they are on to bigger and better things 🙂
Yay Max and Yulia!
Flickr SUCKS BIG TIME FOR SCREWING UP MY POST. I hate you Flickr! I’ll repost my Max and Yulia post though now.
Reading Dance beat's coverage of sytycd
Reading Dance beat’s coverage of sytycd
Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
They thought pasha had most versatility though not technically best dancer & anya was booted bc solos can’t showcase ballroom technique.
Dancing With Stars Season Five Contestants Announced
So, as everyone likely already knows, the next season of contestants on DWTS has been announced. They are:
Spice Girl Melanie Brown, paired with Max Chmerkovskiy;
Musical recording artist Sabrina Bryan, paired with newcomer Mark Ballas (hmmm, any relation to Belle of the Ballroom World, Dame Shirley???);
Indianapolis 500 champ Helio Castroneves, paired with young champ Juliana Hough, a favorite of mine from last season. Helio is from Brazil, fun fun 🙂 ;
Basketball team owner Mark Cuban, paired with Kym Johnson;
Actress Jennie Garth from 90210 (hmmm, don’t remember her?), paired with Derek Hough newcomer to the show and brother of the marvelous Juliana;
Model Josie Maran, paired with Alec Mazo (winner from season one);
Soap opera actor Cameron Mathison, paired with Edyta Sliwinska;
Boxing champ Floyd Mayweather, paired with my idol, Ms. goddess Karina Smirnoff 😀 ;
Vegas legend Wayne Newton, paired with the amazing and talented genius of a dance teacher, Cheryl Burke;
Marie Osmond (aww!), paired with cutie, Jonathan Roberts;
Model Albert Reed, paired with Jonathan’s lovely wife, Anna Trebunskaya, who has been doing quite well in pro Latin competition lately; and
longtime actress Jane Seymour, paired with former American Rhythm champion, Tony Dovolani.
Season premiere is scheduled for September 24th, and looks like it’s to last for three days. Will begin with a battle of the sexes group comp, with male contestants going at it en groupe against female.
Maria at A Time to Dance has a rather funny little list of why she so strongly prefers SYTYCD to DWTS. I don’t think the two shows are comparable though. I think the latter is about turning normal people (well, not normal or they’d be complete nobodies like me — they have to be celebrities on some level to draw an audience — but people who are not natural-born dancers) into the best ballroom dancers they can be. The former is about people who already have talent in a certain dance form honing that ability and learning to be versatile and to work well with partners and choreographers. Okay, at least theoretically, and IMO anyway. I like the former show because the dancers are often so amazing (especially this last season :D); I like the latter because I can often relate to the challenges faced by the amateurs. Learning to dance as an adult is damn hard!
My biggest problem with DWTS is that it seems that the pro dancers aren’t given enough due for their very difficult work, a thought shared by at least one professional dance critic as well. After Pasha was booted from SYTYCD, one of his fans on his Television Without Pity thread, suggested maybe he could be on DWTS so that his fans wouldn’t miss him too much. I think it’s actually a sweet idea. Pasha’s a great teacher, and, if an already famous dancer is on the show, perhaps it’ll create more appreciation for the pros.
Anyway, hopefully it’ll be a decent season. We’ll see…
P.S.: don’t forget to watch Nureyev tonight 🙂
Annual Trek to Brooklyn's Finest Stretch of Sand!
Every summer I must go out at least once to Brighton Beach / Coney Island. I don’t know why, really; I just feel like it’s not a proper summer without it! I usually take a day off of work around mid-May, before it gets too crowded and humid, but this year I must have been too busy because I never made it. Now that our fiscal year’s over at work and I have a couple of vacation days I must take before Labor Day, I looked up on weather.com to see which day this week would be most ideal weather-wise, only to find that it’s going to be rainy and cloudy and fall-like temperatures all week — Saturday was the only day with a little sun icon 🙁 So, I decided to brave the weekend crowds and went out yesterday. It’s kind of more fun that way anyway!
Here’s a little photo essay:
Fun in the sun! And relatively nice blue water.
