Tag: Twitter

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Codfish “Caviar” in Koreatown

Despite the heatwave, last night my friend and I went to Koreatown for some Korean barbecue. I ordered a dish that looked interesting, which was translated as “Codfish caviar and clams.” Hehe, my friend surmised that perhaps caviar meant the entire reproductive organs of the fish. I looked again. It was rather veiny, did kind of look like a uterus and ovaries. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting – which was roe about the size of salmon! I tweeted a picture and a Twitter friend told me they actually are eggs, along with the egg sac. His father has them all the time, he said. Funny, I thought I’d tried practically everything, but apparently not! Anyway, they didn’t really have much of a flavor to me, but their consistency was similar to English pudding.

Also ordered a glass of plum wine, not realizing I’d get the entire bottle. Even I couldn’t polish off the whole thing 🙂 Best thing we had, imo, were the spicy little sausages, right at the front of the bottom picture. Delic!

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NYCB Wants To Monitor Its Dancers’ Social Media Posts

The dance twittersphere is currently aflutter over this Wall Street Journal article. It seems to have started with some tweets by NYCB corps dancer, Devin Alberda, gently poking fun at NYCB benefactor David Koch, at A.D. Peter Martins’ recent drunk driving arrest, and mock-criticizing one of the yellow-face characters in Martins’ Magic Flute for its racial connotations. I’ve seen some of Alberda’s blog and twitter posts and have often found him to be clever and funny but have also sometimes wondered, hmmm, is that going too far? Actually, I’ve seen blog posts (other than Alberda’s) and thought, wow, I wonder what such and such artistic director would think if he saw that. But then I don’t think any less of the company, maybe just the dancer. And since I don’t want to know more, I don’t return to that blog. So, really, no harm done there.

Anyway, NYCB is now in negotiations with the dancers’ union to attain the ability to monitor the dancers’ tweets and Facebook and other social media posts. If the union gives them the right to do so, according to the article, they’ll be one of the first performing arts organizations to have that power.

It’s an interesting issue because, on one hand, it’s never smart to publicly criticize your boss of course, but what about when arguing that a certain stereotype in a certain ballet carries racist connotations is tantamount to such a criticism? In part, it’s a free speech issue, which somehow makes the issue seem especially problematic for an arts organization. I mean, in interviews artists will sometimes speak openly about something deemed offensive in a piece they perform (opera, a play, a ballet, etc.), though usually not as snidely as Alberda. But some on Twitter are also saying companies have the right to control their “brand”  and many companies do such monitoring.

Others are saying Twitter and blogs are good for ballet because it’s such a rarefied, insular art form, it can only help for the public to have greater access to dancers’ daily lives via these popular platforms. But if the blogs and tweets are monitored, then it seems like they’re controlled, and not authentic. I’ve read dancer blogs before where it’s obvious a dancer is just a PR spokesperson for the company, and I don’t take them seriously at all. I usually read once or twice then never return. And it also makes me think the company’s using the dancer. So, maybe, if the posts are going to be heavily monitored, it would have the same effect on the public as not allowing them at all.

And what about dancers attacking critics? And what about the whole system of patronage, which ballet largely operates under? What if a dancer says something that has the potential to anger a patron?

Very complicated issue. Any thoughts? It’s a good article.

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Alice in Wonderland and Twitterland

 

Photo of Lauren Cuthbertson as Alice, by Johan Persson of the Royal Ballet, taken from here.

Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice in Wonderland premiered tonight at the Royal Ballet in London. BalletNews has already posted a detailed review. And the Ballet Bag ladies live-tweeted the event on behalf of the Royal. They had backstage privileges and were privy to all kinds of insider info so definitely check out the hashtag they tweeted under, #AliceInWonderland – they’ve got pictures, reviews, etc. etc. I was also told NYCB’s Maria Kowroski was in attendance. I’m currently searching the hashtag tweets for the photo of her.

I’ve been really excited about this ballet since I first heard about it. Can’t wait for it to tour!

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Natalie Portman’s Black Swan Golden Globe Acceptance Speech

Did you guys watch last night? I thought she looked radiant, and her speech was really sweet. She seemed genuinely happy about both the film and her personal life. She still seemed to be in a state of blissful shock about the latter. I found the part where she reminded the audience about Benjamin Millepied’s character smirking when Vincent Cassel’s character asked him if he would sleep with Portman’s black swan, then said, “see – he’s a good actor because he really does want to sleep with me!” sweetly innocent, though I can imagine some might have thought it a bit crass or childish. Millepied to me looked a little out of his element though. He looked uncomfortable when the camera focused on him.