Beside sunbathing, I love the town. Brighton Beach is very Russian; many people are new immigrants and hardly speak English. I love shopping in these stores, flipping through the Russian romance novels, the Russian videos and CDs, seeing if I can understand anything. I must have a very slavic-looking face; have actually been told several times that I look Eastern European, which is funny because I think I’m more Spanish-looking with my olive skin and dark hair… Anyway, everyone here assumes I’m Russian and begins conversations with me in Russian. Gives me a decent chance to practice my Russian — although, who’m I kidding; I haven’t had any classes since college, I barely remember the Cyrillic alphabet… Most of them don’t know any English anyway, so it makes no difference once they realize I have no idea what they’re saying and then I massacre their language with my hideous American accent. We end up gesticulating wildly with each other — just like in St. Petersberg, the one time I went to Russia, several years ago now — best foreign travel experience of my life!
I remember trying to impress Pasha once by telling him I came out here regularly and he just made this goofy smirk and rolled his eyes. I said, “What?!” and asked him why he didn’t come out here to get a taste of his homeland, be with people with whom he had so much in common. He said that just because someone’s Russian doesn’t mean they’re going to be your friend. I asked him why not; he mumbled something about generation gaps, culture clashes, judgments… It’s kind of sad, but I remember seeing that documentary Ballets Russes about that early 20th Century ballet company (a great movie by the way), and I remember one of the Russian ballerinas laughing and saying that Russians don’t like each other very much. They love us, they love everyone else, but it does seem like they don’t get along with each other very well for some reason.
Anyway, after I finished with the Dom Kniga (bookstore; or literally, house of books), I walked along the boardwalk down to Coney Island.
where they have the huge amusement park. I’ve only been on one ride — the giant ferris wheel, when my roommate from law school, Chris, and I came out here years ago. I was so terrified; that thing is so high off the ground. Chris, who normally had a very tough exterior, admitted as soon as we were safely on the ground that, when we were at full height, she was a bit worried too, though her way of so indicating was to say that she realized, if we were killed on the ride, our estates wouldn’t be able to sue because we’d assumed the risk… typical law students 🙂
And here’s the famous Cyclone, which I think they are supposed to be taking down at some point in the future (?), but apparently not yet, behind this cute froggie ride.
Haha, one of the many lovely eateries aligning the boardwalk on the Coney Island part. This one caught my attention because the name reminded me of dance 🙂 Do you think they misspelled “hole” on purpose??
This kind of freaked me out. They had this guy running around behind some garbage cans with a helmet and shield and people paid to shoot him with what I think was a BB gun?…
Can’t ever go to the beach without a little stop at the aquarium!
Where I saw all manner of wonderful sea creatures. If I was an animal, I’d either want to be a cute little primate denizen of the warm gooey rainforest or some kind of marine animal who inhabits warm waters…
Big, fattypants walrus entertained the crowd greatly 🙂
As did this saucer-eyed giant turtle. I love the woman with the camera. Everyone has digitals these days. No wonder you never see postcards anymore.
Ooh, scary shark, my biggest animal fear. This little girl was adorable though.
They have a couple of seals in this tank that used to be inhabited by the adorably cherubic white beluga whale. He died a couple of years ago and I think he’s too expensive for them to replace, but I always loved coming to see that little whale and his cute little “smiley face.”
Walking back along the boardwalk to Brighton, so I could dine at my favorite Russian restaurant, Tatiana’s (!), I passed this volleyball tournament. Must have been a big deal because they had bleachers set up and there was a big crowd.
The boardwalk kind of scared me. Some of those planks were quite loose, and the street was far below!
If you want to make lots of money off of a food or drink item, just call it “Naked”!
Final desination: Tatiana’s, on the boardwalk, getting my annual fill of caviar (red not black, I can’t afford $120 for lunch!), with sour cream and red wine. Mmmm, so good…
but so filling. Even though it always looks so small, I can never finish it all and I always feel badly for wasting such good food! Summer reading, by the way, New York Magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene’s memoir “Insatiable.” This woman cracks me up: when she was a fledgling journalist, she slept with Elvis after getting herself admitted to his suite following one of his shows by playing up her press credentials. She was in such shock the whole time that all she could remember about the entire thing was that he asked her to call room service for him and order him a fried egg sandwich. She said she knew she was destined to be a food writer after that 🙂