Some dance fans on Twitter noted that Portman thanked everyone involved in the film but the dancers. I think that’s more of a testament to the fact that this wasn’t really a dance film – the other dancers had the relevance and necessity of extras – than to any forgetfulness on her part.

Dance film or not, I’m glad she won. I think she was by far the best of the actresses nominated in her category.

And did you guys see Jackie Reyes sitting next to Aaron Sorkin! I know one person did! I guess she’s no longer with ABT though; she’s now a student at Columbia. I wonder why she left ABT. Though she was in the corps she always stood out to me and she was only 24 and had time to work toward a promotion…

I’m also glad The Social Network won so many awards, including the biggest – best film. I think it had the most reach and breadth and depth and importance of the films nominated. It also had great acting by everyone all around, great writing, great story-telling – everything you’d expect an award-winner to have. I wished Jesse Eisenberg could have won for best actor because I think he did a tremendous job. He found the vulnerability in that character and really created sympathy for him – that’s hard to do when your character is generally a supreme jerk. But there was no way with him going up against Colin Firth.

And speaking of social networks these days, I don’t know how many of you are on Twitter, but as I was watching I was following the #goldenglobes hashtag. I love doing that now when I’m watching something popular. I do it often during big sports games now. It’s one of my favorite things about Twitter because you can connect with people all over the country – all of the world really – who you don’t know but who are doing the same thing you’re doing at that moment. And sometimes people say very funny, clever things – especially during a big celebrity fest like this.

Anyway, Twitter puts the “top tweets” on a given subject at the top of its hashtag list. These are usually – or have been in the past – the tweets that have been the most re-tweeted. This is a way of rewarding the funninest, wittiest tweets on something, or a tweet that has resonance to many – people re-tweet and those tweets rise to the top of the list. Well, last night as I was following along on the hashtag, all of a sudden a tweet by Paramount was suddenly planted at the top. And it was obviously an advertisement for one of their films. It wasn’t a tweet that was clever or funny and had been re-tweeted. I assume the studio had purchased it as ad space from the Twitter execs. That’s what it seemed like anyway. And then several tweets like that started appearing at the top of the hashtag list. If you were reading on a cell phone with a small screen, you had to do some real scrolling down every time you refreshed the page to see the newest tweets.

After a while it became annoying and I just stopped following the hashtag. It really kind of saddened me though. What would Mark Zuckerberg say? According to The Social Network, at first he didn’t want advertising on Facebook because he thought it would ruin it by being too intrusive, not to mention corny. And he was right. But at least on Facebook the advertisements don’t interfere with your ability to use the site for what it’s for – to socialize.

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Page 99 Test for This Week’s Sample Sunday

I hope everyone had a good Christmas. I did. Went to a friend’s to make mulled wine and roasted chestnuts but somehow neither happened. My friend ended up taking me out for a massage, which I seriously needed (especially after spending all morning listening to my next door neighbor’s four unsupervised children run, scream, wail, jump off of his bed loft, and repeatedly ram themselves into the walls of his approximately 200 square foot apartment, nearly sending several of my paintings crashing to the floor). Then when we got back to her apartment, another friend came over with a bottle of vintage Scotch, which was lovely, and which, for the same aforesaid reason, I desperately needed. But somehow we just didn’t get a whole lot of cooking done after that…

Anyway, I almost forgot about Sample Sunday this week. (This is a new promotion for authors on Twitter, to link to a sample passage from one of their books.) I recently uploaded page 99 of Swallow for the newish Page 99 Test site (wherein readers rate how likely they’ll be to buy your book based on a random page somewhere in the middle), but I didn’t realize you couldn’t access the site without signing up for an account. So, I’m pasting my page 99 into the body of this post instead. Here it is:

Okay, I made it worse. I decided to cut my losses and just shut up.

We found Stephen in the next room examining a sketch of Rodin’s sculpture of a woman with her legs splayed in the air.

“This is the ideal woman,” he nodded.

“She’s upside down,” I said.

“Well, obviously. I mean the proportions. Fleshy womb, generous hips, well proportioned-breasts…” He sounded lost in a dream. I cocked my head to try to see her right-side up as Stephen became interested in a Gauguin Polynesian princess. From what I could tell, her body seemed very unlike mine.

I followed Thom’s laughter to some advertisements. There was a hilarious turn-of-the-century one of a woman riding witch-like not a broom, but an uncorked, exploding champagne bottle. Another, more contemporary one, depicted a naked woman, her back to the viewer, but head cocked over shoulder, demurely smiling, sitting at an outdoors picnic with two fully clothed men and a stereo. Caption read, “We could all use a bit of romance in our lives.” Like, buy the stereo, get the woman included. There were naked women selling sports cars, men’s cologne, everything under the sun. This room could have gone on forever and a day.

I saw Stephen shaking his head at something. I walked up. It was an advert featuring a naked female model being sprayed playfully by a hose. Honestly couldn’t tell exactly what it was advertising though. Tap water? Didn’t think so.

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Wendy Perron, Esteemed Editor-in-Chief of Dance Magazine, Recommends Swallow on Twitter!

How awesome is this!: “Tonya Plank’s SWALLOW is a real page turner, & she shows that lawyers get as intensely nervous as dancers.” From Wendy Perron, E-I-C of Dance Magazine, via Twitter. I’m so giddy 🙂 I’d run into Ms. Perron at an Alvin Ailey season preview Tuesday night and when she told me she was reading my book and enjoying learning about my other life, I almost fell off my chair! I can’t even express how honored I am that she even decided to pick the book up!

The Alvin Ailey season preview was excellent, by the way. Their NY City Center season doesn’t begin until December but I think it’s going to be really fantastic. We got to see a sneak preview of The Hunt, by Robert Battle (incoming Artistic Director), which is an African dance depicting how men prepare for an actual hunt but that also serves as a metaphor for how dancers train and prepare to execute a difficult dance. I can’t wait to see that one in full, as well as The Prodigal Prince, by Geoffrey Holder. That one originally premiered in 1968 and Holder was there to talk a bit about it. Really sweetly funny man! It’s about the Haitian artist, Hector Hyppolite, known as “the Haitian Picasso,” and it’s a narrative filled with lots of beautiful African dance. We also saw Camille A. Brown’s Evolution of a Secured Feminine, which I remember from a Fall For Dance program a couple of years ago. It’s a one-woman solo that I liked very much and will, for the first time this season, be performed by someone other than Brown herself.

I enjoyed seeing all my favorite Ailey dancers again – and on a small stage this time (it took place in the Citicorp theater in the basement of their studios instead of City Center), and I was particularly happy to see Briana Reed again. She is one of my favorite women in the company – strong and very dramatic and an intense mover – and I missed seeing her last season. I think she was out with an injury for most of it.

Also, Judith Jamison revealed that Ailey will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Revelations this season, which means the cast for some performances will be increased to 50 dancers! They’re also making a film about that dance, which will be shown at all of the performances, and there will be a lot of live music, some of which Jamison will herself be conducting. Sweet Honey and the Rock will also perform live. And, there will be nice tributes to Denise Jefferson, Joan Weill, and to Jamison, who will be serving her last season as Artistic Director.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of moving out of New York for a while, but I’m now thinking I’m going to wait on that for at least a few months. There are too many exciting things happening this fall – from Ailey’s season, to New York City Ballet’s first ever fall season, to ABT’s first Nutcracker, to of course the regulars like Fall for Dance and the Guggenheim Works & Process series. I think I need to wait a bit. Plus, I’ve made so many wonderful friends here, and I’m so involved in the dance scene, and every time I think of leaving NYC it really saddens me. But of course with the internet, friendships can easily survive physical distance these days. And I’m sure there are dance scenes everywhere, maybe just not of the same intensity. Who knows, maybe I just need a top-floor apartment somewhere else in the city… Upstairs Godzilla has moved out but her furniture-throwing legacy — an extremely creaky ceiling that sounds like it’s going to fall every time the new upstairs neighbor so much as shifts his weight (and which the landlord won’t fix) — remains…

Oh, one more thing (I know this post is very rambling): Ms. Perron mentioned to me that she saw a preview of Mao’s Last Dancer, which she thought was very good, and that it opens this weekend. So, I know one thing I’ll be doing this weekend. So excited for good ballet movies!

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SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE WEEK 5, OR POST ALEX, SOB!

 

Photo from Jonathan (which Alex posted on Twitter).

Uh-oh, where’s Ashley? Oh, another injury – a rib problem. So, she’ll be in the bottom three tomorrow night, could suffer same fate as Alex.

First on is Lauren dancing a Tahitian dance with Mark Kanemura. Wow, fun costumes. And music! At first I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, and then I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. It was repetitive movement — knees shaking for the man, hip shaking both side to side and front to back for her. It looked simple but that kind of movement takes precision and concentration to pull off because it is so repetitive and so fast. It’s the type of movement that could look really sloppy if you lose your concentration, you know? Mia says Lauren looked like a “duck in heat.” Hmmm.

Next, Adechike and Anya dance salsa. Wow, some really difficult lifts – I think this is the first overhead one we’ve seen this season, and perhaps even on the show? I mean that was a full-out overhead lift, like you see in classical ballet. And that opening throw and catch with a double twist in the air. It was really exciting to me, but I think the tricks kind of took over and made it difficult for Adechike to concentrate on getting his basic movement right. He was fine and he did all of those crazy tricks right and well, but the hips weren’t all there. It just wasn’t the sexy salsa I’m used to in competitions and in clubs.

Next, Jose and Courtney do a Broadway routine. Well, he did a jump in the air with a multiple turn that was exciting. But that was all to me, unfortunately. He just didn’t have the polish, there was no pizzazz with those jazz hands, the line wasn’t there – his barrel turn was just not a proper barrel turn at all. I mean, he looked like a regular person dancing that. As the judges said, it just showed how little dance training he has.

Now, Robert and Allison do a contemporary routine. Wow, well that’s the first time Allison has really blown me away.

Continue reading “SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE WEEK 5, OR POST ALEX, SOB!”

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COMMENTS

As everyone who may have tried to post a comment in the past couple of days has probably noticed, something is awry. You can write a comment but then there’s no button to click “post” or “publish” or whatever. I wrote to Disqus and they said they’ve recently upgraded their system and my WordPress plug-in was too old to automatically upgrade. Which means I have to uninstall the old one and reinstall the new edition. Since I’m really busy right now, not to mention technologically inept, this could take me awhile (someone else installed my old plug-in of course). Anyway, I will try to reinstall everything as soon as I can. But in the meantime, if you have a comment, you can always put it on Facebook, where I almost always link to my posts here. That’s where most people have been leaving comments for about the past year now anyway. You can also @ me on Twitter, although I think Facebook is better organized for comments on a particular subject. My Facebook account is here, and Twitter is here. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!

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PURO DESEO, PNB AT THE GUGGENHEIM, BALANCHINE LEOTARDS AND ROBBINS & ASTAIRE

 

Photo of Luciana Achugar’s Puro Deseo, from NYTimes, taken by Chad Batka.

You guys, I am really sorry but there are several things I’ve seen lately that I don’t have time to write about. So, I’m linking to other writers’ reviews. The first is Luciana Achugar’s exploration of the occult, Puro Deseo, which premiered recently at the Kitchen. I generally agree with NYTimes’ Gia Kourlas that Achugar needs to go a bit deeper with this piece, but this is a strong start, and parts of the performance I found very compelling, such as when, toward the beginning, Achugar is wearing a large black cape and moving back and forth in a diagonal pattern across the stage, and every time she backs up, toward a light projector, she casts an ominous shadow that eventually eats up the entire theater. Very cool lighting effect that achieved the result she was aiming for. At points her partner, Michael Mahalchick, would contort his body in ways that were both creepy and unsettling but also ultimately human. At times her movement would mirror his, and at times she’d react off of him, sometimes writhing on the ground seemingly in erotic pleasure. This is what I thought needed to be developed a little further – the connection between eroticism and the occult, but regardless, ever since Tere O’Connor’s Nothing Festival a couple of years ago, Achugar has become one of my favorite experimental artists and I always love seeing her new work.

Second, is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Works & Process event at the Guggenheim over the weekend. I loved seeing James Moore and Carla Korbes again, and especially Seth Orza. Moore’s performance of a beginning excerpt of Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, and Korbes and  Orza dancing an excerpt from Balanchine’s Apollo were, to me the highlights of the evening. But here is Oberon with far more detail on the evening than I can provide right now.

Also, last week I saw two NYCB programs – one comprised of some of Balanchine’s most famous leotard ballets (Symphony in Three Movements is always a favorite of mine, especially in contrast with Concerto Barocco), and an evening of Robbins during which I was blown away, once again, by Gonzalo Garcia as the poetic figure in his Opus 19 / The Dreamer. And, call me a goof (because everyone else seems to hate it), but I always love to see Robbins’ I’m Old Fashioned, with the dancers performing a balletic interpretation of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as a movie excerpt of the latter two dancing plays on a screen erected at the back of the stage.  Anyway, here is Macaulay on the Balanchine program and Roslyn Sulcas on the Robbins.

Review coming soon of Wayne McGregor’s new Outlier, although I said some of what I have to say already on Twitter. I’m actually really enjoying tweeting about performances. I find Twitter a useful device for paring down sentences to the essentials. Of particular use to verbose people like me anyway 🙂

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THANK YOU!

Thank you so much to everyone who showed up last night for my little book celebration party! And as well to those who couldn’t come but who were there in spirit 🙂 I’m so very grateful to have such wonderful longtime personal friends as well as newer-ish Facebook and blog reader friends and Tweeps with whom to celebrate such things. And, as always, I’m immensely grateful for everyone’s support. Thank you, you guys!

Photo taken by my good friend and fellow writer, Ariel Davis.